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The Incredible Mistake



The 1908 release for publication in the London Daily Telegraph of the Kaiser's so-called "interview" with an "unimpeachable" source has been deemed an "incredible mistake", one of the greatest gaffes of the twentieth century, the faux pas that nearly resulted in the Emperor's abdication and led to the retirement of Chancellor Bernhard 'the Lucky' Bulow, where he maintained a discreet silence pending the eventual release of his Memoirs.



Today it is rather difficult to understand why people were so outraged by the Kaiser's  interview. William had said everything therein before at one time or another. The Chancellor on whose watch the gaffe occured, Prince von Bulow, included his account of the affair in his Memoirs, which  he said he wrote as if he had been under oath.  He said he conducted an investigation, and, unknown to him, "the essential points in the English article had already become known to the public": they had already been published in Fleischer's Review - the Chancellor might have added, if only he had known, that the views the Kaiser had expressed in the Daily Telegraph in respect to the Boer War had been already published in the June 1907 and December 1907 National Review, and also the January 1908 Strand Magazine. In any event, Prince von Bulow claimed he had not read the draft of the article before it was published even though it had passed through his hands twice. Or so he swears; and he swears that when he received a summary of the article from the Wolff Telegraphic Agency right after it had been published, that his "peace of mind quickly changed to startled amazement as I read it." He read the "far too characteristic and far too naive assertion" of the Emperor, that Germans did not like Englishmen. "As I read these sad effusions which could scarcely have been surpassed in tactless stupidity," he reminisces, "I suspected in a flash that I had before me an article which, some time ago, I had received.... and which I myself had not had time to read."  Prince von Bulow then recounts how he, unknown to the public, had saved the Emperor from even worse embarrassment:



"But precisely, and above all, in England did these fresh outpourings of William II produce the effect of a hailstorm in early summer. Their result would have been even more disastrous had I been unable, just in time, to prevent the publication of an interview given by the Emperor to an American journalist, Hale, in entire contradiction of the opinions formerly expressed.... In it that same William II, who before had expressed such violent, undying friendship for the English, said just the opposite to the Americans. He warned them against British trickery, against the English hostility to America, advising them to seek German protection from the wiles of perfidious Albion. The well-intentioned proprietor of the American Century Magazine, who had obtained possession of this interview, was, at last, persuaded to relinquish it and forego the joys of publication. At about the same time, reports the former Chancellor,  Herr Bunz, the German Consul General in New York, reported that the 'famous interview', before it reached the Daily Telegraph, had been in the hands of the proprietor of the Daily Mail, Mr. Harmsworth, who later, as Lord Northcliffe, would achieve great distinction in the World War. The Daily Mail, 'with regret', gave up the idea of publishing the interview when Mr. Harmsworth was informed by the English Foreign Office that its publication was not desired."



Rejection by the Daily Mail is particularly interesting in light of the fact that it was the jingo rag relied on by political hawks to stir up hatred against Germany and to scare Parliament into providing more funds for military endeavors, particulary Admiral Fisher's beloved Dreadnoughts - any sailor who opposed the Admiral's views was considered a traitor by him. Lord Northcliffe was well known, to those who wanted the same funds for social pursuits, as a hate-monger: a "true prophet of war" whose mission was to "prophesy war and cultivate hate", said A.G. Gardiner to Northcliffe. Judging from the esctatic demonstrations in the streets when war with Germany was certain, the British had been dying to make war all along. In November 1914 Lord Northcliffe ordered his editorial staff to publish a booklet of clippings from its pro-war editions: Scaremongering from the Daily Mail 1896-1914: the paper that foretold the war; papers who had favored peace were referred to in the booklet as pro-German - meaning, traitors. Hence we wonder if the Daily Mail editors considered the Kaiser's interview too friendly to publish! We discover elsewhere that portions of the suppressed article were leaked to an American publication, The New York World, which duly published the Kaiser's suggestion that Germany and America should get together and dissolve the British Empire after it had been pulled apart by India and China. A.J.A. Morris did some digging into the correspondence of diplomats and others for his book, The Scaremongers, and came up with some choice gossip; such as, that the American journalist by the name of Hale had dressed himself up as a Methodist minister for his interview with the Kaiser, which prompted William to abuse the Vatican after expressing contempt for his uncle the King of England,  saying England was rotten and marching to its ruin. Apparently certain British editors were dying to get ahold of this interview which contradicted the Daily Telegraph interview, and so were the New York papers, the New York Herald offering to pay $10,000 for a copy - but none was produced. So much for this portion of gossip.



The gaffe was in fact the convulsive culmination of considerable public anxiety over the Emperor's personal regime and the uncertain grand future of the barely pubescent German state which had been unified by Bismark in 1871, an Imperial state dominated by the Prussian ruling elite pursuant to the fatally flawed constitution Bismark had provided to ensure that power stayed in the noblest of  Prussian hands. Germany's progress had been astonishing since then: compare, for example, the progress of the United States in the same number of years, from the American Revolution to the War of 1812. Of course nearly a century had passed since 1812, and the scientific-industrial revolution was working its wonders on the world and on William.



The English Woman



The twenty-nine-year old Kaiser inherited the joint Prussian and Imperial crowns from his liberal Prussian father, Emperor Frederick III, an admirer of the English constitution. When Frederick's ninety-day reign was cut short by cancer, William, as if staging a coup against his parent's liberalism, had the family residence surrounded by Hussars, then changed its name from Friedrichson, back to its original name, Neues Palais. He showed no grief for his deceased father, and treated his liberal English mother callously. A relative said William was not being deliberately unkind, but was simply "thoughtless"; his mother often complained about insults at his hands then and thereafter - her fall from prominence when her son took over the Empire did much to add insult to injury.



William's mother, Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise, Queen of Prussia, Empress Frederick of the German Empire, was the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria and Royal Consort Albert of Saxe-Coburg. She was her father's daughter;  at age nine she was already reciting German verses at length, as if German were her native tongue. A marriage was arranged with Prince Frederick of Prussia - she was Alfred and Victoria's offering to secure future peace between German and England. The marriage took place in 1858. The bride was eighteen, the groom twenty-seven.



Intelligent and liberally educated, the new Crown Princess of Prussia considered herself to be a "freeborn English woman."  As far as the Prussians were concerned, she was Die Englanderin in Prussia, in a similar way that Marie Antoinette had been "the Austrian woman" in France. The English and Prussians were supposedly of similar racial stock, but they differed greatly in political temperament: 'English' meant 'liberal' and that term implied parliamentary power and figureheaded monarchy, things no Prussian worth his horse and sword would stand for.



We cannot blame the Prussian Old Guard for their prejudice turned to justified bias given Victoria Adelaide's intrigues to accomplish the mission given to her by Alfred before his death, the father who had believed in constitutional government and who had, his daughter said, "advocated every true, right and sound principle and therefore was great and wise and happy." She was a traitor to Prussian militancy, and wanted the rule of culture instead. It was Alfred's express will that the Princess Royal of England anglicize the Prussian state, a state her mother Victoria called a "police state." Albert of Saxe-Coburn had declared, "Prussia claims to stand at the head of Germany, but she does not behave like a German."



Crown Princess Frederick had her golden opportunity to liberalize Prussia after the 1862 showdown between 333 liberals and 15 conservatives in the Prussian Diet. The Diet refused to fund the military. William I was preparing to abidicate; the document was already drawn up: he showed it to his horrified son; Frederick, in turn, turned to his English wife for advice. She urged him to take the crown; she prophesied that, if he failed to do so, he would regret it, and their children would have pay for the mistake in order to make it good. She said that, if she were a man, she would do the deed herself, but....



Frederick's effort to secure the throne and liberalize the government, which would have placed the Prussian army under civilian control, was too weak to succeed. Bismark was called in from Paris by William I, and Bismark, as we know from his famous speech, relied on blood and iron and not on majorities for the resolution of political conflicts. It would take him an incredible ten years to transform the tiny Prussian state into the most powerful force on the Continent. Frederick, to stay out of prison, was made to promise that he would never attack his father's government again. After Bismark launched the wars of the 1860s, Frederick became a heroic commander-in-chief of armies. After winning an important battle, he asked himself, "Where will victories under Bismark lead us? That is the crushing question." And he noted some time later, "War is a frightful thing." After receiving the Order of Pour le Merite, he secretly wrote, "We can only mourn." Frederick was altruistic and humane, but he also had romantic ideas about his family dynasty. He may have been the prime mover in the restoration of the Imperial order along the majestic lines of Rome; indeed, we may suppose that the Second Reich was really his idea. Bismark the realist liked romantic Frederick's suggestions: the title, 'Kaiser', and the unifying concept of imperial succession. However that may be, Frederick's wife had prophesied truly: he regreted his early failure to secure the crown for himself and his moderately liberal ideas to his dying day - he was already dying when he got ahold of it, and even then his liberlism had chilling effect on the conservatives. His son William did pay for his father's weakness: he moved forcefully to the militant right, and by the time he got wise millions of lives had been lost as well as the Prussian monarchy.



Now Victoria Adelaide loved her new country for awhile. During the Prussian-Austrian war, when her husband's battlefield successes were transforming him into a national hero, she wrote home to Queen Victoria: "I feel that I am NOW every bit as proud of being Prussian as I am of being an Englishwoman, and that is saying a very great deal, as you know what a John Bull I am and how enthusiastic about my home. I must say the Prussians are a superior race, as regards intelligence and humanity, education and kindheartedness...."  She obviously loved her Prussian husband, and she loved the arts and sciences as well: "Amongst the liberals," she wrote. on August 13, 1888, to Queen Victoria in  "I have many good and true friends. Also among men of science, letters and art. But these people are not noisy or powerful." In the same letter, she spoke of her dearly departed Fritz: "All that is foreign, especially all that is English, is hated, because it is thought to have a Liberal tendency! They did not understand Fritz, he was too good, too noble, too enlightened."



However she did not love her congenitally damaged son well enough, or at least, if we are to believe in liberal psychoanalysis, not in the right way. Instead of smothering him with liberal love to overcompensate for his birth trauma, she subjected him to a tortuous regime to willfullly overcome it. You see, poor Willy was mauled during birth, leaving his left arm paralyzed and shriveled. He was partially deaf in the left ear and experienced problems later in life because of damage to the balancing mechanism of his inner ear. He had lain for two hours unattended after his birth and had nearly suffocated while doctors struggled to save his mothers life. Of course some critics blamed the damage on England; that is, on his English mother and her English doctor. Willy was made to wear an atrocious bracing contraption, and he had to study and train for twelve hours a day, six days a week; he studied Latin, Greek, World History, Mathematics - he did not like math; he excelled at horseback riding, swimming, shooting, tennis - he eventually took a liking to the military arts, losing his affection for the Army when he discovered it did not like the Navy. His useless arm throughout was the family's enemy. Sad to say, he mother once called him a "cripple" in front of company - but let us not paint her too black, as many others have done.  According to Freud's analysis of much of this and more besides, Willy was bound to take revenge on his strong-arm mother, rejecting her and his 'weak' liberal father in favor of William I, his tough Prussian grandfather. That is to say, he "skipped a generation."  His mother complained early on that the conservative ruling party had stolen her Willy to make him his grandfather's boy, yet she hoped the liberals and progressives would eventually win him over. No doubt he was glad to get out from under the liberal thumb at home.



As Die Englanderin, a "freeborn English woman", lay dying of cancer herself some time after her husband's death by the same cause, she asked her son, William II, King of Prussia and German Emperor, to wrap her naked body in an English flag and send it to England for burial. Emperor William consulted with tough old Chancellor Bismark, whom she called her bete noir - when he was first appointed First Minister, she declared, "It is a totally erroneous idea that a man like Bismark can be of use to our country - he has no principles."  For reasons of state, Victoria's  dying wish was dishonored.



