The Bag

Imperial Palace, Berlin Monday 30 October, a quarter to midnight

Dear Frederick,

You will see from the top of this page that I am writing Dear Frederick, and you will remember why, and I hope you laughed, because I have been sitting here for twenty minutes trying to think of a better first line and that was the only one that made me laugh.

For the benefit of anybody who opens this who should not, which is nobody, because I have made sure of it: when we were seven, at a wedding in Stockholm, a man in a sash told us both that a prince must always address another prince by his full name and never by a diminutive, and that diminutives were for the nursery. You looked at him and said, “Thank you, Alexander,” and he was not called Alexander, and I laughed so much I had to be taken out. We have called each other by our full names ever since, when anybody was listening, which has been very few times, because we are hardly ever in the same country. I am going to go on doing it. It is the only joke I have that nobody else in this palace understands, and I am keeping it.

I have never written to you before. You know that. I want to say why I am doing it now, and then I want to say some things, and then I am going to stop, because it is nearly midnight and I have school in the morning, which you will find is not abolished by anything, including this.

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Charlotte rang me at five, from the ward. She had heard before the statement went out, because the Regent is told things before they are said aloud, which you will discover your mother is, and which you will come to resent more than almost anything else, and I will come back to that. She said, “The realms have agreed. It’s George. It’s the second of May.” And then a nurse said something to her about a drip, and she said, “I have to go,” and went.

That is how I heard. I was in the library with a book about the Hanseatic League open in front of me that I had not read a word of since four. I went on not reading it for about an hour. Then I went down to dinner with Mama and she had heard as well, and she cried, which she does not do in front of me any more, and then she said, “Poor Ernest,” and then she said, “Poor Frederick,” and then she said nothing at all for the whole of the soup.

I don’t know what you are feeling and I am not going to tell you. Everybody is going to tell you. I want to tell you what I felt, in February, which is a different thing, and which nobody has ever asked me, because they all saw what I did and assumed they knew.

I felt nothing.

I mean that exactly. Papa died at twenty past six on a Saturday morning, in the corridor outside his study, on his way to breakfast. I was told at seven. By nine I had signed something, I don’t remember what, and by eleven I had received the Chancellor and two bishops and a man from the Bundesrat whose name I still do not know, and I had said the correct things to all of them in the correct order. Everybody said afterwards that I was magnificent. Haltung, they said, which is a word we have and you don’t, because the English never needed one, they just stood up straight and assumed God had noticed. It means bearing. It means keeping your shape when something has gone through you. They said I had Haltung.

I didn’t. I wasn’t there. I was standing in my own shape and there was nobody in it, and nobody could tell the difference, and that is the thing I want to warn you about, because it is the most frightening thing that has ever happened to me and it looked, from the outside, like the best thing I have ever done.

It lasted about five weeks. It stopped on a Thursday in March, in the observatory, at Potsdam, at about two in the morning, when I was looking at Jupiter, which is not a sad planet, and I started crying and could not stop for an hour, and Lukas, who had come with me because he always does, sat on the floor with his back against the mount and did not say anything at all, for the whole hour, and then said, “The moons have moved,” because they had, and that was the end of the five weeks.

I am not telling you this so that you will cry at a planet. Your father is alive. It will not be the same for you, and I am not going to pretend I know what it is like to have a father who is there and has stopped. That is a different thing and possibly a worse one, and I have thought about it all evening and I don’t know. What I know is that you are going to be told for the next six months that you are doing very well, and some of the time it will be true and some of the time there will be nobody in your shape at all, and nobody will be able to tell which, including you. Find one person who can. I had Lukas. You have Theo. Lukas found the Milwaukee paper this afternoon, by the way, because Lukas reads everything, and he says congratulations to Theo and that being a page is mostly standing, and that Theo should wear shoes he can stand in, because the ones they give you are designed by people who sit down.

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Now the things I am going to say that I should not say.

I know the rule. I know it because Charlotte taught it to me and because it is written down in two places in our house and probably six in yours: family sympathy may cross between the houses, and constitutional authority may not. I am not your adviser. You were never mine. Everybody has been very careful about that for eight months and I have been grateful, because if it had ever looked as though the American heir was telling the German Emperor what to think about the Prussian Minister-President, my Council would have been able to say I was being managed from New Westminster, and they would have liked nothing better.

