Biographies & Memoirs

11

Three Kaisers and Bismarck’s Fall from Power

The year 1888, ‘the year of Three Kaisers’, changed Bismarck’s position in Germany and the history of Europe. Within the space of a hundred days, William I died, his son Frederick III died also, and a 29-year-old became Kaiser William the Second (1859–1941). This accident of heredity undid Bismarck because he had always depended on royal favour, and that favour no longer sustained him. The way he fell showed up the destructive features of his grip on power in the most lurid of lights. He fell victim to exactly the kind of palace intrigue which had made him great: the secret operations of an unofficial camarilla composed of young Prince William, Philipp Count zu Eulenburg, Friedrich von Holstein, the ‘grey eminence’ of the German Foreign Office, who owed his career to Bismarck, and the ‘political general’, Alfred Count von Waldersee, Moltke’s successor as Chief of the Great General Staff. Bismarck, who had always disdained those in his entourage, now became their victim.

The first link in the conspiracy came about by accident at a chance meeting at the hunting lodge of Eberhard Graf von Dohna-Schlobitten in Prökelwitz in East Prussia. On 4 May 1886 Herbert Bismarck’s friend, Philipp Count zu Eulenburg (1847–1921), scion of one of the most important Prussian dynasties (his uncle Fritz had been Bismarck’s long-serving and long-suffering Minister of Interior; his first cousin Botho had succeeded his uncle in the same office; another cousin August would become Household Minister to Kaiser Wilhelm II) went to join the hunting party. There he met the young Prince William of Prussia and in effect ‘fell in love’ with the Prince. From 1886 to 1900 when the relationship cooled, Phili and William had a relationship so intense, on Phili’s side ‘boundless love’, that nasty tongues began to wag.1 They had something to wag about when on 8 May 1908, ‘Philine’, as Axel von Varnbüler called him in a letter, was arrested on his grand estate Liebenberg and accused of ‘abnormal’ sexual relations with two fishermen on the Starnberger See near Munich. Phili and his close friends in the high aristocracy had an intense set of interlocking relationships and, though many were married with children (Phili had eight), the surviving correspondence shows unmistakable signs that the group belonged to a clique of what would now be called gay men. They called the young Kaiser ‘Liebchen’ (little Darling) in their correspondence. Kuno Count von Moltke (1847–1921), one of their group, which came to be known in the press as the ‘Liebenberg Round Table’, had risen to the rank of Lieutenant General, and had become a General Adjutant of the Kaiser. He was ‘outed’ in 1907 by the journalist Maximilian Harden and at a series of trials lurid details of his activities—and, with his wife of nine years, non-activities—titillated the taste of the new mass public. There were several suicides in the group of friends around Moltke and Eulenburg and six officers in exclusive guards regiments also committed suicide during the early years of the twentieth century, as homosexuality became a public theme in European societies.2

On 4 June 1898 Axel Freiherr von Varnbüler, son of the former Württemberg Prime Minister and brother of Hildegard von Spitzemberg, wrote to Kuno Moltke that he had met Kaiser William II recently. ‘Liebchen stopped me in the Tiergarten and, after he had suitably admired my yellow boots and the matching colour tones of my riding habit, he asked me: “what do you know about Kuno? I cannot get anything out of him nor Phili”.’ In the course of the conversation the Kaiser emitted ‘a few strong expressions not to be repeated here’, which showed Varnbüler ‘that he is completely informed and has no illusions any longer’.3 Isabel Hull provides a remarkable portrait of the Kaiser recorded by Walter Rathenau (1867–1922), the businessman, intellectual, and foreign secretary who was murdered as a liberal and a Jew on 24 June 1922 by the right-wing secret military ‘Organization Consul’:4

There sat a youthful man in a colorful uniform, with odd medals, the white hands full of colored rings, bracelets on his wrists; tender skin, soft hair, small white teeth. A true Prince, intent on the impression [he made], continuously fighting with himself … neediness, softness, a longing for people, a childlike nature ravished … This man must be protected, guarded with a strong arm, against that which he feels but does not know, that which pulls him into the abyss.5

None of this would have mattered, had Phili Eulenburg not made himself into Bismarck’s most insidious foe by becoming an unofficial adviser of the young Prince. Phili poured gushing streams of extravagant, romantic, and exaggerated flattery over the young man and eased his friends and allies into positions of future power. Eulenburg had many real gifts. He preferred the arts to the barracks and after brief military service in the Prussian foot guards, chose a diplomatic career. He rose fairly rapidly, though Bismarck neither trusted him nor set much store by his abilities. Bismarck wrote to Herbert that ‘I like him personally. He is charming but in political matters he has no judgement for what matters and what does not; he lets himself be influenced by carping gossip, which he passes on and causes annoyance without reason.’6

Phili indulged in all the fashionable irrationalisms of the late nineteenth century—spiritualism and séances, nordic mythology, and racism. He wrote song cycles and poetry set in the imaginary swirling mists of Nordic antiquity, and played and sang them to the Kaiser; he had a close and possibly intimate relationship with Count Arthur Gobineau, one of the founders of modern racism, and admired late, overripe romanticism in the visual arts. His politics expressed an equally romantic conservatism, contempt for the masses, mixed with great sensitivity and shrewdness about people, and a light and charming prose style and manner.

At this time, Eulenburg made his first contact with Friedrich von Holstein, the most senior, non-ministerial civil servant in the Foreign Office, and the third member of the camarilla. Holstein, a secretive bachelor, had once been a devoted admirer of Bismarck but had become alienated from his former master. He believed—not without reason—that Bismarck’s foreign policy had become too complicated and had no other purpose than to buttress Bismarck’s power by making it impossible for anybody to replace him. Holstein had no other life than the Foreign Ministry. He worked long hours, read everything, knew everything, and now began to spin intrigues against Bismarck and even more against his immediate superior, Herbert Count von Bismarck, Phili’s close friend. If Phili in Bismarck’s eyes lacked judgement and listened too much to ‘carping gossip’, Holstein had judgement enough for both of them and provided Eulenburg with informed opinions on policy and personnel as well. Holstein wanted neither promotion nor honours, so, in the simple sense, he served without fear or favour. On a deeper level, he knew that he was right, that the Bismarcks had become power-mad and utterly self-involved, and hence a danger to the state. He was thus a principled traitor, powerful and invisible, a kind of spider in a web of intrigue. Holstein flattered and patronized Eulenburg in equal measure, because he saw that the triumvirate—William–Eulenburg–Holstein—could give him the power that he needed to rectify the errors of the late Bismarck Era.

Holstein and Eulenburg wanted to enlist the full-time intriguer and future Chief of the General Staff, Alfred Count von Waldersee, to work with them. They first had to overcome Waldersee’s suspicion, as this frank extract from his diary makes clear.

In the great game of intrigue, more clarity emerges. It concerns, as I correctly supposed, power in the future royal house. Bismarck father and son intend to rule alone. They imagine they can control the Crown Prince. They make the mistake of alienating everybody with whom they might have worked together and show that they do not understand the Crown Princess. I am certain that she will soon tire of her new friends. In order to rule alone everybody in the way, who has influence or might have it, must be eliminated. In that they use contemptible methods. One of the worst agents is Legation Councillor von Holstein. He is so clever as never to show himself in the world so that lots of people are scarcely aware he exists. I too am on the list of the condemned! This is particularly strange since up to now I have belonged to the group who stuck immovably to the Chancellor and intervened on his behalf.7

It took Holstein a year to recruit Waldersee for the camarilla but on 31 May 1887

Waldersee joined the plotters, as he recorded with satisfaction:

Today I was at the Foreign Office and restored the old friendly relationship with Herr von Holstein. Third parties seem to have had an interest in this reconciliation and assert that there were misunderstandings in the way. That may be so. I took the hand offered gladly and had the impression that a weight fell from Holstein’s heart.8

He who rises by camarilla will fall by camarilla seems to be the conclusion here. Bismarck comprehensively and systematically betrayed his chief Otto von Manteuffel in the 1850s. He sent secret dispatches written for Manteuffel first to Leopold von Gerlach and only then to the Minister-President. He wrote frequently to von Gerlach, a key figure in the camarilla around Frederick William IV, behind Manteuffel’s back, and tried to influence policy and to advance his career. With his one-sided morality he could not see the irony in his situation in 1888–9. Holstein justified his treachery with more claim to our consideration; his intrigues had nothing to do with personal advantage. The letters flowed regularly and confidentially between Holstein and Eulenburg. They discussed personnel and policy with equal frankness but had to be careful. On 16 June 1886 Holstein wrote to Eulenburg that ‘Herbert writes me that he has asked you for letters and if they are sufficiently factual and objective, as is to be expected, he will send them unchanged to His Highness. So be warned. With best wishes, your devoted Holstein.’9

The time for the camarilla to grab the levers of power had not yet arrived but it moved closer when, on 6 March 1887, Dr Gerhardt, Professor of Medicine at the University of Berlin, diagnosed a small growth on the left vocal cord of the Crown Prince. He failed to remove it surgically so he tried to burn it out but also without success.10 The Crown Prince Frederick, the most successful field commander during the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars, had been gradually losing heart and equanimity. He had written to Stosch:

In the present regime … every capable person is subordinated. They can only obey; they no longer think independently. There is the further consideration that I feel little inclination to do business through a major-domo [Bismarck] … I am resigned. I lack a joyful or assured spirit. I am inspired by no other wish than to spend the couple of years that yet remain to me as quietly and as retired as possible in my household and be swiftly placed in the background by the new sun [William].11

On 4 May 1886, Stosch wrote to von Normann:

he [the Crown Prince] began to unburden his heart. Bismarck, father and son, treat him simply with scorn. He feels so isolated; only Albedyll has taken up with him, because he is in bad with Prince William—What could I reply? I have sympathy for the Prince in the depths of my soul. You must have attended the Good Friday Lamentations in a Catholic Cathedral. They have always deeply moved me. I had exactly the same feelings at the unending laments of this poor weak soul. I do not know any help for it.12

What had happened to the confident and successful soldier of 1870? That Frederick had energy and curiosity. On his free days he went off to look at French cathedrals and châteaux with his guidebook. He intervened vigorously in debates and confronted Bismarck. By 1887, the Crown Prince had become a ‘poor weak soul’ and may have been what today we could call clinically depressed. In March of 1887 it became clear that he had cancer of the throat.