Let the Ballet Begin.



When young William took the throne when powerful new technology was being developed, and he was not about to give it up during his right-handed move to personal sovereignty. That move was engineered behind the throne by his best friend, Phillip Eulenberg. Eulenberg was responsible for Prince von Bulow's rapid rise to the chancellorship in 1900. He was also a cause celebre of the homosexual scandal that was shocking the Fatherland and embarrassing the Emperor in 1907 at the time he was giving his so-called interview in England.  In 1906, a homophobic muckraker and militant nationalist by the name of Maximilian Harden, convinced that a "weak" homosexual ring,  even more internationalist in character than the Socialist International, was conspiring to seize control of the Empire. Harden used his rag, The Future, to charge Eulenberg and others near the Emperor with homosexuality - gay officers in the military. He claimed to have liberal ideas about homosexuality, yet he felt it had no place in manly politics, which should more concerned with the art of war than that of friendship. He went on to advocate unrestrained submarine warfare during the Great War, after which he converted to socialism.



Phillip Eulenberg was a relative moderate gentleman, a diplomat with an interest in the arts as well as politics who rapidly rose to become the power behind the throne. He preferred diplomacy to war, believing war was too risky of a course for Germany to follow. His personal affection for William led him to oppose the 'New Course' of liberalism and to support the personal  regime of the sovereign who would run his government in the Prussian way, from the top down through his ministers. Eulenberg sponsored Prince von Bulow for the chancellorship because he believed the Prince would augment the Imperial cult of personality and wholeheartedly do the Emperor's bidding, but Prince von Bulow turned out to be a slippery eel. and one who added to the Emperor's extreme discomfort in 1907 by delivering a speech to the Reichstag, assuring Germany that he was disgusted by the suggestion that Germany and its Army had been corrupted by a homosexual ring reminiscent of decadent Imperial Rome. The moral rectitude of the Imperial couple was beyond question, he said. The Imperial family was a perfect model for Germany. It was outrageous to suggest that Germany was some sort of Sodom - it was time to put an end to the gossip.  



When the gaffe over the Daily Telegraph interview erupted thereafter, a sort of People's Court of Justice convened in the Reichstag. The Chancellor's defense of His Majesty was tepid. Yes, the Kaiser had observed the constitution - he had the Chancellor sign off on the interview before it was released. Yes, the Chancellor and the Foreign Office had been inattentive and had unwittingly allowed the indiscreet interview to be released - for that the Chancellor took full responsibility and offered his resignation, which the Emperor had refused. Yes, there were plans to reform the Foreign Office bureaucracy - the legislators laughed at that statement. However, or so the Chancellor implied, the buck stops with the Emperor for making his characteristic statements in the first place. To wit: the Kaiser is personally responsible, and His Majesty must refrain from such incredible mistakes during the future course of his public and private life:



"Gentlemen," said the Chancellor addressed the Reichstag, "it is certain that the appearance of this interview in England has not produced the effect His Majesty desired; that here in Germany it has caused the profoundest emotion, the gravest heart-searchings and regrets. His knowledge of this - these last few days have convinced me of fit - will cause His Majesty, even in future private conversations, to maintain that reserve indispensable to the interests of any consisent Foreign Policy, and to those of the authority of the Crown (Bulow notes a burst of applause, particularly from the benches on the Right.) "But if this were not so," (Bulow says he added, to the "prolonged acclamation of both National Liberals and Conservatives"), "neither I myself, nor any successor of mine could accept the responsibility of office." And that was not all.



Now William had always deeply resented criticism even in private, so we should know without asking how he initially felt when he heard that Chancellor von Bulow's defense amounted to a confession of the His Highness's ineptitude before the entire German nation and his willingness to be a good boy now! He was livid, to say the least. He allegedly burst into tears and accused the Chancellor of judicial murder for the defense presented to the Reichstag by the Chancellor in whom, as the Chancellor later said with some amazement, William had placed his "child-like trust" in to handle the fiasco. Up to that extremely embarrassing point, the Kaiser had not totally collapsed. According to Prince von Bulow Memoirs, Willian did suffer a bit of a shock short after the interview was published: "A dark foreboding ran through many Germans that such clumsy, incautious, over-hasty - such stupid, even puerile speech and action on the part of the supreme Head of the State, could lead to only one thing - catastrophe. The Emperor himself, if only for a passing instant, felt the earth tremble beneath his feet."



Before the Reichstag interpellated the Daily Telegraph hearings into its proceedings, Prince von Bulow recounts that William had planned on visiting Kiel and Hamburg, but he was advised not to do so because hostile demonstrations were expected. On 31 October 1908, three days after the interview was published, he visited the Chancellor: "He was," wrote Bulow, "as he always was at moments of crisis, very pale, very pitiable." Bulow insists in his Memoirs that he told the Emperor what he would say before the Reichstag, a declamation against the sovereign's personal intervention in foreign policy. He claims William then grew calm, placed his child-like trust in him, and said, "However you do it, get us out of this, bring us through."



Despite the "unpleasant shock" Bulow said His Highness initially experienced, we hear from other sources that, on 4 November, William did not seem to have a clue about the grave damage to his image the interview had caused. On 6 November, he sent the Chancellor a cheery note. He slapped another concerned official on the back, saying he ought not worry, the gaffe would blow over, there was a silver lining in every cloud. He went off stag hunting in Austria, then visited his best friend Prince Furstenberg at Castle Furstenberg for a week. On 10 November, while the Reichstag was listening to Chancellor von Bulow's speech, the Kaiser was enjoying a Zepellin launching at Castle Furstenberg; he loved the sea most of all, but he foresaw the virtue of air power and said that the airshow had been "one of the greatest moments in the development of human culture."  So it was not until the next day, on 11 November, when he received the news of the Chancellor's so-called "defense" of His Highness, that he was outraged. However, he was not mortified until several days later, on 14 November, during a tragic episode at the Castle.



"During this whole affair I underwent great mental anguish," wrote the Kaiser in his Memoirs, "which was heightened by the sudden death before my eyes of the intimate friend of my youth, Count Hulsen-Haesler, chief of the military cabinet." While the storm over the Daily Telegraph was raging in Berlin, the Kaiser was being entertained by his best friend and personal advisor, His Serene Highness Prince Maxmilian Egon zu Furstenberg, German-Austrian grand seigneur, multi-millionaire, the power behind the Imperial throne replacing scandalized Phillip Eulenberg. Prince Furstenberg was a very handsome man; his wife apparently kept an eye on him, so there is little suspicion that he was up to hanky panky within the inner Imperial circle. He was in fact the perfect friend to have around during bad times. Not only was he brutally honest with the Kaiser, he loved to tell vulgar jokes and stories and to stage entertainments to distract William from his royal troubles. In this case the entertainment included General Hulsen-Haseler dressed up in a tutu. He was an excellent dancer and had on other occasions performed as a ballerina. This time he had a heart attack immediately after his exertion and dropped dead. The guests hastily redressed the body and laid it on an improvised bier. This whole affair at Prince Furstenberg's castle only served to add to the 'November Storm" raging in Berlin. Emil Ludwig represents the scandalous version well in Wilhelm Hohenzollern, The Last of the Kaisers (1927):  



"It was Durer's Dance of Death come true. But the Emperor did not read the writing on the wall. He did not see that once again a mightier hand than his had pointed threateningly to follies and frivolities. Encircled by anger and resentment of sixty millions of active fellow-creatures, one man sat, inactive and provocative, drowning his mortifications in music-hall songs and jokes, in shooting parties and ballets, and allowing exasperating tales of Court-life to circulate among the people. Now, when finally one of his most prominent Generals had appeared as a ballerina before the highest society, disgracing the most illustrious class in the land, behold! the hand of Heaven was put forth; it struck the abject courtier to the earth- upon the wall of the castle at Donaueschingen flamed the great Mene Tekel, that now at last the roistering King might look into his heart. But the King was looking into quite other places."



A Slap in the Cheek



Instead of a slap to the Kaiser's cheek - it would be merely a wrist-slap in a democracy -  the Reichstag might have used the Daily Telegraph gaffe to diminish the Imperial power by rendering the parliament truly parliamentary, but it passed up the golden opportunity. After all, under Bismark's constitution, the Reichstag, the lower house of the parliament, although it was gaining in power, was little more than a debating society when it came to crucial matters. The upper house, or Bundesrat, the federation of states, had the real power, and it was dominated by Prussia - the latter could always raise enough votes to block any power plays by other states although kid gloves must be used to deal with them lest they pull out of the Empire. The only way to make the Kaiser and his Chancellor legally responsible to the Reichstag would be to amend the constitution. There was no chance of that at the time, and those who were fond of and beholden to Imperial power believed the Chancellor was a traitor to his Emperor. The Chancellor was allowed to stay on for a few months because he was handling the Bosnian crisis - Austria's annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.  But in 1909, when he sponsored an inheritance tax bill to fund the armament build up, which was running the government into a huge deficit, the conservatives, who did not want to be directly taxed for the Navy, and others with opposing interests, took their revenge and defeated the bill, albeit narrowly. The Chancellor got the point and submitted his resignation - he did not have to submit it, as there was no constitutional provision for no confidence. The Kaiser gladly accepted the resignation on the spot, the spot he pointed out later to a visitor, declaring it to be the very spot where he got rid of that "scoundrel."  Prince von Bulow thought he would be recalled someday - fat chance.  In his Memoirs he relates how he parted on good terms with he Kaiser.



As for the chance for the Emperor's abdication, it was rather slim. William had threatened to quit on previous occasions when he felt let down by the Germany he identified with as if he were the state reflected and vice versa. He loved the new media as much as his new fleet and the new dirigible technology, hence he cultivated his personality for the masses - he was a publicity hound. Having identified with public opinion instead of rational reasons of state, his bipolar moods often swung with the irrational public mood; when the German press came down on him after the interview was published, his Zeppelin was punctured, he sunk to the pits of depression after brief periods of denial and enragement - he experienced one of his "nervous collapses", and was given to fits of "convulsive weeping." During his rehabilitation, he was at first only able to take walks and to care for his dogs. His son the Crown Prince recounted in his Memoirs that he was shocked at his father's appearance when he visited his sick-bed; "He seemed aged by years; he had lost hope, and felt himself to be deserted by everybody; he was broken down by the catastrophe which had snatched the ground from beneath his fee; his self-confidence and his trust were shattered. A deep pity was in me. Scarcely ever have I felt myself so near him as in that hour."



The Kaiser's incomplete recovery from the Daily Telegraph gaffe took nearly a year - he never made a full public comeback. "He has never recovered from the blow," wrote the Crown Prince. "Under the cloak of his old self-confidence, he assumed an ever-increasing reserve, which, though hidden from the outside world, was often more restricting than the limits of his constitutional position." But, no, the Emperor was not about to abdicate. When push came to shove, he held on, at least until he left the country after the Great War in order to save his own skin, retiring to the life of a country gentleman in The Netherlands, where he cut down 40,000 trees to stay in shape.    



The Well Written Interview



The Emperor had declared his 1908 interview with the Daily Telegraph to be "well written" prior to its release. He was apparently astonished by the angry worldwide response to his effort to win over the hearts and minds of the English by expressing his friendship for them because relations between Germany and Britain had been strained since the First Morocco Crisis. In 1905, at Chancellor Bulow's urging and against the Emperor's better judgment, or so he said, the Emperor, assisted by nature, created a provocative scene at Tangier. His Majesty got soaked during a rough disembarkation from the ship Hamburg. He then mounted a frisky steed for the ride into Tangiers.



