But how to get rid of Holstein, that was the question. Bismarck had been afraid to let him go because he would “blab in foreign parts” and Bülow had no wish to become a target for Holstein’s psychopathic hate and vengeance. He would stop at nothing; that everyone knew. Bülow thought it out with great care, and later his friends declared that the manoeuvre was his diplomatic masterpiece. On April 5th, the day that Bülow was due to address the Reichstag on the result of Algeciras, he fished Holstein’s three-month old resignation out of his desk and ordered Count Tschirschky to take it to the Sovereign. The Kaiser had been forewarned and was ready to sign it; but Holstein was not to know about it for twenty-four hours.
That afternoon Bülow suddenly fainted while making his speech and was carried home. The timing of this illness was so convenient from Bülow’s point of view that many people claimed it was deliberate. Not only did it relieve the Chancellor of the necessity of defending a bankrupt policy, but it spared him Holstein’s fury when a few days later he learned that his resignation had been accepted. Also, it put Holstein off the track. When Bülow recovered, he assured Holstein that he had had nothing to do with the matter; how could he have done? He was ill in bed. Obviously one of Holstein’s enemies had seized the moment of Bülow’s incapacity to persuade the Emperor to let him go. Then Bülow consoled him; even though Holstein had lost his official position, Bülow would continue to consult him, for how could the Imperial Chancellor do without his trusted friend?
Baron Holstein had not been feared for nothing. He was enraged by his dismissal and his whole being throbbed with the determination to destroy the person responsible for his downfall. Although his smothered hatred for the Emperor burst into new flame, he knew that William would not have taken the step of his own accord. Remarkably enough, he accepted Bülow’s plea of innocence, and began feverishly searching for the culprit. Who was it? Not Hamman, he was too humble to have access to the Emperor; not Tschirschky, he was too new at the Foreign Office. Someone highly placed, someone with influence, someone who hated him. When he learned that Prince Philip Eulenburg had lunched at the palace the day that the Emperor had countersigned his resignation, the search was over. Instantly, he declared that Eulenburg was the man he was after. Perhaps he really believed it; or perhaps he decided that the Emperor’s best friend was too perfect a victim to overlook.
Holstein had not seen Philip for years. Their friendship had come to an end because of Eulenburg’s stubborn loyalty to the Emperor and his repeated refusals to join Holstein in his intrigues to curtail “His Majesty’s arbitrary power” and give more authority to the Foreign Office. One day, when Eulenburg called on Holstein, the latter made his displeasure clear by sending word that he was “not at home.” This had ended the relationship. The paths of the two men did not cross again, even accidentally, for shortly afterwards Eulenburg resigned his ambassadorial post at Vienna on grounds of ill-health. Although Bülow persuaded him to remain on the Foreign Office list en disposition, he seldom visited the Wilhelmstrasse and took only a remote interest in the problems of the day.
Nevertheless Eulenburg remained close to the Emperor. Every year William invited him on his Baltic cruise, and scarcely an autumn passed without the Sovereign visiting Eulenburg’s estate at Liebenberg. Whenever Philip was in Berlin he lunched or dined at the palace; and he was always present at the Emperor’s annual shooting party at Rominten. “I can still see his pale face emerge from behind the red curtains of the gallery when he came to the tea-table of the Empress and sat down to entertain us with his store of literary and artistic reminiscences,” wrote a member of the household. “One could easily understand how the robust personality of the Emperor, so frank, so generous, so open-hearted, was attracted to the somewhat reserved, mysterious, gentle nature of this brilliant man…”[244] When Count Witte, the Russian Finance Minister, stopped at Rominten on his way back to St. Petersburg from the Far East, he carried away a picture of Eulenburg, suave and smiling, sitting with dignity in an imposing arm-chair, looking every inch an Emperor, while his actual Majesty perched on the arm, chattering and laughing.
Eulenburg had a love of beauty and a generosity of mind rare in Germany at this particular period. He sought nothing for himself and tried earnestly to give William wise and dispassionate advice. If anything, he was too high-minded, for the only times he threatened to bore the Kaiser was when he lectured him on the virtues of truth and nobility.
