Kaiser Wilhelm II

by Christopher Clark

  The hope expressed by some of the more quixotic (i.e. left-liberal) Reichstag deputies during the Daily Telegraph debate of 10–11 November, that the crisis might enable the imposition of constitutional constraints of some kind upon the monarch would not be realized. With a few exceptions, the Reichstag parties focused their fire on Wilhelm’s personal misjudgements and skated over the more fundamental constitutional issues; a plan to assemble the federal princes in Berlin for a formal protest was abandoned. Bülow was reluctant to press the point with Wilhelm – one can see why! – and the crisis gradually died away as crises do, without permanently changing the German political landscape.

  The impact of the Daily Telegraph affair on Wilhelm’s state of mind has often been described: for two weeks the fifty-year-old emperor was paralysed by a ‘psychic and nervous depression’ from which he emerged, as Valentini recorded, with his ‘old vital energy’ depleted, in a mood of ‘weary resignation’.78 During the months that followed he avoided public announcements and kept a low public profile. Inevitably, the silence was eventually broken, to storms of indignation from the now highly sensitized press. In the summer of 1910, in a toast address at a gala dinner in Königsberg, Wilhelm reminded his audience that the Prussian crown was his by the grace of God alone, not by that of ‘parliaments, popular gatherings or popular deliberations’, and that the emperor was ‘the chosen instrument of heaven’.79 Leader articles in the major newspapers noted with regret that the emperor had broken with the ‘self-restraint’ he had observed since the ‘black November days’ of 1908, and there were paragraph-by-paragraph analyses of the text, many of which took offence at his providentialist and absolutist rhetoric.80 But the absence of serious press scandals over the following years testifies to the success with which the emperor had been ‘gagged’.81 In a telegram to Bethmann, Wilhelm observed ruefully that, thanks to the machinations of Bülow, the press now enjoyed the privileged status of an arbiter ‘entitled to a decisive view of all persons, especially those in the highest positions’.82

  ‘The entire life of Wilhelm II actually consists of a continual stabilization of his sovereignty,’ noted a critical commentary of 1913 in the left-liberal journal März. ‘Who is there among us nowadays who knows that the German empire is actually, namely in a constitutional sense, a republic, of which the emperor is no more than the central official [Zentralbeamter]?’83 For all its hyperbole, this provocative formulation touched on one of the central problems of Wilhelm II’s reign. The imperial office lacked a secure foundation in the German constitution. As we saw in chapter 2, the constitution of 1871 had little to say about the role and powers of the Kaiser, whose office was discussed under the modest rubric ‘presidency of the federal council’. The imperial office also lacked a political tradition. In a famous speech to the Reichstag, the national-liberal Friedrich Naumann observed that in the absence of a revolutionary tradition, the German parliament had to make do without the nimbus of a ‘popular legend’. But the same could have been said of the imperial crown. The Kaisertum of the high Middle Ages and the Habsburg imperial tradition of the early modern era were too remote and too different in nature to provide a credible antecedent to the new constellation of 1871. This discontinuity with prior political and constitutional realities was reflected in the paucity of established performative traditions associated with the German imperial throne. There was, most strikingly, no imperial coronation, and beyond the precedence lists that set out the seating order at gala dinners and court banquets, there was little in the way of public imperial ritual. The reign of Wilhelm I, who remained sceptical of his new title and continued to comport himself as a Prussian monarch, had done little to make good this deficit. It was Bismarck, rather than the first Kaiser, who was the foremost integrative public figure of the empire.

