Conflict also broke out over the respective powers and responsibility of the two tutors. The prince’s first military tutor grew weary of his post when he realized that Wilhelm’s parents had allotted Hinzpeter the lion’s share of responsibility for the child’s upbringing. After his resignation in 1867 there was a dispute over his replacement in which the king’s entourage became directly involved. ‘We luckily carried our point […],’ Victoria wrote to her mother, ‘but I think this interference in our concerns too bad. You have no idea what trouble the reigning party takes to put their spies about our court, nor to what degree they hate us.’12
The representational duties of the princes were a further cause of grief to the crown princess and her husband. In August 1872 she confessed her ‘horror’ at having heard that Wilhelm would be required to wear a Russian uniform in honour of a visit from the Russian tsar. ‘I of course am not asked and all these things are arranged without my having a voice in the matter.’13 It was in part to get the boys away from the coercive environment of the court that Victoria and Friedrich Wilhelm pressed the emperor for permission to send them to school to be educated with children of their own age. As John Röhl has observed, the decision to send Wilhelm to the Lyceum Fredericianum in the city of Kassel was ‘an experiment without precedent’. No Hohenzollern prince had ever been educated in this ‘bourgeois’ fashion before. It was a move that reflected changing conceptions of princely education, not only in Germany but beyond – George V was also sent to study in the company of his peers at Naval College, and even the youthful emperor Hirohito attended high school in Tokyo.14 Wilhelm could, of course, have been educated at a gymnasium in Berlin, but his mother argued against this on the grounds that the only appropriate school in the capital was too politically ‘reactionary’.15
Not surprisingly, the plan met with strong opposition from the Kaiser (as he had been since 1871); only after a prolonged ‘siege from all sides with various machines’ could he be persuaded to agree. As Victoria observed in a letter to her mother, it would henceforth be impossible for the Kaiser to ‘force Wilhelm to appear at Berlin on all occasions and go out into the world – it was the only way of stopping this preposterous determination on the emperor’s part’.16 The move to Kassel was a victory for the pedagogical ideals of the crown prince and his wife. Wilhelm’s enrolment in the Kassel Gymnasium from 1874 involved prolonged absences from Berlin and, more importantly, exemption from his military duties until his eighteenth year (Wilhelm had been attached to the First Footguards Regiment since his tenth birthday). The subordination to a tough and meritocratic pedagogical regime was also intended to strip Wilhelm of the arrogance and princely allures encouraged by the sycophancy and self-display of court life.
The crown princess had always been suspicious of the role played by the military in the socialization of her eldest son and hypersensitive to any signs that he had begun to assimilate himself to its reactionary ethos. As early as February 1871, when the prince was only twelve, she claimed to have detected in Wilhelm ‘a certain receptiveness for the superficial, narrow attitudes of the military’.17 It was above all thanks to her influence that her son enjoyed – by the standards of Hohenzollern princely education – a remarkably unmilitary upbringing. Until the completion of his tertiary studies at the University of Bonn, Wilhelm’s stints of military service were emphatically subordinated to the demands of his ‘civilian’ education. This helps to explain the fact that, despite his undoubted attraction to the culture and ambience – and especially uniforms – of regimental life, Wilhelm appears never to have internalized the habits of self-subordination and discipline that a fully fledged Prussian military education was designed to instil. He found it difficult to deal with correction or even advice from his superior officers. Even after five years at Wilhelm’s side, from 1879 to 1884, his military adjutant, Captain Adolf von Bülow, acknowledged that he had failed to correct the effects of the prince’s education; Wilhelm had adopted the external trappings, but not the values and mental habits of a Prussian officer.18 Wilhelm was not the creation of Potsdam and the barracks square that some popular biographies have portrayed, but a military dilettante. For all her oft-voiced misgivings, then, his mother’s plan to subvert the claims of the military upon her son must be judged a success. Whether the curious blend of Hinzpeter, Potsdam, Kassel and Bonn on which Wilhelm was nourished actually represented an improvement upon the traditional model is another question. It is plausible to suppose that the curious irresolution of Wilhelm’s upbringing, its oscillation between opposed lifeworlds, its lack of a unifying theme, militated against the crystallization of a coherent outlook or stable code of conduct.
