The cultural historian Karl Lamprecht, who had seen Wilhelm in action, wrote in a similar vein of the Kaiser’s ‘full sonorous voice’, ‘an ever more lively alternation of facial expressions’ and ‘gesticulation escalating to the point of physical action’. ‘The Kaiser,’ wrote Lamprecht, ‘became a speaker from his head to his toes.’15 At this performative and technical level, then, Wilhelm displayed a certain mastery of the public word. By contrast, the content of his public utterances was often catastrophically misjudged. Indeed it would not be an exaggeration to say that far more damage was done to the emperor’s reputation – both among his contemporaries and among historians since – by what he said than by what he did or caused to be done.
The root of the problem lay partly in the direct, unedited way in which Wilhelm unbosomed himself of his current preoccupations. In November 1890, for example, on the occasion of the swearing-in of the new contingent of Guards recruits in Potsdam, Wilhelm broke with convention to deliver a personal address, in which he observed that ‘a spirit of contradiction, rebellion and insurrection’ was ‘spreading through the country’ and warned the troops never to ‘lend their ears to seducers and agitators’, for ‘they belonged to him now, and would have to be prepared to fire on their fathers and brothers if he ordered them to do so’.16 Wilhelm’s preoccupation with this theme, to which he returned periodically during the decade,17 reflected a deep anxiety about the security of the throne – a conviction, as the Dutch envoy in Berlin reported in 1901, that ‘the respect for authority amongst the people has waned since the death of Wilhelm I…’18 But the controversial comments of 1890 also reflected apprehensions that were widespread at the time. As we saw, the SPD emerged from the elections of that year as the most successful German party in terms of votes cast. Since it was widely assumed that votes for the SPD came exclusively from the German working class, the class from which new army recruits were also drawn, there were concerns about the political reliability of the army. It was a question that preoccupied not only the military policy-makers of the pre-war era, but also the Social Democrat leadership, who saw in the gradual ‘reddening’ of the military through the infusion of proletarian recruits one key to the future revolutionary transformation of German society.19
The Civil Cabinet succeeded in having a bowdlerized version of the speech circulated to the press, and thus avoided the outrage that these words might otherwise have caused. Interestingly enough, Count Waldersee was critical of Wilhelm’s speech to the recruits, not because of its brutality, but because he thought it unwise for any commanding officer to imply that Prussian soldiers would ever consider disobeying an order.20 The political problem with such utterances lay perhaps less in the words themselves than in the person of the speaker. Wilhelm may well have felt that as supreme warlord, and as a uniformed military official in a long-standing relationship with the Potsdam Guards Corps, he was both entitled and obliged to adopt the tone of the barracks square in this fashion. But as Wilhelm’s adjutant, Carl von Wedel, observed, there was a danger that in making direct interventions of this kind, the emperor ‘descended from his high position’ and ‘placed himself too much on the level of a superior officer’.21 Role conflicts of this kind were to weigh upon Wilhelm throughout the reign.