Now William took pride in his horsemanship and loved riding horseback - he used a saddle for his desk-chair in his office. He preferred a well-trained horse with a soft mouth, one he could guide with slight movements of his weakened left arm. Yet this horse gave even his strong right arm quite a challenge, hence he arrived at his destination in an excited state of body and mind. There, in the name of free trade, he stepped on France's toes, demanding equal economic privileges in Morocco for all nations. Furthermore, he said would deal directly with the Sultan as a free and equal ruler of an independent country. He said that he expected France to respect his rightful claim, and that he knew how to validate it by "bringing influences to bear." Before the French Charge d' affaires, Count Cherisey, could respond, William curtly dismissed him; paled by the experience, the Count withdrew with head lowered.  To his German colony in Morocco he declared, "I am happy to salute the devoted pioneers of German industry and commerce who aid me in my task of maintaining the interests of the Fatherland in a free country. The Empire has great and growing interests in Morocco. Commerce can only progress if all the Powers are considered to have equal rights under the sovereignty of the Sultan and compatible with the independence of the country. My visit is the recognition of this independence." To the Sultan's uncle he said, among other things, "My visit is to show my resolve to do all in my power to safeguard German interests in Morocco. Considering the Sultan as absolutely free, I wish to discuss with him the means to secure these interests."



Since the visit to Tangiers is considered to be one of the greatest diplomatic blunders of the years leading to the Great War, since it made a mountain out of a molehill, thus causing the limited entente between France and Great Britain to be extended worldwise, we must provide some background information. France and Great Britain had entered into the Entente Cordiale in April 1904: France exchanged her claims to Egypt for a protectorate over the chaotic, disintegrating kingdom of Morocco, with a view to establishing in Morocco trade monopolies. But certain Secret Treaties would also be signed, one in the same month, another in September, pursuant to a diplomatic negotiation between France, Britain and Spain, to partition Morocco when the Sultan lost control over a substantial portion - that portion to go to Spain for her administration providing she keep it open for trade. Hence at the same time Spain was declaring her adherence to the Entente Cordiale between France and Great Britain, she was smacking her lips behind the scenes over the prospect of the choice portion she was to have along the Mediterranean coast from Melila to the Sebu river. As for the Kaiser, he did not give much of a hoot about Morocco until the Secret Treaties were leaked to Berlin, and Chancellor von Bulow then urged him to make waves. If the British or French diplomats had bothered to let Germany, France's dangerous neighbor, in on the deal, Germany might have demurred; but she was the last to know since she was not considered to be a Mediterranean power. Therefore the Fatherland's Foreign Office took umbrage and pressure was brought to bear on the Kaiser. He contacted President Teddy Roosevelt, who was out hunting bears. Teddy believed France had the high moral ground in the crisis, but he was duly concerned about the probable consequences and wanted to ameliorate the anxiety because, he said, "Each nation is working itself up to a condition of desperate hatred of the other - each from fear the other is going to attack." A conference was proposed. At first France was against it and Great Britain took her side.  M. Theophile Delcasse, French Minister for Foreign Affairs, did his best to rouse France to war. William know a demonstration at Tangiers would be a flirtation with disaster; he had expected as much as war and did not want it; that is why he said he had initially demurred when his Chancellor approached him; but then he caved in and proceeded to do what he felt was constitutional - go along with his ministry.



The Opposition in France was suitably alarmed by the prospect of war, especially in view of France's unpreparedness for such an event. Foreign Minister Delcasse was soon dismissed from his post, whereupon William was so overjoyed by the dismissal that, according to Chancellor Bulow, he magnanimously blurted out that he would like to "give" Morocco to France, an expression which of course diminished Germany's influence at the conference that was in fact eventually held at Algeciras to resolve the First Moroccan Crisis.  Both the Kaiser and his Chancellor were embittered by the conduct of Great Britain throughout the crisis. British hawks who had taken their official perches around the time of a previous incident, that of the Kruger Telegram, were already leery of the German "menace" - Admiral Fisher wrote to Landsdowne: "All I hope is that you will send a telegram to Paris that the English and French fleets are one. We should have the German fleet, the Kiel Canal, and Schleswig-Holstein in a fortnight."



Britain, whose previous conduct had been duplicitous to say the least, supported France at the Algeciras Conference, ignoring Germany's friendly approaches, and was working for an agreement with Russia. Nonetheless, the resulting Treaty should have been considered a minor triumph for Germany albeit one that should have not been desired since it reinforced the 'encirclement' of Germany. However that may be, an American diplomat, surprised by the negative reaction in Germany to the agreement, said the Treaty of Algeciras was actually a victory for Germany because Germany had obtained everything the German diplomats had wanted. Prince von Bulow in his Memoirs, reports, "Although it may not have given us all we wished, it did represent the essentials of what we had striven to maintain.... France did not obtain the Protectorate at which she had aimed.... We had made a victorious stand for commercial freedom in Morocco. We had secured a definite right to cooperate in the future development of Moroccan affairs.... We had stood unshakeably by the great principle of the Open Door which had never ceased to guide us since the beginning of the Moroccan Affair." Nevertheless, militant German nationalists considered the 1906 Treaty of Algeciras a national disgrace. The Emperor's influential friend Phillip Eulenberg, who would suffer an ignominious fall from power in 1907 due to the homosexual scandal, was eventually smeared for taking part in the Algeciras disgrace, purportedly for being unmanly or weak. As for the Kaiser, he was convinced by England's behavior that he had good cause to be paranoid; therefore, so did Germany: the Fatherland was being encircled and would soon be suffocated in his crib unless he struck pre-emptively,  in self-defense.



"At the Algeciras Conference," wrote William in his Memoirs, "the shadow of the Great War was already visible. It is assuredly not pleasant to be forced to retreat politically as we did in the Morocco matter, but Germany's policy subordinated everything to the great cause of preserving peace." There would be more trouble in Morocco, and a Second Moroccan Crisis. Germany's interest would evnetually be traded off for a piece of the Congo. In retrospect the Kaiser's intution was correct: Germany would have been better off if Morocco had been "given" to France. Prince von Bulow gets the blame for stirring up a hornet's nest for future references; nonetheless, that the anti-German entente was enlarged and strengthened demonstrates a certain predisposition to fight, a prejudice looking forward to one provocation or another.



It was with the alarming shadows of war in mind; the headaches of the armaments race; the homosexual scandals casting doubt on Prussian and therefore on his Imperial virility; and other pressing matters of state; - that William ventured to England in late autumn 1907. After visiting his uncle King Edward at Windsor, he had been invited over to rest at General Stuart Wortley's Highcliffe Castle. WIlliam had not wanted to travel to England at first, feigning faintness - his detractors insist it was a homosexual panic due to fear of exposure; he said it was due to a cold - but he, feeling better, had been persuaded to travel. Chancellor Bulow asked him to seize the opportunity to get on a good footing with the English. He did just that.



General Wortley was duly impressed by William's friendly effusions in England, so he wrote them down. In November 1908, when the General visited William at the Alsaac Maneuvers, he suggested that William's anglophilic remarks be published as an interview. As the public clamored over the interview, William asked the Chancellor to add the following explanation to the planned press release vindicating him, "The manuscript is a resume of a number of conversations I had last autumn with various people in England, and that it was by their wish - since they seemed to confident of the English public - that the substance of what I said has been made available to as wide a section of their fellow countrymen as possible. I consented to their entreaties in the fashion described above." Curiously, in view of the Chancellor's denial that he had read the interview before its release, and his insistence that if he had done so, he would not have allowed its release, the Emperor wrote in his Memoirs that during his stay in England he had repeatedly telegraphed the conversations in question to the Chancellor; that the Chancellor then repeatedly approved of same by return telegram; and that his companions in England had read the exchanges and "rejoiced with me at the harmonious understanding between me and the chancellor." If we dig deeper in the Memoir wars, we are told that the Kaiser ordered a search of the files for the series of telegrams, but none could be found; so he figured the Chancellor had burned them, but on second thought he thought the exchange might have been by letter instead of telegram; the Chancellor did not remember and such letters, and neither did his wife who kept his correspondence in order; well, the Kaiser recalled that he told his Chancellor all about the conversations while they stood by a tree in the Chancellor's garden; the Chancelor remembered no such conversation - in any case, the Kaiser insisted he remembered very well how he had fully informed the Chancellor the conversations, and the latter thanked him very much for further the ministry's policy.



The Kruger Telegram



The Daily Telegraph interview was a deliberate attempt to use the English press as a tool to manipulate public opinion in order to befriend or mollify the English people - incidentally, the interview had apparently been rejected by the Daily Mail upon request of the English Foreign Office, but was accepted by the Daily Telegraph because pro-German General Wortley brought his influence to bear on the publisher, a close friend of his. After all, a friendship might help alleviate the suffocating encirclement Germany was experiencing on the Continent, and surely that was a crucial consideration, even more important than the opinion of Germans who hated England. The controversy over who was responsible for releasing the draft interview to the press is rather silly, and diverts attention from the fact that the key players involved knew what was going it - there had been no incredible mistake. Heads did not go on the chopping block at once because, after all, as far as His Highness was concerned, it was a damned good interview.



Now the Kaiser was a modern monarch: he was aware that a monarch theoretically only answers to God. Nonetheless, in modern practice, one must listen to the voice of the people and make sure that it echoes the divine will. Again, as for the blaming game, the political heels and slippery eels, your author believes nearly everyone involved were well aware of the contents of the interview before it was published and had few qualms about doing so. The gaffe resulted from an miscalculation of the probable reaction of the German public. Such a gaffe would be avoidable today by means of polling techniques - but once the Imperial egg was laid on the international stage, the actors had to take turns sitting on it. In addition, and unfortunately for the Kaiser, he discouraged negative feedback from the people around him, therefore denying to himself what little information he might get about the fluctuating attitude of his subjects. And, lest we forget, there are always those who secretly relish the idea that the boss will get what he deserves - at the outset of his reign, more than one minister thought the inexperienced young master needed a dousing in cold water to teach him a good lesson.    



Be that as it may, the interview with the Kaiser included his profession of friendship for the English people, a sentiment which he said was not shared by "large sections of the middle and lower classes" of his own people. The original draft of the interview reportedly stated a "universal" German antipathy for the English; but it had been edited; according to later commentators, this was one of the few "minor" or "major" changes to the original draft. The published version represented the Kaiser as a presumably friendly member of the minority of the "best elements" in the Fatherland. The liberals and socialists felt insulted by the elementary school remark; however, there did in fact exist upper-class elements who expressed fondness for the English, and profusely so when they were not prepared to make war on their formidable friend.



Der Kaiser informed the English people that they were "mad, mad, mad as March hares" for doubting his friendship; that he, Queen Victoria's loving grandson, had in effect won the Boer War for the British because he had sent along plans to England for the successful military campaign executed by Lord Roberts. Furthermore, he said that when he was approached by Russian and France for his assistance in an effort to save the Boer Republics and humiliate England in the process, he had refused their advances on the grounds that he would not compromise Germany by going against a great sea power like England. Posterity, he said, will find the evidence in Windsor archives, in the form of a telegram informing England's Sovereign of his refusal. No such telegram could be located later; France denied it had made any such approach; evidence existed that Russian Minister Muraviev had suggested a coalition against England, but in the first weeks of the Boer War, not at its height.



