by Philipp Blom
The military ethos was an integral part of society, or of a certain kind of society. In order to have access to the highest echelons of the administration, the judiciary, and even industry, an ambitious young man did well to be one of the 120,000 Prussian reserve officers. If he was an academic and wanted to make even more effort for his future success, he would join a Burschenschaft or student fraternity, most of which were thoroughly reactionary, antisemitic and nationalist, and devoted to drinking, singing, more drinking - and duelling with sabres. These were duels without real cause. Honour was not at stake, but could be gained. The use of pistol or light épées (as was the custom in France) was disdained as ‘girls’ fighting’. German fraternity students were made of sterner stuff. They would strip to the waist and then, in a Mensur, a ritual regulated to the smallest minutiae, lay into each other with heavy sabres. Combattants were made to stand at regulation distance and were not allowed to move their feet, defensive swordplay was disdained and the fight was stopped by heavily padded umpires when the first nasty gash had appeared on a cheek, forehead or chin. Several times, student duellists’ noses were lopped off. To the fraternity students it was worth the risk: the scars on their faces would be certain passports to promotion by sympathetic superiors, who had themselves been in fraternities.
If student duels in the fraternities were a rite de passage, creating their own, strongly corporatist class with scars as their outward sign of manliness, courage and belonging, duelling for honour was also widespread. There was a national peculiarity, however. Only officers and university graduates - and, in many cases, non-Jews - were regarded as satisfaktionsfähig, that is, socially acceptable for a dispute about honour. Others, it was implied, simply had too little honour to worry about. A man’s honour was by necessity a virtue best symbolized by a uniform, and uniforms were omnipresent in public life. Officers and simple soldiers appeared in public in the Kaiser’s cloak; civil servants had uniforms for ceremonial occasions; businessmen and even academics often chose to wear the uniforms of their reserve grade; policemen were everywhere on the streets; members of the government wore uniform, and the Kaiser himself had a passion for elaborate military apparel and would travel long distances just to have the chance to wear his Admiral’s uniform, or one of the many officer’s outfits belonging to the foreign regiments of which he was an honorary member. He appeared on mugs, paintings and postcards now with an eagle helmet, now with a shining cuirass, now in the simple blue tunic of his guards’ regiment, but always with his right shoulder turned towards the viewer, his crippled left arm discreetly draped in a pocket or resting on his sabre.
Just how far the respect for uniforms and military bearing could go was shown on 16 October 1906, when an army captain in the capital commandeered a platoon of soldiers on their way to their barracks, put them all on a train and marched them into the town hall of Köpenick near Berlin. There he arrested the mayor and sent him to Berlin under escort, confiscated the town’s cash register, wrote out a receipt, ordered the soldiers to remain at their post, walked away, and was not seen again. When the culprit, one Friedrich Wilhelm Voigt, was arrested six weeks later, it turned out that he was not, nor had ever been a military officer. He had spent twenty-nine years of his life in prison for various instances of petty theft and fraud and had simply assembled his uniform (that of a captain in the Ist Foot Guards Regiment) from local pawn shops, after a fortnight’s search. Once glorified by epaulettes, the petty crook had become a god. Seeing an officer enter his bureau, the hapless mayor of Köpenick had jumped to his feet, stood with his fingers at his trouser seams and followed orders. When Voigt found the town hall’s police guard asleep he had reprimanded him sternly and in the rasping tone of a true officer, making the guard quake in his boots and promise to take more care in future. The soldiers had followed the unknown captain without so much as a raised eyebrow. Voigt had obviously enjoyed the entire spectacle: after having made off with more than 4,000 marks and dispatched his prisoners to Berlin by train, he could not resist going there himself, installing himself in a café opposite the police station and watching the prisoners with their guards arrive and the station erupt in general confusion.
Voigt was sentenced to four years in prison but was soon pardoned by the Kaiser himself, who had the grace to be hugely amused by the incident. The Hauptmann von Köpenick became a phenomenon. A biography appeared, thousands of postcards were printed, and after being released from prison the former trickster made a good living appearing at fairgrounds and in night-clubs, telling his story and signing photos of himself. He even went on a tour of Dresden, Vienna and Budapest. In London, the paying public could admire his wax figure wearing a captain’s uniform at Madame Tussaud’s.