  But Wilhelm II came to the throne determined to fill out the imperial dimension of his office. He travelled constantly among the German states; he glorified his grandfather as the warrior-saint who had built a new dwelling for the German people, and he instigated new public holidays and memorial observances to shroud, as it were, the constitutional and cultural nakedness of the throne in the mantle of a ‘national’ history. He projected himself to the German public as the personification of the ‘imperial idea’. In this unceasing effort to create the imperial crown as a political and symbolic reality in the minds of Germans, the speeches played a crucial role. They were instruments of ‘rhetorical mobilization’ that secured for the Kaiser a unique prominence in German public life.84 For Wilhelm personally, they offered compensation for the situation of political constraint and disempowerment in which he so often found himself. Indeed, they were, as Walther Rathenau, author of one of the most insightful reflections on this monarch, observed in 1919, the single most effective instrument of his imperial sovereignty.85

  How successful Wilhelm was in achieving his objective is another question. On the one hand, as we have seen, the more striking indiscretions provoked waves of hostile published comment, especially when they touched on Germany’s relations with other powers. As the most visible (or audible) sign of the sovereign’s independence, they became the primary focal point for the political critique of ‘personal rule’.86 Over the longer term, their effect was a gradual erosion of the political status of pronouncements from the throne. It became increasingly common, especially after 1908, for the government to dissociate itself entirely from unwelcome speeches on the grounds that these were not binding programmatic utterances, but simply personal expressions of opinion by the monarch, a disclaimer which implied that the political views of the emperor were of no wider political consequence.87 The scandals that rocked the imperial throne throughout the first two decades of the reign were not simply arbitrary disruptions, like the freak storms that sometimes appear at the height of summer. There was a cumulative logic to them: Bismarck succeeded in framing his forced departure from office in 1890 as the work of dubious Hintermänner, a trope that came home to roost during the Eulenburg scandal of 1908–9. The ill feeling generated by the passivity of German policy vis-à-vis southern Africa in the 1890s festered, to break out anew during the Daily Telegraph crisis. With each scandal, new themes emerged that left a lasting imprint on critical discourses. The military historian and sometime princely tutor, Hans Delbrück, captured this fateful dynamic with an ominous metaphor: each new outrage, he suggested, was like a wreath (Kranz) into which all the Kaiser’s previous errors and missteps, stored up in the memory of the public, were woven together.88 As the Viennese correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung observed in 1910, a comparison between Wilhelm II and Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria–Hungary revealed how counter-productive was Wilhelm’s overuse of the public word: the Habsburg dynast, it was noted, was a ‘silent emperor’ who always distinguished between his private person and his public office and never used the public forum to make personal utterances of any kind, and yet ‘anyone who tries in Austria to talk about their emperor as we hear [ours] discussed at every table in Germany will soon be in serious trouble’.89

  It is, on the other hand, notoriously difficult to get the measure of public opinion, and we should be wary of any judgement that relies exclusively on newspaper commentaries – ‘published opinion’ and ‘public opinion’ are not the same thing. The emperor may have lost ‘the aura of the sovereign who is above criticism,’ wrote one foreign observer in Berlin at the height of the Daily Telegraph affair. ‘But with all the personal magnetism that he possesses, he will always retain an immense ascendancy in the eyes of the mass of his subjects.’90 This striking resilience can be explained in part by the fact that the relationship between the Kaiser and his public was not exclusively political, in the narrower sense. There were other features of his activity in office that awoke the interest and sympathy of important parts of the public. To a much greater extent than either of his two imperial predecessors, Wilhelm was, as we have seen, a man of modern science who surrounded himself with notable champions of industrial and technolo
gical progress and associated himself publicly with pioneering research. There may, to be sure, have been a compensatory dimension in these fashionable enthusiasms – in the sense that science and technology seemed to offer a domain of activity relatively unimpeded by the obstacles that had dogged his interventions within the executive and a means of recapturing the allegiance of those commercial and industrial middle classes who were most sceptical of his efforts to set the tone in politics. But there is no doubt about the authenticity of the Kaiser’s engagement, or about its positive public impact. Wilhelm’s close association with the immensely popular Count Zeppelin, designer and promoter of the airship, found expression in mass-produced picture postcards in which garlanded portraits of the two men were juxtaposed on either side of one of the most charismatic technical objects of the day. A Berlin newspaper captured the significance of the relationship between the Kaiser and the count when it commented: ‘What is dear to the people should also be dear to the crowned representative of the people, and it is always good when a monarch demonstrates through his actions his acceptance of this axiom.’91

