What was disturbing about such monarchical interventions was not merely the fact that they were not squared beforehand with the relevant ministers and officials, but also the apparent absence of a clear policy concept. Wilhelm seemed prone to oscillations and sudden changes of direction. In the autumn of 1896, for example, at a time when relations between Britain and Germany had cooled dramatically following tensions over German interests in South Africa, Wilhelm briefly favoured the idea of forming a continental league with France and Russia for the joint defence of colonial possessions against Britain. At virtually the same time, however, he toyed with the idea of eliminating potential sources of conflict with Britain by simply doing away with all the German colonies except East Africa. This plan struck the secretary of state for foreign affairs (Marschall) as so outlandish that he took it to be a bluff and a veiled request for naval funding. But Wilhelm was more serious than that. He went so far as to explain his views to the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Frank Lascelles, who passed them on to Prime Minister Salisbury. By the spring of 1897, however, Wilhelm had dropped this idea and was proposing that Germany enter into a close relationship with France.16
This apparently random alternation of options generated consternation among those responsible for planning and managing German foreign policy. In a panicky letter to Eulenburg, Holstein observed that this was the ‘third policy programme in three months’. Eulenburg, who knew Wilhelm better, was less concerned. There was ‘a considerable difference’, he replied, ‘between such remarks and serious action’. Wilhelm’s projects were not ‘programmes’, he assured Holstein, but whimsical ‘marginal jottings’ of limited import for the conduct of policy. Hohenlohe, too, remained calm: ‘It seems that His Majesty is recommending another new programme, but I don’t take it too tragically; I have seen too many programmes come and go.’17
It was clear nonetheless that capricious and unpredictable behaviour of this kind called for careful supervision and management of the monarch. We have seen that this was one of the functions of the group of friends and advisers that formed around Wilhelm after his accession to the throne. The Holstein–Eulenburg group in particular proved remarkably successful in acquiring control over diplomatic appointments, seeing to it that candidates of their choice were sent as ambassadors to Constantinople, St Petersburg, Vienna and Rome. They also succeeded in neutralizing their most prominent competitor for influence over the Kaiser, namely the chief of the General Staff, General von Waldersee, who opposed the foreign policy of the Caprivi administration and had tried to operate the military attachés stationed in foreign embassies as a parallel diplomatic network under his own control.18 In 1891 Holstein and Eulenburg succeeded, as we saw, in preventing Wilhelm from travelling to Danzig to meet the tsar; in the following year the Foreign Office, with Eulenburg’s help, persuaded him to overcome his injured pride and accept the tsar’s invitation to meet in Kiel. Action was also taken to neutralize the effects of monarchical initiatives that were already under way: thus, while Wilhelm was warming up the French in 1890–91, Holstein was cooling them down again with warnings that there was no prospect of lifting the onerous German passport controls in Alsace-Lorraine.19 In 1895, when Wilhelm gave assurances of German support for Austrian policy on the Straits that went beyond the Foreign Office’s policy on Germany’s alliance obligations, Marschall moved quickly to prevent the Austrians from forming a false impression of Germany’s position.20
Wilhelm continued to be ‘managed’ in this way throughout the 1890s. In the spring of 1897 he had to be strenuously dissuaded by Hohenlohe from reinforcing the Boers in the Transvaal with a gradual infusion of German troops. It was sometimes felt necessary to conceal information from him. Wilhelm was never informed, for example, of the details of a meeting of March 1897 between the assistant under-secretary of the British Foreign Office, Sir Francis Bertie, and the German diplomat Baron Hermann von Eckardstein. In the course of discussion on German interests in southern Africa, Bertie warned his interlocutor – a notorious Anglophile – that ‘the English government will not stop at any step, even the ultimate, to repel any German intervention’ and added that ‘should it come to a war with Germany, the entire English nation would be behind it, and that a blockade of Hamburg and Bremen and the annihilation of German commerce on the high seas would be child’s play for the English fleet’.21 This unusually harsh message was never related to Wilhelm, presumably because it was thought that it might prompt an embarrassing outburst.
