A further, and in some ways deeper, cause of concern to the circles around Wilhelm was the ferment within the Conservative Party. The increasing extremism and intransigence of conservative demands meant that their support could sometimes be bought only at a price the government (not to mention other parties and the voters) were unwilling to pay. Moreover, the emergence within the party and its constituency of distinct and powerful factions made it an unpredictable ally. As Holstein noted in April 1897, the Conservatives were unreliable partners for government because they had ‘dissolved themselves into Agrarians, Peasant-Leaguers, Christian-Socials, Antisemites’, with the result that there was ‘no longer a compact conservative electorate’.14 Wilhelm’s conflicts with the conservatives were to prove among the most bitter of his reign.
What did Wilhelm make of all this? What was his political programme? Answering these questions is less easy than it might seem. Wilhelm spoke often about many things, but he was not given to coherent programmatic statements. He lacked the kind of intellectual detachment and synoptic vision that could draw disparate things together, identify common themes, analyse implications and draw reasoned general conclusions. The appetite to exert power was one of the fundamental driving forces behind his political behaviour. But was this drive for power placed in the service of a ‘policy’ of any kind, or did it exhaust itself in demonstrative, planless acts of self-assertion?
In what follows I shall argue that it is indeed possible to discern in the emperor’s domestic political initiatives a consistent – if ill-thought-through and poorly articulated – objective, namely to integrate and enlarge the politically ‘neutral’ middle ground in German politics and culture and to set his monarchy squarely within it. This middle ground was defined by what Wilhelm took to be the key points of consensus amongst the right-thinking majority of Germans: enthusiasm for the German ‘nation’ and its causes, distrust of particularist elements, openness to technological modernization and hostility to socialism. As Johannes Miquel, Minister of Finance after Bismarck’s departure, noted in March 1890, Wilhelm viewed himself as ‘representing a policy of consolidation and conciliation that will lessen the conflict among parties and bring together all those who are prepared to make a contribution’.15 The Kaiser set about achieving this objective in three ways: the mediation of interest conflicts, the rallying of moderate and conservative forces against agreed enemies of the social order and adoption by the monarch of symbolic projects of national scope.
Underlying these commitments was a deep belief in the transcendent quality of his office. Wilhelm made no secret of his strikingly sacral understanding of the imperial crown – there were echoes here of the exalted political theology of Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Wilhelm’s belief in himself as the divinely appointed mediator between God and his subjects was absolutely central to his conviction that it was the emperor’s task, and his alone, to concentrate and reconcile in his person the divergent interests of regions, classes and confessions – like Friedrich Wilhelm IV, Wilhelm associated his public function with an ecumenical conception of Christianity that embraced all the historical confessions.16 There was also a technocratic dimension to this vision of imperial transcendence. As a child, Wilhelm had shared the enthusiasm of his contemporaries for scientific inventions and discovery in an era when technical forms of knowledge were being popularized for a growing mass market of cultural consumers.17 As an adult, he remained deeply interested in science and technology. ‘I am forever amazed,’ wrote one senior official in 1904, ‘at the Kaiser’s unusual interest in many areas of modern development and progress. Today it might be radium rays, then it will be the promotion of free and unconstrained scientific research and finally and especially the development of machine construction.’18
Indeed, these concerns were such a central and abiding feature of Wilhelm’s life that one can speak, with Robert Koenig, of the Kaiser’s ‘technological biography’.19 Wilhelm took a keen interest in the new radio technology and was personally involved in the commissioning process that led to the adoption of the AEG Slaby-Arco transmitting apparatus in the ships of the German navy. He took a passionate interest in flood prevention and dam-building schemes, and in scientific balloon flight (especially for meteorological purposes); he was gripped by the sublime spectacle of the new Zeppelin airships and struck up for a time a close public association with Graf Zeppelin. He was a strong and consistent promoter of technical and scientific education and a generous sponsor of research institutes, often intervening personally in research and development on key technologies, writing to the directors of firms to urge them to press on with specific innovations of supposedly national interest.20 Technology appealed to Wilhelm in part because it offered him a plane of action that transcended the partisan strife of politics.
Schools
Few of Wilhelm’s early political initiatives reveal as much about his evolving conception of his own role as his interventions in school policy during the early 1890s. In view of the great pieces of epochal economic legislation being passed by the Caprivi government during these years – the reduction of grain tariffs, the conclusion of a series of international trade treaties and Miquel’s finance reforms – it may seem disproportionate to focus on secondary schools; there is good reason for doing so nonetheless. While there can be no doubt that Wilhelm strongly supported and endorsed the moderate anti-protectionism of Caprivi and deplored the agrarian backlash against it, he had little to do with the conception of these economic measures or the detail of their implementation. By contrast, he came to the throne determined to reform the German school system. His interventions in this sphere are more revealing of his political vision and attitude to power and office in the early years of the reign than his marginal contributions to the great economic debates of the day.
