Kaiser Wilhelm II

by Christopher Clark

  This plan was soon put into effect. In 1896–7 Wilhelm instigated a comprehensive ministerial purge. The minister of trade, Berlepsch, who had once been associated with Wilhelm’s labour reforms but had fallen from favour in recent years, was dropped in 1896, as was War Minister Bronsart. Bülow’s appointment to the state secretaryship of Foreign Affairs followed in October 1897. There were also new appointments – proposed by Wilhelm himself – to the Imperial Secretariat of the Interior and to the Imperial Post Office. A further appointment, whose epochal significance was only later to become apparent, was that of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz to the Imperial Secretariat of the Navy. Hohenlohe stayed on as chancellor until 1900, but he was a spent force. Bülow slowly pushed himself between Kaiser and chief minister, usurping Hohenlohe’s responsibilities.90

  1897–1900: Wilhelm in control?

  With Hohenlohe more or less eliminated as a political force, the ministers divided among themselves, and ‘emperor’s men’ in control of many of the key offices, the chief obstacles to Wilhelm’s dominance within the executive appeared to have been dismantled. A change made itself felt in the balance of power between the monarch and the ministry. Crown Councils (meetings of the Prussian ministry where the monarch was present) became increasingly frequent. Ministers were not ‘consulted’ as such, but listened while Wilhelm held forth on matters of current interest to him, throwing out orders and proposals that were dutifully jotted down in ministerial notebooks.91

  A further sign of Wilhelm’s expanding conception of his own role was his increasing willingness to commit himself and the government publicly to specific courses of action. On 6 September 1898, during the manoeuvres in Westphalia, and presumably under the influence of hard-line elements in the military entourage, Wilhelm announced a ‘bill for the protection of men willing to work’. The intention was to provide legal protection for men and women who continued to work during a strike. With characteristic exuberance, Wilhelm declared that anyone who dared to prevent those willing to work from doing so, or who incited them to join the strike, should face ‘penal detention’. This unhappy phrase was taken up in the press, and the ‘bill for the protection of productive employment’, whose early drafts were Wilhelm’s own work, came to be known as the ‘penal detention bill’ (Zuchthausvorlage). Among Wilhelm’s other personal initiatives was a bill proposing the construction of a canal linking the western industrial provinces of Prussia with the agrarian east and allowing the transshipment of goods from the Oder to the Rhine. The ‘canal bill’ dominated Prussian politics during the summer of 1899, and was passionately defended by Wilhelm, because it corresponded in various ways with his own conception of the monarch’s mission as the foremost mediator between those economic, cultural and provincial interests (in this case the Catholic industrial west and the Protestant agrarian east) that threatened the unity and coherence of the German polity.92 In this way ‘personal rule’ – understood here as a programme, not as an accomplished fact – became ‘one component of a changing constitutional reality’.93

  John Röhl has argued that the ministerial purge of 1896–7 inaugurated a new phase in Wilhelm’s reign characterized by the monarch’s ‘personal rule’. ‘Not 1890 but 1897 was the decisive year in the early part of Wilhelm’s reign. Only then did the Kaiser achieve his aim of determining the direction of German policy, as opposed to interfering with the schemes of the men in responsible office.’94 While it is certainly true that the confidence and frequency of Wilhelm’s interventions increased after 1897, and that the ministry was worse placed to resist his initiatives than it had been in the early and mid-1890s, it would be misleading to see 1897 as marking a fundamental break in the governance of the German system. Ministers complained of being sidelined by a monarch who preferred the advice of his cabinet chiefs and irresponsible advisers, but they had complained of the same thing in the early 1890s.