Wilhelm becomes a contender
The intermittent disputes over Wilhelm’s upbringing demonstrate the impact of generational tensions, personal animosities and factional polarization on the early life of the prince. They were disputes in which Wilhelm played a passive role; he was a pawn in other people’s calculations. But at some point he must have become aware of the space for manoeuvre created by the long-standing feud between his parents and the reigning party. A clear step in this direction can be discerned in 1883, when the 24-year-old Wilhelm was asked by his father to accompany him on an official journey to Spain. He had no wish to go, but rather than refuse directly he secretly requested his grandfather, who had not concealed his scepticism regarding this expensive venture, to forbid the journey on the grounds that it would be undesirable for him to leave his battalion at that time. This successful move was almost certainly not the first of its kind; when Friedrich Wilhelm discovered what had happened in November 1883, he accused his son in a heated confrontation of ‘having long dealt with the Kaiser behind the backs of his parents’.19
This collaboration between Kaiser Wilhelm I and his grandson reflected a long process of affective reorientation within the family. Wilhelm had maintained an increasingly warm and confidential relationship with his grandfather since the age of fifteen. By the early 1880s the intimacy between the two had begun to impress contemporaries;20 and around 1880 there were signs of a growing distance from his parents. This was in part a result of Wilhelm’s desire for more personal autonomy after his engagement in April 1879 to Auguste Viktoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg. Wilhelm’s parents, and his mother in particular, played a crucial role in bringing about this match, over the protests of those (including the elderly Kaiser) who objected to the bride’s relatively humble status. But if Wilhelm’s mother believed the marriage would bring her closer to her son, she was mistaken.
Anglophobic, illiberal and orthodox in religion, ‘Dona’, as Auguste Viktoria was known to her friends, soon revealed herself to be the ‘pillar precisely of those powers which stood in vehement opposition to the crown prince and his wife and all their values’.21 The resulting alienation between the two households was compounded by Wilhelm’s increasingly outspoken rejection of the liberal political views that had condemned the crown prince and his wife to a life in opposition at the Berlin court. In the course of several unpleasant encounters with his father during the early 1880s, Wilhelm made it clear that his political sympathies were with the governing regime. There was an eerie inevitability in all of this: Friedrich Wilhelm had opposed his father’s policy after 1862, and Wilhelm I, for lack of a living father, had opposed the reigning monarch Friedrich Wilhelm IV during the 1840s. During the First World War Wilhelm II fell foul of the same mechanism when his own son, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, openly challenged his father’s authority. What was unusual about the 1880s was the accumulation of three living adult generations that permitted the eldest and the youngest to make common cause against the middle.
Wilhelm’s cultivation of the sovereign yielded its first political dividend in 1884, when he was chosen to head an important ceremonial mission to Russia. There were good reasons for sending Wilhelm rather than his father, notably the latter’s ‘ridiculously anti-Russian attitude’,22 but Friedrich Wilhelm, who was informed of t
he matter only after it had been decided, justly felt that he had been deliberately overlooked. Wilhelm returned from Russia to a cool parental reception. ‘When he got back from St Petersburg, Wilhelm was greeted warmly by everyone except his parents – they had heard too much good about him,’ observed Count Waldersee, who had accompanied the prince on his journey. ‘Whoever wishes to insinuate himself into their favour must speak badly of their son…’23
Wilhelm’s twelve-day visit to Russia was a success. He got on well with Tsar Alexander and appears to have made an excellent impression on his Russian interlocutors.24 He adopted the curious practice of reporting directly to his grandfather in writing, provoking a protest from the German ambassador in St Petersburg, who felt that the prince’s ‘secret diplomacy’ undermined his professional standing. And even before he had left Russian territory, he began, with Bismarck’s connivance, a ‘secret correspondence’ with the tsar, in which he recommended himself to the Russian sovereign as a staunch opponent of his father’s Russophobe position. In one characteristic letter written shortly after his return, he urged the tsar not to take his father’s outbursts too seriously:
You know him, he loves to oppose, he is under the influence of my mother, who for her part is directed by the Queen of England, and makes him see everything through English glasses. I assure you that the Kaiser, Prince Bismarck and I are all completely in agreement and that I will not cease to see the reinforcement and the maintenance of the Three Emperors’ League as my highest duty.
