Banquo’s ghost: Bismarck in ‘retirement’
Bismarck was very rarely seen in Berlin after his forced resignation in March 1890, but he continued to loom large in the awareness of the German public. In the first instance, many saw the departure of the old chancellor as a harbinger of salutary change, as an ‘end to our inner paralysis’.48 But before long there was a dramatic revival in support for Bismarck, if this can be measured by the frequency of ‘pilgrimages’ to his country mansion at Friedrichsruh and the astonishing volume of fan-mail he received: on 1 April 1895 (his eightieth birthday), no fewer than 450,000 letters and telegrams arrived from devotees throughout the German Empire and beyond.49 This extraordinary response reflected the deep attachment many Germans felt for the ex-chancellor and founder of the Reich, but, as Werner Pöls has shown, it also had an unmistakably political resonance.50
By the mid-1890s Bismarck had emerged as one of the new government’s most vocal and authoritative critics. The contacts and know-how he had acquired in building up his notorious ‘secret press organization’ were put to good use. Newspapers inspired and in some cases partly financed from Friedrichsruh pelted the new Kaiser and his chief officials with an acid rain of printed criticism. Friedrichsruh became the focal point of a loose coalition of dissenting elements which included die-hard Bismarckians, but also others of diverse political motivation, such as the disaffected ultra-conservative Count von Waldersee, and the left-liberal journalist Maximilian Harden, who was later to wreak terrible damage on key figures in Wilhelm’s entourage.51 It was not merely the effect but also the intention of Bismarck’s agitation to legitimate that political dissent he had never tolerated as chancellor: ‘We need a counter-balance,’ he declared piously in a speech of summer 1892, ‘and I regard freedom of criticism as indispensable in a monarchical system of government.’52 As Philipp Eulenburg observed in the summer of 1895, this posturing was part of a plan to establish Bismarck as ‘the personification of modern Germany vis-à-vis Kaiser Wilhelm […]. He is consciously damaging the position of the emperor which he himself created.’53
Wilhelm and his advisers, official and unofficial, were deeply unsettled by the ‘thunder from Friedrichsruh’. They harboured (somewhat far-fetched) fears that Bismarck would ‘return’ to Berlin at the head of a plebiscitary political movement. Since the conflict came increasingly to be perceived as a personal struggle between the ex-chancellor and the young emperor, it seemed that Bismarck would succeed in turning the German public against the monarch, especially in the southern principalities, where it was felt that the chancellor had played a crucial role as a focus for national sentiment since 1871.54 It was widely believed in senior government circles – and not without foundation – that Bismarck was among those responsible for spreading the rumour both in Germany and abroad that the Kaiser was mentally unstable. There was also the possibility that Bismarck might see fit to leak the contents of secret state papers – as indeed he did in October 1896 when he published the text of the defunct but highly sensitive Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in the Hamburger Nachrichten.55 The government responded to these provocations by using semi-official organs to refute the claims of the Bismarck press; the Foreign Office was so concerned that it even attempted to buy out a newspaper in which a consortium of Bismarckians had shown an interest.