  Wilhelm’s invocations of divine providence may have been the laughing stock of the quality papers, but they struck a sympathetic chord with the more plebeian theological tastes of many humbler Germans, and many middle-class Protestants enthusiastically supported his efforts to resacralize the imperial crown.92 Wilhelm was certainly out of touch with many of the latest developments in fin-de-siècle culture. He loathed the works of the Berlin Secession: of the Secessionist Walter Leistikow’s brooding atmospheric painting Der Grunewaldsee, the Kaiser uttered the famous complaint: ‘He has ruined the entire Grunewald for me.’93 But if Wilhelm’s outspoken (and often ignorant) denunciations of avant-garde art appeared ludicrous and retrograde to the cultural intelligentsia, they made sense to those more numerous cultural consumers who believed that art ought to provide escapism and edification.94 Moreover, the Kaiser remained a national symbol – partly by default, because the Reich possessed so few genuinely national symbols.95 In Bavaria the ceremonies of the ‘imperial cult’ (parades, unveilings and the jubilee celebrations of 1913) attracted the mass attendance not only of the middle classes, but also of peasants and tradesmen.96 Even within the Social Democratic milieu of the industrial regions, there appears to have been a gulf between the critical perspective of the SPD elite and that of the mass of SPD supporters, among whom the emperor was perceived as the embodiment of a ‘patriarchal – providential principle’.97 The conversations recorded by police informers in the pubs of Hamburg’s working-class districts registered some disparaging, but also many supportive and even affectionate comments about ‘our Wilhelm’, who was cherished for his role in sponsoring the growth of the shipbuilding industry.98 One – as yet under-explored – dimension of this positive resonance was the public image of the empress, whose sincere manner and charitable and fund-raising activities attracted much supportive comment and who was widely regarded as the ‘most loved member of the royal family’.99

  We should not underestimate the entertainment value of monarchy, sustained by the dramatic expansion of cinematography around 1900.100 The imperial court was quick to recognize the propagandistic potential of the new technology. From 1890 onwards, court officials and the Kaiser himself took the initiative in overseeing the production of films depicting the monarch. The Court Chamberlain Count Eulenburg (August Ludwig Graf zu Eulenburg, not to be confused with his relatives Philipp and Botho) sent the pioneering cinematographer Oskar Messter to the Middle East to film the Kaiser’s Palestine journey – the resulting footage played across the empire and was a huge success with the public. From 1905 the Kaiser commissioned his own personal photographer, Theodor Jürgensen, not only to film the launching of ships and other naval events at which the Kaiser was officiating, but also – a novelty in the history of monarchical self-representation – to record scenes of everyday life aboard the royal yacht Hohenzollern, at the summer palace on Corfu and at home in the Berliner Schloss.

  9. George V and Wilhelm II (right) in a carriage on their way to celebrate the wedding of Duke Ernst August III of Hanover and the Kaiser’s daughter, Princess Viktoria Luise of Prussia, 21 March 1913. This sumptuous family festivity brought together sovereigns from across Europe and was one of the last occasions on which the German reigning house succeeded in connecting with the emotional life of the nation.

  The film sequences produced by Jürgensen were handled by a major distribution company and seen at hundreds of venues throughout the empire. They allowed the Kaiser to present himself to his public in a range of private roles – as a family man, at leisure and on holiday. A bond was forged here between monarchy and mass entertainment that endures into our own day. The familial dimension of monarchy, too, remained an important focal point for sentimental attachments.101 In 1913 the marriage between Wilhelm’s daughter Princess Viktoria Luise and Ernst August III of Hanover was a public sensation; recorded using an early version of colour film and viewed by millions across the empire, this was perhaps the last occasion before the outbreak of war on which an event in the life of the monarch could provide the occasion for mass emotional identification. Even the more critical papers acknowledged the remarkable psychological power of these spectacles over the masses of spectators and cinema audiences. There remained substantial (if not precisely quantifiable) reserves of ‘imperial-royalist capital’ in German society. It would take the social transformations and political upheavals of a world war to eliminate them.

