Authors: Ian Buruma
When Herzl accepted the Ugandan idea,
faute de mieux
, he used an interesting phrase. He would, he said, create a “miniature England in reverse.” By this he meant that he would start with a colony and work toward a metropole. Again, a comparison with Disraeli is instructive. Disraeli believed fervently in the British Empire. It was he who presented Queen Victoria with the imperial crown of India—after she had pressed him for it, to be sure. Dizzy was as fascinated by the Oriental razzle-dazzle of Delhi durbars as his queen-empress. There was even the suggestion, in
Tancred
, that to save England from national decline, the imperial throne should be shifted to Delhi. Empire appealed to Dizzy’s sense of theater, to his Orientalist romance, with the Jews cast as the superior race, and to his idea of England carrying on the civilizing work of ancient Jewish tradition. His enemies often chose to see this romance in a sinister light. They saw Disraeli’s imperialism as a
cunning strategy to promote messianic Jewish interests. In fact, he was thinking only of England.
One can see why enlightened empires would appeal to Jews, or indeed members of any ethnic or religious minority. Empires may be dominated by one nation but always include other nationalities. Queen Victoria, like God, was said to have loved all her subjects equally. Many Jews felt safer, at first, in the Soviet Union than in Russia. Jews were among the biggest supporters of the Habsburg monarchy. Herzl always admired the kaiser. And yet, when Disraeli thought of Empire, it was chiefly as a way of tying the British (he would have said English) nation together more tightly. Empire gave the British people a common mission, and a common source of pride. Like his beloved monarchy, or the Anglican Church, Empire was one more quasi-mystical force to combat the rationalist erosion of nationhood.
The most grandiose gesture in defense of British imperialism actually concerned a Jewish subject. In 1850, a mob in Athens burnt down the house of a Portuguese Jew, born in Gibralter, named David Pacifico. Don Pacifico had never lived in England but was by birth a British citizen, and he appealed to the British government for help in pressing for compensation from the Greeks. When the Greeks refused to pay up, Palmerston sent gunboats with orders to bombard Athens. He told Parliament that “as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say
Civis Romanus sum
, so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong.” Threatening to bomb Athens for the sake of one Jewish merchant might sound a bit over the top. Disraeli certainly thought so. But I think Herzl would have approved.
Herzl admired the British Empire. In a speech he gave in Vienna in 1900, Herzl described Zionism as a colonial policy in the British imperial style. He had hoped Cecil Rhodes would take a fatherly interest in the project. But Rhodes answered that Englishmen couldn’t rule the entire world. Another one of Herzl’s ideas was to found the Jewish state as a British colony in the Sinai Peninsula, which would be developed by the Jewish Company (always identified by its English name, copied from the East India Company). As he said to Joseph Chamberlain, whose monocle dropped when he heard it, the British Empire would gain ten million grateful Jews. While negotiating these and other
plans, Herzl was impressed by the “coolness and calm” of the Foreign Office mandarins. “We must learn to adopt this coolness and calm. It is the key to greatness.”
The technological symbol of British empire-building, indeed perhaps the prime symbol of the entire British
mission civilisatrice
, was the railway network constructed in India. Railways, as Thomas Hughes already lamented in
Tom Brown’s School Days
, took men away from the snug frontiers of their native soil, even as they shrank the world. Railways freed people all over the empire by giving them a chance to move. They also transported British goods for them to buy. Indian nationalists were hostile to the “imperialist” railways. Not Herzl. Altneuland was to be the hub of a worldwide railway system, stretching from the Cape to London. A character in the novel named Professor Steineck, president of the Jewish Academy, has the charming idea of celebrating the centenary anniversary of the world’s first steam railway line, from Stockton to Darlington, by having every train give three toots on the whistle.