"Let my critics ask themselves what brought a sudden stop, and indeed, to absolute collapse, the European tour of the Boer delegates, who were striving to obtain European intervention? They were feted in Holland, France gave them a rapturous welcome. They wished to come to Berlin, where the German people would have crowned them with flowers. But when they asked me to receive them - I refused. The agitation immediately died away, and the delegation returned empty-handed. Was that, I ask, the action of a secret enemy?"



The Kaiser's reference to the Boer War plans drew guffaws from the House of Commons in London when a member joked that the Kaiser's plans could not be located in the files. Actually, the German Foreign Office had been in possession all along of a copy of a document he had sent to the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, on February 4, 1900, containing 'Twenty-two Aphorisms on the Conduct of War.' During a speech to the Reichstag, Chancellor von Bulow informed the members that said aphorisms were relatively harmless observations including an inappropriate analogy to a football match with Australia. Yet we note that the German Foreign Office had given the go-ahead to publication of the interview, and had not corrected the Kaiser's claim in light of what it had in its files. However that may be, Chancellor von Bulow informed the Reichstag that the claim was "mere bragging humbug from end to end." The Chancellor also told the lower house that he recalled that a memorandum on the South African War had been drawn up by the General Staff, as is usual for all wars, but nothing had been transmitted to England. He noted in his Memoirs that his remarks to the Reichstag on the "unhappily chosen expressions of opinion" by the Emperor drew applause. And this all before he moved on to the "direct defense" of His Majesty! Quite naturally William had a few things to say in his own defense elsewhere. No doubt he was fuming most mightily in his inherent Teutonic furor, and we would not want to print his private remarks to Prince Furstenberg even if we were privy to them.



The Kruger Telegram expressed just the opposite sentiment toward England than the warm feelings the Kaiser conveyed in the Daily Telegraph interview. On January 3, 1896, he sent a telegram to Paul Kruger, leader of the Boers, congratulating him for thwarting Dr. Leander Starr Jameson's incursion into the Boer Republics at the head of a  band of British irregulars - the Boers arrested and imprisoned the outlaws: "I express to you my sincere congratulations that, supported by your people and without calling for help from friendly powers, you have succeeded by your energetic action against armed bands that invaded your country as disturbers of the peace, and have therefore been able to restore peace and safeguard the independence of the country from outside attack."



The Kaiser had followed the constitution before sounding off on the issue: before the Kruger Telegram was transmitted, German Secretary of State Baron von Marschal examined it and omitted the Kaiser's reference to providing the Boers with "the support of the Reich." Nonetheless, the Boers considered the telegram as a sign that they could count on the Kaiser as their ally in war, and they proceeded to arm themselves under German auspices - the military successes of the Boers soon astonished the world.



Most of the world and especially the Germans sympathized with the Boers ("farmers"). The Boers, staunch Calvinists who considered themselves divinely elected in Africa to follow in the patriarchical paces of Moses, were descended from a 1707 Cape Colony population of 1,779 that included French Huguenot bloodlines but was largely Dutch and German. They had gone forth out of glutted Cape Town and had multiplied. Germans loved the romantic nomadic quest of the Boers and had made substantial investments in the two Boer Republics. Of course England coveted the diamonds and gold: the world's monetary system was practically based on gold, and control of the largest gold-mining complex in the world, which so happened to be in the Transvaal, would certainly bolster the British neo-mercantilist freedom of trade about the globe. In any event, the attitude of many Germans during the Boer War was anti-British enough at the time one might say that they hated the English with a passion.  As for the Kaiser, he found himself somewhere between loving and hating the English depending on his mood. He was given to spouting off one way or the other, but his seemingly retroactive Daily Telegraph expression of affection for the English and his claim therein to having won the war against the Boers for England did not sit well in the beer- and sausage-laden stomachs of Pan-German nationalists who were touting the advance of the superior Germanic culture everywhere, including Africa, let alone the staunchest of Prussians, who were traditionally antipathetic to the English and considered William the progeny of traitorous wedlock.



Although the English reaction to the Daily Telegraph interview was not nearly as severe as the German reaction, the English had been in fact been outraged by the Kruger Telegram. Of course Britain had not officially authorized Dr. Jameson's invasion of Boer territory, but it had the tacit approval of the British capitalist-superpatriot Cecil Rhodes - he did not appreciate anyone obstructing Britain's path in South Africa, especially when that path led to the biggest gold mines on Earth. As for William, his English side felt "hurt" by the English reaction to the Kruger Telegram while his Prussian side had cause to fear an attack from Britain and the seizure of Germany's colonies, presumably with the help of France and Russia. And what else was he to expect from his self-fulfilling flirtations with disaster? No doubt he was somewhat paranoid: a month after the Kruger Telegram gaffe, William had an irrelevant criticism of the British suppression of the Ashanti tribe - published by the English paper The Speaker - translated into German and published: Britain was characterized as a powerful bully beating up naked savages, treating their families and envoys like pickpockets.



In any case, the English reaction to the Kruger Telegram if not to the Daily Telegraph Interview was scarcely surprising. After all, amongst his other flaws, the half-English Kaiser was a virtual traitor to England. In 1894, Queen Victoria had made her grandson an honorary colonel in the Royal Dragoons; and, shortly thereafter, she made him an honorary Admiral of the British Navy! The Kaiser donned his new uniform and proposed a toast to the peaceful alliance of the British Navy and German Army; the Germans did not have much of an navy to speak of at the time - the Kaiser remarked in Germany that once he had his own fleet built, he would be able to express himself sincerely....



Joachim von Kurenbergin, in The Kaiser, a Life of Wilhelm II, Last Emperor of Germany reports the English outrage over the Kruger Telegram: "The press spoke of 'a gross lack of tact,' and an 'unheard of interference in British affairs that were no concern of the Kaisers.' The bitter feeling was such that German seamen in Dover and German businessmen in London were assaulted. Some German business premises in Liverpool were demolished, and German workman were beat up on the docks. German associations all over England were compelled to close their doors and barricade their windows."  



In 1884, two years prior to the Kruger Telegram, when rioting broke out against the English in Sudan, had not the Kaiser had declared, "Let us hope the Mahdi will drown all the Englishman in the Nile!"



On the other hand, true to his vacillating nature, on October 23, 1899, the Kaiser expressed his delight to Walderson with English military successes in South Africa. And William informs us in his Memoirs that he travelled to England with his wife and sons in 1899 to visit his ailing royal grandmother. She had the English Press informed that it would please her very much if the attacks on the Kaiser over the Kruger Telegram affair would cease during his visit, and that a friendly reception be presented to the public instead: "Not once in the entire visit was the Kruger despatch mentioned," relates the Kaiser. "On the other hand, my royal grandmother did not conceal from her grandson how unwelcome the whole Boer War was to her; she made no secret of her disapproval of, and aversion for, Mr. Chamberlain and all that he represented, and thanked me again for my prompt and sharp refusal of the Russo-French proposal to interfere and for my immediate announcement of this proposal. One could easily see how much the Queen loved her splendid army and how deeply she had been grieved by the heavy reverse suffered by it at the outset of the war, which had caused by no means negligible losses. Referring to these, the aged field marshal, the Duke of Cambridge, coined the fine phrase: 'The British nobleman and officer have shown that they can die bravely as gentlemen." Thus is the Boer War, for which some Africans today want a formal apology from the Queen of England for Britain's brutal conduct, is called the last gentlemanly war.



In the Daily Telegraph interview, the Kaiser said that he received a sorrowful letter from Queen Victoria in December 1899, wherein she grieved the losses of Britain's "Black Week" between whites in South Africa - a rapid succession of British defeats on December 10, 11, and 15, at, respectively, the battles of Stormberg, Magersfontein, and Colenso. It was then that William sent over his war plan to save England: "Was that," he asked in the interview, "an act of one who wished England ill? Let Englishmen be just and say!" Perhaps the plans were "harmless" aphorisms, yet it appears that William linked them in his own mind to the eventual British victory - a ruthless victory at that, involving scorched earth, human shields and massive death in concentration camps. He probably sincerely believed he deserved credit for the so-called 'victory.' Mind you, he said the similarity between the line Lord Roberts had followed and his own suggestions was a "curious coincidence." In the final analysis, no one won the Boer War: it was a costly, futile exercise, a senseless war between whites that also cost thousands of black lives.



Furthermore, the records show that William sent encouraging telegrams to British royalty, one to the Prince of Wales praising him for the defense of Ladysmith against Boer attacks. And Uncle Edward gratefully thanked William for his support. However, at about the same time, it is believed that William sent a diplomatic message to the Tsar, promising Russia that Germany would protect his Western frontier if Russia took advantage of the English preoccupation with the war to attack England's Asian interests. Perhaps  his 'cousin' the Tsar got to William: on October 21, 1899, the Tsar wrote to Grand Duchess Xenia that "Not even the mightiest fleet in the world can prevent us from hitting England where she is the weakest... I intend to arouse the emperor's ire in every way against the English, by recalling to his mind the well-known Kruger Telegram." Moreover, when the British offered a friendly hand to Germany via Chamberlain, the latter received a cold shoulder from Chancellor Bulow.



A Liberal Conservative



German journalists of all political persuasions were clearly angered by the Kaiser's October 1908 effusions in London's Daily Telegraph. William understood the power of the press over the growing masses: he wanted publicity; he used it to manipulate opinion. But this time he got more than he bargained for, although, as we have seen, he was not terribly mortified by the secondary, negative coverage of the Berlin "chatterbox" press, not until his chancellor indirectly admonished him before the Reichstag, assuring the Lower House that His Highness would  be a good boy in the future, even in private.



We have reservations about the memoirs we have read in this case, because memoirs, although sworn to on stacks of bibles, are not the most reliable resource for truth, especially after something awful like the Great War has occurred - perhaps lawyers are mistaken when they tell us that more lies are told in court under oath than anywhere else in the world. In any case, we do know that this historic gaffe, perhaps the greatest faux pas of the twentieth century, innocuous and boring as it may seem to us today, led to another one of William's Nervous Collapses; a German Kaiser Krisis; and an ensuing November Storm severe enough to cause His Highness to significantly lower the tone of his Imperial public relations program. But was the crisis merely a tempest in a teapot stirred up by disgruntled newspaper chatterboxes? What could the Reichstag do, short of pulling the Imperial Linchpin of Bismarck's outmoded constitution?



The Prussian King and German Emperor personally symbolized the Reich, the unity of Germany upon which a multitude of subjects were somewhat morbidly fixated: when William was a boy, a cold he had or some new toy reported in the press seemed more important to the general public than matters of state. And the German public took pride in its written word as represented by professors and writers, and tended to believe what they read; and even more so when the text was illustrated by a political cartoon. For instance we see a Simplicissimus cartoon depicting the encirclement of Germany by its mortal enemies: a bearded German is in bed with his cigar and newspaper; creeping up around him are the English Lion, Russian Bear, French Cock, Asian Dragon - and whose Alligator is that under the bed? How can Germany sleep comfortably under these circumstances? Something must be done.



Arthur Davis, the Kaiser's American dentist before and during the war, informs us that, "The German newspaper is gospel to the people. The last word in any argument was always furnished by proof supplied by some newspaper article, Es steht in der Zeitung - liberally translated, "The paper says so" - was always final and conclusive. Nothing the papers declared was too preposterous to be believe." Of course there were many exceptions to the "they believe what they read"  stereotype and also that of the passive and obedient average Berliner; exceptions usually privately taken rather than publicly expressed. Of course dissent was increasingly raised in the Reichstag and on the streets by socialists, then by the Spartacus group when the socialists sold out. Nevertheless we are considering a gullible public at the time, even more gullible than the public we find today, for example, in the cynical United States where FOX and CNN deliberately cater to gullible angry white males. Thus we have due cause to suspect that the November Storm in the powerless debating society of the Reichstag was caused not by the public but rather by journalists who wanted to whip up mass support for a more constitutional government, one that would be in fact militantly aggressive in contrast to the Emperor's blustering and his Chancellor's bungling. But the noble right was not ready to give up its privileges quite yet.



