Authors: Ian Buruma
The remarkable thing about the kaiser’s
“marineabsolutismus”
is that he took a concept associated with liberal progress and cosmopolitanism and turned it into a symbol of Teutonic reaction. It took a peculiarly resentful Anglophile to carry this off. The man whom the kaiser chose to realize his naval dream could not have been better suited for the task: Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz was an Anglophile who sent his daughter to school in England. But Tirpitz was convinced that the British would stop sneering only when the Germans had a maritime force as big and strong as their own. Trade came into this only insofar as it was argued, over and over, that the British were jealous of German industry, and powerful German battleships were necessary to stop the British from keeping Germany down.
To many British people, the Royal Navy was doubtless a source of national pride, one of those institutions that made patriotic hearts beat faster. But it was not as a nation-building or identity-boosting exercise
that the navy was built. Some Britons may have fetishized the Royal Navy, but it did not start off that way. The kaiser’s navy, as well as other bizarre Anglicisms in his German Reich, did. In 1902, the kaiser visited London and explained his naval vision to the prime minister, Arthur Balfour. Britain was a self-contained island nation, he said. Its unity could be taken for granted. But Germany was a “mosaic” of former principalities that had not yet congealed into a whole. The navy was needed to unify the nation: “Commanded by the Kaiser alone, Germans from all the regions would come streaming towards this active example of the unity of the Reich.”
Similar sentiments lay behind the desire for a German Empire. The late imperial enterprise would not only benefit German trade and provide land for German emigrants, but it would express, in Tirpitz’s rather odd phrase, “transatlantic Germanness.” Richard Wagner had similar ideas: German colonialists would ennoble the world through the German spirit, unlike the English, to whom the empire was only “a tradesman’s till.” The German navy and empire, then, would serve as badges of tribal, or even racial nationhood. That the German empire might spread an idea of universal civilization, which was the French colonial mission, was abhorrent to the kaiser. In 1901 he told students at his alma mater in Bonn to cultivate the national idea and forget “airy-fairy cosmopolitan dreaming.” Old empires, he said, were undermined by “universalism.” The essence of the nation was “to define itself against other nations according to national character and its unique racial characteristics.”
So how could this possibly be reconciled with the kaiser’s ties with Britain, which endured despite all his Teutonism? There was only one way, which was to follow Disraeli’s credo that race was all. Just as the romantic Shakespearomanes saw the English playwright as a Nordic genius, the kaiser stressed the racial affinity between his mother’s and his father’s nations. In 1902, he wrote a letter to Edward VII, stating this clearly. It should be mentioned that he had never got on with his uncle; he felt gauche in the presence of this Francophile bon viveur, and Edward found his nephew’s martial posturing ludicrous. But the kaiser wrote, in English: “I gladly reciprocate all you say about the relations of our two Countries and our personal ones; they are of the same blood, and they have the same creed, and they belong to the great Teutonic Race, which Heaven has intrusted with the culture of the
world … that is I think grounds enough to keep the Peace and to foster
mutual
recognition and
reciprocity
in all what draws us together and to sink everything which could part us!”
When the two countries, largely through the kaiser’s own fault, did grow further and further apart and threatened to destroy not only each other, but the whole of Europe, the kaiser’s reaction was rather like Hitler’s would be some decades later: a form of ethnic pique. He couldn’t understand why one member of the great Teutonic Race should fight another. He could only ascribe it to “typically English” envy of Germany’s success, or to shabby commercial opportunism. When the German ambassador in London reported in 1912 that the British would fight on the side of the French if Germany should attack France, the kaiser flew into a rage. How was it possible, he wrote furiously in the margins of his ambassador’s dispatch, that in the “final struggle between the Slavs and the Teutons,” the “Anglo-Saxons will be on the side of the Slavs and the Gauls?”
The British policy of balancing Continental European powers was, in the kaiser’s view, not only “idiocy”; it was typical of a nation of traders to wish to prevent warrior nations from taking up swords to defend their honor. The British were a bunch of contemptible shopkeepers, who understood only the language of money. Race and honor meant nothing to them. The blandishments of the marketplace had sapped their warrior spirit. Worse: the merchants of Britain were content to see the Continental powers tear one another apart. They got others to fight their wars for them, just like the Jews. And like the Jews, they masked their evil intentions behind humanistic ideals. They encouraged revolution in Russia and would have the liberalized Russians and the liberal French gang up on Germany. The explanation for this disgusting behavior was plain: the Jews had taken over Albion. Once the Jewish cosmopolitan element was purged from that once great nation, Britain would return to its natural Continental ally, and the two halves of Wilhelm could finally come together.