  In reality, little had changed.95 Bills still needed to be thrashed out in negotiation with the ministers; they could be announced, like the penal detention bill, without prior consultation, but they could not be introduced to parliament without extensive involvement by the ministers whose task it was to defend new proposals before the legislature. And it would be misleading to see the bills endorsed by Wilhelm in the late 1890s as entirely conflicting with ministerial priorities. The canal bill of 1899 was – according to Bülow96 – mooted within the Prussian ministry before it was adopted by the emperor. The provocative penal detention bill of 1898 had most of its sharpest edges chipped off in protracted negotiations with the ministers. Moreover, the ministers were able to thwart Wilhelm’s more radical bids to subordinate the ministry to his personal control, such as his transparent proposal that a member of his Civil Cabinet be appointed as head of the ministerial bureau, a secretarial position from which it would have been possible to keep the monarch informed of the progress of discussions.97

  In any case – and this is perhaps a more important point – a victory for the Kaiser over obstreperous ministers did not necessarily mean a victory for the positions he had personally adopted. An example is the resolution of the military justice question. After the purge, Wilhelm ‘filled another whole year with noisy professions of his inflexible opposition to the proposed reform’ and yet the law that was passed and signed in December 1898 made important concessions to the liberal standpoint on the publicity of courts martial.98 The fact was that Wilhelm faced a system of concentric constraints. Even if he could paralyse and demoralize an elderly chancellor (which he had largely succeeded in doing with Hohenlohe by the end of 1898), he still faced the ministers. And even if he could bully the ministers into following up his initiatives against their own better judgement (which he sometimes, though certainly not always, succeeded in doing between 1897 and 1900), he still faced the quarrelsome legislatures that lay beyond, not to mention the censure of public opinion, whose importance to him can hardly be overestimated (see chapter 6 below). The penal detention bill, for example, met a sticky end at the hands of the Reichstag in November 1899. Particular contempt was heaped on the draconian punishments proposed in clause 8 of the bill; enthusiastically drafted by Wilhelm and retained at his insistence despite vigorous ministerial protest, clause 8 was rejected by the Reichstag in the first and last unanimous vote of its history.99

  An equally humiliating, though more drawn-out, fate lay in wait for the canal bill. The agrarian wing of the Conservative Party and its sister organization, the phenomenally successful Agrarian League, saw in the proposed canal system a modernizing innovation that would expose the embattled farming sector to cheap grain from abroad and lure labour away from the east Elbian estates to the industrial centres of the western provinces. On 16 August 1899 the bill was rejected at its second reading by a substantial majority (275:134) of the Prussian parliament.100 This failure was due not only to energetic campaigning by the conservatives, but also to the failure of the ministers to agree on the controversial concessions required to reconcile the conservatives to the canal project101 – evidence that the growing independence of the ministers that resulted from the disempowerment of Hohenlohe could actually militate against the successful implementation of imperial initiatives. Wilhelm had repeatedly endorsed the bill in public and closely followed the daily press reports of the parliamentary debate. This was an issue that spoke to his aspiration to a technocratic form of rule capable of transcending the partisan struggles of politics. He was devastated by its failure, so much so that his wife felt called upon to enlist the assistance of Bülow:

  I come to you in my anxiety. Yesterday evening I had unfortunately to leave the Kaiser […] although he was in great agitation and depression. This unhappy Canal Bill! If it is rejected on Saturday [the date of the third and final reading] I do not know what is to happen. Oh, could you not write to the emperor a letter that might help to calm him? It is really needed! […] It has been a bad summer! May God continue to help us.102

  After the bill’s failure at the third reading, Wilhel
m could, in theory, have dissolved the Landtag. But even this ultimate weapon in the arsenal of the German monarchy would not have enabled him to prevail, for its certain consequence would have been a substantially more liberal assembly.103 So Wilhelm turned instead upon those conservative government officials (the ‘canal rebels’) who, as parliamentary deputies, had refused to support the government over the bill. He used his extensive disciplinary powers under the Prussian constitution to place a number of compromised civil servants ‘at disposition’ (i.e. remove them from office without severing them permanently from the civil service). This punitive collective dismissal of government personnel was unprecedented in Prussian history.104 It did nothing to break the conservatives’ resistance to the canal and it earned Wilhelm general opprobrium. Virtually all the parties were agreed that, whereas the sacking of civil servants without a stated reason was within the monarch’s power (Art. 87, para. 2), the punitive sacking of these civil servants in particular was unconstitutional, since it violated the parliamentary immunity guaranteed by the Prussian constitution (Art. 84, para. 1). The canal bill failed in a modified version in May 1901; the ‘canal bill’ that finally passed into law in 1904 was a torso of its former self that stretched only from the Rhine via Dortmund to Hanover. The grand idea, so passionately adopted by the sovereign, of a waterway linking the geographical and cultural extremities of the empire, had to be given up for good.105

