Kaiser Wilhelm II Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Kaiser Wilhelm II

  Christopher Clark is Professor in Modern European History at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. He is the author of The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia, 1728–1941 and Iron Kingdom: the Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947.

  Kaiser Wilhelm II

  A Life in Power

  CHRISTOPHER M. CLARK

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Pearson Education Limited 2000

  Published with new material in Penguin Books 2009

  Copyright © Christopher Clark, 2000, 2009

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192996-5

  To my father, Peter Dennis Clark

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  1 Childhood and Youth

  2 Taking Power

  3 Going It Alone

  4 Domestic Politics from Bülow to Bethmann

  5 Wilhelm II and Foreign Policy (1888–1911)

  6 Power and Publicity

  7 From Crisis to War (1909–14)

  8 War, Exile, Death (1914–41)

  Conclusion

  Notes

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the friends and colleagues whose advice helped to improve this book. John A. Thompson, a sharp-eyed critic and a generous friend, read the manuscript in its entirety and combed out many confusions. So did Brendan Simms, Jonathan Steinberg, Marcus Clausius and Emma Winter. The late Wolfgang Mommsen, a cherished visitor in Cambridge, gave useful advice and Christopher A. Bayly made stimulating suggestions. Special thanks are due to Professor John Röhl, whose groundbreaking research into the reign of the last German Kaiser remains the starting point for all work in this field. This book engages critically with many of the interpretations advanced in Röhl’s epic three-volume biography of Wilhelm II, but could never have been written without it. Simon Winder helped with the pictures and Bela Cunha copy-edited with her usual gusto. Nina Lübbren listened patiently and identified boring bits. Josef and Alexander provided distraction and happiness. None of the above bears any responsibility for the errors and infelicities that remain.

  List of Illustrations

  1 Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, 1887 (p. 26).

  2 Otto von Bismarck by the sculptor Hugo Lederer (p. 43).

  3 Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow and Baron von Mirbach (p. 127).

  4 Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, Gottlieb von Jagow and Arthur Zimmermann (p. 152).

  5 Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II (p. 195).

  6 Wilhelm II and Edward VII (p. 207).

  7 Alfred von Tirpitz (p. 216).

  8 Wilhelm II at Hoch-Königsburg Castle (p. 226).

  9 George V and Wilhelm II, 1913 (p. 254).

  10 Wilhelm II and Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg (p. 316).

  11 Wilhelm II at Cambrai, 1917 (p. 328).

  12 Paul von Hindenburg and Wilhelm II (p. 342).

  All images reproduced by permission of Ullstein Bild, except image 8, which is reproduced by permission of Topfoto.

  Preface

  The extent of the power wielded by the last German Kaiser has long been the subject of animated historical debate. Was the later Wilhelmine Empire governed through a system of ‘personal rule’; was it a ‘flesh and blood monarchy’, in which the character and preferences of the sovereign played a crucial role in shaping political outcomes? Or was power vested in ‘traditional oligarchies’ and ‘anonymous forces’ that relegated an inconsequential ‘shadow-Kaiser’ to the margins of the political process?1

  Much of the most interesting writing on these issues focused on the question of whether the term ‘personal rule’ could rightly be applied to all or part of Wilhelm’s reign. The debate over personal rule flared up in the early 1950s and flourished intermittently into the 1980s, fed by analogous disputes over the nature and distribution of power within the Nazi regime. It has now generated its own sophisticated meta-literature, in which conflicting viewpoints on the power and political impact of Wilhelm II are classified, compared and assessed.2

  This book does not seek to reopen the debate on personal rule. Useful as this controversy has been in connecting the scholarship on the reign with broader questions about the imperial polity, it has been dogged by an underlying uncertainty about definitions. Used as a catchphrase in Wilhelmine political polemic, personal rule meant different things to different people and has never acquired an agreed or stable meaning, a fact that has muddied the scholarly dispute over its applicability to Wilhelm II. Whereas most scholars who used the term agreed that it fitted some parts of his reign better than others, no consensus has been reached about when personal rule began and when it came to an end.3 It is striking that John Röhl, once the foremost exponent of personal rule, has in recent years abandoned the term in favour of the fuzzier concepts ‘kingship mechanism’ and ‘personal monarchy’.4