Among the various ministers and officials faced with the task of managing the Kaiser’s interventions in foreign affairs, the most skilful was Bernhard von Bülow. In an authoritative account of Bülow’s foreign policy, Peter Winzen has shown how cleverly he manipulated the sovereign. Bülow saw to it that he was the sole conduit of important information on Germany’s diplomatic relations, weighted his account of the options so that the emperor’s choice was virtually a foregone conclusion and maintained throughout the illusion that all policy initiatives were proceeding ‘along the lines set out by Your Majesty’.22 By using such quintessentially courtly techniques, Bülow, supported by Holstein, was able to shield the policy-making process to some extent from the destabilizing effect of monarchical initiatives.23 In the context of the British ‘alliance offers’ of 1898–1901, the effect of such management was to prevent Wilhelm from leaping to make a commitment that would serve British rather than German interests. Bülow’s policy of the ‘free hand’, by which the Reich leadership aimed to capitalize on the tensions among the other great powers in order to maximize its own independence and room for manoeuvre, remained the guiding principle of German diplomacy. Again and again – one could point to the South Africa Treaty of 1898 which defused Anglo-German tensions and extricated Germany from the troubled Transvaal Republic, or the decision to refuse a Russian offer of joint mediation in the Boer War in April 1900, or the agreement struck with Great Britain in 1901 over the Yangtse Valley region24 – important trend-setting decisions were made without Wilhelm’s direct involvement.
Wilhelm II and the naval idea
There is, however, one area in which Wilhelm appears to have exercised a decisive influence: the modernization and expansion of the imperial navy, and the decision to embark upon a naval armaments race with Great Britain.25 Wilhelm had been a keen nautical hobbyist since childhood, a passion encouraged by his British, anti-militarist mother. As a young adult he was an avid reader of naval histories and technical journals, acquiring a knowledge in the fields of modern ship design and technology that impressed contemporaries. The nautical sketches of his early adult years show futuristic floating fortresses bristling with lovingly pencilled guns. Even before his accession, Wilhelm had begun planning the construction of the luxury yacht Hohenzollern, the first official royal yacht to be commissioned by a member of his dynasty. Throughout his reign – until the outbreak of war in 1914 – he was to spend his summers aboard this craft, cruising the Baltic in the company of friends and cronies.
Within six months of his accession, Wilhelm had ordered substantial reforms to the navy’s administrative structure, unifying the chain of command and consolidating the personal authority of the emperor in questions of strategy and personnel. He made no secret of his attachment to the navy; he broke with Hohenzollern tradition to appoint a naval officer as one of his personal adjutants, he was the first German emperor to appoint himself an admiral, and he often seemed to prefer the company of senior naval officers to that of generals at public functions.26 Nevertheless, there was little sign in the early years of his reign that Wilhelm’s interest in naval affairs was linked to a clear strategic or political programme. Shipbuilding was permitted to stagnate, with the result that by 1895, according to a report from the Admiralty, the German fleet was in absolute and relative decline.27 There were occasional flashes of enthusiasm for a more ambitious fleet strategy (notably in 1894 during the Sino-Japanese War) but for the most part Wilhelm’s ideas on defence continued to be dominated by the p
rospect of a territorial war in which the navy would play at best a secondary role.