Holstein’s campaign to destroy Eulenburg was not only poisonous but instructive, for it throws a searching light on the characters of the men in charge of Germany’s destinies. The first indication received by Eulenburg that he had been marked down as a “victim” was on May 1st, 1906, when he received a letter from Baron Holstein which began: “My Phili — you needn’t take this beginning as a compliment, since nowadays to call a man ‘Phili’ means — well, nothing very flattering. You have now attained the object for which you have been intriguing for years — my retirement.” The letter went on to say that no man who valued his moral reputation would care to be seen with such a “despicable person” as Eulenburg.[245]
“Has he gone out of his senses?” Eulenburg wrote in his diary. Yet he knew at once the game that Holstein was playing. Homosexuality was widespread in Germany and Austria, and during the past few years there had been a number of scandals involving army officers and other highly placed persons; the Emperor Franz Joseph’s brother had been driven into exile by such accusations; so had the brother of Prince Philip Eulenburg. Sexual abnormality, despite its prevalence, was a criminal offence and could lead to prison; even worse, it was regarded as such a moral outrage that it spelled utter social ruin. As a result, it was the most damaging charge, short of murder, that one person could make against another, and on more than one occasion unscrupulous antagonists had tried to fasten it on innocent men.
Eulenburg regarded Holstein’s letter as “a matter of life and death.” “I wired instantly to Axel Varnbuler, who is exceedingly punctilious in affairs of honour,” he wrote in his diary, “and betook myself by the next train to Berlin, with the letter in my pocket. Varnbuler dispatched to Holstein the appropriate challenge: ‘Exchange of pistol shots until disablement or death.’
“I went to the Foreign Office to give information of the proceeding, as I am en disposition, and therefore under the Office. Bülow is still laid by, after his slight seizure on April 5th. Tschirschky is representing him. When I told Tschirschky about the challenge, he literally collapsed upon a chair. He said that this would be one of the world’s greatest scandals — for God’s sake and the Emperor’s couldn’t I withdraw the challenge? I said I couldn’t dream of doing that, and I went back to Varnbuler.”[246]
As no word was heard from Holstein on May 2nd, and the Foreign Office was anxious to avoid a scandal, they begged Eulenburg to give Holstein an opportunity to apologize. On May 3rd Holstein sent the following statement: “Prince Eulenburg having assured me, on his word of honour, that he had neither hand, act, nor part in my dismissal, and has been in no way concerned in any of the attacks made upon me by the Press, I hereby withdraw the offensive remarks made upon him in my letter.” But Eulenburg was not reassured. He knew Holstein too well to imagine that the matter would drop. “I cannot say that I consider Holstein’s attacks to be really disposed of. He will revenge himself in his wonted fashion,” he wrote gloomily.
The next act in the drama was disconcerting. For years Holstein had been a bitter enemy of Maximilian Harden, the radical editor of a scurrilous newspaper Zukunft, but suddenly the two men exchanged open letters of friendship. “What can such a pair be brewing?” wrote Eulenburg. “I regard this Holstein-Harden alliance as an ominous development.”
His forebodings were correct, for a few weeks later the paper began to refer to the “Liebenberg Round Table.” Eulenburg, it told its readers, was “the leader of a sinister and effeminate camarilla, which pushed through undesirable policies and encouraged the Emperor’s absolutism.” At present th
e camarilla was working to unseat Prince Bülow and to persuade the Kaiser to appoint a Chancellor more amenable to its views. “Now I am supposed to be the arch wire-puller, the ‘Chancellor-maker,’ the miscreant who is turning the Emperor into an absolutist. Really, the world is too crazy,” wrote the Prince.
Eulenburg hastened to see Bülow to assure him that the accusations were false and to ask him what he should do. The Chancellor urged him to leave Germany and remain away for some time. This was strange advice from a man who was in constant touch with Holstein and knew perfectly well that the latter’s vendetta sprang from the erroneous belief that Eulenburg had caused his dismissal; if anyone could have persuaded Holstein to call off his attack, it was Bülow; but the Chancellor did not lift a finger for his friend.