  This book focuses instead on the character and extent of the Kaiser’s power, his political goals and his success in achieving them, the mechanisms by which he projected authority and exercised influence, and the fluctuations in his authority across the span of his reign. It aims to tease out the different kinds of power Wilhelm could exercise in different domains, and the various constraints that he encountered in doing so. The imperial office, it will be argued, was no monolith, but rather a constellation of functions – political, ambassadorial, religious, military, cultural, symbolic – whose mutual relationship was dynamic and still largely unresolved when Wilhelm II came to the throne. The Kaiser was obliged to operate, moreover, within a political system of the greatest complexity, in which power relations were in constant flux. The office of Kaiser was armed with important executive prerogatives, but whether and how and with what degree of success he could exercise those powers depended on variables that were only partly or not at all under his control. His power as a political actor interacted in complex and often negative ways with his authority as a public figure – it is noteworthy that some of the most important recent work on the Kaiser
’s reign has shifted attention away from the sphere of high politics to Wilhelm’s presence in the vibrant print and visual culture of late imperial Germany.5 The book makes no pretence to the comprehensiveness of biography; it is a study of the Kaiser’s power. Although it draws on a number of unpublished sources, it does not claim to have made crucial new discoveries. It aims at synthesis and interpretation. Above all it asks the question: how much difference did it make that it was Wilhelm II who sat on the German imperial throne during the turbulent years between 1888 and 1918?

  1. Childhood and Youth

  Power in the family

  When Wilhelm II was born in January 1859, his grandfather had not yet ascended the Prussian throne. He would do so shortly before Wilhelm’s second birthday, in January 1861. Nearly three decades were to pass before the grandfather died at the age of ninety in March 1888. From an early age, then, Wilhelm was in a position to observe that his father, Friedrich Wilhelm, Crown Prince of Prussia, was not the only person who commanded respect. Above him there was another, greater father, a figure of almost mythical reputation with the gravitas and whiskers of a biblical patriarch. The grandfather was not only the ruler of a kingdom and (from 1871) the founder of an empire, but also the head of his household, a fact with far-reaching implications for the family life of his living descendants.1 In October 1886 (when he was twenty-seven years old), Wilhelm explained the problem to Herbert von Bismarck, son of the chancellor and a sometime friend and confidant:

  The prince […] said that the unprecedented circumstance of there being three adult generations in the ruling family made things difficult for his father: in every other case, in ruling and in other families, the father had the authority and the son was financially dependent upon him. But he [Prince Wilhelm] was not under his father’s authority, he received not a penny from his father; since everything derived from the head of the family, he was independent of his father […], that was of course unpleasant for his Imperial Highness [the crown prince].

  This awkward division of power between parent and grandparent was the single most influential fact of Wilhelm’s early life. The princes’ holidays, dress, military duties and representative functions were all subject to the ultimate authority of their grandfather King Wilhelm I. The princely tutor was an appointee and employee of the king whose presence in the household significantly diminished parental influence.2 In this sense, as the crown princess confided to her mother in the summer of 1864, her children were ‘public property’.3 After August 1865, when the king refused to permit Wilhelm and his siblings to join their parents on a holiday in England, the crown princess began to complain of increased interference by the king and queen in the life of the children.4

  It was perhaps inevitable that there should be friction between two generations who felt themselves equally responsible for the upbringing of a third, but the potential for conflict was greatly enhanced by the factional and political tensions that polarized the Hohenzollern court. Since the revolutionary upheavals of 1848–9, the court of Friedrich Wilhelm IV had been dominated by two opposed political factions, the western-oriented conservative-liberal party and the pro-Russian arch-conservatives. These two interests had intrigued against each other during the 1850s – notably during the Crimean War, when they supported diametrically opposed foreign policies – and they were still active when Wilhelm’s mother left England in 1858 to set up a household with her new husband in Berlin. The crown princess was particularly hostile to the ‘Russian set’, who distinguished themselves by their ‘ill-nature’, ‘jealousy’, ‘antipathy’ and not least by their ‘ill-feeling against the English and everything that is English’. ‘I do not care a straw for the good feeling of the Russian reactionary, pietistic set, and I despise their way of thinking with all my heart and hope to goodness that their day is over.’5

  Narrowly orthodox or evangelical in religion, reactionary in domestic politics and eastern-oriented in foreign affairs, the Russian set represented the cultural and political antipode of the crown princely couple and their entourage. Friedrich Wilhelm and Victoria were theologically liberal, politically progressive and their views on foreign policy were British-oriented and marked by distrust of Russia. The potential for friction was enhanced by the fact that Victoria, the more liberal of the two and the dominant personality in the partnership, was an intelligent, articulate, bossy and emotional woman with a strong sense of her superiority to those around her. Thanks to her observant eye, her outsider status and her keen interest in political power, Victoria’s correspondence with her mother, Queen Victoria, is among the best sources we possess on life at the Prussian court. Needless to say, these characteristics did not endear her to conservatives at the court, who found her forthrightness unbecoming in a woman and, in later years, accused her of subjugating her husband to her own political will.

