The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  The visit seemed to go so well that it was widely assumed England must be considering joining the Triple Alliance. The thought did not reassure either the French or the Russians. Barely a week after Wilhelm returned from England in August 1891, the French navy visited the Russian naval base at Kronstadt, just outside St. Petersburg, and the great autocrat Alexander III stood bareheaded for the republican anthem, the “Marseillaise”—a song which had previously been banned in Russia. Europe was amazed. The republic and the autocracy were clearly preparing to draw closer.

  Though tirelessly polite to the Germans and keen to seem friendly, Lord Salisbury could see no reason to make a formal alliance and forfeit Britain’s long-maintained detachment from Europe, a detachment which he believed gave it important room for manoeuvre. Nor could Germany help Britain where it was vulnerable, in Asia; and he saw no reason to make any concessions to the Germans in the colonies—he thought they made brutal colonists.25 In any case, he distrusted Wilhelm. Neither Wilhelm nor his Foreign Office took the hint. The kaiser, who constantly failed to differentiate between the queen and the British government, continued to write flattering letters to his grandmother, telling her she was the “Nestor” and the “Sybilla” of Europe—“revered by all;26 feared only by the bad.” He tried to please her by returning to the dukes of Cumberland—the claimants to the kingdom of Hanover—money sequestered by Bismarck. He even kept his temper when she unveiled a statue to his father and failed to ask him to the ceremony. In March 1892 he asked “to visit you quite27 privately at Osborne this summer,” a request to which she reluctantly agreed even though the timing was bad—Eddy had just died. It may well have been because she’d heard that Wilhelm had been unwell. The official version was that he’d had an ear infection. In London there were rumours that he’d suffered some kind of “nervous breakdown.”28 At the German court there were more alarming rumours that members of the medical profession had suggested that Wilhelm might be mad.29

  The kaiser had taken to his bed for two weeks. He told his grandmother he’d been “too much overworked,”30 a description which would have raised a snigger among his ministers. The truth was that, having laid claim to being Germany’s saviour and the most brilliant man in Europe, Wilhelm had proved quite unable to live up to his promise, and Bismarck’s retirement had left him exposed. Although he’d told Caprivi that the chancellor’s job was just a temporary role until he himself was ready to take the reins of government, he had no staying power at all. “Distractions,”31 Waldersee had observed increasingly bitterly, “—whether they are little games with his army or navy, travelling or hunting—are everything to him … He reads very little apart from newspaper cuttings, hardly writes anything himself apart from marginalia on reports and considers those talks best which are quickly over and done with.” Wilhelm was all front. He’d filled his first years as kaiser with a round of pageants, processions, parades and elaborate memorials celebrating long-forgotten Hohenzollerns and historical events. He showed himself off to his people constantly and travelled incessantly—indeed he was so seldom in Berlin that he’d been nicknamed der Reisekaiser, “the travelling kaiser.” After four years, he was still rushing around, the pageants were quite as frequent but there seemed precious little otherwise to show for it all. Wilhelm appeared unable to distinguish the trivial from the important—he’d spend hours looking at photographs of warships or moving the position of the smoke stacks on a new cruiser, rather than read government reports. He had no idea how he was going to accomplish all the great things he had promised. For him kingship had been a rather vague notion of having power, being great and beloved. Worse, he was an appalling vacillator, changing his mind—he was too often influenced by the last person he’d talked to, and constantly in quest of popularity—with such frequency that it drove his ministers mad and made the government look irresolute and confused. Chancellor Caprivi praised Wilhelm’s habit of “continually talking32 to all kinds of people,” but observed wearily that “he often contradicted his official announcements and misunderstandings arose in consequence.” His colleague Marschall, the foreign minister, was more forthright: “It is unendurable.33 Today one thing and tomorrow the next and after a few days something completely different.”

  Although the government passed its social legislation, Wilhelm’s liberal leanings and appetite for being the “King of the Workers” hadn’t lasted long, just as long, in fact, as it took him to realize that the German workers were not going to forsake the Socialist Party for him. He took the working classes’ “betrayal” personally, and denounced their “ingratitude.” He longed to gather the nation around him, and at the same time worried about incurring the displeasure of his traditional constituency, the court, his military entourage, the right-wing parties in the Reichstag on whom the government relied to pass their bills. Then there was his habit of making sudden rogue interventions, getting overexcited during speeches and announcing a new law that completely contradicted agreed government policy, or writing to foreign monarchs without telling the Foreign Office, or appointing someone completely inappropriate to a government position—he particularly prized his power to choose and dismiss ministers. (Caprivi once received a Captain Natzmer who said that the kaiser had made him governor of the Cameroons the previous night, having met him at an imperial reception.) He was also quick to resent anyone he felt wasn’t sufficiently supportive. He was soon complaining of Caprivi, he “never thinks of doing34 something simply because I ask him to … I cannot call such behaviour having confidence in me.”

