The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  In Germany, and even in Russia after 1905, the press and public opinion were developing a voice, or voices, forcefully separate from government. The German government’s relationship with its press was, without the former quite realizing it, becoming increasingly symbiotic. The German papers represented a whole range of interests: powerful new groups such as the Pan-German League and the agricultural and industrialists’ lobbies highly critical of government pussy-footing, as well as the often forgotten left-wing press, which preached a completely different message of internationalism and cooperation. Wilhelm might tell Edward, “I am the sole97 master of German policy, and my country must follow me wherever I go.” But his chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow, wrote, “public opinion even in Germany had to be reckoned with by every Government, and by the Kaiser too, if he did not want to suffer unpleasantness.” Both Wilhelm and Bülow felt increasingly moved to play to public opinion—at least the views of the Right—and increasingly nervous of its power and potential to undermine them. Both, indeed, felt they lived and died by press approval, Bülow was quite as susceptible and vain about his press coverage as the kaiser. He used the German Foreign Office press bureau to feed flattering stories to the papers about where he took his holidays and how close he was to the kaiser. In his desire to sell himself to the country, he even wrote his own PR: “Probably in no other99 question could I have shown more judgement, composure and caution,” went one self-penned encomium. He would try to curry favour abroad by sending stories he’d planted in the German press sympathetic to a particular country, to its embassy. In Russia, even before the October manifesto granted press freedom in 1905, some in Nicholas’s government identified a kind of public opinion emerging from the educated class, the press and the bureaucracy, which held strong and sometimes diverse views on foreign policy in particular—whether its future lay in the Balkans or the East, whether Germany was friend or foe. For the moment, however, “All parties were100 agreed in believing Great Britain to be the arch-enemy … blocking the way of our forward policy.”

  For now governments could exert influence over their respective national presses, but with the power of public opinion growing, how long a monarch could absolutely resist its demands was questionable.

  * For more about this genetic disease see John Röhl et al., Purple Secret. Röhl and his fellow authors make a good case for Wilhelm’s sister Charlotte having porphyria and suggest that more of Queen Victoria’s descendants, including Vicky and Alix, were sufferers.

  * And perhaps also because glasses showed physical weakness in men—monocles were the accepted alternative among German army officers.

  9

  IMPERIAL IMPERATIVES

  1898–1901

  The bad feeling1 between England and Germany is indeed a great distress and anguish to me—as to you and to many,” the queen wrote to Vicky in the summer of 1897. It never occurred to her that the situation wasn’t fixable if Wilhelm would just keep quiet. “I trust this will pass away gradually if William will not keep it up by speeches and colonial follies. The peace is again rendered difficult by him which is incredible. These railings you have so often spoken of have something to do with it doubtless.” Within the British government too, most people assumed the situation with Germany was reversible. Sir Thomas Sanderson,2 Salisbury’s senior civil servant at the Foreign Office, for example, thought that while German brusqueness and hostility might be irritating, Britain should make a few allowances for the adolescent state’s understandable if clumsily asserted desire for world recognition, and things would return to normal.

  But they were wrong. There had been a tangible shift towards hostility to Britain in the highest quarters of the German government—a hostility once discernible only in certain parts of Germany—and it was to some extent, but by no means entirely, due to Wilhelm. The architects of this new position were two men whom Wilhelm appointed in the summer of 1897, having purged the latest band of ministers to have displeased him: his new favourite, Bernhard von Bülow, the new secretary of state for foreign affairs, whom Wilhelm planned eventually to make chancellor, and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the new head of the Naval Ministry.

