In 1911, Sir Ernest Cassel, the formidably astute and philanthropic Cologne-born financier (and grandfather of the future Edwina Mountbatten), donated £200,000 for the creation of an Anglo-German Institute. Its admirable purpose, honouring the reputation of Cassel’s friend, the late King Edward, as a peacemaker, was to promote mutual understanding through the study of the cultures of the two great nations, while providing funds for unemployed workers who found themselves adrift in either country, England or Germany.
Acting in the same conciliatory spirit, King George V, a month before his coronation in June 1911, invited his cousin the German Emperor to pay another visit to London. Wilhelm had appreciated the warm welcome he had received during his attendance at Edward VII’s funeral in 1910. It had felt, he announced at the time, like a homecoming; his current stay in England – and his first in the satisfying role of elder statesman, now that Uncle Bertie was gone – proved equally gratifying. George and his Germanic wife, Mary of Teck, were carefully affable; their British subjects, separating the rising fear of an imminent German invasion from the amused regard in which they held the German Emperor, were positively enthusiastic.
Was the Emperor’s attention caught, during the ceremonious unveiling of the monumental bulk of the Victoria Memorial, by the sculpted prows of four mighty marble ships, thrusting forward, as if putting out to sea, under the supervision of his imperial grandmother? If so, Wilhelm chose not to comment upon the placing of such a brazen declaration of England’s naval supremacy directly between Buckingham Palace and another brand-new testimony to the confident stance of a seafaring nation: Admiralty Arch. That particular designation, as the Emperor would surely have been aware, reinforced the symbolism of the four ships sailing out to battle from beneath Victoria’s rigid skirts. Britain, not Germany, still ruled the waves.
In 1911, the battle of British and German shipbuilders had temporarily slowed down. England, nevertheless, remained apprehensive of Germany’s intentions, and angry about the prodigious expense required to maintain her own traditional supremacy. Wilhelm, when he was not arguing the case for his vastly augmented fleet as a necessary form of national defence, rhapsodised about the eventual prospect of a shared alliance, with rich mutual rewards. England could keep her empire; all Germany would ask in turn was a free hand with the rest of the world. (The Emperor’s proposals were not entirely unlike those that Hitler would produce, a little over twenty years later, when seeking Britain’s support for his raids on Nazi Germany’s neighbours.)
Set within the context of such a grand global vision, the tiny current issue of England’s support for French rule in a (theoretically) independent North African country seemed almost unworthy of mention. Shortly before leaving London, however, Wilhelm raised with his cousin George the topic of Germany’s own interest in Morocco and expressed his hope that no harm would be done if Germany made that interest plain. George, or so Wilhelm persuaded himself after their chat, was reassuring: Germany could do as she wished. She should not fear interference from England.
Wilhelm was good at hearing only the answer that he wished to hear. King George had not consented to stand aside, and he was in no position to do so. In 1904, Edward VII, had negotiated an entente cordiale with France that – as an integral part of the deal – agreed to offer British support of the French in Morocco so long as the French didn’t disturb Britain’s own presence further along the coast of North Africa, in neighbouring Egypt. Possibly, George did offer some bluff words of sympathy for Wilhelm’s concerns about Morocco, a country that provided crucial access to Germany’s own cluster of African colonies.* Sympathy required no action.
In the first week of July 1911, less than three months after Wilhelm’s visit to London, Edward Grey, King George’s tall, patrician and country-loving foreign secretary, was urgently recalled to London from a fishing holiday by a message from the German Ambassador.
Count Metternich’s news was disturbing. Wilhelm had despatched a gunboat, the Panther, with armed troops on board, to anchor off the minor Moroccan port of Agadir. Officially, the Panther had arrived to offer protection from the predatory French to a cluster of Hamburg merchants who lived in Agadir. (Later reports disclosed that a lone German merchant had been despatched to the port and ordered to settle in as quickly as possible.) In fact, as the armed troops indicated, the Panther’s arrival lodged a pointed threat. Germany was questioning the French presence in Agadir and offering an implicit deal (or gunpoint blackmail). Either France could withdraw her demand for a protectorate in Morocco, or Germany should receive, whole and entire, France’s vast holdings in the rubber-rich Congo.
