And yet it is striking that Wilhelm’s anti-Semitism never provided the basis for any practical activities or even gestures in support of the various anti-Semitic groups operating in the Republic. Perhaps this was partly because the Jews were never the only group Wilhelm identified as responsible for his misfortunes; indeed they had to jostle for primacy with a disparate assembly of collective culprits: the ‘Yankee’, ‘English perfidy’, the French, freemasonry (with the exception of the three ‘Old Prussian’ lodges), the Bolsheviks, the Junkers, the Social Democrats and others. And then there were the many individuals who had failed him in various hours of need. When Ludendorff, for example, wrote to Wilhelm in August 1927 assuring him that his (Ludendorff ’s) völkisch movement was committed to the struggle against ‘Jesuit, Jew and Freemason’, Wilhelm noted acerbically in the margins that it was Ludendorff who had ‘lost his nerve at Spa’ and ‘thereby set the stone of revolution rolling’.88 In his recriminations, as in everything else, Wilhelm was opportunistic, self-serving and inconsistent. His repugnant comments on the Jews were too narrowly yoked to the labour of self-exculpation to cohere into a stable world-view or provide a plan for action. ‘For the first time I am ashamed to be a German,’ he remarked when news reached Doorn of the organized pogrom against Jewish lives and property in November 1938. He declared before his entourage that ‘all decent Germans’ should speak up against the Nazi persecution.89
The ex-Kaiser’s intense self-interestedness helps to explain why he never really warmed to the National Socialist movement. At least until 1934, Wilhelm dreamed of his own restoration, in a fullness of power that he had never enjoyed in reality. The Munich putsch of 1923 thus left him cold, because he saw in it a Wittelsbach plot to substitute the Bavarian for the Hohenzollern dynasty on a restored imperial throne. Throughout the 1920s there were frequent contacts between the entourage at Doorn and a loose network of conservative and monarchist bodies in the German Republic. And the late 1920s saw the proliferation of informal ties with the Nazi movement: Wilhelm’s youngest son, August Wilhelm, joined the SA in 1928, an act for which he sought and received Wilhelm’s permission. His new wife, Princess Hermine von Schönaich-Carolath, had friends among the high-ranking party members and participated in the Nuremberg rally of 1929. The collapse of the conservative bloc and the phenomenal success of the Nazis in the German elections of 1930 encouraged the restorationists at Doorn to put out formal feelers to the Hitler movement. Their fruit was a meeting at Doorn between Wilhelm and Hermann Goering in January 1931. No minutes survive of this meeting (if any were taken), but it would seem that Goering spoke positively of the prospect of Wilhelm’s returning to Germany at some time in the future.90
Despite these friendly signals – there were encouraging comments from Hitler and a second meeting with Goering in the summer of 193291 – Wilhelm remained sceptical of the Führer’s commitment to monarchical restoration, and with good reason.92 This was a partnership without prospects. It was, as so often with Hitler, a relationship in which each thought he could exploit the other. Hitler hoped, by associating himself with the old ruling family, to strengthen his credentials as the legitimate successor to Prussia– Germany’s monarchical tradition; Wilhelm wanted to regain the throne. In Mein Kampf, however, which Wilhelm never got around to reading, Hitler had declaimed that the goal of his movement lay not in ‘the foundation of a monarchy’, but in ‘the creation of a Germanic state’. And as Hitler’s appetite to exercise total power in his own person became increasingly evident, Wilhelm’s hopes that a Nazi government would effect a monarchical restoration faded, just as Hitler’s need for Hohenzollern endorsement was also waning. The moment of truth came on 27 January 1934, when Hitler ordered the breaking up of celebrations in honour of the Kaiser’s seventy-fifth birthday. The fate of the restoration movement was sealed a few days later by new legislation outlawing all monarchist organizations.