  Bülow was a pure and fascinating manifestation of how Wilhelm’s whims and near-pathological reluctance to hear criticism had affected government. A former diplomat, he was a clever opportunist and a great conversationalist (his not altogether reliable four-volume memoirs are slyly amusing), with an astonishingly obvious but successful line in extravagant ingratiation. Among those he had cultivated on the way up was Fritz Holstein, who—years later when everyone had comprehensively stabbed everyone else in the back—said that Bülow had “read more Machiavelli3 than he could digest,” and Eulenburg, whom he had assiduously flattered since the 1880s. But most of all he flattered Wilhelm. “He is so4 impressive!” he told Eulenburg. “He is, along with the Great King and the Great Elector, the most impressive Hohenzollern who has ever lived. In a manner which I have never seen before, he combines genius—the most genuine and original genius—with the clearest good sense. He possesses the kind of fantasy that lifts me on eagles’ pinions above all triviality … And with it, what energy! What swiftness and sureness of conception.” He persuaded Eulenburg that he was the man to turn the kaiser’s ideas and intentions—thus far so imperfectly interpreted—into reality, and reveal the kaiser as the great monarch he promised to be. With him as chancellor, he told Eulenburg, “personal rule—in the good sense” would begin. It was nonsense, but Eulenburg and Wilhelm wanted to hear it. Bülow’s big idea was “Weltpolitik”—a clever piece of naming to bring to mind Bismarck’s “Realpolitik”—the aggressive pursuit of what Bülow described as Germany’s “place in the sun”—in other words, the colonial empire it so obviously deserved. This would be done by operating a ruthless opportunist policy of exploiting other countries’ weaknesses while remaining untied by any more formal alliances, so that Germany would be the country which held the balance in Europe. It was actually a rather vague idea, and not that different from what the German Foreign Office had been doing for some years, but it sounded marvellous and the German public loved it.

  Bülow’s fellow appointee, Alfred Tirpitz (he was given a “von” in 1900), was a naval officer with a plan to turn the German navy into the second largest in the world. Building a real navy was a dream Wilhelm had nursed for years, since his mother had regaled him with the wonders of the Royal Navy when he was a child. It had been confirmed by his reading of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, by the American naval historian Alfred Mahan, a book which claimed that naval power was the key to national prestige, power and wealth—and the colonies which were now regarded as the index of status in the world. Wilhelm had signally failed to persuade the Reichstag of this—it couldn’t see the point of a big navy when Germany had the most powerful land army in Europe and only a tiny coastline. Tirpitz, however, promised to deliver a navy, and he did, launching a successful propaganda crusade to persuade the country that it was absolutely necessary if Germany was to get its colonial empire. He was extraordinarily successful at extracting money from the Reichstag, and he managed and manipulated Wilhelm, whom he realized at his very first meeting did “not live5 in the real world,” more successfully than almost anyone else. Tirpitz was utterly single-minded and determined, and this fascinated Wilhelm. More dangerously, he was imbued with the German military worldview which saw military strategy as almost an end in itself, and was unable, or unwilling, to take as consequential other policy considerations, such as the need to make compromises with one’s near neighbours in the interests of peace.

  The appointment of the two men marked a shift: Wilhelm and Bülow liked to call it the start of Wilhelm’s “personal rule.” It was a move to the Right, and with it came a lurch towards institutionalized hostility to Britain. Paradoxically, both men, like their emperor, were fascinated by Britain. Tirpitz ordered his suits from Savile Row, spoke English at home, and sent his daughter to Cheltenham Ladies’ College; Bülow adore
d the British upper classes and modelled his style in the Reichstag on the aristocratic insouciance of the Tory politician and parliamentary star Arthur Balfour—practising Balfour’s mannerism6 of holding his coat lapels and looking personable, in front of the bathroom mirror. England, Bülow liked to say half-ironically, was “the most wisely7 and successfully governed country” in the world.

  They also, however, both regarded Britain as the chief obstacle to Germany’s imperial destiny. At the end of 1897 Bülow told the kaiser it was no longer possible to consider a “really honest,8 trustworthy Anglo-German alliance.” He had the Prussian aristocrat’s traditional suspicion of Britain combined with a new sense of direct rivalry. He claimed that the British looked down on Germany “with indifference9 or even now and again with contempt and sometimes intolerable arrogance,” and were jealous of its economic success. Instinctively he leaned towards Russia; counting himself a Bismarckian, he felt it had all gone wrong with the lapse of the Russian Reinsurance Treaty in 1890. It wasn’t sensible, besides, to be on bad terms with a next-door neighbour with a million-man army. He believed that if Germany pulled too close to Britain, “we would definitely10 lose Russia’s friendship and Russia is worth more to us than England.” Hostility to England and imperial rhetoric, moreover, won him cheers from the right-wing parties he needed to cultivate in the Reichstag in order to get legislation through. As for Tirpitz, in his first memo to Wilhelm in June 1897, he told him, “For Germany,11 the most dangerous enemy at the present time is England. It is also the enemy against which we most urgently require a certain measure of naval force as a political power factor.”

