The Three Emperors Read online

  An empire seemed to offer many attractions: wealth, trade and, perhaps more importantly, status. Increasingly it seemed incomprehensible to many educated Germans that a country as dynamic and powerful as their own should have only a few colonies. Moreover, there were many like Philipp zu Eulenburg, who believed that imperial expansion might be a good way of displacing domestic discontent among the masses, getting them to identify with the state in an exciting imperial project abroad. Having lost his enthusiasm for social reform, Wilhelm seemed to regard this as a particularly attractive proposition. The German political Right—a group the government felt increasingly keen to please—moreover, had within it a well-organized and assertive colonial lobby. The problem was that the Germans were late to the imperial scramble. Wherever they went, they found Britain there first. The British opposed every German incursion. This looked particularly ungenerous to the Germans since the British empire was now heading in size for one-quarter of the world’s49 landmass. What were a few thousand African square miles or a small archipelago in the Pacific to it? There was angry criticism of Britain in the German press and from the German government’s traditional supporters in the National Liberal Party, where colonial enthusiasm was strongest. Fritz Holstein, a senior adviser in the German Foreign Office, who had enthusiastically advocated the German pursuit of England, commented resentfully, “We assist England50 every day—even by sitting still—simply by being there. England assists us damned little up to now … it is always non possumus.”

  Fritz Holstein was the most influential political operator in the German Foreign Office, despite the fact that in his whole time there—he would retire in 1906—it was said he met Wilhelm only once. Whether or not this was literally true, it was certainly the case that he had an instinctive dislike of the limelight, and was already wryly unimpressed by Wilhelm, deliberately keeping out of the kaiser’s way, and relying on others, notably Philipp zu Eulenburg, to sell his policies. This skulking in the shadows, combined with a lack of interest in the diplomatic social whirl, and his unkemptness—in Berlin he was famous for his shabby hat, threadbare coat, shaggy beard and bent, short-sighted, purposeful gait—helped to fuel a myth of sinister and aggressive ubiquity, secrecy and conspiracy. In reality, Holstein was an able, acerbic, workaholic bureaucrat, committed to his work in the Foreign Office, with a dry sense of humour and an omnivorous appetite for gossip and foreign affairs, fuelled by an obsessive letter-writing habit. Little else occupied him—except perhaps the schnitzel with a fried egg on top to which he gave his name. He also had, however, a dangerous weakness for taking offence too quickly and political setbacks too personally. And with Eulenburg he had become involved in backroom manipulations to, as they regarded it, keep the kaiser on track, and to maintain some consistency in German policy. The alliance, such as it was, was a marriage of convenience. Holstein knew Eulenburg had the emperor’s ear; Eulenburg disliked the pro-British policy. While Holstein was beginning to think that Wilhelm needed to be reined in, Eulenburg persisted in believing the opposite—but he valued Holstein’s grasp of politics and foreign affairs and his influence, so tailored his words to him accordingly.

  Holstein still wanted an alliance, but he concluded that Britain needed to be taught a lesson about German support and that Germany should be more robust in pursuing its own interests. So in early 1893 the German Foreign Office told the British government that it must step aside to give Germany a railway concession the two countries had been competing for in Turkey. If it failed to, Germany would withdraw its—vital—support for the British occupation of Egypt. The British were startled by the brusqueness of the demand, but acquiesced. At that precise moment they found themselves in need of German support—more than they had done in decades. The expanding borders of the empire had finally brought them into conflict with every other imperial power at the same moment: the Americans in Venezuela, the French in Africa, the Russians in Asia. The new Liberal foreign secretary, Lord Rosebery, began to wonder whether Britain might need a genuine ally.

  In July 1893, when the kaiser came to Cowes, Rosebery went out of his way to demonstrate that Britain was interested in getting much closer to Germany. On the kaiser’s first evening on the Isle of Wight, an overnight crisis arose between Britain and France over a long-running rivalry for dominance in the kingdom of Siam. For a few hours war seemed possible. Rosebery telegraphed the queen, requesting that the kaiser be informed and sounded out about whether he would be willing to support Britain if war broke out. Wilhelm was at that moment dressed in his British admiral’s uniform, giving a dinner for Edward and his younger brother, Arthur of Connaught, on his yacht. He “expressed satisfaction”51 at the turn of events, announced himself delighted to help, and spent the rest of the evening aggressively teasing his uncle Bertie that he might soon see active service in India—a sore point as the prince had always felt embarrassed by his mother’s refusal to let him serve in the British army.