The 1905 Morocco Crisis, for instance, was intended for show; the performance given by the Kaiser at Tangier was orchestrated by the Chancellor; the Kaiser went along unwillingly, to be "constitutional", which indicates he was not really the imperious autocrat we might think he was. Although a minor diplomatic success was achieved at the Algeciras Conference, the treaty was deemed an disgraceful failure by the hawkish German eagles. As the Kaiser feared before the show began, his command performance at Tangier was construed as an intent to wage war. The net result of the First Moroccan Crisis was the extension of the French-English entente from one small part of the world to the whole world, giving Germany even further reason to be paranoid.



The First Moroccan Crisis reminded Germans and Englishmen of the flap over the Kruger Telegram at the outset of the Boer War, when England was Germany's best-hated country and vice versa. Speaking of eagles, we neglected to mention in the previous discussion of the Kaiser's apparent ambivalence during the Boer War, that, although he encouraged President Kruger in the telegram, he refused to see him when the South African leader was raising funds, and worse, he eventually decorated Lord Roberts, Command-in-Chief of the British winning campaign in South Africa, with the German Order of the Black Eagle. The German people were aware of these acts and other expressions of friendship towards the hated English - a great cacophony of disgusted howling ensued. Therefore, the supposed revelation in the 1908 Daily Telegraph of the Kaiser's contradictory support of England during the Boer War was not a revelation at all to Germans capable of remembering events ten years past, brought to mind yet again three years past in Morocco. And not many Germans should have been surprised in 1908 to hear from the Kaiser that, in his friendship with England, he thought he belonged to the "best elements" of society, while the lower and middle classes disliked England. As for his statement that the recommendations he had sent over to England coincided with the British victory over the Boers; that was a silly remark, but we are a silly lot and tend to make much of coincidences. And as for the Kaiser's sabre-rattling in the name of commercial peace, what was so new about his trumpeting of the German Navy?



Was the German people's memory so short to have forgotten the last decade or so?  Hardly. Somebody wanted trouble, even war, we think, and they used the press to make it. We remember that Prince von Bulow noted how his November Storm speech in the Reichstag, his verbal spanking of His Highness, had met with righteous applause from Conservatives and National Liberals. The National Liberals were once near the center of the political field, but, as many liberals do once ground is gained, they eventually abandoned their liberal principles and adhered to the conservative position - that strengthening unified German was more important than the principles of freedom, liberty, democracy.



As for the Conservatives, we must not think that they were good bedfellows for the Kaiser simply because he moved hard to the right after flirting with Liberty during Chancellor Caprivi's reforms. William initially supported those reforms while resisting the socialists at the same time, but he had misgivings because of the political reactions; he  summoned Caprivi for a one-minute audience on 25 October 1894: "My nerves cannot stand it any more, I must dismiss you."  



Nevertheless, William II had inherited a stubborn liberal streak from his parents although he had rejected them in favor of his grandfather and Bismarck, and it was not that easy for him to consciously overrule his liberal inclination. Even his beloved Prussian grandfather had been pulled a bit to the left by his liberal German wife! Then Bismarck was the hard-nosed Prussian who pushed young William's grandfather, William I, into becoming the "German Emperor" over the Second Reich - William the First did not want the sole Imperial dynasty, preferring to be first among equals as "Emperor of Germany."  And we recall yet again for good measure that Frederick III, father to William II and husband of "that English woman" Victoria Adelaide, Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, was not only liberal but he was also Romantic where his own dynastic ambition was concerned: remember, as Crown Prince, he suggested to Bismarck the restoration of the Roman Empire. Bismarck at first dismissed the notion; he said Crown Prince Frederick was "emperor crazy."  But behold how the romantic power of suggestion came to serve the realistic aims of the Iron Chancellor, the Chancellor young William II would eventually fire when fired to personal sovereignty by his Imperial ambition.



Therefore we find in the last German Emperor diverse influences pulling him in several directions, even though he was a conservative, to say the least, in our current sense of the term. In his day, he was not autocratic enough for the Prussian Court Conservatives - they were his treacherous allies. As for the rest, William II was too autocratic. However that may be, what was coming to the fore in all political parties was the spirit of militant nationalism: Germans were a diverse people, but they loved their newfound unity - the unity in the diversity was in part accomplished by universal military conscription. Their Kaiser with all his internal conflicts suited ordinary Germans quite well whether they approved of his brilliance or hated his awkwardness. For they peered into a mirror, as it were, to get their own bearings. However, in retrospect, we get the impression that there was one issue where Der Kaiser diverged from the general will of his people - the will to wage war. There are astute and reputable historians who believe William was all for war, that he personally conspired to that end while putting off the fatal moment, professing peace until his generals were ready. People who knew the Kaiser and considered him a friend of peace noticed a marked change towards war in him in 1913 - King Albert of Belgium observed that the Kaiser seemed won over by his generals. Yet I am of the camp who believes that, notwithstanding his belligerent posturing designed to cover his weaknesses, William also desired reconciliation and peace. He struggled within and without, against himself and against imperialists of all castes, to keep that peace, and he succeeded for two decades before merely playing soldier finally led him and Germany by the romantic power of suggestion to the real thing.



The Personality Cult





The militarists were dismayed by the Kaiser's 1908 Daily Telegraph interview even though William's professions therein included belligerent implications for anyone who might want to block Germany from kicking open doors around the world in the name of Equality and Free Trade, that the Fatherland would have a glorious place in the Sun. Not that the Second Reich desired to put anyone in the shade; or so Chancellor Bulow had said some time ago, in an 1897 speech to the Reichstag; however, the subtext reveals that Germany was now to be a World Power State with a World Mission instead of just another state with a world policy.



No doubt the militarist in every beating heart, in some more than others, wanted to get on with the inevitable war and were accordingly dismayed by the affection the Supreme War Lord had displayed for the English in the interview. This instant indiscretion of the Kaiser was a good excuse to tighten the skins on the war drums. Prince von Bulow observed in retrospect, "Such political observations and remarks as the Emperor had made in the Daily Telegraph were only the decisive drops in a cup already filled to the brim with discontent at the ever-recurring aberrations, the gossiping imprudence, of his Majesty. This publication, as by some sudden slap in the face, had roused the nation to the memory of all the political faults, through a reign that had lasted twenty years, which William II had permitted himself to commit." True to form, Prince von Bulow, nicknamed "the Eel" for his flexible spine, and "the Lucky" for rising so quickly to high office, neglected to mention that those twenty years had been peaceful ones, and that the slap had been aggravated by German journalists after the interview was published in England, as if Germany would add insult to injury and get itself riled up by slapping itself in the face. With the help of the media, Germany was taking itself personally. Nationhood amounted to personhood. Friedrich Meinecke expounded on this subject in Cosmopolitanism and the National State (1908). The nation as a person rises above the cosmopolitan inclinations of individuals - as we said, it becomes a World Power State. Let us eavesdrop briefly on Professor Meinecke:



"Of all the great spheres of life that a man can enter, there is probably none that speaks so directly to the whole man as the nation, none that carries him so strongly, none that renders so faithfully his entire natural and intellectual being, none that can so readily be or become both macroanthropos and fully realized individual. Thus, it is not coincidence that an era of individualistic strivings for freedom immediately preceded the era of modern national thought. The nation drank the blood of free personalities, as it were, to attain personality itself.... The lofty insight that the state is an ideal supra-individual personality - this insight that sustains and justifies all our thought and concern about the state - could only come ot life when the political feelings and energies of individual citizens permeated the state and transformed it into a national state."



Meinecke rejoiced when the Great War broke out, survived it and lived long thereafter, long enough to regret world wars, and to continuously revise his philosophy at length. The restoration of the heroic ages in the "cult of personality" is now recognized as a defect given the world's experience with the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Saddam Hussein. Just lately Europeans who vividly remembered the first three personages had serious reservations about the highly personalized style and bellicose conduct of U.S. President George Bush, Jr., and analysts noted, "Like father like son." Angry white American males in all their political correctness expressed outrage throughout the establishment media that caters to their fear and anger; we do see the difference between their president and Hitler; yet they should see there is a legitimate cause for concern with the cult of personality in the White House.  



Of course Jesus was the Kaiser's personal hero. During the 17 October 1903 speech given after a dinner at Potsdam in honor of the confirmation of his fourth and fifth sons, William averred: "As princes of the Royal House you are authorized to wear a uniform even in your tenth year. Let me compare this to your baptism. You have received the advanced mark for a warrior in Christ.... I am intentionally speaking in military terms because I assume that you know the fine simile which likens Christ to a warrior.... Your spiritual teacher very wisely emphasized one idea in the magnificent speech he addressed to you, when he urged you to be 'personalities.' This is something which concerns, I believe, every Christian, for there can be no doubt that we are right, when we say our Lord, that his was the most personal of personalities...."



That being said, we recall that young William II, who was not a Stalin or a Hitler, had cultivated under the tutelage of Phillip Eulenberg, who loved him as a person, his sovereign personal regime under God. As the Reich's unimpeachable Head, he isolated himself from personal criticism coming from the lower body, He lost his dearest friend, Phillip Eulenberg, to the homophobic hysteria, unhesitatingly dismissing him. His new best friend, the enormously wealthy Prince zu Furstenberg, was frank and vulgar, a great friend for a man to have at times; he was an intelligent man, an aristocratic plutocrat, a soldier, sportsman, archaeologist, poet, artist, musician; but his was not known for political wisdom, and was more of a follower than a leader in politics. In the final analysis, the Kaiser in secret chambers  was fatally manipulated by the class he had so loved in his youth - the military class. Nonetheless, with all his strengths and weaknesses, he happened to be the epitome of the precocious state. If we count him among the mad, he would be personally insignificant given the millions in the madhouses. If we were to peel off the roof of every house now matter how large or small and peer into the private lives of the residents, madness would seem to be the rule rather than the exception.



In any case, William appeared to act whimsically, constantly travelling about the land in his famous train - it was said that he was too busy to rule - as if he simply could not sit still and concentrate on anything for very long. At least he acted on his own whim and not that of others; he was as constitutionally stubborn as his liberal English mother: he was not one to be pushed around, although his stubborn attempt to be constitutional and cooperate with his ministry went against the grain. He sincerely contradicted himself depending on his mood at the time, as if he were being torn apart inside by his Prussian father and English mother, between being Prussian and being English. His physical mutilation at birth was a fundamental factor in all this: he might sympathize with the statement of Frida Kahlo, the postmodern artist who was crippled by an accident in her youth and went on to paint beautiful yet morbid images: "I am not sick, I am damaged."



Of course the Kaiser, no matter how divided within and formally separated from his subjects without, identified himself with his great rising nation and craved the limelight, and he could not seem to keep his mouth shut. The collection of his statements published in the 1908 Daily Telegraph as a so-called interview were indiscreet and injudicious, a laughing matter in several parts of the world, and, as we have observed, a source of serious political ammunition for the German press. It was the publicity straw that broke the camel's back in an adolescent nation naturally oversensitive and credulous, hence vulnerable to public embarrassments. Although the Kaiser was admired and even adulated as the national idol by many Germans, quite a number of admirers, duly informed by the unflattering German press, were beginning to believe their Emperor might be mad if not a fool.



