The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  Vicky’s attempt to challenge the stereotypes of royal upbringing and Prussian militarism had produced a strange hybrid. “A high spirited,65 sensitive boy who had a ready brain and a quick but not profound intelligence,” the glamorous English aristocrat Daisy Cornwallis, who married into the German aristocracy, wrote of Wilhelm. “… He always thought he knew everything and no one dared to tell him he was sometimes wrong. He hated to be told the truth and seldom, perhaps never, forgave those who insisted on telling him.” Obsessive dislike of any criticism would become one of Wilhelm’s most marked characteristics. Those who wanted his favour quickly discovered that the way to gain influence with him was to flatter him.

  What Wilhelm did have was an identity—or perhaps a disguise. He especially loved the look of the army: the ceremonial, the drilling, the clicking heels, the medals and most of all the uniforms. After the age of twenty he almost never wore anything else. He turned himself into a caricature Prussian officer, with a puffed-up, heel-clicking, hearty manner, an apparent boundless confidence in his own abilities that seemed entirely impervious to doubt or criticism, a new handlebar moustache and views—the opposite of his mother’s—to match.

  In 1881, at the age of twenty-two, Willy married Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg-Augustenburg, known as Dona, a woman as unthreatening, conventional and obedient as Vicky wasn’t, and was granted his own premises, the charmingly intimate—by Prussian standards—Marble Palace in Potsdam. Submissive, devout and fertile, Dona would prove an irreproachably correct daughter of the German empire: she was, and remained, in awe of her husband, agreeing with everything he said, obeying his every stipulation (including taking diet pills to stay thin and wearing outfits he designed for her) and providing constant, unquestioning support. She also, however, shared some of the limitations of the new Germany. She was narrow-minded and xenophobic: she hated Catholics, atheists, liberals and foreigners—the English most of all. Within months of the marriage she was barely speaking to Vicky, who, with her nose for disaster, had picked Dona out as a bride for Wilhelm (even though the Prussian family thought she wasn’t well-born enough), in the hope that she might heal the rift between herself and her son.

  Within a year Dona had borne an heir, “Little Willy,” and followed this with five more strapping sons, the splendidly named Eitel-Friedrich, Adalbert, Augustus-Wilhelm, Oskar and Joachim, and a daughter, Victoria. Wilhelm, however, spent as little time with his wife as possible because he found her deadly dull and provincial. He was faithful to her, more or less. In the first years of their marriage he kept a couple of mistresses in Vienna and Strasbourg, who had to be bought off by the Bismarcks after he was notably ungenerous over recompensing them for services rendered. It was noticeable, however, that he preferred the company of men, and soldiers most of all, picking himself an entourage of virulently Anglophobic Prussian army officers, and spending as much time as possible at his regiment.

  There was more to Wilhelm’s keenness on the army than just politics and manliness. As kaiser he would surround himself with tall, handsome, ramrod-backed young ADCs, a predilection which would prompt one member of his entourage to note twenty years later that it was “nothing short of66 a religious relationship.” There was definitely a homoerotic edge to Wilhelm’s military passion, and it was almost certainly noticed by Bismarck. In 1886 Wilhelm was introduced to Count Philipp zu Eulenburg, a diplomat and amateur composer twelve years his senior. Eulenburg was famously charming, had a gift for informality, and was the leader of a small group of politically reactionary, Anglophobic, “artistic” and homosexual German aristocrats, called the Liebenberg Circle after the estate where they met. They wrote endlessly to each other about the dreadfulness of modern life, and how it forced them to hide their “real selves,” their Eigenart. Bismarck, to whom Eulenburg reported after the meeting, seems to have thought the staunchly conservative Eulenburg would be a useful influence on Wilhelm. In 1888 his son Herbert von Bismarck wrote: “I have known67 for a long time that HM loves Phili Eulenburg more than any other living person.”

  Eulenburg completely fell for Wilhelm, or at least an idealized version of him, and Wilhelm responded to his palpable affection and admiration. Dona seems to have alternated between viewing Eulenburg as a family friend and feeling deeply jealous. The relationship was carried on through letters and a series of house parties and trips each year, where Eulenburg and his friends laughed approvingly at everything Wilhelm said. They also seem to have been extraordinarily careful never to state their homosexuality explicitly around Wilhelm (whom they privately and devotedly called “der Liebchen,”68 the “darling”), though the undercurrents obviously ran not very deeply at all. In twenty years Wilhelm never allowed himself to acknowledge Eulenburg’s homosexuality directly.