There began a desperate struggle between the Crown Princess and the German medical establishment over his treatment. On 29 April 1887 the Crown Princess wrote to her mother, Queen Victoria, from Bad Ems:

His spirits are far better here than at Berlin, and his throat seems daily improving. All the irritation, swelling and redness is fast subsiding, he never coughs, and has not the feeling of soreness, but part of the little ‘granula’ which Professor Gerhardt could not take off with the hot wire, because the throat was too much irritated, is still on the surface of one of the Stimmbänder [vocal cords] and will have to be removed when we go home.13

The royal couple then moved from Bad Ems to San Remo on the Italian Riviera for the winter. Everything she did was wrong and earned her criticism, as she wrote to her mother on 27 October 1887: ‘I am driven quite wild with the newspapers of Berlin and dear Ct Radolinsky keeps writing that people are so angry with me for choosing San Remo and for not calling in another German doctor. Really it is excessively impertinent of these people.’14 On 6 November Sir Morell Mackenzie, the most famous English oncologist, arrived in San Remo to examine the Crown Prince, who asked if it was cancer. Morell replied: ‘I am sorry to say, sir, it looks very much like it, but it is impossible to be certain.’15 The struggle became embittered because Bismarck and his captive press had waged a campaign of vilification against the Crown Princess for years, which she recognized and described in another letter to her mother:

To return to Prince Bismarck, he has so much that is brutal and cynical in his nature, so little that is noble and upright, he is so completely a man of another century than ours, that as an example or ideal he becomes very dangerous. He is a patriot and is a genius, but as a school there could not be a worse one. Opinions such as William holds are very much the fashion nowadays in Germany—they have half created the immense power Bismarck possesses and he has half created them.16

Bismarck planted spies in the royal household at the Neues Palais to watch the Crown Princess. Hugo Prince von Radolin (1841–1917) was appointed Marshall of the Palace in the entourage of the Crown Prince. Radolin, a Germanized Polish prince, belonged to the Bismarck connection and rose through Bismarck to ambassadorial duties in due course. Lady Ponsonby (1832–1916), the wife of Sir Henry Ponsonby, private secretary to the Queen, watched the situation of the royal couple at close hand:

I don’t think the Queen realizes what an extraordinary state of things exists in Germany in the way of espionage and intrigue. They, the foreign office, which means Bismarck, wanted to put a man of their own about the Crown Princess so as to more effectually control the Crown Prince when he became Emperor. Seckendorff refused to play the spy … then they appointed Radolinsky (Court Marshall to the Crown Prince) with orders to get rid of Seckendorff … Radolinksky’s manner of defending the Crown Princess simply consists in spreading these reports and trying to detach her family from her.17

Early in January 1888 the well-informed General Waldersee wrote in his diary that the Bismarcks had begun to suspect that there were those who wanted to influence Prince William against him:

We, including Albedyll, are agreed that the Chancellor is jealous of those people who want to alienate Prince William from his son Herbert. Here as so often he sees ghosts and goes ruthlessly after them … Given the tendency to revenge in the Bismarck family war will be waged on them all, if at first in a careful way.18

On 3 February 1888 Bismarck published the text of the secret Austro-German treaty concluded on 7 October 1879. Waldersee noted it in his diary: ‘Today’s publication of the German-Austrian Alliance has caused an immense sensation. I hardly believe that overall situation will change much.’19 In fact, it made a significant difference. The Hungarian elite recognized to their relief that the treaty had an entirely defensive character, and the Russians saw to their dismay that the Treaty had them as its object. On 6 February Bismarck delivered one of his grand speeches on foreign policy in the Reichstag. The final paragraph whipped up the members of the Reichstag and led to such demonstrations in the street that Bismarck had trouble getting through the cheering crowds:

We Germans fear God but otherwise nothing in the world and that fear of God is what has let us love peace and cultivate it. Whoever breaks the peace will soon convince himself that the pugnacious love of the Fatherland of the then weak, small and exhausted Prussia which called the entire population to the colours, has today become the common possession of the entire German nation and that whoever attacks the German nation in any way will find it uniformly armed and every soldier with the firm belief in his heart: God will be with us.20

On 9 March 1888 William I, German Emperor and King of Prussia, died a few weeks short of his 91st birthday. The old King had for more than twenty-five years supported Bismarck in both senses of the word, approving his work and policy as well as tolerating his increasingly impossible and irrational behaviour. He had been well rewarded for that support. In 1859, he became Regent of a small, not very powerful German kingdom and by the time of his death it had become the greatest and most powerful state in Europe. He had become an Emperor and seen his beloved Prussian army win three brilliant military campaigns. The King’s contribution may not be obvious but it was essential to that success. He let Moltke command his armies and Bismarck run his state. He recognized early that fate had given him the greatest military strategist and the most developed political genius of modern times and to them he entrusted his fate, that of his dynasty and his people. He worked hard, read government papers and always had well-founded opinions on subjects but he never let his own views, even when he knew they were correct, as they often were, overrule Bismarck’s policies. He had a strong sense of loyalty, a virtue his Chancellor completely lacked, and rewarded many of those whom Bismarck had savaged. He refused to let his favourite ministers go just because Bismarck had suddenly turned against them. He was a kind, decent, honourable, and unpretentious man, in effect the only kind of King who would and could have tolerated life with Otto von Bismarck. William I made Bismarck’s career possible and his longevity made it into an institution.

His death confronted Bismarck with the drastic possibility that the new Emperor would simply dismiss him. As in September 1862, after the ‘Blood and Iron’ speech, on 11 March 1888 he boarded the new Emperor’s train at Leipzig, who ‘repeatedly embraced and kissed him’.21 The next day, the Emperor Frederick wrote a two-page memorandum on constitutional issues, which began with the following introduction:

My dear Prince,

On assuming power, I feel the necessity of addressing you, the long-tried, first servant of my father, who now rests in God. You have been the faithful and brave adviser who gave shape to the aims of his policy, and secured their successful realization. I and my House are and remain most grateful to you.22

Bismarck realized that he now had nothing to fear. On 13 March, the next day, he told the Prussian Cabinet,

I feel relieved of the great concern I had that I would have to fight with a dying man against inappropriate intentions to the point of demanding my release from office. Everything is going easily and pleasantly with his majesty, like a jeu de roulette. … The Kaiser wishes to make no changes at all in the cabinet, neither do I. This is no time to change course. In view of his earlier utterances in younger years, there was reason to fear he would pursue all kinds of deviant aims—but I do not fear that any more.23

Others were less pleased. The new Emperor rewarded some of his faithful friends and Waldersee disliked what he saw. He deplored the names on the new honours list:

Among the first acts of government in the new reign was the granting of the Order of the Black Eagle to the Empress and to the Minister Friedberg … Friedberg has been for a long time a friend and in many affairs an adviser of the Crown Prince and Princess. He has the reputation among Liberals as being one of them and is of Jewish origin. I believe in fact was a Jew himself. The decoration stakes out a programme. It reveals the effort to make them popular with Liberals and Jews. The Ministers Puttkamer, Maybach and Lucius were passed over by the decoration of Friedberg …24

The great chronicler of Prussian life, the novelist Theodor Fontane, exploded at the Liberal newspapers which dared to suggest that the new Emperor might graciously allow Bismarck to continue in office. On 14 March 1888 Fontane wrote to his wife Martha to express his rage:

After the greatest political achievement in a millennium (for Frederick’s was smaller and Napoleon’s more fleeting) to have to be told by a Jewish rascal, behind whom unfortunately many, many stand: he was only a ‘servant’ and can, if he is nice and polite, remain in his servant’s position. Unheard of! Frightful! … Now they will all creep out of their swamps and holes and make their monkey business with him and tell him that it serves him right.25

Two days later the old Emperor was laid to rest. The Empress Frederick, as she was now styled, described the day vividly in a letter to her mother, Queen Victoria:

All went off well, there was no hitch in spite of the bitter cold weather—sharp frost and deep snow. The public was respectful and silent; there were no great crowds. The service I thought rather conventional, stiff and cold; the singing was very good … The hearse was very simple indeed … It is an inestimable blessing to be relieved of the thraldom and tyranny which was exercised over us in the poor Emperor’s name, as now the right thing can be done for Fritz’s health. But oh—if it is not too late, too late.26

Waldersee had become genuinely alarmed for his position. Bismarck had begun a press campaign to get him out of Berlin and to break his links to others, as yet unknown to him, who had been intriguing against him. Waldersee went to see the new Crown Prince William and opened his heart.

The conversation turned to the Chancellor, and I took the occasion to turn it to the attacks on me in the press and to the Chancellor’s intention to remove me from Berlin. The Prince said to me very confidently that I can be reassured on that point. He would stick to the rule that nobody should be moved from his post and not allow the Chancellor to interfere in military matters. I referred explicitly to this danger, which is, in fact, very real. Thank God, the Prince understands the situation very well.27

On 21 March Bismarck had a rude shock. Frederick III refused to sign a two-year extension to the anti-socialist act, and a bill to make Reichstag elections every five years instead of three. Bismarck, of course, threatened to resign, because ‘the existence of the cabinet is most seriously in question’. Bismarck summoned his carriage and drove to Charlottenburg in person, where he was received by the Empress. He explained that a bill passed by the Reichstag could not be subject to an Imperial veto. The Kaiser had no such power. The Empress Frederick went into the Emperor’s bedroom and came out with the signature on the two bills. With his paranoid misogyny, he blamed the Empress and her three ladies-in-waiting, Anna von Helmholtz, Baroness von Stockmar, and Henriette Schrader, who, he believed, had conspired to intervene between the Emperor and his cabinet.28 The only incident in Bismarck’s long career of rage and revenge crazier than this was his accusation that the Reichstag stenographers had ganged up to undermine him.