To Grey and his anxious colleagues (the British Chancellor, David Lloyd George, promptly began urging England to prepare for war), Germany’s aggressive stance seemed preposterous. Did the Emperor not remember his humiliation at the Conference of Algeciras, back in 1906, when, championing Morocco’s right to reject French control, Wilhelm had managed to receive the support of only a single country out of fourteen (and that one was Austro-Hungary, which had no option but to side with Germany)?
For a second time, Wilhelm’s bluff was called. The Panther was compelled to withdraw and the Treaty of Fez in 1912 saw Morocco placed – with Britain’s blessing – under the divided protection of Spain and France. True, a sizeable portion of the Congo was transferred to German ownership, but that was mostly a diplomatic sop, and the Emperor knew it.
The Second Moroccan Crisis had more enduring consequences than the wound to a vain man’s self-esteem. For the first time, England had experienced serious alarm. On 20 July 1911, England and France concluded an agreement to maintain their mutual safety. If Germany should offer a future threat to either country, an immediate joint mobilisation of 150,000 troops would be put into action. Three years later, that agreement, significantly, remained in effect.
In Germany, where face had been lost, Kiderlen-Waechter, the foreign secretary responsible for despatching the Panther in 1910, remained in office (he died the following year). Instead, the blame was laid upon the German Ambassador to Britain, Daisy Pless’s friend, the peace-loving and honourable Count Metternich. In May 1912, Metternich was unhelpfully replaced at the Embassy in London by the non-English speaking Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, a grim elder statesman unswervingly committed to Admiral Tirpitz’s clarion call for greater efforts to be devoted to building up Germany’s war fleet.
The German Navy – as viewed by a glowing-eyed young Anglo-Irishman who went straight from English public school to the Rhineland, aged just seventeen – played a crucial role in strengthening Germany’s national morale.
Stranded in Germany as a lonely teenager during the earliest years of the twentieth century, Evelyn Wrench was bewitched by the friendliness of the German people upon whom, as an ardent young imperialist, he inflicted his arguments in favour of the Boer War. Entranced by the glamour of the military (‘capes of pale grey worn with all the air of Henry Irving in a Shakespeare play’), young Wrench was more impressed still by Germany’s attitude to her navy.1 Any German sailor, however low his rank, was treated as a king, Wrench wrote. When boats came down the rivers, their masts and funnels were festooned with garlands; stepping ashore, a sailor could expect to be greeted by wreaths, feasts and the applause normally reserved for royalty. Thriving on such treatment, Germany displayed ‘all the confidence of successful youth’, or so Wrench recalled in 1934. ‘Her rise to prosperity and world fame had been meteoric . . . All Germany had to do was to sit tight.’2
Despatching hundreds of brightly coloured souvenir postcards to friends and family had occupied Evelyn Wrench’s spare hours in Germany; home again, he set up a postcard business before landing the job of overseas editor at Lord Northcliffe’s new Daily Mail. His heart lay elsewhere. Attending the funeral of Edward VII in 1910, Wrench introduced himself to Philip Kerr and Robert Brand, two brilliant members of the group known as Milner’s Kindergarten, men whose work towards South African union after the Second Boer War had led Kerr to set up the influential political group named (Camelot-style) the Round Table. Wrench played no part in the Round Table’s ‘moots’ and he never joined the high-minded coterie linked to it, that was already beginning to congregate at Cliveden, the newly acquired riverside estate of William Waldorf Astor. Nevertheless, the encounter with Brand and Kerr thrilled Wrench. ‘We talked imperialism,’ he noted in his diary on 5 October 1910. ‘It is splendid to think that there are young men like Kerr devoting themselves to the Empire.’3
That conversation with Milner’s protégés gave Wrench the confidence to embark upon his own grand plan. He aimed – ‘aflame with enthusiasm’ – to create ‘a great Brotherhood of Service, which would be to the Empire what the German Navy League was to Germany, a kind of “Imperial” Salvation Army.’4 Working in alliance with his cousin, Frank Yeats-Brown, Wrench had recruited 300 members by the following year (1911). At its peak, over 12,000 imperial enthusiasts would join the Royal Over-Seas League.
Since Evelyn Wrench was ardent in his desire for friendship between England and Germany and inspired by what he had seen of the German Navy, it is not surprising that one of the greatest heroes of his youth was the German-born prince who, by 1912, had achieved the position of first sea lord of the British Navy.