T
HE KAISER
’
S PERSONAL
history would have been fascinating, but of minor importance, if he had wielded less power and his own preoccupations hadn’t happened to coincide in an unfortunate way with the
history of Germany itself. By the 1880s German industry had begun to catch up and in some cases overtake Britain’s. The British Empire, though still the greatest power in the world, was showing signs of wear. Crises in Khartoum and Afghanistan were watched from Berlin with a degree of schadenfreude. It is unfashionable and certainly risky to ascribe human characteristics to nations, but Wilhelminian Germany had all the marks of adolescence: full of bravado and sensitive to slights; eager to show off brute strength and confused about identity. To be German was as much a question of language, culture, and race as it was to be a citizen of the German Reich. The borders of
Deutschtum
were dangerously fuzzy. Wilhelm’s Reich was young and impatient, but at its core was old Prussia, which viewed modern developments with dismay.
So much about the Wilhelminian period had an unpleasant swagger, an ostentatiousness, a crying for attention about it: all those helmeted figures on outsize, neo-rococo facades, the endless parades and flashy uniforms. Kaiser Wilhelm II did not create the nation in his own image. That would have been impossible. But his posturing, although embarrassing to many Germans, was typical of the Reich he ruled. He wanted to get away from his mother’s haughty English skirts (as did his uncle Edward, in his way), and the kaiser’s Germany measured itself with increasing resentment against his grandmother’s empire. England was resented by the kaiser and his reactionary allies, not only for being older, grander and more powerful, but for being the source of liberalism, which threatened to consume the old Prussian order.
Although the kaiser was a ferocious enemy of liberalism, the start of his reign was relatively moderate. His first chancellor, General Leo von Caprivi, was a cultivated, liberal-minded man who increased the welfare of workers, promoted foreign trade, lowered tariffs on imported goods, warned against the dangers of anti-Semitism, and sought good relations with Britain. However, this moderate interlude lasted only four years. When the kaiser turned against the usual enemies of his Reich—Jews, liberals, socialists, Social Democrats, or indeed democrats of any kind—Caprivi was swiftly dismissed. The kaiser’s enemies still dominated the Reichstag and parts of the metropolitan press. But the tragedy for Germany, and Europe, was that Bismarck had emasculated the Reichstag: parliamentarians could criticize, but not govern. That task fell to the kaiser and his clique of generals and
courtiers. Like the liberal press, which continued to function in its irreverent, satirical way, parliament’s largely negative role only fed the kaiser’s paranoia about liberal-socialist-Jewish conspiracies to undermine his Reich.
The kaiser didn’t need to look far to find fellow paranoiacs. Industrial progress was making Germany, or at least many Germans, richer than they had ever been, but landed Junkers saw it erode their privileges: rich stockbrokers were moving into the villas some of the gentry could no longer afford; down-at-the-heel aristocrats were marrying the stockbrokers’ daughters. Theodor Fontane described these little aristocratic “tragedies” in some of his best novels. He found, only somewhat to his amusement, that his most loyal readers were Jews. A similar process was taking place in other European countries. There were anxious aristocrats in England who didn’t like to see bourgeois upstarts buying their way into the British political establishment, accumulating titles and land. As in Germany and France, many of them saw the rich Jew as the main destroyer of the old order. On the whole, however, the British upper class was flexible enough to absorb new wealth and cash in on capitalist opportunity. But in the anxious eyes of German nobles rich Jews and rich Britishers blurred to form a liberal demon. The kaiser was influenced by a variety of characters who echoed these resentments.
First, there was the court chaplain, a disreputable political operator named Adolf Stoecker. He argued that Jewish stock-market wealth was the result of “Manchester liberalism” and that a Jewish-liberal alliance had impoverished the German workers. Traveling around Germany, making raucous speeches in this vein, Stoecker hoped to steer workers away from Social Democrats and attract them to his Christian Social party. Kaiser Wilhelm I, though not unsympathetic to Stoecker’s views, didn’t like to see his chaplain gadding about as a political agitator. Bismarck, who thought anti-Semitism was vulgar, couldn’t stand the man, especially when his personal banker, Bleichröder, came under attack. But Wilhelm II, as crown prince, thought Stoecker “had something of Luther about him.”