While Bismarck blamed nefarious ‘feminine intrigues’. Waldersee saw the Jews as the real culprits. He knew, as always, exactly what had happened and blamed Frederick III, not the women of the household, for the crisis. The real culprits were the Liberals, that is, the Jews, who had voted against both reactionary bills in the Reichstag:

The opponents of the two laws were the ‘enemies of the Reich’. One can easily see in what direction the Emperor would have taken us, had he been healthy … Jewish circles have been unusually active, in order to gain some advantage for themselves out of it all. Even liberal people take the view that the Progressive Party to which the Jewish circles belong has operated in an unbelievably stupid way. The Crown Prince will have an easy time finishing those people off.29

Waldersee believed that ‘World Jewry’ had initiated a conspiracy to defame and undermine the Crown Prince William. The fact that the Crown Prince and Princess had become enthusiastic congregants of Court Preacher Stoecker and showed that in public had inflamed the press:

In the whole hostile press the word has gone out to make the Crown Prince unpopular … Foreign newspapers achieve amazing things. The Jew papers, above all Die Neue Freie Presse and Pester Lloyd, make the running. Every time they drag Stoecker in, often naturally Puttkamer, and from time to time I get mentioned. In general attacks against me seem to have rather slowed down lately.30

On 4 April 1888 Moltke rejected the Kaiser’s request to give Waldersee command of an Army Corps, in effect, to reduce his malign influence on his son by sending Waldersee to a remote posting. Moltke told Waldersee:

I see that my powers are declining. I can in any case not continue my position for much longer. It would, therefore, be nonsense to take you away, when it will not be a year before you are back here and this time as Chief of the General Staff.31

On 15 June 1888 Frederick III, German Emperor and King of Prussia, died in Berlin. Philipp Eulenburg’s father described the scenes from the palace after the Emperor’s death in a letter to his son written on 17 June 1888:

The Empress is beside herself. Kessel heard her not only weeping but screaming. She said to him on one occasion, ‘what will become of me at my age without a home?’ … He says that with all the grief that he feels, he also feels relief to be freed from an unnatural, artificial English intrigue, and that he can now think and be honestly himself. Tomorrow at 10 is the funeral and by 12 it will all be over. Many wreaths have arrived from regiments but more from the Jews. There is a whole room full of Bleichröder, Schwabach, Heimann etc.32

Within three months, three generations had passed across the stage of German history. William I, born in 1797, Frederick III born in 1831, and now William II born in 1859, all Emperors one after another. Frederick’s illness and death have always been a great ‘might have been’ in German history. Had he arrived healthy and strong, would the course of events have been different? Obviously the question has no answer but one thing can be said definitely—the mid-century generation, Frederick’s contemporaries, never came to power with him. Instead an uncivil, illiberal, unsteady, and insecure 29-year-old came to the throne and the ‘lost generation’ of the German mid-century never came to power.

The struggle of the generations had, however, another long-term effect, as Christopher Clark argues in his biography of Emperor William II. The great age of the old Emperor, his reactionary views, and the absolute power he exercised over the royal family weakened the power of the young Prince’s parents over him in ways that made an alliance between the old and young a reality, the great hope that the Bismarck family cherished. In October 1886, the Prince, then 27 years old, explained the situation to Herbert von Bismarck, who then passed on the substance to his father:

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 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].33

Clark argues that this alliance of old and young had foreign and domestic significance. The Prussian Kingdom, as a ‘state in the middle’, had always been torn between the Western powers, France and Great Britain, and the Russian option. William I had been a ‘Russian’ in sympathy, tied to the Romanovs by bonds of family and by his natural reactionary instincts; Frederick III and Victoria represented England, liberalism, and the hated Jews, who embodied all those aspects of a commercial and open society that the old Kaiser and most of his entourage disliked. Bismarck who belonged to neither camp, made it possible for the old Emperor to gratify his instincts just enough to keep him happy but never tied his foreign policy or the German Reich to a pro-Russian line, quite the opposite. He considered the English option at various stages but got too little encouragement from Disraeli and the Tories and none whatever from the Liberals whose leader William Ewart Gladstone embodied everything he detested about Liberalism save that he happened to be a devout Anglican rather than a Jew. Now Bismarck had to cope with a headstrong young man who from the beginning intended to rule in his own name and not as an agent of the great Bismarck. He shared most of Bismarck’s values but he had too much of the irrationalism, showiness, and ambivalence about the new industrial society which the younger members of the Prussian ruling class, his contemporaries, also shared, to be a comfortable master for the old man of Friedrichsruh.

William II became the most controversial figure of modern German history and gave his name—Wilhelm—to a period in that history, the Wilhelmine era, 1888 to 1918, in the way that his grandmother Queen Victoria gave her name to the era 1837 to 1901. And rightly so. His flamboyance, his aggressive speeches, his public image and dress, his quick wit and capacity to create slogans, the exaggeration of his uniforms and his bellicosity, all those aspects came to embody the period of explosive economic and military growth that the German Empire unfolded from the 1890s to the First World War. He led Germany when it went to war in 1914 and his abdication on 10 November 1918 cleared the way for the armistice. Many in Germany and almost everybody abroad blamed him for the First World War and ‘hang the Kaiser’ was a popular slogan in the British ‘khaki’ election of 1918.

William II was born on 27 January 1859. During a traumatic birth, his left arm was damaged and he could never use it properly in later life. In May 1870 the Crown Princess wrote to Queen Victoria: ‘Wilhelm begins to feel being behind much smaller boys in every exercise of the body—he cannot run fast because he has no balance, nor ride nor climb nor cut his food.’34 He had a very strict tutor who used brutal methods to get him to overcome his disability and to excel intellectually. His mother wanted him to ‘be something of what our beloved Papa was, a real grandson of his, in soul and intellect, a grandson of yours’.35 What effect this combination of physical handicap and high maternal expectations had on the young Prince has attracted the attention of psychologists and psychiatrists, including Freud. William’s impulsiveness, outbursts of brutality, and changes of mood made many fear that he would not be able to rule steadily. His mother wanted him to understand the lives of ordinary people, so his tutor took him to see the poor and later he became the first Hohenzollern to attend an ordinary school, a gymnasium in Kassel, and to spend a few years at university. Like Bismarck he never had a proper Prussian upbringing, no Kadettenanstalt, as a small boy and Christopher Clark speculates that as a result he never ‘internalized the habits of self-subordination and discipline that a fully Prussian military education was designed to instill’.36 He rebelled against his parents’ values (perfectly normal) and sought solace in his grandfather (not unusual either) but, since his grandfather happened to be Emperor of Germany, a soldier by avocation, a reactionary in politics and the uncle of the Tsar Alexander II, young William had an alternative political model. He did his military service and became a caricature of the young Junker officer in a posh regiment complete with the language, demeanour, and prejudices.

On the other hand, he fell for the romanticism and myth-making of Phili Eulenburg and his song-cycles, not the sort of material that Botho von Rienäcker and the other guards officers described by Fontane knew anything about. He was intelligent, charming, and interested in modern technology but had a quick temper and a cruel sense of humour. The Bismarcks had done everything to win him over and cultivate him as a tame and flexible Emperor but by June 1887, they had begun to doubt whether it would work. Holstein recorded a conversation with Herbert on the subject:

I was very struck by a talk I had two days ago with Herbert about Prince Wilhelm … The Prince had no staying power—he simply wanted to be amused. And all that really interested him in army life was wearing a handsome uniform and marching through the streets to music. He fancied himself as Frederick the Great, but had neither his gifts nor his knowledge. And Frederick the Great, as a young man, had ceaselessly worked and exercised his intellect, whereas Prince Wilhelm allowed his talents to deteriorate by constantly consorting with Potsdam lieutenants. And as cold as a block of ice. Convinced from the start that people only exist to be used—either for work or amusement—and that even then they only do duty for a given period, after which they may be cast aside … I found Herbert’s changed attitude towards Prince Wilhelm particularly interesting psychologically in that it revealed that he does not enjoy the status with the Prince which he desired and imagined he had.37

During his father’s illness, William’s relationship with his mother deteriorated and he had nasty spats with her, one of which the Crown Princess described in a letter to Queen Victoria:

You ask how Willy was when he was here! He was as rude, as disagreeable and as impertinent to me as possible when he arrived, but I pitched into him with, I am afraid, considerable violence, and he became quite nice and gentle and amiable (for him)—at least quite natural, and we got on very well. He began with saying he would not go out walking with me ‘because he was too busy—he had to speak to the doctors.’ I said the doctors had to report to me and not to him, upon which he said he had ‘Emperor’s orders’ to insist upon the right thing, to see that the doctors were not interfered with, and to report to the Emperor about his Papa! I said it was not necessary, as we always reported to the Emperor ourselves. He spoke before others and half turning his back to me, so I said I would go and tell his father how he behaved and ask that he should be forbidden the house—and walked away. Upon which he sent Ct Radolinsky flying after me to say he had not meant to be rude and begged me not to say anything to Fritz.38

William’s reaction to his mother became increasingly bitter and on 12 April 1888 he wrote to Eulenburg to express ‘the shame for the sunken prestige of our once so high and untouchable House … That our family’s shield should be spattered and the Reich brought to the edge of ruin by an English princess who happens to be my mother is the worst of all.’39

On 15 June 1888 Frederick III died and William now assumed his new role. At once the new camarilla came under fire from the well-informed press. Waldersee hastened to cover his flank by visiting Bismarck in July 1888 and had

an interesting afternoon with the Chancellor. He was his old self. We drank two bottles of Grünhäuser and had a very agreeable conversation. … With regard to France he asked whether it would not be useful for us to violate Belgian neutrality in order to march through Belgium. I explained to him that I would advise against that but did think it would be extremely helpful if the French marched through Belgium.40

This remarkable conversation on the violation of Belgian neutrality took place three years before the first sketch of the Schlieffen Plan was drawn up in the German General Staff, a plan for a two-front war against Russia and France that involved in the first version a violation of both Belgian and Dutch neutrality. The plan foresaw a gigantic encircling movement by the German army to come into France from the north and cut the French army off from Paris. It is extraordinary that the idea came from Bismarck not the soldiers. Had the Chancellor considered the diplomatic consequences of such an attack? That Great Britain, a guarantor of Belgian neutrality, would be forced to join France, as, indeed, happened in 1914? That Germany would reap a whirlwind of hatred and contempt for its violation of the rights of peaceful, small states?

William II began his reign with a variety of visits abroad, where he made a very bad impression. In November 1888 he visited Rome for an audience with the Pope and a state visit to the Italian Kingdom. On 17 November Ludwig Bamberger summed it up as ‘in short, a total fiasco’. He had received a letter from his old friend, the novelist Heinrich Homberger (1832–1890), which told the story:

Now, all voices agree, that He did not please. ‘Unripe, impolite, ruthless, bad manners’. When he came back from the Vatican, he described what happened during the visit at the court table with all sorts of bad jokes and made fun of the Pope. Further, with the young Crown Prince of Italy, an eighteen-year-old who had in the Roman way been largely educated in a cloister, he used ‘des discours lestes’, asked questions which made the poor lad red with shame. That he took no interest in art or antiquities was held against him.41

In addition to his gaucheries abroad, he showed hostility to Catholics and Jews at home. In September 1888 the ever watchful Waldersee recorded in his diary that the Kaiser ‘could not bear Jews’ and ‘often stated’ this.42 Nor was this a superficial attitude. John Röhl, the author of the great multi-volume life of Kaiser William II, writes that the Kaiser’s ‘animosity towards Jews, recorded in such marginalia and also in Waldersee’s diary, was anything but peripheral; it formed a key element of his thinking.’43

