Early in December 1907, when the Bloc seemed on the point of falling apart under the pressure of its internal contradictions, Bülow called a meeting of the party leaders, at which he insisted that they bury their differences and form a united front. If they failed to do so, he warned, he would resign. This was an unprecedented move, which implied – publicly – that the chancellor’s tenure in office depended not upon the emperor, but upon the Reichstag parties. As Katherine Lerman has observed, this move had important constitutional implications, for it shifted the political centre of gravity from the relationship between monarch and chancellor towards that between chancellor and parliament: ‘the Chancellor had now asserted that the Kaiser’s confidence alone was not sufficient to permit his remaining in office’.54
Interesting as these developments were from the standpoint of constitutional theory, they were not in themselves sufficient to secure Bülow’s position in the longer term. By the end of 1908, Wilhelm’s remaining trust in the chancellor had been obliterated by what Wilhelm saw as Bülow’s treacherous refusal to support him during the ‘Daily Telegraph Affair’, the biggest and most damaging of the many media sensations of Wilhelm’s reign. The affair, which will be discussed in more detail in chapter 6 below, arose from the publication in the Daily Telegraph of an interview with Wilhelm in which the emperor made a number of ill-judged remarks about foreign policy and Anglo-German relations. During the uproar that followed in Germany, Bülow failed to offer a robust defence of the monarch, choosing instead to exploit the prevailing mood against the Kaiser for his own advantage. From November 1908, therefore, lacking the confidence of the monarch, Bülow depended for his continuation in office largely upon the unstable coalition of parliamentary forces represented in the Bloc. But despite some encouraging legislative successes (on deregulation and political associations), the taxation issue continued to divide the parties.
Bülow’s manoeuvrings during the end-phase of his chancellorship placed the Kaiser in an awkward position. Wilhelm’s earlier esteem and affection for the chancellor had given way to outright hostility and distrust. But he was keen to see the financial reform bill pass into law and was reluctant to let Bülow go until this task was complete. If, on the other hand, the bill were to fail on account of the intransigence of the conservatives, the immediate departure of the chancellor would be unacceptable, since it would be taken as a public acknowledgement by the monarch that a minister’s tenure in office could depend upon the will of parliament, and a tacit recognition that the chancellor had installed a ‘different [i.e. a parliamentary] kind of rule’.
Bülow later claimed that he could discern Wilhelm’s disquiet at the dilemma he found himself in: ‘I knew my Imperial master too well not to see the inner conflict that arose in him. On the one hand he longed to be rid of me; on the other he wished to be the one to determine the moment and occasion of my retirement’.55 In the event, a compromise solution was found. The fiscal reform bill failed at the second reading on 24 June in the face of concerted conservative and Centre opposition. Two days later, Bülow was in Kiel requesting his resignation from the emperor. Wilhelm granted the request, on the condition that Bülow remain formally in office until the reform had been seen through the Reichstag. This was achieved under the supervision of the prospective successor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, on 10 July 1909, and Bülow formally left office four days later.
