Death of a Nation
Page 33
This cultural explosion was mirrored by a period of unparalleled scientific discoveries; Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength (X-rays) won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901; Heinrich Rudolf Hertz’s work on electromagnetic radiation was pivotal in the development of telecommunications; Carl Bosch’s work on high pressure industrial chemistry and Fritz Haber’s ability to work out how to fix nitrogen thereby inventing artificial fertilizers, earned them both the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Karl Friedrich Benz gave the world the first gasoline-powered motorcycles and automobiles, Rudolf Diesel invented the diesel engine, and the world’s first Zeppelin took flight from Lake Constanz in 1900 leading to the creation of DELAG (Deutsche Luftschiffahrts AG), the world’s first commercial airline. These are to name but a tiny fraction of the inventions of German science, all of which were accompanied by a process of industrial expansion that saw Germany overtake Great Britain and come to rival the continental United States.
By the time of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Silver Jubilee on 15th June 1913, his reign seemed to many Germans to have been twenty-five glorious, peaceful, and above all, prosperous years.cxxiii He was celebrated as the Friedens Kaiser, the Emperor of Peace. This might seem strange to us now but a quarter century of peace was the exception in European history at the time. And this prolonged period of peace (following on from Bismarck’s twenty years without war) certainly does not support the notion that the Kaiser was engaged in a headlong rush to war.
In 1905, Wilhelm II had expressed his passionate disposition for peace in an emotive letter to his Chancellor, in which he described his recent meeting with his cousin, Tsar Nicolas II of Russia, while they were sailing their respective royal yachts on the Baltic. Wilhelm wrote:
I took the envelope out of the case, unfolded the paper on Alexander III’s desk, in front of the picture of the Tsar’s mother amidst a collection of photographs of Fredensborg and Copenhagen, and laid it before the Tsar’s hand. He read it once, twice, a third time. I prayed a prayer straight to God Almighty. May he be with us both and guide the young ruler. It was deadly quiet — only the rustling of the ocean waves could be heard, the sun shone gaily and bright into the cabin, and gleaming white before my eyes lay the royal yacht Hohenzollern, and the Kaiser’s standard fluttered high in the breeze. I could just make out the words ‘God is with us’ on the standard, when I heard the Tsar’s voice next to me — ‘This is excellent. I agree whole heartedly.’ My heart was beating so loudly I could hear it — I pulled myself together and casually asked, ‘Would you like to sign it? It would make a wonderful souvenir of our meeting.’ He scanned the paper once more. Then he said ‘Yes. I will.’ I opened the inkpot and handed him the quill, and he signed with a firm hand — Nicolas. Then he handed me the quill, I signed, and as I got up, he gave me an emotional embrace… (19)
But peace could not be secured based solely upon family ties between the royal houses of Europe. The royals could not exist in a vaccum separated from the harsher political climate outside their royal palaces. They could still cajole and wield considerable influence, but the age of their ruling by dictate from the throne was fading, even in the more autocratic states of Central and Eastern Europe. The German Chancellor objected to the document signed by Tsar Nicolas II, even threatening to resign over it. And Russian ministers told the Tsar that, for reasons of economic expediency, Russia needed a treaty with France more than she did with Germany. Thus the opportunity for peace slipped through Wilhelm II’s fingers.
With France remaining the ‘inherited enemy’ and prospects of an alliance with Russia drifting away, the Kaiser often returned to the theme of Anglo-German relations and their common Saxon heritage, which had been widespread in both Britain and Germany until the 1890s. The concept of a common racial, historical and cultural heritage between Britain and Germany — a theme popularised in Britain in the novels of Sir Walter Scott and in the fables of Hereward and Robin Hood, showing heroes fighting to free Saxons from the ‘Norman yoke’ — was firmly fixed in people’s minds. It was so commonplace that even the Bishop of Winchester, shortly after Queen Victoria’s funeral (that Kaiser Wilhelm II had attended) welcomed the coming together of ‘the two great kindred branches of our race’.(20) And as late as the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, Germany and Britain worked together to stamp out the brush fires in this combustible region to prevent them from spreading further.