Hitler had thus, in Wilhelm’s eyes, declared ‘war against the house of Hohenzollern’.93 The ex-Kaiser’s hostility to Hitler and his movement during the years that followed gradually deepened, especially after April 1937, when his wife broke off her connections with the party and became an implacable opponent of the Nazi regime. Their contempt was richly reciprocated by the Nazi authorities, who continued to erase the memory of the monarchy in Germany, prohibiting the display of imperial images and memorabilia. Only in the autumn of 1939, with news of the German victory over Poland, did Wilhelm start to take a more positive interest in the regime. He was jubilant at the arrival of invading Wehrmacht troops at Doorn on 13 May 1940, and moved by the Nazi victory over France. Still fixated on the moment of his deposition and Germany’s collapse, he regarded the fall of France as ‘revenge for 1918’. Having been warned by members of his entourage that Hitler was displeased at his failure to congratulate him on his achievements, Wilhelm now sent a telegram extolling the Führer for this ‘victory sent by God’.94 Needless to say, this gesture did nothing to improve Wilhelm’s standing with Hitler, who spoke of him in later years as ‘a strutting puppet of no character’, or, for that matter, with Goebbels, who described him in 1940 as an ‘incorrigible fool’ who was probably of part-Jewish ancestry.95
Wilhelm had by now passed his eightieth year and his health was failing. On 4 June 1941 he died after a series of heart attacks. Hitler had intended that the body be translated to Potsdam for a ceremonial interment that would have allowed the Führer, as the self-appointed successor to the warlord monarchs of Prussian tradition, to display himself walking respectfully behind the coffin of the last Kaiser. But Wilhelm’s will stipulated that the body was not to leave Doorn until Germany was once again a monarchy, and the Nazis agreed instead to send a small delegation to Doorn for the interment. The service passed off quietly on 9 June 1941, despite delays caused by a British air raid.
Conclusion
‘I am for hanging the Kaiser,’ announced the Labour MP George Barnes, during an election speech at Netherton in November 1918.1 At the end of the First World War, Wilhelm II was the object of mass hatred. The poster art of Allied wartime propaganda portrayed him as a bestial blood-soaked creature stooped over the corpses of raped Belgian women, or strutting ape-like before burning libraries, rejoicing in the destruction of civilization. Learned treatises bristling with footnotes were published to demonstrate to a more educated public the Kaiser’s prime culpability in the horrors that had engulfed Europe since 1914. ‘When all is said and done,’ one such study announced in 1917, ‘the German Emperor […] is the responsible author of the misfortunes that afflict the world’; another spoke of his ‘complete and direct responsibility’ for the catastrophe of 1914–18.2 Small wonder that so many joined in the call for the execution by hanging of this ‘enemy of the human race’.3
Even within Germany, the empire over which Wilhelm II had reigned for thirty years, a torrent of denunciation followed his fall from the throne. The last German Kaiser was diagnosed as a ‘psychopath’ who led his subjects down the road to ruin. The self-serving memoirs of prominent figures who had served under him did little to improve the picture. ‘Every new publication makes the image of this weakling, coward, domineering brute and braggart, this posing dunce who plunged Germany into misfortune even more repugnant,’ wrote Harry Graf Kessler in 1928. ‘There is not a single trait in him that could arouse sympathy or pity; he is entirely contemptible.’4
Eight decades on, at the opening of a new century, the emotion and immediacy that fuelled such judgements have largely died away, but our image of Wilhelm II remains overwhelmingly negative. Recent studies of the reign describe him as a ‘suitable case for [psychiatric] treatment’, an ‘abominable emperor’ with an ‘incoherent, narcissistic personality’, a ‘psychically disjointed’, ‘offensive’ and ‘sadistic’ bully who took pleasure in the humiliation of others and felt a ‘cool alienation’ from his fellow human beings, a ‘tedious’, ‘deranged’, ‘puffed up, vainglorious and self-overestimating fool’, a ‘precursor to Adolf Hitler
’, the ‘missing link’ between the genteel chauvinism of the empire and the annihilatory hatred of Auschwitz, a man who ‘gazed upon the greatest evil and declared it to be the work of God’ – in short, ‘the Nemesis of world history’.5
The mocking, denunciatory, even diabolizing tone of much historiographical comment on Wilhelm is one of the most distinctive and striking characteristics of the field. One need not approach the subject with rehabilitation in mind to feel that there is something excessive and misplaced about such language. It is as if Wilhelm were being made to signify something beyond and greater than himself – the mass destruction of the First World War, the horrors of the Second, the catastrophe and shame of a nation. This book did not set out to ‘rehabilitate’ the last Kaiser. He remains, by my reading, a man of intelligence but of poor judgement, of tactless outbursts and short-lived enthusiasms, a fearful, panic-prone figure who often acted on impulse out of a sense of weakness and threat. But by setting his utterances and actions in context, this book has tried to redress the balance between denunciation and understanding.