Dr. Emil Reich, doctor juris, did not think so.  Dr. Reich was educated at universities in Prague, Budapest, and Vienna. Having moved to England and identified with the British, he thought he had better warn them about the true nature of the Kaiser and his subjects. His prophetic book entitled Germany's Swelled Head was published in 1907, King Edward enjoyed the book about his nephew and passed it on to a friend in military service. Two statements, said Dr. Reich right off the bat, are the "entire burden" of his book - a book intended to forewarn the British to forearm themselves with ground forces. One: "The Germans are afflicted with the severest attack of swell-headedness known to modern history." Two: "The British are practically ignorant of the dangerous state of mind in their greatest rivals." The Kaiser is thought of in England as an "impulsive young man", a "reckless after-dinner talker", "hasty telegraphist", and "commercial traveller of the Germanic firm." But do not be deceived! For the real Kaiser is "a man of ripe, sober, and substantial judgment. On all outstanding questions of European policy he is undoubtedly the best informed individual in existence.... The information possessed by the Kaiser on international policies is true and valuable knowledge. It is in the light of this knowledge that we must view all his apparently rash and impulsive acts. The famous wire to President Kruger was, as we now know, a carefully thought-out lightning. He wanted to embroil England in South Africa, so as to win time for his naval preparations. Prussian policy has always been what soldiers call ricochet shooting: one aims at A, but shoots at B."



Furthermore, Dr. Reich says, the Kaiser is a great orator but he is disrespected by the British because they do not appreciate talkative people; whereas, on the Continent, long conversations are the rule and good long-winded speeches are given deference. However that may be, the gist of the Kaiser's speeches is that Germany's future lies on the water; that is, figuratively speaking, Germany should lay off the beer and totally commit itself to soberly sailing the seas to the end that the Pan-German world be ground up into a Great German Universal Sausage - the Kaiser did not drink much later on because he apparently once had a drinking problem. In other words, Germany is preparing for war - that much is obvious. "In Germany every able-bodied person is a soldier filled with the great military spirit... the spirit that prompts every German to think that if he were not ready to die for his country, what on earth is living for?" And do not expect Socialism to incapacitate or impede Germany's totalitarian political moves: "No greater illusion can be possibly indulged in. Socialism in Germany, as everywhere else on the continent, except France, is a pure theoretical force. It yields to the first onslaught of any one of the old historical and real forces on the Continent.... Socialism in Germany is politically not a party based on historical realities, but only a maneuver based on abstract ideas of certain economists."



"Swell-headedness": apparently a form of madness - Dr. Reich's book was also published with the title, Germany's Madness.  Well, them, madness must have its reason. William has been psychoanalyzed to death; no less than Sigmund Freud threw his hat into the ring, in part to contest his wayward disciple's (Alfred Adler) hypothesis - the will to superiority causes one to overcompensate for his feelings of inferiority due to some defect such as the tragic results of William's birth trauma. As for the popular psychoanalysis of William, Dr. Freud understood that, when our lives want personal meaning we may project our want onto a majestic personal authority and hold him (or her) responsible for current events and their outcomes, as if he guided the events and purposed the fates. Perhaps we may avoid our own complicity and feelings of guilt by distancing ourselves from the person by analyzing him. People close to the Emperor depended on him for their status and good feelings, or bad feelings when their balloons were punctured - we must keep that in mind when considering their testimony, as well as the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt.  



Bernhard von Bulow, in a letter to Phillip Eulenberg dated 28 May 1891, eulogized Eulenberg's beloved Kaiser, "His ideas and plans are almost always right, often brilliant; they rise up from the well of singular and splendid individuality, which combines rare energy and prudent consideration with remarkable understanding for the requirements of the time, (an individuality) that wants the best and usually perceives what the best is. It is another question whether the All-Highest's intentions are always efficiently carried out." Eulenberg had met Bulow in 1880, and thereafter championed him with the Kaiser. Eulenberg reached the pinnacle of his influence in 1897. On 21 June 1897 Bulow was summoned by the Foreign Office to report to the Kaiser on the Kaiser's yacht. Eulenberg urged him to honor the summons. Before he left, Eulenberg slipped him a note and said, "This is my last word, my last request. It comes from the heart of a true friend and patriot. Only if you take the Kaiser in the right way psychologically, can you be of use to your country. You are Kaiser Wilhelm II's last card." Bulow read the note handed to him:



"Wilhelm II takes everything personally. Only personal arguments make an impression on him. He wants to teach others, but learns unwillingly himself. He endures nothing that is boring; slow, stiff, or too serious people get on his nerves and have no success with him. Wilhelm II wants to shine and to do and decide everything for himself. What he wants to do unfortunately often goes awry. He loves glory and is ambitious and jealous. In order to get him to accept an idea you must act as though the idea were his. You must make everything easy for him. He readily encourages others to take bold steps but throws them overboard if they fail. Never forget that His Majesty needs praise every now and again. He is one of those people who grow bad tempered if they do not, from time to time, hear words of appreciation from the lips of some important person or the other. You will always obtain his consent to all your wishes as long as you do not neglect express appreciation of His Majesty whenever he deserves it. He is as grateful for it as a good and clever child. If instead of appreciation he gets nothing but unbroken silence, he concludes that there is ill somewhere. We two will always respect the border line between praise and flattery, we will respect it scrupulously."



We might include much of the above advice in our own How to Succeed manual. William appointed him Secretary of State of Foreign Affairs in June 1897, and, in 1900, Imperial Chancellor and Prussian Prime Minister. Once Bulow had reached the highest possible office that a subject can reach, he wanted more, and his tune changed - his Memoirs at least are sprinkled with all sorts of aspersions. And from other familiars we hear a number of  negative epithets applied to the Kaiser over the years. We might as well cite a few: impulsive; self-deluded; an explosive powder keg; self-reliant on nonexistent experience; impetuous; fitfully angry; pugnacious; tactless; bellicose; splenetic; wild; out of control; neurotically compelled to be manly; purposeless; pathological liar.



We have seen that Dr. Reich, who did not know William personally but knew some Germans, pointed his finger at the Kaiser as being the most characteristic of the Germany public's real character, and he predicted what everyone knew was coming although most could not say why. He was not the only one to credit the Kaiser for his positive characteristics, then cry wolf. Yet others thought the Kaiser was not only sane but brilliant; that is, until the Great War came to pass and even the mass murder of non-combatants was joyfully celebrated in beer halls. Take, for instance, a man we have mentioned before, the Kaiser's American dentist of fourteen years, Arthur N. Davis, who wrote The Kaiser As I Know Him (1918). Dr. Davis stayed in Germany during the war. He had this to say in his discussion of the "the Kaiser's dual personality":



"If I had come away from Germany in January, 1914, instead of in January, 1918, and had then written the impression I had gained of the Kaiser in the ten years I had known him, what a false picture I would have painted of the man! It would have been a picture of a man who in general appearance and bearing was every inch an emperor and yet who could exhibit all the courtesy, affability, and gentleness of the most democratic gentleman; a man soft of eye and kindly in expression; a man of wise reading and attainments, perhaps the most versatile man in the world; a man possessed of a most alert mind, a remarkable memory, and the keenest observation; a man who was not generous in nature and yet was at times considerate of others; a man of charming personality and amiability. It would have shown a man of unparalleled egotism, a man who would brook no opposition. There might have been in the picture a suggestion of the dire lengths in which he would go to have his way, but it would have been only a suggestion. As far as that picture went, it would have been accurate; but it would have been sadly incomplete - with all the lights worked in, but lacking in the shadows. It took the war and its attendant horrors to reveal the Kaiser in his true colors. The war has not changed his character. It has uncovered it for all the world to see."



[Why should a man's faults always define his "true" character?]



According to Dr. Davis, the Kaiser made approximately 150 visits to the dental office over the years. While admiring crowds gathered on the sidewalk outside and other patients gladly rescheduled, his royal patient was as talkative as he could be during the procedures, and, after each sitting, he liked to stay for awhile and chat.



"In every act he was conscious of the public," relates Dr. Davis. "A post-card picture of the Kaiser, was, in his own estimation, one of the most priceless gifts he could bestow.... He is widely read on almost all subjects and knows the literature of England, France, and America, as well as that of Germany....Of his own taste in art little need be said. The monuments which he caused to be erected... are the laughing-stock of the artistic world.... His readiness to talk to me was undoubtedly due to a tendency he had to trust every one with whom he came in intimate contact.... He seemed to trust every one; his sense of personal security loosened his tongue and made him more talkative, perhaps, than was always discreet.... No matter how gloomy the outlook for Germany, the Kaiser seldom exhibited concern...."



"Veneration and awe of the Kaiser are bred in the bone of the German," Dr. Reich points out in a chapter on the relationship of the Kaiser and his people. "Even among the Socialists, who are not nearly so opposed to the monarchical idea as is commonly supposed, there is a strong sentiment of loyalty toward the Emperor. True, the socialists are clamoring constantly for the reform vote and other political changes, but I doubt very much whether - before the war at any rate - any large percentage of Socialists would have seized an opportunity to dethrone the Kaiser, even had one presented itself."



So much for Dr. Jekyll. Now Mr. Hyde: "If there could be any doubt as to the Kaiser's direct responsibility for the sinking of the Lusitania, certain it is that he fully approved, openly defended, and even exulted in the murder of women and children by Zeppelin raids in London, Manchester, Liverpool, and other non-military cities and towns. 'England expects to starve my women and children to death,' he declared to me, early in the war - long before we in Germany had begun to feel the slightest effect of the diminishing food-supply, 'but our Zeppelins will give their women and children a taste of war, too. Confound them! They sit on their island and try to starve us. We will give them a taste of what war is!"



[During the 'November Storm'  raging in the Reichstag on 10 November 1908 over the Kaiser's Daily Telegraph interview, William was praising Count Zeppelin at an airship show, calling him "the greatest German of the twentieth century," a statement that gave cause for laughter and satire since only 8 years of the century had elapsed. William loved the new air-power technology: The dirigible flight he saw was, he said,  "one of the greatest moments of human culture."]



"This was the man," Dr. Davis continued, "whose various acts of consideration toward me, whose talents and personal charms, had made such a favorable impression upon me! How trivial and inconsequential they all seemed now! Clearly, they were all a part of the role he had been playing for years. While he was outwardly displaying all the earmarks of a gentle character, he was plotting to dominate the world. For twenty-five years he maintained the peace of Europe - this he constantly made his boast. He maintained peace - just long enough to complete his final preparation for the wickedest was that was ever waged!"



As we now have the privilege of knowing, the wickedness would be surpassed a few years later, and far worse atrocities would be uncovered for all the world to see. Of course the world, like the Kaiser's dentist, roundly condemned the German emperor during and after the fact, as practically the cause of it all. Still we might wonder what would now be said if Germany had won the Great War. After all, there are those who, following Hegel, believe that he who wins must have been right, hence their positive aspects should be accentuated; and, on the other hand, he who loses must have been wrong; at least they are right or wrong in the eyes of the presumably same god who provides moral obstacle courses and determines the fates of all, so that man may be free to choose rightly, in order to rise to heaven, or sink into hell. Therefore those who are attuned to the spirit of world history will condemn the losers for war crimes, but should not question the winner for his role in bringing about the war in the first place, at least not while the graves are fresh in mind.



"I have a vivid impression of him now as I write, " reminisces Dr. Davis. "He is standing in the center of my room, drawn up to his full height, his shoulders thrown back, his left hand upon the hilt of his sword, and his right hand emphasizing his remarks, protesting in the most earnest manner that it was not he who was responsible for the war and all its horrors, but that it had come upon the world despite all he had done to prevent it. His ready, well-chosen words entrance me, and under the spell of his personality I feel that this man must be telling me the truth and I am ready to believe that before me stands the most unjustly judged man in the world. He shakes my hand in farewell and is driven away, and then as I gaze at the spot where he just stood there comes before my eyes the desolation... the tragedy... the destruction... atrocious deeds.... and I realize that I have been talking to the world's most finished actor and have simply been bewitched by the power of his personal magnetism."



