General Count Alfred von Waldersee, quartermaster-general of the Prussian army and deputy chief of the General Staff, had often met the prince to discuss military questions and had accompanied him on his first journey to Russia in 1884. But their relations became more intimate from January 1885, when Wilhelm began to confide in the general about ‘delicate family matters’ and made the tantalizing announcement that he ‘was counting on [Waldersee] for later on’.39 Waldersee subsequently became Wilhelm’s most trusted confidant, deftly handling a number of awkward situations arising from the prince’s few pre- and extra-marital liaisons, and supporting him during his controversial crusade against gambling at the Union Club in Berlin.40
Anti-Semitic, narrowly zealous in religion, and reactionary in domestic politics, the quartermaster-general was the personification of everything Wilhelm’s parents most detested, and thus a welcome accomplice in his struggle to dissociate himself from the crown princely household. But Waldersee was also a threat to the influence of the Bismarcks over the prince. He was extremely ambitious and rumoured to have his sights fixed on the chancellorship. Waldersee did his best to counter Herbert von Bismarck’s influence on the prince’s judgements and attitudes, and carefully monitored the fluctuations in relations between Wilhelm and the chancellor.41 Waldersee’s views on foreign policy also diverged from those of the chancellor. Although he had initially aligned himself with Bismarck’s foreign policy, by the late 1880s he had lost faith in the chancellor’s leadership and was an outspoken supporter of preventive war against Russia.42 The two men fell out when Bismarck upbraided Waldersee: the pretext was a minor indiscretion, but Waldersee was doubtless right in supposing that the real issue at stake was the struggle between himself and the chancellor’s son for influence over Wilhelm.43
By the end of 1887, the question of who commanded Wilhelm’s allegiance was of the highest importance. In March of that year a growth was discovered in the throat of the crown prince. Medical opinion was divided as to the prognosis; a number of the crown prince’s German physicians took the view that the growth was cancerous and should be excised as soon as possible by means of a radical and dangerous operation which would certainly leave the heir to the throne permanently speechless, and might well kill him. The chief exponent of a more optimistic view was the British physician Sir Morell Mackenzie, a confidant of the crown princess, who argued that the lesion was not malignant and would heal itself if Friedrich Wilhelm were given a change of climate and an extended period of rest. The crown princess supported Mackenzie’s prognosis and rejected the surgical option; the patient was moved to a villa in the northern Italian coastal town of San Remo for rest and recovery. At court, among government officials and in public opinion, however, it was the more pessimistic view that gained ground when the crown prince’s illness became widely known in May 1887. The Kaiser was ninety years old and increasingly frail. The prospect of Wilhelm’s succession, once a distant and thus somewhat theoretical eventuality, moved into the foreground. ‘God moves in a mysterious way,’ Friedrich von Holstein, chief of the Foreign Office Political Department, wrote in his diary. ‘The relentless course of world history is unexpectedly altered. Prince Wilhelm may be Kaiser at thirty. What will happen then?’44
Since it seemed likely that the crown prince’s reign would be brief, even if he survived the death of his father, Wilhelm was now the man of the future and the foremost focus of political aspirations. ‘It is interesting to observe,’ wrote Waldersee, ‘how among certain clever people, the esteem in which Prince Wilhelm is held is changing; whereas yesterday they were raging at him, found him heartless and thoughtless and God knows what else, he is now a firm character and [thought to show] much promise for the future.’45 Any remnants of doubt about Friedrich Wilhelm’s condition were removed by an official announcement of 12 November 1887 that the crown prince was suffering from an incurable cancer. The effect of this news on the court environment was electric. Herbert von Bismarck recalled that ‘all the time-servers and crawlers’ who had previously wondered whether they would have better luck with the son or the grandson now turned definitively to the latter, ‘blowing with unashamed complacency into the sails of the prince’s exalted vanity’.46
The rivalry for influence over Wilhelm took on a new urgency. For Bismarck, there was everything to lose; the future of his foreign policy and his own tenure of office were at stake. In attempting to reinforce his hold on the prince, the chancellor adopted a characteristic mix of carrot and stick. He continued to commend himself as the champion of Wilhelm’s political advancement, acquiring the Kaiser’s signature for a document stating that in the event of the incapacitation of the head of state, the status and powers of deputy were to pass to Wilhelm – a development that caused understandable commotion in San Remo. At the same time, he took action to discourage Wilhelm from making common cause with his most visible antagonist, General Waldersee. In order to achieve this end, he focused his fire on the relationship between Wilhelm, Waldersee and the clergyman-politician Adolf Stoecker.
