Kaiser Wilhelm II

by Christopher Clark

  But the connection between Wilhelm’s personal relationships and reputation and the fortunes of German diplomacy as a whole is less direct than may at first appear. Wilhelm’s personal intercourse with his fellow dynasts had little impact on the course of German policy. The dividing line between personal relations and the relations between governments was often less clear-cut than one might imagine: the Kaiser’s ‘private’ letters to Nicholas II were in fact vetted and revised by the German Foreign Office, just as ‘Nicky’s’ replies were by the Russian foreign minister.87 It is true that Wilhelm was heartily disliked by some statesmen, but this was not an important factor in German foreign relations. It was the incommensurability of what the Germans wanted and what the British felt able to offer that scuppered hopes of an Anglo-German alliance in the early 1890s, not Salisbury’s antipathy towards Wilhelm. By the same token, it would be absurd to suggest that the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894 was even partially due to the sympathy felt by the reactionary Tsar Alexander III or his son Nicholas II for the republican leaders of France, or vice versa. We should not be misled by the prominence of gossip and personal asides in the diplomatic sources into overestimating their impact on the formation of policy. It was the character of relations between states and their interests that set the tone, not the personal intercourse among dynasts and statesmen. Dutch, Austrian and American diplomats were, broadly speaking, far more positive in their judgements of Wilhelm and far less inclined to impute bellicose motivations to him than their French, British and Russian counterparts. American and Dutch diplomatic reports consistently depicted the German sovereign as ‘impressive, well-informed and capable’ and as fundamentally pacific in his intentions, if not always in his utterances. They saw him as a moderating counterbalance to the influence of the ‘military party’.88

  This is not to say that attitudes to Wilhelm’s person had no impact whatsoever on the international climate. There is no doubt that Wilhelm came to personify the character of German policy in a way that was quite unique. This happened in part because his sporadic interventions were often very exposed, like the Kruger telegram, or poorly concealed, like the naive and transparent intrigues launched by Wilhelm during the ‘Fashoda crisis’ of 1898–9.89 Then there was the fact that Wilhelm’s personality embodied what seemed to many observers in Paris, London and St Petersburg to be the most unsettling characteristics of German policy, namely its unpredictability and lack of clarity, its ‘leaping restlessness’ and its lack of a consistent ‘guiding idea’. These affinities between the behaviour and character of the man and the policy of the state naturally strengthened the widely entertained, though false, inference that Wilhelm was the first and foremost author of German policy, and this in turn meant that Wilhelm became the focus for more general concerns about German power and the direction of German policy. In the summer of 1899, for example, the French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé became extremely vexed at news that Wilhelm was trying to organize a meeting with the tsar. He concluded that Wilhelm intended to propose to Nicholas that Germany and the Russian empire partition Austria–Hungary between them, and he even travelled to St Petersburg in person to prevent this diabolical scheme from coming to fruition. Delcassé’s apprehensions were utterly groundless, but they illustrate the degree to which the perceptions of diplomatic establishments were distorted in this period by a climate of paranoia. ‘The diplomacy of imperialism,’ Christopher Andrew has written, ‘was often based on suspicion and on myth generated by suspicion. Governments were apt to attribute to others their own imperial ambitions.’90

