The War that Ended Peace
Page 12
It did not help that German policy oscillated in those years between 1890 and 1897 between attempts to win over either Russia or Britain or that German leaders veered back and forth from blandishments and threats. On particular issues, moreover, German policies were too often incoherent. In 1894 Caprivi told the German ambassador in London that the Solomon Islands were of crucial importance to Germany; two months later, Berlin had lost interest.7 The British were not the only Europeans to find German policies a mystery. It also did not help that the Kaiser, who fancied himself a master diplomat, intervened with increasing frequency and often with disastrous effects. While there is still some dispute about the origins of the Kruger telegram, which he dispatched in 1896 to show support for the Transvaal in the Boer republic’s struggle against Britain, it seems to have been the result of an attempt on the part of his government to prevent him from doing anything worse. (Wilhelm had initially suggested, among other things, establishing a German protectorate over the Transvaal and sending German troops to Africa, which would have a challenging task, given the dominance of British sea power at the time.)8
In 1897 German policy and governance took a decisive turn which was to push Germany further along the path towards confrontation with Britain. Wilhelm, with the support of Eulenburg and other leading conservatives, decided that the time had come to put his own men into key positions in the German government. Among other changes, he brought back Alfred von Tirpitz, an admiral from the German China squadron, to be his Minister of the Navy and so, as we shall see, set in motion the Anglo-German naval race. And Bernhard von Bülow, the German ambassador in Rome, was summoned to be Foreign Secretary. His impact on German policy was perhaps less dramatic than that of Tirpitz, but he also played a part in the steps that led from peace to war.
Bülow, the man who was supposed to solve Germany’s international problems, was an amusing, charming, cultivated, and clever career diplomat. He was also intensely ambitious and, like his new master, Wilhelm, lazy. ‘He would be quite a fellow’, Bülow’s brother once said, ‘if his character could only attain the height of his personality.’9 Although the family came originally from Denmark, his father had become the new Germany’s Foreign Secretary in 1873, working loyally as the great Bismarck’s subordinate. Bismarck took a fancy to the son and Bernhard moved steadily upwards in the diplomatic service, cutting a swathe through Europe’s capitals and making along the way a name for himself as an inveterate ladies’ man. He met his match in his wife, who was the daughter of a leading family in Rome. Although she was married at the time, she divorced her husband, also a German diplomat, and married Bülow, devoting herself to furthering his career.
Over the years, Bülow had gained a deserved reputation among his colleagues for being devious, untrustworthy and slippery as an eel, said Holstein, who initially considered him a friend. ‘Bernhard von Bülow’, wrote Holstein in his diary, ‘is clean-shaven and pasty, with a shifty look and an almost perpetual smile. Intellectually plausible rather than penetrating. He has no ideas in reserve with which to meet all contingencies, but appropriates other people’s ideas and skilfully retails them without acknowledging the source.’10 Bülow was both adept at making people feel they had said something clever and at giving the impression that he was sharing important information with them. ‘Bernhard makes a secret of everything’, his mother-in-law said. ‘He takes you by the arm, leads you to the window and says: Don’t say anything, but there’s a little dog down there who’s pissing.’11 He was like a cat, said a woman who knew him, who caught mice by putting out their favourite cheese.12
From 1897 onwards he turned all his attention to catching his new master. Wilhelm, Bülow assured him repeatedly, was ‘brilliant’, ‘splendid’, ‘completely accurate’, and always said the right thing. It is very difficult to handle the British and requires infinite skill, he told the Kaiser in 1900: ‘But just as the Hohenzollern eagle wiped the two-headed Austrian eagle off the field and clipped the wings of the Gallic cock, so with God’s help and Your Majesty’s strength and wisdom, it will also deal with the English leopard.’13 Just to reinforce the message, he repeatedly sent fulsome praise of the Kaiser to Eulenburg, no doubt in the knowledge that it would be shown to Wilhelm. ‘Of all the great kings’, Bülow wrote shortly after his appointment, ‘he is by far the most significant Hohenzollern who has ever lived.’14 He would, he assured the Kaiser himself, be his ‘tool’ and enable him to assert his personal rule over Germany. In 1900 a grateful Wilhelm made him Chancellor.
