In December 1897, the Kaiser came to Friedrichsruh for the last time “to see how long the old man will last.”84 William found his former Chancellor in a wheelchair. Bismarck, as host, tried repeatedly to begin a serious conversation. William evaded every political subject, listened absent-mindedly, replied with old barracks-room jokes from his regimental days in Potsdam. During the winter and spring of 1898, Bismarck declined rapidly, rarely left his wheelchair, and had difficulty breathing. He died on the night of July 30, 1898. William, cruising aboard the Hohenzollern on the North Sea, hurried back for the funeral. Bismarck had refused a state funeral in Berlin and was buried at Friedrichsruh. Herbert, who inherited the title of Prince on his father’s death, met the Kaiser at the station. They kissed on the cheek, but at the funeral William and his staff stood on one side of the grave, the family on the other. On June 16, 1901, a monument to Bismarck was to be unveiled in Berlin. Bülow, now Chancellor, gave the Kaiser the news. William said he would not come. When Bülow insisted that this insult was too great, William reluctantly consented. “Very well,85 if you insist, I shall come,” he said. “But only in a modest uniform.”
fn1 Italy was approaching, but never quite reached, full Great Power status.
fn2 Bismarck also correctly judged these early journeys as lacking in benefit to William II’s reputation. After the young Kaiser’s visit to St. Petersburg in the summer of 1888, Tsar Alexander III told an aide that his guest was “a rascally young fop53 who throws his weight around, thinks too much of himself, and fancies that others worship him.”
fn3 William telegraphed directly to his grandmother at Windsor Castle: “I deeply regret73 to inform you that Prince Bismarck has placed his resignation in my hands—his nerves and strength have given out.”
fn4 William’s nautical language, published on March 22, was probably the inspiration for one of the most famous political cartoons ever drawn. Appearing in Punch on March 29 and captioned “DROPPING THE PILOT,” it depicts Bismarck in mariner’s cap, jacket, and boots descending a ship’s ladder to a waiting rowboat while above on deck the Kaiser in crown and epaulettes leans languidly over the rail, watching.
Chapter 5
The New Course: Kaiser William II, Caprivi, and Hohenlohe
Europeans who turned to look at the new German Emperor saw a short young man with restless, bright-blue eyes and curly light-brown hair. His most prominent feature was a brushy mustache with extended, upturned points, the creation of a skillful barber who appeared every morning at the palace with a can of wax. “[The Emperor] carries himself well.1... [He] walks into the room with the stiff stride of a Prussian soldier,” noted the English statesman John Morley. “If he laughs,”2 wrote another English observer, “which he is sure to do a good many times, he will laugh with absolute abandonment, throwing back his head, opening his mouth to the fullest extent possible, shaking his whole body, and often stamping with one foot to show his excessive enjoyment of any joke.... He will continually shake the forefinger of his right hand into the face of anyone whom he wishes to convince or will rock slowly on his toes backwards and forwards.” A drier, more disparaging view of the Kaiser was that of a third English eyewitness, a yachtsman who often sailed with William: “He was small and... handsome,3 with clear blue eyes... rather short in the neck and a little lopsided owing to his left arm being shorter than the other.... He spoke English very well, with no marked or unpleasant German accent, and took pride in picking up and making use of English slang expressions and colloquial phrases... which... in his anxiety to copy... he would often get wrong. His admiration of English gentlemen was extreme.... Sometimes, in moments when he was not on his guard, he found himself showing it too openly or plainly... and then he rather obviously tried to restrain it.... In particular his admiration turned towards the officers of our Royal Navy; his admiration of them and their appearance amounted to worship. I have often known his eyes [to] follow one of our young naval men who was, of course, quite unaware that he was the object of any special attention. He once told me: ‘I like to look at your naval officers.’”