What conclusions has this exercise yielded? Wilhelm’s understanding of power and how it should be wielded was not the outlandish confection of a deranged mind. It was acquired in part from a familial setting uniquely disturbed by power-political conflicts, and in part from Bismarck, the titan who loomed so large over Wilhelm’s political education.
The peculiar indeterminacy of the German constitution permitted the concentration of power under certain circumstances in the hands of the sovereign, but also facilitated its dissipation; more generally, this book has highlighted the fluid character of the power exercised within the German constitution after Bismarck, its capacity to change hands unexpectedly, especially in the context of the pivotal relationship between the Kaiser on the one hand and ‘his’ chancellor and generals on the other.
In separating himself from Bismarck, Wilhelm learned to deploy many of the instruments available to him under the imperial constitution and developed an inchoate political programme that connected the mediating social and cultural mission of the throne with grand schemes of national consolidation. Outside the domain of politics proper, Wilhelm consistently associated himself with the latest developments in technology, science and industry, surrounding himself with men from these milieus and thereby created a new elite space in which otherwise separated social groups could come into contact with each other. He aspired, in this sense, to be a ‘lord of the centre’, as Nicolaus Sombart observed in an idiosyncratic but suggestive study of the reign. (Whether one needs, as Sombart also proposed, to ‘love’ this Kaiser in order to understand him, is questionable.)6
Yet the Kaiser was unable, despite many energetic interventions, to realize this programme in any meaningful way, or even consistently to impose his will on the executive. Nor did his appointment of ‘favourites’ to key offices necessarily translate into an aggrandizement of his power. This was partly because imperial ‘placemen’, once installed, tended to go their own way. But a more fundamental problem was the Kaiser’s utter inability to devise or follow through a coherent political programme of his own. The ‘kingship mechanism’, proposed by Röhl as a more nuanced alternative to ‘personal rule’ (and borrowed from Norbert Elias’s analysis of the absolutist court of Louis XIV), thus remains problematic, for it can work in a political sense only if the monarch’s objectives are known to all and can be anticipated by his courtiers. But this was hardly true of Wilhelm II, whose goals changed drastically from one moment to the next. He picked up ideas, enthused over them, grew bored or discouraged, and dropped them again. He was angry with the tsar one week but infatuated with him the next. He reacted with fury to perceived slights and provocations, but panicked at the prospect of genuine confrontation or conflict. None of this means that the Kaiser was unimportant. However, it does suggest that his significance lay less in the imposition of an autocratic will than in a chronic failure of leadership. Even in the spheres of science and technology his interventions, though important in themselves, were too ad hoc and too short-term to amount to a consistent programme.
Neither with Bülow nor with Bethmann-Hollweg did Wilhelm seek or acquire the kind of purchase on political affairs he had made a bid for in the 1890s. Bernhard von Bülow may not have planned the permanent parliamentarization of German politics, but he was not the pliant tool of the sovereign will that was implied by the bogus Bülowian concept ‘personal rule in the good sense’. As for Wilhelm’s interventions in the field of foreign policy, these certainly exercised the men of the Wilhelmstrasse, but they were less malign than has often been asserted and did little in any case to shape the course of German foreign relations. Dynastic ties and correspondence were of little avail in this respect. Far more important was Wilhelm’s role in stimulating the rapid expansion of the German navy, but the connections between the naval programme and the decline in Anglo-German relations should not be overstressed. Neither the unfocused imperialism of Weltpolitik, nor the building of ships was responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914. In the context of the crises that preceded the onset of conflict, this book has highlighted the peaceable character of Wilhelm’s interventions regarding the Balkans. Wilhelm did not see the Balkans from 1912 onwards as providing a welcome pretext for conflict between the central powers and one or more other Great Powers. His support for the Austrian ally from 1895 was not unconditional in a sense that posed an existential threat to the independence of the German empire and the peace of Europe. His undertakings of 5 July 1914 (the ‘blank cheque’) did not amount to a pre-emption of Austrian intentions and were not intended to facilitate the outbreak of a preventive war in which Germany could reverse the relative decline in her level of military preparedness. Indeed, we should probably take seriously the assurances Wilhelm offered to the Reichstag on the occasion of its opening on 25 June 1888: ‘In foreign policy I am determined to keep the peace with every man as far as I am able. Now that it fought for and won the right to exist as a unified and independent nation, Germany has no need either of further military glory or of conquests of any kind.’7
