Kaiser Wilhelm II

Christopher (St Catherine'S College, University Of Cambridge) Clark

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317891468
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Weltgeschichte

Kaiser Wilhelm II is one of the key figures in the history of twentieth-century Europe: King of Prussia and German Emperor from 1888 to the collapse of Germany in 1918 and a crucial player in the events that led to the outbreak of World War I. Following Kaiser Wilhelm's political career from his youth at the Hohenzollern court through the turbulent peacetime decades of the Wilhelmine era into global war and exile, the book presents a new interpretation of this controversial monarch and assesses the impact on Germany of his forty-year reign.

Chapter 1
Childhood and Youth

Power in the Family

When Wilhelm II was born in 1859, his grandfather was still on the throne. Nearly three decades were to pass before his grandfather died, at the age of 90, in March 1888. From an early age, then, Wilhelm was in a position to observe that his father, Friedrich Wilhelm, Crown Prince of Prussia, was not the only person who commanded respect. Above him there was another, greater father, a figure of almost mythical reputation with the gravitas and whiskers of a biblical patriarch. The grandfather was not only the ruler of a kingdom and (from 1871) the founder of an empire, but also the head of his household, a fact with far-reaching implications for the family life of his living descendants.¹ In October 1886 (when he was 27 years old), Wilhelm explained the problem to Herbert von Bismarck, son of the chancellor and a sometime friend and confidant:

The prince. . . said that the unprecedented circumstance of there being three adult generations in the ruling family made things difficult for his father: in every other case, in ruling and in other families, the father had the authority and the son was financially dependent upon him. But he [Prince Wilhelm] was not under his father's authority, he received not a penny from his father; since everything derived from the head of the family, he was independent of his father . . ., that was of course unpleasant for his Imperial Highness

[the Crown Prince].²

This awkward division of power between parent and grandparent was the single most influential fact of Wilhelm's early life. The princes' holidays, dress, military duties and representative functions were all subject to the ultimate authority of their grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I. The princely tutor was an appointee and employee of the king whose presence in the household significantly diminished parental influence.³ In this sense, as the Crown Princess confided to her mother in the summer of 1864, her children were ‘public property’.⁴ After August 1865, when the king refused to permit Wilhelm and his siblings to join their parents on a holiday in England, the Crown Princess began to complain of increased interference by the king and queen in the life of the children.⁵

It was perhaps inevitable that there should be friction between two generations who felt themselves equally responsible for the upbringing of a third, but the potential for conflict was greatly enhanced by the factional and political tensions that polarised the Hohenzollern court. Since the revolutionary upheavals of 1848–9, the court of Friedrich Wilhelm IV had been dominated by two opposed political factions, the western-oriented conservative-liberal party and the pro-Russian arch-conservatives. These two interests had intrigued against each other during the 1850s – notably during the Crimean War, when they supported diametrically opposed foreign policies – and they were still active when Wilhelm’s mother left England in 1858 to set up a household with her new husband in Berlin. The Crown Princess was particularly hostile to the ‘Russian set’, who distinguished themselves by their ‘ill-nature’, ‘jealousy’, ‘antipathy’ and not least by their ‘ill-feeling against the English and everything that is English’. ‘I do not care a straw for the good feeling of the Russian reactionary, pietistic set, and I despise their way of thinking with all my heart and hope to goodness that their day is over.’⁶

Narrowly orthodox or evangelical in religion, reactionary in domestic politics and eastern-oriented in foreign affairs, the ‘Russian set’ represented the cultural and political antipode of the Crown Princely couple and their entourage. Friedrich Wilhelm and Victoria were theologically liberal, politically progressive, and their views on foreign policy were British-oriented and marked by distrust of Russia. The potential for friction was enhanced by the fact that Victoria, the more liberal of the two and the dominant personality in the partnership, was an intelligent, articulate, bossy and emotional woman with a strong sense of her superiority to those around her. Thanks to her observant eye, her outsider status and her keen interest in political power, Victoria’s correspondence with her mother, Queen Victoria, is among the best sources we possess on life at the Prussian court. Needless to say, these characteristics did not endear her to conservatives at the court, who found her forthrightness unbecoming in a woman and, in later years, accused her of subjugating her husband to her own political will.

Initially, the prominence of ‘Russians’ at court and in Berlin society was little more than an irritant to the Crown Prince and his wife. But things took a dramatic turn for the worse in 1862, when a protracted conflict between the crown and the liberal parliamentary majority in the Prussian parliament (Landtag) culminated in the appointment of the notoriously illiberal Otto von Bismarck as minister-president and the dissolution without elections of the Landtag. The problem was not simply that the ‘reactionary party’ now controlled the organs of government and was beginning to put into practice its ‘Russian’ agenda in foreign policy,⁷ but more importantly that the court itself lurched rightwards. The King no longer drifted between factions, as Friedrich Wilhelm IV had done during the 1850s, but aligned himself unequivocally with the reactionary interest. ‘The reactionary party gets stronger every day’, Victoria wrote in July 1862, ‘and have the King now completely on their side and in their power.’ By the summer of that year, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm and his father had drifted so far apart politically that rational communication was virtually impossible; the slightest allusion to political matters, Victoria reported, ‘drives him into a frenzy and excites all the opposition in his nature so that it is impossible to argue or reason with him’.⁸ For the Crown Prince and his wife, the sea change in the political mood at court brought a painful awareness of isolation and impotence. ‘The feeling of humiliation is the hardest to bear’, Victoria wrote in January 1863. ‘Nothing remains but silence as passive witnesses of the lamentable mistakes made by those we love and reverence.’⁹

