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Updated: June 29, 2025
Instead of trying to alter the traditional attitude of Germany to her neighbors, Herr von Bethmann Hollweg let it continue. That he did not want it to continue I am pretty sure.
The peace had indeed been preserved, but, as Herr von Bethmann Hollweg told me later on, not without effort. The attitude of Germany toward France had seemed ominous. The British Government had done all it could to avert a breach, but its sympathy was opposed to language used in Germany, the spirit of which seemed to us to have in it an aggressive element.
To this end a fresh engagement had to be negotiated with Director Bethmann for the coming winter season. Unable to await the conclusion of our contract in Leipzig, I availed myself of Laube's presence at the baths in Kosen, near Naumburg, to pay him a visit. Laube had only recently been discharged from the Berlin municipal gaol, after a tormenting inquisition of nearly a year's duration.
The peace resolution of July 19, 1917, was the result of this step. The Imperial Chancellor Bethmann was the first victim. The Supreme Military Command, by whom he always had been persecuted, now trying to secure his dismissal, declared such resolution to be unacceptable. When Bethmann had gone and Michaelis had been appointed, they were satisfied.
What made it strong was largely that its members shared his view of England and of the situation. "They looked to us," he says, "it was the last chance of international freedom." I thought in 1912 that Bethmann might in the end win, for in the main at that time the Emperor was with him, and so were Ballin and many others of great influence.
Berlin, too, was quite certain that we were losing time, although Bethmann once thought fit in the Reichstag to assert the contrary; but the German military leaders and the politicians looked at the situation among our opponents differently from us.
He took me back to his house, where he presented me to his second wife, who, crippled in one foot, lay on an extraordinary couch while an elderly bass, concerning whose excessive devotion Bethmann had already complained to me quite openly, smoked his pipe beside her. From there the director took me to his stage manager, who lived in the same house.
The German Emperor said that he must consult his Chancellor before answering, and sent for Bethmann Hollweg and the Under-Secretary, Zimmermann. He saw them in the afternoon in the park of the Neues Palais at Potsdam. The Chancellor thinks that no one else was present. It was agreed that the situation was very serious.
They are three in number, representing the death of a son of the present banker, Moritz von Bethmann, who was drowned in the Arno about fourteen years ago.
Bethmann, as already stated, says that he did not see the ultimatum itself until the 22nd, when it had already been dispatched. But he does not say that he had been given no forecast of its contents from the German Ambassador at Vienna. Tirpitz quotes, but without giving its exact date, a memorandum sent to him at Tarasp apparently just after the 13th.
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