  If German foreign policy in the Wilhelmine era ‘lacked unity of control’, as George Peabody Gooch once observed,91 was this a negative consequence of Wilhelm’s role? We have seen in the sphere of domestic politics how the disjointed character of the imperial political system created tasks of coordination that Wilhelm was never able to master. And it is certainly the case that German foreign policy often spoke with more than one voice. That Wilhelm’s interventions made the work of the responsible policy-makers more difficult is beyond question; that they ‘to a very considerable extent helped to provoke’ the ‘encirclement’ of Germany after 1906–7 is doubtful.92 First, there is the fact that the effect of many of Wilhelm’s interventions was to soften the edge of official policy, to open doors that the Wilhelmstrasse seemed on the point of closing: hence his unauthorized overtures to France and Russia in the early 1890s, his reassurances to Austria in 1895 and his gestures towards Great Britain in the late 1890s. Then there is the difficulty of disentangling Wilhelm’s impact from the broader problem of confusion and irresolution within the German foreign policy establishment. It would be simplistic in the extreme to attribute this much remarked phenomenon to the sins or omissions of the monarch. It was in part the legacy of Bismarck’s total suppression of collegial culture within the Prussian–German Foreign Office after 1871. To a certain extent it also reflected the uncertainties of the German position. We should not underestimate the difficulties German policy-makers faced in plotting out a correct course for the newest of the great powers. Joining the Franco-Russian alliance as an equal third partner was not an option, as we have seen. But a British alliance was also fraught with risk, for what was to prevent Germany from becoming the continental fall guy in a conflict between Britain and one or more of her imperial rivals? It was in part the insolubility of this dilemma that produced the indeterminate Bülowian policy known as the ‘Free Hand’, by which Germany aimed to avoid commitments and exploit opportunities as they came along. But was such a policy not bound to appear unpredictable, improvised, bewildering and provocative?

  Perhaps the true key to Wilhelm’s impact on Germany’s foreign policy lies outside the diplomatic sphere proper, in his endorsement of a far-reaching programme of naval armament. There is no doubt that the threat, however remote, of a German challenge to British naval hegemony was a factor in bringing about the Anglo-French and Anglo-Russian agreements. But exactly how serious were the repercussions of the German naval policy? The shipbuilding programme inaugurated under Tirpitz did not in itself rule out the possibility of an understanding with Great Britain; on the contrary, it opened up new avenues of communication. In 1906, 1908, 1909–10, 1911 and most famously in March 1912, there were negotiations – in most of which Wilhelm played a crucial role – towards a ‘good general understanding’ that would involve an agreement to limit naval construction.93

  Why did these negotiations yield so little? The answer is not simply German intransigence over the scale and pace of naval construction,94 because Bethmann and – albeit reluctantly – Wilhelm were willing to make concessions on that front. The real sticking point was the fact that the Germans insisted on something tangible in return, namely an undertaking of British neutrality in the event of a war between Germany and another continental power. Why were the British so unwilling to grant what was asked? The argument that the British were bound by the terms of their obligations to France is flawed, because Bethmann was willing to limit the proposed neutrality agreement to cases in which Germany ‘cannot be said to be the aggressor’, and expressly conceded that any agreement reached would have ‘no application insofar as it may not be reconcilable with existing agreements which the high contracting parties have already made’.95 The true reason for British reticence lay rather in an understandable disinclination to give away something for nothing: Britain was winning the naval arms race hands down and enjoyed unchallenged superiority. Bethmann and Wilhelm wanted a neutrality agreement in exchange for recognizing that superiority as a permanent state of affairs. ‘Why,’ as Niall Ferguson has put it, ‘should Britain bargain for something she already possessed?’96 In sum: it was not ships as such that prevented an agreement, but rather the irreconcilability of perceived interests on both sides.97

  How different would German policy have looked had Wilhelm not been on the throne? We need not enter into the speculative scenarios of ‘virtual history’ to see that the domestic pressures for n
aval expansion would still have been formidable. The preoccupation of the German national movement with the naval weapon dated back to the Frankfurt parliament and the role of the Danish navy in the defence of Schleswig-Holstein.98 By the 1890s, that preoccupation had intensified to the point of obsession among the German industrial and commercial bourgeoisie. The hunger for prestige and international recognition had become the ‘biggest political fact’ in German public life.99 Tirpitz’s foremost achievement was to have harnessed that social and political potential in support of a far-reaching programme of naval expenditure. Of course it is true, as Paul Kennedy has pointed out, that Tirpitz had his critics, and that he owed his ascendancy to Wilhelm, but it cannot be presumed that a man as energetic as Tirpitz, as sensitive to public opinion and as well connected within the naval establishment, would have sunk into obscurity without Wilhelm’s intervention.100 It seems highly likely, in other words, that even without Wilhelm in control, Germany would have pursued a more or less ambitious policy of naval construction.