The inevitable clash between the young Kaiser and the old Chancellor gradually emerged in early 1889. On 14 January the Kaiser opened the Landtag in the White Hall of the Palace. He announced that a draft bill for reform of the income tax in Prussia would be forthcoming to ‘lighten the burden on the less well off’.44 Since Bismarck had not entirely approved the proposal and certainly not the direction it took, tensions emerged within the cabinet and between Bismarck and the Kaiser, who had begun to think of himself as ‘the King of the Poor’. This self-image would be put to the test when on 3 May 1889 the Ruhr miners began a strike which spread to the Saar, Saxony, and Silesia. The strikers demanded eight-hour shifts underground including transport down and up from the shaft, a 15 per cent wage increase, an end to prolonged shifts, and better working conditions. From 14 to 20 May there were 7,000 on strike in Upper Silesia, 13,000 in Lower Silesia, 10,000 in Saxony, in the Saar and Aachen 20,000, and in the Ruhr district 90,000 of the 120,000 employed. The government sent in so many troops to the Ruhr basin that the Nationalzeitung joked it looked the spring manoeuvres.45 The panic and arrogance of the coal barons annoyed the army chiefs. On 11 May General Emil Albedyll (1824–97), formerly head of the Military Cabinet and now commander of the VII Corps stationed in Münster,46 sent a message to Chief of the General Staff Waldersee:

Every ten minutes I get a telegram announcing the overthrow of everything if immediate military help does not come, and absolutely nothing has happened which might look even remotely like damage to property.47

The Kaiser on 6 May 1889 ordered local authorities in strike areas to report directly to him. He also tried to force owners to raise wages immediately without consultation with Bismarck. On 7 May three miners were killed by police fire and on 12 May at a meeting of the Prussian cabinet William II suddenly appeared unexpectedly and unannounced his intention to preside over the strike discussion. After the Kaiser left, Bismarck said to his colleagues: ‘The young master has Frederick William I’s conception of his authority and power, and it is necessary to protect him from excessive zeal in this regard.’48 Bismarck’s reaction reflected his tactical approach more generally. He said on 25 May that in his view it would ‘be useful if the settlement of the strikes and its unfortunate after-effects were not too smoothly and quickly resolved, the latter in particular to make the liberal bourgeoisie feel it.’ He wanted to use the strikes to remind the liberals how useful the anti-socialist law would be after all. So, above all, no rush to conciliate the strikers.49 He was not at all fussed by the strikes but the Kaiser’s tendency to govern by himself without consultation made him uneasy.

The mounting tensions between the Kaiser and the government led Bismarck—unusually for him in high summer—to return on 10 August to Berlin. On 17 August Bismarck presided at a cabinet meeting and discussed the issue of strikes:

If the mine administration should no longer have the freedom to dismiss a worker without the consequence of a general strike, that would mean the establishment of mass rule, which would present a great danger for public life.50

On 20 August Bismarck left Berlin but went to Friedrichsruh, which was, of course, nearer Berlin. On 9 October Bismarck returned to Berlin to welcome Tsar Alexander III on an official visit and three days later, on 12 October, the following conversation between them took place:

ALEXANDER III: Are you sure of your position with the young Kaiser?

BISMARCK: I am certain of the confidence of Kaiser William II and I do not believe that he would ever dismiss me against my will.

ALEXANDER III: It would give me great pleasure if your optimism were to be fully confirmed.51

The last act of the great drama began on 1 December when 3,000 miners in Essen gathered to protest against employers’ blacklists which had locked them out of employment. Unluckily for Bismarck, Hans Hermann Berlepsch (1843–1926), a rare Liberal at the top of the provincial government system, was Superior President of the administration of the Rhine Province. Berlepsch had been involved in the strike movement from the beginning and had seen and got to know workers well. He had become convinced that the workers were part ‘of a great historical movement which cannot be suppressed with force’.52 He convinced the employers to lift the blacklist and reinstate the sacked workers. Bismarck was distinctly unhappy with that decision but, as usual, he was away in Friedrichsruh and unable to reverse it. In fact, even Bismarck’s personal assistant, Franz Johannes Rottenburg, who had replaced Christoph Tiedemann in 1881, believed that a ‘new course’ in social policy would be needed and later he caused a scandal as Curator of the University of Bonn in his inaugural lecture by advocating official recognition of the Social Democratic Party, for which he was investigated by the police.53 Bismarck’s deputy, Karl Heinrich von Boetticher, as his biographer describes him, was ‘the model civil servant, shrewd, adroit and agreeable in manner. It was his good fortune to be persona grata with Bismarck and William II.’54 But not for long, because Bismarck refused to accept their advice. On 19 December Rottenburg informed Boetticher that the ‘Chief’ had rejected conciliation and Berlepsch’s policy. Bismarck had ordered that Boetticher draft an Immediatbericht (a direct report for William II) in which he wanted it said that:

We are cultivating in the workers a great danger that will ultimately be felt not only at the polls but also in the army. The efforts of the workers to obtain ever more pay for ever less work has no limits … If we let the mistake they [Berlepsch and the local authorities—JS] began (i.e. mediation in favour of workers) exert an influence, its consequences can only be corrected later by hard and perhaps bloody disciplinary measures (harte und vielleicht blutige Massnahmen).55

On the same day, Albert Maybach, the Minister of Trade, and Herrfurth, the Minister of the Interior, ordered the provincial authorities to cease conferring with labour representatives. This was more or less the opposite of the Kaiser’s intentions, as events would soon show.

On 24 January 1890 Bismarck returned to Berlin for a Crown Council in something of a hurry because the Kaiser, without informing him, had called one for that evening at 6 p.m. Neither Bismarck nor his son had any idea why the Council had been called. When on 23 January 1890 Herbert asked for an audience, the Kaiser granted it and explained that the Council had been called because he wished to put his ideas on ‘the handling of the labour question to the ministers; if your father wishes to take part, I shall be very pleased.’56 Herbert sent a telegram to urge his father to come to Berlin as soon as possible. Bismarck had to rise early, something he hated and made him irritable. He took an early train, which arrived at 1.50 p.m. At 3.00 he met the cabinet, at 5.30 the Kaiser alone, and at 6 p.m. the Kaiser chaired the Crown Council. Holstein, who had been in bed on Tuesday, 23 January, with influenza, had received a visit from Herbert Bismarck, who was in a great state of agitation. Holstein told him his opinion and then with a pencil sent him the same views in writing, dated 24 January, the day of the fateful Crown Council. He warned Herbert not to push the Kaiser too hard. The letter did no good, for that very afternoon the session of the Imperial Council took place at which sparks really flew for the first time.57

A few days later, he wrote a full account of the fateful Council to Phili Eulenburg. The Kaiser opened the Council by saying that the anti-socialist law would certainly pass without the expulsion paragraphs and then added that ‘it would be lamentable if I were to colour the beginning of my reign with blood … I cannot and will not be forced into such a situation.’ Bismarck then announced that

under the circumstances he had no choice but to submit his resignation since he could not accept the views of His Majesty. The declaration was brief and without any attention to the Kaiser’s arguments. The Kaiser then asked each minister individually for his view; all declared that they shared the Chancellor’s view. The Kaiser then gave in … He behaved with admirable self-control and was right not let the Chancellor go. He must take a personal stance which is not identical with that of the ruler. In addition, Kaiser, Chancellor, Ministers, Bundesrat, Cartel, Parties are all in a dreadful mood.58

Lucius wrote in his diary that ‘we parted with our differences unresolved, with the feeling that an irreparable breach had occurred between sovereign and chancellor. His Majesty exerted himself to be friendly toward the prince, but he was boiling. At any rate he possesses great self-control.’59 The next day, as expected, the anti-socialist law was rejected in the Reichstag by 169 to 99 and thus would expire on 30 September 1890, unless a new bill were introduced in the next Reichstag after the February elections.

Bismarck had become seriously worried now about his position and suddenly called on his ‘enemies’ for help. On 18 February 1890 Bismarck visited Waldersee, who was not at home so he left his card. Waldersee was astonished, as he wrote in his diary: ‘The chancellor wanted to visit me! I didn’t trust my ears when I heard that. For years he has made no visits whatever, and now he drives to me and the Field Marshall [Moltke—JS] in order to call. He is indeed becoming weak.’60 At the same time Bismarck requested an audience with the Empress Frederick, which she refused. If he wanted to call, it ought to be a social call and hence with the Princess. Bismarck had no choice but to agree. Victoria was even more startled than Waldersee, as she wrote to her mother, the day after the visit on 19 February:

Prince Bismarck and his wife came to see me yesterday. He spoke a long while on the subject of William’s newest coup! He also spoke of retiring soon, as he could not keep pace with innovations so suddenly resolved on and carried out in such a hurry and on the advice of people he thought in no way competent to give it. I dare say he quite means what he says in this instance but I do not suppose his resignation would be accepted … I thought Prince Bismarck looked remarkably strong and well and inclined to take things philosophically.61

Baroness Stockmar, who had lady-in-waiting duty that day, passed on to ‘neighbour’ (their agreed code-names) Ludwig Bamberger some more of the conversation. Apparently the Empress Frederick had asked Bismarck whether he had composed the February Decrees which he claimed (implausibly) to have edited to make them less ‘impossible’. Frau von Stockmar continued:

Bismarck had made it clear that he intended to go. William took counsel from any and everybody, without listening to him. It was all vanity; he wanted to be a great world historical monarch … Bismarck saw the time coming when he will be ignored and denied. As Victoria asked, ‘what is then to be done?’ He answered, ‘Majesty if you meet me later in a salon, be gracious enough to greet me …’62

While the Empress and Bismarck gossiped like old friends, Germany went to the polls, and the results were fully as bad as National Liberals had feared. It is just possible that Bismarck hoped for such an outcome, because it would make him irreplaceable, and that might be why he refused to remove the expulsion clause from the anti-socialist bill. Voter participation fell to 71 per cent and was thus lower than the crisis election of 1887. The election was a disaster for the Cartel Parties, which lost 85 seats. The Socialists raised their vote to 19.7 per cent (about 1.4 million votes) and became for the first time the strongest party in terms of votes.63 The ‘enemies of the Reich’ now controlled its parliament; 106 Centre deputies plus 35 Socialists and 66 Progressives gave a majority of 207 of the 397 seats in total, easily enough to put an end to the anti-Socialist Law and frustrate reactionary military bills.

On 2 March 1890 Bismarck startled the Prussian State Ministry with a new and daring plan. He intended to introduce into the Reichstag an anti-Socialist law far more stringent than the one the old Kartell-dominated Reichstag had rejected five weeks earlier. Social Democratic ‘agitators’ would be banned from voting and from standing in elections and could be summarily exiled. The inevitable rejection would lead to a dissolution and a conflict election, very like the scenario in Prussia in 1862, which gave him power in the first place. There would be elections in which radicals and Socialists would gain until Bismarck announced a new electoral law with an end to universal suffrage. Since the German Empire rested on an alliance of princes and not of states, Bismarck declared, according to the minutes of the meeting ‘the princes … could decide, if need be, to withdraw from the joint treaty. In this way it would be possible to free oneself from the Reichstag if the results of the elections continued to be bad.’64 The authentic Bismarck stands revealed here. Domination mattered and nothing else. He would destroy the Reichstag rather than surrender power.

