That’s a bust of the last emperor of Germany, with the house here in NL where he lived his last decades in exile in the background. Various photos and trinkets from the interior, including if you choose to look closely a photo taken the year before WWI started, at someone royal’s wedding in Berlin, at which most crowned heads and other non-crowned heads of state and / or government from European states which would soon be losing a generation of lives and a great deal of money in that war, were all at the same dinner table in apparent ease and peace. Since I happened to be there a few weeks after US tax dollars began flooding out of the accounts for more war and destruction again instead of education and healthcare, this struck me, somehow, as another example of simple lessons of history that seem never to settle in the brains of our voting publics or those they choose to elect. There’s also a fascinating little toilet cupboard of sorts, probably installed so as to avoid a bigger remodel or something?
So either the modern-day curators who set the scenes in currently or formerly royal-affiliated homes have a taste for odd and interesting knicknacks…or it’s been a general trend in at least Euro-royal types to accumulate odd and interesting knicknacks. Herewith several examples from Huis Doorn.
Sad lessons one might choose to learn about war, its consequences and the end of dynastic rule from Huis Doorn, where the second and last emperor of the short-lived late 1800’s – early 1900’s German Empire lived out his last years in exile. Such an odd notion, really, royalty, when you stop and think about it, eh? Absolute rule, too, if you ask me: bad policy, full stop.
(so much world, so little time....) 