Domestic politics to 1914
Bethmann was not Wilhelm’s choice for the new appointment. The emperor had considered a number of other candidates and personally offered the post to the diplomat Anton von Monts – it was Bülow who had proposed Bethmann.56 There was no honeymoon as there had been in the early days of the partnerships with Bismarck, Caprivi, Hohenlohe and Bülow. Bethmann’s stiff, official persona militated against the kind of relaxed cosiness that had sprung up between emperor and chancellor during Bülow’s heyday. Wilhelm found Bethmann’s predilection for observing correct procedure pedantic and frustrating and the latter’s refusal to take short-cuts on matters deemed urgent by the Kaiser repeatedly produced tension between them. Indeed in March 1913, Wilhelm went so far as to send Bethmann an article cut from the Daily Graphic in which it was alleged that ‘Germany is a patriotic land governed by fearful meticulous bureaucrats, who hate doing anything and are only plagued into activity by the experts.’ Wilhelm had annotated the offending passage with the comment ‘it’s true’. Bethmann, who was involved at the time in difficult negotiations over the new Army Bill, was deeply offended and came close to tendering his resignation.57
In spite of such difficulties, the two men managed to establish a good working relationship, perhaps the most stable such partnership of the reign. This was possible for several reasons. Firstly, although theirs was not a particularly cordial connection, the two men knew each other well. As a young man, Wilhelm had hunted with Bethmann on the latter’s family estate at Hohenfinow; it was here that he killed his first stag with the muzzle of his rifle resting on the obliging shoulder of Theobald’s father, Felix.58 So there was a degree of familiarity, if not much real warmth, between them. Secondly, Bethmann enjoyed a ‘Bülow-bonus’, in the sense that he benefited from the extreme deterioration of relations between Bülow and the emperor during the final years of the previous chancellorship. After Bülow’s guiles and duplicity, Wilhelm was disposed to appreciate Bethmann’s straightforward manner and grim conscientiousness. Bethmann was less liberal with flattery but also less vain and self-aggrandizing than Bülow had been. Thirdly, Bethmann’s unpopularity with an increasingly polarized Reichstag helped to cement the relationship in two ways. On the one hand, it made Bethmann more dependent upon (and more aware of his dependence upon) the monarch. Adolf Wermuth, state secretary of the Reich Treasury from 1909 to 1912, recalled in his memoirs that Bethmann attached the greatest importance to the solidity of his relationship with the emperor: ‘it constituted the root of his strength’.59 On the other hand, Bethmann’s unpopularity encouraged Wilhelm (erroneously) to see him as a champion of the monarchical executive against the pretensions of the legislature. The heavier the storms of criticism that Bethmann faced in the Reichstag, the more enthusiastic was the monarch’s support for his beleaguered chancellor.60 Fourthly, Bethmann was a sincere monarchist – a sincerer one in some respects than Bülow – and a man who shared many of Wilhelm’s prejudices, including his suspicion of Polish national aspirations.
4. After the manoeuvres and manipulations of Bülow, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, an angular figure who was as upright in his dealings as in his posture, represented a welcome change of approach. He was as successful as his predecessor, however, in shielding the political process from Wilhelm’s interventions. He is seen here in conversation with Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Gottlieb von Jagow and Under-Secretary Arthur Zimmermann beside the steps of the Reichstag building in Berlin.
However, none of this implied a return to personal rule. The emperor’s capacity to shape the political agenda and his personal impact on political affairs remained strictly limited. There could be no falling back to the conniving with individual ministers that had so destabilized the Hohenlohe chancellorship. Bethmann quickly succeeded in acquiring a control over the executive that was at least as far-reaching as Bülow’s had been. Like Bülow, he accentuated the primacy of the presidency within the Prussian state ministry by delaying the appointment of a vice-premier. Potential rivals and ministers who opposed the minister president’s views on key issues (such as Rheinbaben, Arnim and Moltke) were levered out of office in 1909–10. Moreover, it was Bethmann, not the Kaiser, who substantially determined the new appointments (Dallwitz, Schorlemer, Lentze) with the result that life within the ministry became unprecedentedly harmonious. It is striking how few changes were made to the composition of the Prussian ministry (after Bethmann’s reshuffle) until 1917.