Wilhelm’s public utterances failed to project and consolidate his authority in the way he would have wished and did more to damage his reputation than anything else he did. The Kaiser’s speeches were sometimes tactless and ill-judged, but it would be mistaken to attribute the commotion surrounding the speeches solely to the emperor’s personal shortcomings. The assemblage of titles and functions blended in personal union through the figure of the Prussian– German king and emperor required that Wilhelm personify different roles to a range of diverse constituencies. That Wilhelm failed to resolve the resulting tensions, and that this failure resounded so destructively in the public life of the empire, owed as much to the fissured character of the German political culture as to the incoherence of his personality. ‘Perhaps,’ as Thomas Kohut has suggested, ‘Germany was simply so divided that no significant community of interest could have been developed that might have formed the basis for effective political leadership.’8
Despite his titular warlordship, the Kaiser was excluded from any active role in strategic or operative management of the German war effort. But his position at the constitutional hinge between the military and the civilian authorities – already clearly in evidence during the late pre-war years – ensured that he played an important role in some of the most crucial decisions made by the German leadership after July 1914. For many difficult months he protected Falkenhayn against a growing campaign to oust him from office. More clearly than the otherwise far-sighted Bethmann-Hollweg, Wilhelm saw the threat personified in Hindenburg. The Kaiser was among the last to hold out against the pressure to adopt unlimited submarine warfare – perhaps the most fateful decision made by the German wartime command. Yet none of this should distract from the Kaiser’s fundamental failure to provide genuine leadership. Wilhelm occupied a position at the heart of the German constitution – he stood at the focal point of the system. It was a posit
ion that could have been used to bestow coherence and a sense of direction in strategy. Wilhelm’s failure to do either helps to explain why it took so long to resolve the question of the relationship between the eastern and western fronts, why the naval and military commands were so poorly coordinated and why it proved impossible to achieve a meaningful dialogue between diplomacy and post-war peace plans on the one hand and military strategy on the other.
Wilhelm II drastically accelerated the delegitimization of monarchy as a German political institution, and thereby, though indirectly, bestowed a heightened urgency upon the quest for a ‘Führer from the people’ legitimated by success and mass acclaim. For the old conservative elites, the ignominious circumstances of the monarch’s departure impeded any continued identification with the last occupant of the German throne. Monarchism thus never developed into an ideological formation capable of providing post-war conservatism with a coherent and stable political standpoint. Noblemen, especially of the younger generation, drifted away from the personal, flesh-and-blood monarchism of their fathers and forebears towards the diffuse idea of a popular tribune who would fill the vacuum created by the failures and flight of the monarch. We find a characteristic articulation of this longing in the diary jottings of Andreas Graf von Bernstorff, descendant of a line of distinguished servants of the Prussian throne: ‘Only a dictator can help us now, one who will sweep an iron broom through this whole international parasitic scum. If only we had, like the Italians, a Mussolini!’9
The authority of this Kaiser was woven together from different kinds of power. Wilhelm possessed the means to launch political initiatives (though not to see them through to implementation), he controlled appointments to many pivotal offices (but was unable to steer his appointees once they were in office), and he enjoyed the privilege of a uniquely prominent position in public life (but was unable to control public depictions of his person). The unstable and in some respects mutually undermining relationship between these different species of power was a riddle that Wilhelm II never quite solved. The most serious problems in the system – the unreformed Prussian franchise and the unresolved, partly extra-constitutional position of the military – remained unaddressed. Under this Kaiser, the office that might have facilitated the creation of a stronger legislature and the further maturation of a dynamic European political culture became instead a distorting mirror held up to the nation, a mirror in which all the most troubling features of Germany’s predicament – the backlog of blocked reforms, political, confessional and socio-economic fragmentation, the disconnect between power and culture, the anomalous status of the military, uncertainty about one’s place in the wider world – appeared grotesquely magnified.
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