Described by one shrewd admiral, Lord Selborne, as ‘the cleverest sailor I have met’, Prince Louis of Battenberg (born Prince Ludwig Alexander von Battenburg) grew up at Hessen-Darmstadt, back in the years when Princess Alice was despatching teams of Protestant nurses to the German Hospital in London.5 Always kind to the young, Alice became a second mother to a quiet, clever boy whose parents were not rich and whose own Polish mother was not royal.
In 1868, the effortlessly trilingual prince reached fourteen and discovered his enduring passion for ships. Alice, aware that Germany possessed as yet no navy of her own, pulled strings to enable her intelligent protégé to join the British fleet.
Naturalised, transformed from Ludwig into Louis, and trained as a cadet on Nelson’s old flagship, the Victory, the handsome young man was just twenty when he gained the best marks ever recorded in his exams for seamanship. A favourite with both sexes, Louis’s philandering days were put behind him when he married Princess Alice’s eldest daughter. When Louis’s equally good-looking brother, Henry (‘Liko’), married Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, Beatrice, the position of the modestly born Battenbergs (of which ‘Mountbatten’ was a later, neat translation) stood secure within the royal circles of both England and Germany.
For Edward VII, Louis Battenberg was the perfect family diplomat, one who was always able to calm the easily aroused feelings of the German Emperor. (He proved his value in this respect during the awkward stationing of the Panther at Agadir.) Louis’s tact, as much as his naval skill, resulted in his steady promotion through the British ranks. In December 1912, just as feelings between England and Germany settled into a dreadful awareness of the likely consequences of creating two over-burdened and vastly expensive war fleets, Prince Louis reached the pinnacle of his career. As first sea lord, he occupied a role that placed a German at the head of the entire British naval service, including defence.
Few questioned the authority of a man who was widely liked and respected. To Admiral ‘Jacky’ Fisher, Prince Louis was ‘Moses and Aaron rolled into one’. To an observant German naval attaché, he seemed an impressively modest man, one who combined a wise prudence with ‘the inborn German thoroughness of a systematic worker’.6 Prince Louis epitomised, in fact, what was best in both the English and the Germans.
To the Emperor Wilhelm’s engaging younger brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, visiting England in the autumn of 1912, Louis was the ideal person with whom to discuss politics. Henry wanted to find out what, if anything, Britain would do if war broke out in Europe. Alarmed by the Prussian’s airy confidence in British neutrality, Louis reported the conversation back to the King. George, who had already warned Henry that England would support either Russia or France if Germany attacked ‘under certain circumstances’, shared Louis’s concern. Henry was delightful, but he shared the dangerous tendency of his older brother for hearing only as much as suited him.7
George V was not a linguist, but the conversation that took place between Louis and Henry in 1912 could have been held in either of the languages that they spoke with equal ease. From discussing diplomacy, they could have turned with mutual pleasure to an informed argument about which was the finer: a German Daimler or an English Rolls. Henry, almost certainly, would have opted for the British car.
Anglicising the German royals with a view to strengthening the bond to their own mother country was a task to which both Vicky and her sister Alice had applied themselves with diligence and success. Prince Henry, Vicky’s second son, was as entranced by English cars as the Emperor was by English-built boats. Vicky’s youngest daughter, Margarete or ‘Mossy’ (nicknamed for her short and springy hair), confided to Daisy Pless that England was the only place in which she felt free to be herself.8 Wandering around the house that Mossy had inherited (much to the Emperor’s annoyance) from their mother, Daisy saw evidence everywhere of the friendly Princess’s sincerity. Friedrichshof, while less rigorously run than in Vicky’s day, still looked and felt like an English home in which English was spoken in preference to the German language.
Anglophilia went deeper still. Several of Willy’s offspring took long, regular holidays at Eastbourne on England’s sunny south coast and educated their children at nearby schools. Mossy’s third son, Prince Philipp of Hessen-Kassel, playing truant from one such establishment at Bexhill-on-Sea, found that Germany was not, after all, so very far removed. Local landmarks showed where the gallant Hanoverian soldiers of the King’s German Legion had defended the coast from Napoleon; it must have occurred to Philipp that by calling its magnificent new pier the Kursaal, Bexhill was showing pride in its German connections.*
Prince Philipp of Hessen-Kassel, royal-born and speaking English with only the faintest trace of an accent, suffered from no Germanophobic unpleasantness during his pre-war schooldays on the south coast.