  From 1882 tales began to circulate round the Berlin court that Wilhelm was taking every opportunity to express his aversion to everything English, especially his mother, and that he was politically anti-democratic. “Prince Wilhelm is,69 despite his youth, a dyed-in-the-wool Junker and reactionary,” the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, Rudolf, reported in 1883. “He never speaks of the parliament except as ‘that pig-sty’ or of the opposition deputies other than as those ‘dogs who must be handled with a whip.’” One of Wilhelm’s new friends, the arch-conservative General Waldersee, wrote, “The Prince is70 strongly biased against England, to a great extent this is a wholly natural reaction to his mother’s efforts to make anglomaniacs out of the children.” In February 1883 he had himself photographed in Highland costume and sent out the prints to a select group of admirers, with the moustache-twirling phrase, “I bide my time,” written—sinisterly or hilariously depending on your point of view—along the bottom. The doyen of Berlin gossip, Fritz Holstein, a senior figure at the German Foreign Office, noted that the prince was said to be “self-willed,71 devoid of all tenderness; an ardent soldier, anti-democratic, and anti-English. He shared the Kaiser’s views on everything and had the greatest admiration for the Chancellor.” Bismarck, who still viewed Vicky and Fritz as a potential threat, was all too happy to exploit the growing rift between Wilhelm and his parents. He offered the prince chairs on government committees and found him a desk in the Foreign Office—all things denied to Fritz. His son Herbert, his closest political operative, ingratiated himself with Wilhelm. “Willy and Henry72 are quite devoted to the Bismarck policy and think it sublime. So there we are, alone and sad,” Vicky wrote to her mother.

  In a particularly flattering move, Bismarck sent Wilhelm to Russia in 1884 to attend the sixteenth birthday and coming-of-age of Tsarevitch Nicholas, his second cousin,* as the kaiser’s representative. Diplomacy was regarded as the highest form of government, the preserve of monarchs and aristocrats. Willy brought a personal letter from Bismarck to Tsar Alexander III, proposing a renewal of the old Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, the Dreikaiserbund, against the rising forces of liberal democracy and anarchy. The visit was73 an astonishing success. Alexander, legendarily suspicious of foreigners, took to the twenty-five-year-old Willy’s upfront manner and frankness. The prince could be very charming. He had a liveliness and energy that cut through the etiquette and form that swaddled most royals and made him impressive and surprising on first meeting. Willy in turn succumbed to hero-worship—huge, bearded Alexander seemed to him the epitome of monarchical power. Foreign ministers on both sides commented excitedly about the chemistry between the two; the tsar agreed to consider the Dreikaiserbund, though nothing actually came of it because Austria-Hungary and Russia had too many unresolved rivalries to be able to work together. Wilhelm returned to Germany bathed in glory, with a high opinion of his own diplomatic skills and a new taste for the pomp, display and fuss of state visits—he’d adored being met at the station by the entire complement of grand dukes in uniform. More dangerously, he had also acquired a completely unrealistic idea of what they could accomplish.

  On his return to Berlin, Willy decided to
extend his diplomatic success by starting up a correspondence with the tsar. He told no one, not even the Bismarcks. In his first letter, in which he described himself as “a blunt soldier unversed in the arts of diplomacy,” he promised to devote himself to defending Russia against English plots. “Can I ask you a favour?” he added. “Don’t trust the English Uncle,” meaning his uncle Bertie, the future Edward VII and Alexander’s brother-in-law. In the letters he sent over the following year, Wilhelm described a series of English conspiracies against Russia in the Balkans, all headed by Uncle Bertie, “owing to his false and intriguing nature.” He repeatedly denounced his parents, who were “directed by the Queen of England.” In 1885, as war between Russia and Britain seemed inevitable, Wilhelm sent the tsar a series of notes74 he had made on English troop deployments on the Northern Indian frontier—information which he had extracted from the British military attaché in Berlin whom he had flatteringly befriended. Wilhelm still admired the tsar, but he also thought it would be useful for Germany if her two biggest rivals were at each other’s throats, and the intended aim of the letters, he eventually confessed to Herbert von Bismarck, was to provoke a war between Russia and Britain: “It would be such a75 pity if there was not war.” In fact war was avoided, as the tsar told Wilhelm two weeks later in a letter in which he thanked him for his information, “as interesting76 as it was useful,” and for the “lively interest” he took in Russian affairs, adding that he believed that the “traditional bonds which linked their two countries [Germany and Russia] together would always be the best guarantee of their success and prosperity.” Was there just the hint that Alexander thought the prince was laying it on a bit thick, that the old straightforward relationship was better? If there was, it did nothing to dislodge Wilhelm’s growing liking for using personal correspondence to both ingratiate himself with, and manipulate, other monarchs, and his conviction that he had a particular talent for it.

