The bright star in the American journalistic firmament in Berlin is Karl Heinrich von Wiegand, the special representative of the New York World.  The New York World is not pro-German, but von Wiegand is of direct and noble German origin.  Apart from his admitted talents as a newspaper man, his Prussian “von” is of no inconsiderable value to any newspaper which employs him.  Von Wiegand, I believe, is a native of California.  Persons unfriendly to him assert that he is really a native of Prussia, who went to the United States when a child.  Wherever he was born, he is now typically American, and speaks German with an unmistakable Transatlantic accent.  He is a bookseller by origin, and his little shop in San Francisco was wiped out by the earthquake.  About forty-five years of age, he is a man of medium build, conspicuously near-sighted, wears inordinately thick “Teddy Roosevelt eye-glasses,” and is in his whole bearing a “real” Westerner of unusually affable personality.  Von Wiegand claims, when taunted with being a Press agent of the German Government, that he is nothing but an enterprising correspondent of the New York World.  I did not find this opinion of himself fully shared in Germany.  There are many people who will tell you that if von Wiegand is not an actual attache of the German Press Bureau, his “enterprise” almost always takes the form of very effective Press agent work for the Kaiser’s cause.  He certainly comes and goes at all official headquarters in Germany on terms of welcome and intimacy, and is a close friend of the notorious Count Reventlow.

My personal opinion, however, is that he is above all a journalist, and an exceedingly able one.

Von Wiegand’s liaison with the powers that be in Berlin has long been a standing joke among his American colleagues.  Shortly after the fall of Warsaw in August, 1915, when the stage in Poland was set for exhibition to the neutral world, he was roused from his slumbers in his suite at the Adlon by a midnight telephone message, apprising him that if he would be at Friedrichstrasse Station at 4.30 the next morning, with packed bags, he would be the only correspondent to be taken on a staff trip to Warsaw.  Wiegand was there at the appointed hour, but was astonished to discover that he had been hoaxed.  The perpetrators of the “rag” were some of his U. S. confreres.

Von Wiegand for nearly two years has been the recipient of such marked and exclusive favours in Berlin that Mr. Hearst’s New York American (the chief rival of the New York World, and the head of the “International News Service” which has been suppressed in Great Britain, where it has been proved to have maliciously lied on divers occasions) decided to send to Germany a special correspondent who would also have a place in the sun.  The gentleman appointed to crowd Mr. von Wiegand out of the limelight was a former clergyman named Dr. William Bayard Hale, a gifted writer and speaker, who obtained