On 5 March William II went to the annual dinner of the Brandenburg provincial estates and gave the toast: ‘Those who want to help me are heartily welcome, whoever they are, but those who oppose me in this work I shall crush.’65 Both the Kaiser and Bismarck had now begun to use violent language and plan for extreme situations. Holstein wrote that ‘the present preference of His Highness for extreme situations is a sign of the irritability of old age. Earlier in spite of his decisiveness he was the most superior statesman there has ever been.’66 Waldersee had another and much more profound explanation for Bismarck’s behaviour. In an entry for 5 March 1890, which the editor of the Waldersee diary omitted, he wrote that Bismarck

cannot leave because he is afraid of his successor and of the anger which will be unleashed in many whom he has oppressed, lied to and deceived … he has a very bad character; he has not hesitated to disclaim his friends and those who have helped him most; lying has become a habit with him; he has made use of his official position to enrich himself on a colossal scale and has had his sons promoted with unbelievable ruthlessness although no one thinks them competent!67

Waldersee made two mistakes in that assessment. He had always lied from his earliest childhood, and he had not the least fear of any successor. He wanted absolute dominance and would do anything to retain it. In fact Bismarck had begun to play his combinations as he always had. As Paul Kayser (1845–98), head of the Colonial Department in the Foreign Office and one of the camarilla, said of Bismarck’s plan to cause a crisis in the Reichstag, it was ‘the most masterful move in the whole game of chess: it means checkmate for the king.’68 After all, Bismarck would be able to claim that the trouble lay not with him but the new master who refused to accept realities. Bismarck had engineered the defeat of the Cartel by refusing to compromise on the expulsion clause to please the National Liberals. They, not he, had paid the price in a huge electoral defeat and he still had his room to manoeuvre. Now he had to steer a big Army bill through and renew the anti-socialist law. His Minister of War, Julius Verdy du Vernois, who had been one of the three ‘demi-gods’ of 1870, contemplated offering the hostile Reichstag two-year compulsory service in exchange for the passage of the bill, an irony of history, for it was precisely that compromise which Bismarck wanted to offer the Landtag in October 1862, that the King had vetoed.

Bismarck had another option—to entice the Centre to give him both bills in exchange for the final abolition of the remaining restrictions on the Catholic Church. On 10 March Windthorst called on Bleichröder, who urged him to meet Bismarck privately—whether he acted on his own or on Bismarck’s request is not known. On 12 March 1890 Ludwig Windthorst presented his card at the Bismarcks and was immediately received. Margaret Lavinia Anderson provides a vivid account of that meeting:

Bismarck welcomed his old opponent warmly, seating him on the sofa and plumping up cushions to support his back. Then he sat down beside him, leaned his head back on the sofa rail, and outlined the general political situation. He needed support and he asked Windthorst his price. It was Windthorst’s great moment. ‘The repeal of the Expatriation Law’, he began. ‘Done!’ Bismarck interjected. Revision of the Anzeigepflicht in accordance with the formula of the Prussian Bishops’ Conference, Windthorst continued; free activity of missions, the establishment of the status quo ante in Catholic matters, including the readmission of the Jesuits. To the last demand, Bismarck replied equivocally, but concluded, ‘It should be feasible. Not of course at once, but step by step …’ In this un-dramatic manner Bismarck agreed to concessions for which Windthorst had been fighting for eighteen years … In their unexpected need for each other, the barriers of rank, manners and long enmity dissolved and the old men treated each other as the intimates that they in some ways were. Windthorst cautioned Bismarck, ‘If anyone says to you, turn in your resignation, that in a fortnight they will be calling you back—don’t believe him. I went through that sort of thing twice in Hanover. Don’t believe a word; if you go, you won’t come back. Stay in office.’ Bismarck was not offended at this familiarity. ‘That’s true,’ he mused, ‘you have experience on your side. I must say you have spoken frankly with me.’ As he left, Windthorst was poignantly aware of how slim the chance that the concessions he had obtained would ever see the light of day. When he met Porsch that evening he look surprised and dazed. ‘I am coming from the political deathbed of a great man,’ he confided.69

The next day, 13 March 1890, Count Otto von Helldorf-Bedra (1833–1908), the leader of the Conservatives in the Reichstag, called an extraordinary meeting of the Fraction and bound them to accept no concessions on the Septennat and none on religious and educational questions. This decision meant that no deal with the Centre in spite of its 106 seats would have a majority in the Reichstag. Bismarck’s approach to Windthorst would compromise him without assuring his survival.

On the 14th Bismarck sent word to the Kaiser to beg an audience, which the Kaiser ignored. Bismarck gives a vivid account of the scene which followed in his memoirs. At 9 a.m. on the morning of the 15th the Kaiser sent word that he would arrive in thirty minutes. Bismarck had to be awakened, dressed hurriedly, and awaited the Kaiser without having time to breakfast. Bismarck began the report by announcing that he had seen Ludwig Windthorst, to which the Kaiser replied, ‘and you did not show him the door’. Bismarck declared that all parliamentary colleagues, provided they were well mannered, had always been received. The Kaiser then confronted Bismarck with the accusation, ‘you negotiate with Catholics and Jews behind my back.’ Bismarck reacted furiously that soon he would have to submit his menus.70 The Kaiser described the scene to Phili Eulenburg very vividly:

I sat at the table, my sabre between my knees, smoking a cigar. The Chancellor stood before me and his growing anger made me calmer. Suddenly he picked up a huge folder and hurled it down on the table in front of me with a big bang. I was afraid he was going to throw an inkwell at my head. Well, I took hold of my sabre! I could not believe it.71

The discussion had gone badly wrong from the beginning. Next the Kaiser demanded that the cabinet order of 1852 be rescinded to allow him to contact ministers directly since the Chancellor was always in Friedrichsruh. This further infuriated Bismarck. The Kaiser then said that he would amend the military bill to make sure that it found a majority in the Reichstag. The Kaiser thus removed the only conflict which might have assured Bismarck’s survival.

That afternoon the Chief of the Military Cabinet General Wilhelm von Hahnke (1833–1912), the Adjutant-General Adolf von Wittich, and the Chief of the General Staff Waldersee had an audience with the Kaiser, who told them what had happened. The Kaiser believed that ‘there is collusion between the Jesuits and rich Jews’. Waldersee argued, according to his diary, that Bismarck could not resign for fear of what his successors would find and ‘unfortunately also because he was too closely allied with the Jews and could not escape from them’. He then gave the Kaiser ‘a frank account of my views on the Chancellor without sparing him anything. Hahnke and Wittich were astonished, but the Kaiser not at all.’ The only disagreement between the Kaiser and Waldersee was over what to do next. Waldersee urged the Kaiser to dismiss Bismarck; Wilhelm II wanted to provoke Bismarck to resign.72

The next day von Hahnke arrived at the Reich Chancellery with the Kaiser’s demand that the 1852 order be rescinded and Bismarck refused. On 17 March August Eulenburg reported to Phili that no reply had been received to the Kaiser’s demand so that Hahnke would go again in the morning with a summons to the Chancellor to order him to come to the palace that afternoon with his resignation in his hand.73

Meanwhile at the palace, the Kaiser waited for Bismarck’s reply. His friend Phili Eulenburg spent the tense hours with him in his study and by the evening, when ‘Uncle Ernst’, the Duke of Coburg, arrived for dinner, nothing from Bismarck had been received. The Kaiser said, ‘now we have had enough; lets make music’. After dinner, Phili sat at the piano and played and sang his various ballads while the Kaiser sat next to him on the piano bench and turned the pages. The adjutant on duty slipped into the salon and the Kaiser went out for a second. When he returned and settled down next to Eulenburg, he whispered ‘the farewell is here’.74 Eulenburg may have got the date wrong or the Kaiser may have read more into the adjutant’s message then was actually there, for, according to other sources, nothing seemed to have arrived at the palace on 17 March.

That evening the entire cabinet assembled at Boetticher’s house and voted to appoint him as their spokesman. He was to beg an audience of his Majesty, as Lucius wrote in his diary,

in order to express our regret at the resignation of the Prince and to submit collectively our resignations in order to offer his Majesty in this respect complete freedom. The meeting became known that very evening through the Kölner Zeitung. All the papers according to their position published a political death notice and approved without exception the resignation of the Prince as right. With respect to the succession nothing positive has emerged. All the commanding generals have assembled.75

This unanimity from left to right in the press that Bismarck should go gives an indication of how much his political status had eroded and how little he understood that.

On 18 March Hermann von Lucanus (1831–1908), the Kaiser’s Civil Cabinet Chief, arrived at the Wilhelmstrasse to ask why the Prince had not replied to the Emperor’s demand. Lucanus, a senior civil servant, whom Bismarck had placed in the delicate office of Civil Cabinet Chief, must have found the assignment uncomfortable.76 Bismarck answered that the Kaiser had power to dismiss him at any time and needed no letter of resignation, nor could Bismarck see any need to submit one. He intended to write an explanation of his position which could be published and sat down to do so. While he composed this statement, General Leo von Caprivi had arrived to take over the Chancellorship and began work in the next room. Bismarck described his reaction in the Chapter ‘My Dismissal’ in Book Three of his memoirs: ‘My indifferent feelings gave way to a sense of injury … That was an expulsion without warning which at my age and after the length of my service I had every right to regard as rudeness and I am still today not free from the sense of injury at the mode of my expulsion.’77 He then wrote a long memorandum on the importance of the Cabinet Order of 8 September 1852, an order ‘which since then has been decisive for the position of the Minister-President and alone gave him the authority which made it possible to exercise that level of responsibility for the collective policies of the cabinet.’ He then stated that he could not in good conscience carry out the Emperor’s demand that he rescind the Cabinet Order and still serve as His Majesty’s Minister-President and Reich Chancellor. He concluded the memorandum by writing:

With the devotion to the service of the royal house and to Your Majesty and the long years of habitual activity in a relationship, which I had considered lasting, it is very painful to withdraw from the accustomed connection to the All-Highest person and from my responsibility for overall policy in the Reich and Prussia. After conscientious consideration of All-Highest intentions, to the execution of which I must be ready, if I am to remain in service, I can only humbly beseech Your Majesty to relieve me of the office of Reich Chancellor, of that of Minister-President of Prussia and that of Prussian Minister of External Affairs with Your grace and with the obligatory pension.78

Thus ended the extraordinary public career of Otto von Bismarck, who from 22 September 1862 to 18 March 1890 had presided over the affairs of a state he had made great and glorious. In the convoluted language of the promemoria, the experienced courtier used the language of subordination and royal power which he had mastered and used for forty years but which had never impeded his ability to act as he saw fit. Now the humble posture that he had always necessarily adopted in his written communications with his royal master had become his real posture. The old servant, no matter how great and how brilliant, had become in reality what he had always played as on a stage: a servant who could be dismissed at will by his Sovereign. He had defended that royal prerogative because it allowed him to carry out his immense will; now the absolute prerogative of the Emperor became what it had always been, the prerogative of the sovereign. Having crushed his parliamentary opponents, flattened and abused his ministers, and refused to allow himself to be bound by any loyalty, Bismarck had no ally left when he needed it. It was not his cabinet nor his parliamentary majority. He had made sure that it remained the sovereign’s, and so it was that he fell because of a system that he preserved and bequeathed to the instable young Emperor. On 20 March the Kaiser replied in gracious tones and the resignation became official and public. The Kaiser wrote a twenty-page private letter to explain what had happened and why he had been forced to dismiss Bismarck. His conclusion uses a term which comes up again and again in contemporary assessments of Bismarck, ‘lust for power had taken a demonic hold on this noble, great man.’79 The Kaiser was not alone in that view.

