The contrasts and logical inconsistencies within the text suggest that Wilhelm may, in standard fashion, have departed from a more anodyne prepared text to improvise on a matter that had preoccupied him over recent weeks, namely the cruelty and ruthlessness of the Boxer assault on the European legations in China – which had prompted a wave of atrocity stories in the European press – and the need for exemplary punitive action. However, his references to ‘mercy’ and ‘prisoners’ also reflected a broader preoccupation with the problem of managing encounters between a modern ‘civilized’ army and the fanaticized mass that many contemporaries saw in the insurrectionary movements of what is now known as the ‘third world’. The debates surrounding the formulation and ratification of the Hague Convention in 1899 both signalled and stimulated a heightened awareness of the divide between ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’ military behaviour. Was Wilhelm, who always took such a sympathetic interest in England’s imperial adventures, perhaps also aware of the atrocities committed under Kitchener’s command at Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898, when wounded Mahdist prisoners were slain en masse on the grounds that, even as injured captives, they still posed a mortal danger to British troops? All these issues were focused in a more immediate way for contemporaries by the ‘rumour panic’ that raged through the European press in mid-July, as leader writers speculated on the scale and horror of the Boxer atrocities in Peking, exploiting western readers’ prejudices about the alleged barbarity of the Chinese.50
In his memoirs, written during the early years of the Weimar Republic, Bülow described the Bremerhaven address as ‘the worst speech of that time and perhaps the most disgraceful speech that Wilhelm II [had] ever given’. It was a perspective coloured by the fact that British wartime propaganda took up the ‘Huns’ theme of the Bremerhaven address and applied it successfully to the German enemy.51 At the time, however, as Bernd Sösemann has shown, responses to the speech were rather more mixed. Chancellor Hohenlohe praised it in a diary entry as a ‘fiery speech’ that had cheered the soldiers, all of them volunteers, as they embarked on their long and dangerous journey. The French foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé, informed the German ambassador in Paris that the speech had made ‘the best impression throughout the whole of France’. The reception in the German press was varied; Centre, Social Democrat and left-liberal organs tended to denounce the inhumanity of the exhortation not to grant mercy, while the conservative and parts of the National Liberal press defended the emperor’s words as a legitimate preparation for the travails that awaited German soldiers in a country where the modern laws of war were not observed.52
In the Reichstag, where there was lively debate over the rights and wrongs of the Chinese expedition – especially as reports of atrocities committed by European troops in the Chinese countryside began to appear in the German press – Wilhelm’s speech itself became an object of political debate. This was an important departure since it marked a break with the parliamentary convention excluding the person of the monarch from political discussion. It was the venerable President of the Reichstag, Franz Xaver Graf von Ballestrem himself, who had authorized this change of policy. In an address delivered on the occasion of the Kaiser’s forty-first birthday on 27 January 1900, Ballestrem had declared before the House that it was precisely this Kaiser’s intention that his speeches should be ‘heeded, weighed up, discussed by all of those who had a stake in them, above all by the representatives of the German people’.53 The Reichstag deputies were not slow to exploit this new expansion of the parliament’s relationship with the sovereign. In a speech of 19 November, August Bebel of the Social Democrats read out passages from the government’s bowdlerized official version of the speech, observed to the amusement of the House that the reference to ‘Huns’ had ‘for some reason been left out’, and sharply criticized the speech for its imperialist and Christian triumphalist sentiments (Wilhelm had suggested, inter alia, that the anti-Boxer expedition might open doors to the evangelization of China).54 In a speech the following day, the left liberal leader Eugen Richter focused on the constitutional significance of the sovereign’s utterances. Richter pointed out that ‘the present monarch’ made more extensive use of ‘public declarations of programmatic character’ than his predecessors had done, and criticized the chancellor for failing to control his public appearances. In future, Richter suggested, ‘the monarch [should] clear the content and form of such programmatic speeches with the responsible ministers’.55
In his response, Bülow, newly appointed as chancellor, pointed out that his duties under the constitution required him only to carry responsibility for the ‘decrees and orders’ of the monarch, not for his public utterances; but he agreed nevertheless in future to assume ‘full moral responsibility’ for the emperor’s speeches. He also insisted that it was quite appropriate for the emperor to have spoken to his departing troops in Bremerhaven ‘as a soldier and not as a diplomat’.56 Two days after Bülow’s speech, Eulenburg fired off an uncompromising note to Wilhelm, imploring him ‘to restrain [himself ] from any further public announcements whatsoever – whether civil or military in character, if they are in any way likely to excite or annoy…’57
The Daily Telegraph crisis
Despite the best efforts of Richter and Bebel, parliamentary indignation over Wilhelm’s indiscretions quickly died down. This was partly a consequence of Bülow’s agile – if somewhat ambivalent – defence of the monarch; but a further reason may well be that the critics failed to persuade the parliament that the sovereign’s personal interventions had at any time damaged the international standing of the German empire.58 It was the possibility that Wilhelm’s indiscretions might have diplomatic consequences beyond the control of German politicians that most aroused concern. This issue came to the fore in 1908, when public exasperation over remarks made by Wilhelm in an interview with a British newspaper plunged Wilhelm and the Bülow government into the most serious crisis of the pre-war period. The ‘Daily Telegraph crisis’, as it came to be known, centred on an interview given by Wilhelm to a personal friend, Colonel Edward James Montagu Stuart-Wortley, at Highcliffe Castle in November 1907, while the Kaiser was staying there as Stuart-Wortley’s private guest. In the course of his talks with his English host, Wilhelm claimed that he personally had provided decisive strategic advice to Britain during the Boer War and had headed off attempts by other continental powers to exploit the Boer crisis by combining against Great Britain. He described the English as ‘mad, mad as march hares’ for questioning the peaceful outlook of the German empire and its sincere desire for peace with England. It was true, he conceded, that the prevailing sentiment among the German populace was ‘not friendly’ towards England, but he, the Kaiser, was a true friend who incessantly strove to improve relations between the two countries. Stuart-Wortley worked his notes from these remarks and others made in the following year into an article which he published in the Daily Telegraph in October 1908; he appears to have believed that publication of the interview would persuade the English public of the Kaiser’s goodwill at a time when Anglo-German relations were strained by the Balkan crisis.