  After the guests left, however, Wilhelm’s blustery confidence collapsed. Alone—apart from a few of his entourage and Eulenburg—he became panicky and tearful, talking himself into a state about Germany’s (or perhaps his own) inability to prosecute a war. If there was a war, he said, Germany would have to be part of it in order to show its status as a world power; but what if Russia came in with France? The Royal Navy couldn’t beat the combined navies of France and Russia, and Germany would lose a war on two fronts. “If one is not a world power, one is nothing,” he said. “I really have never seen him so overcome,” Eulenburg wrote, “and I had to bring the whole force of my mind to bear upon finding reasonable arguments which would soothe him.”52 Under Wilhelm’s hearty Prussian warlord lurked a deeply vulnerable, fearful man, whose fragility was another reason why his entourage and coterie were so unwilling to trouble him with awkward news. The Jewish industrialist and intellectual Walter Rathenau, who met the kaiser perhaps once a year, remarked how visible the contrast was up close between the man Wilhelm wanted to be and the man he was—with his little white hands, his soft hair, his small white teeth. Rathenau found himself rather moved by a man “continuously fighting53 with himself, overcoming his nature in order to wrest from his bearing energy, mastery … a nature directed against itself, unsuspecting.” Wilhelm’s fragility lay at the heart of his friendship with Eulenburg, perhaps his only real friend.

  In many respects Eulenburg was the anxious, indulgent, uncritical parent the kaiser had never had. He was also a hypochondriac, volubly emotional and “artistic,” and around him Wilhelm was able to be both masterful and in charge, but also to shrug off the exhausting hyper-macho persona he felt obliged to adopt so much of the time. Because of this, Eulenburg was one of the few people to whom Wilhelm would listen; he in turn had set himself to smooth over the many problems the emperor encountered. Inevitably, he had become enmeshed in the incessant intriguing endemic in the German government, his extreme monarchism causing him to encourage Wilhelm to ignore or dismiss ministers, and his influence gaining other members of the so-called Liebenberg Circle influential posts which made them deeply unpopular. But he was also a pragmatist and virtually the only person who could moderate Wilhelm’s more extreme and unreasonable behaviour.

  By the next morning the crisis had blown over. Britain and France reached agreement, Wilhelm recovered his sang-froid and went out yachting, leaving Eulenburg with “the fat unwieldy”54 Edward, whom he watched disgustedly, “breakfasting steadily from ten till four.” Like most of Wilhelm’s entourage, the majority of them Prussian soldiers with an instinctive suspicion of the British, Eulenburg had no great liking for England (he complained that the beer tasted like “rubber Mackintoshes”55) and he dreaded its effect on the kaiser. He was highly suspicious of Edward, whom he regarded as “a capable, amiable, but very crafty man, with a remarkably sinister look in his eye—not our friend.” Bertie, he later wrote, passed amused, hostile comments about Wilhelm, professing confusion at his “colonial game,” and concern at his one-armed nephew’s inter
est in boats: “one can’t help being a little afraid he may do himself some damage.”56

  Two days later there was a major family falling-out when Wilhelm refused to cut short a race between his yacht Meteor and Bertie’s Britannia, when it became clear that the race wouldn’t finish in time for a gala dinner which the queen had organized in his honour. Bertie, clearly irritated, felt he couldn’t refuse Wilhelm though he was fully aware of how angry the queen would be. “Much startled and57 put out at hearing only after 8 that William and Bertie could not be here for dinner,” she wrote irritatedly in her journal. “Georgie [who had just returned from his honeymoon] was in a great state and everything had to be rearranged. It was extremely vexatious.” Perhaps Edward secretly wanted to finish the race—he beat the kaiser, who had spent a fortune trying to get himself a yacht faster than his uncle’s. The two men didn’t arrive at Osborne until 10:30 p.m., just as the queen was sweeping furiously out of the dining room. One—not always entirely reliable—German onlooker described the scene: as Wilhelm apologized,58 Bertie stepped behind a pillar for a moment to compose himself and mop his brow, then came out to apologize to his hatchet-faced mother, retiring immediately afterwards behind his pillar.

