Dreadnought, Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War

by Robert K. Massie

  Underlying specific criticism of the Kaiser's unguarded remarks was the general complaint that William was attempting again to exercise personal rule-a right he had not been granted by the Imperial constitution. The left reacted by demanding greater limits on the monarchy and tighter restriction of the Emperor's right to interfere in domestic and foreign policy. The Conservatives wanted the monarchy left unfettered, but desired restraints placed on the eccentric, damaging behavior of this monarch. When a majority in the Reichstag, including many Conservatives, demanded a censure debate, Bulow sent Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, the Imperial Secretary of the Interior, to assess the mood of the assembly. Bethmann-Hollweg reported to the Chancellor that "it will be impossible to limit the present uproar to the Daily Telegraph or to formal mistakes committed in the treatment of the document" by the Foreign Office. "What is erupting now with primeval force is resentment against the personal regime, dissatisfaction over the Emperor's attitude of the last twenty years, of which the conversations in the Daily Telegraph are only one among many symptoms."

  Before he could deal with the Reichstag, Bulow had to make sure of the Kaiser. Under the German constitution, the Chancellor was chosen by the Emperor and could remain in office as long as the Emperor wished, no matter what the views of the members of the Reichstag. William II, who had agreed to publication of the interview to contribute, he thought, to friendly relations with England, was stunned by the personal criticism directed at him from all sides. He had behaved in strict accordance with the constitution by forwarding a draft of the interview to the Imperial Chancellor for approval. The Chancellor had approved, the interview had been published-and now he, the German Emperor, was everywhere regarded as a menace or a fool.

  Bulow's most effective weapon had always been the threat of resignation; he used it now. He wrote to the Kaiser, who was still at Romintern, declaring that though he had not read the interview, he had submitted it to the Foreign Office. "If Your Majesty is displeased with my having failed under pressure of business to go through the English manuscript in person, and blames me for the carelessness shown by the Foreign Office, I humbly beg to be relieved of my Chancellorship. If, however, I have not lost Your Majesty's confidence, I feel I cannot remain at my post unless I am given the freest scope to defend Your Majesty openly and vigorously, against the unjust attacks on my Imperial Master." As soon as Bulow saw the Kaiser, on William's return from Romintern, the Chancellor realized that he had no need to worry. "He was," said Bulow, "as he always was at moments of crisis, very pale, very pitiable." William did not reproach the Chancellor; this time Bulow did not even need to blame the Foreign Office. He informed the Kaiser that the Reichstag debate would begin on November 10. "Go ahead," said William. "Say what you like. But, however you do it, bring us through." "His trustful, childlike attitude touched me more than I can say," Bulow observed.

  With the Kaiser submissive, Bulow had no difficulty getting permission to publish a statement in the official government gazette, the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. The statement ignored the content of the interview and dealt solely with responsibility for publication. The guilty party was the Foreign Office; the Chancellor had taken the blame; the Emperor had refused the Chancellor's resignation.

  In the Reichstag, which debated both the content of the interview and the responsibility for publishing it, the targets of attack were the Foreign Office and the Kaiser. Speakers on all sides condemned the carelessness and incompetence of the Foreign Office; members on the left demanded constitutional changes which would restrict the authority of the Emperor; Conservatives expressed "the wish that in future the Emperor will maintain greater reserve in his conversation." Bulow successfully avoided the storm, managing to incriminate the Kaiser, exonerate himself, and present the image of a brave and chivalrous Chancellor, willing to absorb all blows, just and unjust, and persevere for the sake of Crown and nation. The interview, he said when he rose to speak, contained incorrect facts: No plan of campaign had been worked out or sent to Windsor, rather the Boers had been warned that they would have to fight alone; there had never been a proposal of a Continental alliance against England; the majority of Germans were not hostile to England; Germany had no ambition to threaten Japan in the Far East. "For the mistake which was made in dealing with the manuscript, I take the entire responsibility," Bulow continued. "It is repugnant to my personal feelings to brand as scapegoats officials who have done a life-long duty."* Bulow characterized the Kaiser as a willful, clumsy child, anxious to be useful and important, who stumbled badly when left untutored. "Gentlemen, the knowledge that the publication of his conversations had not produced the effect which the Emperor intended in England, and has aroused deep excitement and painful regret in our country will-and this is the firm conviction which I have gained during these days of stress-will induce His Majesty in future to observe that reserve which is as essential in the interests of a coherent policy as in those of the authority of the Crown. If this were not so, neither I nor my successors could accept the responsibility."