Stoecker, court chaplain in Berlin since 1874 and founder of the Christian Social Workers Party (later Christian Social Party), was one of the most strident and innovative figures in late-nineteenth-century German conservatism. Like the contemporaneous Karl Lueger in Vienna, Stoecker used a potent blend of populist anti-capitalism, opportunist anti-Semitism and a missionizing revivalist rhetoric to mobilize mass support for his conservative agenda. His aim was to reconcile a secularized and alienated working class with Christianity and the monarchical order. Bismarck’s attitude to Stoecker was ambivalent; he appreciated the conservative, monarchical thrust of the chaplain’s politics, but was sceptical of his ability to win workers away from Social Democracy and disapproved of his rabble-rousing tactics. More importantly, by the end of 1887 he had come to see Stoecker as a political threat. In November of that year a fund-raising meeting was convened at the apartments of General Waldersee for Stoecker’s City Mission, an establishment formed to combine charitable activity with evangelizing among the urban poor. Prince Wilhelm was present and gave a brief speech praising the work of the chaplain and observing that the rechristianization of the masses was the only way to neutralize the ‘revolutionary tendencies of an anarchistic and irreligious party’ (a reference to the Social Democrats). Bismarck saw in this occasion the makings of a new and dangerous coalition of political forces. Stoecker was a potential conduit between Prince Wilhelm and those conservative, Protestant-clerical ‘ultras’ who threatened the integrity of the chancellor’s liberal-conservative Reichstag majority.47 To Bismarck it seemed clear that the ultimate aim was to set the scene for a Waldersee chancellorship following Wilhelm’s accession.
Rather than press Wilhelm directly on the matter, Bismarck availed himself in characteristic fashion of the Imperial Chancellery’s very considerable publicistic resources. In the second week of December several biting attacks on Stoecker appeared in the pages of the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, a national newspaper widely known to be the semi-official organ of the government. The National Liberal and moderate Conservative papers associated with Bismarck’s Reichstag majority soon joined the fray, charging that a reactionary clerical clique had hijacked the susceptible prince for its own interests. For the first but not the last time, Wilhelm found himself at the centre of a national press campaign.
The sudden exposure to public scrutiny and criticism seems to have thrown Wilhelm into a panic – early evidence of a sensitivity to public opinion which would stay with him throughout his reign. By the end of the month he had made a public statement dissociating himself from Stoecker’s anti-Semitism. In a private letter to Bismarck, Wilhelm pleaded that his involvement with the mission had not been intended to imply any partisan commitment and assured him that he would rather have his limbs ‘hacked off one after the other’ than cause the chancellor any ‘difficulties or unpleasantness’.48 In a speech given before the provincial parliament of Brandenburg on 8 February (the text of wh
ich was immediately passed to the press), Wilhelm demonstratively aligned himself with Bismarck’s foreign policy.49 Bismarck had won his battle, but this trial of strength between chancellor and prince did considerable damage to the relationship between the two men. Wilhelm was indignant at the way in which Bismarck had chosen to pillory him before the eyes of the nation. He began to speak menacingly of the times to come: ‘He’d better remember that I shall be master’; ‘I shall not manage without the chancellor at first, but in due course I hope […] to be able to dispense with Prince Bismarck’s cooperation.’50
On 9 March 1888 the old Kaiser died. Among his last utterances was an endorsement of his grandson: ‘I have always been pleased with you, for you have always done everything right.’51 The new emperor’s first communication with his son after Wilhelm I’s death was a coldly phrased telegram warning him to submit to the authority of his father. Despite the new Kaiser’s parlous state of health, a deputization order of 23 March conceded only minimal rights and responsibilities to the new crown prince. In reality, however, it was Wilhelm who remained the centre of attention and the focus of political speculation. No one within the highest circles of government, not even the new Kaiser’s military entourage, was prepared to recognize the legitimacy of the new regime; it was seen as a transitory inconvenience. ‘I think people in general consider us a mere passing shadow, soon to be replaced by reality in the shape of Wilhelm,’ the empress wrote to her mother in March.52 The reign of Kaiser Friedrich III, as he chose to style himself, was in any case far too brief (ninety-nine days), and the ruler himself too enfeebled by his medical condition to permit the kind of ministerial reshuffle and reorientation of policy that the conservatives had expected and feared for so long.