  The trip was generally agreed to have been a great success.

  Over the autumn and winter of 1893 Lord Rosebery made ever-warmer overtures to Germany. In the New Year of 1894 he made it clear that he was willing to enter into real negotiations with the Triple Alliance. Wilhelm congratulated himself on Rosebery’s “new about-turn,”59 claiming that it stemmed “from my initiative”—he had, he claimed, sent the British foreign secretary a blunt message stating that only “complete honesty” would do.

  But instead of meeting Britain halfway, the German government rejected the offer, even though it was exactly what they had been working for since 1890. Their frostiness was, as one historian has written, “almost incomprehensible.”60 It seems the Germans got themselves tied up in knots, caught between suspicion that the British were planning to ensnare them in some trick they hadn’t anticipated, and a belief that if the British needed them it was a good time to extract concessions. They took an aggressive line on a number of simmering colonial disputes. In April 1894, as Wilhelm and Queen Victoria celebrated Nicky and Alix’s engagement in Coburg, the German Foreign Office demanded sole possession of the Samoan islands, over which the countries had been arguing since 1889. The British, highly irritated, baulked. The German ambassador, Hatzfeldt, was urged by his masters to break the stalemate. Hatzfeldt was a conscientious servant of the state who had long seen his role as trying to coax Britain into the Triple Alliance. At the same time he had noticed that since 1890 his government had become more and more obsessed with the desire for colonies. He wrote a long memo to the chancellor in which he observed that if Germany applied pressure on Britain’s colonial empire it might both “demonstrate the disadvantages61 of our hostility” and force the British to be more amenable over the question of Samoa. The irony was, Hatzfeldt himself didn’t believe in pressure politics, he regarded them as counterproductive. He told a colleague wistfully that if the Germans could only be patient, “turtle doves62 would fly into their mouths, but their vacillations meant they defeated themselves all the time.”

  The kaiser was extremely enthusiastic about the new idea. “Splendid, corresponds63 entirely with my views and our policy is to be conducted as recommended here.” He would tell one of his English cousins a few years later, “We must have64 an alliance with England and if she won’t agree we shall have to frighten her into it.” Hatzfeldt’s plan was almost eerily similar to his own semi-bullying attempts to force his English relatives to give him attention. Even though the relationship was supposed to be thriving, Wilhelm had pointedly failed to attend a memorial service for Eddy in Berlin, and had refused to let his brother Heinrich go to England for the funeral. When the queen had told him he wouldn’t be invited to George’s wedding, he had refused to let Heinrich, who was invited, go. Edward suspected ill feeling. He asked the queen to demand an explanation, whereupon Wilhelm pretended that he had always meant to let his brother attend. The kaiser suspected, and it pained him, that the British preferred Heinrich to him. He wasn’t entirely wrong. Heinrich was much more easygoing and friendly than he. Since marrying Irene of Hesse, one of Alix’s older sisters, he had become an enthusiastic and frequent visitor to England. He’d got to know George, to whom he sent occasional inconsequential letters notable for their kindly warmth, very different from Wilhelm’s own productions: his mother, he passed on to George in one letter, had praised George so highly that he was almost jealous. “Never you mind,65 Georgie,” he added. “I think you are fully entitled to a good name and character!”

  The policy was soon put into action. In the spring of 1894 the British were trying to negotiate agreements with various imperial parties over the Congo, as part of a long-running rivalry with France in North Africa. The German government refused to come to an agreement. The refusal backfired because the British negotiated a treaty with the more obliging Belgians. The German Foreign Office, working itself up into a great rage, denounced the treaty as “shameless,”66 because it ignored German claims in the area. Then, when the British offered to amend the treaty, the Germans insisted it be abandoned.

