Post-war, our writer’s German grandmother fell in love with a British officer, creating a complex relationship between family and fatherland
In a leafy square outside the Nassauer Hof, Wiesbaden’s oldest and finest hotel, there is a statue of a man who, had he lived a little longer, could have changed the course of history. Kaiser Friedrich III is relatively unknown in Britain, but here he’s a familiar figure – a symbol of the peaceful path Germany might have taken, rather than plunging into two world wars.
The year was 1888. The German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm I, had died, and had been succeeded by his son, Friedrich III. Unlike his father, Friedrich was a progressive monarch, who planned to reform the German parliament along British lines, yet he was already gravely ill with throat cancer. He died after only three months on the throne, aged just 56, and was succeeded by his son, the vain and volatile Wilhelm II.
Wilhelm II led Germany into the First World War, and gazing up at his father’s statue I begin to wonder what might have been but for Friedrich’s heavy smoking. Wilhelm I lived until he was 90. If Friedrich III had lived as long, he would have reigned until 1921.
A firm Anglophile, married to Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, it’s hard to imagine him leading Germany into the First World War. Without the First World War there would have been no Hitler, no Holocaust, no Second World War, no Cold War… These are the sort of things I end up pondering whenever I return to Germany. Nowhere else I know does the past feel quite so pressing, or quite so close.