The effect of the Bismarck campaign on Wilhelm personally can easily be imagined. Several of the most damaging public outbursts of the early 1890s can be traced to the Kaiser’s sense of vulnerability and paranoia in the face of the threat from Friedrichsruh. ‘The Reich has but one ruler and I am he. I tolerate no other,’ he told a meeting of Rhenish industrialists he suspected of harbouring Bismarckian, anti-labourist sympathies.56 Such blusters, needless to say, merely swelled the sails of the Bismarckian and oppositional press. In private, there were bouts of mingled rage and alarm. After hearing that Bismarck had (falsely) told the Russian ambassador Shuvalov that he had resigned in protest at the Kaiser’s anti-Russian policy, Wilhelm repeatedly contemplated legal action on grounds of high treason, and a preliminary enquiry was instigated to this end by the Reich Office of Justice.57 In the summer of 1892, when Bismarck was preparing to travel to Vienna for a family wedding, Wilhelm fired off a letter to the Austrian emperor urging him not to grant an audience to this ‘disobedient subject’ until he had gone to Wilhelm to say ‘peccavi’ (I have sinned) – an act of malice for which, according to one well-informed observer, the German public never forgave him.58 On holiday in the autumn of 1893, he was still furious and talked of ‘a big trial [for Bismarck] some time in the future’.59 A widely publicized and highly theatrical meeting between the two men in Berlin in January 1894 brought a truce rather than lasting reconciliation. In 1896, after Bismarck’s revelation of the Reinsurance Treaty, Wilhelm spoke again of imprisoning the ‘evil old man’ in the fortress of Spandau.60
Wilhelm’s feelings for the old man were tangled and intense. ‘How I loved Prince Bismarck!’ he told Philipp Eulenburg during one of his annual Scandinavian boat journeys in the summer of 1896. ‘How much I sacrificed to him! I sacrificed my parental home to him! For his sake I was mistreated for years of my life and I bore it, because I saw him as the living embodiment of our Prussian fatherland.’61 There was more to such outbursts than self-pity and self-legitimation; they tell us something of what it meant to grow up in the orbit of one of the titans of European political history. If Bismarck had largely usurped the place of Wilhelm’s father in the prince’s political loyalties, he exercised a correspondingly potent influence on the new Kaiser’s political imagination. It is striking how often – especially during the 1890s – Wilhelm endorsed policies and struck up attitudes that were Bismarckian in inspiration. He continued, for example, to believe in the Cartel as the soundest basis for government, even after the Cartel parties had ceased to be capable of forming a parliamentary majority in the Reichstag.62 Holstein believed that some of the Kaiser’s personal interventions in German diplomacy (see below) were in fact attempts to bring the foreign policy of the New Course into line with Bismarckian priorities.63 Indeed, in seeking to consolidate his own political supremacy, one might argue, Wilhelm was merely taking literally the ‘fiction of monarchical government’ that had been the ‘lie at the heart’ of the Bismarckian system.64
Even Wilhelm’s well-known flirtations with the idea of a coup d’état following repeated dissolutions of the Reichstag were arguably Bismarckian in origin. On numerous occasions, the chancellor had even pondered aloud the possibility of foreclosing on the parliament or radically altering its franchise through a coup d’état. In the following decade Emperor Wilhelm II spoke in a similar vein of ‘chasing the Reichstag to the devil’ and re-establishing the Federal Council as the true seat of executive power, in keeping with ‘Bismarck’s theory’ of the German constitution.65 In February 1890, during a brief thaw in their relations, Bismarck enjoined Wilhelm not to shrink from a policy of confrontation and made him promise to ‘shoot when necessary’ if it should prove impossible to bring the Reichstag to heel. In the short term, as we saw, Wilhelm demonstratively rejected this option, but he appears to have been won over by its inner logic, even as he repudiated it tactically.66 His foolish (uncoded) telegram of March 1890 to a guards officer in Berlin encouraging troops to use their rifles in clashes with striking workers exemplifies Wilhelm’s determination to apply the principles of the master, to prove himself the chancellor’s worthy successor.
In a polemical analysis of Bismarck’s legacy, Max Weber observed that those who most admired Bismarck tended to do so not for the ‘grandeur of his subtle, sovereign mind, but exclusively for the element of violence and cunning in his statesmanship, the real or apparent brutality of his methods’.67 Not only through his protestations but through his entire comportment in office during the 1890s, Wilhelm demonstrated that he was a Bismarckian of this stamp. His refusal to tolerate criticism from those around him (and the consequent servility and Byzantinism of his milieu) evoke
d parallels with Bismarck in the minds of some well-informed contemporaries. ‘We always complained that Bismarck suppressed people,’ wrote Waldersee in December 1890. ‘Now it’s the same thing, only in a stronger and more dangerous form.’68 In the summer of 1892 Wilhelm faulted his ministers with not leaping to carry out his wishes as they had been wont to do under the first chancellor. ‘In the old days, Bismarck would bring an idea to the ministers and one of them would say: “I’ll do it.” ’69 On a later occasion, after a public outcry over his dictatorial behaviour, he claimed at last to understand the ‘colossal perfidy of old Bismarck’, who had encouraged him to ‘bring the absolutist element more sharply to the fore’.70 In other words, when Wilhelm stated his intention to be his ‘own chancellor’, he meant not merely that he would take on the political functions of the post, but also that he would perform them after the manner of the man who had defined the meaning of political power for a generation of Germans. The notorious conflict between Wilhelm and Bismarck should not blind us to the ways in which the last German Kaiser’s conception and performance of his office drew on an (albeit crude and self-deluded) attempt to emulate the achievements of the first German chancellor.