But all of this was only one side of the coin. It would be disingenuous to summarise the Kaiser’s era as one that only evoked a serene aura of peace and security towards his neighbours. The Kaiser, his advisers and diplomats were responsible for plenty of self-inflicted diplomatic disasters that led to Germany’s isolation in the two decades leading up to the First World War.
The Kaiser developed a paranoid obsession. He began to believe that Germany was encircled by enemies who initially sought to prevent her achieving the greatness she deserved, and would later seek to destroy Germany altogether. Yet there was no individual who did more to create the uncertainty and prompt the alliances directed against Germany than the Kaiser himself. He may have embodied the aspirations of the majority of Germans, for Germany to raise herself to her rightful place in the world, but he lacked the intelligence and skill Bismarck had displayed in forming German foreign policy. Wilhelm II’s public utterances expressed an almost schizophrenic quality, first rousing his royal cousins on the thrones of Europe to rise up as one against the ‘yellow peril’ and the socialist menace, and then railing against them for conspiring against Germany.(21)
Wilhelm II was certainly a complex personality. Winston Churchill, who had met him and exchanged gifts with him during his birthday celebrations in Silesia before the Great War, said, ‘… no human being should ever have been put in the position the Kaiser was in… the combination of pomp and power in a single head of state, tests every mortal to his limits… that overwhelm the strength of even the best and greatest statesmen.’(22) Surrounded by a sycophantic court camarilla, ever ready to praise him to the heavens, the Kaiser was never a good judge of character, or of sincerity. Nor was he the best judge of words and when to use them. When Lord Haldane, the British Minister for War, arrived in Berlin in 1912 on a business-inspired peace mission, the Kaiser let loose one of his infamously tactless remarks that undermined all the good work he and his ministers had done to try and engender a successful outcome. Haldane spoke fluent German and was a great admirer of the philosophy of Hegel and the writing of Fichte. During his much-feted stay he went to visit the graves of his idols. Later, over dinner with the Kaiser, he remarked that he thought it a shame that such notables should not have their grave sites better maintained. The Kaiser then replied, ‘Yes, well in my Reich there is no place for scoundrels like Hegel and Fichte.’(23) This quote — one of many that show Wilhelm II’s tendency towards tactlessness — particularly illustrates his pompous, arrogant and militaristic nature. After sparing no expense to entertain Haldane, a man who admired and loved the Germany of great thinkers, poets and composers, who had come in peace to try and bind two nations together, after making him a guest at the palace and reserving the best rooms for him, the Kaiser undermined all his own efforts by alienating the British minister with one sentence.
Haldane’s visit was yet another attempt to forge an Anglo-German alliance, one in a succession of attempts that had a considerable history. In 1879, Bismarck had asked what Britain would do if Germany, in support of Austria, got into a war with Russia over the Balkans. He pointed out that this would also protect British interests in the Dardanelles Straits and further check Russian expansion. The British foreign office at that point said it would ‘keep France quiet’ to which Bismarck replied, ‘Is that all!?’ Bismarck was not prepared to let Germany carry the greatest burden in a war against Russia from which Britain — since it would protect her imperial interests — would benefit most. But Britain was perfectly happy to let Germany and Austria take care of Russia’s Balkan ambitions while she concentr
ated on her greater imperial ambitions in Africa, and elsewhere. Bismarck wanted an ally that would help fight Germany’s battles and not just use Germany to fight her own, so increasingly he did not configure Britain in his web of continental alliances. In any case, Britain did not have the great standing land armies that Russia, Germany, France or Austria-Hungary had. Bismarck was once famously noted as saying, ‘If Germany ever found herself at war with Britain he would have the British Army arrested.’ In practice, neither side had much to offer the other and for most of the nineteenth century they took each other’s support — or at least neutrality — for granted, having no direct quarrels between themselves, either in Europe or the wider world. It is one of the great ironies of international diplomacy and power politics that this position was to become exactly reversed half a century later.
