Harper Perennial
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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.
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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
CONTENTS
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …
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