The young Robert Graves, arriving at Charterhouse in 1909, at the sensitive age of fourteen, faced a very different experience. At Rokeby, the London prep school where he had previously enjoyed three happy years, the young Graves had been urged to take pride in his Bavarian connections, encouraged by a headmaster who admired German culture. By 1909, the mood had altered. Signed onto the Charterhouse school list under his full name, Robert von Ranke Graves, the new boy was identified, from the start, as one of the enemy. ‘Businessmen’s sons, at this time, used to discuss hotly the threat, and even the necessity, of a trade war with the Reich. “German” meant “dirty German.” It meant: “cheap, shoddy goods competing with our sterling industries.” . . . It also meant military menace, Prussianism, useless philosophy, tedious scholarship, loving music and sabre rattling.’9
Understandably – forgivably – Graves decided that the time had come to suppress his German links. The ‘von Ranke’ of his mother’s family, a name in which he had previously taken immense pride, was dropped. Dropped, that is, until the young author elected, in 1929, to write his memoir of the war and to speak up for the enemy country to which a large part of his own family belonged.
The youthful Robert Graves, within the confined walls of a public school, was made personally aware of a spirit of hatred that was rising against Germany in the England of 1909. Attendants of the fiery lectures being given at Queen’s College in that same year by a fiercely moustached and scholarly Scottish historian, John Cramb, experienced at firsthand just how easily that spirit could be inflamed.
Constricted by the difficulties of caring, on a modest income, for a crippled son and an invalid wife, John Cramb’s chief solaces were music and literature. Wagner was his favourite composer; in 1911, Cramb was a devoted attendant at the great Ring Cycle that Thomas Beecham (aided by the family fortune that derived from Beechams Powders) sponsored at Covent Garden. Beecham himself, having given Richard Strauss’s magnetic operas Elektra and Salome their successful British premieres the preceding year, was naturally on the podium.
Cramb’s love for Germany was of a singular kind. His lectures at Queen’s College, illustrated by lurid quotations from the tales of the Nibelungen, conjured up a world in which battle, conducted upon a titanic scale, became a glorious inevitability: a manifestation of ‘the world-spirit in the form most sublime and awful that can enthral the contemplation of man’.10
Cramb’s mind, although brilliant, was to become increasingly deranged and his hunger for imperialism went far beyond Evelyn Wrench’s idealistic quest for a unifying sense of national purpose. But Cramb’s more troubling obsession, towards the end of his life, was with the need for a great and cleansing war. His death in 1913 cut short his projected series of lectures on the likely outcome of an imminent and, in Cramb’s view, desirable clash between England and Germany.
Cramb sounds, on first acquaintance, to have had much in common with the dreadful – and far too influential – Houston Stewart Chamberlain. But the Scottish academic was not an evil man; unhappiness, combined with fierce intellectualism, had led an essentially noble mind into taking a disastrously wrong course. Chamberlain, a globular-eyed distant relation of the English political family, was a far less benevolent figure.
Married in 1908, to Eva Wagner (by arrangement with her mother Cosima), Chamberlain achieved what he had long desired: a controlling position at the summit of Wagner-land, among the complex and unhappy clan who lived upon the hill of Bayreuth. Driven by a hatred of Britain that was only exceeded by his loathing of all Jews, Chamberlain’s successful endeavours to gain control in the Wagner family and to influence the Emperor have been outshone, posthumously, by our knowledge of the awe in which this dangerous man was later held by Adolf Hitler, a pall-bearer at his funeral.
Shunned today by even the most rabid of right-wing apologists, Chamberlain was widely admired in his own time for a book which argued that the early Germanic people had, by over-running Europe, saved it from Jewish domination; that the Germanic races belonged to the world’s most highly gifted group, the Aryans, and that the Germans themselves, representing the physical and mental peak of this group, could justifiably regard themselves as the lords of the world.
First published in German in 1899, Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century became an immediate success, selling 10,000 copies in its first ten days and 87,000 by 1914. In England, the 1910 translation was provided with a glowing introduction by Lord Redesdale, an erudite peer and former diplomat who had written authoritative works on early Japan. Thanks in part to Redesdale’s own excellent connections, the book received a handful of admiring reviews; English interest never, however, matched the veneration accorded to Chamberlain’s Foundations in Germany.