By this time the press campaign had petered out, but the Prince was still racked by fear and foreboding. His letters to his friends make pitiful reading. “The feeling that a fresh storm may break out fills me with uneasiness, because I am physically too reduced to be able to act with the necessary equanimity… I have never been among the strong characters who could take the bull by the horns… I have worked indefatigably and faithfully for King and Country — worked until my health gave way… but my reward has been mud-slinging and this hunt to the death… Now the poor hunted deer has had a shot through the heart and is cowering in the thicket. But his friends all cry: ‘Up with you! There’s no help for it. You must leap the ditches as you used to do.’”[247] Once again his forebodings proved correct. On April 27th, 1907, Zuhunfi came out with a blistering article revealing that three elderly A.D.C.s, all members of the Emperor’s entourage, were homosexuals. This was perfectly true, but it was not true that Eulenburg and Moltke were close friends of these men, as the paper alleged, and that all were members of the “Liebenberg Round Table.” Needless to say, the article caused a sensation, but no one dared to show it to the Emperor. A week or two passed before General von Hulscn-Haeseler, who hated Eulenburg, hit upon the happy idea of persuading the Crown Prince to undertake the task. “Never shall I forget the pained and horrified face of my father,” wrote young William, “who stared at me in dismay, when in the garden of the Marble Palace, I told him of the delinquencies of his near friends. The moral purity of the Kaiser was such that he could hardly conceive the possibility of such aberrations.”[248]
The Kaiser lost his head. Although for years he had refused to read the vituperative columns of Zukunft and had censured people for paying attention to its outrageous assertions, he suddenly was frightened that the mud might cling to himself. He demanded the resignation of the three A.D.C.s — Count Lynar and two brothers, the Counts Hohenhau — and also of Count Kuno Moltke. Although he did not believe for a moment that Eulenburg was guilty, he sent a military aide to demand why he was taking no steps to exculpate himself. He also sent an imperial rescript to Bülow emphasising his displeasure, and ending: “I therefore insist that Philip Eulenburg shall at once ask to be retired. If this accusation against him of unnatural vice be unfounded, let him give me a plain declaration to that effect and take immediate steps against Harden. If not, then I expect him to return the Order of the Black Eagle, and avoid a scandal by forthwith leaving the country and going to reside abroad.”
Eulenburg had no fight in him; although he was already taking lawyer’s advice, he resigned his position and sent back his decoration. “The loss of an old imperial friendship,” he wrote to Bülow, “was not the cruel deception which perhaps you expected it to be, since I know, only too well, the character of this pilot, who shouts ‘Abandon ship’ in every case long before it is necessary. I am still objective enough to realise that a monarch must be rid as quickly as possible of any friend who had got into the horrible position in which, thanks to the efforts of the Harden-Holstein clique, I find myself… I know myself to be entirely innocent — but I fear false witnesses, since Holstein would not stop at having to spend ten thousand marks if he could buy some really damaging evidence.”[249]
The Kaiser’s harsh treatment of his devoted friend is not creditable, but Bülow’s fawning acquiescence is nothing short of despicable since at this point he still believed in his innocence. “I was convinced,” he wrote in his memoirs, “that the accusations of unnatural practices brought against him were unfounded. His affectionate relations with wife and children, the deep and passionate love with which his charming and distinguished wife still clung to him, made such vile assertions appear monstrous.” Yet he did nothing to help his friend to whom he owed his whole public career; instead, he congratulated the Kaiser on his stand, writing that “in these painful circumstances we must see to it that the Crown is kept ex nexu, and completely removed from all connection with the affair.” This was tantamount to endorsing Eulenburg’s guilt.
Eulenburg and Count Moltke had lodged information with the Crown Prosecutor several weeks earlier, and asked him to institute proceedings against the Zukunft. If the Prosecutor had agreed there is no doubt but that both men would have been completely vindicated; but although the Prince was an ambassador en disposition and Count Moltke Commandant of Berlin, the Prosecutor declared that he was unable to grant the request as the public interest was not involved.[250] This is where Bülow could have intervened if he had wished, but the Chancellor had no intention of annoying his friend Holstein. Eulenburg’s only recourse, therefore, was to initiate a private lawsuit against Harden. His lawyers, however, advised him against going into open court, pointing out that Harden would produce false witnesses, and the wide publicity given to the accusations, no matter how the case ended, would prove fatal to his reputation.