Herzl’s Utopia, then, was less a miniature England than a miniature British Empire, with its own civilizing mission, which went beyond feats of engineering. His description of British imperialism in Egypt is as rhapsodic as his writing about the poet laureate’s dinner table in Kent. Herzl traveled there in 1903 and wrote a series of feuilletons. Never, he said, had the Egyptians been ruled by such splendid foreign masters. Here was a despot who, “far from exploiting or oppressing the people, wanted to elevate and improve them. This extraordinary invader spreads light, restores order, and brings hygiene, justice and health.” And these wonderful things are done with the lightest of touches. Local customs, arts, and languages are always respected. Freedom of religion and speech is guaranteed. That is why, says Herzl, “a people lucky enough to be subdued by England, has more freedom than was ever dreamed of before.”
Like the British Empire, Altneuland is a universal model of progress and freedom and offers protection to all peoples of the world. Just as the British brought light, justice, order, and electricity to the Egyptians, so the Jewish
Kulturvolk
elevates all the peoples of the holy land. A German-American traveler in Altneuland is astounded by all the wonders of technology and the extraordinary level of
Kultur
. But he wonders about the fate of the Arabs. Hadn’t Jewish immigration displaced
them? Weren’t they resentful? (This was written in 1902.) So he asks a Palestinian Arab, named Reshid Bey. “What a question,” answers the Arab, “for us it has been a blessing.”
It is the classic defense of colonialism: the blessings bestowed by a superior civilization. In Herzl’s case, his wishful dream might have included an element of messianic zeal: the Chosen People as the liberators of mankind. But as usual with Herzl, there was a more practical side to his dreaming. He believed that by making the Jewish state a model of freedom and tolerance, Jews would be treated with more tolerance everywhere. His aim was to ensure that Jews in all countries could feel as much at home as Nathaniel Meyer Rothschild did in England. His mission was to civilize the world by creating a model Jewish homeland. It was madly ambitious and wholly admirable. If he entertained doubts, it was mostly about the Jews themselves. He was never fully convinced they would live up to his dreams. British doubts about their burden were different: they were never convinced that foreigners could follow the British example. And when foreigners tried, in literary societies in Calcutta or grand hotels in Cairo, they were laughed at and called monkeys.
Herzl was perceptive about the dilemma of enlightened imperialism—at least as far as the British were concerned. On that same visit to Egypt in 1903, Herzl attended a lecture by an authority on irrigation named Sir William Wilcox. The lecture is “hellishly boring,” and Herzl’s eyes wander round the hall. He notes the presence of many intelligent-looking young Egyptians. Here, surely, are the future rulers of Egypt, and the British don’t seem to realize it. The British are doing a grand job, he writes in his diary. “But with liberty and progress they are teaching the natives to rebel. I believe that the English school in the colonies will either destroy British colonial rule—or establish British rule of the world. One would like to return in fifty years and see the outcome.”
A year later Herzl was dead, aged forty-four. His weak heart could no longer stand the strain of his mission. Thousands of Jews traveled to Vienna to be at his funeral. Among the mourners were Hermann Bahr, his fraternity brother who turned against the Jews after the death of Richard Wagner, and William Hechler, the English vicar. His son Hans, destined to become the doge of the Jewish aristocratic republic, read the kaddish. He was educated in England, analyzed by Freud, became
a Baptist, Catholic, Quaker, Unitarian, Lutheran, and finally a member of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London. He killed himself in 1930.
We now know what happened in the century after Herzl’s death. His worst fears for the Jews were as nothing compared to what lay in store. But Herzl’s state was born, as a child of the British Empire, even as the Empire itself was dying. There was to be no titled upper class, either of Sephardic Jews, as Disraeli had hoped, or German-speaking Ashkenazim, as Herzl had expected. Israeli boys do not play cricket, nor is Jerusalem filled with English gardens. Dueling never caught on. German is not the national language, and neither is English. But Jewish settlement did bring economic progress, as well as a parliamentary system, both of which Herzl’s British supporters would have recognized and saluted. Yet it wasn’t counted as a blessing by the colonized. Two things in particular were inherited by the “miniature England” from the British Empire: a more or less permanent anti-colonial war on its borders, and a permanent tension in the metropole between Herzl’s open, constitutional idea of nationhood and the wail of tribal voices.
