Wilhelm and Bethmann found themselves in open conflict with the military leadership over both these issues, although it was the franchise question that supplied the occasion for the chancellor’s fall from office. Early in July 1917, when Hindenburg and Ludendorff learned that Bethmann was pressing Wilhelm to announce immediate franchise reforms, the two commanders travelled to Berlin to demand the chancellor’s dismissal. But Wilhelm held firm and Bethmann remained in office. Bethmann was now under pressure not only from the military command, but from the Reichstag deputies, a majority of whom had lost patience with the chancellor’s slowness to instigate franchise reform and were demanding his dismissal. The wily Ludendorff even attempted to discredit Bethmann by hinting to a number of key Reichstag faction leaders that he himself had no objection to franchise reform and that it was the chancellor who was the chief obstacle.47 On 10 July Bethmann at last succeeded in winning the emperor around to his standpoint and two days later it was announced that the next Prussian Landtag would be elected under a new democratic franchise. On the following day, in yet another of the spasms of insubordination to which the German military command had become so prone, Hindenburg and Ludendorff telephoned their resignations to Berlin, explaining that they could no longer work with the chancellor. Wilhelm was furious at being blackmailed in this way and observed to the chief of his Naval Cabinet that ‘this behaviour by Prussian generals was the most unheard-of thing that had ever transpired in the history of Prussia’. He assured Bethmann that he would not give way, but he felt himself to be in an ‘impossible position’ – with their letter of resignation, the two commanders ‘had him up against the wall’.48 The chancellor, too, was in a precarious position – implacably opposed by the military leadership and lacking any secure platform in the Reichstag, he now depended solely upon the support of the Kaiser, whose attachment was beginning to flag under pressure. Worn down by his struggle with the titans and anxious to save Wilhelm any further agonizing, Bethmann resigned.
The resignation of 13 July marked a fundamental caesura in the history of the reign. Wilhelm saw this clearly enough: ‘Now I may as well abdicate,’ he told Bethmann.49 Nothing better illustrates the dramatic collapse of what remained of Wilhelm’s authority than the identity of the new chancellor. The first five chancellors of Wilhelm’s reign had all been personally known to the emperor before they served under him: Hohenlohe was his ‘uncle’, Bülow was a member of the Eulenburg circle, Wilhelm had shot his first stag in the company of Bethmann’s father. By contrast, the new incumbent, Georg Michaelis, was a virtual stranger to Wilhelm, though not to his wife, who knew him through her church connections and was willing to speak up for him on that score. Michaelis was known as an efficient administrator – he had been responsible for organizing the civilian and military food supply – but he was hardly a prominent public figure, and he was not Wilhelm’s choice for the job. Nor was Count Hertling, who replaced Michaelis at the Chancellery when the latter fell from favour with the Reichstag in October 1917. The chancellorship – that pivotal office in the German constitutional system – was no longer in the emperor’s gift. Wilhelm was still, on occasion, capable of standing up to the ‘terrible twins’, as in January 1918, when he opposed Ludendorff ’s plans to annex Poland to the Reich and headed off a subsequent resignation threat.50 But the twins soon extracted their revenge by forcing the dismissal of trusted officials from within Wilhelm’s personal advisory group, among them the faithful Cabinet chiefs Valentini and Lyncker. Wilhelm wept at Valentini’s departure; his replacement, Friedrich Wilhelm von Berg, soon endeared himself to the emperor but was seen by informed observers as an agent of the military leadership.
Public opinion
If the power of the Prussian–imperial throne had been undermined within the administrative structure by the end of 1917, something analogous was taking place in the sphere of public opinion. In 1914 the news of impending war had generated in Berlin and many other German cities a powerful sense of identification with the person of the emperor in some sectors of the population. One observer recalled how on the afternoon of 31 July 1914, as Wilhelm and his wife drove through the Brandenburg Gate in an open motorcar, ‘the crowds acclaimed Wilhelm II with wild excitement, overflowing into the roadway as though they wanted to show their Kaiser the warmth of their loyalty by pressing close around him’.51 Journalists wrote of an unexampled unity of purpose between Kaiser and people. Wilhelm took up this theme on the following day in a speech to the German people from the balcony of the Schloss in Berlin, in which he announced: ‘When it comes to war, all parties cease and we are all brothers. If this or that party has attacked me in peace time, I now wholeheartedly forgive them.’ In a speech to the Reichstag deputies assembled in the throne room of the royal palace three days later, he reiterated these sentiments in a famous flourish: ‘I no longer recognize parties, I know only Germans.’52 Reproduced on postcards bearing Wilhelm’s image and in government propaganda, this phrase was to become one of the ‘winged words’ of wartime Germany.