Hildegard von Spitzemberg took time to reflect at some length in her diary how far and in what ways Bismarck had been the author of his own downfall. On 20 March, the day of Bismarck’s official resignation, she recognized that he had been to blame in the catastrophe for his long absences and his tendency to confuse public and personal business:

a series of necessary laws fell under the table because they did not suit his private interests as a landlord or simply because he had no time for them—As far as the family is concerned, nemesis breaks over them not unjustly for the brutality and heartlessness with which they trampled so many people, great and small into the dust, but the prospect will not be pleasant. My God, the vulgarity which will now show itself after the servility of earlier days.80

On 23 March 1890 the new Chancellor, Leo von Caprivi, the new Foreign Minister Adolf Marschall von Bieberstein (1842–1912), and Holstein met to decide whether or not to renew the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia. Neither Caprivi nor Marschall had any experience of foreign affairs or diplomacy. Marschall had served in the Reichstag and from 1883 had been Baden’s ambassador to the Federal Council. He knew so little that he was jokingly described as the ‘minister étranger aux affaires’.81 Herbert Bismarck’s resignation had still not been accepted by the Kaiser and he continued to occupy the office of State Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Marschall’s new job. When he heard that Caprivi had been shown the secret Reinsurance Treaty, he became very angry with Holstein:

Thereupon the Count sent for me and said, maintaining his self-control with difficulty: ‘you have been guilty of something which in past circumstances I should have been obliged to punish most seriously. Under present conditions all I can say is that you have been in too big a hurry to regard me as a past number.’ I had no difficulty in justifying the professional propriety of my behaviour, and we parted, shaking hands for the last time.82

Holstein had not, of course, been honest with Herbert for some time but in this case he had behaved correctly by giving the text of the treaty to the new Reich Chancellor and Foreign Minister. Herbert behaved the way Hildegard Spitzemberg noted and confused personal and public.

On the night of 23 March 1890 the Prince and Princess Bismarck gave a farewell dinner for the entire State Ministry and the new Chancellor, General von Caprivi. Lucius, who attended, described it on the last page of his long record of life under Bismarck:

Caprivi gave his arm to the Princess, on whose left sat Boetticher. Maybach and I sat on either side of the Prince. The initial, stiff and depressed mood lifted gradually. The Prince and Princess had already during the afternoon taken leave of the Empress Frederick. The Princess expressed loudly and without reserve her view of the events of the recent days. Bismarck treated Caprivi with great warmth, wished him as he left everything good and offered his advice, if should need it.83

On 24 March the annual dinner of the Black Eagle Order, the highest Prussian decoration, took place. Everybody who counted and who had made a reputation in the Hohenzollern Kingdom regularly attended. Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, who kept a splendid diary, recorded the event:

At half past one—dinner at which I sat between Stosch and Kameke. The former told me about his quarrel with Bismarck and was as chirpy as a wren that he could now speak openly and that the great man was now no longer to be feared. This comfortable feeling is universal here. Here again it is true that the meek inherit the earth.84

Hildegard Spitzemberg went back to see them a week after her previous visit and found the atmosphere already very unpleasant, as

a consequence of the sad and subjective view of people which for a long time determined the tone in this house and how much is now personal hatred and bitterness? … It is highly distressing to hear how dreadfully the violence and petty urge to rule had gained the upper hand in the Prince’s behaviour.85

On 29 March 1890 Hildegard Spitzemberg called at 77 Wilhelmstrasse as the Bismarck family were about to leave. She found movers and packers dismantling the house, and

empty, smoke-stained walls … Only when the Princess told us how yesterday the Prince had gone alone to the old Kaiser’s mausoleum to take leave of his old master, did we all burst into tears. ‘I took roses with me,’ the Prince explained, ‘and laid them on the coffin of the old Emperor. I stood there for a long time and called down to him a variety of things.’86

News of their departure had spread in Berlin and large crowds lined the route to the Lehrter Bahnhof. The public had expected that William II would appear to see Bismarck off but he did not. ‘A squadron of guards cuirassiers with band and standards had assembled on the platform. All the ministers, ambassadors, generals were present … There was a deafening “hurrah” and “auf Wiedersehen”. As the train began to move, the public joined in singing the “Wacht am Rhein”. Thus the last act has been played out and an event of incalculable scope has taken place.’87 With these words, Robert Lucius von Ballhausen ended his long diary. Ludwig Bamberger noted the event on the same day: ‘departure today. The Bismarck legend begins. If the National Liberals were not slaves, they could use it to become great again. He is gone as the Great Devil who towers over his nation.’88

Nobody who knew Bismarck or Johanna could imagine a serene retirement and a quiet old age. Within days he had set up a ‘shadow government’, the shrine to his genius and the headquarters of the anti-Kaiser William II fronde. Two weeks was all that Bismarck needed to mobilize his own press corps. He no longer had the ‘Reptile Fund’ at his disposal to pay for planted articles, but he had no need to pay in cash. He paid in secrets revealed, in interviews, and in his incomparable authority, the authority of ‘the Great Devil who towers over his nation’, as Bamberger called him. War between Friedrichsruh and the new government would soon break out. To the surprise of the family, he no longer interested himself in the management of his now considerable landed property. It worried Herbert that his father looked ‘uninterested or bored or actually never listened’ when farm management needed decisions. He interested himself only in reading newspapers and in what Herbert called ‘playing pseudo-politics’.89 Herbert moved to Schönhausen, where he actually enjoyed the life of the country squire, and never returned to Berlin politics.

On 15 April 1890 the Prince received Dr Emil Hartmeyer (1820–1902), the proprietor of the National Liberal daily, the Hamburger Nachrichten. Hartmeyer, who inherited this substantial regional newspaper from his father in 1855 and ran it as owner-editor for almost fifty years, invited Bismarck to use the services of the paper and its chief political correspondent Hermann Hofmann (1850–1915) as his own personal newspaper, and Bismarck accepted.90 The paper launched on that very day a sharp attack on the new Chancellor’s first Reichstag speech. Bismarck had no intention of going quietly into retirement. He lusted for revenge.

Hatred and revenge had always moved him strongly and, now in impotent retirement, no positive activity nor satisfaction could distract him from the absolutely ruthless settlement of grievances—against the Kaiser, his successors as Chancellor, and against all those ministers who had not followed him into exile. Those on the list of enemies who had already died, like Guido von Usedom, would have their reputations blackened in every way possible when he came to write his memoirs. Those still alive and in office could be compromised and destroyed by leaks to the press. Heinrich von Boetticher, his subordinate and deputy, had stayed in office after Bismarck left, an offence for which the minister could not be forgiven. In March 1891 Bismarck leaked the story through his tame press that he had arranged a loan of 100,000 marks from the Guelph fund so that Boetticher could pay off the debt of his father-in-law. A few days later Philipp Eulenburg wrote to Boetticher a kind of condolence letter in which he expressed his horror and amazement:

I had not remotely considered it possible that somebody would be capable of playing such a trick. If I take the personal grudge out of the picture, the entire affair must be seen as an unpatriotic act, which makes the line between personal wickedness and high treason very hard to draw.91

Bismarck had no hesitation in crossing that line and wickedness is not a bad word for his act. He devoted six pages in his memoirs, an entire chapter, to the ingratitude and treachery of Karl Heinrich von Boetticher,92 and not a word about his leak of the compromising loan.

The new Chancellor, Leo von Caprivi (1831–99), found himself in a delicate situation. He had no political background but, as a soldier and as Imperial State Secretary of the Navy, after Bismarck had fired his enemy Stosch, Caprivi enjoyed a reputation as an upright, competent man, a conservative Christian but with a social conscience. The Times of 21 March 1890 gave its readers a picture of the man. He was unmarried, did not smoke, and had no independent income. His physical presence commanded attention:

A typical Teuton of the hugest, most impressive type. He might very well pass for a brother or even a double of Prince Bismarck himself … In point of stature and breadth of shoulders, General von Caprivi even has the advantage of the man he is going to succeed … He is a good enough speaker but a brief one, and when at the head of the admiralty, he never failed from his place on the Federal Council bench in the Reichstag to put his case clearly and well.93

Caprivi determined to adopt, as Heinrich Otto Meissner writes, ‘a Versöhnungspolitik [a politics of reconciliation] which would take the good from where it came … even hoped to win Social Democracy for the state.’94 The Reichstag which Bismarck had bequeathed to him had a negative majority. Caprivi had to govern with shifting majorities assembled for each bill, ‘which was no peculiarity of Caprivi’s system but of non-parliamentary constitutionalism in general’. The difficulty lay in appearances. ‘Without the characteristics of a demonic genius … it looked like wavering.’95 Windthorst had decided to support Caprivi’s army bill and did so. On 27 June 1890 ‘the military bill passed with 211 against 128. The majority contained the votes of the entire Cartel Parties, the overwhelming majority of the Centre and the Polish Party. To the minority belong the Progressives, the People’s Party, the Social Democrats, a few Guelphs and 21 South German Centre deputies.’96 Windthorst explained why he had opted to support Caprivi to one of his aides on 23 June 1890, who took down the remarkable argument verbatim:

If the bill had been rejected, then a serious constitutional conflict stood in prospect and universal suffrage would have been extremely endangered. One may think what one wants of universal suffrage—I would never have introduced it—but to do away with it now would mean to make way for revolution and to weaken essentially the power of the Catholics. The latter lies in the masses. Catholics are positively the poorer [of the two confessions]; the ruling classes in the state, in municipal government, and, on account of their greater wealth, in social life as well are Protestant. The position of the new Chancellor Caprivi would have been violently shaken, if not destroyed, through the rejection of the military bill. These political considerations alone forced its adoption.97

Windthorst, who always understood Bismarck’s tactics, showed again his acuteness. Bismarck had intended to create a crisis to abolish universal suffrage. If a crisis occurred now after his fall, he might be recalled. Windthorst and the Centre Party had to support Caprivi for fear of somebody worse and, above all, to keep Bismarck safely in retirement.