Chamberlain did not expressly advocate war, as Cramb had done; nevertheless, he played an important part in bolstering a sense of entitlement in a people to whom his book granted the idea of racial superiority. Convinced, as Prince Henry became, that England would never stand in the way of German expansion in Europe, Chamberlain made use of his sycophantic correspondence with an easily flattered emperor to reassure Wilhelm on this point. The events of 1914 came as a shock to the hilltop occupants of Bayreuth. ‘You can’t imagine the deep grief England’s declaration of war has caused me,’ Chamberlain wrote to a German friend: ‘shame, anger and despair’.11 Disillusionment did not, however, lessen his confidence in a victory for Germany, his chosen country.
*
Viewed through Chamberlain’s supercilious and Anglophobic eyes, it seemed clear that a waning imperial power like England would never have the courage to oppose German might. Ida Wylie, a British novelist whose later works helped to create the modern image of strong, independent women in the Katharine Hepburn mould, shared that view. Growing up in an England that bristled with suspicions of the German aggressor, and putting her own visits to the Rhineland and the Black Forest spa towns to good use, Wylie published My German Year in 1910, when she was just twenty-five. Her chosen audience were the English householders who, as avid readers of the Daily Mail and The Times, dreaded that they might one day awake ‘to find themselves overwhelmed by German airships, German Dreadnoughts, German soldiers, and – worst of all – German policemen; in other words, to find that their dear Motherland has been transformed into a German colony . . .’12
Keen to calm the fervour of imaginations that had been over-heated by the press, Wylie based her account of Germany on personal recollections of tranquil, orderly Carlsruhe, the former winter habitat of old Fanny de Bunsen. Germany, she wrote, was a homely country, aglow with pride in her army (little mention was made of the mighty navy) and the lovingly preserved traditions of regional rule. The German, Wylie’s readers learned, was not really interested in nationalism; his attachment was only and always to ‘his own particular little Fatherland, his own particular Sovereign’.13
Later, Wylie became a strident champion of German supremacy. In 1910, she was seeking to restore a peaceful friendship between two cousinly nations. England and Germany had fought together, blood-brothers, at Waterloo, she pleaded; why, then, should they quarrel? ‘Two nations, who, time after time, have fought shoulder to shoulder, who together saved Europe from her greatest danger, related in blood and in all the highest virtues of courage, and tenacity, and loyalty, should surely go forward in the future united as in the past . . .’14
*
Wylie sought to preserve the peace by reminding her readers of a shared, harmonious past. Ford Madox Ford, in 1908, began making use of his new publication, the English Review, to give German authors a voice in England. He had, during his visits to Germany, formed a great admiration for Levin Schücking, a writer who bore an uncanny facial resemblance to the late Stephen Crane, Ford’s friend and literary neighbour. Schücking was happy to contribute an essay about Shakespeare, beloved in both countries.15 Joseph Conrad, Ford’s former collaborator, meanwhile agreed to hand in a friendly appraisal of the German Emperor.
Appearing in Ford’s magazine at the same time was a young English writer who needed no converting to the cause of Anglo-German friendship. D. H. Lawrence, at the time when Ford began to publish the young man’s first poems and stories in the English Review (1909), was already studying German and even writing a novel, The Trespasser (originally titled The Saga of Siegmund), with a Wagnerian theme.
Lawrence was not only a brilliant mimic but a gifted linguist. Following his mother’s death in 1910, his aunt, Ada Krenkow, newly married to a scholarly German and living in a remote part of the Rhineland, had a suggestion to make to her young nephew. Lawrence desperately wanted to escape from his roots in the mining village of Eastwood; why did he not consider making his future in Germany, where he could supplement his fledgling writing career by teaching? Ada Krenkow’s husband was himself an academic; doors could be opened for a clever young man, if he chose to settle in a new country.
Some scheme along such lines had begun to shape Lawrence’s plans for his future by February 1912. He could have sought the advice of Ford, whose German connections were excellent. Instead, Lawrence went to lunch at the family home of one of his teachers at Nottingham University College. Professor Ernest Weekley was a fluent Germanist; it had possibly occurred to Lawrence – a collier’s son with a powerful streak of snobbery – that Weekley’s wife, the well-born Baronin Frieda von Richthofen, could provide introductions to a grander German circle than those inhabited either by Ford’s friends or his own Krenkow connections.
All occurred as planned – and as had not been planned. The gaunt, fiercely sincere young man fell in love with the Professor’s blonde and buxom wife; Lawrence’s sedately charted journey towards a new life as a teacher and writer was transformed into a runaway escapade with a woman who, in these early stages of their romance, had no intention of enjoying more than another brief fling, an affair of the light kind that enlivened the tedium of her married life.