A further problem lay in the diversity of audiences and expectations by which Wilhelm’s every utterance was judged. Early in 1891, for example, he told a gathering of Rhenish industrialists that ‘the Reich has but one ruler and I am he’; the remark was intended as a stab at Bismarck, who had many supporters in Rhenish manufacturing circles, but it also aroused unintended offence among those who saw it as a slight to the dignity of the federal princes.22 The fact was that Wilhelm’s public office comprised a complex of non-transferable relationships with specific constituencies. When he spoke each year at the annual banquet of the Provincial Diet of Brandenburg, he was in the habit of styling himself ‘Margrave’ in order to invoke the unique historical ties between his dynasty and its home province.23 It was a harmless (if somewhat self-dramatizing) gesture that went down well with a largely conservative assembly of Brandenburgers, but it was unpalatable fare to the South Germans who pored over the published texts of such speeches in the daily press on the following day. Eulenburg explained the problem to Wilhelm in a letter of March 1892:
The great eloquence and the manner and style of Your Majesty exert a captivating influence upon listeners and audience – as the mood among the Brandenburgers after Your Majesty’s speech has once again proven. But in the hands of the German professor, a cool assessment of the content gives a different picture. […] Here in Bavaria, people are ‘beside themselves’ when Your Majesty speaks as ‘Margrave’, and the ‘Margrave’s Words’ are printed in the Reichsanzeiger [Imperial Gazette] – as words, so to speak, of the emperor. In the Imperial Gazette, members of the empire expect to hear imperial words – they don’t care for Friedrich the Great (who referred to Bavaria, as they know only too well, as ‘a paradise inhabited by animals’ and so forth); and they don’t care for Rossbach and Leuthen.24
Wilhelm’s remarks were apt, moreover, to be read by journalists and the general public as commentaries on contemporary political events, in a fashion that inevitably drew the Kaiser into the crossfire of partisan debate. The daily political press frequently cited passages from imperial speeches in support of specific partisan viewpoints.25 When Wilhelm lashed out at those ‘malcontents’ who ‘criticize and carp at everything the government undertakes’ in a speech of February 1892, he intended his words as a general denunciation of partisan strife, but they were widely interpreted in the liberal and Catholic press as an endorsement of the Centre’s position on the highly controversial Schools Bill (see above, chapter 3). It was the supposedly partisan intervention by the Kaiser that aroused such a vehement public response.26 The grievances that resulted could have an immediate impact on the conduct of the parties, as Caprivi discovered only days after the Brandenburg speech, when the deputies of the Prussian Landtag withdrew their prior undertaking to grant 10 million marks towards the building of a new cathedral in Berlin.27
8. Wilhelm II inspects the restoration works at Hoch-Königsburg Castle, Alsace in 1908. There was an element of pantomime in Wilhelmine pageantry, which one historian (Bernd Weisbrod) has described as ‘the Middle Ages plus electricity’. In an era of rapid industrial growth, urbanization and technological innovation, the culture of official display in the German empire clung to historicist images and motifs.
We should not, in other words, underestimate the complexity of the environment in which imperial utterances were heard and understood and the difficulty of finding an idiom appropriate for the many situations in which the Kaiser found himself and the many roles he was expected to play. Yet it must be said that Wilhelm was singularly ill-suited to the communicative tasks of his office. He found it virtually impossible to express himself in the sober, measured diction that the politically informed public clearly expected of him. The plangent, subjective tone of many of his public utterances seemed calculated to invite commentators to thematize the personality of the speaker. (Hence the success of Ludwig Quidde’s devastating satire Caligula; this bestseller, which went through thirty-four reprintings, focused less on the actions of the emperor in government than on the alleged deformations of his personality.)
Wilhelm’s more flamboyant speeches were like nineteenth-century history paintings: charged with heavy-handed symbolism in which tempests alternated with shafts of redeeming light where all about was dark and sublime figures floated above the petty conflicts of the day. The aim was to ‘charismatize’ the monarchy and invoke the kind of transcendent, sovereign vantage point from which Wilhelm aspired to reign over his people. A central theme was the historical continuity of the Hohenzollern dynasty and its Prusso-German mission.28 There was an emphasis on the imperial monarchy as the ultimate guarantor of the unity of the empire, the point at which ‘historical, confessional and economic oppositions may be reconciled’.