William II was the first German Kaiser who had the inclination and opportunity to glory in this role. William I had resisted the office, preferring what he considered the honest title of King of Prussia; Frederick III had no time to fulfill his dream of becoming a Charlemagne-like medieval emperor. William II, coming to the throne at twenty-nine, his head filled by Bismarck with notions of monarchical prerogative, was determined to invest the Imperial office with supreme power and brilliant prestige. He made plain from the beginning that his empire, the German Reich, was to be a military state; William II desired—even longed for—the approval and affection of his people, but ultimate power, he insisted, lay not in the people or their representatives in the Reichstag, but in the monarch loyally supported by the army. William’s first proclamation, issued on the day of his father’s death, was to the army: “So we are bound together4—I and the army—so we are born for each other and will hold together indissolubly, whether it be the will of God to send us calm or storm.” William repeatedly underscored this theme. In November 1891, he addressed a group of new soldiers being sworn in at Potsdam: “Recruits! You have sworn Me allegiance.5 That, children of My Guard, means that you are now My soldiers. You have given yourselves over to Me body and soul. There is only one enemy for you and that is My enemy. With the present Socialist agitation, it may be that I shall order you to shoot down your own families, your brothers, yes, your parents—which may God forbid—but then too you must follow my orders without a murmur.” William’s reign was filled with references to his own preeminence. “There is only one ruler6 in the Reich and I am he. I tolerate no other,” he said in 1891. The sovereign, he told a military banquet in 1897, bears a “terrible responsibility to the Creator7 alone, from which no man, no minister, no parliament, no nation, can free him.” The Reichstag, accordingly, was an object of contempt; Social Democrats were “enemies of the Empire8 and Fatherland... a gang of traitors.” In 1903, he told Bülow that he had no interest in the strength of different parties in the parliament, saying that it was all the same to him “whether red, black or yellow monkeys9 cavorted in the Reichstag cage.” When shown the house of a native king at a colonial exhibition with the skulls of his enemies stuck up on poles outside it, William exclaimed, “If only I could see the Reichstag10 strung up like that!”
William’s attitude towards England continued ambivalent. He oscillated between powerful attraction—“I adore England,”11 he said in 1911 to Theodore Roosevelt—and petulant grievance which came close to hate. He wished to be understood and accepted as an English gentleman and, at the same time, feared as a Prussian warlord. He worked hard for British respect and his frequent failure caused him perplexity and irritation: “Not one of your ministers12 can tell me how many ships of the line you have in your Navy,” he said to an English visitor. “I can tell him—he can’t tell me.” Part of the problem was the intensity of William’s effort. Englishmen preferred understatement; the German Emperor seemed flashy, operatic, unreliable, or—the Englishman’s ultimate word of censure—tiresome.
William’s feeling about England centered on the British royal family, of which he felt himself a part—as much a member of the House of Windsor as of the House of Hohenzollern. When angry at his British relatives, he described them as “the damned family.”13 His greatest respect was accorded his grandmother; his mother and his Uncle Bertie stirred mixed emotions. On assuming the throne, William could relegate his antagonism towards his mother to the past; Vicky’s opinions no longer mattered. But his uncle, the Prince of Wales, could not so easily be set aside. He was the heir to a mighty throne; despite his flaws, the toast of Europe; and an uncle with eighteen years’ seniority in age. William admired and was jealous of his uncle. Bertie managed, seemingly spontaneously, to please; if he did not, he did not care. William, caring desperately, tried too hard. Bertie looked down on William and William’s country as pushy and parvenu, and
William knew it. Each was cutting in private about the other: “William the Great14 needs to learn that he is living at the end of the nineteenth century and not in the Middle Ages,” said Bertie on one occasion. “Willy is a bully15 and most bullies, when tackled, are cowards,” he said on another. His nephew, he often announced, was “the most brilliant failure in history.”16 William responded. His uncle, he said, is “an old peacock.”17 “He is a Satan,”18 he told his staff, “you can hardly believe what a Satan he is.” Unsurprisingly, on both sides these words traveled far.
Early in his reign, William’s decision to eschew a period of mourning for his father and to plunge immediately in the summer of 1888 into a round of visits to foreign capitals involved him in a flagrant snub of the Prince of Wales. The new Kaiser, after visiting St. Petersburg, next invited himself to Vienna. As it happened, the Prince already had been asked to Austria-Hungary during the same period. Bertie, on hearing of William’s plans, wrote amicably to his nephew that he looked forward to seeing him in Vienna and would meet the Kaiser’s train at the railway station wearing a Prussian uniform. William did not reply. The Prince, on arriving in Vienna, was told by an embarrassed Austrian Emperor that the Kaiser had insisted that no royal guest other than himself be present in Vienna during his stay; the Prince, accordingly, withdrew to Romania during the eight days of the Kaiser’s visit. The day after his nephew left Austria, Bertie returned to Vienna to complete his visit.