  Bulow emerged triumphant. "When, amid a roar of cheering, I sat down, I felt that the battle had been won," he said. Holstein, watching from retirement, supported the Chancellor's tactics: "In view of the Kaiser's indiscretions, no defense was possible," he wrote in his journal. The Berliner Tageblatt openly attacked Kaiser William: "We have a population of more than sixty million, a highly

  * Two weeks later, Bulow transferred Klehmet from Berlin to the post of Consul in Bucharest.

  intelligent nation, and yet the fate of the Chancellor as well as the choice of his successor rests with one man! Such a situation is intolerable to a self-respecting nation. The events of the last few days have made it clear that the German people will not continue to allow their vital interests to depend on the mood of a single individual whose impulsiveness they have once again had the opportunity of witnessing."

  The Kaiser was not in Berlin during the Reichstag debate. His schedule, established well in advance, had called for a visit to the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian Heir, and then attendance at a hunting party at Donaueschingen, the Black Forest estate of his friend, the multimillionaire German-Austrian Prince Max von Fiir-stenberg. William's decision to go ahead with his journey at a time when the nation was convulsed by talk of the monarch's indiscretion had drawn bitter comment in the Reichstag. In fact, before his departure, the Kaiser had asked Bulow whether he ought to remain in Berlin during the debate. Bulow had told him to go: "He was longing for Donaueschingen where fox-hunting, cabaret entertainments and every kind of amusement were in prospect," the Chancellor explained. "I yielded to his wish." Once the Kaiser had gone-and despite the fact that William was being roundly condemned in the Reichstag for his absence-Bulow did nothing to bring him back. When Holstein questioned Bulow, "Did you, as people are saying, dissuade the Kaiser from returning to Berlin?" Bulow replied, "No, I said nothing either way." In fact, during William's stay at Donaueschingen, he received a lengthy, coded telegram from the Chancellor, stating that it was unnecessary for him to return to Berlin during the debate.

  When the Kaiser arrived at Donaueschingen, his host was struck by William's look. "If you met Kaiser William, you would not know him," Prince Max said. At first, the visit distracted the Kaiser. "The two days here have gone off very harmoniously and gaily," he wrote to Bulow. "The shoot went splendidly. I brought down sixty-five stags. I remember you in all my prayers, morning and evening… There is a silver lining in every cloud. God be with you! Your old friend, William I.R." Then, one evening after dinner, William suffered a personal blow. The ladies "in full evening dress with all their jewels, the gentlemen in green or black swallowtails… were assembled in the Great Hall of the Castle, with a band playing on the staircase. Suddenly, Count Hulsen-Haeseler appeared in pink ballet skirts with a rose wreath and began to dance to the music." General Count Hulsen-Haeseler, a friend of the Kaiser's since boyhood, and Chief of the Military Cabinet, had performed in this manner before. "I
t is an unusual experience to see a Chief of the Military Cabinet capering about in the costume of a lady of the ballet," said a new member of the Kaiser's suite. Exhausted by his pirouettes, the Count stopped, bowed-and then sagged to the floor. The Castle was in pandemonium: a doctor worked over the stricken dancer; Princess von Furstenberg sat in a chair and wept; the Kaiser paced frantically up and down. After an hour and a half, the Count was pronounced dead of heart failure. Rigor mortis had set in and only with great difficulty was the General's body stripped of its tutu and dressed in proper military uniform.