C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN
T
HE
A
NGLOMANE
W
HO
H
ATED
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NGLAND
I
N THE LATE AFTERNOON OF
N
OVEMBER
9
,
1918
,
EVEN THE
kaiser, lounging around with his generals in the wintry gloom of a grand hotel in Spa, realized his game was up. The Allied armies had broken through the German lines at Arras and Cambrai in September. Germany’s allies—Bulgars, Austrians, Turks—were surrendering all over the southern front. Sailors of the kaiser’s beloved navy had refused to obey orders in Kiel on November 3. Revolution was brewing in Berlin, Hanover, Hamburg, Lübeck, Bremen, Munich, and Cologne. Marshal Foch was laying down the conditions of Germany’s surrender in France. The kaiser was to be arrested as a war criminal. So it was clear to everyone, from the Social Democrats now governing in Berlin to the generals in Spa, that the kaiser had to go. It might even be best, so the kaiser was advised by his friends, for His Majesty to die a hero’s death: a sinking of his flagship could be arranged, or a last splendid little land battle, perhaps. Or maybe the kaiser might prefer to take his own life? That way the honor of Germany, the German armed forces, and the monarchy could still be salvaged, and—this was really the main point—the red revolution averted.
But Kaiser Wilhelm II had no intention of taking his life or dying a hero’s death. He had considered several options, each more fantastic than the other: a “coalition of Germanic peoples,” led by Germany, would yet show the effete French and the perfidious British what was what. The kaiser himself would march on Berlin at the head of his loyal troops and crush the revolution. He wasn’t going to let “a few hundred Jews and a thousand workers” remove him from his throne. He would have every treacherous liberal hauled from the Reichstag and executed on the spot.
None of this happened, of course. Instead, the kaiser and his entourage, twelve military officers and thirty servants, including his barber, his chambermaids, his butler, his cooks, his doctor, his equerry, and his old cloakroom attendant, “Father” Schulz, crossed the Dutch border, bound for the hospitality of Count Godard Bentinck’s castle at Amerongen. The kaiser’s first request, upon his arrival, was to have “a cup of real good English tea.” He got his tea, served with English scones.
The Allied powers asked the Dutch to hand him over. The terrified kaiser tried on various disguises for a possible escape to Denmark or Sweden. But the Dutch government decided to offer him permanent asylum, so long as he didn’t make trouble. And the kaiser soon settled into a routine of chopping down Count Bentinck’s trees, plotting his comeback, and brooding over Jews and socialists who had stabbed him in the back.
The compulsion to fell trees (“Hackeritis”) was something the kaiser shared with William Gladstone, a figure he otherwise despised. Since the kaiser had the full use of only one arm, he would order foresters to do most of the work, whereafter he would strike fine poses at the end of a saw, particularly when a photographer was on hand to record his prowess. Much to the relief of Bentinck, who was worried about the state of his park and began to find his visitor’s interminable monologues about the backstabbers wearisome, the kaiser acquired a country house nearby from Audrey Hepburn’s grandmother, Baroness van Heemstra. (Before moving in, he had already managed to eliminate 470 trees from his new domain.)
Huis Doorn, the Kaiser’s residence until his death in 1941, is hardly in the Wilhelminian style. Its simple eighteenth-century proportions, grafted onto a fourteenth-century core, and modest size didn’t match
the kaiser’s operatic pretensions. Since he had much of the contents of his Berlin palace brought to Doorn, the house, now a museum, looks overstuffed, like a uniform with too many medals, or the poky retirement flat of a once very grand lady. All available space is filled with knickknacks, paintings, mementos, drawings, uniforms, prints, curios, official presents, tapestries, busts, books, photographs, ancestral portraits, and assorted imperial gewgaws. Portraits of his first wife, Auguste Viktoria, abound, as do large paintings, porcelain statuettes, and bronze busts of Frederick the Great—a hunched figure, usually sitting on a horse. There are many portraits of the kaiser himself: in the uniform of a Prussian hussar, as a German admiral, a Nordic huntsman, a Turkish general, a Spanish general, a Danish admiral, a general of the Prussian Guards, a Highlander in a Royal Stewart kilt, and an honorary doctor of law at Oxford, complete with the Order of the Garter.