  Conclusions: power and constraint

  Wilhelm’s conflicts with the Caprivi and Hohenlohe ministries, and his failed initiatives during the late 1890s, shed light on some of the external constraints that bound the monarch. The establishment of a ‘popular absolutism’ of the kind envisaged by Wilhelm was simply not reconcilable with the complex and dynamic structures of the German political system. In this sense personal rule – though an irritant for the ministers and a factor in decision-making processes, remained an ‘anomalous experiment’.106 The adventures of the early and mid-1890s also exposed the limits of Wilhelm’s own capacity to use his power in an effective way. Wilhelm was painfully indiscreet – a fatal flaw in a political system where the success of legislative initiatives often depended on the carefully timed release of information. His extreme defensiveness and rudeness when he felt his authority was under challenge militated against a cooperative relationship with any but the most exceptionally deft subordinates. He lacked objectivity; as Bernhard von Bülow, hardly one of Wilhelm’s severest critics, observed in a letter to Eulenburg: ‘it is a misfortune that our beloved, highly gifted Kaiser so readily exaggerates and his temperament and occasionally his imagination take over’.107

  Wilhelm was quick to absorb the contents of reports, especially if they were short and wittily presented, but he had never really been a ‘hands-on’ monarch who dealt with matters of state in a disciplined and systematic way. Routines were disrupted by virtually constant travel – Wilhelm spent less than half his reign in Berlin and Potsdam.108 As early as 1889, General Waldersee observed that ‘the frequent journeys, the restless activity, the many and varied interests have as their natural consequence a lack of thoroughness’; there was no order in the conduct of affairs, no timetable in which certain hours of the day were set aside for specific tasks.109 Wilhelm’s disinclination – or inability – to become informed in a general way about the development of policy meant that his interventions were often out of touch with the broader drift of government action; this in turn made his initiatives seem bizarre and out of place, even when their substance was unremarkable. In the summer of 1893 Friedrich Holstein noted a disturbing combination of ‘travel-fever, laziness, [and] frivolity’ and warned that a stronger chancellor would be needed to restrain the emperor’s ‘moods and whims’.110

  These deficiencies were due in part to Wilhelm’s sheer lack of consistency and self-discipline, but in part also to his need to regain his composure by withdrawing himself at intervals from the scene, a need made all the more urgent by a tendency to panic under pressure. In a revealing letter to Eulenburg written during a dispute with the ministry in February 1895, Wilhelm apologized for being at his hunting lodge in Hubertusstock at the height of a crisis, but added that when things got tough, ‘one has to get out from one moment to the next in order to maintain one’s cool blood and cool judgement. For I want to be absolutely fair in judging all matters.’111 The result of this curious blend of absenteeism and periodic interventions, of lethargy and sudden explosions of energy, was a style of monarchical government that increasingly resembled that of his cousin Nicholas II of Russia, of whom the state councillor A. A. Polovtsov observed in July 1901 that ‘in no field of policy is there a principled, well-considered and firmly directed course of action. Everything is done in bursts, haphazardly, under the influence of the moment…’112 Exactly the same could have been said of Wilhelm – evidence perhaps that his failures as a ruler reflected a generic incongruity between the quite phenomenal demands of monarchical office in a highly developed authoritarian system and the modest capabilities of those placed on the throne by dynastic providence.