If Voigt’s daring prank was sensationalized to Europe’s universal amusement, this was made possible by the already existing market for images of heroic virility and its chief icon, the Kaiser himself. No ruler before had exploited the media with such gusto, and no other monarch so assiduously projected an image of heroic masculinity as he. The aged Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef was usually shown uniformed but unarmed and with few medals, an image of authority due to his white whiskers and steady gaze; Edward VII, jolly and famously promiscuous, was hardly ever seen in uniform at all; while diminutive Nicholas II revelled in his love for tassels, gold braid and military decorations. Not even the Tsar, though, could rival the grand attitudes struck by his German cousin.
William the Sudden
A self-styled embodiment of martial masculinity, the impulsive ‘Wilhelm the Sudden’ would regularly drive his officials to despair with his uncontrollable urge towards grand, flamboyant rhetoric whenever he found himself in front of a crowd, as he frequently did. According to Christopher Clark, between 1897 and 1902 the Kaiser made at least 233 visits to at least 123 German towns, and would always seize the opportunity to make an impromptu speech, brushing aside the safe text prepared for him by his cabinet. Chancellor Bülow spent a good deal of his time editing overblown phrases out of his master’s utterances before they reached the press, only to find himself accused of having ‘left out the best bits’ by the Kaiser. These ‘best bits’, excised from the official versions made available to newspapers, usually came straight from the Emperor’s heart and said more about his personal mood than about political priorities. In 1890 a preoccupation with the dangers of socialism led him to remind recruits of a Guards regiment that they would have to be prepared ‘to fire on their fathers and brothers if he ordered them to do so’. In 1900, when seeing off the expeditionary force sent to subdue the Boxer Rebellion in China, he famously exhorted his soldiers to be like Huns: ‘there will be no mercy, prisoners will not be taken. Just as the Huns one thousand years ago ... made a name for themselves in which their greatness still resounds, so let the name of Germany be known in China in such a way that a Chinese will never again dare even look askance at a German.’ In 1907 he promised an audience that the German eagle would ‘spread its wings once again over Europe’, a phrase amended in the official version to ‘over the German Empire’.
The Kaiser’s gung-ho rhetoric did not reflect the thinking of German politicians, and their exasperation reached a peak in the wake of the Daily Telegraph affair, kicked off by an interview with Wilhelm which was published in Britain in 1908. The monarch had spent some weeks at Highcliffe Castle, which he had rented from its owner, Colonel Edward James Montague Stuart-Wortley. Glorying in the role of British country gentleman, His Majesty had given his host generous insights into the imperial mind during long fireside chats, and Stuart-Wortley had taken these remarks as the basis of an ‘interview’ he offered to the Daily Telegraph. The text had been cleared with the German chancellery, but this time it was allowed to appear - whether through negligence or calculation - including the Emperor’s customary offensive remarks, which on this occasion attacked Britain, much to the dismay of diplomats in London and Berlin who were engaged in a round of delicate and elaborate talks sounding out the possibility of avoidi
ng conflict over their countries’ naval programmes. The Kaiser’s clumsy bravado hit German-British relations like a bomb: ‘You English are mad, mad as March hares ... To be forever misjudged, to have my repeated offers of friendship weighed and scrutinized with jealous, mistrustful eyes, taxes my patience severely. I have said time after time that I am a friend of England, and your press ... bids the people of England refuse my proffered hand and insinuates that the other holds a dagger.’
It was not only the opposition that shook with rage. The Berlin courtier Baroness Spitzemberg noted in her diary: ‘This is the most shameful, the lowest, most indiscreet and the most worrying thing the Kaiser has ever been guilty of ... [He] ruins our political position and makes us the laughing stock of the world ... ! One can only clutch one’s head, uncertain about whether this is a madhouse!’ More public voices were hardly less chiding, particularly among elected politicians furious at seeing their efforts dashed yet again by their reckless ruler. Ernst Basserman, a national liberal politician, rose to his feet in the Reichstag to vent his ‘feeling of bottomless astonishment, of deep sadness’. The Social Democrat Paul Singer spoke of ‘legitimate rage, a deep shame amongst the German people’, and even the Prussian arch-conservative Ernst von Heydebrandt und der Lasa vented his feelings of ‘an accumulation of concern and resentment that has been gathering for years, even in circles whose loyalty to the Kaiser and Empire has hitherto been unquestioned’.
