by Philipp Blom
Holstein knew at once what to do. Having been on friendly terms with Eulenburg for decades, he, like everyone at court, knew the open secret that the Prince, the father of eight children from a detested marriage, was not, in fact, interested in women and that behind all his culture and male camaraderie lay a crime punished, according to German law, under the infamous article 175 of the penal code. In an angry letter, he wrote to his former friend: ‘My dear Phili - you needn’t take this beginning as a compliment since nowadays to call a man “Phili” means - well, nothing very flattering. You have now attained the object for which you have been intriguing for years - my retirement ... I am now free to handle you as one handles such a contemptible person with your peculiarities.’
Even to the gentle and unmilitary Philipp zu Eulenburg, this letter allowed only one course of action: he challenged Holstein to an exchange of pistol shots ‘until disablement or death’. Horrified by the prospect of a duel fought by two elder statesmen, Secretary von Tschirschky embarked on a whirl of intra-governmental diplomacy and succeeded in extracting a grudging apology from Holstein, but this additional humiliation only made the slighted diplomat look for other, more devastating means of bringing Eulenburg down. He found an unlikely but devastatingly effective ally in Maximilian Harden (1861-1927), an investigative journalist, editor of the newspaper Die Zukunft, and long-time thorn in the government’s side. Supplied by Holstein with confidential government documents, Harden mounted a comprehensive attack, accusing Eulenburg and other members of the Liebenberg circle of homosexuality first by innuendo, then openly.
Harden’s main interest in the story (his own monumental ego aside) was political. Eulenburg was emblematic of the undemocratic, unaccountable and personalized style of government that Wilhelm so loved and the democratic opposition so despised. A ruthless journalist with a gift for controversy, Harden understood that this was his chance of showing that the Kaiser was open to the dark, unhealthy influences of a decadent, perverted coterie secretly ruling over one of the world’s foremost countries. Eulenburg’s social ruin was a price the journalist was only too willing to pay.
In Wilhelminian Germany (as, indeed, in other European countries) the mere suspicion of homosexuality was enough to wreck lives and careers, even - and perhaps especially - in the highest reaches of society. Only a few years earlier, the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Ludwig Viktor (‘Luzi-Wuzi’), the brother of Emperor Franz Josef, and known for his propensity to turn out in public in women’s clothes, had had to go into exile in provincial Salzburg after an affair with a masseur. In Germany in 1902, none other than the Continent’s richest and most powerful industrialist, Fritz Krupp, committed suicide at his grand Villa Hügel in Essen after being publicly accused of holidaying in Capri not so much for the sun, as for the younger sons of the island.
Harden had no proof that Eulenburg was homosexual, but he piled article upon article: ‘I am pointing my finger at Philipp Friedrich Karl Alexander Botho Fürst zu Eulenburg und Hertefeld, Graf von Sandels,’ his first salvo read, ‘who is ... whispering in the Kaiser’s ear that he alone is called to rule ... At least the insidious working of this man must no longer be in the dark.’ The following year he became more explicit. The Liebenberg circle, he implied, had taken the manly strength out of Germany’s foreign policy and made the Kaiser back down where he should have stood firm. The result was a policy of effeminate indecision, as the circle no longer ‘dreamt of burning worlds’ because they were ‘already warm [German slang for homosexual] enough’; a little later, he wrote openly about Eulenburg’s ‘unhealthy vita sexualis’.
If part of the accusation was that a ‘court camarilla’ of unelected noblemen and hangers-on kept the Kaiser isolated from reality, then Wilhelm’s reaction itself provides the best illustration: the first time he heard of the entire affair was on 3 May 1907 when the Crown Prince confronted his father with a copy of Die Zukunft containing one of the damaging articles. Chancellor Bülow and other court officials had thought it wiser not to burden His Majesty with such details. The Kaiser was flabbergasted but acted quickly to dissociate himself from any damage the revelations might cause. One of those accused, his friend of long standing, Count Kuno von Moltke, was immediately dismissed. The very next day, the Kaiser wrote to Eulenburg, asking him not only what steps he intended to take against these accusations, but also whether he felt ‘beyond reproach regarding certain allusions’. At the end of the month, Wilhelm set his formerly much adored mentor an ultimatum: sue Harden or get out of the country, ‘avoiding all publicity’. The two men would never meet again.