In Friedrichsruh, the former Chancellor received visitors and played politics through his tame press. He also let it be known that he had begun working on his memoirs with the aid of his old amanuensis, Lothar Bucher. In March 1891, Baroness Spitzemberg visited and asked Bismarck if there were a chance of a reconciliation with the Kaiser and Bismarck made clear that there was not:

No, that’s all over and done with. Imagine what it would be like if I lived in Berlin. How could I present myself to all those who have shamelessly dropped me as soon as they saw I no longer counted? Given the miserable way people behave would I not harm my friends? Everyone to whom I spoke, anybody who came to my house would be accused of ‘plotting with Bismarck!’ The Kaiser sent me packing like a lackey. I have all my life felt myself to be a nobleman, whom one cannot unpunished simply insult. From the Kaiser I can demand no satisfaction, so I just stay away.98

When she asked him the next day why the Kaiser dismissed him, she got an unexpected answer from the Chancellor:

I certainly can. A word from Versen, the chief flatterer,99 expresses it. He told him that if Frederick the Great had had or inherited such a chancellor, he would never have been ‘the Great’, and he wants to be ‘the Great’. May God give him the talent for it. I am the thick shadow there that stands between him and the sunshine of fame. He cannot allow as his grandfather did that some glamour of rule fall onto his ministers. It is inconceivable that he and I should work together. Even seeing each other is painful. I am a standing rebuke.

Gradually Bismarck’s contemporaries began to die. On 15 March 1891 Windthorst died, on 24 April Moltke. In June 1891 Hans von Kleist visited Bismarck in Friedrichsruh. He had been moved to do so by ‘the public accusation that his old friends did not come to visit him. He was very friendly and dear. I caught not a trace of bitterness. That he gave up saying grace at table years ago, made me sad.’100

During 1891 Herbert went to Fiume to stay with the family of his old friend from the diplomatic corps, Count Ludwig von Plessen, who had married the eldest daughter of Count Georg Hoyos and Alice Whitehead, daughter of the English inventor of the Whitehead torpedo. Count Georg had gone into his father-in-law’s business and ran the Silurifico Whitehead in Fiume. There he met another daughter, Marguerite Hoyos, a beautiful 22-year-old, and they got engaged. The marriage was planned for Wednesday, 21 June in the Protestant church in the Dorothea Gasse in Vienna’s fashionable First District. A marriage between the Bismarcks and one of the great Magyar noble houses would have been a social event in any case but in view of the status of the groom’s father, it became a political crisis for the Kaiser and Chancellor Caprivi. They assumed—wrongly—that Bismarck had arranged the occasion to make his re-entry onto the diplomatic stage in Vienna and the Kaiser reacted with his usual intemperance. Bismarck had, of course, notified the officials at the Hofburg that he would be in Vienna during the week of 15 to 22 June and would wish to pay his respects to the Emperor Franz Joseph, whom he had known for four decades. On 9 June the Kaiser ordered Caprivi to notify the German embassies everywhere to take no notice of the former Chancellor’s presence and to Franz Joseph he wrote on 14 June to ask the Emperor his ‘true friend’ not to receive ‘this disobedient subject until he comes to me to say peccavi’.101

The Austrian Emperor had no choice but to close his door to Bismarck and to order the official establishment in Vienna to ignore the most glamorous social event of the summer to which some 600 guests had been invited. As the New York Times wrote, ‘the Austrian officials were conspicuous by their absence. The Austro-Hungarian aristocracy were represented by Hungarian magnates attired in their gorgeous national costumes … The ex-Chancellor was attired in the uniform of the German Garde du Corps and wore a helmet surmounted with a silver eagle.’102 The event in spite of the Kaiser’s petty vindictiveness became a huge triumph for Bismarck. He was received by cheering crowds at every point on the journey to Vienna and in the city itself. He spent a week as a fantastic celebrity, loudly welcomed everywhere in Vienna and in cities in Germany which had officially been forbidden to receive him.

Every kind of German patriotic body made a pilgrimage to the shrine at Friedrichsruh. The real Bismarck, the real history, no longer mattered. Bismarck became a public idol even in places like Munich where he had been hated. He had come to symbolize German greatness and pictures of the Iron Chancellor in his uniform and helmet hung in school rooms and parlours. His image had become and remained especially after the First World War a potent symbol of German greatness and articles and books appeared, as Robert Gerwarth shows in The Bismarck Myth103 with titles like ‘the Bismarck Legend’, ‘Bismarck’s Shadows’. His uniform and his aggressive facial expression in these souvenirs conveyed the image of blood and iron and contributed to the cult of German militarism and its deep-seated roots in German culture.

Reality, as always, looked very different. On 18 March 1893 Baroness Spitzemberg visited Friedrichsruh:

I found them entirely alone, the old couple, both now entirely white, she pathetically asthmatic. First they kept us company after lunch, and then we chatted and asked about each others’ friends and family. The death of Countess von Arnim before her decrepit husband, led Bismarck to remark, ‘I often think that our Creator and Lord does not do everything himself but lets the direction of certain areas pass to his ministers and civil servants, who then do dumb things. You see how imperfect we are and the Saviour is supposed to come to us. I cannot believe that. A police chief arrests a woman instead of a man. Those things happen.’104

Relations between the Kaiser and Bismarck began to thaw in 1894. On 21 January Herbert von Bismarck was invited for the first time for years to the annual Ordensfest (the Festival of the Royal Orders), to which he was entitled as former Reichstag deputy and the holder of the Hohenzollern Hausorden (Family Order) with star and chain but Baroness Spitzemberg noted in her diary that the Kaiser ‘cut him’ even after Eulenburg had placed Herbert in the front of him. ‘Count Cramer told me that the fat deputy Alexander Meyer said that the Kaiser had placed him ostentatiously in such a way that he could intentionally cut Herbert.’105 Prince Hohenlohe, who had almost every order imaginable was also there and reflected on it: ‘Hence great indignation among the Bismarckians. They declared that the Emperor had notified Herbert Bismarck that he would speak with him. This, however, cannot be true. For when the Emperor sends anyone a message like that, he does not cut him in so marked a manner.’106

A visit by the Chancellor to Berlin to see the Kaiser happened very shortly after the insult to Herbert. On 26 January 1894 Bismarck in his general’s uniform took the train to Berlin. Huge crowds waited at every station between Friedrichsruh and along the Hamburg line to Berlin and at the Lehrter Bahnof when the train arrived in Berlin. Prince Heinrich, the Kaiser’s younger brother, received him and escorted him to the palace where the Kaiser received him in a short private audience of which no record of any kind seems to have survived.107 Baroness Spitzemberg reported that the lunch party was very intimate and friendly: those present were the Kaiser and Kaiserin, Count Klinckstroem, twin brother of the commanding officer of the Halberstadt Cuirassiers of which Bismarck had been named Honorary Colonel, Prince Heinrich, the King of Saxony, Herbert, and Bill. ‘Everything went very cheerfully.’108 Hohenlohe noted that ‘the very numerous crowd that had gathered round greeted the carriage but there was no sign of any great enthusiasm … It is certain that this reconciliation has earned the Emperor great popularity through the whole of Germany. In the afternoon I left my card at the Bismarck house.’109 On 19 February 1894 William II returned the visit. Official relations had been restored between William II and Bismarck but there was never to be cordiality between them.

During 1894 another structure designed by Bismarck for his own purposes came unstuck and led to the dismissal of Caprivi. After Caprivi’s failure to get a school bill through both the Reichstag and the Landtag in 1892, the Kaiser decided with Caprivi’s agreement to divide the Reich Chancellor’s post from that of the Prussian Minister-Presidency, and appointed Botho Eulenburg (1831–1912), nephew of the former Interior Minister under Bismarck and a hard-line Bismarck protégé.110 This was exactly what Bismarck had tried in 1872. It had not worked twenty years before and could not work in the 1890s either, indeed, could work even less well. Caprivi and Eulenburg had diametrically opposite views. Worse still, the Prussian Constitution of 1850 with its House of Lords and three-class voting system assured the owners of the Junker estates a permanent veto on change in the federal state which contained three-fifths of the population and most of the heavy industry. Its electoral districts, in addition, took no account of the growth of cities, working-class districts, and population trends. Even in the late 1890s, rural districts still voted for their lords as they had done fifty years earlier. During 1894 the Kaiser demanded that his two chief executives pass legislation against subversive and revolutionary activities, the so-called Umsturz-Vorlage, the overthrow bill. Caprivi faced a Reichstag elected in 1893 which had shifted rightwards but not far enough. The Cartel Parties had gained 18 seats but still only had 153 seats, short of 199, the minimum for a majority, but the opposition of Centre Left Liberals and SPD only had 188, also short of a majority. The logic of the system demanded that Caprivi introduce a mild bill against subversion while Botho Eulenburg demanded a harsh one in the hope that the Reichstag could be forced either to accept it or to face the Staatsstreich, or coup d’état, that Bismarck had also wanted: abolition of universal suffrage. On 26 October 1894 both Eulenburg and Caprivi submitted their resignations.

In December 1894 Caprivi summed up the problem that the successor of Bismarck faced. Bismarck had done great damage and reduced the civil service ‘to servility … In my opinion, the successor—even if his capabilities had been greater—had to strive to give the Nation back its self-esteem; one must get along, indeed, with average—or, if you will, normal people.’111 This deep truth shows how much Germany lost when the unsteady Kaiser got bored with the sober, competent, and honourable soldier and dismissed him. Bismarck had left a system which only he—a very abnormal person—could govern and then only if he had as superior a normal Kaiser. Neither condition obtained, and the system slithered into the sycophancy, intrigue, and bluster that made the Kaiser’s Germany a danger to its neighbours.