‘I wish I could put a padlock on his mouth for all occasions where speeches are made in public!’ the Kaiser’s exasperated mother had already exclaimed in 1892, but her son’s swaggering impetuosity was uncontrollable, despite the efforts of those closest to him, including his most trusted adviser, Count (later Prince) Philipp zu Eulenburg (1847-1921). The Count alone dared speak openly to his monarch, and the ministers of state would often address themselves to Eulenburg to make his imperious master see sense. Eulenburg was ‘Ambassador of the German Government to the Kaiser’, members of the Reichstag quipped, and he was more than content with this unofficial leverage. He was shrewd enough to know that he owed his extraordinary influence over the Emperor to the fact that he had always remained outside the realm of official power. ‘Whenever he came into our Potsdam home,’ the Kaiser noted, ‘it was like a flood of sunshine in the routine of life.’ Several times the Kaiser invited him to join his government, and the Prince always refused, politely and with gentle self-mockery, preferring instead the much more modest post of Prussian ambassador to Vienna and later Prussian representative in the German cities of Oldenburg, Stuttgart and Munich: ‘A poor barndoor fowl like me, cockered up into an eagle. I can hear myself cackling instead of clawing, and see myself laying an egg instead of sitting with flaming eyes on the gable of 76 Wilhelmstrasse [the foreign ministry]. The thing is out of the question.’
To the Kaiser, Prince ‘Phili’ Eulenburg, a man twelve years his senior whom he had met on a hunting visit to friends in 1886, was not one of those bustling and grovelling Berlin officials constantly telling him what he could not do and what the Reichstag would not pass or pay for. Rather, he was a pure, disinterested friend whose country house at Liebenberg was a secluded paradise. There the Kaiser enjoyed days spent out hunting, uncomplicated companionship, long conversations, and evenings with friends clustered around the piano, with the host playing his own compositions, and Wilhelm himself eagerly turning the pages. It was an atmosphere that was the absolute opposite of Wilhelm’s own upbringing at court and at the hands of his strict preceptor, Hintzpeter. At Liebenberg the Kaiser would relax in a circle of like-minded men with the Prince and the cultured Count Kuno von Moltke and could admire his friend Phili’s talent for telling amusing and sometimes risqué anecdotes, as well as for music and for literature - after all, Eulenburg was not only a career diplomat but also an ambitious composer whose Rosenlieder song cycle had sold 500,000 copies, as well as a playwright whose works were professionally produced. Every now and then, Eulenburg’s wife and children would be allowed to join in and the daughters would sing their father’s songs, then the men would be left alone once more.
Wilhelm was intoxicated by the Liebenberg atmosphere and by the Prince, whom he described to Hintzpeter as ‘my only bosom friend,’ and it appears that Eulenburg, too, was genuinely enthusiastic about the qualities of the personable but erratic young Crown Prince, as he wrote in a letter to Wilhelm, describing their friendship as ‘a radiance in my life’. Many observers commented on this close relationship. Returning from the peace negotiations after the Russo-Japanese War, former Russian prime minister Sergei Witte paid the Emperor a visit at the country estate of Rominten. He was met at the train by Prince Eulenburg and spent the night with the imperial family. During the evening’s conversation around the fire, Witte noted, ‘I was particularly struck by the Emperor’s attitude toward Prince Eulenburg. He sat on the arm of the prince’s chair, his right hand on Eulenburg’s shoulder, almost as if he were putting his arm around him.’
So admiring was Wilhelm of his older friend that he treated him with a consideration not shown to anyone else. An inveterate and crude practical joker (the King of Bulgaria once departed from Berlin ‘white with hatred’ after the Kaiser had jocularly slapped him on the bottom in public), Wilhelm would often amuse himself on his Baltic cruises by summoning all guests for morning gymnastics on deck and then giving a well-judged push to one of the generals puffing on their hands and knees so as to enjoy the hilarity as they collapsed in a heap. But never Eulenburg. ‘The Emperor has never touched me,’ the Prince stated simply, ‘he knows I would not suffer it.’
