The Young Emperor William II. of Germany by Harold Frederic

Author:Harold Frederic [Frederic, Harold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographie
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
Published: 2017-07-06T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII. A YEAR OF EXPERIMENTAL ABSOLUTISM.

THE young Emperor's dislike for the press was indeed a fruitful source of sensational incidents during the first year or two of his reign, and still is uneasily felt to contain the elements of possibly further disturbance. The fault of this attitude is by no means entirely on one side. Both the character of the Kaiser and the character of the German press are in large part what Bismarck has made them, and if their less admirable sides clash and grind into each' other with painful friction from time to time, it is only what might be expected. During Bismarck's twenty-eight years of power in Prussia he so by turns debauched and coerced the press that the adjective "reptile " had to be invented by outsiders properly to describe its venomous cowardice, He openly and contemptuously prostituted it to serve his poorest and pettiest uses, so that it was not possible for anyone to think of it with respect; yet, oddly enough, he always showed the keenest and most thin-skinned sensitiveness when its attacks or innuendoes were aimed at himself.

This whimsical susceptibility to affront in the printed word, no matter how mean or trivial the force back of it, is a trait which has often come near making Bismarck ridiculous, and it is not pleasant to note how largely William seems also to be possessed with it. He is as nervous about what the papers will say as a young debutante on the stage. Not only does he keep an anxious watch upon the talk of the German editors, but he ordains a vigilant scrutiny of the articles printed in foreign countries from the pens of correspondents stationed at Berlin. In this he is very German. Nobody in England, for example, ever dreams of caring about, or for the most part of even taking the trouble to learn, what is printed abroad about English personages or politics. The foreign correspondents in London are as free as the wind that blows. But matters were ordered very differently at the beginning of the present reign in Berlin, and to this day journalists pursue their calling there under a sense of espionage hardly to be imagined in Fleet Street. It is true that a change for the better is distinctly visible of late, but it will be the work of many years to eradicate the low views of German journalism which Bismarck instilled, alike, unfortunately, in the royal palaces and the editorial offices of Prussia.

One of the very first acts of William's reign was the expulsion from Berlin of two French journalists whose sympathetic accounts of his father's dismissal of Puttkamer had been distasteful to the royal eye. In the following January the correspondents of the Figaro and National of Paris were similarly driven out. In March, 1889, simultaneously with the seizure of the Berlin Volks-Zeitung and the prosecution of the Freisinnige Zeitung, a new Penal Code was presented to the Reichstag which contained such arbitrary provisions

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