The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  In England, the piece caused amusement. The kaiser genuinely seemed to want to be Britain’s friend, but he sounded so ridiculous, an observation even the kindest reactions in the British press couldn’t resist: the Nation called the interview “sincere and impulsive;”5 the Westminster Gazette, “well meant”6 but “embarrassing.” Lord Esher described it as “amazing,”7 and added, “he thinks himself immortal and omnipotent.”

  In Germany, however, the article prompted a frenzy of anger and resentment against the kaiser, both at the revelation that he had supported Britain during the Boer War and—almost more painful to the prickly adolescent nation—because he had made himself and the country a laughingstock. In his memoirs, Bülow described the interview as a “dynamite bomb8 … sad effusions, which could scarcely have been surpassed in tactless stupidity.” The Telegraph interview seemed the last straw, after the rumours of Wilhelm’s insanity, the intemperate speeches and the Eulenburg scandal. The case had ended only in July, with Eulenburg fainting while standing trial for perjury, amid a welter of pitiful and half-substantiated stories about sex with fishermen and milkmen, which dated from the 1880s.* “Of all the11 political gaffes which HIM [His Imperial Majesty] has made, this is the greatest,” Edward told Hardinge.

  Within days of the interview, the press, the Reichstag and even the princes of the German empire in the Bundesrat and ministers in the Prussian government were queuing up to express their seething anger. There were calls for Wilhelm’s abdication, or at the very least for some constitutional curtailment of his power. Bülow told the kaiser he needed a free hand to deal with the crisis and offered his resignation just to make it clear, bundling him off to Austria to see his new friend Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire. He then issued a statement in the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, claiming he’d had nothing to do with the article, that he’d been too burdened with other state matters to look at it, and that all the fault lay with the Foreign Office. In fact, he was thoroughly implicated in it. The kaiser had personally asked him to read the draft after Tirpitz among others had advised that it shouldn’t be published. Bülow had read it,12 had suggested some cuts and had then gone on holiday—passing it on to the Foreign Office. The article was handed from minion to minion, and the various cuts and editorial suggestions seem not to have been incorporated before it was sent back to its English author. It’s impossible to say for sure whether this was Bülow’s carelessness, a deliberate decision to allow Wilhelm to embarrass himself or institutional disorganization. It was probably all three. The new British ambassador, Sir Edward Goschen, reported that he’d seen “more muddle13—more confusion—[in the German government] than I have found in any country during my 35 years experience. Chaos is the only word for it.” He wondered what, if anything, was getting through to Wilhelm.

  At a Reichstag debate on 10 November, member after member rose to criticize the emperor with a directness that was completely unprecedented. Bülow spoke just once. He seemed ostensibly to be taking responsibility for the gaffe, but it was clear to his audience that he was actually saying his sympathies were wholly with the kaiser’s critics. He made Wilhelm sound like a childish fantasist, when he explained that what the kaiser had described as the winning strategy of the Boer War was in fact a series of clichéd “aphorisms.” He promised that in future Wilhelm would act “with restraint,”14 and as a guarantee of this, he said that if the kaiser overstepped his position, he would feel obliged to resign. When Bülow’s speech was reported to him, Wilhelm burst into tears and denounced it as all-out betrayal.15

  In an effort to distract him, the kaiser’s entourage decided to put on an entertainment, the kind that amused him: a ballet spectacular performed by the middle-aged members of his various cabinets. The climax was a performance by Field Marshal Count Dietrich von Hülsen-Haeseler, the hefty, fifty-six-year-old chief of Wilhelm’s military cabinet. Described in some sources as wearing a pink tutu (“not for the first time,” Zedlitz-Trützschler wrote), in others a pink ball gown—what was undisputed was that he was in drag—with a large feather in his hair, he performed a series of energetic pirouettes,16 jumps and capers, flirtatiously blew kisses to his audience, stumbled off the stage and suffered a massive heart attack that killed him instantly. It was reported that by the time the doctors arrived, rigor mortis was so far17 advanced that it was extremely difficult to get Hülsen out of his tutu and into his military uniform. The story made Wilhelm look even more irresponsible and odd; in the French, Italian and British papers there were gleeful screeds about German moral degeneracy.

  Back in Berlin on 17 November, four days after Hülsen’s death, an uncharacteristically silent and shocked Wilhelm was persuaded, after hours of haranguing by Bülow, to issue what amounted to an apology for his behaviour, an admission that he had breached his constitutional responsibility, that he had confidence in his chancellor, and that he wouldn’t do it again. He regretted it almost immediately.

  It must have seemed as if things couldn’t get any worse. But then, on 22 November, the Observer newspaper in London printed an account of an unpublished interview Wilhelm had given the previous July to an American journalist, which seemed to contradict everything he’d said in the Telegraph: America and Germany, he said, were the two Great Powers of the future. England was “rotten and marching18 to her ruin, and ought to be wiped out.” Germany was “ready for war at any moment with her and the sooner it came the better.” He also expressed “the greatest contempt” for Edward. Bülow immediately repudiated the article as a fake, but the whole British Foreign Office and the king had seen the original. Edward told Knollys, “I know the E[mperor]19 hates me and never loses an opportunity of saying so … whilst I have always been civil and nice to him.”