  Around Wilhelm there was a force field of approval. Few members of his entourage—his civil and military cabinets, his ministers, his friends even—could bring themselves to contradict him. People around him found themselves agreeing with his version of reality rather than the one that actually existed outside his head, partly out of a traditional deference to the dynasty, obsequiousness and to stay in favour, but also because it was so exhausting not to. Anne Topham, an English governess who later taught the kaiser’s daughter, described how his entourage lived

  in a state of35 constant self-suppression, for the one thing their master could not bear was for anyone to disagree with him, to have an opinion apart from his own. What he seemed to seek in his surroundings was a chorus of approval from persons who had sunk their own personalities, submerged them for the time, while they themselves played the role of listeners. At first I rather despised this complaisant [sic] courtier-like attitude, yet insensibly I too fell into it, found myself searching for points of agreement with the Emperor, rather than risk displeasing him by any form of polite argument.

  Even Philipp zu Eulenburg, who repeatedly tried to make him understand his mistakes, wrapped his criticisms up in elaborate flattery. “Wilhelm II wants36 to shine … to decide everything himself,” he would tell a rising politician. “But what he wants to do often goes wrong. He loves glory; he is ambitious and jealous. In order to get him to accept an idea, you must act as if the idea were his.” When dealing with the kaiser, he advised above all, “Don’t forget the sugar.” The professional costs of failing to do this were obvious. In 1890 General Waldersee—unable, after nearly a decade of toadying, to bite his tongue any longer—had told the kaiser that his participation in military manoeuvres and insistence on winning, despite making hopeless mistakes, was wrecking the entire point of the exercise. Wilhelm demoted him.

  This might not have mattered so much if Wilhelm hadn’t believed his own publicity, and been so possessive of his personal power, refusing to turn the government over to professionals. As it was, it put him right in the firing line when things went wrong. In early 1892 there was a hysterical Protestant backlash within the government and the liberal and conservative press to a bill to liberalize religious teaching and specifically to allow Catholics to set up and administer their own schools. Catholics were a large minority in Germany, especially in the South, and they were represented politically by the Centre Party, a liberalish party on whom Caprivi had had to
call to pass much of his social legislation. Suspicion of Catholicism, and Catholic allegiance to Rome, however, was still a deep-seated prejudice among the traditional Prussian elite who ran the government and headed the right-wing Conservative and (confusingly named) Liberal (who weren’t actually liberal at all) parties. Wilhelm, who regarded himself as enlightened about Catholicism, panicked, first publicly supporting the bill, next seeming to denounce it, then condemning “grumblers,” and finally killing it with the insistence that it be amended to meet Protestant criticism. Caprivi, a decent man who was struggling to juggle all the different interest groups and felt publicly abandoned by Wilhelm, tendered his resignation. It would not be the last time: he would resign ten times in four years, usually because it was the only way to bring Wilhelm into line. The crisis was a stark illustration of just how politically cracked, even broken, Germany was, and how hard it was for anybody to make a popular appeal across partisan loyalties. It also demonstrated that to make the kind of popular appeal to the nation that Wilhelm wanted, he would have to be seen to extricate himself from politics as Emperor Franz Joseph had done in Austria. But that would involve renouncing the exercise of personal power, and this was something he refused to do.

  Criticism of Wilhelm and his regime was coming from all sides. From retirement Bismarck had begun to take revenge by orchestrating a cleverly pitched press campaign consistently attacking the government’s policies. One of its effects had been to encourage criticism from other parts of the Right, for example from the newly formed Pan-German League, which—inspired by anger over the Heligoland Treaty, by which “The hope of a37 great German colonial Empire was ruined!”—had been set up to campaign against government policy which “weakened” Germany. Wilhelm himself had begun to attract a torrent of personal criticism for a series of public gaffes. In 1891, on a visit to Munich, he’d offended the whole of South Germany by inscribing Suprema lex regis voluntas, “The will of the King is the supreme law,” in the town hall “golden” book. It might have been a joke, but it was interpreted as a crass assertion of Prussian might. He’d shocked the nation in a speech to a group of new army recruits in which he said that, should he order it, they would have to “shoot down” their own families “without a murmur.” On another occasion, he’d denounced the German Socialist Party as the “enemy of the Fatherland” and said he intended to “crush”38 it. While this might play well in the Prussian heartland of rural Brandenburg, it was not acceptable in Germany’s sophisticated urban centres. August Bebel, the Socialist Party leader, said that every time the kaiser made a speech the party gained another 100,000 votes. A speech to the provincial Landtag in Brandenburg, in February 1892, had had a particularly bruising reception, and prompted suggestions that the kaiser was suffering from megalomania—or “Caesaromania” as contemporaries liked to call it. He’d spoken a little too emphatically about how he had “been appointed by an authority39 on high, to whom I shall later have to account for my actions,” and told his audience, “I shall lead you on to ever more splendid days. I am taking the right course and I shall continue full steam ahead.”

  Four years before such words would have been greeted more sympathetically; now the honeymoon period was over. “The World,”40 the now-demoted Waldersee commented with more than a little schadenfreude in March 1892, “which was initially enthusiastic about him, is now completely disillusioned.” Couldn’t someone, his English grandmother wondered, “Altogether beg41 him not to make so many speeches”? The irony was, Wilhelm’s aggressive absolutist rhetoric was almost never matched by action. But as he knew all too well, in public affairs appearances counted.