  Initially the prominence of ‘Russians’ at court and in Berlin society was little more than an irritant to the crown prince and his wife. But things took a dramatic turn for the worse in 1862, when a protracted conflict between the crown and the liberal parliamentary majority in the Prussian parliament (Landtag) culminated in the appointment of the notoriously illiberal Otto von Bismarck as prime minister and the dissolution without elections of the Landtag. The problem was not simply that the ‘reactionary party’ now controlled the organs of government and was beginning to put into practice its ‘Russian’ agenda in foreign policy,6 but more importantly that the court itself lurched rightwards. The king no longer drifted between factions, as Friedrich Wilhelm IV had done during the 1850s, but aligned himself unequivocally with the reactionary interest. ‘The reactionary party gets stronger every day,’ Victoria wrote in July 1862, ‘and have the King now completely on their side and in their power.’ By the summer of that year, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm and his father had drifted so far apart politically that rational communication was virtually impossible; the slightest allusion to political matters, Victoria reported, ‘drives [the king] into a frenzy and excites all the opposition in his nature so that it is impossible to argue or reason with him’.7 For the crown prince and his wife, the sea-change in the political mood at court brought a painful awareness of isolation and impotence. ‘The feeling of humiliation is the hardest to bear,’ Victoria wrote in January 1863. ‘Nothing remains but silence as passive witnesses of the lamentable mistakes made by those we love and reverence.’8

  There was, of course, an alternative to silence, and the crown prince and his wife were not in fact entirely alone. Throughout Prussia a socially influential liberal movement continued to challenge the legitimacy of a government now ruling without parliament and in defiance of the constitution. On 5 June 1863, after the publication of new decrees curtailing the freedom of the press, the crown prince took, for the first time, a public stance against the new government. At a reception held in his honour by the city of Danzig, he dissociated himself from the Bismarck administration and expressed his regret at the recent provocative measures. The occasion was less momentous than it seemed at the time. Friedrich Wilhelm shrank from placing himself permanently at the head of the progressive movement. Indeed he even assured his father that he would refrain from protests of this kind in future.9

  However, for the personal lives of the crown prince and his wife, and, by extension, of their still-infant son, Wilhelm, the events of June 1863 were of lasting significance. They brought down upon the young couple the wrath of the prime minister, a hater of unique ingenuity and stamina who repeatedly intrigued against them and was to remain the dominant force in Prussian-German politics for the next thirty years. In the short term, Friedrich Wilhelm’s public gesture of opposition and Victoria’s outspoken personal support for her husband’s views further deepened the couple’s political and social isolation at court. ‘You cannot think how painful it is,’ wrote Victoria in July 1863, ‘to be continually surrounded by people who consider your very existence a misfortune and your sentiments evidence of lunacy!’10

  It
is only against this background that we can understand the animus generated by apparently minor conflicts over the training, education and representative duties of young Wilhelm and his brothers. The education of an absolutist or neo-absolutist monarch is always, as John Röhl has observed, ‘ipso facto a political issue of the highest importance’ because it is concerned with the future exercise of sovereign power.11 In the case of the Hohenzollern court, these tensions were complicated by the partisan allegiances that alienated the crown prince and his entourage from the reigning monarch and his prime minister. The resultant polarization was reflected in two opposing pedagogical ideals: one Anglophile, liberal-bourgeois and based upon the cultivation of civil virtues and social responsibility; the other old-Prussian, aristocratic and based upon the cultivation of military skills and discipline. This became apparent when ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ tutors had to be found for Prince Wilhelm. The first candidate selected by his parents as civilian tutor had to be dropped on account of his progressive political connections; the final choice fell upon Georg Ernst Hinzpeter, a man with close, if indirect, links to the ‘Crown Prince Party’, who requested and received exclusive authority over the princes’ education. He was to remain Wilhelm’s civilian tutor until his eighteenth year. It was Hinzpeter who set the tone of Wilhelm’s early education, establishing a demanding schedule of lessons in Latin, history, religion, mathematics and modern languages that began at six in the morning and ended at six in the evening (an hour later in winter) and was interspersed (on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons) with edifying visits to mines, workshops, factories and the homes of the labouring poor.