to boarding the Titanic, John Thayer and his wife had spent some time visiting Berlin as guests of both the US Consul General, Alexander Montgomery Thackara, and the new American Ambassador, John Leishman, who had previously served as the US representative to Switzerland, the Ottoman Empire and Italy. Although it had existed for hundreds of years as Prussia’s capital, as Germany’s Berlin remained new, high on hustle and low in majesty, with most traces of the provincial capital vanishing in pursuit of modernity. Berlin, like Belfast, seemed ever expanding; Mark Twain had once quipped, ‘Next to it, Chicago would appear venerable.’[18] Nonetheless, it was European and, like Thayer, Leishman was persuaded of the European way of doing things, at least when it came to manners if not to business. Unhappily, by the time the Thayers arrived as guests of the embassy the Ambassador had run aground on some of the Old World’s less appealing attributes. His eldest daughter had already married a French count when her younger sister, Nancy, received a proposal from the Prince von Croÿ, who was in the happy and increasingly unusual position of possessing both a fortune and a pedigree like Midas’. Nancy, as an American and a commoner, was counted as defective on two fronts by the Prince’s formidable aunt, the Archduchess Isabella of Austria and in her crusade to prevent the nuptials, the Archduchess enlisted the help of the German Kaiser, who was traditionally required to give his blessing to the marriage of a subject as high-ranking as von Croÿ.[19] This the Kaiser declined to give, causing a rupture with the American Ambassador, who was understandably mortified by the insult to his daughter. As the newspapers buzzed with the scandal, relations between the Kaiser and the Ambassador deteriorated to the extent that, after Nancy and the Prince married without imperial permission in October 1913, Leishman felt he had no choice but to resign.[20]
For the Thayers, their trip to Germany had also offered an opportunity to see one of the world’s most prosperous states. With plenty of fertile agricultural land, huge natural reserves of coal and iron ore, and population growth sustained by an increasingly excellent healthcare system, Imperial Germany also stood at the forefront of new industries like electrical engineering as well as steel and chemical production. Germany’s public education system was superior to those in Britain, France or America, while conditions for its working classes, particularly after the development of its sophisticated welfare state, meant that a German factory worker’s average life expectancy was about five years longer than their British equivalents’ and nearly two decades longer than a Russian’s. This spate of progress was rendered all the more remarkable by the fact that Germany had existed as a political entity for only forty-one years by the time the Titanic sailed on her maiden voyage.
The recession of Habsburg influence in Germany after the Napoleonic Wars had allowed the northern kingdom of Prussia, ruled by the House of Hohenzollern, to assume primacy and eventually, in 1871, to unite the many kingdoms, grand duchies, principalities and states into the Second Reich, with the King of Prussia installed as hereditary German Emperor.[21] The other pre-unification German rulers kept their wealth, titles, prestige and varying degrees of regional influence, but it was the culture of Prussia – confident, militarist and expansionist – that dominated the new empire. This caused particular concern in London, Paris and eventually St Petersburg. Despite being the son of a British princess, upon his succession to the German throne in 1888 Kaiser Wilhelm II did little to allay British fears and much to exacerbate them. In some way, the Titanic’s genesis lay with the Kaiser’s dichotomy when it came to his mother’s homeland – devout emulation jarring with suspicious competition. Wilhelm II’s passionate interest in the mercantile marine had, in fact, begun thanks to a White Star liner, the Teutonic, when, during the Kaiser’s 1889 visit to the United Kingdom, she had been picked to underscore Britain’s commercial and military dominance of the oceans. Wilhelm had been invited to a naval review at Spithead and then, in the company of his uncle, the future Edward VII, offered a tour of the Teutonic. If the intention had been to intimidate the German Emperor, or gloat, it backfired spectacularly. Instead, as he viewed the Teutonic, the Kaiser was apparently heard to remark, ‘We must have some of these.’[22] In 1897, imperial encouragement, the sustained economic miracle of the Second Reich and a booming eastern European migrant trade for which the German ports proved more convenient points of embarkation to America than their rivals in Italy, France or England, wove together to create the Kaiser Wilhelm der Große, the first transatlantic liner with the soon to be iconic four funnels. Christened after the Kaiser’s late grandfather, the ship was a sensation – hugely popular with all classes of travellers, particularly European emigrants and affluent Americans – and lavishly decorated with the fantastically overwrought designs of Johann Poppe. A contemporary joke described the aesthetic as ‘two of everything but the kitchen range, and then gilded’.[23] Six months after her maiden voyage, she took the Blue Riband, the award for the fastest commercial crossing of the North Atlantic.[24] Her success was sufficient to inspire her owners, the Norddeutscher Lloyd, to commission three running mates over the next decade, all likewise named for, and launched in the presence of, members of the German Imperial Family.[25] A testament to how important these ships were to the German Empire’s sense of self was delivered via Our Future Lies upon the Water, a large allegorical mural painted for the first-class Smoking Room of the Kronprinz Wilhelm; it depicted conquering sea gods in aquatic chariots, holding aloft tridents and a banner that looked suspiciously like the German flag.[26] There seems to be no truth in the story that the last of the quadruplets, the Kronprinzessin Cecilie, bearing the name of the Kaiser’s daughter-in-law, Cecilia of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, which should logically have been the largest of the four, had her gross tonnage registered as one ton less than that of the third ship in the series, the Kaiser Wilhelm II, in deference to the Kaiser’s enormous yet fragile ego. In fact, the Kronprinzessin Cecilie was publicly listed as the heaviest of the four sister ships, with 19,400 tons against the Kaiser Wilhelm II’s marginally smaller 19,361.[27]
The first of the greyhounds: the Kaiser Wilhelm der Groβe.
Ocean liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Große, photographed c.1897 (The Library of Congress)
Nicknamed ‘the German greyhounds’ and ‘the Hohenzollerns of Hoboken’ after Norddeutscher Lloyd’s piers on the Hudson, the Kaiser-class transformed the transatlantic trade by proving the idea of the commercially viable super-ship.[28] Norddeutscher Lloyd’s home-grown rivals, the Hamburg-Amerika Line, retaliated with their own four-stacker speed queen, the Deutschland. Reflecting on the race thirty years later, the maritime historian Gerald Aylmer wrote, ‘By 1903 Germany possessed the four fastest and best appointed merchant ships afloat, with another on order. This state of affairs was not palatable, to put it mildly, to Britain, a country which had always prided itself on its steamship construction and speed.’[29] Aylmer was right; the success of the Kaiser-class inflamed within the British a fear born of the belief that their place in the world was tied inextricably to mastery of the sea lanes, which had as much to do with their passenger and cargo ships as it did with their dreadnoughts and destroyers. During the Second Boer War, between 1899 and 1902, the White Star Line had donated several of its ships to temporary military service with the Royal Navy, which, combined with unease at the success of the German greyhounds, helps explain the British reaction when White Star was purchased by J. P. Morgan’s conglomerate in 1903.[30]
A few years earlier, the writer and apostle of British imperialism J. A. Froude had sounded like the voice of Cassandra when he warned his compatriots, ‘Take away her merchant fleets, take away the navy that guards them; her empire will come to an end; her colonies will fall off like leaves from a withered tree; and Britain will become once more an insignificant island in the North Sea.’[31] In 1903, despite assurances that it was only White Star shares and not her ships that were passing into American control, the sale was sufficiently worrying to inspire speeches in Parliament, a mood turned brilliantly to their advantage by White Star’s main British competitors, the Cunard Line, who intimated that they too were considering joining Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine. Suppressing the news that they had in fact already passed on a too low offer from Morgan, Cunard presented themselves as the firm