The Kaiser decided to appoint Chlodwig Prince zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Prince of Ratibor and Corvey (1819–1901) as the new Reich Chancellor and summoned him to Potsdam by a telegram. He arrived on 27 October and after a day of long negotiations accepted the Emperor’s request to become Imperial Chancellor and, once again, Prussian Minister-President. Chlodwig Prince zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst belonged to one of the grandest and richest of German dynasties. He was born on 31 March 1819 and was thus only four years younger than Bismarck, a Catholic but not an ultramontane, a Prince but an experienced politician, a Bavarian but one who had supported unification as Bavarian Prime Minister in the late 1860s, and a friend of the Hohenzollern family. Bismarck knew him well, got on with him, and had appointed him Viceroy in Alsace-Lorraine. The Kaiser called him ‘Uncle Chlodwig’.112 Except for his age and his emollient temperament he had the perfect pedigree to fill the job. In January, 1895, Freiherr von Roggenbach wrote to Stosch that he was following Hohenlohe’s moves

with melancholy fellow feeling … He is cunning and smooth but he has the Privy Councillor [Holstein—JS] against him … How shall he, Bavarian and Catholic, make people fear him? He would have to have a monarch stand behind him, who knows what he wants and supports him vigorously. As it is his chancellor post is a slow death.113

On 27 November 1894 Johanna, Princess Bismarck died at Varzin. Baroness Spitzemberg reported that Bismarck’s first reaction to Johanna’s death was ‘were I still in office, I would work without rest, that would be the best way to help me get over this, but now …’114 Another, unexpected change occurred with the death of Johanna von Bismarck. Hildegard Spitzemberg lost her entrée to the Bismarck household.

Since the death of the Princess, I lack the personality through whom I can make my wishes and rights count. Marie is entirely alienated, the sons, even when the Bismarcks were still here, stood apart from me. If I were a man, I could settle somewhere in Friedrichsruh and enjoy everything that happens from A to Z.115

This change casts an interesting light on the relationship which Baroness Spitzemberg had cultivated for nearly forty years. Bismarck could have summoned her at any time, which in view of his emotional moments with her might have been expected, but he did not. Was it really Johanna who used Hildegard Spitzemberg to provide attractive and intelligent female company which she knew she could not provide? ‘Higachen’ served as a safe flirt and an intelligent listener, a Marie Thadden or Katarina Orlov with whom Bismarck never fell in love and with whom Johanna actually felt comfortable.

Bismarck carried on life on his own. He hosted an official visit by the new Reich Chancellor and Prussian Minister-President who travelled to Friedrichsruh to pay a condolence call on 13 January 1895. Prince Hohenlohe took his son Prince Alexander (1862–1924) with him, who proved to be as gifted a diarist as his father. It is his account which I cite:

Bismarck, large, massive, broad shouldered with a small head for his size but finely shaped, under bushy eyebrows his eyes—something that one often sees among heavy drinkers—teary but remarkably beautiful from which sudden bolts of lightning would flash. He covered his massive body with a one-piece black, long and remarkably old-fashioned tunic, more appropriate for a priest than a statesman. He wrapped a white neck cloth around his neck of the kind people used to wear in the 1830s or 1840s … While Bismarck spoke, his soft gentle voice struck me and those unforgettable eyes … On the way home I asked my father about that remarkable, gentle voice. He said to me with a laugh, ‘In those gentle tones he read the death sentence for many careers and twisted the neck of many a diplomat who had provoked his hate.’116

On 26 March 1895 the Kaiser himself visited Friedrichsruh to pay respects to Bismarck on his 80th birthday. The Kaiser arrived ‘on horseback with spiked helmet and glistening breastplate and led a small army of infantry, artillery, hussar cavalry and naturally the Halberstadt cuirassiers’.117

After the festivities Bismarck settled into old age and loneliness. As he wrote to Bill on 30 July 1895:

I continue to vegetate in peace here, put my clothes on and take them off and would have pleasure in driving through the good harvest in Schönhausen, if I did not come back in the evening punished with more acute Gesichtsreissen in spite of the good weather. According to medical opinion my pains come from too little, according to my opinion, from too much outdoor exposure. A similar dilemma confronted Merk with his palace dog (Hofhund); he wanted to beat him because he barked too much. I offered him the thought that the dog might take the view that he had been punished for not barking enough. My incapacity to judge the cause of my facial pains is as great as the dog’s about the reason for the beating.118

The old Chancellor had one more sensation to spring on his successors. On 24 October 1896 the Hamburger Nachrichten published the terms of the Reinsurance Treaty and reported that it was

Count Caprivi who rejected the continuation of this mutual assurance, where Russia was prepared to continue it. … So came Kronstadt with the Marseillaise and the first drawing together of the absolutist Tsardom and the French Republic, brought about, in our opinion, exclusively by the mistakes of the Caprivi policy.119

A curt official note a few days later denounced this revelation as a ‘violation of the most confidential secrets of state which constituted a blow to the serious interests of the Empire’.120

The revelation of the treaty naturally caused a huge sensation. On 27 October Eulenburg wrote a secret memorandum for Bernhard Bülow in which he argued that the revelation ‘certainly qualifies as betrayal of a state secret for which not less than two years in prison is the penalty. It has crashed like a bomb in the Foreign Ministry.’ Nobody, including the Chancellor, could imagine the motive that might have prompted it. Eulenburg believed that it had no purpose other than ‘to stir up dissatisfaction—in general increase the disquiet’.121

A few days later, Eulenburg wrote a long letter to Kaiser William II and made another attempt to explain the revelation. He rejected Holstein’s theory that Bismarck wanted to destroy the Austro-German-Italian Triple Alliance of 1882 and the Chancellor’s explanation that Bismarck simply wanted to stir up trouble: ‘I believe that the evil old man found the articles very irritating that appear from time to time that say (and rightly!) he had caused our bad relations with Russia. With him everything is explainedpersonally.’ He went on to describe how Alfred Marschall von Bieberstein, the Foreign Minister, had arranged a lunch to discuss the government’s response and

sat there with a long, pear-shaped face. First as the fruit was served, he cheered up. His own home-grown pears awakened him from his state prosecutorial reflections about the two year jail sentence that awaited the wicked old man in Sachsenhausen according to § so and so. And still, if the old Prince had gone to jail, he would have offered him a slice of his ‘Beurée Marschall’ or the ‘Marschall long-lasting pear’. C’est plus fort que lui. These pears are his joy, his sunshine. Everybody has his ‘pear’, so why should not he?122

The debate in the Reichstag and in the public concentrated on the treaty’s terms, but which treaty? All the Three Emperor’s League treaties were secret and the Reinsurance Treaty of 1887 most secret of all so commentators thought that Bismarck had revealed the terms of the 1884 agreement which—they reasonably assumed—had been set for six years and thus needed renewal when Caprivi came into office. Herbert complained to Kuno Rantzau, who was living with his father-in-law in Friedrichsruh on 16 November about the confusion. On 17 November Rantzau replied that apparently even Bismarck had begun to get the treaties muddled, perhaps, the first sign of failing powers:

He continues to think in spite of everything that the treaty of 1884 which was revealed had a six-year term. I have up to now been unable to convince him. Maybe you can get him to understand when you come.123

The shock abroad was no less great. Kaiser Franz Joseph in Vienna was ‘beside himself about the evil old man in Friedrichsruh’, and even Lord Rosebery, the former British Prime Minister, wrote a personal letter to Herbert on 25 November 1896 to ask for an explanation:

I wish, if it seems good to you, you would throw some light on the recent ‘revelations’ and their cause. But if you prefer to say nothing. I will understand. I don’t think I have ever asked you a question of this kind on paper in my life before.124

Manfred Hank in his remarkable study of these last years could not find an answer and has no reliable explanation.125 I suspect that a combination of Bismarck’s habitual ‘frankness’, his irresistible urge to show the world that he did everything better than his successors, and sheer malice combined to create the conditions for the revelation. He had always been beyond and above the laws that bound mortals. The only sign of a difference is that he muddled the 1884 and 1887 treaties; Bismarck in full command of his powers would never have done that.

In other respects, during 1896, Bismarck’s health began to decline and the disintegration of his household without the firm grip of Johanna did not help. Schweninger diagnosed gangrene of the foot, which he treated but Bismarck refused to accept the treatment. He was supposed to stand up and walk but no longer did so. During 1897 he was often reduced to a wheelchair and by 1898 he rarely went out to his woods and fields. In July 1898 he could only get about in a wheelchair and was in such pain and often feverish he had difficulty breathing. On 28 July Schweninger got him onto his feet and he sat at the table, talking and drinking champagne. Afterwards he smoked three pipefuls and read the newspapers, the old Bismarck once more but for the last time.

The Kaiser and the entourage were aboard the SMS Hohenzollern on the annual North Sea cruise on 29 July 1898 and were heading for Bergen in Norway, when, as Eulenburg recorded in his diary,

Today news arrived that Schweninger had left Friedrichsruh … That Schweninger would make every effort to arouse the impression in Germany that the Kaiser was indifferent to this deeply moving event is certainly to be expected and his departure from Friedrichsruh is an adroit chess move which he placed through the Tägliche Rundschau. It is probably safe to assume that he only left because the Prince is now beyond hope.126

The fact that Bismarck had improved on 28 July would not have been known to the Kaiser or the court on board but they immediately assumed that Schweninger’s move had a nefarious purpose—to undermine the Kaiser. Even the last forty-eight hours of Bismarck’s life were darkened by suspicion and recrimination.

Over the next two days his condition deteriorated and he had trouble breathing. Just short of midnight on 30 July, he died. Herbert was with him to the end. On 31 July Herbert wrote to his brother-in-law Ludwig von Plessen:

yesterday morning his breathing grew worse and at about 10.30 he spoke to me and stretched out his hand to me, which I held until he went to sleep … Toward 11 it was all over for us. I have lost the best and truest father and most splendid and noblest spirit in the world.127

Even after death the Bismarck’s family needed to revenge itself on its enemies and Moritz Busch had found a way to get at the Kaiser. On 31 July the Berliner Lokal- Anzeiger published an article by Moritz Busch which contained the complete text of Bismarck’s resignation letter. Eulenburg asked,

Who had fired this unhappy reminiscence into the public, a provocation in view of the fact that the dead Prince still lay on his death bed? Without having asked Herbert, Rantzau and the family, Busch would never have reopened this feud.128

The Kaiser had ordered the ‘Hohenzollern’ to return to Kiel as quickly as possible. On the journey home, William II planned a magnificent funeral in the Cathedral of Berlin and burial of ‘Germany’s greatest son … by the side of my ancestors’.129 But when the royal party reached Friedrichsruh, they learned that Bismarck’s final wishes had been set out: no postmortem, no death mask, no drawings, no photographs, and a burial place on the grounds. There were to be no flamboyant gestures from Kaiser William II and no ceremony in Berlin. He had chosen as his epitaph ‘A loyal German servant of William I.’130 A brief memorial ceremony on 2 August then took place. Hildegard Spitzemberg read about the simple ceremony at the house in the Sachsenwald and saw at once what it meant: ‘I can well understand it. Blood is blood and the Bismarcks are defiant, violent men, unrestrained by education and culture and not noble in temperament.’131 Phili Eulenburg recorded how painful the occasion was:

Next to me stood Herbert, to whom I was the truest of friends, when he had to choose between Elizabeth Hatzfeldt and his father. There he stood, cold and still at war for his father … Never has the poison of politics been brought so crudely to my sight, as now in this house …132

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