If Eulenburg’s tempering influence was largely positive and helped steer the Kaiser away from some of his more disastrous ideas, it is also true that the Prince exploited his power and was not above mounting elaborate intrigues to ensure that a candidate he approved of was appointed to an important post. On one occasion, Friedrich von Holstein, the éminence grise of the foreign ministry and a long-time ally, requested that Eulenburg ask the Russian ambassador to Bavaria if he would ask the Tsar to recommend a particular diplomat as German ambassador to St Petersburg to his cousin the Kaiser. Eulenburg then earnestly counselled his monarch that it would be a grave insult to go against the personal and spontaneously expressed wish of Nicholas II, and the appointment was duly made.
Phili’s Fall
Eulenburg had always avoided the exposure of government in order to retain a steady and all the more pervasive influence. Eventually, however, his considerable power antagonized even his closest allies, who mounted their own intrigue to rid themselves of him, a campaign that began with private insults but soon spiralled into the biggest scandal the Kaiser’s Germany had ever seen. The trigger for this chain of events was a resignation letter meant as a sign of hurt pride, but not to be taken seriously. The man who had written it was Eulenburg’s ally, Friedrich von Holstein (1837-1909), first councillor to the foreign ministry at Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse, known to his enemies as the ‘monster of the labyrinth’, who had effectively been running much of the country’s foreign policy (and been responsible for some of its disastrous failures) from the anonymity of his wood-panelled office. Like Eulenburg he was suspicious of official power and had repeatedly refused promotion, arguing that the social obligations and diplomatic receptions attached to a high position would be a waste of time. A former protégé of Bismarck and reclusive to the point of ducking out of the back door of his office whenever the Kaiser visited the ministry, he preferred quietly working in his office, twelve hours a day every weekday, surrounded by silent messengers who entered, bowed, left their paper on his desk and left without saying a word. He did not accept invitations to fashionable houses; he lived alone; he even dined alone, in a room kept for him at the Borchardt restaurant, which he entered through a side entrance after a short walk from the office. Chancellors and foreign secretaries had succeeded one another in the limelight, but his work and quiet, iron grip on policy remained the same.
For all his dedi
cation and ability, Holstein was a notoriously touchy man, quick to take offence and very slow to forgive even the smallest lack of respect towards him, even on the part of his superiors, whom he would regularly frighten by threatening to resign if anyone opposed his opinions. His vindictiveness and tantrums were tolerated, as Count Eulenburg noted: ‘Holstein’s great talents [were considered] to be indispensable. No one could replace his understanding of complex questions of international importance …In the Emperor’s and the Government’s interests, he had to be humoured, as one humours a bad-tempered, erratic, positively dangerous sporting dog for the sake of his good nose.’
In 1906 the expensive luxury of an uncontrollable and obscure but brilliant presence at the heart of the foreign ministry seemed an indulgence too far in the eyes of the new state secretary there, Heinrich von Tschirschky. Holstein had been involved in Germany’s latest foreign policy disaster, the 1905 Morocco crisis which had risked an unnecessary and profitless war with France and Britain. Now his superior, von Tschirschky decided to put the monster of the labyrinth on a tighter leash. Holstein reacted as he had often done before: he submitted his resignation. This time, however, he had overplayed his hand. Chancellor Bülow, his long-term political ally, forwarded the resignation to the Kaiser, with a recommendation to accept. After decades in the diplomatic service, Holstein was out of a job, and fuming.
Who could have plotted against him? Who could be brazen enough to attack the brain of the foreign ministry? Holstein let his friends and enemies pass before his mind’s eye. Bülow, he calculated, was too loyal, too old an ally to betray him. On the very day of the Kaiser’s signing his resignation, however, Eulenburg had lunched at the imperial palace. It was his inscrutable, nefarious toady who had poisoned Wilhelm’s mind, Holstein decided in a rare but comprehensive misjudgement of the political situation. Eulenburg had the Emperor’s ear, Eulenburg had worked against him; Eulenburg must be destroyed.