There were still important areas of disagreement between Wilhelm and the chancellor, most importantly in foreign policy. Influenced by the jittery state of German public opinion during the prolonged Russian war scare of spring and summer 1888, Wilhelm alternated between allegiance to Bismarck and support for the bellicose anti-Russian views of Count Waldersee.53 However, the sudden revival in April of the Battenberg marriage project provided an issue on which Wilhelm and the chancellor were of one mind. Bismarck threatened to resign over the issue and Wilhelm lost no time in informing the ‘Bulgar’ that if the engagement went through, his first act as Kaiser would be to banish the couple from the territory of the empire.
The hostility between Wilhelm and his mother, Victoria, remained unabated. In the eyes of the empress, his continued opposition to the Battenberg marriage was further proof – if any were needed – of his ‘hate, revenge and pride’ and his desire to ‘destroy’ her by making a ‘cause célèbre’ out of a ‘private family matter’.54 Weakness and the philosophical resignation that sometimes comes with serious illness had mellowed the ardour of Friedrich Wilhelm. As his fitness and inclination to do battle with his eldest son declined, he himself became a contested property. Wilhelm had always sided against his mother and Sir Morell Mackenzie with that pessimistic majority of attending physicians who diagnosed incurable cancer and called for surgery. Since the chances of any patient surviving a full laryngotomy in the 1880s were fairly slim, Victoria saw this partisanship as a ruthless ploy to hasten his own succession or to have her husband declared unfit to rule. When Wilhelm returned from his visit to San Remo in November 1887, he reported that his mother, in addition to treating him ‘like a dog’, had tried to prevent him from seeing his father. She did so again during the last days of Friedrich Wilhelm’s life. But time, cancer and the dynastic mechanism were on Wilhelm’s side. The death of Friedrich Wilhelm on 15 June 1888 unleashed a storm of public controversy over the alleged mismanagement of his care by those, including the empress, who had refused to believe in cancer. Against the express wishes of his father and of his bereaved mother, Wilhelm ordered that the corpse be opened. The presence of cancer was confirmed and publicized, vindicating the position Wilhelm had taken in the debate since the spring of 1887.
1. Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, pictured here in a cuirassier’s uniform on 1 January 1887, reigned as Friedrich III for only ninety-nine days. He was already dying of laryngeal cancer when he came to the throne on 9 March 1888. The imperial succession thus missed out on the liberal, progressive generation that had helped to build a German nation-state. The question of what might have happened if Friedrich had survived to a ripe old age is one of the great what-ifs of German history.
People at court were – and perhaps generally are – prone to overestimate the manipulability of others, partly because they are so willing to believe in the efficacy of plots and intrigues. The crown prince and his wife saw Wilhelm as a ‘tool’ and a ‘card’, whose judgement had been ‘warped’ and his mind ‘poisoned’ by palace intrigues. As Victoria put it in March 1887: ‘He is not sharp enough or experienced enough to see through the system, nor through the people, and they do with him what they like.’55 Waldersee was concerned at Wilhelm’s susceptibility to the blandishments of Herbert von Bismarck; the chancellor feared that Wilhelm had fallen under the influence of Waldersee. The truth was, as the events of 1887–8 revealed, that Wilhelm was the creature of no one party. Waldersee was right when he observed in January 1887 that the prince stood ‘on his own feet’ and would ‘deliberately refrain from creating a fully-fledged party around himself, because he wish[ed] to avoid falling into its hands’.56 It was around this time that well-informed observers (Holstein, H. von Bismarck, Waldersee) commented approvingly on the prince’s ‘cold-blooded detachment’ and his striking capacity to dissemble, traits which had been honed by the long years of domestic conflict. His glib political adjustments – Russophile in foreign policy in 1884–6, aligned with the ‘war party’ in December 1887, ‘Bismarckian’ in February 1888 – suggest that he had already acquired an inclination to use men and parties in changing combinations.
