* The
* In 1906, the outcry against Leopold’s brutal proprietorship of Congo led the Belgian state to negotiate the takeover of the colony, spending 45.5 million francs to finish his building projects and paying the king himself 50 million francs: yet the cost of buying out the predator was to be raised from Congo itself. Leopold, one of the richest men in the world, died in 1909 – though it was far from the end of Belgian predations in Congo.
* In the royal palace in Munich, the princes were being tutored by a respected local schoolmaster, Gebhard Himmler, an enthusiastic royalist whose favourite pupil was Prince Heinrich. When he had a son, he named him Heinrich after the prince, who became a godfather of the future Reichsführer-SS.
* Much of Bavaria was poor. Between 1881 and 1890, 1.4 million Germans immigrated to the USA, many of them Bavarians. A typical example of these migrants, leaving in 1885, was Friedrich Drumpf, whose family would travel from the village of Kallstadt to the White House, a quintessential American story. Later Drumpf changed his name to Trump.
* As Rudolf was buried, his ‘friend’ Wilhelm, the new German kaiser, reflected that ‘lunacy was lurking in the background and the monomania of suicide has done its silent but sure work on the overexcited brain’. Stephanie survived the malice of Sisi to remarry and settle in Hungary, but in a surprising initiative for a Habsburg crown princess, in 1908 she invented the hostess trolley – ‘a new chafing dish and spirit lamp combined’ – taking out US and British patents.
* Willy loved bullying his Junker generals. ‘It’s a curious sight,’ chuckled Phili. ‘All those old military fogeys having to do their knee-jerks with strained faces! The Kaiser sometimes laughs out loud and eggs them on with a dig to the ribs.’ Willy encouraged his courtiers – Junker officers – to dress as poodles or ballerinas. ‘You must be paraded by me as a circus poodle! – that will be a “hit” like nothing else,’ Count Georg von Hülsen wrote to a fellow courtier. ‘Just think: behind shaved tights … at the back a genuine poodle tail, a marked rectal opening and, when you “beg”, in front a fig-leaf. Just think how wonderful when you bark, howl to music, shoot off a pistol or do other tricks. It is simply splendid! … I can already see H.M. [His Majesty] laughing with us … H.M. must be satisfied.’
* This was funded by raising loans on the markets but also selling grain. When this caused a famine on the Volga, Alexander denied it existed, continued exporting grain and 350,000 perished – a precursor of the famines of 1932/3.
* Willy was so inconsistent that at various times he planned to seize Iraq, China and Latin America, and in 1903 he even ordered the Admiralty to prepare an invasion (Operationsplan III) for Cuba, Puerto Rico and New York, while seeking alliances with and against virtually every other state.
The Houses of Hohenzollern and Roosevelt, Solomon and Manchu
EMPRESS CIXI, QUEEN MIN AND YAT -SEN: THE SUN ALSO RISES
That July, the seventy-year-old Dowager Empress Cixi, retired for five years, was informed by her nephew the Guangxu Emperor that a war was about to start with Japan. Guangxu was rattled: ignorant, insouciant, terrified of thunder (during storms the eunuchs shouted to drown out the sound), the emperor had reversed Cixi’s reforms and neglected her navy while his teenaged Consort Zhen was selling offices to the highest bidders. The Manchu monarchs, ruling 400 millions, regarded the forty million Japanese as racially inferior
Thirty years earlier, in November 1867, the hereditary shogun, whose Tokugawa family had ruled Japan for the three centuries since Tokugawa Ieyasu, handed back power to the emperor. After a short conflict, a new