Europe buzzed with accounts of the Prince’s humiliation. Lord Salisbury summoned Count Hatzfeldt, the German Ambassador in London. The Ambassador offered the excuse that the Prince of Wales’ presence at the time of the Kaiser’s visit might have alarmed the Russians. Hatzfeldt also suggested that the Kaiser worried that the Prince would treat him “as an uncle treats a nephew,19 instead of recognizing that he was an emperor.” Salisbury, attempting to put the incident in perspective, proposed that “discussions of this kind20 on personal questions, whatever we might feel about them, would not affect the general policy of the two nations.” Hatzfeldt agreed.
Queen Victoria was enraged by her grandson’s behavior. “As regarding the Prince’s21 not treating his nephew as Emperor, this is really too vulgar and too absurd, as well as untrue, almost to be believed,” she wrote to Lord Salisbury. “We have always been very intimate with our grandson and nephew, and to pretend that he is to be treated in private as well as in public as ‘his Imperial Majesty’ is perfect madness! He has been treated just as we should have treated his beloved father.... If he has such notions, he better never come here. The Queen will not swallow this affront.... William... also said... that, if his uncle wrote him a very kind letter, he might perhaps answer it!! All this shows a very unhealthy and unnatural state of mind; and he must be made to feel that his grandmother and uncle will not stand such insolence. The Prince of Wales must not submit to such treatment. As regards the political relations of the two governments, the Queen quite agrees that that should not be affected (if possible) by these miserable personal quarrels; but the Queen much fears that with such a hot-headed, conceited, and wrong-headed young man, devoid of all feeling, this may at ANY moment become impossible.”
William, in his new role as Kaiser, was anxious to visit England. Salisbury warned Hatzfeldt that until the Vienna episode had been resolved, no invitation would be forthcoming. The Prince of Wales, to facilitate peace, asked his brother-in-law, Prince Christian of Denmark, to invite William to express his regrets in writing so that the English visit could be scheduled. “Most sincerely do I hope,”22 Bertie wrote to Lord Salisbury, “that the young Emperor will accept the olive branch I offer him.” The Kaiser refused. The Queen, now trying to achieve harmony, asked William “how this mistake23 could have arisen.” “The whole affair is absolutely invented,”24 William replied, “there not being an atom of cause to be found. The whole thing... originated either in Uncle Bertie’s imagination or in somebody else’s. Who put it into his head?” The Queen nevertheless decided to terminate the quarrel and wrote to William that he could come to England but must try not to offend his uncle again. William blandly replied, “I am happy to see25 that you regard the Vienna affair as concluded, in which I happily concur; I shall be happy to meet Uncle Bertie at Osborne.”
Queen Victoria, in preparation for her grandson’s first Imperial visit to England, and aware of his interest in the Royal Navy, decided to make him an honorary Admiral of the Fleet. William received the news with delight. “Fancy wearing the same uniform26 as St. Vincent and Nelson,” he told the British Ambassador in Berlin. “It is enough to make one giddy.” The commission, presented in August 1889 aboard the royal yacht Victoria and Albert, restored the Kaiser’s admiration for England, and he returned to Germany glowing with warm feelings about his grandmother’s country and his English relatives. “I now am able to feel27 and take interest in your fleet as if it were my own,” he wrote to the Queen, “and with keenest sympathy shall I watch every phase of its further development knowing that the British ironclads, coupled with mine and my army, are the strongest guarantees of peace.... Should, however, the Will of Providence lay the heavy burden on us of fighting for our homes and destinies, then may the British fleet be seen forging ahead side by side with the German, and the ‘Red Coat’ marching to victory with the ‘Pomeranian Grenadier’!!”