Wilhelm’s interest in educational reform was probably rooted in his unhappy memories of the Gymnasium at Kassel, which he recalled as ‘ossifying and spiritually deadening’,21 although it also reflected the influence of fashionable contemporary critiques of secondary schooling in the German empire and Europe generally. In the spring of 1889, after consultation with friends and advisers, he issued a cabinet order to the Prussian Ministry of State stipulating that the teaching of history was to be made more relevant to contemporary concerns. The end-point of the curriculum was to be moved forward into the very recent past to incorporate the wars of liberation and unification, and the subject matter should encompass social and economic history with an emphasis on the social achievements of the modernizing state. In the following year a large conference of teachers and educational officials was convened, on Wilhelm’s initiative, to discuss the ‘school question’. Wilhelm himself opened the first session with a speech – one of the longest of his career – that touched upon school hygiene, physical education, reduction of the study burden and the need for a ‘national foundation’ to the curriculum.22 The objectives were clear: the army was to be provided with muscular young men (‘I am looking for soldiers!’). The public sphere was to be infiltrated with ‘vigorous men who will also be intellectual leaders and servants of the Fatherland’. The young were to be immunized against the virus of Social Democracy by a thorough grounding in labour policy and the state’s mediating social mission. But most importantly – this was a point to which Wilhelm repeatedly returned – young people were to be educated as ‘Germans, not as Greeks and Romans’; what was lacking above all was a ‘national basis’ for German education. Only by this means could the ‘centrifugal tendencies’ at work on the political fabric of the German Reich be arrested and reversed.23
Wilhelm’s address produced discomfort and alarm among many of the educators present.24 This is hardly surprising: his remarks took no account whatsoever of the preparations made by the conference organizers, whose agenda Wilhelm simply brushed aside, noting that it seemed too ‘schematic’. And many a bespectacled Schulrat must have blanched at the proposition that all teachers ‘must be proficient in gymnastic exercises and practis
e them every day’.25 However, shocking as they were to an audience with a vested interest in the existing arrangements, Wilhelm’s proposals were scarcely novel in their content. There was a precedent, moreover, for monarchical intervention in this sphere: in a decree of 12 March 1888 (composed in a characteristically milder tone), Wilhelm’s father, Friedrich III, had connected the national, social and school questions in similar fashion, observing that educators had a crucial role to play in countering the destabilizing ideological effects of rapid economic growth and social polarization.26
Nevertheless, a monarchical reform campaign as detailed and ambitious as this was indeed new. It reflected not only Wilhelm’s desire to place himself at the centre of affairs, but also his confidence in the unique capacity and obligation of the throne to pursue improvements in the general interest. In a telling passage of the schools speech, Wilhelm observed that ‘the position which I occupy enables me to form an accurate judgement […], for all such matters are brought to my notice’.27 Wilhelm’s position was of course unique: unlike ministers and bureaucrats, he was not bound by official protocols and could request advice from wherever he chose. As in his contest with Bismarck over labour relations policy, Wilhelm drew, in standard Hohenzollern fashion, on the advice of colourful outsiders, such as Paul Güssfeldt, sometime mountain-climber and explorer and author of a work that called for more technical instruction and physical exercise in German schools, or Konrad Schottmüller, a former history teacher and director of the German Historical Institute in Rome, who had happened to escort Wilhelm on a tour of Rome in October 1888. Herein, he thought, lay the superiority of his perspective over that of the many ‘experts’ who claimed special authority in educational and other ministerial affairs. Only he could see problems from all sides. Only he embodied the executive power of the state, but was not of the state. It was inevitable that this perceived gulf between the universalizing monarch and the custodians of expert knowledge would weigh heavily on his relations with the ministers, many of them career bureaucrats, who were employed by the state to conduct its affairs. It did not escape public attention that the Kaiser’s sally into schools policy conflicted with the declared agenda of the long-serving minister of education, Gustav von Gossler, and thereby placed the minister in an awkward position. The Preussische Jahrbücher brought this point home to its readership by juxtaposing announcements made by Gossler with the Kaiser’s very different views in parallel columns. Three months after the conference, Gustav von Gossler resigned.
Wilhelm’s intervention did not result in the radical reshaping of Prussian and German education that he would have liked (he later expressed disappointment over the meagre impact of the conference and the associated reforms). But it did lead to an increase in German instruction at the expense of Greek and Latin and more time for physical education.28 In the longer term, the emperor’s interventions also helped to reduce the status divide between the humanities and scientific knowledge within the gymnasium system, opening the way to the creation of elite schools providing high-quality instruction in a range of scientific disciplines.29 Perhaps the most important consideration for Wilhelm at the time was the wider resonance of the conference in public opinion. The Badensian envoy in Berlin reported that the emperor’s initiative had met with ‘criticism and the shaking of heads’ within the educational establishment but with ‘jubilation and enthusiasm’ among the ‘broad masses of the people’.30 Wilhelm referred to this positive response in his closing speech of the conference when he spoke of his dynasty’s peculiar ability to ‘anticipate the future course of events’ by ‘constantly feeling the pulse of the time’: ‘I believe that I have rightly understood the aims of the new spirit and of the century which is now drawing to a close, and I am resolved, as I was in the matter of Social Reform, to follow modern tendencies regarding the education of the coming generations.’31 For all their bombast, such remarks reflected Wilhelm’s confidence that there was a consensus ‘out there’ that could be tapped by a modern monarch with his ear to the ground.