3. Going It Alone
Wilhelm II’s first decade in power after the departure of Bismarck coincided with a phase of heightened turbulence in German domestic affairs. The 1890s were an ‘era of excitability’ and ‘political nervousness’, of ‘heightened conflict between government and Reichstag’.1 They were also the decade of his reign in which the Kaiser himself was most politically active. It was during these years above all that he explored the potential of his office. Wilhelm embarked on the 1890s determined to assume in his own person the fullness of power that Bismarck had possessed. Indeed, he was so confident of his ability to manage the German political system that he told Caprivi to view his tenure of office as transitional; the chancellorship itself would soon be redundant.2 The emperor’s political initiatives, the aspirations driving them, the reception they met with, and the various forms of friction and constraint they encountered form the subject matter of this chapter. But first we turn briefly to the changes afoot in German politics after 1890.
The nervous nineties
‘We are living in an age of transition!’ Wilhelm told the Provincial Assembly of Brandenburg in February 1892.‘We are passing through agitating and exciting times.’3 In hindsight, it is easy to endorse this judgement. The unprecedented success of the Social Democratic Party in the elections of February 1890 signalled the advent of a new era in German politics. The old anti-socialist law, which provided a legislative basis for the suppression of Social Democrat associations and publications and the expatriation of key ‘agitators’, was still theoretically in force, but it was scarcely honoured in practice, and the Social Democrats were able more or less freely to campaign for support among German voters.4 With 19.7 per cent of the national vote (double the previous figure in 1887) the SPD now gained more popular support than any other single party (though only 8.8 per cent of the Reichstag seats, thanks to constituency boundaries that disadvantaged working-class urban districts). The SPD result sent ripples across the political spectrum. It was qualitatively as well as quantitatively revolutionary: for the first time, as Jonathan Sperber has shown, the SPD poached significant numbers of votes from other, ‘bourgeois’ parties.5 A drive had begun for ascendancy within the Reichstag that would culminate in the elections of 1912, in which over one third of Germans would cast their votes for the SPD.
The presence in the Reichstag of a substantial bloc of socialist votes in turn greatly enhanced the position of the Centre Party, the party of German Catholics, whose loyal following in the southern and western regions of the empire had been forged in the furnace of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf in the 1870s. Under the conditions inaugurated by the election of 1890, it would be more difficult than ever to pass laws through the Reichstag without first acquiring Centre support. But the Centre Party’s votes could often be bought only at the price of highly controversial concessions to Catholic institutions and culture in Germany. How to acquire Centre support without alienating the Protestant ‘national’ parties (conservatives and liberals) was one of the key problems facing the administration during Wilhelm’s reign.