In the first years, Bülow managed the Kaiser with considerable success. He sent short memoranda spiced up with bits of gossip, avoided formal meetings, where Wilhelm would get bored, and made a habit of going for a walk with him every morning. The von Bülows had Wilhelm to lunch and dinner and kept him entertained. Nevertheless, Bernhard the Obliging, as one of his critics called him, was prepared to disregard or modify the Kaiser’s wilder policies where he could, especially since the Kaiser often forgot what he had said in the heat of the moment. Nor did Bülow really want to carry out the coup d’état against the German parliamentary institutions which the Kaiser so wished for. What he wanted to do was manage the German people as well as their ruler and, as much as possible, bridge their differences. His policy, then and when he later became Chancellor, was one strongly promoted by Wilhelm and his conservative advisers of bringing together German nationalist and conservative forces in support of the crown and at the same time undermining the growing socialist movement and the strong regional feelings, in the south for example, which had never really accepted Prussian rule.
Sammlungspolitik, as it was known, needed a core organising principle and this was to be pride in Germany. The government, Bülow believed, must adopt ‘a courageous and generous policy that knows how to uphold the joy in the present character of [our] national life, a policy that mobilizes national energies, a policy attracting the numerous and ever-growing Mittelstand [middle class]’.15 An active foreign policy was clearly crucial in doing this. The fuss over Samoa, Bülow said revealingly, ‘has absolutely no material, but an ideal and patriotic interest for us’. And he gave orders that German newspapers were to treat the issue in such a way as ‘strengthens the trust in our foreign policy internally’.16 His key strategy in foreign affairs was to manoeuvre to ensure that Germany continued to rise up the table of world powers. That might well mean stirring up conflict among the other nations. In 1895 he had told Eulenburg: ‘I consider an Anglo-Russian collision not as a tragedy but as “an aim most fervently to be desired”.’17 Let the two of them exhaust themselves while Germany quietly grew stronger.
As far as specific policies went, Bülow believed in maintaining the Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary and Italy and was privately cool on the idea of an agreement with Britain. Much better for Germany, he felt, to remain neutral between Britain and Russia in their continuing conflict. ‘We must hold ourselves independent between the two’, he wrote, ‘and be the tongue on the balance, not the pendulum oscillating to and fro.’18 If he inclined to either side, it was probably towards Russia, which he felt in the longer run was likely to be the stronger of the two powers. As for Britain, he held that sooner or later it would realise that it had to be on friendly terms with Germany because of British enmity with both Russia and France. It never seems to have occurred to him that the British might come up with other solutions to their isolation.
In directing Germany’s foreign policy he had the support, at least initially, of one of the Foreign Ministry’s cleverest, most powerful, and strangest figures, Friedrich von Holstein of the Political Division. Eulenburg called Holstein ‘the Monster of the Labyrinth’ and the name has stuck. The epithet was unfair because Holstein was no monster but a highly intelligent and dedicated servant of the German state who did his best to further its interests internationally. Like all nicknames, though, it had an element of truth. He was secretive and saw conspiracies everywhere. Bismarck’s son Herbert described him as having ‘an almost
pathological delusion of persecution’.19 While Holstein could be cruel and cutting to others, he was himself highly sensitive. He lived extremely simply in three small and unpretentious rooms and, apart from target shooting, seemed to have had no other interests beyond his work. He rarely went out in society and did his best to avoid meeting the Kaiser, of whom he increasingly disapproved. When the Kaiser tried to drop by the Wilhelmstrasse to meet Holstein, the latter disappeared on a long walk.20 When the two men finally met in 1904 at a large dinner, it is said that they talked about duck hunting.21
Holstein always refused the highest offices within the Wilhelm-strasse, preferring to be the power behind the scenes, keeping track of the reports coming in and out, spinning his intrigues and rewarding friends and punishing his enemies. His office adjoined that of the Foreign Secretary and he developed the habit of wandering in through the door whenever he pleased. Although he had been close to Bismarck, who relied heavily upon him, he fell out with the old Chancellor, his son, and his supporters primarily over the issue of Russia. Holstein opposed the Reinsurance Treaty and the very idea that Germany and Russia could build a friendship. Perhaps because he had thoroughly disliked his time as a young diplomat in St Petersburg, then the capital of Russia, his hatred and fear of Russia was one of the few consistent strands in his foreign policy.22 In time he and Bülow would part company over the same issue.