  The notion that countries must inevitably clash and fight for dominance had become a truism of the 1890s, given a spurious pseudo-scientific credibility by theories of Social Darwinism which interpreted Darwin’s phrase “the survival of the fittest” as the survival of the most aggressive, rather than the most well-adapted. By extension it had become an established cliché that an empire that didn’t expand would find itself being torn apart by other circling imperial predators. As Germany began to catch up in industrial output and trade with England, the idea was gaining ground in Germany that the latter had reached its peak and that, as the German nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke put it, the sceptre was inevitably falling from British hands into German ones. Tirpitz believed that the German navy was the vehicle which would replace Pax Britannica with Pax Germanica. If Germany could build the second largest navy in the world, so powerful that in a conflict its ships could inflict enough damage to threaten the Royal Navy’s dominance, Britain would choose to back down in order to keep its naval superiority, and allow Germany to become the world power it ought to be.

  The new line was not made explicit, however. The reason for the navy’s expansion was kept deliberately vague so as not to alert the British or to attract opposition within Germany. Abroad, Bülow’s justification was that it was to protect Germany’s growing merchant marine and colonies; playing to his audience in the Reichstag, he presented it as anti-British. Even the government’s own senior officials, such as Holstein, were not clear as to precisely what Germany’s position was. And then there was Wilhelm, charging in and changing his mind all the time. The kaiser might have appointed Bülow and Tirpitz, and he certainly had moments when he was furious with England and fantasized about punishing it, or suddenly convinced himself that Britain was planning to attack Germany. But there were other moments when he loved and longed for England; or saw his navy as something to impress Britain with; or as an engine of tough love, the thing that would force it to take him seriously and join with him.

  Indeed, his tendency to succumb to moments of fondness for Britain led other anti-British members of his retinue to extreme measures to keep him hostile. In February 1898 the chief of his naval cabinet, Admiral Senden-Bibran, an Anglophobe and hawk, returned from London claiming that Edward had deliberately cut him when he visited Marlborough House. The complaint brought Wilhelm storming to the British embassy, declaring that Edward’s behaviour would have serious international consequences.12 Edward denied the charge: “Nobody is more anxious for friendly relations with the Emperor than I am—though on more than one occasion I have been ‘highly tried’ … I think I have the character of being civil to everybody.” He pointed out that he had personally arranged for Senden-Bibran to join the Royal Yacht Squadron. When the British ambassador read the letter out to Wilhelm, he muttered that Edward had always regarded him as a “silly boy.”13 British diplomats were convinced that Senden-Bibran had cooked the whole thing up to drive a wedge between Wilhelm and the English family.

  It was perhaps, then, a slightly inopportune moment for Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary—taking advantage of Salisbury succumbing to a bout of flu—to arrange a private meeting with the German ambassador at the end of March 1898, Hatzfeldt, in which, without consulting the prime minister, he seems to have proposed a fully fledged defensive alliance between the two countries. The German response was somewhat confused.

