Kaiser Franz Josef arrived the following evening at the Potsdam station to a similar display of flags, martial salutes, and political cross-dressing. There was “something comical,” noted Vizetelly, “in the conceit of the victors in the war of 1866 decking themselves out in the uniform of the vanquished.” As if mindful of this black comedy, Franz Josef did not throw himself into the arms of Wilhelm, but merely proffered his hand. The Austrian emperor was also not amused by his hosts’ indelicate choice of routes from the station to the palace: it followed the Konig-gratzstrasse, named after the decisive Prussian victory in the Austro-Prussian war. Nor were there many Berliners in the streets to greet Franz Josef. According to Vizetelly, “the Berliners still regarded him as a slightly insignificant personage in comparison with the high and mighty austere Russian Czar, before whom they seemed almost disposed to prostrate themselves, while holding their noses high enough in the air in presence of the over-gracious Austrian Kaiser.”
While snubbing Franz Josef, the Berliners turned out in droves for the first major spectacle of the Three Emperors’ Meeting, a military review on Tempelhof Field. Arriving at the field early in the morning of September 7, Vizetelly found the area already clogged with carriages and vendors selling sausages, butter rolls, and “Das Bier der Drei Kaiser (the Beer of the Three Kaisers).” The sun rose in the clear sky to pour its rays upon the assembled multitudes, “causing the perspiration to stream from beneath the helmets of the mounted police, tanning the complexions of the lovely Jewesses whom one saw on every side, half smothered in gauze and cashmere, and rendering the glossy black carriage horses skittish and irritable, and the poor, broken-down droschken hacks still more weary and dispirited.”
People soon forgot the heat, however, as across the sandy plain brilliantly accoutred cavalry began wheeling in formation, their helmets flashing in the sun. Although most of the riders were German, horsemen from Austria and Russia were also in evidence, cantering flank to flank behind the three emperors. “All were intermingled, all pressed together in one compact particoloured mass in which red, blue, green, black, white, and grey, picked out with gold, could be distinguished,” observed Vizetelly. In retrospect, of course, this glittering moment can be seen as an innocent harbinger of the rather less harmonious martial entanglement to come a generation later.
That evening Wilhelm I put on a gala banquet at the palace, combining huge amounts of food and drink with extreme punctiliousness of etiquette. Britain’s Queen Victoria, happily ensconced in London, sniffed at the whole business in a letter to her daughter Vicky, who as the wife of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm was obliged to be in attendance. “I pity you indeed to have to be at Berlin for that week of Emperors. . . . How ever will you manage between the Kaisers as to rank?... Every Sovereign is alike—& no one yields to the other. . . . What will happen? I should really be amused to hear.” In the event, Franz Josef got to sit next to Wilhelm because he had been on the throne longer than the Czar, who was seated next to Vicky. She was not happy with this arrangement, resenting Alexander for having given her teenage son Willy a grenadier uniform, thus encouraging his blossoming militarism. In fact, Vicky was unimpressed with the entire occasion, which she informed her mother was “more like an immense bivouac than anything else.” Present here, as at all the other events during the meeting, was Count Bismarck, the true orchestrator of the affair. Unlike Vicky, who saw nothing but bother in this kind of thing, Bismarck understood how useful it could be politically—at least as long as the imperial guests were kept on a tight leash. “We have witnessed a novel sight today,” Bismarck told Odo Russell after the opening banquet.
It is the first time in history that three emperors have sat down to dinner together for the promotion of peace. I wanted these emperors to form a loving group, like Canova’s three graces. I wanted them to stand in a silent group and allow themselves to be admired, but I was determined not to allow them to talk, and that I have achieved, difficult as it was, because they all three think themselves greater statesmen than they are.
The “bivouac” continued that evening with a Zapfenstreich (a Prussian military tattoo) on the Opernplatz in the shadow of the statue of Frederick the Great. Columns of guardsmen bearing torches goose-stepped across the square, looking to Vizetelly like “soldiers of the middle ages carrying fire and sword within some doomed city.” Suddenly, over the sound of drums and cymbals, came piercing cries of distress, startling the observers but not interrupting the ceremony. Later, it was learned that the Berlin police, anxious to clear curious crowds from the route leading back to the palace, had charged into the throng, pinning hundreds of men, women, and children against buildings and fences. Eight people were killed and ten badly wounded. In this respect, too, the festivities at the Three Emperors’ Meeting anticipated ugly events to come.
For the moment, however, Berlin basked in its new status as the “diplomatic navel” of Europe. Bismarck exploited the good will generated by the conference to create the Three Emperors’ League, which was formally inaugurated in the following year. Although little more than a declaration of common interest in monarchical principles, the League was certainly a triumph of Bismarckian diplomacy. It was also a triumph for the new German capital, which in hosting the preparatory meeting demonstrated its arrival as a center of Grosse Politik in the last third of the nineteenth century.
If the Three Emperors’ Meeting in 1872 served as modern Berlin’s debut on the lavishly decorated stage of European high politics, a much larger diplomatic gathering, the Congress of Berlin in 1878, confirmed the German capital’s centrality to the workings of international affairs. For the first time in its history, Berlin welcomed statesmen from around the world to a full-dress multinational conference. This fact alone, wrote Georg Brandes, showed how much Berlin had come up in the world. Of course, Europe’s policymakers did not come to Berlin for its urban amenities, such as they were, but because it was the home turf of Bismarck, who was becoming known as the master of diplomatic arbitration.
Arbitration was called for in 1878 because the so-called Eastern Question—the precipitous disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the resulting power vacuum in the Balkans—was generating a dangerous pushing and shoving match among the Great Powers. Prodded by pan-Slavs anxious to extend Russia’s influence in the region, Russia had gone to war against Turkey in 1877 after the Porte had brutally put down rebellions by Serbs, Montenegrans, and Bulgarians. Emerging victorious, St. Petersburg had forced the Turks, in the Treaty of San Stefano, to accept a Russian presence in the Straits and the creation of an enlarged Bulgaria, which acted as a Russian client state. This development enraged the Austrians, who had their own interests in the Balkans, as well as the British, who regarded Turkey as a valuable protective buffer between their Russian rival and their colonial holdings in the Middle East and India. London and Vienna insisted that the Treaty of San Stefano be revised, threatening war if it was not. Bismarck, seeing his delicate diplomacy in jeopardy, agreed to try to resolve the dispute in hopes of keeping his eastern partners from each others’ throats, and from a possible embrace with France. In the chancellor’s earthy locution, the problem was simply that “Russia had swallowed too much Turkey, and the powers were trying to get her to relieve herself.” By getting Russia to agree to excrete some bits of Turkey, Bismarck wanted to prevent the British from teaming up with Paris to force St. Petersburg to back down. Yet he took up his role as “honest broker” (his words) with some trepidation, aware that he would undoubtedly be blamed by whichever power felt it had gotten the short end of the stick.