  William, already agitated by the Daily Telegraph affair, was further unnerved. Meanwhile, Bulow's success before the Reichstag was evaporating. To secure his position as Chancellor, he needed a public endorsement by William of the stand he had taken in the debate. On November 17, Bulow went to see the Kaiser, who had returned to Potsdam. William and Augusta awaited him on the terrace in front of the New Palace. As he approached, the Empress hurried forward and whispered in his ear, "Be really kind and gentle with the Emperor. He is quite broken up." William led Bulow into his study. The Kaiser, pale and dejected, was "in such a depressed and pessimistic mood that I had to comfort him more than criticize his past conduct," said Bulow. With the monarch deep in melancholy, the Chancellor had no difficulty. He drew from his pocket a prepared statement:

  "Uninfluenced by the exaggerations of public criticism, which seem to him unjustified, His Majesty the Emperor regards it as his chief Imperial task to assure the continuity of Imperial policy, while, at the same time, maintaining his constitutional responsibilities. His Royal and Imperial Majesty has accordingly approved all declarations by the Imperial Chancellor in the Reichstag, at the same time assuring Prince von Bulow of the continuation of his confidence."

  William eagerly endorsed the document and, said Bulow, "grasped my hand convulsively. 'Help me! Save me!' He embraced me and gave me a hearty kiss on both cheeks." As Bulow bowed and was leaving, the Kaiser said again, "Thank you! Thank you with all my heart!" Returning home, Bulow told his wife, "I've managed, once more, to get the Crown and the Emperor out of a scrape."

  When Bulow left, William began to weep and went to bed. The following day, Bulow was informed by telephone that the Kaiser intended to abdicate. The Chancellor hurried back to Potsdam. The Empress, her eyes red with tears, received him on the ground floor. "Must the Emperor abdicate?" she asked. "Do you wish him to abdicate?" Bulow attempted to calm her, assuring her that, thanks to his speech in the Reichstag, "the storm had begun to abate."

  Bulow left without seeing the Kaiser. The Crown Prince arrived. "I rushed upstairs," he recorded in his Memoirs. "My father seemed aged by years; he had lost hope and felt himself to be deserted by everybody. He was broken down… his self-confidence and his trust were shattered. He talked vehemently… bitterness aroused by the injustice… kept reasserting itself. I stayed with him for an hour sitting on his bed, a thing which, so long as I can remember, had never happened before."

  William never mentioned abdication again, but his depression was evident. "The Emperor made no attempt to conceal the deep dejection of his soul," said Princess Victoria Louise's English governess. "[He] moved about-this man usually so loquacious, so pleased with himself and the world-in a mournful silence, speaking seldom and then in an undertone… Everyone else, too, seemed to talk in whispers." In his rare public appearances, William veered to the opposite extreme, affecting a forced cheerfulness, cracking jokes and laughing louder than anyone else. The Kaiser avoided Bulow. The morning visits to the Wilhelmstrasse and strolls in the Chancellory garden ceased; Kaiser and Chancellor saw each other only when business required it. At the end of six weeks, William began to recover. On New Year's Day, as he drove through the streets and the crowd broke into cheers, William's self-confidence and self-esteem began to creep back. Public sympathy for the Emperor increased; his silence and withdrawal were ascribed, not to collapse, but to a becoming royal dignity. Blame was directed at the Chancellor: the Emperor, after all, had done his constitutional duty by showing the draft of the interview to Prince von Bulow. The Chancellor had betrayed his master twice: first, by failing to read the document before publication; second, by not sufficiently defending the monarch in the Reichstag. In private, then gradually, in a wider circle, William accepted and repeated this view. He had been "left in the lurch," he said; "I became the scapegoat and my Chancellor washed his hands in innocence." To Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian Heir, he wrote: "You will understand what agony it is for me to behave as though everything were normal, and to go on working with people whose cowardice and lack of responsibility has [sic] deprived me of the protection which anyone else would have accorded to the Head of State as a matter of course. The German people is beginning to look into its soul and to realize the deed which has been done to it." Bulow, sensing that public opinion was shifting to the Emperor, became alarmed. He wrote to William on February 13 that everything he had said and done in November had been motivated "solely and exclusively by loyalty to Your Majesty's house and country and inner love for Your Majesty's… Person." In the margin of this letter, William wrote "Pharisee!"