It follows that the postures he adopted during these early years tell us more about Wilhelm’s appetite for power and recognition than about any commitment to particular men or the policies they pursued. Wilhelm had grown to maturity in an environment periodically galvanized by struggles for power and influence that infiltrated personal relationships, reinforcing some allegiances and poisoning others. Wilhelm’s parents – and especially his mother – were no less absorbed by this struggle than their nemesis, Chancellor Bismarck. From the vantage point of Wilhelm, who stood to gain from the resultant factional strife, it is easy to see how issues and debates came to seem subordinate to the acquisition and retention of power; how politics itself came to be seen in personal and adversarial terms. By the time he acceded to the throne, Wilhelm had developed an unusually sharp interest in and appetite for power – as demonstrated by his habit of distributing postcards of himself bearing the legend: ‘I bide my time’ – but only a very inchoate sense of what he wished to do with it when he got it. This was perhaps the single most fateful legacy of Wilhelm’s political education in the conflicted Hohenzollern household.
The Kaiser’s personality
Did the circumstances of Wilhelm’s birth and childhood lay the foundations for an abnormal psychological development? Ever since the revolution that forced Wilhelm from his throne in 1918, the alleged instability or even insanity of the last German Kaiser has been a central theme of the historical and popular literature on his reign. Within twelve months of his abdication, a number of studies appeared that questioned Wilhelm’s psychological fitness for his role as sovereign: The Madness of Wilhelm II (F. Kleinschrod), Kaiser Wilhelm Periodically Insane! (H. Lutz), Wilhelm II as Cripple and Psychopath (H. Wilm). ‘[H]e was sick, sick, as were his thoughts and emotions,’ wrote Paul Tesdorpf, author of The Illness of Wilhelm II. ‘For the experienced physician and psychiatrist there can be no doubt that Wilhelm II, even in his youth, was mentally ill.’57 Some of these early studies agreed that Wilhelm suffered from a degenerative congenital condition caused by years of dynastic ‘overbreeding’. Needless to say, these polemical works are
of negligible diagnostic value. Their chief concern was to focus German war guilt on Wilhelm, as the ‘psychopath’ responsible for the disastrous downturn in German fortunes since 1914 (‘The blame for the war that can be attributed to him was the result of his illness,’ wrote Paul Tesdorpf in 1919). And the argument from dynastic ‘degeneracy’ owed less to clinical observation than to a long-standing bourgeois-liberal political critique of hereditary monarchy.
In 1926 a bestselling biography by Emil Ludwig rejected the tendentious generalizations of the early post-war pamphlets and offered a more nuanced and sympathetic analysis of the former emperor’s character development. Ludwig focused instead on Wilhelm’s physical handicap. The application of forceps during a long and difficult birth had injured nerves in Wilhelm’s shoulder, leaving his left arm permanently paralysed. The ‘perpetual struggle’ with this ‘defect’, Ludwig argued, ‘was the decisive factor in the development of [Wilhelm’s] character’. The long-term consequence was a ‘love of absolutism’ and a tendency to conceal his insecurity by adopting combative, bellicose postures.58 Among those who reviewed Ludwig’s book was no less an authority than Sigmund Freud himself, who criticized the biographer for overplaying the issue of the withered arm. It was not the arm as such, Freud argued in his ‘New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis’ (1932), but his mother’s rejection of that defect and the attendant withdrawal of maternal love, that accounted for Wilhelm’s inadequacies as an adult.59
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