Death of a Nation

by Stephen R A'Barrow

  The British Foreign Office and Edward VII soon pulled off another unthinkable foreign policy coup; ending the ‘Great Game’ — the tug of war for dominance from the Middle East to Central Asia that had raged between Great Britain and Russia since the close of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1907, the two sides settled their differences in the St Petersburg Treaty. As part of the subsequent Anglo-Russian convention, Russia became part of the Triple Entente. Wilhelm II felt personally betrayed. Not only because of the meeting and signing of the agreement between himself and the Tsar two years earlier — albeit one that was never ratified — but also because Germany had supplied and backed Russia in her recent war with Japan, in which Britain had sided with the Japanese. German foreign policy had been seriously miscalculated and paranoia now enveloped the Kaiser and his advisers, all of whom now believed Germany was encircled by enemies awaiting their opportunity to strike.

  Historiographies of the 1970s and 1980s largely try to paint the personalities out of modern history, putting everything into a socioeconomic context, suggesting society shapes the man, not man society. Whilst this has deepened our understanding of the forces at play in society, the role of particular individuals should not always be so lightly dismissed. European monarchs were certainly not the force they had been a century before, but they still had influence. The personalities and petty rivalries, the betrayals, and the incestuous nature of the European monarchy in the era before the First World War should not be so lightly overlooked. For example, Edward VII had married the Danish princess, Alexandra, shortly after the Austro-Prussian invasion of Schleswig Holstein. Alexandra had never forgiven Prussia for annexing these territories. She hated all things German and poisoned both her husband and their son George (who became King George V), against their cousin Wilhelm II. Edward’s mother, Queen Victoria, had never favoured the royal match, fully comprehending the diplomatic problems such a union could cause. Alexandra snubbed the German royals at every possible turn. Edward VII certainly used his influence, in conjunction with the Germanophobia at the British Foreign Office, to end Britain’s isolation and reconfigure the European alliance system to balance out the ever increasing might of Germany.(41)

  In November 1907, Wilhelm II returned to Britain for the first time since he had attended his grandmother Queen Victoria’s funeral in 1901. At that time, he had been well received and the newspapers had published headlines such as ‘Long Live The Kaiser’, crediting him with his dignified speeches and expressions of fraternal friendship between Germany and Britain. When he arrived six years later, he wanted to see if any of this affection could be rekindled, to reverse Germany’s diplomatic isolation. He was greeted by the Prince of Wales (later George V), in his German admiral’s uniform at Portsmouth harbour. The Kaiser again made a good impression, with toned down speeches of good will, and he took a three-week holiday at Highcliffe Castle in Bournemouth. But the fundamental issues were not resolved, and all the while, both the British parliament and the German Reichstag continued to argue over, and then issue more credits towards, the naval arms race. The Kaiser’s pro-German host at Highcliffe, Colonel Monatgu-Stuart Wortley, was interviewed by the Daily Telegraph, an interview in which the Colonel emphasised the ties that bound Great Britain to Germany. The paper’s editor, Lord Burnham, then invited the Kaiser to comment in a follow-up article.(42) The Kaiser’s reply undid much of the good work he himself had done, and the pro-German lobby in Britain had undertaken on his behalf, during the visit. It was a rambling, flailing outburst, typical of Wilhelm II in one of his darker moods, an ever-downward spiral of backhanded compliments and insinuations.

  You English are mad, mad, mad as March hares. What has come over you that you are so completely given over to suspicions quite unworthy of a great nation. What more can I do than I have done? I declared with all the emphasis at my command, in my speech at the Guildhall, that my heart is set upon peace, and that it is one of my dearest wishes to live on the best of terms with England. Have I ever been false to my word? Falsehood and prevarication are alien to my nature. My actions ought to speak for themselves, but you listen not to them but to those who misinterpret and distort them. That is a personal insult, which I feel and resent. To be forever misjudged, to have my repeated offers of friendship weighed and scrutinised with jealous mistrustful eyes, taxes my patience severely. I have said time and after time that I am a friend of England, and your press, at least a considerable section of it, bids the people of England refuse my proffered hand and insinuates that the other holds a dagger. How can I convince a nation against its will? I repeat that I am a friend of England’s, but you make things very difficult for me. My task is not the easiest one. The prevailing sentiment among large sections of the middle and lower classes of my own people is not friendly towards England. I am, therefore so to speak, in a minority in my own land, but it is a minority of the best elements as it is in England with respect to Germany. That is another reason why I resent your refusal to accept my pledged word that I am the friend of England. I strive without ceasing to improve our relations, and you retort that I am your arch-enemy. You make it hard for me. Why is it?

  He rambled on about German anger at the way the Boers had been treated in South Africa, stating that his government had nevertheless stayed aloof to this growing bitterness. He spoke of his close relationship with his grandmother, Queen Victoria, and then came to the most important matter at hand.

