IN their English version, the first two volumes of Prince von Bülow’SMemoirs (Little, Brown, $5.00 each) arrive on the full tide of their success on the Continent. The first succès de curiosité has grown into a deeper and more widespread welcome; the historical student frowns but the general reader has discovered that these full volumes are astonishingly readable — and they are destined (far more than is yet realized) for a permanent popularity.
All this is exactly what the author intended. The same ‘prestige policy’ which took the place of solid achievement in actual life his literary talent now applies toward the task of re-creating a lost reputation. From his precocious boyhood in the '60s until the Gotterdämmerung of 1918 he had participated in much, observed a good deal more, and had been told everything; he had met all the figures on the stage, and in a period of fifty years had heard, so to speak, every story in Europe. All Bülow’s innate gifts, all the accomplishments gained in his long career as man of the world, courtier, diplomat, and political leader, he has drawn upon to present an apologia in telling and effective fashion. Under the smoothest of glazing one may discern his trained experience in selecting what an audience will enjoy listening to; the light and graceful touch which turns even the heaviest affairs of state into sprightly anecdotes and tempting ‘inside’ revelations; the deft skill in constantly varying and shifting the point of interest; and the smooth urbanity in ignoring all unfavorable realities — all the traits of his most finished Reichstag manner. He adds to these an astonishing facility in brushing in portraits of those who appear in his narrative. The array is endless; each figure is posed and placed and colored to give exactly the desired effect in his background.
The book is not history, but an escape from history; not Bülow’s actual career, but the revised and amended course he would have followed in the light of afterwisdom. The claim of precise historical accuracy made by his literary executor is comically misleading; the present value of the book is due to the fact that this executor died before he could carry out his intention to revise and correct it. As a result we have, not a mass of accurate data, but Bülow’s own rearrangement of history; anyone could have gathered the data. His ‘errors’ are not slips, but basic necessities of his apologia — truer and more revealing in their way than the corrections so plentifully brought forward by critics. In the process of escaping from history Bülow has drawn an incomparable self-portrait; and in distributing the blame so generously upon those around him he has disclosed the inmost character of the régime he lived in — the very soul and spirit of the generation he personified.
It is not a pleasant picture, but in its own way unsparingly truthful. In the end, malgré lui, he has achieved an invaluable contribution to history.
The Memoirs are published in the order in which they were written. The first two cover the years of Bülow’s Ministerial career, from 1897 to his dismissal in 1909—the most flamboyant period of Weltpolitik and the most rhetorical phase of the Kaiser’s participation. The difficulties of the Kaiser’s character form a central thread of the story, but the digressions are too abundant, and much too entertaining, to be catalogued briefly. The intricacies of German party politics are reduced to a minimum, and the focus of interest ranges as far as America.
THOMAS H. THOMAS