Vicky, a Dowager Empress at forty-seven, now had no influence on her son. Visiting Munich, the Kaiser wrote in the city’s visitors’ book: “Suprema lex regis voluntas est” (“The King’s will is the highest law”). His mother, appalled, wrote to Queen Victoria, “A Tsar, an infallible Pope28—the Bourbons—our poor Charles I—might have written such a sentence, but a constitutional monarch in the 19th century!!! So young a man—the son of his father—and your grandson—not to speak of a child of mine—should neither have nor express such a maxim!” She felt isolated and ignored. “William never comes29 and I am taken no notice of,” she wrote in the summer of her husband’s death. “Of course, it would be far better30 for me to go away from Berlin and not return, but I cannot be banished from the spot where my darling husband and two sweet children lie buried, nor leave the house for good and all where we spent so many years together, and where now recollections haunt every nook and cranny.... Besides, it would look as if I were afraid of them—William and Dona—if I gave up my rights.”
In the autumn, Vicky turned over the New Palace to William and departed, first for England, where she spent three months with Queen Victoria, then for Kronberg near Frankfurt, where she purchased a small estate and built a private house in the style of an English country manor. She called it Friedrichshof and emblazoned on its front the inscription FREDERICI MEMORIAE. She continued, from afar, to disapprove of her son. “William is as blind and green,31 wrong-headed and violent on politics as can be,” she wrote to England. “He is a big baby.... I wish I could put a padlock32 on his mouth for all occasions where speeches are made in public.” William—now that he was Kaiser—adopted a more relaxed attitude towards his mother and her strictures. “My mother and I33 have the same characters,” he said amiably to the British Ambassador. “I have inherited hers. That good, stubborn English blood which will not give way is in both our veins. The consequence is that, if we do not happen to agree, the situation becomes difficult.”
Vicky outlived her husband by thirteen years. In November 1899, at fifty-nine, the Dowager Empress began to complain about “this awful lumbago34... the constant pain.” It was cancer of the spine. Her brother Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg, former Duke of Edinburgh, died of cancer in July 1900; Vicky followed in August 1901. Near the end, her brother, now King Edward VII, came to visit, bringing with him English doctors who recommended more intensive doses of morphine to dull her pain. The German doctors resisted and again there was a medical confrontation across a sickbed. When his mother died, William repeated his performance at the death of his father: the house was sealed off and the rooms searched for the deceased’s private papers. Again, Vicky outwitted
him. All her letters and papers had been sent secretly back to England in the luggage of Sir Frederick Ponsonby, King Edward’s private secretary. The morning after her death, the Kaiser, walking in the garden with Bülow, told the Chancellor that his mother had wished to be buried in England but that he could not permit this offense to German dignity. He did, however, endorse her other final wish, and her body, before being laid in the coffin, was wrapped unclothed in the English flag.
On March 18, 1890, the Kaiser summoned his senior generals and revealed the name of Bismarck’s successor. The new Chancellor of the Empire and Minister-President of Prussia was to be General of Infantry Georg Leo von Caprivi, former State Secretary of the Imperial Navy, currently serving as commander of the Tenth Corps in Hanover. Caprivi, fifty-nine, was the model Prussian officer. He lived a Spartan life, had never married, did not smoke, and had few intimate friends and few enemies. He read history and spoke fluent English. His movements were quiet, his manner open and friendly, his language sensible. With a large round head, fringe of white hair, and sweeping mustache, he was, The Times told its readers, “a typical Teuton35 of the hugest and most impressive type. He might very well pass for a brother, or even a double of Prince Bismarck himself.”
Caprivi, although of noble birth, possessed not an acre of land and prided himself on having managed for forty years on his army salary. He was born in 1831 into a family which mingled Italian, Slav, and Hungarian with Prussian blood and which had only recently acquired the noble “von.” In 1849, at eighteen, he entered the army. He steadily climbed the ladder and established a reputation as a military administrator. In 1882, he was placed in charge of the German Navy, succeeding General Albrecht von Stosch. Caprivi had no interest in naval affairs and did not know the names of his officers or the emblems of rank on the uniforms they wore, but he accepted the assignment, which he performed for six years. Convinced that a war on two fronts against Russia and France was near (Bismarck had never troubled to reveal his secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia to his Navy Minister), Caprivi chose the torpedo boat as the best and least expensive weapon to use against the Russian and French navies. Kaiser William II did not appreciate torpedo boats; he had no wish to appear at Cowes among his grandmother’s huge battleships at the head of a squadron of small torpedo boats. Immediately after his accession, he began to interfere at the Admiralty. In July 1888, Caprivi resigned in protest and went back to the army.