Historians have rightly questioned the unanimity of the German national enthusiasm that greeted the news of war, and these reservations doubtless apply in equal measure to the effusions of royalist emotion documented in the German press during the early days of the conflict.53 It remains difficult to assess the state of public opinion regarding the monarch during the war years, because intensified wartime censorship made the publication of overtly critical commentaries virtually impossible.54 Government propaganda texts and films promulgated an image of the emperor hard at work for the nation and sharing the privations of his people.55 Wilhelm wisely avoided compromising these efforts; he abstained from frequent public utterances and reserved his position on divisive issues such as domestic reform and post-war annexations. In this way the indiscretions of the man could be prevented from undermining the authority of the office. According to Arnold Wahnschaffe, under-secretary in the Reich Chancellery, writing in 1915, the Kaiser’s best asset in public opinion was the widespread perception that he had never sought to bring about a war. ‘Various Social Democrats have told me,’ he wrote in a letter to Cabinet Chief Valentini, ‘that nothing is as effective against the malevolent agitation of the radical [Left] as the universally held belief in the emperor’s honest desire for peace. One hears again and again: “If the Kaiser had been able to avoid the war, he would have done so …” ’56
Press commentaries on one of Wilhelm’s last speeches, an address to the workers of the Krupp factories in Essen on 12 September 1918, suggest that he was still capable, on the eve of Germany’s collapse, of connecting in positive ways with parts of the German public. Striking a personal, somewhat lachrymose tone, Wilhelm assured his audience that he was aware of the ‘suffering, need and misery’ of the German people, reminded them of his efforts for peace, enlisted sympathy for the illness of his bedridden spouse, invoked divine providence and closed with an exhortation to hold out against the might of the enemy. The speech elicited a positive echo that went beyond the neutral reportage required by the censorship regulations. The Stuttgarter Tageblatt declared that its readers were ‘thankful to our imperial ruler that he knows our cares and with his sovereign sympathy respects and shares them…’57 The Kölnische Zeitung noted that the emperor had ‘always proved in decisive moments that the feelings and longings of our people resonated in his heart’; another journalist reported ‘a quiet undertone of grief in the [speaker’s] voice’, and another that ‘he knows what we all feel’.58 And similar comments could be read in many other regional papers.59
Nevertheless, we should not be misled by these emotive last-minute effusions into underestimating the degree to which the Kaiser had been displaced from the centre of German public life. From the early months of the war Wilhelm was increasingly eclipsed by the figure of Paul von Hindenburg. A cult developed around Hindenburg, who was credited with responsibility for the German victory over the Russians at Tannenberg. His likeness, with the trademark rectangular head, was end
lessly reproduced and exhibited in public spaces. Hindenburg statues, wooden colossi erected in town squares and studded with devotional nails purchased with donations to the Red Cross, sprang up across Germany. There was a parallel here with the Bismarck cult of the 1890s, in the sense that choruses of praise for the field marshal were often intertwined with implied critiques of the Kaiser and the civilian government.60 Both phenomena thrived in a ‘vacuum of a genuine political representation’ of the nation.61 But the longing felt in some quarters for a Führer whose authority and power over friend and foe alike would be absolute and undiluted lent a note of intensity to the Hindenburg cult that had been lacking from the adulation for Bismarck. The cult that flourished around Hindenburg constructed him as the symbolic and psychological antipode of the Kaiser. In a time of war, as Wolfram Pyta has shown, calm and imperturbability came to be prized above all other faculties of leadership – ‘German calm suddenly became the cardinal virtue for a successful completion of the war.’62 The contrast between the field marshal, who always radiated a sense of sovereign confidence, and the jumpy, fragile Kaiser, with his boundless energy and his short-lived enthusiasms, could hardly have been more marked. The mobility and highly-strung nature of Wilhelm II had once seemed to capture and reflect the dynamic modernity of the German empire itself; after 1914 these attributes, so indelibly associated with the person of this Kaiser, turned from assets to liabilities. In the words of one prominent annexationist industrialist, what Germany required in her hour of need was ‘the strong man, who alone can save us from the abyss’.63 That the Kaiser failed to qualify for this role went without saying. As Martin Kohlrausch has shown, the cumulative weight of the scandals that burdened the imperial monarchy during the reign of Wilhelm II had accelerated a conceptual separation of the individual from the institution; it thereby became possible to reject the former while merging the sovereign elements of the latter with an idealized Führer figure.64