This letter is in the bag. The Ambassador has been told it is family and is not to be opened, which is true, and he will not open it, because he is more frightened of my mother than of anything in the Foreign Office. Your end will give it to you by hand. Nobody will read it. So I am going to break the rule, once, now, and then you can decide whether I am allowed to break it again.

Three things.

The first is your mother.

She is going to be your Regent. You will be King and she will decide. I want to tell you what that is like, because I have had a Regent for eight months, first nine people and now my sister, and I have learned some things that are not in the constitution. A Regent who loves you is the most dangerous kind, because she will protect you, and protection and exclusion feel the same from the inside. Mama wanted to protect me from the Falk papers. She was right that I was fourteen. She was wrong that I didn’t need to know what was being done in my name, because it was being done in my name whether I knew or not, and not knowing did not make it less mine. Ask your mother to show you everything she decides. Not to let you decide it. To show you. Ask her in the first week, before she has got into the habit of not showing you, because habits get harder to break than laws, and she will be very tired in the first week and might say yes.

Your mother has done this before, which mine had not. She has been a Queen herself for longer than we have been alive. That will make her better at it and also more certain she is right. Both.

The second is the record.

If they do something in your name that you think is wrong, ask for your view to be written down. They cannot refuse. It is the only power we have before we are sixteen and it is more than it looks. In April the Council dismissed Johanna Falk in my name by six votes to three, and I had asked them not to, and Charlotte made sure what I said went into the minutes. Within a fortnight somebody had given the minute to the newspapers, and nobody has ever found out who, and the whole of Prussia knew that the King had said no and been overruled, and everything changed, and in October the Court said the Council had been wrong, and none of it would have happened if my no had not been written down somewhere with a date on it. In your country there is no Council, there is your mother, and the Regency Act, which is two hundred years old and does not mention minutes at all. So make one. Write it yourself. Date it. Keep it. You will very likely never need it. I never thought I would need mine.

The third is the oath, and it is practical, and it is the most useful thing in this letter.

You will have to stand still in front of a great many people for a long time while somebody says words at you and you say words back. You will not know what to do with your hands. Hold something. At the coronation I held the edge of the cushion they had put the orb on, with two fingers of my left hand, underneath, where nobody could see, for an hour and twenty minutes, and it was the only thing that kept me in the cathedral. Decide in advance where you are going to look. There is a clock at the back of Berlin Cathedral over the west door and I looked at it the whole way through, and when the bishop put the crown on I was watching the minute hand go from seventeen minutes past to eighteen, and that is why my face in the photographs looks so calm. Everybody thought it was Haltung. It was a clock. Find your clock.

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I am going to stop now. It is ten past twelve, and the guard on the corridor has walked past my door three times, which is how they tell me to go to bed without telling me.

I want to say one thing about your father, and then I’ll stop.

When Papa died, your father came to Berlin for the funeral, and he stayed two days longer than the programme said, and on the second of the two days he took me for a walk in the Tiergarten in the rain, with his detail and mine walking twenty yards behind us like two funerals of their own, and he said almost nothing for an hour. Then he said: “You have three capacities. Keep them in three drawers. Never open two at once.” And I asked him how many drawers he had, and he said, “Fourteen. I have had to buy a very large desk.” And I laughed for the first time since it happened, in the rain, in the Tiergarten, and I think he had walked me round for an hour so that I would.

He was right about the drawers. It is the best advice I have ever been given. I have used it every day. I wanted you to know that he gave it, and that it worked, and that whatever is happening to him now he was, in February, the person who knew exactly what to say to a boy whose father had stopped all at once. I don’t know what to say to a boy whose father is stopping slowly. I don’t think anybody does. But I thought you should know what he said to me, since he cannot say it to you now, and since I am the only person who heard it.

Write back if you want to. You don’t have to. If you do, give it to the Embassy by hand and tell them it is for me, and it will come in the bag, and nobody will read it. If you don’t, I will write again anyway, from Potsdam, on a clear night, when they let me go out there, which will be the weekend if it doesn’t rain.

Charlotte doesn’t know I am writing. She writes to you; she told me so in the summer, and told me it was about novels. Please don’t tell her about this. I don’t know why I don’t want her to know. I think because she would be kind about it, and I could not bear it.

Yours, with every formality, and in a great deal of affection,

Alexander

P.S. Do not, under any circumstances, sign your reply George. I will not be able to read it with a straight face, and I have to keep a straight face for a living.