Still more unsettling was a radicalization of the style and techniques of the political Right during the early 1890s. With their outspoken, ritualized monarchism (it was party custom to close meetings with a deafening ‘Heil!’ to the Kaiser) the conservatives were seen as something of a royal Hauspartei. In December 1892, however, a split opened between moderates and right-wingers within the leadership of the Conservative Party – now the largest of the governmental parties. The right-wing activists demanded that the party become more ‘demagogic’ and adopt ‘the tone of the people’ in order to win the support of a mass rural constituency. In a heated policy debate, the right-wingers won the day and succeeded in having anti-Semitic and anti-capitalist clauses incorporated into the party programme. This was a signal acknowledgement of the inroads anti-Semitic agitators had already made into depressed farming areas.6 In pursuit of a rural constituency hurt by poor harvests, low prices and escalating indebtedness, the party teamed up with the Agrarian League (Bund der Landwirte), founded in 1893. The league proved spectacularly successful in channelling rural discontent into political action. With a membership of over 300,000 farmers by 1913, it became the political machine of the Conservative Party, dominating its organizations, financing its pamphlets and books, coordinating its electoral campaigns and pressuring government to adopt pro-farmer policies. The result was a new brand of right-wing politics – more strident, more radical, more populist and more prone to opposition than its predecessors.7
The 1890s did not, in other words, merely bring a narrowing of parliamentary support for the government; there was a deeper transformation in the character and style of politics. In a classic study of the Wilhelmine parties, Thomas Nipperdey contrasted the notables’ politics (Honoratiorenpolitik) of the Bismarckian era with the mass politics (Massenpolitik) that became the norm thereafter. Bismarckian parties were, for the most part, dominated by self-recruiting members of local elites (Honoratioren) who formed loose organizations for the purpose of contesting specific elections. Party central organizations and discipline were weak, campaigning was lacklustre, and mass agitation was virtually unknown. After the elections of February 1890, however, a new kind of partisan organization came to dominate the scene. Based on broad fee-paying memberships, or affiliated with mass-membership lobby groups, the new parties were round-the-clock organizations that employed permanent staff and used a range of new techniques, including rallies, processions and agitation, to mobilize voters.8 This view has not remained unchallenged, but most recent studies have tended to support and deepen Nipperdey’s interpretation, identifying the 1890s as a ‘major moment of flux’ in which the liberal-dominated political spectrum of the Bismarckian era gave way to ‘a more complex and fragmented array of forces’.9
These transformations at an organizational level were accentuated by broader changes in the political culture: the proliferation of lobby groups and their growing influence over party organizations led to a fragmentation and alternation of political discourses, so that, for example, the language and arguments of radical Agrarians and Social Democrats were sometimes hard to tell apart.10 The 1890s also saw a sharpening in the tone of the critical public sphere. This is, of course, difficult to quantify, but Reichstag debates, press critique and satire – political argument as a whole – were more rough-and-tumble, more fundamental in their opposition to the existing order and, most importantly for our purposes, less considerate in their handling of the sovereign person than had been conceivable before the death of Wilhelm I. In general, one can say that the public sphere gradually slipped beyond the reach of government. This was in part a result of Bismarck’s departure from office. The former chancellor had succeeded, through a ramified covert organization funded extra-legall
y from the sequestered treasury of the Hanoverian crown, in exerting an influence over press coverage which reached deep into the provinces, but the purchase Bismarck had acquired over public debate was never regained under his successors.11
The new balance of power among the parties generated unease in high political circles, and especially in the smaller circle of those who were closest to Wilhelm II. One of the most persistent themes in John Röhl’s magisterial edition of the political correspondence of Wilhelm’s intimate, Count Philipp zu Eulenburg, is a fear of the power wielded by the Centre Party under the new political constellation. The Centre was seen as the Trojan horse for a menacing ultramontane Catholicism with a retrograde particularist programme in cultural matters and a narrowly ‘Roman’ foreign policy that would undermine the unity of the Reich from within and compromise its international commitments.12 Friedrich von Holstein – another key figure among the new emperor’s advisers – warned that concessions to the Centre would strengthen particularist forces to the point where the empire would literally disintegrate under the pressure of its internal confessional tensions.13 These anxieties were regularly communicated to Wilhelm himself. It was clear that, ultimately, the emperor and his ministers would have to come to some kind of arrangement with the powerful party of the German Catholics. But the question of the government’s relationship with the Centre remained an important bone of contention between a Kaiser wary of concessions and a chancellor who had to do business with Landtag and Reichstag.
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