The chancellor was thus able to neutralize – or hold in check – the most important constitutional instrument of the monarch�
��s power. Bethmann was also successful in controlling ministerial access to the emperor, especially over the financial questions that so preoccupied his chancellorship during the pre-war years. He also cultivated (as Bülow had done) excellent relations with Valentini, chief of the Civil Cabinet, who personally supervised the flow of non-military personnel and information to the sovereign. Alhough Valentini’s independence and influence over the emperor were never comparable with Eulenburg’s, it was possible on occasion to cooperate with Valentini in blocking unwelcome initiatives.61
Moreover, Bethmann himself was prepared to block or subvert imperial initiatives where necessary, and could generally prevail over the emperor by persuasion.62 In April 1910, for example, when Wilhelm expressed to Bethmann his indignation at the fact that Social Democrat electoral processions had taken place in Berlin with police permission, Bethmann replied that the permissions had been granted under the conditions set out by the new Associations Law (Vereinsgesetz): ‘The government must never depart from the terrain of legality. The more pedantically it observes the law, the stronger will be its justification when necessity requires it to employ force against the breakers of the law.’63 In March 1912, when Wilhelm attempted to intervene directly in negotiations with the British government over naval armaments and thereby bypassed the chancellor, Bethmann presented the emperor with a letter of resignation that closed with the words: ‘by virtue of the office confided in me by Your Majesty, I carry responsibility before God, the country, history and my conscience for the policies ordered by Your Majesty. Not even Your Majesty can take this responsibility away from me.’64 In his reply, Wilhelm swiftly capitulated, as he had so often done before. He disclaimed his intervention as grounded in misunderstandings and begged the chancellor not to hold it against him. ‘I appeal to you as my highest official, personal friend and nobleman of the Mark, to remain loyal to your Kaiser, king and margrave, and ask you to carry courageously the difficult and thorny burden [of office].’65
In any case, as Wilhelm withdrew from direct interventions in domestic politics after the Daily Telegraph crisis of 1908, and the government became bogged down in a stand-off with the polarized, post-Bloc Reichstag, the potential for serious disagreements between Kaiser and chancellor over domestic policy issues dwindled. On the one hand, Wilhelm’s interest in domestic questions had dramatically declined and he now had virtually no contact with the ministers who managed the internal administration.66 On the other hand, the government’s waning ability to generate political consensus in support of even the most urgently needed reforms narrowed the scope for initiatives from the throne.67 It is thus no coincidence that the political conflict generated by imperial interventions after 1909 came increasingly to focus on areas involving the relationship between civilian and military authority. If Wilhelm had been substantially neutralized as an influence on domestic politics and policy, he was nonetheless still a crucial player by virtue of his unique status as the only organ of the constitution in which the civilian and military chains of command converged.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the crises that broke out over relations between the civilian and military authorities in Alsace and Lorraine during the last decade before the outbreak of war. Alsace-Lorraine had been seized from France after the war of 1870–71 and its constitutional status within the Reich was unique. It was not a federal state; it was administered by a viceroy (Statthalter) who was appointed (and dismissed) by the Kaiser. The viceroy operated outside the chancellor’s sphere of responsibility and control – his appointment and dismissal required co-signature by the chancellor, but his political comportment in office was entirely a matter of negotiation between the viceroy and the emperor. The same applied to the military commanders stationed in the province. Like their counterparts throughout the Reich and on the high seas, they enjoyed direct access to the emperor through the Military Cabinet. They were thus under no obligation to include the viceroy, or any other representative of the civilian authorities, in their discussions with the sovereign over military policy in the province. In the event of conflict between the civil and military arms of authority in Alsace-Lorraine, the first and only arbitrating official was thus the emperor himself.
The potential for conflict over policy in this sphere was considerable, above all because the civilian and military authorities viewed the province in radically different ways. For Viceroy Karl Count von Wedel and his civil administration (and for the government in Berlin), the long-term objective was to facilitate the ‘inner integration’ of the province through a mix of constitutional concessions and good government. Bethmann-Hollweg’s ultimate aim was to establish Alsace-Lorraine as a distinct federal state with its own dynasty, in other words to neutralize pro-French sentiment with concessions to regional particularism. The military authorities, by contrast, saw the province as a militarized border zone with a highly sensitive security role in German defence policy. They were inclined to regard any concessions to separatist sentiment in the Duchies as inimical to German security interests, and they saw firm discipline and the readiness to deploy force against misbehaviour by the locals as the keys to successful management of the region. Relations between Wedel and the corps commanders in Alsace-Lorraine were correspondingly tense.
