Having initially expressed support for the bill, Wilhelm now panicked. On Eulenburg’s advice, and under pressure from the anti-Catholic finance minister Johannes Miquel, he invited himself for beer at Zedlitz’s residence on 23 January and turned up with a posse of dignitaries from the Cartel parties to announce that he would not accept any school bill that did not command the support of the Conservatives and the National Liberals. A few weeks later, however, he gave a speech before the Brandenburg Provincial Assembly that called for an end to ‘grumbling’ and was widely misconstrued as a defence of the Zedlitz bill.40 On 17 March 1892, after a tense meeting of the Crown Council, at which Wilhelm brusquely insisted on a compromise that would meet liberal objections, Zedlitz resigned his post. Caprivi felt that his policy had been publicly disavowed and submitted his own resignation. In desperation, Wilhelm tried to hold on to Zedlitz by offering to approve the school bill after all, but to no avail. Caprivi’s withdrawal was a more serious blow. Wilhelm initially refused to accept his resignation: ‘I would not dream of it,’ he wrote in reply to the chancellor’s letter of notice. ‘It is not nice to drive the cart into the mud and leave the Kaiser sitting in it.’41 Caprivi eventually agreed to remain chancellor while handing the minister presidency of Prussia to the conservative Botho von Eulenburg.
Wilhelm’s irresolution under pressure did not escape the notice of contemporaries. In his letter of resignation, Caprivi explained that he was leaving office because he felt that he was unable ‘personally to rely on [the Kaiser’s] inestimable confidence’.42 Others commented during the crisis on the difficulty of guessing which side the Kaiser would take.43 In far-off Altona, the clerical ultra and sometime Kaiserfavourite General Waldersee, still sulking after his dismissal in 1891 as chief of the General Staff, ruminated on Wilhelm’s ‘vacillation and contradictions’: ‘the impression is conveyed that he speaks with a double tongue’.44 Wilhelm seems to have found his own position extremely onerous. He was suffering at the time from the effects of an ear infection and the strain of maintaining a coherent position in the face of conflicting commitments soon began to tell on his physical and emotional health. In a letter of 10 March to Philipp Eulenburg, he wrote:
Am very wretched […] and must abstain from work. Condition caused by strain and over-exertion. Fever abated. But still great lassitude. Shall perhaps when better, have to get away and take a change of air. Therefore all politics, domestic and foreign, are for the moment out of my thoughts.45
The shock of Caprivi’s resignation seems to have triggered a nervous collapse lasting some two weeks.46
It would be simplistic, of course, to ascribe Wilhelm’s zig-zag course solely to his personal indecisiveness, for the schools law crisis also exposed the fissured character of the German political culture. Neither can Wilhelm be blamed for venturing on to the minefield of the schools question, since it was the Centre and subsequently the chancellor himself who had insisted on concessions in this area. It may be that by handling Zedlitz more tactfully he could have avoided the minister’s resignation and secured the compromise bill he wanted. It was certainly an error on Wilhelm’s part – and one he repeatedly committed throughout the 1890s – to identify himself so closely with specific political positions, especially when these changed, of necessity, from one week to the next. As the schools law crisis showed, the integrative role Wilhelm dreamed of performing for the German polity was not reconcilable with daily forays into politics. A Kaiser who stood at the apex of the nation had to be a Kaiser above, and therefore outside, politics. But therein lay the rub: to stand outside of politics would require that Wilhelm renounce his consuming ambition, the exercise of personal power.