  It is questionable, in any case, whether a less confrontational naval policy would have averted German alienation from Britain over the longer term. For it was not just the naval race, but the entire spectacle of Germany’s titanic industrial and commercial expansion that triggered British anxieties and suspicions. The naval chief of staff Albrecht von Stosch was not far off the mark when he observed in February 1896 that the ‘fury of the English against [Germany]’ had its ‘real explanation in Germany’s competition on the world market’.101 Significantly, it was not the inauguration of the Tirpitz plan, but the earlier seizure of Kiaochow on the Chinese coast in 1897 as a base for supporting German commercial activity in the Yangtse Valley that prompted the first Anglo-Russian soundings towards a possible global compromise between the two embattled world empires – a compromise to be founded on shared concern over German commercial expansion into areas of shared Anglo-Russian interest.102

  7. Alfred von Tirpitz descends a flight of steps, possibly those of the Reichstag building in Berlin (no date). Wilhelm II took a profound interest in the development of the German navy, but it was this imposing figure, with his trademark forked beard, who actually controlled the naval programme.

  We may sympathize with the anxieties of British policy-makers, or even admire the tenacity and vigilance with which Britons of this era guarded the British global power share, but we must also recognize them as political factors in their own right. In a climate of mutual suspicions fanned by press speculation and bordering periodically on the paranoid, an unruffled ‘partnership’ with the island power could have been purchased only with a drastic renunciation of German power. Historians have occasionally pointed to the success with which Bismarck kept the peace in Europe by performing just such a Machtverzicht (renunciation of power), implying that the foreign policy of Wilhelm II and his government suffers by contrast. That is as it may be. But in the era of alliance blocs, chauvinist mass newspapers, navalism and breakneck export growth, there was no way back to the narrower horizons of Bismarckian diplomacy – not for the German commercial and political classes and certainly not for the man on the throne.

  6. Power and Publicity

  The power of speech

  In a sense that seems unremarkable to us today, but represented a genuine novelty at the time, Wilhelm was a ‘media monarch’. We have seen that he found himself at the eye of a journalistic storm over his connections with Court Chaplain Stoecker even before his accession to the throne. He also had a number of unpleasant early brushes with the press in connection with the illness and death of his father. During his visit to the bedridden Friedrich at the Villa Zirio in November 1887, the shortage of rooms in the villa meant that Wilhelm had to stay at the Hotel Victoria opposite, where he was watched and followed by newspapermen who had set themselves up with telescopes trained on the sick man’s residence; some were receiving privileged information from the British physician, Morell Mackenzie. ‘Even on the day of my father’s death, when his eyes had scarce been closed,’ Wilhelm recalled in his memoirs, ‘I found in the death chamber a Viennese journalist introduced by Mackenzie. He went out faster than he came in.’1

  Wilhelm was thus acquainted from early on with the power and ubiquity of the press; indeed he tended throughout his life to overrate its capacity both to reflect and to shape public opinion. A belief in his own ability to speak for and to German public opinion was, as we have seen, central to Wilhelm’s conception of successful monarchy, and it was through voracious browsing in the national press that he sought to maintain a sense of connectedness with the great issues that moved the nation. It was here that he picked up impulses for some of his initiatives in the fields of social policy, defence, academic research and technological innovation. Orders or recommendations to ministers often came in the form of scribbled annotations to articles cut from the daily papers – small wonder that those who sought to influence him were so concerned to control the flow of press cuttings to his desk.2 Like Bismarck and the Prussian administrations before him, Wilhelm sometimes intervened personally to ‘correct’ press commentary that he judged to be damaging to his own or the government’s interests.3 Wilhelm was also extremely sensitive to the press’s handling of his own person. It is remarkable, the court marshal Count Robert von Zedlitz-Trützschler observed in 1904, ‘how sensitive the Kaiser is to the press. […] harmless inaccuracies and untruths about his life can greatly upset him when they are reported to him or when he comes across them in his own reading’.4 These concerns were reflected not only in Wilhelm’s allergic response to printed criticism, but also in his fastidious attention to outward appearances – the rapid alternation of uniforms to match specific occasions, the careful ‘training’ of his famous moustaches, and the affectation of a grave official countenance during public ceremonies. The obsession with outward presentation extended to close management of the empress: as the Australian cultural historian Juliette Peers has shown, Wilhelm not only provided designs for her clothes, her distinctive jewels and extravagant hats, but also pressured her to maintain her hourglass waist by means of dieting, drugs and corsetry.5