In the mid-1890s, however, naval construction and strategy came to occupy a central place in Wilhelm’s thinking on German security and foreign policy. This fundamental (and historically novel) reorientation reflected the emperor’s sensitivity to the newest trends in public opinion. While it is true, as Paul Kennedy has pointed out,28 that support for ambitious naval projects (and the substantial funding they would require) remained weak within parliament, there was a growing and increasingly well-publicized enthusiasm among the academic and commercial middle classes for a naval policy to support Germany’s claim to an equal share in territorial settlements on the imperial periphery and to secure for her an unchallenged place among the great powers. Wilhelm monitored and occasionally annotated navalist articles in the press and, like many of his educated middle-class subjects, he read the works of the immensely influential American writer Alfred Thayer Mahan, who foretold a struggle for global power that would be decided by vast fleets of heavy battleships and battle cruisers. In pursuing naval expansion Wilhelm felt himself to be acting in concert with sound, national opinion. Naval expansion was especially well suited to realize Wilhelm’s vision of successful monarchy: by comparison with the army, which was seen as narrowly Prussian, aristocratic and parochial in its outlook, the navy was the weapon of the empire and of the German nation, especially of its industrial, commercial and academic middle classes. A monarch closely associated with naval expansion might hope to place himself on that national middle ground in German politics and opinion that had proved so elusive in the early and mid-1890s.
Important as these domestic considerations were, there was also an international dimension. Wilhelm’s awareness of the power-political potential of a substantial navy was sharpened by a series of conflicts on the colonial periphery. There was a dispute with London, for example, over the Anglo-Congolese Treaty of May 1894, which, as Berlin rightly argued, damaged German interests in East Africa and was in breach of an earlier Anglo-German agreement. In the following year, the German government muscled its way into the ranks of the powers mediating in territorial negotiations following Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War. This intervention was motivated by an (in this case unfounded) fear that the British were on the point of seizing Shanghai.29
By far the most serious of these peripheral conflicts was the Transvaal crisis of 1895–7. There had long been local tensions between the British-controlled Cape Colony and the neighbouring Boer South African Republic, also known as the Transvaal. The British had formally recognized the republic as an independent sovereign entity, but Cecil Rhodes, the dominant figure in the Cape Colony, pressed for annexation of the northern neighbour, lured by the vast gold deposits there. Since German settlers played a prominent role in the Transvaal economy and Germans owned one-fifth of all foreign capital invested there, the Berlin government took a legitimate interest in maintaining the republic’s sovereignty. In 1894 there were tensions between Berlin and London over the building of a German-financed railway linking the landlocked Transvaal with Delagoa Bay in Portuguese Mozambique. While the British considered acquiring control of the offending railway through the annexation of Delagoa Bay and rejected any arrangement that would dilute their political and economic dominance in the region, the Germans insisted on the continuing political and economic independence of the Transvaal.30 There was further friction in the autumn of 1895, when the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Edward Malet, spoke of the Transvaal as a trouble spot in Anglo-German relations and hinted darkly at the possibility of war between the two countries if Germany refused to back down. Despite Prime Minister Salisbury’s hasty moves to dissociate his government from the envoy’s remarks, their effect on Wilhelm was electric. He descended on his friend Colonel Swaine, the British military attaché in Berlin, raging at Malet’s impertinence in threatening him, Queen Victoria’s grandson, over ‘a few square miles of negroes and palm trees’.31
Wilhelm and the government were thus in an ill humour when an abortive British attack on the Transvaal in December 1895 triggered an international crisis. Dr Leander Starr Jameson’s raid on the republic had not been formally sanctioned by the British government, though it is clear in retrospect that at least one British government minister ( Joseph Chamberlain) had prior knowledge of it. Salisbury lost no time in issuing the necessary official condemnations and denials, but the Berlin leadership, for its part, remained convinced that London was behind the raid and was determined to signal its indignation. On 3 January 1896, the day after news of Jameson’s defeat and capture reached Berlin, Wilhelm met with Marschall, Hohenlohe and various naval representatives to discuss the options available to the German government. Having considered various possibilities, they hit upon the idea of sending a personal telegram from the Kaiser to Paul Kruger, president of the Transvaal Republic. The ‘Kruger telegram’, as it came to be known, wished the president a happy new year, and congratulated him on having defended ‘the independence of his country against external attack’ without ‘appealing for the help of friendly powers’.32
Historical narratives of these events have tended to cast the Kruger telegram and Wilhelm’s role in its despatch in the worst possible light. It has been argued, for example, that the telegram was only approved by the officials at the meeting of 3 January in order to wean Wilhelm off a fantastical plan to embroil Germany in an African land war with Britain. The telegram itself has been criticized as ‘gratuitous’ and ‘superfluous’.33 But such assessments do not faithfully represent Wilhelm’s role in the events surrounding the telegram. Wilhelm was not alone in considering the option of despatching German troops to the region: Marschall had also considered it. Under the influence of Holstein, the foreign minister had already decided on a firm policy in the question of the independence of the Transvaal Republic; he had instructed the German ambassasor in Lisbon to enquire whether the Portuguese authorites would permit the transit of German troops to Transvaal via Portuguese-controlled Lourenço Marques. Wilhelm was thus not as isolated at the council of 3 January as some accounts suggest; all participants shared the same ‘basic position’ on the Transvaal question.34 The telegram did not, in other words, arise from an attempt to rein in an enraged Kaiser who had lost touch with reality.