Eulenburg was deeply hurt by the ‘revolting vulgarity’ of the Kaiser’s reaction, the end of an intense twenty-year friendship. During the following year, a succession of libel cases was followed by the German public with rapt attention. Eulenburg brought a case against himself and was cleared of all charges. Kuno von Moltke challenged Harden to a duel. When the journalist declined, von Moltke brought a case against him in the provincial court. Over the following weeks, prosecution and defence cited one witness after the other, and each of them contributed another scandalous facet to the case. The Kaiser, it was revealed, was called Liebchen (sweetie) by his Liebenberg friends, and a whole rogue’s gallery of rent boys, past and present, testified to having known the gentlemen in question. Von Moltke lost the trial and he appealed the verdict. ‘I never did anything dirty,’ he simply affirmed, and, with a different judge presiding, he was acquitted and Harden sentenced to four months in prison.
Harden took revenge by engineering another trial, this time defending himself against a newspaper article libelling him, but secretly commissioned by him. Freshly prepared and with renewed energy, he presented the Munich district court with the milk merchant Georg Riedel and the fisherman Jakob Ernst, both of whom claimed to have had love affairs with Eulenburg as young men: ‘Whenever we went on an outing, we did the dirty thing,’ Ernst claimed. For Eulenburg, who had already suffered one heart attack under the stress of the trials, this was the end. The judge had him remanded in custody and transferred to Berlin’s Charité hospital under guard. His old friend the Kaiser twisted the knife by ordering the Prince to return his Order of the Black Eagle, the empire’s highest decoration. A disillusioned and disgusted Eulenburg sent it back, together with all other medals he had ever received. His health deteriorated further and he had to be carried into court on a stretcher every day.
When his prey could no longer leave his sick room at all, Harden had 145 witnesses (most of whom had a criminal record or a history of mental illness) pile past the bed, stare at the broken man and pronounce that yes, they had indeed been intimate with him. Eulenburg’s failing constitution eventually put an end to this farce. The trial was suspended in 1909 and never reopened. Eulenburg died, bitter and isolated, at his Liebenberg estate in 1921. ‘These things are unutterably sad because the social annihilation [of Eulenburg and von Moltke] is so total,’ sighed Baroness von Spitzemberg in her diary, ‘but morality and moral consciousness demand a boycott, a total exclusion of such sinners.’
Faced with the debris of the campaign he had conducted, even Maximilian Harden would have second thoughts about whether he had been right to use a prejudice he himself did not share to destroy a political opponent. While the journalist was mulling over the morality of wrecking a man’s life for political gain, Kaiser Wilhelm himself was cruelly reminded of his abandoned friend in 1908, when his boyhood comrade, General Dietrich Hülsen-Haeseler, chief of the military cabinet, was entrusted with cleansing the Prussian officer corps of homosexuals in the wake of the Eulenburg affair. Hülsen-Haeseler appeared before the guests of a hunting party in the Kaiser’s honour dressed ‘in pink ballet skirts with a rose wreath and began to dance to the music’. Having finished his performance, the Count bowed to the applauding audience, and collapsed. General chaos ensued among the guests. Princess Fürstenberg, the hostess, wept uncontrollably and the agitated Kaiser was seen pacing up and down, but the doctor who had been has
tily summoned could do nothing more than declare the performer’s death by heart failure. When attention finally turned back to the general, rigor mortis had set in and it proved very difficult to get the late chief of the military cabinet out of his tutu and into more seemly military attire.
