The Kaiser’s Last Kiss
A fictionalised account of the Kaiser Wilhelm’s last years in Nazi-occupied Holland.It is 1940 and the exiled Kaiser is living in Holland, at his palace Huis Doorn.The old German king spends his days chopping logs and musing on what might have been.When the Nazis invade Holland, the Kaiser’s Dutch staff are replaced by SS guards, led by young, eager Untersturmfuhrer Krebbs, and an unlikely relationship develops between the king and his keeper. While they agree on the rightfulness of German expansion and on holding the country’s Jewish population accountable for all ills, they disagree on the solutions. Krebbs’s growing attraction and love affair with Akki, a Jewish maid in the house, further undermines his belief in Nazism. But as the tides of war roll around them, all three find themselves increasingly compromised and gravely at risk.This subtle, tender novel borrows heavily from real history and events, but remains a work of superlative, literary fiction.Through Judd’s depiction of the Lear-like Kaiser and the softening of brutal Krebbs, the novel draws unique parallels between Germany at the turn of the 20th century and Hitler’s Germany.
Читать The Kaiser’s Last Kiss онлайн беплатно
Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2004
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers in 2003
Copyright © Alan Judd 2003
PS Section © Josh Lacey 2004
Alan Judd asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007124473
Ebook Edition © MAY 2016 ISBN: 9780008193195
Version: 2016-04-28
From the reviews of The Kaiser’s Last Kiss:
‘Fascinating … if one of the hallmarks of a good novel is that the characters do not remain static but are subtly transformed by events, then this is a very good novel indeed.’
Sunday Telegraph
‘A haunting tribute to a near-forgotten figure – the German Kaiser who spent his last years in Dutch exile. Judd has complete command of the subtleties of character, ambition and emotional ambiguity in extreme circumstances – an unusual and intelligent treatment of the Third Reich.’
ANNE MCELVOY
‘Alan Judd’s new novel is extremely appetising. It’s like seeing a waiter bringing a beautifully arranged dish towards you. Judd has written scenes that perfectly combine fear and embarrassment … this is a story that shows us how the nastiest of regimes are composed of real people. Brilliant.’
Daily Telegraph
‘A fascinating and imaginative exploration of a seminal episode of 20th-century history.’
Irish Examiner
To Katie
The Kaiser was chopping logs. In the summer air his strokes echoed through the trees, across the park and gardens and into Huis Doorn itself, where those of the household would be listening. So long as they could hear him, they would know that all was well with their Kaiser that morning. They could relax, he thought, and be happy, or busy about their work, which was to his mind the same thing.
His strokes were regular but the pauses were longer now. At eighty, it was an achievement to split a log at all – to see it, even – let alone do it daily. Nearly every day since his exile in 1918 he had chopped or sawn. At first he had imagined the logs his enemies, the poltroons who had betrayed him and urged him to flee so that they could grab power for themselves. Gradually, he had ceased to care about that bunch of pigs but had continued felling because it made him feel better, restoring his sense of achievement. Twenty thousand trees felled in the first eleven years of exile; that was something. Since then another twelve years during which he had not kept such meticulous records; not quite another twenty thousand, perhaps, but still a good number. His best was 2,590 in one week – Christmas week – after he had moved here to Doorn after Amerongen, the other Dutch place. What would the Englishman, Gladstone, another elderly tree-feller, have said to that? It might have silenced him, and his tribe. Tree-feller, tree-fella, it punned in English. He would entertain people with it.
Bismarck would have had something to say to it, of course. He was a tree-lover who used to try to plant a tree for every one that Gladstone felled and then write to him about it, to boast. Well now, he, Wilhelm II, had bested them both, because he had felled more and planted more than either.
Bismarck had something to say to everything, that was his trouble. That was why it was right to get rid of him all those years ago, to drop the pilot, as someone put it. It was right then, anyway. Perhaps he might not have made the same decision now. But that was then, when everything was different. When you are young you do not understand how different then and now are because you have lived only in now and it feels as if that is where you will always live. You do not realise that your now – and you – are becoming then. And when you realise how completely now has become then, how different it is, it is like the fall of the axe. It splits you off from all these younger people who, however much they think they know or understand, cannot feel life as it was then. The pulse of it, that was the thing, always, with everything, and that is what cannot be conveyed.