  In sweeping away obstacles to the extension of his authority within the executive during 1896–7, Wilhelm merely exchanged one set of constraints for another. The more he tried to bypass his ministers, the more he came into direct conflict with the legislatures in Land and Reich. And the more closely he associated his person with bills that were attacked in the parliaments, the more he suffered under the slings and arrows of outraged public opinion. He spoke at times, as we have seen, of breaking through all the constraints that bound him by means of a coup d’état, and some historians have seen here a genuine option for the beleaguered monarch. But we should remember how easy it was for those who knew Wilhelm best to deter him from such a course by reminding him of how he would be reviled by the German public. Although there was certainly some theoretical enthusiasm for extra-constitutional measures against Social Democracy in parts of the German bourgeoisie, it was always clear that the political basis for such action was lacking.113 Talk of a coup d’état was thus little more than an exercise in constitutional escapism; as Bülow recalled: ‘these utterances of the Kaiser’s, reeking of powder and blood, were […] intended more to impress the hearer […] There was no firm will behind it all.’114 Having hollowed out the chancellorship and atomized the ministry Wilhelm was unable to provide the policy-making process with a unifying impetus. The need for a coordinating and limiting force was as great as ever. It was to come in the person of Hohenlohe’s successor, Bernhard von Bülow.

  4. Domestic Politics from Bülow to Bethmann

  ‘Personal rule – in the good sense’?

  Bernhard von Bülow, state secretary for foreign affairs from 1897 and chancellor from 1900 until 1909, owed his ascendancy to the influence of Wilhelm’s close friend Philipp Eulenburg. Indeed, his appointment could be seen as representing the apogee of ‘camarilla politics’ during Wilhelm’s reign. It would be unfair to say that Bülow cultivated Eulenburg solely in order to secure political advantage – the two men met in the mid-1880s at a time when neither could have foreseen the other’s usefulness. However, as Eulenburg acquired influence over Wilhelm, Bülow, with his eye on high office, stepped up his efforts to commend himself to Eulenburg’s consideration.

  In his correspondence with Eulenburg, Bülow projected himself as an ardent exponent of the monarchical principle who would assist in the restoration of an imperial monarchy damaged by the conflict with Bismarck and by the recurrent ministerial crises of the 1890s. ‘We cannot be grateful enough that we have such a master,’ he told Eulenburg in August 1890. ‘[He] always reminds me of the heroic Salier and Hohenstaufen emperors of our Middle Ages. He is […] made of the wood from which our Lord God loves to carve the great, the very great rulers.’1 ‘His ideas and plans are almost always right, often brilliant,’ he wrote in the following year. ‘They rise up from the well of singular and splendid individuality, which combines rare energy and prudent consideration with remarkable understand
ing for the requirements of the time […]. It is another question [he added pointedly] whether the All-Highest’s intentions are always efficiently carried out.’2

  By 1894, Bülow had replaced Holstein as Eulenburg’s chief political collaborator. Eulenburg groomed Bülow for office, assiduously commending him to Wilhelm as a fit successor, first to Marschall as state secretary for foreign affairs, and later to Hohenlohe himself.3 Bülow, for his part, set out his mission statement for the chancellorship:

  I would be a different kind of chancellor from my predecessors. Bismarck was a power in his own right, a Pepin, a Richelieu. Caprivi and Hohenlohe regarded or regard themselves as the representatives of the ‘Government’ and to a certain extent of the parliament against His Majesty. I would regard myself as the executive instrument of His Majesty, so to speak his political Chief of Staff. With me, personal rule – in the good sense – would really begin.4

  It would seem plausible to assume that the appointment to the highest responsible office in the land of a famously compliant and conciliatory figure5 must have set the stage for a formidable consolidation and expansion of the emperor’s role in political affairs. This is the view taken by John Röhl, who has argued that Bülow’s tenure in office brought a transition from ad hoc monarchical interference in the process of government (as in the 1890s) to ‘institutionalized personal rule’ in which ‘interference by the Kaiser in the machinery of government was hardly necessary’, since the ‘key departments’ of government were ‘in the hands of men (Bülow, Tirpitz, Miquel, Podbielski) who had been appointed by the Kaiser precisely in order to carry out his intentions’.6