Being Uranist
Many great scandals of the two decades leading up to the First World War involved the army and accusations about homosexuality. Oscar Wilde’s trial in London pitted the outrageously homosexual poet against the Marquess of Queensberry, an army officer and boxing fanatic; during the Dreyfus case, resolved in 1906 with the full pardon and reinstitution of the Jewish captain, the undertones had been antisemitic as well as sexual; in the Eulenburg affair Kuno von Moltke, the military commander of Berlin, had represented the armed forces and paid the price; the Austro-Hungarian traitor and double agent Colonel Alfred Redl was forced to commit suicide by his superiors in 1913 after he had sold military secrets to Russians, who had blackmailed him over an affair with another officer; and evidence of Roger Casement’s homosexuality during his trial would be enough to hang him in 1916.
As well-oiled machinery was taking over from muscle power, making masculine strength less valuable in the work space, and the changing role of women raised fundamental questions about the relationship between the sexes, men felt less sure of themselves, of who they were supposed to be, and what space would remain for the traditional male virtues - courage, honour, strength - in an industrialized society. Amid these insecurities, homosexuality had become a worrying spectre, liable to break lives and certain to grab the headlines.
Homosexuality was still a crime in all European countries, and an accusation, even anonymous, could result in social ostracism and lengthy prison sentences. But, as Freud has shown, societies with such strong prohibitions in the face of human passions can never exist without an operational degree of hypocrisy. In Berlin, for instance, there was a flourishing gay scene, lovingly described by the early sexologist and psychiatrist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) in his reportage Berlins drittes Geschlecht (Berlin’s Third Sex, 1904). The big city, Hirschfeld wrote, allowed identities to thrive away from neighbourly control, and the result was there to see for all with eyes to see it: ‘Those who are in the know see on the streets and in various Berlin cafés not only men and women in the conventional sense of the word, but also frequently persons whose mannerisms and even their physical appearance can be different from others. It is almost as if there were not only a male and a female sex, but also a third one.’
Using a then fashionable appellation (whence the notorious pun in Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest), Hirschfeld described a ‘uranist’ scene of astonishing frankness in Berlin, a barely hidden and extensive subculture of cafés, pubs, beer gardens, clubs, gyms, swimming pools and even social occasions such as dances almost exclusively frequented by gays: ‘One has seen homosexuals from the provinces who have come to such spots for the first time crying with profound psychological shock,’ Hirschfeld commented about the liberalizing effect of such a scene on those who had been ‘deprived of rights and humiliated’ all their lives.
Sandow the Magnificent
Being a man meant different things in different countries. German Chancellor Bülow regarded it as a point of honour and great pride to gallop past his Emperor at the head of his old regiment, the King William I Hussars, a feat rewarded with a commission as major general immediately afterwards. It would be impossible, the historian Robert Massie rightly points out, to imagine British prime ministers Salisbury, Balfour, Campbell-Bannerman or Asquith engaging in any such antics. Britain was calm, measured and civilian, and looked askance at its neighbours’ martial posturing. The underlying preoccupations, however, were much the same, as a look into any newspaper of the time shows: the same advertisements here for tinctures promising to cure ‘male exhaustion’, the same pills for ‘manly vigour’ and hidden corsets to fight middle-aged spread - only in London or Manchester the figure of the hero was less likely to be encased in a uniform than in leopardskin shorts.
A perfect man: Eugene
Sandow’s displays of strength
were followed by huge
audiences.
The shorts in question draped the extremely muscular loins of Eugene Sandow (1867-1925), a strongman, fitness prophet, businessman and international phenomenon. Sandow had been born plain Friedrich Wilhelm Mueller in the east Prussian enclave of Königsberg and had set himself the goal of developing a perfect body. After a stint displaying his feats of strength at provincial fairs, he was snapped up by the legendary showman Florenz Ziegfeld and soon became a star in the Anglo-Saxon world. His shows were sellouts from Chicago to Invercargill in New Zealand; crowds would cheer their hero and demand autographs, women would go backstage and pay three hundred dollars to touch his steely muscles, and his books, with titles like Sandow’s System of Physical Training, Strength and How To Obtain It, and Body-Building were bestsellers. ‘Such a scene of excitement has never before been witnessed in any Australian theatre,’ wrote a breathless reporter in Perth. ‘The audience went absolutely frantic at Sandow’s Marvellous Performance, and recalled him no less than fifteen times.’