  7. From Crisis to War (1909–14)

  As we approach the outbreak of the First World War, the task of weighing Wilhelm’s impact on events becomes increasingly difficult. The narrative of his reign intersects at this point with one of the most complex and ramified debates in the historiography of modern Europe. It is impossible to assess Wilhelm’s role without touching, at least in passing, on debates over the character of German diplomacy during the Balkan crises, the nature and significance of German planning for war before 1914, the German contribution to the escalation of the Austro-Serb conflict of 1914 and the failure to avert a catastrophe when war was clearly imminent. And there is a further problem of perception as we draw near the brink of the disaster of August 1914: every bellicose marginal note, every call for increased naval or military expenditure appears – in retrospect – to be pregnant with ominous meaning. Like objects nearing the threshold of a black hole, decisions, written comments, even throwaway remarks, gain gravity, or appear to do so from our posterior vantage point. It thus becomes doubly important to set speech and action in context. This general observation applies in a very specific way, as we shall see, to Wilhelm II.

  Wilhelm, Austria–Hungary and the Balkans

  In the string of diplomatic conflicts that stirred European diplomacy during the last decade of peace, two regions loom especially large: Morocco and the Balkans. Wilhelm had never shown a serious interest in northern Africa. By contrast, the Balkan crises that culminated in the outbreak of war in 1914 raised issues that had long been central to his view of an effective and honourable German foreign policy. Wolfgang Canis and Lamar Cecil have emphasized the consistency with which Wilhelm assured the Austrians that he would support them in their various Balkan entanglements.1 In view of the catastrophic dénouement of 1914, when Germany went to war at Austria’s side, Canis has suggested that Wilhelm’s long-standing commitment to the Austrian alliance partner should be seen as a fatal liability for German policy and a demonstration of the ‘existential danger posed to the Reich by the continuity of this Kaiser’s power’.2 This judgement is not, however, borne out by the record of Wilhelm’s involvement in the various Balkan crises of the pre-war era. As we shall see, his commitment to Austrian policy in the region was not uncritical, and his willingness to proffer German support fluctuated according to his perception of the rectitude of Austrian demands and his assessment of the risks involved.

  In October 1908 the first of the great Balkan crises broke out when the
Austrians unexpectedly announced that they intended to annex Bosnia and Herzegovina. This move ought not to have provoked a continental crisis; after all, the territories had been under Habsburg occupation for three decades, and their formal absorption into the legal fabric of the empire had been agreed with Russia as part of a complex secret negotiation between the Austrian foreign minister, Aehrenthal, and his Russian counterpart, Izvolsky. The crisis arose largely because Aehrenthal sprang the news of the annexation plan on the European public before the Russians had had time to prepare their own press for what was bound to be a controversial measure. Faced with a wave of domestic outrage at the surrender of ‘Slav brothers’ to the Habsburgs, an embarrassed Izvolsky denied that he had reached an agreement with Aehrenthal.3 The result was an Austro-Russian crisis that strained relations between the two alliance blocs. It culminated in the ‘St Petersburg Note’ of March 1909, in which the Germans warned the Russians not to press on with their threats against Austria. The French refused to commit themselves, the Russians backed down and Izvolsky resigned. The ultimatum of 1909 is widely seen as having deepened the isolation of the central powers and thereby enhanced Germany’s dependence on the Austrian partner.

  Wilhelm’s chief concern when he was first informed was that the annexation might give the green light for a comprehensive partitioning of Ottoman territory in the Balkans. He denounced the Austrian démarche as ‘an irresponsible prank’ that had broken the ‘European record’ for diplomatic destabilization.4 The ‘appalling stupidity of Aehrenthal’, he noted on 7 October, had confronted German policy with a dilemma, ‘so that we cannot stand by or protect our friends the Turks’.5 Indeed, it was probably the suspicion that Wilhelm would have opposed an annexation if asked for his view that motivated the Austrian decision not to give him prior warning of their action. When Wilhelm upbraided Aehrenthal in May 1909 for not having consulted him beforehand, the foreign minister ingenuously replied that ‘he had not done so because he had proceeded from the assumption that the Kaiser, having regard to his longstanding friendly relations with the [Turkish] Sultan, would have advised against the project’.6