Frieda and Lawrence left England on 3 May 1912. Weekley, receiving confirmation of their relationship a week later, declared the marriage to be over and that he would take the children into his custody. Lawrence, having spent an impatient two weeks with Krenkow’s family at Waldbröl, sped joyously to Munich (the hometown of Frieda’s family) to embark on a new life with the woman he adored.
Lawrence’s summer in Germany, although punctuated by emotional storms, proved to be a time of exceptional happiness. Spending the Whitsun holiday at an inn near the River Loisach, he grew rhapsodic about strolling with Frieda through flower-spangled meadows to a lake, beside which they sat, putting Frieda’s rings on their toes and dabbling their feet in the pale-green water, ‘to see how they looked’.16 Later, assisted by Frieda’s elder sister, Elsa, and her lover, Alfred Weber, the runaways settled into a Bavarian home at tiny Icking, set high above the River Isar and looking out towards the Alps across fields sprinkled with the brightly coloured square farmhouses inhabited by members of Der Blaue Reiter painting school. (Lawrence, who became one of the school’s earliest English admirers, was thrilled to be confronted by one of Franz Marc’s great horse paintings when he visited Alfred Weber’s Munich home.) Later, helped by Elsa’s husband, Edgar Jaffé, the couple moved to Irschenhausen, where a woodside chalet offered another glorious Alpine view and the daily company – so the nature-loving Lawrence wrote – of tumbling squirrels and wandering roe deer.
Living in rural bliss, Lawrence could not entirely escape a glimpse of the future in a country where large-scale army manoeuvres had become a feature of everyday life. His witnessing of these ominous preparations provided the material for one of his finest early stories, ‘Honour and Arms’ (Lawrence’s editor shrewdly changed the title to ‘The Prussian Officer’ in November 1914, strengthening the tale’s relevance to a country newly at war with Germany). For the most part, however, despite the evident hostility of Frieda’s autocratic father, Lawrence enjoyed his time in Germany. He never – as the most notorious of his later works shows – ceased to admire its culture.
Sexually incompatible though Sir Clifford Chatterley and his wife appear to be in the revolutionary study of sexual appetites that Lawrence wrote during his last years, they can commune through a shared attachment to Germany. We learn that Connie (having been hurried home to England from her Dresden school on the outbreak of war) had been ‘profoundly thrilled’ by the German way of life, the music and the talk (‘The endless talk about things had thrilled her soul . . .’). Sir Clifford Chatterley, although seriously injured during the war, retains a quiet and stubborn sympathy for the enemy: ‘the young intelligent Germans who were, like himself, caught up in the huge machine that they hated’. During periods of leave, he reads aloud to Connie from the works of Rilke and Gerhart Hauptmann.
For Lawrence to have written in this way during the late 1920s, in years when the merest reference to Germany could provoke a British snarl of abuse, testifies to the strength of the English novelist’s own feelings for a country where he had known great happiness.
Back in the summer of 1914, Frieda and her lover returned to England, but only to get married. Their plans, already settled for a return to Europe, were overtaken by events.
Had there been no war, it’s entirely possible that Lawrence might have settled in a country where he, like Ford, felt instantly at home. Post-war, his visits to Germany were brief and circumscribed by the demands made by Frieda’s mother, living out her widowhood near Baden. It was during the last of these visits, in 1929, that the terminally tubercular Lawrence wrote one of his greatest poems, inspired by a jar of sea-blue flowers that had been placed in the dying man’s room, there in Germany.
‘Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness.’
‘Bavarian Gentians’ charts Lawrence’s descent into the underworld. Reading the poem today, it’s tempting to intuit that a dying man had been granted a prescient, dreadful glimpse of the darkness (the ‘sightless realm’) that lay ahead for Germany, a country that he loved.
The plans that Lawrence had initially made, back in 1912, for his future as a teacher in Germany were not seen by his friends as reckless or eccentric. It is only with hindsight that the signs of impending war glare out from the terrifying summer of 1911, when Germany’s challenge to Agadir, a French port in Morocco, suddenly threatened to compel Britain to fulfil her promise to support France in times of war. The signs were certainly there, but only a small circle of people were conscious of what was at stake and how urgent the situation had become.
