The Kaiser's Lady

A VIEW OF THE SPREE (305 pp.)--Alson J. Smith--John Day ($5.95).

Americans popularly blamed World War I on the blustering German Kaiser and traced his evil aspirations back to Frederick the Great. They need not have looked so far. When he was in his 20s, no one stirred the Kaiser's dreams of empire more than a pretty, blue-eyed American of good family and Protestant piety named Mary Esther Lee. After combing many volumes of letters she sent home from Europe, Alson Smith concluded that this daughter of a rich Manhattan grocer (and his own great-aunt) was the Kaiser's mistress. The course of modern German history might have been much different, he argues, if this American had not turned into a German nationalist.

Saintly Pompadour. Mary Lee sailed for Europe in 1855, an outwardly demure 17-year-old determined to make her mark and spread her Calvinist faith. When she snagged the elderly Prince Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein, she planned a honeymoon of New Testament grandeur. The couple retraced St. Paul's path to Damascus, camped out for a month in imitation of St. John the Baptist. But the prince collapsed and died before the honeymoon was over. Though his family accused Mary of murdering him by too many bedroom "fatigues," Mary inherited $4,000,000 in cash, several chateaux, and a few thousand choice acres of European soil.

Mary found her next husband in a German spa. He was stiff-necked Count Alfred von Waldersee, whose one attraction for Mary was his friendship with Prince Wilhelm, heir to the German throne. In due course, Mary met Wilhelm. She was a svelte 42, he only 21. Noting that his withered left arm made him feel insecure, she put him at ease with a few soulful chats. She earned his gratitude by finding him a submissive little wife, who later bore him eight children. Husband in tow, Mary moved into an elegant house in Berlin overlooking the River Spree. Wilhelm, who lived 16 miles away at the Sans Souci Palace in Potsdam, was soon spending most of his time on the Spree. "The serene confidence of the American woman," writes Smith, "must have exercised a powerful attraction on the crippled, inferiority-haunted heir to the German throne."

Berliners dubbed Mary a "Pompadour in saintly garb." Despite her status as a mistress, she insisted that Wilhelm's morals conform to her own Calvinist standards. First, his pornographic pictures had to go. In a little ceremony by the fireplace, the pair solemnly watched the vast collection consumed in flames; then over oranges and tea, Mary lectured Wilhelm on the duties of a Christian prince. Wilhelm was soon sending swords to friends with the inscription: "In the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost." Under her badgering, he lent his name to her efforts to organize Berlin's first Y.M.C.A. But the Countess von Waldersee's most lasting influence was political.

Protestant Empire. In the 1880s, liberals and nationalists were vying for control of Bismarck's newly unified Germany. Mary took the side of the nationalists, whose religious fervor appealed to her. She befriended a fiery Lutheran preacher named Adolph Stoecker and installed him in her salon, where he led the company in hymns to the Fatherland, and excoriated Jews. Mary dreamed of a pure Protestant empire stretching from the U.S. to Europe to the Middle East, and rabid nationalists from all over Germany swarmed to sit at her feet. Under her influence, Wilhelm lost all interest in liberalism. When he succeeded to the throne in 1888, he dismissed Bismarck (who considered Mary a meddlesome woman, snubbed her salon and its anti-Semitism and irritated Wilhelm by the power he commanded) and appointed Mary's husband Chief of the General Staff of the Army. A U.S. newspaper cheered the home-town girl: "She is the only woman the male Bismarck was ever afraid of."

But once he was emperor, Wilhelm decided he could fend for himself. He grew his famous bristling mustache, swaggered more than ever. For company he surrounded himself with a crew of homosexuals who found politics tedious.

Wilhelm tired of Mary. He demoted her husband to a corps commander, and when Mary reproached him, petulantly ordered all the Y.M.C.A. signs torn down in Berlin. Banished from politics at 52, Mary devoted her life to religion. She died at 76, five weeks before the Kaiser led the nation to war in 1914.

Mary's fascination for her nephew Smith is almost as fatal as it was for Wilhelm. While other historians attribute German imperialism to social and economic forces, Smith attributes it to Mary. He may overrate her allure as well as her influence. "She was a lovely, luminously intelligent American," he writes at the apogee of his infatuation. But in the end he resists her charms and preserves his objectivity. "Her piety was sincere enough," he concludes. "Yet it masked a towering ambition and a Machiavellian talent for intrigue. Out of a life lived with a clear conscience, and with the best of intentions, the desired good had somehow failed to come."

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