  The day the Observer story appeared, Wilhelm announced that he could20 no longer cope and would have to abdicate, and he collapsed in a heap. The entourage gathered him up off the floor and put him to bed. He spent the next two weeks, his daughter’s English governess, Anne Topham, later wrote, in “a kind of stormy stupor … crushed under the weight of the universal displeasure.” For a few weeks the crown prince, Willy, took over his official functions—reviewing soldiers, leading parades, meeting Bülow, though he took no significant decisions—while the kaiser paced up and down for hours, quiet, for the first time in decades, but giving way occasionally to tears. “One felt pity for the tortured man suffering so acutely under the blow to his self-esteem, his infallibility.” In her memoirs Topham remembered “the ghastliness of the dreadful luncheons of the next few days … the silence that prevailed was terrifying.”21 Periodically Wilhelm would complain about Bülow’s betrayal.

  He seemed exhausted. Fritz Ponsonby saw the extent to which Wilhelm’s martial identity was a disguise, and the tired, confused little man beneath it. “He was the22 creation of the Germans themselves,” he wrote. “They wanted a sabre-rattling autocrat with theatrical ways, attempting to dominate Europe, sending telegrams and making bombastic speeches, and he did his best to supply them with the superman they required.”

  Masochistically, Wilhelm bared himself to the family members who liked him least, and for whose approval and sympathy he perhaps most longed. He sent a telegram to Alexandra and Edward early in December, asking after Edward, who had had a bad cold. When Alexandra responded, enquiring tactfully after Wilhelm’s own “cold,” he replied—en clair so everyone could read it—“I am not suffering from cold but from complete collapse.” Edward commented, “We do live in marvellous times.”23

  Sir Edward Grey wrote to an old friend after the Daily Telegraph interview:

  The German Emperor24 is ageing me; he is like a battleship with steam up and screws going, but with no rudder, and he will run into something some day and cause a catastrophe. He has the strongest army in the world and the Germans don’t like being laughed at and are looking for somebody on whom to vent their temper and use their strength. After a big war a nation doesn’t want another for a generatio
n or more. Now it is 38 years since Germany had her last war, and she is very strong and very restless, like a person whose boots are too small for him. I don’t think there will be war at present, but it will be difficult to keep the peace of Europe for another five years.

  Serbia and Austria continued to swap threats. With the kaiser in the equivalent of quarantine, Bülow had decided that Austria had to be supported because it was now Germany’s only reliable ally and couldn’t be seen to be weak—a reaction on which the Austrian foreign minister, Aloys von Aehrenthal, had counted—though at the same time he said that Germany must take care not to be dragged into a war over Bosnia. Wilhelm, however, had initially been angry about the annexation—he had called it “a piece of brigandage”25—and said he was “wounded in my deepest feelings” that Franz Joseph had failed even to give him a hint about it. Nor was he entirely certain that Austria deserved German support. Bülow, however, told him that Germany should encourage Austria not to back down. If there were to be a future “European conflagration,”26 he told Wilhelm, the two would fight together, and Austria would “concentrate all her powers against Russia.” It was a sign of how easy it had become in Germany’s governing circles to talk about war. Helmuth von Moltke, the chief of the German General Staff, went further. He told his opposite number in the Austrian army that Germany would protect Austria even if it invaded Serbia and provoked a war.27 Moltke actively welcomed a war with Russia; he felt the timing and circumstances, with Austria ready to take part, were “propitious.” His views were shared by many senior German officers—such as the head of Wilhelm’s military cabinet, Moritz von Lyncker, who talked freely about war as a solution to Germany’s “internal and external difficulties.”28

  In Russia, meanwhile, the press was demanding action against Austria more and more insistently. The government, painfully aware of Russia’s post-war weakness, knew it simply couldn’t offer Serbia military support. In late December Nicholas wrote directly to Wilhelm asking him to use his influence with Austria to resolve the crisis29 once and for all. Wilhelm refused, but he insisted that the annexation had been a genuine surprise to him—as indeed it had—and added, in a tone that combined an unconvincing airiness and aggrievedness, that, while he quite understood why Russia had to cosy up to Britain, he was disappointed that since 1906 it had pulled away from Germany “more and more.”30 He asked Nicky how he could support Serbia, a nation which had assassinated its monarch.* If only, he said, the tsar had approached him sooner, he might have been able to help.

  A few weeks later, in February 1909, Edward and Alexandra arrived in Berlin for their long-delayed state visit. The king had made strenuous efforts not to come, but Grey said that the times required that “informal relations” be as friendly as possible. “The FO to gain their own object, would not care a pin what humiliation I should put up with,”31 the king grumbled.