Army bill (1893)
With the school bill crisis behind them, Wilhelm and Caprivi turned to the task of getting the new army bill drawn up and passed through the Reichstag. As preparations for the army bill progressed, Wilhelm showed signs of having learned some of the lessons of the schools fiasco: during his annual summer holiday in the Baltic he spoke with Eulenburg of the need to prepare the public for the bill through a press campaign in support of increased military expenditure.47 In the same month, Caprivi appointed Major August Keim to coordinate propaganda for the bill. It was a striking break with the chancellor’s reserved handling of publicity hitherto. With its fund-raising drives and mass meetings attended by civil servants and nationally minded professors, Keim’s campaign anticipated (in character if not in scale) the highly effective naval agitation of the later 1890s.48 The chief obstacle to success was still the Centre Party. Centre moderates declared their support for the bill early on, but the party’s agrarian wing refused to come out of opposition. Once again, it was the prospect of religious concessions that helped to bring the party together in support of the bill; these were discussed at a meeting between the emperor and the archbishop of Breslau, Georg Cardinal von Kopp, one of a group of elite ‘enlightened Catholics’ with whom Wilhelm was on good terms.49
Even as these arrangements were put in place, however, Wilhelm was contemplating the possibility that they would not suffice to secure the bill’s passage. As early as July 1892 he spoke ominously of ‘formally placing responsibility [for the matter] in the hands of the people’, i.e. dissolving the Reichstag.50 In January 1893 Wilhelm assured the commanding generals of the Prussian army that he would ‘get the bill through, whatever the cost. What does this civilian rabble know of military matters? […] I will chase this half-mad Reichstag to the devil if it opposes me.’51 It should be noted in this context that conflict over the military was virtually pre-programmed into German politics by the imperial constitution, which left open the question of who controlled military expenditure. The army was, in theory, at once a royal and a parliamentary institution. The constitution stipulated on one hand (Art. 63) that ‘the Emperor determines the effective strength, the division and the arrangement of the contingents of the Reich army’, and on the other (Art. 60) that ‘the effective strength of the army in peace will be determined by legislation of the Reichstag’.52 Thanks in part to this ‘avoided decision’ in the empire’s legal fabric, the question of control over military spending was a source of recurrent conflict between the executive and the legislature. Of the four Reichstag dissolutions decreed during the life of the empire (1878, 1887, 1893, 1907), three occurred for reasons related to the control of military expenditure.53
In the event, the support acquired through Keim’s campaign and the machinations of Wilhelm and Caprivi were not sufficient, and the Reichstag was promptly dissolved on 6 May 1893. The dissolution was a success in the sense that the new Reichstag did pass the army bill, but it also demonstrated the government’s vulnerability. The pre-1890 Cartel majority was not reinstated, and the new parliament contained more socialist deputies than the old. The bill could be passed only in a heavily modified version proposed by the Centre deputy Georg von Huene, and depended ultimately for its success upon the votes of an incongruous array of oppositional splinter factions: Poles, Alsatians and Hanoverian Guelphs.
The struggle over the army bill was an important milestone on Wilhelm’s road to a more uncompromising attitude. Two courses of action dominated his political thinking in the mid-1890s: the integration of a liberal–clerical– conservative bloc through a campaign against the enemy on the left (Social Democracy) and an all-out break with the constitution of the German empire, should it become impossible for the government to work under the existing arrangements. We will examine these two policy options in turn.
The failure of negative integration
In July 1894 Wilhelm ordered Caprivi to prepare legislation providing the state with new tools for the suppression of Social Democracy, including the power to exile Social Democrat agitators to the countryside. This move has been portrayed in some accounts as a reversal of the labour-friendly social policy of the early 1890s and a sign of the insincerity of Wilhelm’s commitment to his own programme.54 In fact, however, drastic action against the socialists was quite consistent
with the intentions underlying the labour programme, whose objective had always been to immunize ‘sound’ elements of the working class against socialism.55 The election results of 1893, together with new waves of strikes in the Saar region and the Rhineland, persuaded Wilhelm that the policy of conciliation was not working. Under these circumstances, he hoped that the ‘state-supporting’ forces of the middle ground would rally to the government against the socialists. The result was a resort to the repressive remedies proposed by Bismarck in 1889–90.