Stoecker was still hovering around the imperial court when the future kaiser met his most intimate friend, Philipp Eulenburg, at a hunting party in 1886. “Phili” (sometimes “Philine”) Eulenburg was a clever, highly educated man with an artistic temperament, but also a
bit of a crank. He was not much of a sportsman, and although always present at the kaiser’s dressing-up parties, he rarely participated in the more physical entertainments. Dressing up as a sausage, producing animal noises, or dancing in a skirt were not for him. Instead, he would play the piano and sing Nordic ballads of his own composition in a fine baritone voice, while his royal friend, addressed as
Liebchen
, “darling,” turned the pages. Philine’s circle of friends, which gathered at his Liebenberg estate, included, along with the kaiser, Kuno von Moltke and Axel “Dachs” von Varnbüler. The set was known as the Liebenberg Round Table.
Phili’s crankiness had its harmless side. He had a taste for spiritism. In one instance he visited a clairvoyant together with Kuno Moltke, who reported to Varnbüler that Philine felt “absolutely dreadful—in spite of the clairvoyante who felt him in the rectum and gave him such helpful guidelines for his behaviour.” But despite such curious fancies, Eulenburg was a shrewd diplomat who was at times a stabilizing influence on the kaiser. And yet it was also he who contrived to get rid of Caprivi. And Eulenburg’s crankiness had a more sinister side, which encouraged the kaiser’s worst instincts. Not only was Eulenburg an Anglophobe—that was to be expected—but he was a firm believer in the
Führerprinzip
, as long as the absolute leader was of royal blood. The matter of blood was indeed paramount in his thinking. One of Phili Eulenburg’s closest friends was the Frenchman Count Gobineau, author of
Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
.
The exact nature of Eulenburg’s relations with Gobineau and the kaiser himself is still a matter of some dispute. More may well have been going on at Liebenberg, and on the imperial yachts, than dressing up in tutus. We know that Eulenburg thought his correspondence with the French racialist thinker was “too much of an intimate personal nature” to be made public. And we also know that Eulenburg’s royal connections came to a sudden end when that scourge of the kaiser’s circle, Maximilian Harden, published reports of Eulenburg’s homosexual activities. A court case was prepared against him. Damaging witnesses, in the form of two Bavarian workingmen who had enjoyed Eulenburg’s favors, turned up. Phili’s old friends dropped him. The kaiser, who dropped him too, blamed the whole affair on “Jewish impudence, slander and lies.” And the only thing that saved Eulenburg from complete disaster was his physical unfitness to appear in court.
It was through Eulenburg that the kaiser met the man who promised to reconcile the two nations in the imperial bloodstream. And the resulting brew was sheer poison. The key figure in this meeting, quite unwittingly, because he was already dead, was Richard Wagner. Many years before his scandal, Eulenburg introduced the kaiser to the Wagner family in Bayreuth. Eulenburg was a Wagnerian of the first order. The kaiser loved Wagner’s music as much as his mother loathed it—a good enough reason, in fact, for the kaiser to love it. He had his car fitted with a horn that sounded the lightning motif of
Das Rheingold
. So, one fine day in 1891, at Eulenburg’s hunting lodge, Wilhelm met that great Wagnerian fanatic Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the most noxious of the kaiser’s mentors. Chamberlain was married to Wagner’s daughter Eva and lived in Bayreuth. He was the perfect match for the kaiser: an English fetishist of German blood.
Like Eulenburg, Chamberlain was singularly lacking in machismo. He was neither a soldier nor a sportsman, but a bookish worshiper of culture, specifically German culture: Wagner, Beethoven, Goethe … Shakespeare. Perhaps the kaiser was bored with the limited conversation of soldiers and enjoyed an artistic ambience, especially when it took on a spiritual, Nordic tone. He had some Jewish friends, too, such as Albert Ballin, chairman of the Hamburg-American Steamship Line, but the kaiser denied that his friend was a Jew or, as he put it, “a real Jew.” German music, German language, German
Geist
, German race—these were Chamberlain’s main preoccupations. And it was, in his view, only through these manifestations of the German spirit that the world would be saved from the abyss of deracinated Yankee-Anglo-Jewish materialism.