Sir Maurice de Bunsen, a shrewd observer of events in Europe from his position as British ambassador to Spain, had been among the first to sense where the kindling match might be lit. Back in 1908, while the English papers filled their columns with details ofthe Highcliffe interview and the German Emperor’s gaffes, Sir Maurice took anxious note of the furious response in Serbia to Austria’s annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In February 1912, Wilhelm II was visiting Pless when he discourteously informed his English hostess that her countrymen were due for a thrashing. Daisy had shuddered when Willy added, with a glare, ‘and they’ll get it if they don’t take care’.16
De Bunsen and Daisy Pless inhabited the social and political spheres in which every avenue was being explored for ways to avert an oncoming crisis. Richard Haldane, England’s formidably prudent and long-serving secretary of state for war, was despatched in February 1912 on a secret mission to Germany (Sir Ernest Cassel, making use of his friendship with the German shipbuilder Albert Ballin, was a prime mover behind the scenes) to negotiate for a mutual reduction in the pace of shipbuilding. The news that Haldane brought home to England was not good. Germany had no intention of deviating from the increased naval programme that Admiral Tirpitz had set in motion. Germany’s intention, so it seemed, was not to attack Britain, but to intimidate her: the Emperor and his advisors wanted no interference from the English in Europe. A strong navy would hold a troublesome island at bay.
Out in the eastern wilds of Silesia, in the summer of 1913, Daisy Pless’s teenage son, Hansel, was offered another portent of the future when he came across an unmarked aerodrome and a line of flimsy, wire-strung biplanes drawn up, all ready for action. Later, strolling homewards, a startled Hansel witnessed the final stages of an army manoeuvre as, in a scene that seemed to belong to another century, a line of magnificently uniformed Prussian cavalry officers came charging out of a wood, to a blast of golden trumpets.
War was in the air, but only a few had caught the acrid whiff of smoke. While Lawrence felt confident enough to start plotting a German future for himself in 1912, a wealthy young violinist who had already left England to make her home in Bavaria began laying plans for her personal contribution towards the preservation of peace.
Germany, in the years before the war, remained the pinnacle of aspiration for young English musicians. When Mary Portman discovered her vocation, at the age of eighteen, she asked nothing more of her parents than to be allowed to go to study music (like Ethel Smyth, whom she greatly admired) in Germany.
The tenth child of the aristocratic owner of Bryanston House and large tracts of land in north London, Mary was expected to tread the traditional route towards a good marriage, a fine house and the production of an heir. It took a persistent daughter fifteen years to be granted her wish for independence and freedom. In 1910, Mary moved to Bavaria. Armed with her violin and impressed by the openheartedness of a musical nation that was ready to pay tribute to her compatriot, Beatrice Harrison, as the greatest cellist of all time (Harrison performed a tour of Germany in 1912, to rapturous reviews), Mary developed an idea.
A century later, in 2009, an ancient inhabitant of Garmisch-Partenkirchen was still relating the tale of his family and their momentous encounter with Miss Portman. Back in those long-ago days before the First War, his parents had been out walking together through the beautiful local valley known as ‘the Golden Round’ when they met a solitary Englishwoman. She was looking for Schachen, Ludwig II’s secluded hunting lodge, and – having lost her way – seemed transfixed by the beauty of her surroundings. She asked the couple what the valley was called. When they told her, she smiled and announced that she had found what she had sought. ‘Here,’ Mary grandly declared to the two puzzled Germans, ‘here, I will build my house.’17
The Portman House, as Mary’s ambitious project rapidly became known, was to be no ordinary home. Designed by the Arts and Crafts architect Detmar Blow in the style of an Anglo-Germancastle, with high, stepped gables, its principal feature was to be the immense concert hall at which, in Mary’s vision, an international community of musicians would be drawn together in a setting of almost mystical serenity. Here, in the meadowlands of Bavaria, Germany and England would reaffirm their friendship. On 8 September 1913, the sum of 4,192 marks was paid by Mary into a bank in Munich: the first step had been taken towards the realisation of a magnificent dream.
Footnotes
* Germany held Togoland, Namibia and Kamerun (Cameroon) in West Africa, and Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania in East Africa.
* The connection survived the war. The Augusta-Viktoria College at Bexhill was German-funded and attended by the daughters of German industrialists with British connections (MAB Mallender-MS, December 2012). Meanwhile, the Kursaal was demolished, largely on account of its German name.