THE KAISER AND “LESE-MAJESTE”

The talents and ability and agreeable personality of the German Emperor must not blind us to the fact that he is the centre of the system which has brought the world to a despair and misery such as it never has known since the dawn of history. We must remember that all his utterances disclose the soul of the conqueror, of a man intensely anxious for earthly fame and a conspicuous place in the gallery of human events; envious, too, of the great names of the past, his ears so tuned for admiration and applause that they fail to hear the great, long drawn wail of agony that echoes around the world. His eyes are so blinded with the sheen of his own glory that they do not see the mutilated corpses, the crime, the pestilence, the hunger, the incalculable sorrow that sweeps the earth from the jungles of Africa to the frozen plains of the North, from Siberia to Saskatchewan, from Texas to Trieste, from Alaska to Afghanistan everywhere he has brought the dark angel of mourning to millions upon millions of desolate homes.

Do you remember that picture of the Conquerors, Cæsar and Alexander, Attila and Napoleon, Charlemagne and Cambyses, astride their horses or in chariots in the centre of the picture, dark, gloomy, menacing? On each side of them, lining a vast plain that fades in the distance, lie the dead stiff, cold, grey, reproachful; yet all the victims of those conquerors, as well as all their battalions do not equal the countless number that have already drenched a forgiving earth with their dying blood in this war: victims all of the vain-glorious ambition of a single mortal the German Kaiser.

But the despot who sends his subjects to die, as Frederick the Great said, “in order to be talked about” is not indigenous to any one particular country. Like conditions produce like results. The career of Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” for instance, whose wars and extravagances sowed the seeds of the French Revolution, is epitomised in two phrases uttered by him: “I am the State” and “I almost had to wait.”

After the French Revolution, another despot, the first Napoleon, not only sought the conquest of the world, but made his ex-waiter and ex-groom marshals and his washerwomen duchesses ape the manners and customs of the old regime. Despotism has been characteristic of many generations but the world had thought itself rid of the worst offenders.

Royalty still lives to torture and retard civilisation. Its methods of perpetuation are unchanged from the middle ages. What is lèse-majesté but a survival of feudalism, a kind of slavery to inviolable tradition the immunity of the monarch and his family from that criticism and freedom of discussion which is the essence of democracy?

To commit lèse-majesté, to speak slightingly of royalty in Germany, is a very serious offence.

I have taken the following examples of decisions in lèse-majesté cases not from the records of the lower courts, the decisions of which may be reversed, but from the records of the Imperial Supreme Court at Leipzig, the highest court in the land.

For instance: The defendant, a speaker at a meeting consisting chiefly of sympathisers with the socialist cause, made the following statement in reference to a speech of the Kaiser:

“Under the protection of the highest power of the State the gauntlet has been flung before the (socialist) Party, the gauntlet which means a combat for life and death. Well, then, so far as the insult concerns our Party, we are so far above it, that the mudslinging no matter from what direction it may come cannot touch us.”

The defence pointed out that the defendant “had considered each word carefully before he had made the speech, and that in doing so, wanted to avoid any possibility of lèse-majesté.”

The Supreme Court held that although the defendant carefully selected his words and tried to evade prosecution, he must be adjudged guilty, because his audience could not have misunderstood the insinuation. The sentence was affirmed.

Dangerous as it is to say anything that can be construed as derogatory of the authority, of the Kaiser it is equally dangerous to attack the dead members of the Royal House.

The editor of the Volkswacht had published in his paper an article entitled “The German Characteristics of the Hohenzollerns” which the Lower Court interpreted to be a reply to a statement of the Kaiser, which had referred to a group of people considered unworthy by him to be called “Germans.” Without doubt the editor was alluding to the Kaiser’s speech, made at Koenigsberg to the newly enlisted army recruits, in which he called the socialists “vaterlandslose Gesellen,” i.e., scoundrels without any country. The writer, however, discussed “the conduct of the Elector Joachim of Brandenburg and of his brother Albrecht, Elector of Mainz, before and during the election of Emperor Charles V.”

The defence claimed that the defendant could not be held guilty of lèse-majesté against the Kaiser since the defendant “criticised the Kaiser’s ancestors and not the Kaiser himself.” But the Court held that it was the intent of the defendant to discredit the “House of the Hohenzollerns, and that the Kaiser by implication, being the living head of the Hohenzollern family, was thereby insulted.” The Court further states that the defendant’s article could not be regarded as a scientific or historical contribution since the Volkswacht’s subscribers, consisting chiefly of workingmen, had neither any understanding of nor interest in dynastic intrigues of the sixteenth century.

Even those Americans who have expressed themselves freely about the Kaiser will, after the war is over, be compelled to take their “cures” in some country other than Germany, for in one case it was held that an American citizen was rightfully convicted in Baden of lèse-majesté because of statements made by him in Switzerland.

The Court held that the judgment of the Lower Court must be sustained, since the German Imperial Laws have precedence over any treaties engaged in by the Grand Duchy of Baden and the United States and “that the fact that the defendant had become a citizen of the United States does not exempt him from prosecution in the German Imperial Courts.”

In another case a newspaper editor criticised a speech delivered by the Kaiser before the Reichstag on December 6th, 1898. The defendant did not refer to the person of the emperor himself, but simply attacked and ridiculed the propositions and proposals made by His Imperial Majesty. The defence pointed out that the Kaiser’s speech was not an act of the Kaiser’s own personal will, but only an act of government for which the Imperial Chancellor should be responsible, and that the defendant was not conscious of the fact that the criticism contained in his article could be an insult to the person of the Kaiser.

It was held, however, by the Court that a criticism of the Kaiser’s speech at the opening of the Reichstag is always to be regarded as a criticism of the Kaiser’s person, and that the plea that the Imperial Chancellor should be responsible for acts of government of this sort is not sustained.

In other words it is, in Germany, a crime to criticise or ridicule any proposition uttered by the sacred lips of the Kaiser.

If the Kaiser announces that two and two make five, jail awaits the subject who dares to ridicule that novel arithmetical proposition.

It is because of these convictions for lèse-majesté that the Berliners, when discussing the Emperor at their favourite table or “Stammtisch” in the beer halls and cafes, always refer to him as “Lehmann.”