The emergence of Hindenburg as a ‘surrogate Kaiser’ was a source of growing concern to the monarch and those around him. And yet Wilhelm did little to arrest the decline in his standing. Abandoning Berlin to reside at the imperial headquarters was probably a serious error, since it deprived the capital city and the nation of its political figurehead. Since it was widely known that the Kaiser had little to do with the operational management of the war (responsibility for which was attributed in the popular mind to the hero–warlord Hindenburg), Wilhelm’s presence at the headquarters, interrupted by occasional forays to the front, could easily awaken the suspicion that his was a costly and pointless drone’s existence, far from the real centres of political or military decision-making. While Hindenburg worked hard to cultivate his image as the father and warlord of the nation, meeting regularly with journalists, having himself photographed and painted in flattering poses, and speaking to numerous gatherings of supporters, Wilhelm and his staff completely failed to sustain any kind of consistent media presence. Access to Hindenburg was generally easy for journalists, who often figured among the field marshal’s dinner guests. By contrast, Wilhelm’s entourage strenuously excluded the press from the Kaiser’s environment, partly because they hoped thereby to prevent potentially damaging indiscretions.65
In a curious way, Wilhelm helped to stoke the flames of the Hindenburg cult. He openly participated in it, even to the extent of undermining his own and Bethmann’s public standing. In February 1917 the chancellor was alarmed to learn that the Kaiser had passed an essay by the racist cultural theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain to the General Staff for distribution to the troops. Chamberlain’s essay focused on the role of willpower in securing victory and closed with the lament that, although a great man had been bestowed upon the people in the form of Hindenburg, the German leadership in general was dominated by mediocrities and the country lacked an adequate leader.66 Ever prone to fall in with public opinion, Wilhelm ultimately came to see himself as a kind of cheerleader for Hindenburg. ‘With this “Yes” I shall go to the Field Marshal,’ Wilhelm told the Essen factory workers in September 1918, after his call to keep up the struggle was greeted with a storm of affirmation.67 But as Hindenburg’s popularity waxed, Wilhelm’s waned. The last eighteen months of the war saw a growth in the circulation of anti-monarchical pamphlets and a drastic falling away of confidence in the dynasty. This was especially pronounced in Bavaria, where anti-Kaiser sentiment fed on a long-standing particularist tradition. Here, Crown Prince Rupprecht reported in the summer of 1917, ‘the ill-feeling is so widespread that serious and thoughtful people doubt whether the dynasty of the Hohenzollerns will outlast the war’.68
The man who had once taken such an obsessive interest in his popularity and public image now seemed utterly indifferent to the need to be seen by his people. Members of his entourage – Lyncker, Müller and Valentini – did repeatedly press the Kaiser to travel to Berlin for meetings with Reichstag leaders and Admiral Müller argued that he should relocate permanently to the capital. But Wilhelm was deeply reluctant: ‘Nothing will come [of this talk] of coming to Berlin,’ Moritz von Lyncker wrote to his wife. ‘Again, he doesn’t feel like it; he’s afraid of unpleasant confrontations. A great pity in every respect. It really would be good if the newspapers could report that he was conferring with the Chancellor and had spoken with this or that person.’69 Lyncker, who had spent hundreds of hours in the Kaiser’s company and knew him better than most, was doubtless right when he ascribed the reticence of the sovereign to fear. The emperor’s braggadocio and flights of fancy had always concealed a profound aversion to open confrontation or real conflict. By 1918, after years of relative isolation in the unreal world of the imperial headquarters, they had emerged as dominant forces in his personality.
Neither Hindenburg’s prestige nor the remnants of royalist sentiment within the German population were enough to save the throne when it became clear that Germany had lost the war against the Allies. Wilhelm had been shielded by his entourage from the worst news about the collapse of the German offensive of 1918. He was all the more shocked to learn from Ludendorff himself on 29 September that defeat was inevitable and imminent. This news precipitated a dramatic last-minute transformation of the German political system. The military commanders now accepted the need for domestic reform, mainly because they believed this would better Germany’s standing in peace negotiations with the American president, Woodrow Wilson. After grasping at various straws, Wilhelm accepted the proposals of the military. Count Hertling was dismissed, because he was unwilling to accept responsibility for the democratization of the German constitution. He was replaced by Prince Max of Baden, who promptly formed a new government composed mainly of Reichstag deputies (not imperial appointees).
