The Hohenzollerns in America

(1919)

Preface:

The proper punishment for the Hohenzollerns, and the

Hapsburgs, and the Mecklenburgs, and the Muckendorfs,

and all such puppets and princelings, is that they should

be made to work; and not made to work in the glittering

and glorious sense, as generals and chiefs of staff, and

legislators, and land-barons, but in the plain and humble

part of laborers looking for a job; that they should

carry a hod and wield a trowel and swing a pick and, at

the day's end, be glad of a humble supper and a night's

rest; that they should work, in short, as millions of

poor emigrants out of Germany have worked for generations

past; that there should be about them none of the prestige

of fallen grandeur; that, if it were possible, by some

trick of magic, or change of circumstance, the world

should know them only as laboring men, with the dignity

and divinity of kingship departed out of them; that, as

such, they should stand or fall, live or starve, as best

they might by the work of their own hands and brains.

Could this be done, the world would have a better idea

of the thin stuff out of which autocratic kingship is

fashioned.

It is a favourite fancy of mine to imagine this

transformation actually brought about; and to picture

the Hohenzollerns as an immigrant family departing for

America, their trunks and boxes on their backs, their

bundles in their hands.

The fragments of a diary that here follow present the

details of such a picture. It is written, or imagined to

be written, by the (former) Princess Frederica of

Hohenzollern. I do not find her name in the Almanach de

Gotha. Perhaps she does not exist. But from the text

below she is to be presumed to be one of the innumerable

nieces of the German Emperor.