When the text of this interview was published in the German press, ‘a mood first of bewilderment and later of despair and indignation took hold of all circles of the people’.59 The Reichstag seethed with rage and frustration. The National Liberal Ernst Bassermann spoke before the House of ‘a feeling of bottomless astonishment, of deep sadness’; the Social Democrat Paul Singer of ‘legitimate rage and a deep shame amongst the German people’; the Conservative leader Ernst von Heydebrand und der Lasa, known as the ‘uncrowned king of Prussia’, of ‘an accumulation of concern and resentment that has been gathering for years, even in circles whose loyalty to Kaiser and Empire has hitherto been unquestioned’.60
A central preoccupation of most participants in the debate was the damage done by the Kaiser’s remarks to Germany’s relations with Britain and other powers, but the terms of the discussion quickly expanded to embrace the
role of the emperor – and ultimately of the Reichstag – within the German constitutional system. Bassermann, for example, attacked the ‘interventions of a personal regime’ that had undermined a ‘policy of objectivity, tact and firmness’ pursued by the chancellor. Baron von Hertling of the Centre Party observed that the readiness of all parties to censure the Kaiser directly constituted ‘a milestone in the parliamentary history of Germany’. Oswald Zimmermann of the anti-Semitic Reformpartei denounced the sycophancy of the court culture around Wilhelm and asked: ‘how is it that he comes to be chatting in this way with English private gentlemen?’ Heine of the SPD requested that the House ‘consider the matter also from the psychological angle’ and warned that the Kaiser would always remain unable to curb his own tendency to exaggeration. There was laughter on all sides when Heine supported this contention by reference to a speech Wilhelm had only just given on the Bodensee, in which he had honoured Count Zeppelin as ‘the greatest German of the twentieth century’, only eight years after that century’s inception. ‘Now gentlemen, with all respect for the courageous and decidedly modest Count, is that not spreading it a litle thick?’61 In short, the debate represented a comprehensive, public and virtually unanimous denunciation by the parties of Wilhelm’s comportment as sovereign. ‘Never before,’ one observer noted, ‘has anyone dared to use language like this in the open parliament.’62
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the debate, however, was the lukewarm tone of the chancellor’s defence. Bülow’s first move was to publish a report to the effect that he had not seen the text of the interview beforehand and would personally have advised against publication if he had. His address to the Reichstag on 10 November was a masterpiece of ambivalence in which Bülow ostensibly presented the monarch’s case while implicitly appealing to the sympathy and solidarity of the House. It was not true, Bülow told the deputies, that the emperor had provided the British with a campaign plan for the Boer War (though he left it unclear whether it was Wilhelm or merely the interviewer who had made this claim), he had merely shared with them some ‘purely academic [laughter among the Social Democrats] reflections – I believe they were expressly described as aphorisms – about the art of war in general’; it was true, Bülow implied, that Wilhelm’s communications with his British relatives had on occasion involved indiscretions, but weren’t such indiscretions a frequent occurrence in the diplomatic history of all countries? As for Wilhelm’s remarks on his own attitude to England, Bülow declared that he could only too well understand that the Kaiser, having ‘worked so eagerly and honestly’ for better Anglo-German relations, resented the destructive attitude of the chauvinist press. Lastly, Bülow assured the Reichstag that he ‘had become fairly convinced’ that the commotion of the past few days would ‘lead His Majesty henceforward to observe that reserve even in his private conversations, which is indispensable in the interest both of a unified policy and of the authority of the Crown. [Bravo! on the right.] Were that not the case, neither I nor any one of my successors could take responsibility.’63
This was clearly not the best that Bülow could have managed on Wilhelm’s behalf – it was, as the Dutch envoy in Berlin put it: ‘un plaidoyer trop leger’.64 As Katherine Lerman has shown, Bülow had abandoned a speech written earlier in November that offered a more robust defence of the Kaiser’s behaviour.65 His chief objective, as ever, was to reinforce his own political position vis-à-vis the Reichstag, the Prussian ministry and the emperor. Not surprisingly, some observers claimed to discern a note of triumph in the chancellor’s next public appearance before the Reichstag, on 19 November:
In his entire appearance, language and attitude, the Reich Chancellor gave expression to the changed situation. Instead of striking the tragic pose of a […] martyr who has taken upon himself the sins of others, Prince Bülow now showed the confidence and surefootedness of a statesman who has the situation under control…66