  The combination of the criticism and Caprivi’s resignation pushed Wilhelm over the edge. In March 1892 he took to his bed for two weeks in “nervous collapse.” It would not be the last time that he would have to acknowledge the gaping difference between how he wanted to see the world and how it actually was, and that he was not quite Siegfried and Bismarck rolled into one. Collapse was his response and his coping mechanism. It was his way of processing failure and disappointment without actually having to do anything about it. Behind his bedroom doors he recalibrated reality with his view of himself. Then he would bounce up, ready to conquer the world again.

  The crisis was weathered. As would be future crises. Even though large sections of the country would continue to feel disconnected from the court and the government—industrial workers, the Left, progressive liberals, large swathes of the South, Catholics—and there would be periodic waves of criticism of government policy from across the political spectrum, the fact was Germany was rich, and wealth was a great political emollient. The boom that had started in the post-unification years continued and continued; money poured into the country. There was also a large mass from the rising lower-middle classes—in England their equivalent would have been the “clerks” who read the Daily Mail and embraced its patriotic imperialism—for whom Wilhelm would continue to be the heroic leader, despite his idiosyncrasies and gaffes. Extreme Pan-Germans might oppose government policy, but they still felt loyal to the kaiser. In some strange way, moreover, Wilhelm truly did embody Germany, a fact that even his decriers allowed. It was almost as if his personality—his touchiness, his unpredictability, his restlessness, his lack of resolve—resonated with the young country which, only seventeen years old when he had acceded, was in its own adolescent spasm: quick to detect a slight, overexcited by the idea of flexing its muscles, prey to sudden switches in mood, desperate not to appear weak, insistent on being acknowledged. This struck contemporaries. Wilhelm, the Jewish intellectual Egon Friedell would conclude in 1926, “almost always was42 the expression of the overwhelming majority of his subjects, the champion and executor of their ideas, the representative of their outlook on life. Most Germans were nothing more than pocket editions, smaller versions or miniature copies of Kaiser Wilhelm.” Heinrich Mann would write a novel, Der Untertan (The Man of Straw), about just such a figure, a slavish admirer of the kaiser.

  So in April 1892, a month after his nervous breakdown, Wilhelm Tiggerishly waylaid the queen on her return journey from a visit to Italy, and tried to persuade her to come to Berlin. Lord Salisbury, who regarded the queen as one of the few people who could manage the kaiser, suggested “it would be43 a very good thing if your Majesty would see him and calm him.” The queen couldn’t face the idea: “No no I really44 cannot go about keeping everyone in order,” she protested, and took the opportunity to complain to her private secretary about his forthcoming summer visit. “The Queen never45 invited the Emperor … she wd. be very thankful if he did not come.” She asked that Sir Edward Malet, the English ambassador in Berlin, might “hint that these46 regular annual visits are not quite desirable,” a message that Malet—like so many of those who had dealings with Wilhelm—never quite got round to delivering.

  When Wilhelm did come, however, he was on his best behaviour, respectful of the family’s terrible recent loss of Eddy. “Not in the least47 grand, and very quiet, and most amiable in every respect,” Edward wrote to George. The queen had stipulated that he must lodge on his own boat, and refused his enthusiastically proffered brass bands. Nevertheless Wilhelm enjoyed himself “immensely,”48 Bertie’s private secretary, Sir Francis Knollys, wrote. “So much indeed, that I am afraid it will tempt him to repeat his visit very frequently.”

  There was no movement, however, on the diplomatic front. By 1893 there was palpable disappointment in the German Foreign Office that there seemed to be nothing to show for three years of explicit friendliness to Britain—no alliance, no colonies. A Liberal victory in the British general elections of 1892 brought no change of attitude. Though the two countries were supposed to be on excellent terms, the German Foreign Office began to feel intense irritation towards what it felt was British condescension and obstructionism. It was aggrieved and upset by the British reluctance to talk about an alliance, because Russia—spurned by Germany—and France had now done the unthinkable and made a secret defensiv
e alliance (of which every politician in Europe was aware), sandwiching Germany between two potential enemies—Bismarck’s worst nightmare. At the same time, Britain and Germany found themselves in disputes over colonial claims in Fiji, New Guinea, Congo, South-West Africa and Samoa.

  The crucial change was that the German government had begun eagerly to pursue a colonial empire. Bismarck had regarded colonies as an expensive distraction. Realizing that Germany’s wealth came largely from its manufactured goods sold to other developed countries, he’d only occasionally encouraged would-be German colonizers as a sop to the German Right, and otherwise viewed the imperial scramble as a way to sow dissension between France and Britain. This he’d done very successfully, particularly with the Berlin Conference of 1884, which ordained that Africa should be carved up into the spheres of influence, the divisions decided by who occupied a piece of territory more convincingly, or aggressively, than anyone else—a recipe for constant clashes. After Bismarck’s departure, however, Wilhelm had seized on the notion of creating a great colonial empire as the achievement that would demonstrate how he had surpassed the chancellor, and unite Germany around him. After all, throughout his childhood his mother had drilled into him the greatness of the British empire as a uniting, civilizing force that had brought the country lasting riches and status.