There was, of course, an alternative to silence, and the Crown Prince and his wife were not in fact entirely alone. Throughout Prussia a socially influential liberal movement continued to challenge the legitimacy of a government now ruling without parliament and in defiance of the constitution. On 5 June 1863, after the publication of new decrees curtailing the freedom of the press, the Crown Prince took, for the first time, a public stance against the new government. At a reception held in his honour by the city of Danzig, he dissociated himself from the Bismarck administration and expressed his regret at the recent provocative measures. The occasion was less momentous than it seemed at the time. Friedrich Wilhelm shrank from placing himself permanently at the head of the progressive movement. Indeed he even assured his father that he would refrain from protests of this kind in future.¹⁰ However, for the personal lives of the Crown Prince and his wife and, by extension, of their still-infant son Wilhelm, the events of June 1863 were of lasting significance. They brought down upon the young couple the wrath of the minister-president, a hater of unique ingenuity and stamina who repeatedly intrigued against them and was to remain the dominant force in Prussian–German politics for the next 30 years. In the short term, Friedrich Wilhelm’s public gesture of opposition and Victoria’s outspoken personal support for her husband’s views further deepened the couple’s political and social isolation at court: ‘You cannot think how painful it is’, wrote Victoria in July 1863, ‘to be continually surrounded by people who consider your very existence a misfortune and your sentiments evidence of lunacy!’¹¹

It is only against this background that we can understand the animus generated by apparently minor conflicts over the training, education and representative duties of young Wilhelm and his brothers. The education of an absolutist or neo-absolutist monarch is always, as John Röhl has observed, ‘ipso facto a political issue of the highest importance’ because it is concerned with the future exercise of sovereign power.¹² In the case of the Hohenzollern court, these concerns were overlayered and complicated by the partisan allegiances that alienated the Crown Prince and his entourage from the reigning monarch and his prime minister. The resultant polarisation was reflected in two opposing paedagogical ideals: one anglophile, liberal-bourgeois and based upon the cultivation of civil virtues and social responsibility; the other old-Prussian, aristocratic and based upon the cultivation of military skills and discipline. This became apparent when ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ tutors had to be found for Prince Wilhelm. The first candidate selected by his parents as civilian tutor had to be dropped on account of his progressive political connections; the final choice fell upon Georg Ernst Hinzpeter, a man with close, if indirect, links to the ‘Crown Prince party’, who requested and received exclusive authority over the princes’ education. He was to remain Wilhelm’s civilian tutor until his 18th year. It was Hinzpeter who set the tone of Wilhelm’s early education, establishing a demanding schedule of lessons in Latin, history, religion, mathematics and modern languages that began at six in the morning and ended at six in the evening (an hour later in winter) and interspersed (on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons) with edifying visits to mines, workshops, factories and the homes of the labouring poor.

Conflict also broke out over the respective powers and responsibility of the two tutors. The prince’s first military tutor grew weary of his post when he realised that Wilhelm’s parents had allotted Hinzpeter the lion’s share of responsibility for the child’s upbringing. After his resignation in 1867 there was a dispute over his replacement in which the king’s entourage became directly involved. ‘We luckily carried our point . . .,’ Victoria wrote to her mother, ‘but I think this interference in our concerns too bad. You have no idea what trouble the reigning party takes to put their spies about our court, nor to what degree they hate us.’¹³

The representational duties of the princes were a further cause of grief to the Crown Princess and her husband. In August 1872, she confessed her ‘horror’ at having heard that Wilhelm would be required to wear a Russian uniform in honour of a visit from the Russian tsar. ‘I of course am not asked and all these things are arranged without my having a voice in the matter.’¹⁴ It was in part to get the boys away from the coercive environment of the court that Victoria and Friedrich Wilhelm pressed the emperor for permission to send them to school to be educated with children of their own age. As John Röhl has observed, the decision to send Wilhelm to the Lyceum Fredericianum in the city of Kassel was ‘an experiment without precedent’.¹⁵ No Hohenzollern prince had ever been educated in this ‘bourgeois’ fashion before. It was a move that reflected changing conceptions of princely education, not only in Germany but beyond – George V was also sent to study in the company of his peers at naval college, and even the youthful Emperor Hirohito attended high school in Tokyo.¹⁶ Wilhelm could, of course, have been educated at a Gymnasium in Berlin, but his mother argued against this on the grounds that the only appropriate school in the capital was too politically ‘reactionary’.¹⁷

Not surprisingly, the plan met with strong opposition from the Kaiser; only after a prolonged ‘siege from all sides with various machines’ could he be persuaded to agree. As Victoria observed in a letter to her mother, it would henceforth be impossible for the Kaiser to ‘force William to appear at Berlin on all occasions and go out into the world – it was the only way of stopping this preposterous determination on the emperor’s part’.¹⁸ The move to Kassel was a victory for the paedagogical ideals of the Crown Prince and his wife. Wilhelm’s enrolment in the Kassel Gymnasium from 1874 involved prolonged absences from Berlin and, more importantly, exemption from his military duties until his 18th year (Wilhelm had been attached to the First Footguards Regiment since his tenth birthday). The subordination to a tough and meritocratic paedagogical regime was also intended to strip Wilhelm of the arrogance and princely allures encouraged by the sycophancy and self-display of court life.

The Crown Princess had always been suspicious of the role played by the military in the socialisation of her eldest son and hypersensitive to any signs that he had begun to assimilate himself to its reactionary ethos. As early as February 1871, when the prince was only twelve, she claimed to have detected in Wilhelm ‘a certain receptiveness for the superficial, narrow attitudes of the military’.¹⁹ It was above all thanks to her influence that her son enjoyed – by the standards of Hohenzollern princely education – a remarkably unmilitary upbringing....