  The next time Wilhelm saw the tsar, however, in September 1886 at Russian army manoeuvres, Alexander was just a touch cooler than he had been, and Willy’s flattering admiration for him, one of the tsar’s ministers observed, seemed a little strained, even obsequious.77 During their private audience Wilhelm told the tsar several times that Russia had a “right” to Constantinople and the Straits, and virtually urged him to invade Turkey—a hotspot where Russia and Britain clashed. The tsar told him,78 a little curtly maybe, that if Russia wanted Constantinople it wouldn’t need Germany’s permission to take it. Perhaps Wilhelm’s clumsy attempts to prod him into military action had begun to arouse Alexander’s suspicions.

  Back in Germany the family’s increasingly bitter split had spilled into the public arena. In 1884 Vicky had become determined to marry one of her younger daughters, Moretta, to Alexander (Sandro) of Battenberg, a minor German royal who had recently been installed as King of Bulgaria by the Russian government. Sandro had promptly bitten the hand that had put him there and positioned himself at the head of the Bulgarian independence movement, and now the Russians hated him, and looked upon all support of him as a deliberate attempt to undermine them in the Balkans, which they regarded as their backyard. The kaiser and Bismarck opposed the match, claiming it would endanger Germany’s relations with Russia. In England, Queen Victoria was enthusiastically for it—Sandro’s two brothers had married one of her daughters and one of her granddaughters, and she loathed Russia. Publicly, Vicky refused to acknowledge the political aspects of the match; privately, she had grandiose visions of ridding the Balkans of Russian influence. Wilhelm weighed in on Bismarck’s side. He convinced himself that his mother and grandmother were masterminding an English conspiracy to gain influence in the Balkans; he insisted that Sandro was not sufficiently well-born to marry royalty—his great-grandfather had been a valet. He was certainly jealous of his mother’s very public approval of the dashingly handsome Sandro.

  This enraged his English grandmother. “That very foolish,79 undutiful and—I must add—unfeeling boy … I wish he could get a good ‘skelping’* as the Scots say,” Queen Victoria wrote furiously in 1885. She was also angry because Wilhelm had so blithely crossed the line from public to private. The queen believed in the mystique of royalty, she had kept her subjects at arms’ length for fifty years. They knew very little about her and that was how she liked it. But Wilhelm had brought a family feud glaringly into the public gaze. This was not done. Even Bertie, whose foibles were periodically, if obliquely, aired in the press, never discussed or acknowledged his behaviour in public. The matter ground on for four years before Vicky finally let it go. (The now-deposed Sandro finally married an actress; Moretta eventually married Adolf of Schaumberg-Lippe.) By then, Vicky’s insistence on pushing the match through in the teeth of such resistance looked slightly unstable, as did Wilhelm’s opposition—he said he would “club the Battenberger80 to death” if he married his sister. “The dream of my81 life,” Vicky wrote in 1887, just before her mother’s Golden Jubilee, “was to have a son who should be something of what our beloved Papa was—a real grandson of his in soul and intellect, a grandson of yours! … But one must guard against the fault of being annoyed with one’s children for not being what one wished and hoped, what one wanted them to be!” She couldn’t bear, however, to give up on Wilhelm entirely, and persisted in seeing him as a tool of Bismarck. “He is a card82 here in the hands of the Chancellor’s party … he means no harm …,” Vicky told her mother. “He hates her83 [Vicky] dreadfully,” one Berlin insider told another. “His bitterness knows no bounds. What will become of all this?”