  Edward was not in good shape. “The King of England32 is so stout that he completely loses his breath when he has to climb upstairs,” Zedlitz-Trützschler wrote in his diary. “The Emperor told us that at the first family dinner he fell asleep … he eats, drinks and smokes enormously.” Edward was now sixty-eight and his chronic bronchitis and great weight were wearing him down. The striking energy of a few years before was on the wane. The only accommodation he would make for his worsening health was to promise his doctor—who, with a nurse, numbered among the thirteen members of his suite—he would smoke only two cigars before breakfast. He asked, uncharacteristically, that speeches might be read rather than made impromptu—dreading that Wilhelm might slip in some unexpected horror33 to which he would have to respond. But Edward’s demeanour was not merely the result of illness. He had been terribly upset34 by what he saw as Franz Joseph’s dishonesty. In August 1908, just before Bosnia, the Hapsburg emperor and his foreign minister, Aehrenthal, had gone out of their way to assure him of their desire for “the closest cooperation35 between the two countries especially in the Balkans,” and insisted they were committed to stability. Afterwards, Edward had persuaded the emperor to take his first trip in a motor car. They’d reached the princely speed of thirty miles an hour. The king had been proud of his relationship with Franz Joseph, “the dearest36 and most courteous old gentleman that lives,” as Hardinge called him. He’d regarded it as a prime example of his diplomacy, a genuine friendship which mitigated some of the hostility with which he was regarded in German-speaking Europe. Now it seemed to have been worth nothing. His dreams of peace appeared to be ebbing away, and at home he had seen a government schism blow up over the extent of the German threat.

  Wilhelm, by contrast, seemed to have bounced back remarkably from his collapse. Despite everything, he persisted in feeling excited. He told the tsar that he expected the visit to have “useful results37 for the Peace of the World.” While he was still bruised by the Daily Telegraph affair, the new year had brought a resurgence of sympathy for him in parts of the press, where it was being suggested that the chancellor had not been altogether supportive of his emperor. He was very solicitous of his uncle and aunt, though Fritz Ponsonby found him brittle and full of “forced jokes.”38

  Truth be told the whole visit had a slight air of farce and disaster about it. When the train rolled up at the Berlin station, the king was in the queen’s carriage, and the emperor, empress and their entourage had to scuttle undignifiedly down the platform to greet them. Then the horses drawing Alexandra and Dona’s carriage in the procession to the Berlin Schloss stopped and refused to move, two cavalrymen were thrown off their horses, and the whole procession had to be re-ordered. Wilhelm and Edward arrived at the Berlin Schloss to find no one behind them. On the second day, after a long lunch at the British embassy, Edward sat down on a sofa with a cigar next to the glamorous English aristocrat Daisy Pless, began to cough horribly and passed out, the cigar popping out of his fingers. Daisy and Alexandra scrabbled to loosen his—even tighter than usual—clothing, and Edward’s doctor rushed into the room and ordered everyone out. The king reappeared fifteen minutes later, insisting that everything was fine. But his projected trip to Potsdam was downgraded to a day in Berlin, visiting Wilhelm’s stables, Wilhelm’s motor cars, Wilhelm’s ballet (one he had “devised”) and the Hohenzollern museum, most noted—apart from its collection of Frederick the Great’s snuffboxes—for memorabilia about Wilhelm. Edward recovered his old easy charm only once: when he addressed a large crowd of Berliners at the town hall with an off-the-cuff speech in fluent German, which was greeted—to everyone’s relief—by enthusiastic applause. The kaiser, meanwhile, was piqued by the snootiness of some of the British entourage. He complained that they had behaved as if Germany was in the Stone Age; one lady “openly expressed her astonishment” that there were “bathrooms, soap and hand-towels.” Another was amazed that Berlin “actually had streets on which one could find handsome hotels and big stores.”39

  The king and queen departed on 14 February, escorted by the kaiser to the Berlin station. The two men embraced. Edward boarded his train. They never saw each other again.

  Both men colluded in the fiction that the meeting had achieved something. Edward told the banker Ernest Cassel it was “in every respect40 a success;” Wilhelm told his new friend and correspondent Franz Ferdinand that it had “had a very41 relieving and satisfactory effect.” Fritz Ponsonby, however, was sure that “The effect of this42 visit was nil. One felt that a few charming men really liked us, but with the majority one derived the impression that they hated us.”

  By early March 1909 the Austrian army was mobilizing to attack Serbia. In response Russia—its press already in a lather about its failure to defend the Slavs of Bosnia-Herzegovina from the Hapsburg empire—began to mass soldiers on the Austrian border. The Russian government knew it could not afford to go to war, but it was desperate to glean a shred of dignity from the crisis. It appealed to the German government to intervene on its behalf—effectively to broker some face-saving device with the Austrians.

  Bülow and Moltke
decided that the request must be refused. That Germany might negotiate a deal between the two countries and emerge the power broker of middle Europe was nowhere in German Foreign Office calculations. Instead on 22 March Germany sent the Russian government a brusque ultimatum that left Russia with no graceful way out, insisting that it back down and unconditionally accept the annexation or it would find itself at war with Germany. “We expect a43 precise answer, Yes or No, any vague, complicated or ambiguous reply will be treated as a refusal.” Bülow approved the tone of the message, presumably feeling that a show of toughness would lend the government an air of brute effectiveness that it was sorely lacking.