In Europe

caught waging a war on two fronts. That was the last time I saw him.
    ‘These days, our family only gets together for funerals and on special occasions. My second cousins, the daughters of Crown Prince Wilhelm's son, Louis Ferdinand, organise a concert at Schloss Hohenzollern once a year, and we see each other then. My grandfather's body is kept in a mausoleum at Doorn, in a coffin on trestles, so that he can be repatriated right away if Germany should request that. But I believe Doorn is an excellent final resting place for him. He felt quite content there in later years, and to send him to Berlin and have him shoved in among those hundred and fifty other sarcophagi, in that terrible family tomb …
    ‘My father moved to an estate near Göttingen after the war. My uncle August spent some time in a prisoner-of-war camp, and died soon after he was released. My other uncle, the crown prince, was taken prisoner by the French. Later he was sent back to the castle at Hohenzollern. But he was already a broken man. He had no more illusions that Germany would some day embrace the monarchy again. Louis Ferdinand still toyed with that idea, but he was the only one. Sometimes he would say: “If called, I am ready.”
    ‘But then, who would ever call him?’

Chapter TWELVE
Stockholm
    SUNDAY, 28 FEBRUARY. I LEAVE BERLIN AT 10.30, AND AT 2.30 I see the Baltic, at the end of a long, bare field of stubble running down to the shoreline. Not much of anything happens during this trip. At first we roll along in the sunshine for a bit, then the sky goes grey. The landscape spreads out flat as a tabletop. Spring is nowhere in sight, many of the fields are covered in water. We stop at an old-fashioned, staunch-looking station painted yellow, with decorative female breasts moulded beneath the eaves – Wittenberge – and then I fall asleep.
    In the old days, during a trip like this, the saltwater would have been flying in all directions. At Puttgarden they slid the carriages one by one, puffing and steaming, onto the ferry to Rødbyhavn and fastened them down with chains, the ship's horn would scream, smoke would come pouring from the stacks and there it would go, creaking and swaying. These days the train rolls into a floating amusement park full of shops and cafés, with lots of chrome and marble, a magic kingdom in which everything happens automatically, right down to the sliding doors and flushing toilets.
    After that there is the rolling countryside of Scandinavia, white houses, cows around a pond, a blonde girl on a bike at a crossing. In the late afternoon we roll across little inland seas and huge bridges. The sky clears, a very faint blue, a big white moon is suspended on the horizon, floating above the water. Then the world slowly empties out.
    My route is following a strange detour now. I am trying to travel in the tracks of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Bolshevik leader and professional revolutionary, who returned in April 1917 from the dissident den of Zurich – by way of Germany, Sweden and Finland – to Petrograd, as St Petersburg was known then.
    Russia at the time was in an uproar. Striking workers marched across Petrograd's Nevski Prospect, entire army units mutinied, Czar Nicholas II had stepped down, soldiers’ and workers’ soviets had seized power and a provisional government had been set up, the February Revolution was over. This was the moment for which Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, had been waiting the past thirty years, the culmination of a life full of theories, intrigues, exile, study and even more theories: the moment a young Pole burst into his sparsely furnished room at Spiegelgasse 14 or 15 March, 1917, and cried out ‘Russia is in revolt!’ That afternoon all of the city's Russian expatriates rushed the news-stands along Zurich's lake shore and gaped at a little article, squeezed between the reports run over from the front onto page two of the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung:
one week earlier, it said, on 23 February by the Russian calendar, the revolution had broken out in the Russian capital. The Duma had ordered the arrest of the czar's ministers. Nothing more was known.
    Were these revolutionaries-at-arm's-length surprised by this turn of events? That would be putting it mildly. Lenin, as his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya later wrote, was shocked and silenced, ‘stunned’. As the leader of the Bolsheviks he should, of course, have been informed of what was going on, but he was not. The Mensheviks, his