Relations between the new government and the supreme command remained tense. As it became clear that the Allied peace conditions were going to be tougher than the German leadership had expected, Hindenburg reneged on his earlier decision to delegate responsibility for negotiating peace to the civilian government and circulated a note to his generals declaring that Wilson’s terms were unacceptable. Rightly perceiving this as a challenge to his own authority, Max von Baden threatened to resign unless Wilhelm put an end to civil–military ‘double government’ in Germany. Wilhelm was thus obliged to flex his constitutional muscles in a final act of adjudication between the two power centres. On 26 October he upbraided Ludendorff and accepted his resignation. ‘The operation is over,’ he later remarked. ‘I have separated the Siamese twins.’70
Wilhelm’s future as sovereign was now on the agenda. Was his continuance in office compatible with the changes taking place in German politics? During the last weeks of the war, this question was increasingly widely discussed, especially after the censorship regulations were relaxed in mid-October. It acquired a heightened immediacy from the wording of the American note to the German government of 14 October, in which President Wilson referred to the ‘destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can […] disturb the peace of the world�
� and added ominously that ‘the power which has hitherto controlled the German nation is of the sort here described. It is within the choice of the German nation to alter it.’71 Many Germans inferred from this communication, and from similar comments in later notes, that only the removal of the Kaiser from office would satisfy the Americans.72 There was now a swelling chorus of calls for the emperor’s abdication, and questions arose as to whether the monarch would be safe in the city of Berlin. Yet it is plausible that the throne might have remained intact, had Wilhelm not left the capital for the general headquarters at Spa on 29 October. Why did he do it? There were people close to Wilhelm who argued that this was the only way to avoid abdication, and even that the Kaiser’s presence at headquarters might revive German morale at the front and thus trigger a reversal of German fortunes.73 In reality, however, like the fateful flight to Varennes of the captive King Louis XVI, the move to Spa dealt a drastic blow to Wilhelm’s prestige and that of his office.
12. Paul von Hindenburg (left) and Wilhelm II (right) converse at the headquarters in Spa, Belgium. The third man is the Austrian military plenipotentiary von Klepsch-Roden. Wilhelm’s decision to relocate to the headquarters during the First World War reflected his (largely unrequited) sense of attachment to the armed forces, but was a public relations disaster, since it removed him from Berlin, the political hub of the empire, and made it almost inevitable that the collapse of the German front would also sweep away the imperial throne.
The dramatic circumstances surrounding Wilhelm’s abdication and flight into exile on 9–10 November 1918 have been related in detail elsewhere and need only very brief treatment here.74 During the last week of his reign, an atmosphere of unreality pervaded the imperial entourage. Far-fetched plans received serious consideration, including one proposal that Wilhelm should redeem the dignity of the throne by sacrificing himself in a suicidal attack on enemy lines. Wilhelm spoke of marching back into Berlin at the head of ‘His army’. But the military informed him that the army was no longer his to command. He then toyed with the various permutations of abdication – perhaps he could abdicate as Kaiser but stay on as king of Prussia? But with revolution spreading across the cities of Germany, there was no mileage in this quixotic attempt to disentangle the two offices that had become so hopelessly muddled since the proclamation of the empire. At no point did Wilhelm give serious consideration to the idea that it might be possible to preserve the institution of monarchy by distancing it from his own person and placing another more politically acceptable member of his dynasty on the throne. In any case, political events soon outpaced and pre-empted the anguished deliberations at Spa. At 2 p.m. on 9 November, just as he was about to sign a statement abdicating the imperial, but not the Prussian, throne, news reached the headquarters that Chancellor Max von Baden had already announced the Kaiser’s abdication of both thrones one hour before, and that government was now in the hands of the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann. After some hours spent absorbing the impact of this momentous news, Wilhelm boarded the royal train for Germany without having signed an instrument of abdication (he eventually signed one in respect of both thrones on 28 November). When it became clear that a return to Germany was out of the question, the royal train changed course for Holland. Upon hearing that parts of the railway to the border had fallen under the control of ‘revolutionaries’, the royal party shifted to a small convoy of automobiles. In the early hours of 10 November 1918 Wilhelm crossed the Dutch border and left his country for ever.
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