The situation only started to shift when Bismarck reluctantly acceded to domestic pressure for Germany to acquire colonies from 1884 onwards, and when Kaiser Wilhelm II loosened the shackles on German ambition, allowing rivalries to emerge. All this made further attempts at reaching an alliance all the more complicated. In 1898, the British Foreign Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, argued in favour of what he called a ‘natural alliance’ between Germany and Great Britain against Russia. But again, as in 1879, Britain had nothing to offer that could adequately compensate Germany for fighting a major war in Europe against France and Russia that would essentially protect British interests in the Near and the Far East.(24)
The Kaiser could and should have been the embodiment of a natural alliance between Germany and Britain, but it was largely he who turned what was simply a lack of common interest into an increasingly embittered mutual rivalry. To what extent he truly embodied the underlying antipathy towards Britain that existed in Germany, or whether he pandered too much to the pan-German nationalist fringe who saw Britain as Germany’s greatest future rival, is open to question. There were as many Anglophile Germans, not least in the upper echelons of society, who aped and admired British traditions, as there were Anglophobes. One thing many contemporaries of the time did comment on was that they saw the Kaiser as the embodiment of a new Germany. Ann Tophan, the British tutor to the Kaiser’s only daughter, Victoria Louise, commented that Wilhelm II looked totally out of sorts in civilian clothes, rarely touched alcohol, ate fast, was extremely restless and forever kept the court on the move. In her opinion, ‘the Kaiser and the country reflect one another perfectly.’(25) Wilhelm loved the pomp and circumstance of all things military. His recollections paint his happiest days as those spent at the military academy. He surrounded himself with military types and often used the language of the parade ground. He also loved playing aggressive, and often painful, practical jokes on visitors. It is not an exaggeration to say that Wilhelm became the caricature of German militarism both at home and abroad. He was rarely seen out of uniform and spared no expense on an elaborate panoply of uniforms for all occasions. Decked out in his military paraphernalia Wilhelm made endless emotive speeches. These speeches inflamed international tensions to such a point that, following the Kaiser’s disasterous interview with the Telegraph in London, a liberal German parliamentarian Friedrich Naumann lambasted Wilhelm’s foreign policy statements as ‘self-inflicted disasters’.
Wilhelm II’s desire to practise Weltpolitik (exercise power on the world stage) on the back of his new navy neglected to take on board that Germany had never been a naval power of any consequence, which due to the size of her coastline was hardly surprising. She had not even previously managed to be the supreme naval power on the Baltic. Nevertheless, the popular navy league and Germany’s nationalist movements were as keen as mustard for Germany to have her own overseas empire to rival those of Britain and France. Thus the Kaiser expended huge sums of Germany’s wealth on a naval building race competing with Britain; it was a race that threatened Britain’s ‘God-given mastery of the Seas’ and it was a race that Britain was determined not to let him win. The two issues that would complete Germany’s estrangement from Great Britain, and ensure her future encirclement, were both driven by the Kaiser himself; namely German colonial and thereby economic expansion and the building of a great navy with which to achieve this aim.
In 1895, Britain attempted to seize the Transvaal from the Boers in the botched Jameson Raid. Germany ruled in neighbouring modern day Namibia (German West Africa) and had initiated trading interests with both the British Cape Colony and the Boers of the Transvaal. The Kaiser regarded the Boers, who were descendents of Protestant Dutch settlers, as being part of the greater pan-German family, much as the Russians emphasised their pan-Slavic relationship with the orthodox Slavic peoples of the Balkans. The Kaiser sent President Krueger his congratulations at crushing the raid, which had not been officially sanctioned by the British government, but had been a clandestine attack mounted by Cecil Rhodes, the Governor of the Cape Colony. The British press picked up on German support for the Boers against the British Cape Colonists, and it was the first major breach in hitherto good Anglo-German relations. The coming Boer Wars, in which the media, not only in Germany but all around the world, came to support the plucky Boers against the increasing brutality of British forces,cxxiv further exacerbated the rift between Great Britain and Germany. Britain had furthered Germany’s interests in gaining colonies and now the hand that fed her had been bitten. This left a bad taste and lingering resentment in both the Foreign Office and the British media, but of far greater consequence was how the experience cemented in Wilhelm’s mind the fact that, while he could make all the pronouncements he wanted, Germany was in no position to assist the Boers, nor project its will overseas, without a powerful navy.
EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN IMPERIALISM BEFORE THE FIRST WORLD WAR
All the great European empires were maritime empires built on the back of great fleets and sustained by the great riches they transported in their hulls, and the mercantile trade that followed in their wake. If Germany was to be a great power, equalling the greatest nations on earth and comensurate with her new-found economic strength, it was clear she needed a great fleet. Germany’s imperial ambitions have all too often been seen in isolation. The nineteenth century and early twentieth century were times of nationalism and imperialism; an age in which all the great European powers vastly expanded their overseas possessions. By the outbreak of the First World War, more than half the globe had been colonised by Europeans.(1) The kaleidoscopic view of history usually depicts Germany as the nation with the most voracious appetite for ‘world domination’. But when viewed in the context of the imperial aspirations and conquests of other great powers, Germany’s imperialism was not an isolated phenomenon, nor was it the most expansive in either ambition or reality. Germany’s imperial ambitions had naturally been forestalled by the fragmented nature of the number of German states until unification in 1871. The great maritime nations, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Spanish, French and the English, had therefore colonised entire continents, enslaving their populations and accruing their accumulated wealth and resources for centuries before the Germans had even built their first dreadnought.
For much of the twentieth century, European national histories attempted to gloss over the brutalities of their colonial ‘adventures’. Colonisers were depicted as having arrived to find ‘largely empty lands’ to which they brought infrastructure, industry and nascent democracy. When the horrors of slavery, wholescale expropriation, divide and rule policies among local tribes (which helped to sow the seeds of later conflicts), the drawing of artificial colonial boundaries (lots of neat, straight line boundaries in Africa) and the crippling of national colonial economies (by turning them into single commodity producers) were exposed, the legacies of these shameful colonisations were all but dropped, not only from national curriculums, but also from public consciousness.
British history curriculums(2) in the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries firmly focused on Britain’s role in the abolition of slavery, not its murderous parti
cipation in the evil trade for the better part of three centuries. The BBC History Magazine reiterated that view in an article in January 2008, when its contributor alluded to the so-called ‘man on the street’ to paraphrase his own views, ‘… when the usual suspects tried to use slavery to berate us, the man in the street was savvy enough to stand up and make himself heard; hold on — this (commemoration) is about celebrating our part in abolition, not political posturing over the original sin, which was addressed two centuries ago.’(3) But the subject of Britain’s colonialism, and the lead role she played in the murder of millions of African slaves, cannot be so casually cast aside. Barely any mention at all was made of the fact that from the early 1600s–1807 Britain enslaved over 12.4 million African slavescxxv in the most appalling sub-human conditions, in which an estimated 3 million died (a figure that doesn’t even include the number of Caribs and Native Americans slaved to death in the Caribbean or North America). This is a colossal loss of humanity when one considers that the population of the United States of America, at the time of her independence from Britain in 1781, was less than 5 million, and the population of England and Wales in 1800 was only 8.9 million.(4) The same publication, when weighing up the positive and negatives of British imperialism in Australia, glossed over the genocide committed against the indigenous black Aboriginal population. It conceded that, ‘(Aboriginal) Blacks were routinely poisoned, or hunted like game, their women raped and their children taken away… Not till 1967 were black Australians recognised as citizens,’ but still suggested the balance sheet of British colonialism was ‘too close to call’ in respect to whether history should now regard these colonial adventures in a positive or negative light. Worse still, the British colonial balance sheet in North America fails to mention the indigenous Native Americans at all, and weighs up this episode in British imperialism as being ‘positive’. There is clearly still a very strong ‘patriotic prism’ through which history is viewed that prevents an honest, forthright, and full appraisal of the genocidescxxvi committed by the great European powers, and by Britain in particular, during the age of imperialism.