There was a cruel irony in all of this – at least from Wilhelm’s point of view – for on this of all occasions he had striven to observe the constitutional niceties. In a conversation with the chief of the Civil Cabinet, Valentini, on 13 November 1908, Wilhelm explained that he had taken care to inform Bülow verbally of the general content of the discussions recorded at Highcliffe Castle as soon as he had arrived back in Berlin and recalled that the chancellor had ‘thanked him with feeling for having so effectively supported his policy’. When he had received a manuscript of the interview, he had sent it immediately to Bülow with a request that the chancellor should personally read it through to check whether there were grounds for preventing its publication. ‘I thought the matter of such importance,’ Wilhelm told Valentini, ‘that I didn’t want to entrust it to some subordinate figure in the Foreign Office.’ After several weeks, the manuscript was returned ‘with several corrections and a note from the Chancellor saying that there were in his view no objections [to publishing the text]’. In other words, Wilhelm had done everything possible to ‘cover himself constitutionally [um sich konstitutionell zu decken]’.67
Whether Bülow actually read the interview in advance is impossible to establish with any finality. It would certainly be odd if he neglected to check the contents of such a document despite an express request to do so from the Kaiser – the more so as the manuscript was accompanied by a four-to-five-page letter from Bülow’s cousin Martin von Rücker-Jenisch, who was accompanying Wilhelm at the time, expressing strong reservations about publication.68 Efforts by Valentini to establish what had happened to the document between its arrival from England and its clearance for publication revealed that Bülow, having received the manuscript while on holiday on the island of Norderney, forwarded it to the Foreign Office with a request for advice. When the manuscript was returned to him with some minor corrections early in October, Bülow sent it back to Jenisch with a letter explaining that he had taken note of the manuscript ‘with lively interest’ and that he wished Jenisch to convey his thanks for ‘this new demonstration of All-Highest confidence’ in his (Bülow’s) policy.69 It is, of course, possible that Bülow’s trust in his subordinates was so profound that he was prepared to defer to their judgement; Katherine Lerman has rightly observed that this would fit with Bülow’s generally nonchalant handling of his public duties.70
But a core of doubt remains: on 6 October Bülow dictated to Felix von Müller, a German diplomat in attendance at Norderney, changes to the text proposed by Klehmet, the relatively junior Foreign Office official entrusted with the task of vetting the document for publication.71 He must surely, at this point if not before, have learned enough about its contents to rouse his suspicions. And it is not as if Bülow was unaware of the potential significance of speeches from the emperor; only weeks before he received the text of the Daily Telegraph interview, he had written to Valentini from Norderney to stress the importance of holding Wilhelm to an agreement that he confine himself exclusively to reading aloud from fully prepared and officially vetted speeches while travelling in the Reichslanden Alsace and Lorraine.72 In short, the weightiest reason for not assuming that Bülow had read the interview is his own emphatic denial. Yet in view of his formidable capacity for misrepresentation in matters that affected his own reputation, this is hardly conclusive.73 The suspicion thus remains – as it certainly did for Wilhelm – that Bülow had read the interview before passing it for publication. Believing this, Wilhelm was bound to feel deeply aggrieved at the chancellor’s sauve qui peut response to the crisis, and his subsequent efforts to build support in political circles for the view that it was the Kaiser who should bear the primary responsibility for what had occurred. At best, such behaviour amounted to desertion; at worst, it suggested a malevolent scheme to undermine the public authority of the emperor.74 Small wonder that the Daily Telegraph crisis effectively destroyed what little trust remained in the relationship between Wilhelm and the chancellor.
The crisis also dealt a serious blow to the Kaiser’s popularity among his subjects.75 The press criticism
that followed in the wake of the publication in German of the interview set new records for vehemence and radicalism; ‘the press of all the parties had never been so aggressive against the person of the sovereign’.76 Predictably enough, Wilhelm was upset at the bitter tide of press comment. In a letter to Tsar Nicholas of May 1909, he complained that he felt ‘blamed’ for the continental tensions that had followed the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (in October 1908). ‘Especially the press in general has behaved in the basest way against me.’77 Perhaps he had a point. One does not need to excuse Wilhelm’s indiscretions in order to see that they made it beguilingly easy – for politicians, the public and historians alike – to blame complex problems and collective errors on the ‘man at the top’. That Wilhelm’s interview with Wortley was foolish and ill-judged is obvious; but the notion that it might seriously have damaged relations between Germany and any other power is absurd. In its fury over the Daily Telegraph interview, the politically informed public found an outlet for a deeply felt anxiety about the drift into international isolation that had occurred since the departure of Bismarck, and specifically since the Moroccan crisis of 1905. And yet, as we saw in chapter 5, this epochal transformation in Germany’s international position can hardly be blamed on Wilhelm.
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