A letter of June 1884 informed the tsar of his father’s extreme hostility to the policies of the Russian sovereign and his government: ‘He (Papa) accused the government of lying, of betrayal etc., there was no hateful adjective that he did not employ in order to blacken your name.’25
During the following year, with Bismarck’s encouragement, Wilhelm continued to operate his ‘hotline’ to the tsar. The striking breach of familial confidentiality before a foreign sovereign demonstrates the extent of his determination to enhance his profile by exploiting the animosities and political divisions at the Hohenzollern court. The Russian mission of 1884 also set important precedents for Wilhelm’s later comportment as a monarch. This was not the last time Wilhelm blithely usurped a diplomatic role for which he had received no training or instruction. Throughout his reign, as the notorious ‘Willy-Nicky’ correspondence suggests, he tended to see diplomacy in narrowly dynastic terms and to overestimate grossly the impact of personal intercourse between sovereigns on the maintenance of international relationships.
A protracted dispute over the proposed marriage of Wilhelm’s sister Victoria (known as ‘Moretta’) to Prince Alexander of Battenberg of Bulgaria, deepened the conflict at court and provided Wilhelm with further opportunities for self-aggrandizement. The Battenberg marriage project became a complex and ramified political controversy which need only be sketched in outline here.26 The crown princess had favoured an alliance between her daughter and ‘Sandro’ Battenberg since 1882, and after a meeting in the following year the couple appear to have regarded themselves as betrothed. But the plan was vehemently opposed by Chancellor Bismarck, whose main objection concerned the impact of the proposed marriage on German relations with Russia. Battenberg had initially been installed by the Russians in Bulgaria as a puppet ruler in 1878, but his subsequent involvement with a nationalist movement for Bulgarian unification and independence placed him in direct opposition to Russian policy in the Balkans, and he was now persona non grata in St Petersburg.
Bismarck took the view that the marriage of a Hohenzollern princess into the Battenberg household would undermine the good relations with Russia that were the centrepiece of his foreign policy. For the crown princess, by contrast, the ‘anti-Russian’ spin of the proposed marriage was one of its chief attractions. Supported by her mother, Queen Victoria, she hoped through closer German involvement in Bulgaria to furnish the foundation for a coalition of powers dedicated to the containment of Russian influence in the Balkans. The best thing, she wrote to her mother in June 1883, would be ‘if England, Austria, Italy and Germany could join together and support Bulgaria […] so that that country would become a true barrier against Russian designs on Constantinople’.27 It was a revival of the old struggle between ‘westerners’ and ‘Russians’ that had traditionally animated debates over foreign policy in Prussia.
By the summer of 1884 a powerful coalition led by Bismarck and the Kaiser had formed to oppose the marriage on both political and dynastic grounds.28 The Battenberg controversy rumbled on through the 1880s, periodically re-emerging to sow discord anew. Even after the prince had been ejected from his throne and expelled by a Russian-sponsored coup in August 1886, Victoria and – with occasional reservations – the crown prince remained attached to the idea of the marriage and even considered finding the prince a senior German administrative post. The issue gained in sensitivity when the anti-Russian behaviour of Battenberg’s elected successor, Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Kohary, caused international tensions to flare up over Bulgaria late in 1887 and led to a Balkan war scare. Predictably enough, Wilhelm joined the anti-Battenberg bandwagon. He supplied his grandfather with reports of secret meetings between his sister and the prince. In a discussion with Bismarck’s son Herbert – doubtless intended for the ears of the chancellor – he even pondered aloud whether the best way of dealing with Battenberg might not be ‘to provoke him [to a duel] and put my bullet through his head’.29