Count Moltke, however, refused to heed professional advice and sued Harden for libel. The case proved even more disastrous than the lawyers had predicted. It opened in the Berlin Municipal Court on October 23rd, 1907, before a young inexperienced magistrate with a butcher and a milkman as his sheriffs. Harden was represented by the Crown-Solicitor of Munich, Herr Bernstein, a clever and unscrupulous advocate who seized the offensive and, without a shred of proof, set out to implicate Moltke and Eulenburg in homosexual orgies that had taken place ten years earlier. The inexperienced magistrate failed to keep Bernstein in order, allowed him to wander far outside his brief and to call witnesses who were not subject to cross-examination. Although the hearing became a judicial farce, it was reported all over the world; even the London Times gave its readers full coverage under the heading PRUSSIAN COURT SCANDALS.
From the first day Bernstein’s attack centred on the so-called Eulenburg “group.” Harden, said Bernstein, had printed his articles in order to destroy the pernicious political influence of a degenerate coterie. He then called the divorced wife of Count Moltke, a vindictive and half-mad woman, who told the court that Prince Eulenburg had gone down on his knees and begged her to give up her husband; when she asked Moltke what the Kaiser would say to a divorce he replied that the Kaiser only knew what he wanted him to hear (sensation), for the Eulenburg group had placed an impenetrable ring around him (great sensation). Bernstein then dwelt on the notorious activities of the three Counts, the members of the imperial entourage, mentioned in Zukunfi as perverts. Although, he said, he could not prove that either Moltke or Eulenburg had indulged in “unnatural vices” he hoped to show that they were better acquainted with the Counts, whose abnormal proclivities were beyond dispute, than they admitted. “The evidence was taken,” reported The Times correspondent, “of a former trooper of the Gardes du Corps Regiment with regard to disgusting orgies which he described as having taken place in 1896 at the Potsdam residence of Count Lynar, who was at that time a captain in the regiment. The witness thought that he recognised Count Kuno Moltke as one of those present at these orgies. He had also believed that he recognised Philip Eulenburg.”[251] Another witness told the court that he had been debauched at Count Lynar’s house ten years earlier by a gentleman who might have been Prince Eulenburg, but he could not be sure. The witnesses that Bernstein called were not allowed to be cross-exam
ined. He then was permitted to deliver a two-hour political attack on Eulenburg which obviously had come from the pen of Holstein. “I do not want to be King,” Eulenburg was reported as saying, “I prefer to be the maker of Kings.” Even The Times correspondent thought that Bernstein was going outside his brief. “It is strange that an indictment of this character — traversing some of the most important features of German home and foreign policy — should be delivered before a petty Court in which the bench is composed of a young judge with two lay assessors who were in this case a milkman and a butcher.”
Although Bernstein had been able to produce only the flimsiest gossip to support his arguments, on the last day of the case he made great play of the fact that Moltke and Eulenburg had resigned their positions as Commandant of Berlin and Ambassador en disposition. If the Emperor believed in their innocence, he asked, why had His Majesty requested them to take this step? The question was unanswerable, for it was impossible to explain that the Emperor had panicked, and in order to protect himself had decided to throw his friends to the wolves. Bernstein’s argument so impressed the bench that Harden was acquitted.
However, the outcome of the case was no longer important, for the public was unable to disentangle the truth from the lies, and simply fell back on the old adage “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” “Alas! I am still alive,” the Prince wrote to his cousin, Count August Eulenburg. “I am going through tortures. Those who condemn me for not bringing an action against Harden in the summer, but merely appealing to the Crown-Prosecutor, ought to understand now why I acted as I did… I agonise so deeply that I scarcely know if I shall ever stand upright again, though I declare a thousand times before God that my conscience is clear.”[252]
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