The volatility of the situation was further heightened by an increase in the frequency of clashes between locals and the German authorities in Alsace-Lorraine from around 1909–10. Many of these clashes were trivial episodes involving the taunting of troops by excitable youths, but they generated a disproportionate resonance in the German chauvinist press, led by the pan-German Rheinisch-Westphälische Zeitung. It was by this means that they came to the attention of Wilhelm, who was an avid reader of the Fürstenkorrespondenz Wedekind, a twice-daily digest of articles in the German national press. He would then request reports from military commanders in the province, who routinely used the opportunity to press for harsher measures against the population and to carp at the laxity and irresolution of the civilian administration. Wilhelm was inclined to view reports from this quarter with sympathy, the more so as his gradual marginalization from domestic politics heightened the significance of the Kommandogewalt – the warlord’s extra-parliamentary power of command over his military subordinates – as the foremost intact remnant of his operative sovereignty. We should also remember that Wilhelm’s foremost non-military adviser, the emphatically civilian Philipp Eulenburg, had been driven out of the entourage by Bülow, Harden and consorts, a fateful development that had the unintended consequence of driving Wilhelm further into the arms of his maison militaire.
In January 1911 the awkwardness of these arrangements was made apparent when a minor cooling in relations between the civil and military authorities in Alsace-Lorraine produced a serious political crisis. The circumstances of the dispute, which involved a confrontation between a German administrative official in the town of Mühlhausen and his military counterpart, were trivial in the extreme, but Wilhelm soon got wind of it (through press reports), immediately sided with the military protagonist and demanded an investigation. Viceroy Wedel filed a report to Wilhelm strongly supporting the civilian official; Corps Commander General von Huene, by contrast, backed his officer and took, as usual, the view that the authority and reputation of the Prussian army were at stake.
Wilhelm sided with the militaries and cabled an expression of personal support to von Huene and the officer involved. Wedel made it clear to Bethmann that he was on the point of resigning; he even sent the chancellor a copy of his proposed letter of resignation, in which he pointed out that the very principle of civil government in the province, and, by extension, in the Reich as a whole, was at stake. As Bethmann well knew, Wedel’s resignation under these circumstances would have been seen as a victory for the military and might have provoked a national political crisis. The chancellor faced an uphill battle: he had somehow to move Wilhelm around to a more accommodating position without appearing to compromise the hallowed principle of the Kommandog
ewalt or to meddle in areas beyond his constitutional remit. His task was made even more difficult by the fact that in the summer of 1911, when the crisis was reaching its climax, Wilhelm was abroad on his annual Baltic sea cruise, in the almost exclusive company of his military entourage.
After hard struggles on Bethmann’s part, Wilhelm agreed to transfer the offending officer, though he would do so only after the civilian administrator had also been recalled from his post. When news of the officer’s impending transfer was celebrated in the liberal press, however, Wilhelm reneged on this agreement on the grounds that ‘it must not appear that the sovereign has been forced into a decision by public opinion’. The long-suffering Wedel now tendered his resignation in earnest, and further efforts were required to persuade Wilhelm of the wisdom of the transfer, and Wedel of the wisdom of remaining in office. Wilhelm gave in, though he signalled his displeasure with the whole episode by bestowing a high order on the same officer in his new post, a symbolic gesture that did not escape the attention of the liberal press.68
Far more damaging to the reputation of the German administration in Alsace-Lorraine and to the political standing of the Bethmann administration was the celebrated ‘Zabern affair’ that broke out in October 1913, when insulting remarks by a German officer set off a train of minor clashes with the local population that culminated in the illegal arrest of some twenty citizens on 28 November. Here again, the conflict turned on divergent understandings of how the administration should handle its relations with the local inhabitants. The military leadership in the province took the view that insubordinate behaviour posed a direct threat to the prestige and effectiveness of the military and supported the action taken by the officer who had ordered the arrests. The civil administration, by contrast, blamed the military for exacerbating the political climate in the region by its provocative and insensitive behaviour. Once again, Wilhelm sided with the military; while he expressly pledged his support to Corps Commander von Deimling, he sent Wedel a telegram in which he laid responsibility for the deterioration in the province at the door of the civil administration. And as in the Mühlhausen affair two years previously, it was difficult for civilian personnel to get access to the Kaiser, since he was staying at the time in Donaueschingen on the country estate of his friend Prince Max Fürstenberg, in the company of his military entourage.
Kaiser Wilhelm II Page 14