Germany and the English

Octopus



The 1908 Daily Telegraph interview with German Emperor William II made His Highness look like a political moron. The Kaiser and his English confidants had expected the interview to make a favorable impression on the English, whose lion-hearted tempers, provoked by jingo journalism, were almost at the boiling point. Publication of the pacific interview had nearly been suppressed by chauvinists in the British government. Of course the jingo press expressed outrage over the Interview; however, many members of parliament chuckled over the obvious attempt of the Kaiser to kiss the proverbial ass by claiming that he had always been England's best friend, and that he had won the Boer War for her by giving her good advice - which apparently consisted of some irrelevant maxims, including one about a football match. On the other hand, the mood in Germany was au contrare, first of all among the militarists and their press organs. And since the newspapers were gospel to many Germans, the gaffe embarrassed even those who were devoted to the Kaiser.



"I have said time after time," the Kaiser reiterated in the Interview, "that I am friend of England, and your press - or, at least, a considerable section of it - bids the people of England refuse any proffered hand and insinuates that the other holds a dagger. How can I convince a nation against its will? I repeat that I am a friend of England, but you make things difficult for me. My task is not of the easiest. The prevailing sentiment among large sections of the middle and lower classes of my own people is not friendly to England. I am, therefore, so to speak, in a minority in my own land, but it is a minority of the best elements as it is in England with respect to Germany."



The Kaiser, Supreme War Lord and Prince of Peace, or rather the diplomat in the German Foreign Office who edited the pertinent clause to include other German friends of England besides the Emperor, was referring to a pacific-minded minority of elements in the upper crust. Peace was professedly preferred among the higher ranks; nevertheless, war was considered inevitable, especially among the militarists who were armed to make peace with the sword. In any case, Germans of all parties and persuasions were personally embarrassed if not indignant over the Kaiser's indiscreet effusions; he was the person they identified with, whether they were for him or not. Some people, particularly the intellectuals, thought that they could make do rather well without an Emperor or a monarchy; yet few people were willing to take that leap so soon. The Second German Empire was barely out of its crib as a political entity, and the states it tenuously comprised, or rather, consisted of, were hardly of one cloth. General Friedrick von Bernhardi, in Britain as Germany's Vassal, carefully noted the modern effects of the ancient parochial particularism of Germanic tribes:



"The peoples and States which are united in the German Empire," wrote the General, "have had a long and tragic history. That history, it is true, is filled with great and glorious deeds. At the same time, it cannot be disguised that it has been the history of gradual decline from the time when the ancient German Empire broke up, down to the moment when, in our own time, Germany once more became united....



"At the time of Germany's weakness the German people lost their sense of national consciousness. They lost their faith in their own strength and in their destiny. Germans began to overvalue everything foreign. The people became accustomed to narrow parochial conditions in their country, and they acquired narrow and parochial political views. Germany's reunion became their greatest ideal.... However, they had completely lost the idea of world-politics.... Even to-day many German people do not realize the necessity of a world-policy and cannot make up their minds to pursue a larger policy. There are many Germans who would like to confine their country to its continental position, and who describe those who desire to open up their country a great future as advocates of a policy of reckless adventure.... There are people who do not object to the alliance which Germany's enemies have concluded among themselves, for they believe that the Triple Entente serves to maintain the peace of Europe.



"Under these circumstances it seems necessary to tell the people again and again that Germany is an exceedingly important factor in human civilization...."



And that the German press set about doing, time and time again, often prompted by provocative statements in the British jingo press. We must not imagine that all Germans were petty and small-minded; as a matter of fact, many of them were interested in the world about them, so much so that "cosmopolitan" rather than "parochial" would be a more appropriate term for their disposition; yet that too was a threat to German unity: the independent state must be elevated over the world, hence Germany as a world-state, engaged in world-power politics, was emphasized. People are frequently their own worst enemy. The English language owes its existence to Low German. Whether the English as well as Germans are Teutons or not, German and English people have a reputation for stubborn particularism. England's independent spirit inspired her to rule the waves, and her cousins in the Fatherland who wanted the Roman Empire restored were jealous of the British Empire. Britain, on the other hand, looked down on the rude Prussian upstart; whether Germany be her cousin or not, she could not allow the continental applecart to be upset and the nations gathered up against her.  



Prussian historians contemptuously referred to the England as a nation of shopkeepers whose previous conquests and narcotic materialism had lulled them into a false sense of security. There is nothing like an enemy to bring a great nation together. Millions of lives have been lost to world wars, yet even today proud leaders speak at length on how war makes a nation great by exalting heroic individuals on the high altar of sacrifice. And all those who oppose reckless adventures that lead to war are called cowards if not enemies of the state. The Soviet Union, the most recent Evil Empire, if the United States is the Good Empire, was secretly missed. Now, thank Mars! Dualism has been restored! the world is divided into Good and Evil again! there is a deadly enemy again! Unfortunately, the enemy is elusive today, has no country, and wears no uniform. On the other hand, the German Empire did not want for easily identifiable enemies; their location was obvious; the Fatherland had grounds to be paranoid: Germany was being encircled by enemies. Absolute Power, the god of worldly religion, is what was sorely wanted and loved above all. Decrepit Britain had the lion's share and no longer deserved it. In any event, something had to be done and soon, and for that a pretext was needed.



Of course ordinary people do not need sophisticated explanations for disliking or even hating a people who seem to be posing a threat or standing in their light. Even family members are notoriously ambivalent towards one another. William II loved and hated his English mother. Of course, like many children with problems at home, he loved most of all his grandparents. He loved his grandfather, William I, King of Prussia and German Emperor - he was also fond of his grandfather's Iron Chancellor, Bismarck, until he saw fit to dismiss him. He loved perhaps most of all his grandmother, Queen Victoria of England, who died in his arms - he tried to lift her into her coffin despite his withered arm. There existed a corresponding, natural love and hate relationship between the English and German people. Certain members of the German power elite genuinely appreciated Britain's global glory: for instance, Admiral Tirpitz, who was busy building up the German Fleet for its inevitable stand off with the British Fleet - no admiral in his right mind would risk his entire fleet in a battle to the death on the deep blue waters - admired his English friend and enemy. Germans who could afford it visited England, even sent their kids there to school, yet they expected her glory to fade fast as Germany eclipsed the global robber-state and converted it into Germany's lackey. There was considerable moral justification rooted in legend and myth for same. Rather than casting so much blame on William II for failing to reign in the militarists who were eager to do what they do best, make war, we should give more credit to the Kaiser for fighting against his Prussian heritage, for stubbornly holding out for peace as long as he did, surrounded as he was from birth by the cultivation of war - as every self-respecting Prussian prince was destined to be.



In any case, German patriotism did not depend on princely disposition for its expansive mood: populist patriotic leagues such as the Pan-German League, the Alldeutscher Verband, arose in Germany. The Pan German League was a nationalistic folkish organization seemingly opposed to Imperial politics at the time - the Imperial government was quick to co-opt elements of the movement and adopt its symbols for its own purposes. An especially sore spot was the Heligoland Treaty entered into, on the German side, by the Caprivi government: Germany relinquished claims to choice African lands in return for Britain's cession to German of the island of Heligoland.



Pan-Germanism originated in the Alldeutschtum and Pangermanismus cultural movements. The Grossdeutschland solution to cultural fragmentation was largely educational at first, purposed to entice German emigrants back to the Fatherland or to provide them, with the help of German writers and professors, with German culture wherever the German flag was flown. But the vague cultural movement was soon provided with a rigid ideological scheme for fighting the flood tide of foreign immigrants inundating Germany and its provinces; and, externally, for expanding the German ethnic community about the globe. The cultural movement was couched in apocalyptic or millenarian rhetoric, its key element being Water, representing enemies surging, flooding, streaming, and storming about the fertile German lands, threatening to drown the Fatherland itself. The world was divided into twain for battle: into good, the Germans, and evil, the non-Germans. Socialists, Catholics, Jewish intellectuals and capitalists, homosexuals, and other internationalists were of course the true German's mortal enemies, just as the Roman Empire had been the mortal enemy of apocalyptic Jews and Christians.  Ironically, in context of the holocaust to come, some Pan-Germans thought of themselves as the genuine Jews of the world - witness the Boer patriarchs in South Africa. Pan-German colonists and ideologues at-large were pioneers; prophets in the wilderness; martyrs; lighthouses or rocks or islands in the raging seas, swimming against the flood tide. One recalls the enemy, the Whore of Babylon, the Hills of Rome, the Grand Dragon - the conglomerate political totem resulting from miscegenation, associated with floods and the birth of the anti-Christ - and so on. Hence a dragon-slayer is wanted, a messiah gifted with charisma.



Professor Max Weber, who thought the Kaiser was a dangerous fool, stepped forward and asserted the superiority of the German power state over the cosmopolitan world. His timing was perfect. German group-love was feeling especially expansive notwithstanding the fact that particular states in the new imperial federation such as Bavaria did not appreciate Prussian domination or its belligerent plans for European dominion. Yet, despite their primordial particularist tendencies, Germans were rightly taking more pride every day in their nascent national unity, a nationality religiously preached in the admirable school system. And they had every right to be proud of their almost miraculous progress, at least in raw, economic terms. Not that all was peaches and cream: the prosperity of average Germans was modest to say the least; but Germany industry had surpassed Great Britain and was second only to the United States. The population and production explosion wanted somewhere to go.



Alas, the world was hardly encircling the rambunctious new empire on the block with warm welcoming embraces - Germans were being stiff-armed here and there by their old French brothers and English cousins. Wherefore Weber inflamed ambitious intellectuals with his 1895 Inaugural Lecture at the University of Frieburg: he said the unification of Germany would merely be a "youthful folly" unless followed up on with Weltmachpolitik, or World Power Politics. In brief: Might makes right. Power takes precedence over ethics, if you will. Professor Weber's speech was lengthy and quite rational, but the powerful gist of it was nothing new: the popular or vulgar version circulated with myths of the barbaric paradise of Nordic gods who are instinctively overjoyed by uninhibited violence. Then Weber prayed for the rise of a charismatic leader. As the saying goes, we must be careful what we pray for: Germany got Hitler - but we should not place too much blame on Professor Weber. The dragon-slayer was about to become the dragon, his own worst enemy. The cause is One, is the Original or First Cause, the Will to Overpower. However that may be, the sacred national symbols must be conserved; that responsibility eventually fell to the Pan-German League - Max Weber was one of its early supporters.    



The Pan-German League was a reorganization of the General German League, which, in turn, was an umbrella organization of other societies. The General German League was stillborn in 1886; it was revived in 1891, under the leadership of one Carl Peters, for the "activation of patriotic consciousness at home and combating all tendencies opposed to national [volkisch] development.... Fostering and support of German ethnic aspirations in all countries.... Promotion of... German power in Europe and overseas, especially the continuation of the German colonial movement toward tangible results." It's main symbol was 'Germandom everywhere on earth.'