  On March 11, 1909, with the Bosnian Crisis at a critical stage, William received Bulow in the picture gallery of the Berlin Castle. "I walked up and down with him," the Kaiser said, "between the portraits of my ancestors and the paintings of the battles of the Seven Years War… and was amazed when the Chancellor harked back to the events of the autumn of 1908 and undertook to explain his attitude." Bulow employed the technique which had worked in the past, telling William that "I could not continue to shoulder the heavy burden of office unless I felt that I had the entire confidence of my sovereign." The Kaiser countered bluntly that, in the autumn, the Chancellor had not "shown sufficient energy in contradicting attacks" against the Crown. "Froben," he said, "would not have spoken as you did in the Reichstag debate on November 10." As he spoke, William stood before a portrait of Froben, a royal equerry, who, at the Battle of Fehrbellin in 1675, had mounted the piebald horse of the Great Elector in order to attract enemy musketballs away from his master. As Chancellor, said William, Froben would have declared that he had advised the Emperor to say what he did in the Daily Telegraph. Bulow replied that he could not have said this since, knowing his beliefs, the public would not have believed him. "Which simply means," retorted William, "that you consider me a donkey, capable of blunders you yourself never could have committed." Bulow apologized, extolled the Kaiser's remarkable qualities-and William swung around. "This frank conversation released the tension between us," the Kaiser said. "Haven't I always told you that we complete one another famously?" he asked Bulow. "We should stick together and we will." He pumped the Chancellor's hand and took him in to lunch. "I've just been having it out with the Imperial Chancellor and everything has been put right between us," the Kaiser announced to the waiting entourage. "If anyone says anything against Prince Bulow, I shall punch his nose for him." That night, William wired his brother, Henry, "Have just forgiven Bulow who begged my pardon in a flood of tears." The following night, at Bulow's request, the Imperial couple dined with him. William walked in the door and greeted Princess von Bulow: "How happy I am to be here again! What a terrible winter this has been! But now it's all going to be perfect."

  Despite this jaunty talk, the Kaiser's renewed affection for his Chancellor had a hollow quality. To a friend he confided that the whole reconciliation has been "a comedy" and that as soon as the political situation permitted, he intended to remove Bulow from office. The opportunity arrived in June; the occasion was the Chancellor's defeat on a key vote in the Reichstag. By the spring of 1909, the building of the fleet had created a fiscal crisis in Germany. Five hundred million additional marks were required. In deference to the power of the conservatives in the Reichstag, four fifths of the new revenues-400 million marks-was to be raised from sales taxes, which hit the lower and middle classes hardest. Some concession, however, had to be made to the liberals; Bulow p
roposed that one fifth of the required sum-one million marks-be raised from property owners by means of an inheritance tax. Conservatives stiffly opposed death duties, which had never before been imposed in Germany. The Kaiser supported the Chancellor, but he made it clear that if Bulow failed to deliver the vote for the inheritance tax, he must resign. One June 24, the inheritance tax was defeated by eight votes, 195 to 187.

  On June 26, 1909, twelve years to the day after he had accepted the State Secretaryship from the Kaiser on board the Hohenzollern at Kiel, Bulow returned to the same site to offer his resignation as Chancellor. William was waiting on deck, impatient and nervous. "As a matter of fact, I'm in rather a hurry," the Emperor said. "In an hour I have to have lunch with the Prince of Monaco." He told Bulow that his successor would be Bethmann-Hollweg, the Imperial Secretary of the Interior. "I'm sure you'll agree with me," the Kaiser said. "He'll soon put the Reichstag down a peg or two. Besides, I shot my first roebuck at his estate in Hohenfinow." Bulow's response was tentative: "As far as domestic policy is concerned, Bethmann-Hollweg is perhaps the best man… [but] he understands nothing about foreign policy." "You leave foreign policy to me," William said. "You've managed to teach me something, you know." When Bulow recommended that the Kaiser do everything possible to reach a naval agreement with England, William frowned. "I cannot and will not allow John Bull to give me orders on how many ships I can build." Cheerily, the Kaiser returned to Bethmann-Hollweg: "Just wait till that great tall fellow stands up in the Reichstag and glares at all the 'honorable' members. Why, he'll scare them to death. They'll run off and hide in their mouse holes." When it was time to leave, the Kaiser took Bulow with him to lunch on the Prince of Monaco's yacht. At the table, where most of the other guests were French, William was in high spirits and laughed loudly. "I had the peculiar sensation I had eaten the condemned man's last meal in the presence of foreigners," Bulow remembered.