In his first speech to the Reichstag, in December 1897, Bülow laid out his vision for Germany’s foreign policy with particular reference to what looked like the coming partition of China. His speech was calculated to appeal to a wide swathe of German opinion. ‘We must demand that the German missionary and the German entrepreneur, German goods, the German flag and German ships in China are just as respected as those of other powers.’ Germany was willing to respect the interests of other powers in Asia as long as its own were respected in turn. ‘In a word: we don’t want to put anyone in the shadow, but we too demand our place in the sun.’ The world must recognise, he went on, that the old order had changed: ‘The times when the German left the earth to one of his neighbours, the sea to the other, and reserved for himself the heavens were pure doctrine reigns – these times are over.’23 (Bülow’s speech was very well received; its phrases, said the Württemburg representative in Berlin, ‘have already become almost proverbial and are on everyone’s lips’.24) Two years later, again in a speech to the Reichstag, Bülow used the term Weltpolitik for the first time. Although today, curiously enough, it often translates as ‘environmental policy’, in those days it meant a global or world policy, and one, moreover, which many outside Germany looked at with the deepest suspicion. Allied to it was the equally slippery notion of Weltmachtstellung, or ‘world power’.
The terms reflected the widespread notion among patriotic Germans that the country’s remarkable economic progress, the rapid spread of German investment and trade around the world, and Germany’s advances in such areas as science ought to be matched by an increase in its standing in the world. Other nations must recognise Germany’s achievements and its changed position. For liberals this meant Germany providing moral leadership. As one of them wrote wistfully from the vantage point of the 1940s: ‘My thoughts always wander back to the time when [we] co-operated in that fine effort: work for Greater Germany, peaceful expansion and cultural activities in the Near East … A peaceful Germany, great, honoured and respected.’25 For right-wing nationalists, though, and that included the Kaiser and his closest advisers as well as the numerous members of patriotic societies, it meant rather political and military power and, if necessary, a struggle against other powers.
In those years while the new Kaiser and Germany were feeling their strength, an elderly history professor was attracting packed audiences at his lectures at the University of Berlin. Heinrich von Treitschke was one of the intellectual fathers of the new German nationalism with its longing for a place in the sun. Through his lectures and writings, which included a very popular multi-volume history of Germany, he influenced a whole generation of Germany’s leaders to take pride in the great German past and in the extraordinary achievements of Prussia and the Prussian army in building the German state. For Treitschke patriotism was the highest of all values and war was not only a necessary part of human history but a noble and elevating one. If only Germany seized its opportunities, it would rise, as it deserved, to world dominance.26 He was, said Bülow, whose favourite writer he was, the ‘prophet of the national idea’.27 When Helmuth von Moltke, the future chief of the German general staff, read Treitschke’s history as a young man he was ‘captivated’ and wrote later to his wife that ‘a spirit of patriotism and love of the German Fatherland drifts through the whole work, without violating historical truth; it is superb’.28 The Kaiser was surprisingly lukewarm; although he liked the general drift of Treitschke’s writings, the historian did not praise the Hohenzollerns highly enough.29
What Weltpolitik actually meant in terms of concrete policies was another matter. As Field Marshal Count von Waldersee, who commanded the European forces suppressing the Boxer Rebellion, wrote in his diary when the idea first started to circulate widely: ‘We are supposed to pursue Weltpolitik. If I only knew what that is supposed to be; for the time being it is nothing but a slogan.’30 It did seem, though, to imply that Germany acquire its fair share of colonies. Treitschke certainly argued so. ‘All nations in history’, he said in his lectures, ‘felt the urge to impress the stamp of their authority on barbaric countries while they felt strong enough to do so.’ And Germany was now strong enough; its high birth rate was evidence of German vitality. Yet Germany was cutting a poor figure by comparison with Britain and other empires: ‘It is therefore a vital question for the nation to show colonial drive.’31