  Wilhelm was in an awkward position. In Germany he professed himself furious at the Congo Treaty and British trickery. Almost simultaneously, however, the queen had just made him colonel-in-chief of the 1st Royal Dragoons. It was quite a gesture: the first time a foreign monarch had appeared on the British army list. Wilhelm had been begging for a rank in the British army—preferably with a Scottish regiment; he liked the kilts—for months, and had cunningly got Edward campaigning on his behalf by offering him in return an honorary title à la suite in the queen’s German regiment. Victoria disapproved: “This fishing67 for uniforms on both sides is regrettable,” and besides, “The Queen thinks he is far too much spoilt already.” What if he started to interfere with army policy? Rosebery had initially agreed with her. He was beginning to find the Germans’ abrupt tone “thoroughly insufferable,”68 and he thought the title would seem like an endorsement of their rudeness. Lord Salisbury, from whom Rosebery occasionally took advice, pointed out, however, that it was a cheap way to keep the kaiser sweet. The queen gave way and Wilhelm was characteristically fulsome: “overwhelmed,”69 and “moved, deeply moved, at the idea that I now too can wear beside the Naval uniform the traditional British ‘redcoat.’” He told the British70 ambassador that he utterly deplored the German Foreign Office’s regrettable attitude in the Congo and implied that he had nothing to do with it. At Cowes that summer he was all smiles, wearing his new Royal Dragoons uniform, as he “graciously acknowledged71 the hearty cheers.” What a shame it was that the usually impeccably organized British somehow forgot to remind his new regiment to send a detachment to greet him.

  Germany’s threats so alarmed its Austrian and Italian allies, who felt their security depended on the Royal Navy’s commitment to defend the eastern Mediterranean from Russia, that they quietly insisted the German government accept the amended Congo Treaty. The damage was done though, and to no one’s advantage. And over the autumn and winter of 1894 there were more imperial clashes between the two nations in Morocco, the Sudan, the Transvaal and, once again, Samoa, where by the end of the year the two countries so distrusted each other that they had stationed warships there despite the onset of the hurricane season. The Prince of Wales’s success in St. Petersburg occasioned angry complaints72 in the German press and even the usually phlegmatic ambassador Hatzfeldt complained that after years of being rebuffed by England, his government viewed Britain’s cosying up to Russia with extreme disappointment. The next time England73 wanted anything from Germany, it would have to pay a very high price for it.

  The plan to bully the British into closer friendship often looked indistinguishable from plain hostility. “The abrupt74 and rough peremptoriness of the German action,” wrote one Bri
tish junior foreign official, “… gave me an unpleasant impression … the method adopted by Germany in this instance was not that of a friend.” Thirteen years later this man, Sir Edward Grey, would be foreign secretary himself, one with a deep-rooted mistrust of German power politics. As for Rosebery, the one British statesman who might have considered an alliance, he was an enthusiastic imperialist, very sensitive to accusations that the Liberal Party was not as committed to the empire and its defence as the Conservatives. The harder the Germans pushed on colonial issues, the more obstructive he became. By the end of 1894 he had concluded that an alliance was impossible. What the British Foreign Office couldn’t make out was why the Germans were being so gratuitously aggressive. “It is difficult75 to understand what advantage they expect to gain by such a policy,” the new foreign secretary, Lord Kimberley (Rosebery having become prime minister), wrote. “… I can’t pretend to read the riddle.”

  The fact was, the German government wasn’t quite sure what its goals were either; or at least different people had different ideas. Marschall, the foreign minister, had become convinced that Samoa was the key issue and that Germany must take control of it by any means in order to demonstrate to a critical domestic audience that the government’s foreign policy was effective. Holstein, angry with the British uncooperative attitude, continued to be committed to bullying England into an alliance. “England would only be76 a reliable ally for us,” he told a friend in 1896, “… if we left her in no doubt that we would simply abandon her to her fate unless she concluded a formal alliance with us.” Eulenburg, who represented the feelings of many of the Prussian elite, had always felt Germany’s pursuit of Britain was a mistake. “I cannot deny77 that this new turn against Albion warms my heart. The centre of our future lies in world trade, and our deadly enemy in this field is England.” As for Wilhelm, he contained all the contradictions: he wanted an alliance, he wanted to trounce Britain, he wanted an empire, he wanted to be popular at home.