The confessional divide
So far so good; but it was not long before an explosion of public controversy over schools policy revealed the pitfalls that lay in wait for a monarch determined to take a stand on the great issues of the day. The role played by religion in education, and specifically by churches in the administration of schools, was highly controversial in virtually all the polities of nineteenth-century Europe. It was made at once more complex and more sensitive in Germany by the fact that the Left-Right political spectrum (ranging from socialists to left-and right-liberals to conservatives) was cross-cut by the confessional divide between Protestants and Catholics. As a party of workers, farmers, artisans and townsfolk, the Centre Party of the German Catholics was socially heterogeneous. Consequently, social and economic questions often divided the party faithful, but purely confessional issues tended to consolidate the Centre’s unity; they played a correspondingly important role in the policies pursued by the party leadership. Among the Centre’s most controversial confessional policies was the call for increased clerical involvement and supervision in schooling.
Was there room for the Centre in the middle ground of German politics? For the circle of advisers and senior officials around Wilhelm, conceding ground to the Centre Party in cultural-confessional questions meant betraying the ‘national’ interest. A policy of ‘impartiality’ (Unparteilichkeit), Philipp Eulenburg explained to Wilhelm, was one that commanded the support of the (largely Protestant) National Liberals and Conservatives.32 It was crucial to stay with the ‘middle parties’, he told Friedrich von Holstein; if concessions had to be made, let them be made to the oppositional (but Protestant) left-liberals rather than to the ‘Romans’.33 Wilhelm tended to accept this view; although he was keen to win over German Catholic opinion through symbolic gestures such as repeated meetings with the pope, he remained suspicious of the Centre Party and convinced that an effective government must remain ‘independent’ of Centre influence.34 However, no government charged with shepherding legislation through the Reichstag could afford to be so doctrinaire. As Chancellor Caprivi explained to Eulenburg:
If we survey the party situation in the Reichstag, we must recognize that the Conservatives, Free Conservatives and National Liberals together can command only 132 of the 199 votes that are needed for a majority. It follows that the support of the Centre Party, which has more than 100 votes will be necessary for the success of the important measures which will preoccupy us in the coming year.35
By ‘important measures’, Caprivi meant above all a bill to increase the peacetime strength of the army. The prospects for collaboration with the Centre seemed good. In the first eighteen months of the Caprivi chancellorship, the party had demonstrated its friendly intentions by voting for virtually all important bills. But in the spring of 1891, with a major new army bill in the offing, the Centre leadership informed the chancellor that they expected concessions in the sphere of education in return for their parliamentary support. Caprivi obliged by pressing for the resignation of the education minister on the grounds that his school policy was not clerical enough for the Catholics. The new minister, Count Robert von Zedlitz-Trützschler (a Caprivi nominee),36 produced a school bill that made very substantial concessions to the Catholic standpoint.
Wilhelm signed the Zedlitz draft law on 14 January 1892. This was, on the face of it, a strange decision, since it went against the grain of the emperor’s known political preferences and those of his advisers. The bill, had it been implemented, would have weakened the state’s hold on the school system to make way for an educational apartheid in which clerical authorities vetted new teachers and nearly all pupils were taught in schools of their own confession. Why did Wilhelm clear it for debate in the Landtag? According to one of his favourite adjutants, Count Carl von Wedel, Wilhelm approved the bill in the first place only because Caprivi had threatened he would resign otherwise.37 Wilhelm may also have assumed that debate and committee negotiation woul
d modify the bill while allowing the government to demonstrate to the Catholics its conciliatory position. Perhaps, on the other hand, he was genuinely sympathetic (as was his wife) to its clerical overtones. One thing is certain: Wilhelm grossly underestimated the violence of the Protestant backlash generated by the draft bill.
The concessions proposed by Zedlitz were almost unanimously denounced within the upper circles of the Prussian government. Warnings circulated of Catholic intrigues to bring down the dynasty, of the imminent disintegration of the Reich, of the rise of an Austrian-led ‘Catholic family league’ that would rally the southern states against Prussia and even of a triumphant Bismarckian campaign to quash the bill.38 There was also a deafening roar of criticism from the liberal and conservative press. The liberal papers defended the monopoly of state supervision; the celebrated National Liberal historian Heinrich von Treitschke warned that freedom of research and teaching were under threat from Catholic obscurantists. There were petitions of protest to the Ministry of Education. The conflict over schools policy reflected one of the many structural divides in the Reich: the conciliation, as Caprivi put it, of ‘all politically relevant groupings’, including the Catholics, made sense in the national legislature, where the Catholics held a crucial portion of the seats, but it could not be sustained in Prussia, where the distortions imposed by the franchise guaranteed the hegemony of (Protestant) conservative and liberal interests.39 Nothing could better demonstrate the difficulty of balancing the demands of the two most influential legislatures of the German empire.
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