The General German League asserted the right of the German folk, clearly distinguished from the Imperial government, to be the nation; that is, the people and not the imperial elite are the nation, hence the national symbols belong to the people. Many members of the league were National Liberals, a party of middle-class urbanites who had split off from the Progressive Party. The National Liberal Party became more national than liberal: it abandoned its liberal ideals and advocated the military-industrial strengthening of German. Carl Peters went back to Africa; the General German League was beset with organizational and financial problems and was on the verge of collapse in 1893. Its membership ranged from a few hundred people in the Berlin chapter, in the first three years if its existence, to a few thousand people at its peak. One persistent bone of contention within the organization was the inclusion or exclusion of Jews from its membership. That question was not fully resolved until Hitler's time, when Jews were selected as the scapegoat for German unity; Jewish intellectuals even participated in early activities of the National Socialist organization. But prior to the Great War, the Navy and not the Jew was employed as the unifying symbol.  



The Pan-German League succeeding the General German League was organized in 1894 by a prominent member of the General German League, professor Ernst Hasse, statistician, Reichstag member for the National Liberal Party. He was said to be a most candid man, a rigid thinker, enthusiastic, humorless, volatile, impatient. He had the ideologue's intolerance for ambiguity. Haase was the League's chairman and chief ideologue until 1908. Deutsche Politik, his attempt to voice a coherent doctrine, was published between 1905 and 1908. He was dedicated to imperial expansion and to the defense of German culture. The Pan-German League's Constitution provides that its organization "strives to quicken the national sentiment of all Germans and in particular to awaken and foster the sense of racial and cultural kinship of all sections of the German people.... These aims imply that the Pan-German League works for preservation of the German people in Europe and overseas and its support wherever threatened, (and) settlement of all cultural, educational, and school problems in ways that shall aid the German people." The League's 1898 convention specified certain policies, including "Transference to the west of all officials and military men of Polish race.... Employment of only German labor in imperial and state possessions and domains.... Possession of German citizenship by all Germans from the Empire in foreign countries.... Prohibition of the use of foreign languages in clubs and meetings.... Germanization of all foreign place names in the German Empire...." and more.



The Pan-German League like other patriotic societies had chapters all over the world to serve the German race. The 'races' of popular 'racism' are not scientific facts but are fictions or myths; the Germanic linguistic group and ethnos was diffused about the world, far from their obscure origin in time and place. In fine, it is difficult if not impossible to define just who was German, although there were Germans almost everywhere. Some of the more expansive definitions included certain categories elsewhere despised: the English, and, more significantly, the Slavs, on whom Frederick the Great had used his propaganda machine - to disparage them as crude and uncouth barbarians.



Of course there were plenty of 'Germans' in Austria, where the Pan-Germans were led by Hitler's model for agitation: Georg Ritter von Schonerer. Schonerer looked like a jovial farmer: broad, bearded, pot-bellied. He was a demagogue who used his perch in parliament to agitate for German unity as the response to a single issue: "the Jews versus the people." He regarded anti-Semitism as "the greatest achievement of our century. We regard as a deserter anyone who knowingly supports Jewry and its agents." He divided the world into anti-Semites, Jews, and "Jewish stooges." Furthermore, during a speech supporting his "Chinese Bill", so-called because it resembled the U.S. Congress exclusion of Oriental immigrants, he declared, "We... regard anti-Semitism as the cornerstone of our nationality, as one of the most important means of inculcating volkisch> values, and as the greatest sign of this century...." His associates employed simple slogans such as "fighting corruption" and "destroying capitalism", implying, "burn the Jews." Pan-Germanism abhorred the economic determinism of socialism as well as that of capitalism, and, instead of the commodity-fetich and its money-god, the movement relied on its ethnic or folkish spirit as the determining cultural force.



Schonerer developed vulgar obstructionist tactics in the parliament: interrupting speeches with derisive hoots and personal insults in tavern terminology; insisting on reading out the names of long lists of persons who had signed petitions; and so on. He used his privileged position to debase the constitutional process, slandering and intimidating people, while, at the same time, incongruously appealing to high ideals. In the same emotional speech he would, for instance, demand censorship and press freedom. The ambiguity did not matter since the underlying question demanding a solution was, for him and his ilk, the Jewish question. Hitler perfected Schonerer's incongruous approach; for instance, addressing strikers, Hitler promised them higher wages, and, in the next breath, promised their employers higher profit margins as a consequence - many people walked away knowing very well that the contradictions amounted to absurdity, but that was not the point during Hitler's rise to power: the point was always the unpatriotic Jewish merchants and capitalists, and, since capitalism and socialism had failed, their need for any kind of action at all in response to the desperate economic situation.



In 1884 Schonerer gained widespread admiration for his opposition in parliament to the renewal of a railroad franchise owned by the Vienna Rothschild bank. Democrats wanted all railroads nationalized. Schonerer got petitions together and proceeded with a vilification campaign against "the worst enemies of the people", the "capitalist Jews" and their allies, the Vienna press, the "Jew journalist slaves" - most of the editors and writers of the Vienna press were Jews. As a consequence of Schonerer's scandalous agitation, a new, revised railroad bill was submitted by the government. The new bill was in fact a victory for Schonerer and for the public: the state immediately benefited by three times the railroad's annual net profit; 300 million gulden would be saved in the long run; the political benefit to the public of the pioneering, popular opposition to the government was immeasurable.

  

The Austrian Pan-Germans wanted Austria to be ceded by Germany - that would be accomplished later by Hitler. In Germany, Pan-Germanism was largely a reaction to the "soft" policies of Chancellor Caprivi, who cared little for imperialism and who was, like Bismarck before him, more interested in consolidating and strengthening Germany's position on the Continent - a policy that alienated German super-patriots. William II supported his Chancellor for awhile, but so much opposition arose that he had to wash his hands of Caprivi's liberal 'New Course' and abruptly dismiss him.



The Pan-German League was certainly influential despite its small membership of a few thousand, primarily middle-class, people. Even those who scoffed at the Pan-Germans sympathized with their views. As we have noted, the Imperial government was quick to co-opt the most popular ideas. The disenchantment with all things not German, and lover for things German including the Fatherland was widespread. To counter the flood tide of aliens everywhere, a wave of chauvinism was sweeping over Germany at the turn of the century. The crests were blown to new popular heights by big businessmen interested in unloading their surpluses overseas and paying off employees at home to stave off a social revolution. To that vertical end they profited at every level; most importantly and at enormous expense, they were building the fleet to protect their imperialism on the high seas. "Tear down your houses and use them to build an Ark!" we heard from Sumeria long before. If the dragon symbolizes the raging flood, one way to control the disorder is to ride the dragon with a big fleet of capital ships. But Navy officials were leary of the Pan German League's grass-roots advocacy of a big navy, lest the enthusiasm get out of hand and jeopardize the building program with undue agitation and populist influence on Navy administration. The Navy had become the symbol for national unity in Germany; this symbol might be a folk symbol but its application was to be in the hands of the power elite. Another league was wanted to that end. Patriotic industrialists and bankers, with vested interests in building the Navy for the Imperial government and in revitalizing the economy at the same time, organized the enormously popular Navy League. In contrast to the few thousand members of the Pan-German League, Navy League membership grew to nearly one-million members.



Yes, Germany's time had come to build a dreadful fleet to sail the deep blue waters, that Germany might bask in the Sun. Great Britain ruled the waves, but not to worry, for her fortunes were bound to sink forthwith. The message of Germany unity and its mission was repeated time again and again. The great English robber-State had become a nation of shopkeepers cravenly depending on her fleet and mercenaries instead of her own army of valiant warriors. She will as a matter of course be replaced by ascending Germany. After all, Germany is a nation inspired by Prussian militancy and by the ancient religious spirit of the four great world religions, to pursue those ideal ends which led Frederick the Great to mock the myth of the Holy Roman Empire, just as Germany now mocks the myth of the English Empire. England's possessions, England's arrogance on the seas, her claim to world-wide empire, is a provocative insult to Germany. How dare the German Emperor proclaim his friendship for England in the Daily Telegraph interview!



Britain, the elder power, had already glutted herself, lectured Professor Heinrich von Treitschke, leader of the patriotic Prussian School of History. England's "supremacy is an unreality," he said to his audience of both German and English students, who listened rapturously to his heartfelt propaganda. "Her political power is as hollow as her moral virtue; the one an arrogance and pretence, the other hypocrisy. She cannot long maintain that baseless supremacy." Moreover, "A German could not live long in the atmosphere of England - an atmosphere of sham, prudery, conventionality, and hollowness."



Max Weber believed that Professor Trietschke had gone overboard with his professional propaganda, that he was pandering to his students with what they wanted to hear; nonetheless, Weber admired Trietschke's patriotic German idealism. He also admired and to a far greater extent the English intellectual and leading philosopher of the Enlightenment: Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was a master of clear thinking and English prose; his ideas about the solution to man's presumably natural state, the war of all against all, rang a bell in the Fatherland, and quite naturally so, since the most generous Pan-German thinking included the Anglo-Saxons as a branch of the original superior race - Professor Weber personally excluded the Poles from original superiority, saying, "It is only thanks to us that Poles are human beings!" Hobbes was of course taken a bit out of context in Germany, but Machiavelli was taken true to heart. However that might be, one thing is for sure: Prussia, and not England, is now to be the leading cause of world progress.



Prussianized Germany, now a nation of warriors, must and will take her turn and play the leading role on the world stage, for Germany is the agent of the world spirit confronting opium-dealing, parochial Bible-thumping England - the Anglican Church has contributed nothing of lasting value to the world, whereas Germany's professors and scholars instruct the world in the great world religions. To use another one of Treitschke's phrases to reiterate the proper German attitude toward England: "A thing that is wholly a sham cannot in this universe of ours endure forever. It may endure for a day, but its doom is certain; there is not room for it in a world governed by valour, by the Will to Power."



And Germany, if anything, is valiant. She does not, like England did in the Boer War, "march chained Boer women together in order to form a screen to protect themselves from the bullets of outraged husbands and fathers." As for women, German women are not loud-mouthed English Suffragettes who wage war on flower-beds and shop windows. At least Prussian women are noble women! Witness how, in the heroic rising of the Prussian Schill in 1809, when in more than one instance, as the helmets of the dead were removed, a flood of golden hair rolled down from under the helmet to the waist of the fallen. That, they say, is how German women go to war.



It all makes sense now, it is quite simple, according to the Prussian historians. Frederick the Great, like Alexander the Great, was an astounding military genius, yet he was content with the Prussia he had secured at the time. Furthermore, in 1871, nearly a century after Frederick, the "bad boy of Europe", had made a mockery of the crumbled Holy Roman Empire, Germany was inspired to a genuine Imperial unity, led, of course, by the Hohenzollern Dynasty. Thanks to Bismarck, Germany had by force of arms and clever diplomacy achieved its unity under Prussian hegemony. The north would rule the south, but with some trepidation, under Bismarck's constitution, of an incongruous imperial federation.



We must not blame Bismarck for the fatal defect of his constitution: he did not foresee the full force of the social revolution coming from below; rather, he was anxious about holding the various states together under the Prussian dominance, and did not realize a dragon would soon be unleashed on the world. And now, with the restoration of the Imperial Roman Majesty in the Second Reich, and with Kaiser William II of the Hohenzollern House on the Imperial Throne, the Time had finally come for every patriotic German to carry on where Napoleon had failed, to accomplish what Nature demanded: a United States of the World!



First of all, Europe must be saved. Since England was the greatest impediment to progress, the world must be saved from the clutches of the decrepit old English octopus. William II is at the helm of the Imperial Ark, yet the World Spirit is steering. The Kaiser is the genius of the German people whether he likes it or not, and he will soon become, against his will as a mere individual, the "mad dog of Europe."  



Yes, indeed, the day of reckoning is coming, the hour is nigh, "Germany is watching and waiting, Year by year silently she prepares."







to be continued







(work in progress to be continued here)



Note: This article is the sixth of a series of twelve significant events of the year 1908.



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