Wilhelm’s adoption of a hard-line policy has also been seen as an example of a neurotically egoistic approach to politics, in which sentiments of personal injury and betrayal (in this case by the German workers) were allowed to outweigh more ‘rational’ considerations.56 But the policies adopted by European governments towards the perceived threat from the Left were not in general guided by purely rational considerations; exaggerated fears, religious qualms and an abhorrence of anarchy all played a role. In this context, Wilhelm’s proposals were not particularly outlandish. After a chain of anarchist bombings and assassinations across the continent in 1893–4, a number of other states, including Switzerland and France, adopted new anti-socialist and anti-anarchist laws.
There was good reason to suppose that such measures would be popular in Germany. The liberal and conservative press (including the Bismarckian Hamburger Nachrichten) expressed enthusiasm for firm action against the Left, boosting Wilhelm’s confidence that an anti-socialist law would generate much-needed consensus within the Reichstag and beyond. At a speech for deputies of the province of East Prussia given in Königsberg on 6 September, he castigated his Junker-dominated audience for having opposed the government over agrarian policy and called upon them to join him in the ‘battle for religion, order and morality against the parties of revolution’.57 As Wilhelm subsequently boasted to Caprivi, the speech had been well received in the conservative and liberal press; by appealing directly to the political instincts of his people, the Kaiser had won over those elements that Caprivi’s policies had failed to integrate.58
In the event, Wilhelm’s pursuit of an anti-socialist law failed to rally the moderate parties and seriously undermined the cohesion of the government. The problem lay partly in the fact that the chancellor, Leo von Caprivi, and the reactionary minister president of Prussia since the crisis of 1892, Botho von Eulenburg, took very different views on how such a law should be introduced. Caprivi wanted to slip a milder version of the law through the Prussian Landtag, where the conservatives and right-liberals were well placed. But Botho Eulenburg pressed for a policy of confrontation with the Reichstag: if the Reichstag refused to pass the law, the Kaiser should resort to repeated dissolutions, and then break with the constitution altogether to impose a new, less democratic imperial franchise. Caprivi objected vehemently to this course of action on the grounds that the other German kingdoms (Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg) would refuse to support such a move and would exploit the resulting mayhem to pursue their own particularist policies. The result would be a weakening, and perhaps ultimately the disintegration, of the Reich.59 He insisted that the government avoid conflict and work within the limits of the constitution.60
The unbridgeable divide between the two men demonstrated how harmful it had been to place the Prussian and imperial premierships in different hands after the schools crisis of 1892. The dualist (federal/unitary) problem was now personified in two distinctive figures, the conservative Botho von Eulenburg, who spoke for a Junker-dominated, right-wing, Prussian constituency, and Caprivi, the conservative reformer, who answered to the more labile national constellation of the Reichstag parties. Wilhelm was forced to adjudicate. He initially supported Caprivi’s view, but was subsequently persuaded by Botho Eulenburg to adopt the more uncompromising line. He accepted that the law might not make it through the Reichstag, but was willing to face the possibility of a break with the constitution; he even discussed plans for a coup with his fellow-sovereign the king of Saxony – telling evidence that he had internalized Bismarck’s theory that the constitution had been made by the German princes and could thus be unmade by them. At the beginning of September he even went so far as to inform Botho von Eulenburg that he should regard himself as Germany’s next chancellor. Wilhelm’s growing enthusiasm for a policy of confrontation was nourished by his half-baked conviction that a blow against the parliament would somehow restore his relationship with the politically sound elements of ‘the people’ by removing the irritant of partisan strife. It was the Kaiser and not the chancellor, Wilhelm told Caprivi in October 1894, who ‘knew the soul of the German people [deutsche Volksseele] and carried responsibility before God…’61
Dismayed at Wilhelm’s disavowal of his policy and disregard for his advice, Caprivi once again tendered his resignation.62 It was entirely characteristic of Wilhelm that, having driven Caprivi to the limits of his endurance and having seemed to settle for Botho as the successor, he should now back down once more, ride up to the chancellery in a carriage with white horses, embrace the exhausted chancellor and beg him over port and cigars to remain in post. As this strange behaviour makes plain, Wilhelm’s freedom of action was narrowly curtailed. Max Weber observed in a classic analysis of parliament and government in Germany that the fragile equilibrium of the imperial constitution would become completely unmanageable if ‘the rule of the Conservative Party in Prussia were applied to the leadership of politics in the Reich with the kind of ruthlessness that is usual within Prussia itself ’.63 Wilhelm might dream of carrying out a coup with Botho at the helm, but the reality, as he himself knew only too well, was that if Caprivi left to make way for Botho von Eulenburg, the Kaiser would find himself in an impossible position. ‘For then,’ as one of his intimates warned him, ‘he would be branded in German [opinion] as the despot who discarded Caprivi, the man of law, in order to install a tyranny.’64 But letting Botho go while Caprivi stayed on would be almost as damaging, for Botho was the government’s link to the conservative and largely agrarian constituency that dominated the Prussian Landtag. Since the two men remained irreconcilable in office, Wilhelm was forced to accept both their resignations on 26 October.