Germans such as Treitschke were by no means alone in thinking that colonies were a good thing. An assumption widely held at the time in Europe was that colonies brought tangible wealth and the intangible benefits of prestige to their owners. And the depression in agricultural prices and the cycle of business slumps which lasted from 1873 to 1895 made German political and business leaders, like their counterparts elsewhere, acutely aware of the need to export and to secure foreign markets. Critics of empire could point, and did, to the awkward fact that colonies often cost much more to manage and defend than they ever brought in or that investment, trade and emigration tended to flow to parts of the world such as the United States, Russia, and Latin American which were not colonies. Caprivi, for one, thought that Germany’s natural markets were in central Europe. Belief, as so often, was not to be shaken by inconvenient evidence. There was something so exciting in looking at a map and seeing all the coloured pieces that belonged to one’s nation. Surely territory and population, no matter how poor or how scattered, added up to power in the world. And, as the then British Foreign Secretary, Lord Rosebery, put it in 1893, acquiring new colonies was ‘pegging out claims for the future’.32
In Germany the question of colonies was a sensitive one. Here was a powerful country, one of the most powerful in the world, yet it did not have its India or its Algeria. True, Germany had scooped up some odds and ends in Africa and the Pacific, but its empire was insignificant beside those of France and Britain. Even little bourgeois Belgium had the immense Congo. The need to catch up and look like a proper great power increasingly preoccupied Germans. In both the Wilhelmstrasse and the military imperial ambitions found strong support. As the head of the Colonial Division in the Foreign Ministry was noting as early as 1890, ‘No government, no Reichstag, would be in the position of giving up colonies without humiliating itself before Germany and Europe. Nowadays a colonial policy has supporters in all parts of the nation …’33 Among the general public, the Pan-German League and the Colonial Society may not have had all that many members but they made up for it with the noise and vehemence of their demands.
There were sceptics too, of course, on both the left and the right, who pointed to the expense of colonies and the limited returns
they so frequently produced. The great Bismarck himself had never been much interested in colonies (or in a big navy to protect them). As he said in 1888 to an explorer who was trying to interest him in Africa: ‘“My map of Africa lies here in Europe. Here lies Russia, and” – pointing to the left – “here lies France, and we are right in the middle; this is my map of Africa.”’34 His successor, Caprivi, took much the same attitude: ‘The less Africa the better for us!’35
While Bülow had not initially been an enthusiast for colonies, he rapidly came round to include them as part of his vision. In his speech to the Reichstag in December 1899, he threw out a challenge: ‘We cannot permit any foreign power, any foreign Jupiter, to tell us: “What is to be done? The world is already partitioned.”’ He added an ominous prophecy: ‘In the coming century, Germany will either be the hammer or the anvil.’36 A tricky question was where these colonies were to come from since so much of the world was already divided up among other powers. The decaying Ottoman Empire was one possibility and so Germany started to look into building railways and lending money to the Ottoman government. In 1898 the Kaiser made an extended visit to the Middle East and, carried away by the moment, gave a dramatic speech in Damascus: ‘May the Sultan and his 300 million Muslim subjects scattered across the earth, who venerate him as their Caliph, be assured that the German Kaiser will be their friend for all time.’37 China, another declining empire, also looked promising and the seizure of the port of Tsingtao (Qingdao) at Kiachow (Jiaozhou) Bay and other concessions in the Shantung peninsula appeared a good first step. There was also a bizarre attempt by German colonial enthusiasts, acting with the approval of Tirpitz, to secretly buy up land in one of the Danish Virgin Islands in the Caribbean until Germans held a majority share. At this point the German government was to step in and buy the whole island from Denmark for a naval base. Wilhelm fortunately opposed the plan, which would have embroiled Germany in a completely unnecessary dispute with the United States and quite probably Britain as well.38