  Chamberlain was a unique and unignorable figure in British politics. A self-made Birmingham industrialist from a lower-middle-class home—which in itself made him different—he had spent the first half of his political career as a popular hero in the Liberal Party, championing a revolution in workers’ conditions. After leaving the Liberals over Irish Home Rule, he had joined the Conservative Party, and now occupied himself with imperialism, British greatness, and ways to unify and extend the empire. He was the most popular politician in the country, someone the Conservatives needed in the new democratic age, though Salisbury and the other Tory grandees did not rejoice to admit it. (When Chamberlain was invited to stay with the then Duchess of Devonshire at Chatsworth for the weekend, she claimed to be anxious that “he would eat14 peas with his knife.”) While Salisbury looked increasingly tired and distant, Chamberlain was charismatic, dynamic and indisputably modern. He tapped into a new strain in British politics with which Salisbury had no connection—populist and demotic, but also jingoistic, aggressive, touchy and anxious. He had been furious about Russia’s grabbing of Port Arthur and had been all for declaring war—a move Salisbury had wearily dissuaded him from. He worried about Britain’s isolation, and had impressed on Arthur Balfour, Salisbury’s nephew and deputy, along with other ministers, his view that Britain should befriend Germany, using fashionable phrases about race and destiny—he talked about the natural links between the British Anglo-Saxons and the German Teutons. But his buccaneering passion, his quickness to antagonism and his unsure grasp of foreign affairs (not helped by Salisbury’s habit of keeping secret so much of what the Foreign Office did) made him a loose cannon in international relations. Salisbury complained Chamberlain wanted “to go to war15 with any Power in the world and has no thought but Imperialism.”

  Once Salisbury returned to office, Chamberlain became rather sheepish about his overtures and claimed they had all come from the German side—though he supported them. The confusion didn’t help the negotiations, which Salisbury and Bülow, for different reasons, worked to close down. Bülow—publicly stating how extremely anxious he was for an understanding with Britain—seems to have encouraged the German Foreign Ministry to make excessive demands that he knew the British would reject. Under the impression that the British were desperate for German friendship, it presented a bullish list of colonial demands as a prerequisite for negotiations, which Salisbury refused. He saw no reason to hand over colonies for no obvious advantage and had no desire for an alliance with Germany. Talks limped along into May. Neither side wanted to be seen as the supplicant. As Salisbury’s clever nephew Balfour observed, both countries wanted to be “the one that16 leant the cheek, not that imprinted the kiss.”

  In the meantime a mangled version of Chamberlain’s original proposal and Salisbury’s subsequent negotiations found their way to the British royal family. At the end of May, Vicky—recently diagnosed with cancer and convinced it was her last chance to bring
about the alliance she had so long dreamed of—wrote an emotional letter to Wilhelm, urging him to grab this “world-saving idea.”17 Germany, she added, “need never fear the Russians and French again … It seems to me that you can have this ripe fruit of inestimable value in the hollow of your hand if you will and can but seize it!” Unfortunately, with her characteristic tactlessness, Vicky also let slip that Salisbury himself was probably the greatest stumbling block to an alliance. The news confirmed Wilhelm’s suspicions that Salisbury had taken against him. He sent his mother a long complaint against the prime minister and Britain. “I for the last three18 years have been abused, ill-treated and a butt to any bad joke any musikhall [sic] singer or fishmonger or pressman thought to let fly at me!” Now the British dangled the possibility of an alliance, but expected him to come in by the back door, “like a thief in the night whom one does not like to own before one’s richer friends.” The tsar, by contrast, had happily given him a coaling station in China. (In fact, he and Nicholas were still barely on speaking terms.)

  Nevertheless Vicky’s letter convinced Wilhelm that, apart from Salisbury, the rest of the British government wanted an alliance. Though Bülow tried to remind him that “We must hold19 our selves independent between the two [Russia and Britain] and be the tongue on the balance, not the pendulum oscillating to and fro,” he and the German Foreign Office drew up another, even longer, list of colonies they wanted from Britain. Once again Salisbury refused. At the end of July the prime minister told Hatzfeldt there could be no agreement because Germany asked for too much. “Shameless scoundrel!”20 Wilhelm scribbled on the report of Salisbury’s words. “Positively jesuitical, monstrous and insolent!” Bülow, meanwhile, worked Wilhelm up with stories that “Princess Beatrice,”21 his least favourite aunt, along with “the entire English-Battenbergian-Hessian-Danish etc cousinage is quietly plotting against His Majesty.” Furious, Wilhelm fired off a telegram to his mother, who was now staying at Windsor with the queen, complaining that his offers of alliance had been received with “something between a22 joke and a snub.” As he hoped she would, Vicky passed on his complaints. The queen asked her prime minister for an explanation. Salisbury swore he had no idea what “snub” Wilhelm was talking about. He told the queen23 the disagreement was purely over colonies which public opinion made it impossible to hand over to Germany.