  This recognizably modern concern for image should not be dismissed as the symptom of a narcissistic personality disorder. It was perfectly rational, given Wilhelm’s assumptions – and those of many contemporaries – about the power of a rapidly growing press. It also reflected his exposed position in German public life after Bismarck’s departure in 1890 and the increasingly irreverent and damaging tone of press commentary on the ‘All-Highest Person’. The 1890s were, as one observer noted, ‘a time of limitless publicity, where countless threads run here and there and no bell can be rung without everyone forming a judgement about its tone’.6 The post-Bismarckian era, with its relaxation of press controls, saw a burgeoning in the critical energies of Germany’s highly differentiated and rapidly expanding press.7 Indeed, in view of the steep growth in the number and readership of newspapers during these years, it seems appropriate to speak of a ‘media revolution’ driven partly by technical progress and partly by the unruly escalatory dynamic of an increasingly competitive market in political print.8 As Hans-Ulrich Wehler has pointed out, the journalists of the Wilhelmine era used ‘a more open, more pointed, on occasion more aggressive language than was otherwise characteristic of the era’.9 In this increasingly disinhibited environment, the press emerged as an independent force no longer instrumentalized by the authorities.10 But Wilhelm himself must shoulder the chief responsibility for the rapid cooling in the climate of published comment on his person; throughout the first two decades of his reign, he actively and consistently courted the attention of the public, often with disastrous effect.

  No Hohenzollern monarch had ever spoken as often and as directly to so many large gatherings of his subjects as Wilhelm II. His great-uncle, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, had become the first Prussian king to give an impromptu public speech during the ceremony of the Oath of Fealty in 1840. On this occasion, he astonished his entoura
ge by delivering an off-the-cuff plebiscitary address to a massive crowd in the Schlossplatz. But the experiment was rarely repeated. Wilhelm’s grandfather seldom spoke in public and his father, though an able orator, was unable to play much of a public role under Bismarck and had virtually lost his voice by the time he came to the throne. By contrast, Wilhelm treated the German public to an uninterrupted flow of public utterances. During the six-year period from January 1897 until December 1902, for example, he made at least 233 visits to at least 123 German towns and cities, in most of which he gave speeches that were subsequently published and discussed in the regional and national press.11

  Wilhelm’s speeches, at least until 1908, were not set-pieces prepared for him by professional writers. The men of the Civil Cabinet busied themselves researching and writing up texts for specific places and occasions, sometimes pasting a final printed version to a wooden reading-board that was passed to the emperor when the moment arrived, but their work was largely in vain – Wilhelm preferred to speak without assistance.12 By contrast with his father, who as crown prince had always written out his speeches beforehand and then ‘changed them over and over again’, Wilhelm only rarely prepared his speeches in advance.13 They were consciously performed as impromptu, unmediated acts of communication, as this contemporary description – possibly by an ‘inspired’ journalist – makes clear:

  Here and there the Kaiser makes little pauses, one can see that he is reflecting, folds appear upon the brow and the eye looks out into the distance until the connecting element has been found that can serve as the natural and logical continuation of that which has already been said. Once this thought has been found, however, the speech resumes without interruption, and he is carried on a river of words until the end.14