  But you will say, what of the German navy? Surely that is a menace to England! Against whom but England are my squadrons being prepared? If England is not in the minds of those Germans who are bent on creating a powerful fleet, why is Germany asked to consent to such a new and heavy burden of taxation? My answer is clear. Germany is a young and growing Empire. She has a worldwide commerce which is rapidly expanding, and to which the legitimate ambition of patriotic Germans refuses to assign any bounds. Germany must have a powerful fleet to protect that commerce and her manifold interests in even more distant seas. She expects those interests to go on growing, and she must be able to champion them manfully in any quarter of the globe. Her horizons stretch far away… (43)

  He was suggesting that the German navy was fundamentally there to protect German commerce. The fact remained, however, that Germany would not be able to impose her will for a greater share of world power, even against France, whilst she did not have a powerful navy that could match that of Britain’s. And everyone, including the Kaiser, knew that all too well.

  Why the German Foreign Ministry did not choose to ameliorate the tone or edit this open letter we will never know. There were obvious suspicions that members of both the British Foreign Office and the Foreign Ministry in Berlin did not want rapprochement between the two nations; the former out of concern for the threat Germany posed to British global trading interests, and the latter who were not prepared to give up a powerful navy and Weltmacht. The German Chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow, carried the can for the diplomatic disaster which had told the British people, in the Kaiser’s own words, of many Germans’ ‘unfriendly diposition’ towards their island cousins, which had only helped to pour oil on the fire of an increasingly vitriolic media on both sides of the North Sea (marked on Roman maps as Oceanus Germanicus and known in Germany since the time of the Holy Roman Empire as the German Sea!). The media played its role in arousing the negative passions of popular sentiment in both Germany and Great Britain. Since the Boer War, German newspapers across the political spectrum — from the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts, to the conservative Kreuzzeitung, — had been unanimous in their condemnation of Great Britain. The British press baron, Lord Northcliffe, owner of the largest newspaper, the Daily Mail, a publication which often led with anti-German articles, wrote that Germany was ‘no longer the land of thinkers and poets — it is a nation of business and battleships.’ His journalist, Robert Blatchford, wrote ever more vicious anti-German columns that reached a million and a half people a day. When Northcliffe bought The Times in 1908 he pledged never to in
terfere with the paper’s editorial independence, ‘Unless it failed to warn readers about Germany.’(44)

  In Britain, and to a lesser extent in Germany, the genre of spy and invasion novels also did much to change public perceptions. John Ramsden’s book, Don’t Mention The War, records no less than sixty such novels appearing in Britain between 1870–1914, over two-thirds of which were focused on Germany as the threat.(45) Upon the accession of George V to the throne, and at his personal invitation, Wilhelm II visited Britain again in 1911, ostensibly for the unveiling of Queen Victoria’s monument outside Buckingham Palace. Wilhelm had high hopes that he would have better relations with the new monarch than he had had with his father. This personal visit between Wilhelm II and George V passed off without incident, but later that year, before the relationship between the two nations could have time to blossom, Britain, France and Germany clashed again over foreign policy, this time at Agadir.

  The clash occurred when Germany used gun-boat diplomacy, insisting that Germany be compensated, in true European balance of power fashion, following France’s occupation of the territory of Fez in North Africa. Wilhelm II was using the same inept foreign policy posturing that had undone Napoleon III before the Franco-Prussian War. The crisis was only settled when Germany received a face-saving tract of the French Congo that was essentially worthless. As for Anglo-German relations, these had reached an impasse. When Britain told Germany to limit her Weltpolitik, suggesting that her aspirations should not grow proportionately to her population and economy, the German Chancellor, Bülow, described it succinctly by saying it was like a father saying to his son, ‘If only you would not grow, you troublesome youth, then I would not need to buy you longer trousers!’(46) With her new-found wealth and power, why should Germany not have a seat at the table with the great powers? Why should she be content to confine herself to Europe, when powers which Germany herself had now economically superseded continued to gorge themselves on ever more colonial possessions? What were the alternatives for Germany?

  To break her diplomatic isolation, Germany would have had to renounce the aim of naval parity with England, renounce the claim to more colonies (which had to be taken at the expense of others), reign in her ally Austria in her aspirations for greater territorial aggrandisement in the Balkans (rather than egging her on), and then disarm. That would have smacked not just of a climb down but of Germany, in her ever increasing wealth and power, accepting second rate status, and at a time when the other great powers — particularly France and Britain — were in economic decline. In short, it would have demanded a level of political restraint that fundamentally ran against the grain of the expansionist spirit of the age. Perhaps better diplomacy and a more gifted, less conflicted individual as head of state could have led to a different outcome, but in Wilhelm II, Germany was not blessed with an individual sufficiently capable of navigating Germany to a safe harbour through the troubled waters that lay ahead.

  cxvi The national flag of the German Reich would become the tricolour composed of the black and white of Prussia with the red of the towns of Hanseatic League.

  cxvii The franchise of the Great Reform Bill of 1867 in Britain did not come anywhere close to achieving the breadth of franchise given to the German people in 1871, and the British people would also have to wait a generation before the government attempted to give the social and welfare benefits enjoyed by German citizens.