29 Lastly, the providential dimension of monarchy was a theme that ran through all the speeches of his reign. During a characteristic address delivered in the Rathaus at Memel in September 1907, he urged his audience to remember that the ‘hand of divine providence’ was at work in the great historical achievements of the German people: ‘And if our Lord God did not have in store for us some great destiny in the world, then he wouldn’t have bestowed such magnificent traits and abilities upon our people.’30
Wilhelm’s speeches often made a far better impression upon those who heard than upon those who read them. They could be carried by the speaker’s appearance and conviction and the solemnity of the occasion. The consumption of alcohol by the audience presumably also helped. But reproduced in cold print, even in heavily edited form, the texts made easy targets for ridicule – they appeared excessive, pompous, megalomaniacal. They ‘overshot the target’, as Holstein put it.31 Images and phrases from Wilhelm’s speeches were often picked up and turned against him in the satirical press. When he announced, for example, that he would not tolerate ‘pessimists’ (‘Schwarzseher dulde ich nicht!’), Simplicissimus, the Private Eye of Wilhelmine Germany, responded with an entire edition devoted to ‘pessimism’.32 In 1898 a speech Wilhelm had made in Jerusalem during a tour of the Middle East was lampooned in a poem published in Simplicissimus mocking the sovereign’s delusions of grandeur that included the following strophe:
Millions of Christians with pride you fill;
Likewise too Golgotha’s hill,
That once from the Cross the final word
From you today the first has heard.33
In his speech of 1892 to the Brandenburg Diet, Wilhelm had closed with the grandiose promise that he would lead his Brandenburgers ‘onwards to glorious days’; the phrase soon took on a life of its own, making repeated appearances in a variety of satirical publications. As late as 1913, a cartoon in Simplicissimus showed the German ‘Michel’ as a child trustfully holding the hand of a quixotic figure, recognizable from behind as Wilhelm. In front of them stands a sign-post bearing the legend: ‘To Glorious Days’. The child asks: ‘Is it much farther, Papa?’34 Indeed visual caricature played an increasingly prominent role in critical reception of the German monarch. After 1904, when the first unmistakably hostile caricatures of the Kaiser were published without triggering prosecutions by the authorities, there was, as Jost Rebentisch has shown, a veritable chain reaction of increasingly radical visual satires. In the year 1906 Wilhelm II was the single most caricatured individual in the empire.35
Neither Wilhelm I nor Bismarck had ever been ridiculed in this irreverent fashion (though closer parallels can be found in contraband depictions of Friedrich Wilhelm IV around the time of the 1848 revolutions). The legal sanctions against lèse-majesté, such as the confiscation of journal numbers or the prosecution and imprisonment of authors and editors, were extensively applied during the Wilhelmine era, but they were counter-productive, since they generally had the effect of boosting circulation figures and transforming persecuted journalists into national celebrities.36
There were two ways in which one could set about solving this problem. The first was to stem the flow of words from the man himself. ‘I wish,’ Wilhelm’s mother exclaimed in February 1892, ‘I could put a padlock on his mouth for all occasions where speeches are made in public.’37 Silencing Wilhelm entirely was out of the question, but one could hope to ‘manage’ his public appearances, to prevent him from giving a ‘cracking’ speech at festivities – such as the annual dinner of the Brandenburg Diet! – where he was likely to misbehave; Holstein, Eulenburg and Hohenlohe occasionally attempted this with some success.38 One could at least make the Kaiser aware of the damage he was doing to himself and the government. In May 1891, for example, the chancellery, which had previously withheld such material, passed press cuttings on a controversial speech directly to Wilhelm, with the most critical passages underlined in red pencil.39
As Wilhelm’s trusted intimate and supporter, Philipp Eulenburg also proffered warnings and sharp criticism. In November 1891, when asked to make an entry in the official visitors’ book of the City of Munich, Wilhelm inscribed the text ‘Suprema lex regis voluntas’ (The will of the king is the highest law):
It is not for me to ask why Your Majesty wrote these words, but I would be committing a cowardly injustice if I did not write of the ill effects that this text has had in south Germany, where Your Majesty has stationed me to keep watch [Eulenburg was the Prussian envoy in Munich at this time]. In the first place, the text has caused great offence […] because people discern [the assertion of ] a kind of personal imperial will over and above the Bavarian will. All parties, without exception, were offended by the words of Your Majesty, and the remark seemed perfectly made to be exploited against Your Majesty in the most disgraceful way.40
The fact that Wilhelm found direct press criticism so difficult to bear raised hopes that a generous supply of negative feedback might in itself effect a moderation in tone. Late in March 1892, nearly a month after the controversial speech to the Brandenburg Diet, Count Helldorf-Bedra reported that Wilhelm had been unable to sleep for nights on end after reading his press cuttings and was still looking ill and depressed. ‘I had intended to caution him respectfully about frivolous speeches etc. – but I felt so sorry for him and I was so certain that he would be making the necessary reproaches to himself, that I […] could not say anything hurtful.’41 But the impact of such episodes was shortlived. Once the initial shock had subsided, the imperial ego would gradually reinflate and the flow of bombast would resume. In a characteristically confused way, Wilhelm regarded attempts to curtail his public utterances as impingements upon the freedom of speech enjoyed by the humblest of his subjects.