  Wilhelm’s feelings for Britain seemed no less violent but they were contradictory. He engineered an invitation to Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebrations in June 1887—getting himself made his grandfather’s official representative in Vicky and Fritz’s place—“to prove to84 my mother and all the English relations that I do not need them in order to be popular in England.” When his grandmother implied she would not be pleased to see him, he whipped himself into a fury. “It was high time85 that the old woman died … One cannot have enough hatred for England,” he told Eulenburg. “Well, England should look out when I have something to say about things …” After the Jubilee he complained bitterly that he had been treated with “exquisite coldness.” The passion of his complaints caused unease in both British and German diplomatic circles. In November 1887 unease turned to anxiety when it became clear that not only was Willy’s ninety-year-old grandfather finally failing, but his father, the crown prince, now diagnosed with throat cancer after months of confusion and misdiagnosis, was dying too. It wouldn’t be long before the prince was kaiser.

  Rather than bringing the family together, the terrible blow simply exposed the Oedipal struggle to more public scrutiny. Wilhelm more or less accused his mother of conniving to murder his father by delaying the diagnosis of the cancer and persuading him not to have the potentially life-saving—but also very dangerous—operation to remove it. He showed an unseemly keenness to get to the throne himself, arranging for close allies to suggest in public that his sick father renounce his claim so that he could succeed his grandfather directly. Fritz was said to be “in deep grief86 that his son could hardly wait for his end.” Vicky, in denial and exasperatingly upbeat, alienated potential sympathizers, and Bismarck used his newspapers to show her in the worst possible light.

  Shortly after Fritz’s diagnosis, the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, alarmed by reports of Wilhelm’s Anglophobia and admiration for Russia, told the German Foreign Office that he feared that the prince’s moods might dictate German foreign policy. Bismarck wrote personally to reassure him of the contrary. What Salisbury didn’t realize was that Wilhelm was now as hostile to Russia as he was to England, and that his special relationship with Alexander was in shreds. Over the autumn of 1887 the most astonishing turn-about had taken place between Russia and Germany—and in Wilhelm’s head. By the winter the two countries were in the grip of a war scare. The Russians threatened to march into rebellious
Bulgaria, an act which would inevitably draw in Austria-Hungary, its rival in the Balkans and Germany’s ally. The circumstances were not dissimilar from those that would lead to the First World War, thirty years later.

  Despite years of amicable relations, the Russians had become convinced that Germany was somehow colluding with Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary. This belief was subconsciously an acknowledgement that Germany was now a rival to Russia, no longer a junior ally. Though there was no substantial cause—as the German ambassador to St. Petersburg observed, there was not “the slightest possible87 reason” for war—Germany, especially Prussia, succumbed to a war scare. With the old emperor dying and his son mortally ill, the country felt vulnerable, and Russia’s aggression revived old fears about the country’s geographic vulnerability. Hysterical anti-Russian articles appeared in the press. Members of the army began talking about the need for a pre-emptive strike against Russia. Wilhelm agreed with them, convinced by the ambitious General Alfred von Waldersee, his would-be new mentor, who was obsessed with fighting a “preventive war” against Russia. Bismarck had no desire for a war—though he was as responsible as anyone for the hysterical atmosphere in Germany, having for decades assiduously fanned fears of foreign invasion for his own political ends. To make it hard for the Russians to act, he closed the German stock market to Russian investment (though in such a way that it didn’t look as if the initiative had come from him). This was a disaster for the Russian government which relied on the German markets for massive loans, and brought the tsar, along with his son Nicholas, on an emergency visit to Berlin in mid-November 1887. Bismarck said he couldn’t reopen the German markets, but the visit cleared the air. The chancellor gave the Reichstag a dressing-down, talked tough but accommodatingly to Russia, and the scare subsided. Wilhelm, however, failed to get the tête-à-tête he’d expected with the tsar, and spent two hours on a train platform in full dress uniform, waiting for him. Alexander’s coolness rankled with him. “HM did not speak a word to me about politics, and therefore I remained silent,” he reported huffily to Bismarck.