Not content with imitating Greek statues and lifting impossible weights on stage, Sandow also believed he had a mission to improve humanity’s puny lot by founding a series of twenty fitness studios, a magazine dedicated to physical strength and a mail order business for merchandise ranging from Sandow cigars to Sandow dumb-bells and exercise books in order to enable other, lesser, men to attain his miraculous proportions. His success was extraordinary. George V and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were among his friends, and the 1901 finals of his Great Competition, the first official beauty contest for well-muscled men, attracted a crowd of 15,000 spectators at London’s Albert Hall.
It is possible that British men were less worried than their Continental counterparts about their modern identities - the industrial revolution, after all, had taken place much earlier here than in the rest of Europe, and urban life and culture more established in a country with a rural population that was the lowest of any developed country (only 8 per cent of Britons of working age were employed in agriculture in 1911, three times more in Germany and four times more in France); but if the visibility of the army in public life was so much smaller in Britain than across the Channel it is also worth remembering that its importance in British history had been much smaller. A fraction of the size of those of its Continental neighbours, and constantly engaged in far-flung regions of the globe, the British army was respected, but remote. Britain, after all, was famously an island and a marine empire not invaded for centuries and it had given its navy, the key to its abiding power, pride of place. The Dreadnought race was not just a military matter; it was a defence of a national self-image. Britannia, all politicians and newspapers agreed, simply had to rule the waves. Toting the biggest guns was a simple necessity.
The British were proud of their essentially civilian culture, but the military enthusiasm of their neighbours bared underlying anxieties. Who could say whether they would withstand an invasion attempt? Who could say that they still had the mettle, the sheer moral force, to defeat an enemy at home? Was it not possible that Britain was already being undermined by foreign spies? Ever on the lookout for a sensational story, the English Daily Mail thought it wise to advise its readers: ‘Refuse to be served by an Austrian or German waiter. If your waiter says he is Swiss, ask to see his passport.’
The spying waiter, the overly curious hairdresser with a suspicious accent, the cabbie who was more ear than mouth - these figures became commonplace. Most foreigners, the novelist William Le Queux (1864-1927) warned the British public,
were Germans who, having served in the army, had come over to England and obtained employment as waiters, clerks, bakers, hairdressers, and private servants, and being bound by their oath to the Fatherland, had served their country as spies. Each man, when obeying the Imperial command to join the German arms, had pl
aced in the lapel of his coat a button of a peculiar shape with which he had long ago been provided and by which he was instantly recognized as a loyal subject of the Kaiser.
An important shift occurred in this form of popular paranoia. Ever since William the Conqueror, and certainly since Napoleon, the traditional enemy had been France. Around 1900, however, the threat was increasingly perceived to be Germany. Terrifying numbers were bandied about in public. Lord Roberts, himself a military hero, speculated that there were 80,000 trained German soldiers living in Britain, while the Conservative MP Sir John Barlow claimed to know of 66,000 German army reservists living in and around London alone. Popular novelists were quick to capitalize on this idea. In the wildly successful The Riddle of the Sands (1903), the writer Erskine Childers lets two young Englishmen stumble upon a dastardly plot by the Kaiser, for whom one of the protagonists expresses great admiration:
I did know something of Germany, and could satisfy his tireless questioning with a certain authority ... I described her marvellous awakening in the last generation, under the strength and wisdom of her rulers; her intense patriotic ardour, her seething industrial activity, and, most potent of all, the forces that are moulding modern Europe, her dream of a colonial empire, entailing her transformation from a land-power to a sea-power. Impregnably based on vast territorial resources which we cannot molest, the dim instincts of her people, not merely directed but anticipated by the genius of her ruling house, our great trade rivals of the present, our great naval rival of the future, she grows, and strengthens, and waits, an ever more formidable factor in the future of our delicate network of empire, sensitive as gossamer to external shocks, and radiating from an island whose commerce is its life, and which depends even for its daily ration of bread on the free passage of the seas.