Wilhelm’s steadfast opposition to the Battenberg marriage and his apparent commitment to Bismarck’s ‘Russian’ foreign policy were rewarded with a further outstanding commission: in August 1886 it was decided to send Wilhelm to Russia to meet the tsar, not, this time, for a ceremonial occasion, but for high-level discussions of policy regarding Russian interests in the Balkans. It was hoped that the mission would benefit from the goodwill accumulated during Wilhelm’s previous visit in 1884. Once again the crown prince felt, with some justice, that he had been overlooked. In a written complaint to Bismarck, Friedrich Wilhelm protested at the decision, adding that he had not been personally informed of the decision, but had learned of it ‘through the press and through rumours’.30 When the chancellor replied that the arrangements for Wilhelm’s journey had already been announced and could no longer be altered, the crown prince attempted to prevent his son’s travelling to the meeting on health grounds (Wilhelm was recovering from a bout of illness), and even offered to go in his place ‘because I think it a good thing to make my own contribution towards emphasizing our wish of maintaining good relations with Russia’.31 But the consensus against such a change of plan was too well established among the most powerful figures at court. Although a visit by the crown prince would demonstrate a higher degree of ‘formal courtesy’, Bismarck informed the Kaiser on 17 August, there was also the danger ‘that Tsar Alexander and the Crown Prince may quarrel over the Prince of Battenberg, whom the former hates and the latter loves’. This argument found its mark with the Kaiser, who agreed that his son was ‘not suitable society for Tsar Alexander’.32 It was also internalized in characteristically extravagant form by Wilhelm himself. In a letter to Herbert von Bismarck of 20 August, Wilhelm warned that if his father were sent, ‘he would lecture the tsar about England and the courage of the Bulgar! It would be the downfall of us all if he went there!’33
Had Wilhelm been marked out for special advancement in some area of the domestic administration, with or without prior consultation with his parents, the crown prince would doubtless have been rather less aggrieved. But in the absolutist and neo-absolutist regimes of nineteenth-century Europe, diplomacy was regarded as the domain of politics proper, the supreme sphere for the exercise of sovereign power and the highest activity of the state. ‘Foreign Affairs are a purpose in themselves,’ declared Bismarck in 1866. ‘I rate them higher than all other matters.’34 This subjective ‘primacy of foreign policy’ as the pre-eminent vocation of monarchs and statesmen helps to explain why Wilhelm’s growing role in
German diplomacy touched a raw nerve in the crown prince and his wife. Wilhelm was now trespassing on an area central to Friedrich Wilhelm’s ambitions as future monarch.
The same issues emerged in sharper relief during the autumn and winter of 1886, when it became apparent that Wilhelm – on Bismarck’s suggestion – was to be initiated into the internal workings of the Foreign Office.35 The crown prince wrote to the chancellor objecting to this move on the grounds of his son’s ‘lack of maturity and inexperience, together with his tendency towards arrogance and exaggeration’, and warned that it would be ‘dangerous at this early time to bring him into contact with foreign questions’. Bismarck disagreed and pointed out that Wilhelm was now twenty-seven years old, older than Friedrich Wilhelm I and Friedrich Wilhelm III at the times of their accessions. He went on to remind the crown prince that ‘in the royal family the authority of the father is subsumed in that of the monarch’.36
The news of Wilhelm’s posting triggered a row of unprecedented fury between father and son in December 1886, and it is worth citing Wilhelm’s account of the episode (as reported by Herbert von Bismarck) at length:
His father had always been hard, contemptuous and rough with him, said the prince, but he had never seen him so embittered, he had become greyish-white and threatened [him] with clenched fist, saying: ‘This is a trick that has been played upon me, and one which I shall never forget: my objections which I so pointedly expressed, were completely ignored: people behave as if the Crown Prince were no longer there. But I will teach the gentlemen of the Foreign Office, I give my word of honour that I will do this as soon as I accede to the throne and that they will not be forgiven for this.’37
Wilhelm’s early political advancement thus owed a great deal to the inspiration and help of the Bismarcks. Since 1884, with the encouragement of his father, Herbert von Bismarck had cultivated Wilhelm’s friendship with phenomenal assiduity and obsequiousness. Small wonder that the crown princess, ever hostile to the chancellor, saw Wilhelm’s political opposition as ‘the natural consequence of Bismarck’s omnipotence’.38 But Wilhelm, ever keen to assert his independence, was anything but permanently or exclusively committed to the Bismarcks. From the early 1880s another figure emerged who competed with the Bismarcks for the prince’s political allegiance.
Kaiser Wilhelm II Page 2