The anti-revolution bill was finally introduced to the Reichstag under Caprivi’s (and Botho von Eulenburg’s) successor, Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, in December 1894. The earlier plan for an ‘exceptional law’ was abandoned; the bill merely proposed various amendments to existing legislation. These were nevertheless vigorously attacked in the Reichstag and in the press. They were then revised by a committee which tried to make them more appealing to the Centre by giving them a clerical twist: in addition to the anti-socialist provisions, new clauses were introduced criminalizing ‘disturbance of divine worship’ and incitement to adultery and blasphemy. These modifications exposed the hopelessness of assembling a durable coalition around the idea of suppressing socialist agitation; too many Germans had other, higher priorities. The new ‘clericalized’ bill came before the Reichstag in May 1895 and was thrown out with no further ado. Wilhelm was disappointed. Without an anti-socialist law, he gloomily confided to Hohenlohe, the government would have to rely on ‘fire hoses for ordinary situations and cartridges as a final resort’.65 Wilhelm’s hope that an integrated bloc of state-supporting parties could be generated by a joint onslaught against the Left had shown itself to be illusory; ‘negative integration’ was a failure.
Throughout the early to mid-1890s there was a gap between Wilhelm’s wishful absolutist rhetoric and the constrained position he occupied in reality. During the early 1890s the emperor began to stretch his executive muscles, particularly in the area of appointments. In 1890 he nominated a new bishop of Strassburg without consulting Caprivi. Sporadic interventions in diplomatic appointments during 1891 ruffled feathers in the Foreign Office. In 1893 he appointed Count Arthur von Posadowsky-Wehner to the Reich Treasury, disregarding Caprivi’s own shortlist of candidates for the position. In the autumn of 1894, under Caprivi�
�s successor, Chlodwig Hohenlohe, he stepped up the intensity of his interventions, nominating his own candidates to the ministries of agriculture and justice. The monarch’s power to make appointments to (and order dismissals from) government and civil service posts was sanctioned under the Prussian and imperial constitutions, and historians have rightly identified it as the single most important instrument of monarchical power within the German system.66
However, Wilhelm’s freedom to make use of this power was limited. If the chancellor was determined enough, and the ministry unified enough, his orders could be countermanded. Thus, Caprivi succeeded in 1890 in blocking the appointment of the Krupp executive Johann Friedrich Jencke to the powerful Prussian Ministry of Finance, because he was seen by the ministers as a stooge of heavy industry (Wilhelm, characteristically, had chosen Jencke for precisely this reason, in order to conciliate industrialists who opposed the emperor’s labour policy and thereby restore the government’s image of neutrality). In November 1894, when Wilhelm – again as a sop to the agrarians – proposed a right-wing firebrand for the Ministry of Agriculture, the ensuing struggle with Chancellor Hohenlohe resulted in the Kaiser’s capitulation and the appointment of a compromise candidate.
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