That the telegram appeared gratuitous and offensive to Queen Victoria, the British government and an enraged British press is certainly true, but there is no reason why this response should be the touchstone for our own judgements.35 There is a perplexing tendency in the literature on this period – and in popular present-day awareness – to see things from the Westminster point of view, to accept implicitly the notion that British colonial expansion and British perceptions of British rights constituted a ‘natural order’, in the light of which German objections appeared to be wanton provocations. Inasmuch as it signalled – before the eyes of the international community – an objection to Britain’s arrogant handling of the Transvaal question and her dismissive treatment of Germany, the mildly worded Kruger telegram was anything but gratuitous. Moreover, if it was Wilhelm’s intention to elicit the solidarity of the German public, then the telegram must be judged a great success, in the short term at least, for it was greeted by a wave of jubilation that engulfed every party in the political spectrum.36
Germany ultimately withdrew from the confrontation with Great Britain over southern Africa. As it became clear that Germany lacked the means to enforce its will, or even to secure the respect due to an equal participant in such conflicts, Wilhelm’s ministers manoeuvred him into a conciliatory agreement which, in return for nugatory British concessions, excluded Germany from further involvement in the political future of South Africa. Wilhelm’s sentimental fellow feeling for the Boers and ‘African Germandom’ quickly waned and in his insouciant way he even became a warm admirer of Cecil Rhodes. ‘What a man he is,’ he enthused after a breakfast meeting with Rhodes in March 1899. ‘Why is he not my minister? With him, I co
uld do anything.’37
Navalism becomes policy
The Transvaal crisis and the Kruger telegram represented an important caesura. They at once whetted Wilhelm’s appetite for a more ambitious course and sharpened his awareness of the constraints that the lack of a navy imposed upon German policy. In a widely reported speech given on 18 January 1896, only two weeks after despatch of the telegram, Wilhelm declared that ‘out of the German empire a world empire is born’ and closed with a plea to the German people ‘to help me bind fast this greater German empire to our own empire at home’.38 He became obsessed with the need for ships, to the point where he began to see virtually every international crisis as a lesson in the primacy of naval power. In the following year, when a rebellion on the island of Crete triggered conflict between Greece and the Ottoman empire, Wilhelm observed with envy and exasperation how Britain led the way in resolving the issue through a diplomatic convention and reasserting her dominance in the Mediterranean. He noted on a report from the German envoy in Athens:
Here again one can see how much Germany suffers for lack of a strong fleet. […] If, instead of one ship, we had had a strong cruiser division with armoured cruisers off Crete, Germany could, alone and on her own initiative, have blockaded Athens without delay and thereby drawn in the other powers and forced them to participate nolens volens. In the event, nothing happened, and the one who has crossed all plans, paralysed all will to action and who is therefore deserving of consideration is England! Because it has the strongest fleet! In this context our 100,000 grenadiers are of no use whatsoever!39
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