Since the sovereign seemed – at least until 1908 – unwilling or unable to restrain himself, court and government officials also attempted to control the form in which the emperor’s remarks reached the broader public. We have seen, for example, that Wilhelm’s speech at the swearing-in of the recruits in November 1890 was sanitized before release for general circulation.42 Indeed, many of the printed versions we now have of speeches given by the Kaiser were doctored before publication. Stenographic verbatim records of the speeches made on the spot by government officials were vetted by the Civil Cabinet before being released for publication.43 Those journalists who attended occasions at which the Kaiser was expected to speak were often instructed by members of his staff to tone the text down for public consumption, or even provided with an official version from which the more embarrassing passages had been deleted.44
Fortunately for the officials, many reporters and editors were willing to collude in curbing the damage done by the sovereign’s indiscretions. It was not unusual for editors to submit stenographic records of imperial speeches taken by their own reporters to the chief of the Civil Cabinet, so that the latter could make any necessary changes;45 on occasion, newspaper editors would even make textual amendments on their own initiative. In September 1907, for example, Wilhelm gave a speech in Tecklenburg, in which a celebration of German virtues and strength culminated in the announcement that ‘the German eagle spreads its wings once again over Europe’. At a meeting held after the speech, the journalists who had been in attendance agreed unanimously that the words ‘over Europe’ should be dropped from the text sent out for publication in the German press. A subsequent version issued by the Civil Cabinet inserted the words ‘over the [German] Empire’.46
A press policy run along these lines was, of course, inherently leak-prone, since it relied upon the assumption that journalists would always abide by ‘gentlemanly agreements’ with the court officials. In reality, such agreements were often broken, sensitive material being passed to German-language foreign papers, such as the Fremdenblatt in Vienna, and subsequently reproduced in the German press.47 In any case, Wilhelm travelled so frequently and spoke in such a variety of places and contexts that it was virtually impossible to control the diffusion of i
nformation about his utterances.
One episode in particular illustrates dramatically the difficulties involved. On 27 July 1900 Wilhelm gave an address in Bremerhaven on the occasion of the embarkation of German troops for China to suppress the Boxer rebellion, which has since become notorious as the ‘Huns’ Speech’ (Hunnenrede). On the morning of the day on which he gave the speech, Wilhelm had inspected three troopships in harbour. At one o’clock in the afternoon, the men from all three ships formed up together on board the Halle to hear a speech from the sovereign urging them to be models of German discipline and courage and warning them of the dangers awaiting them in China; it also contained the following passage:
When you come before the enemy, let him be struck down; 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 Germany be known in China in such a way that a Chinese will never again dare even to look askance at a German.48
Even as the Kaiser was speaking, Bülow (at this time still state secretary for foreign affairs) appears to have agreed with Chancellor Hohenlohe that the journalists present should be required not to publish the speech until an official text had been disseminated by the government. The pressmen acquiesced in this arrangement, and the official story put out that evening included quotations, but made no reference to mercy not being given or to ‘Huns’. It was not possible, however, to suppress the memory of all those who had been present at the speech. For in addition to the soldiers, some two to three thousand spectators had gathered in the harbour area and they carried away the phrases that had impressed them most. The words ‘Pardon wird nicht gegeben’ (‘there will be no mercy’) appeared chalked up on troop trains making their way through Germany. As he became aware of the (true) rumours circulating about what the Kaiser had said, Bülow attempted to regain the initiative by authorizing a second ‘official version’ which contained the phrase ‘there will be no mercy’ but still omitted any reference to ‘Huns’. In the meanwhile, however, a third version of the speech appeared in a number of newspapers in the Bremerhaven area. It originated in a report filed by a journalist who was present at the address, but was either unaware of or disinclined to observe Bülow’s directive. This version provides the fullest record of Wilhelm’s original utterances, including the ‘mercy’ and ‘Huns’ passages.49
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