  cxviii Max Weber, the great historian and sociologist coined the term Obrigkeitsstaat for Imperial Germany, a state in which a rational, intelligent bureaucracy governs, unencumbered by the whims of irrational mass public opinion!(3)

  cxix Bismarck had ruled the Reichstag from 1866–78 with the backing of National Liberal Party, which remained the largest party in the Reichstag and Prussian Landtag. However the party eventually split over divisions on the anti-socialist law but to an even greater extent because of Bismarck’s conversion from laissez-faire free trade to protectionism in 1879 — the Free Liberals forming their own party in 1884. From 1879 onwards Bismarck turned away from free trade and relied upon the Conservatives and the ‘Alliance of Steel and Rye’, a mixture of industrialists from the Ruhr and the East Elbian agrarian Junkers, who both favoured protectionism, a move that was mirrored across Europe with the abandonment of laissez-fair free trade policies in Austria in 1879, Sweden 1880, Belgium in 1884 and finally even in Great Britain in 1885.(6) From 1881–87 the parties in the Reichstag were strong enough to have opposed the Chancellor but remained divided against themselves. From 1887–90 a cartel of National Liberals and Conservatives again ruled in support of Bismarck’s policies.

  cxx The 2-million-strong Polish minority in the east remained doubly suspect both for being Catholic and Polish and not surprisingly fighting to maintain their language and separate identity. In the battle to create a national community, Prussian tolerance would make way for Germanisation. ‘Die Welt soll genesen am deutschen Wessen’ — ‘The world should benefit from Germanisation’ — not entirely dissimilar to the British concept of the ‘white man’s burden’ and the founding myths that turned places like New Zealand into ‘a better version of England’.

  cxxi Bismarck envisaged a system of tripartite contributions to social welfare from the state, employee and employers. The Reichstag struck out the first and increased the latter. Health insurance was introduced in 1883, followed by accident insurance in 1885 and pension insurance in 1889.

  cxxii As for Bismarck himself, during his final years in office, he spent ever more time on his country estates, at Varzin in Pomerania for much of the summer, and Friedrichsruh near Hamburg in the winter; walking and riding and keeping irregular hours. Bismarck gave the impression that his work was done, that he had done enough reconstructing and simply wanted to maintain the status quo but he also showed no signs of going gracefully, or being prepared to relinquish the reins of power. The problem was Germany now had a Chancellor and Foreign Minister (as did Prussia) who was more absent than present. He allowed the policy of the nation to drift into the doldrums, at a time when her wealth and economic might continued to grow. There were many who wanted Germany to take on a commensurate role in the world befitting her new-found economic might. Kaiser Wilhelm II was a man more in tune with that aspiration. Bismarck was a historical icon but he was not going to be the man to move Germany forwards. With a new Kaiser there were grand hopes for a new era in which Germany would build on the foundations that Bismarck had laid and not be content with admiring the foundations alone.

  cxxiii At the time of Wilhelm’s Silver Jubilee, he was only fifty-four years old, and there was every expectation he would celebrate his Golden, and even his Diamond Jubilee in 1938 (in fact he lived until 1941 dying at the age of eighty-one). Kaiser Wilhelm II died two weeks short of the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. He had congratulated Hitler upon his conquest of France, for achieving what Imperial Germany had failed to do. Yet he never returned to Germany, where the Nazis had no place for the idea of a restored monarchy. He died in self-imposed exile at Huis Doorn (in the Netherlands) in the neutral country that had given him sanctuary after the First World War. Its generosity would be rewarded with invasion and occupation by the Nazis and callous ingratitude from the Kaiser.

  cxxiv British forces were under the command of General Kitchener.

  cxxv Slavery had three phases: the initial phase of capture and transportation in Africa to holding stations, which could result in confinement in appalling conditions for up to eight months before a ship arrived to take them on the ‘middle passage’. The death rates on the initial stages are not recorded, unlike the death rates on the middle passage, which are meticulously documented in captain’s logs and diaries providing a figure of 1.8 million deaths during this stage — deaths typically occurred as a result of suicide, dysentery, malaria, dehydration and general abuse. Slaves were confined in coffin-sized spaces, shackled below decks, where they slept, defecated, vomited and performed all their bodily functi
ons. In bad weather they were confined below decks for days on end. Rape was also not uncommon. Alexander Falconbridge, an anti-slavery doctor wrote: ‘[the officers] are permitted to indulge their passions among them at pleasure and sometimes are guilty of such brutal excesses as disgrace human nature.’ When the slaves finally arrived at port, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, and parents from children were separated — in virtually all cases, never to see one another again.(5)

  cxxvi The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide defines genocide as, ‘… any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such; killing members of the group; causing serious bodily harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’ This definition did not exist prior to the Nazi crimes of the Second World War but no one in their right mind would fail to call the Holocaust genocide. The same clearly applies to all other crimes that fit this description no matter when they occurred.(6)