Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (101 page)

Yet the Jews were surely right to view with alarm the state’s reluctance to enforce more energetically the letter of the constitution. It was one thing for the traditional Protestant agrarian oligarchies to cling to their accustomed share of government patronage (which of course they did); it was another somewhat more ominous thing for the state authorities to invoke the ‘mood of the population’ as grounds for departing from
constitutional practice or the principle of equitable administration. In doing so, they allowed the anti-Semites to set the terms of the debate. There was an irony here, because whereas the Jews were among the foremost friends of the state, the anti-Semites were without question among its most implacable enemies. For them, the very word ‘state’ possessed connotations of artificiality and machine-like impersonality, in contrast to the organic, natural attributes associated with the
Volk
. The only acceptable form of state organization was that which demoted the apparatus of the state to an instrument for the self-empowerment of the
Volk
– an ethnic, not a political, entity.
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Herein lies the parallel with Polish policy. Poles and Jews were fundamentally different social groups in almost every conceivable way, but they both presented the conservative elites that ran Prussia with policy domains in which the political logic of the modern state, conceived as a zone of undifferentiated legal authority, conflicted with the ethnic logic of the nation. In both cases, it was the idea of the (Prussian) state that gave way and the ideology of the (German) nation that prevailed.

The creation of the German Empire confronted the Hohenzollern dynasty with a complex task of adjustment. The King of Prussia was now also the German Kaiser. What exactly this would mean in practice remained unclear during the early years after unification. The new German constitution had little to say about the role of the Kaiser. The liberal nationalist Frankfurt constitution of 1848 had included a section entitled ‘The head of the Reich’, which dealt exclusively with the imperial office. There was no such section in the German constitution of 1871. The powers of the Emperor were set out in section IV under the modest rubric ‘the presidency of the Federal Council’. These and other passages in the document made it clear that the Kaiser was no more than one German prince among others, a
primus inter pares
, whose powers derived from his special place within the federal body rather than from any claim to direct dominion over the territory of the Reich. It followed that his official designation was not ‘Emperor of Germany’, as Kaiser
William I would personally have preferred, but ‘German Emperor’. There were distant echoes here of the limited sovereignty implied in the eighteenth-century title ‘King
in
Prussia’; then as now, allowance had to be made for the other sovereigns whose sphere of authority overlapped with that of the new office.

In the relationship between chancellor and Emperor-king, it was generally Bismarck who had the upper hand. William I did assert himself on occasions, and he was no ‘shadow figure’, but he could generally be pressed, bullied, blackmailed or cajoled into agreement with Bismarck on matters of importance. William I had not wanted the war against Austria and he disapproved of the chancellor’s political campaign against the Catholics. When there were disagreements, Bismarck could unleash the full force of his personality, hammering his arguments home with tears, rages and threats of resignation. It was these scenes, which the Kaiser found almost intolerable, that moved him to make the famous observation: ‘It is hard being Emperor under Bismarck.’ There was no false modesty in the Emperor’s observation, on another occasion, that ‘he is more important than I.’
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The effect of Bismarck’s dominance, both as a political manager and as a national figurehead, was to retard the expansion of the Prussian throne into its imperial role. William I was a hugely respectable and widely revered man, a figure with the gravitas and whiskers of a biblical patriarch. But he was in his seventies when the Reich was proclaimed and essentially remained a Prussian king until his death at the age of ninety in 1888. He rarely spoke in public and seldom journeyed outside the territory of his kingdom. He retained the thrifty habits of an East-Elbian Junker: he resisted the installation of hot-water baths in the Berlin palace on the grounds of cost, for example, preferring to bathe once a week in a watertight leather bag slung from a frame that had to be carted over from a nearby hotel. He marked the labels on liquor bottles to prevent tippling on the sly by the servants at court. Old uniforms were made to do long service. After signing state papers, William would wipe the wet nib of his pen on the dark blue sleeve of his jacket. He made a point of eschewing carriages with rubber tyres on the grounds that they were an unnecessary luxury. There was an element of self-conscious performance in all of this – the king aspired to be the personification of Prussian simplicity, self-discipline and thrift. Every day he would appear punctually at the corner window of his study to oversee
the changing of the guard – this reinvention of an old Prussian tradition became one of the great tourist attractions of Berlin.
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William I’s son and successor, Frederick III, was a charismatic man with strong ties to the German liberal movement. He was also respected for the important command role he had played in the wars of unification. Given the chance, he might well have become a genuinely national-imperial monarch. But by the time Frederick came to the throne in March 1888, he was already dying of throat cancer and had only three months to live. He remained bedridden for much of his reign, reduced by his condition to communicating in scribbled notes with his family and staff.

In 1888, then, when William II came to the throne, the office of emperor was like a house in which most of the rooms had never been occupied. His arrival inaugurated a style revolution in the management of the German imperial monarchy. From the very beginning, William II saw himself as a public figure. He was fastidiously attentive to his outward appearance, rapidly alternating uniforms and outfits to match specific occasions, training his famous moustaches to trembling stiffness with a special patented wax and affecting a grave official countenance during public ceremonies. The obsession with outward presentation extended to close management of the Empress, the former Princess Auguste-Viktoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg. William not only provided designs for her clothes, her distinctive jewels and extravagant hats, but also pressured her to maintain her hourglass waist by means of dieting, drugs and corsetry.
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He was the first German monarch to live and work in close proximity – one might even say symbiosis – with photographers and cameramen. They filmed him during public appearances and on family occasions, they filmed him on manoeuvres and riding to the hunt; they even followed him on to the royal yacht. Contemporary films of this Kaiser, of which there are many, show him always surrounded by the winding cranks of the movie cameras.

William II was, in other words, a media monarch, perhaps the first European monarch truly to deserve this epithet. More than any of his predecessors or, indeed, than any of his contemporary colleagues, he courted the attention of the public. The aim was not simply to draw attention to himself, though there is no doubt that this Emperor was a deeply narcissistic individual, but to fulfil the national and imperial
promise of his office. He promoted the German navy, the genuinely national alternative to the Prussian-dominated army, lending his support to fund-raising campaigns and presiding at the massive naval reviews that were held annually at Kiel. He attempted, with mixed results, to establish a national cult around the figure of his grandfather William the Great, the founder of the Empire. He travelled across the Empire, opening hospitals, christening ships, visiting factories and observing parades. And, most of all, he gave speeches.

51. Dressed in the relatively austere uniform of the II Guards Regiment, Kaiser William II walks with his family in the grounds of Sans Souci. Painting by Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Pape, 1891.

No Hohenzollern monarch had ever spoken as often and as directly to so many large gatherings of his subjects as William II. He treated the Germans to a virtually uninterrupted flow of public utterances. During the six-year period from January 1897 until December 1902, for example, he made at least 233 visits to at least 123 German towns and cities, in most of which he gave addresses that were subsequently published and discussed in the regional and national press. William’s speeches, at least until 1908, were not set-pieces prepared for him by professional writers. The men of the civil cabinet busied themselves researching and writing up texts for specific places and occasions, sometimes pasting a final printed version to a wooden reading-board that was passed to the Emperor when the moment arrived, but their work
was largely in vain – William preferred to speak without assistance. By contrast with his father, who as crown prince had always written out his texts beforehand and then ‘changed them over and over again’, William only rarely prepared his speeches in advance.
⁶⁴
They were consciously performed as impromptu, unmediated acts of communication.

The Kaiser’s most flamboyant performances were like nineteenth-century history paintings – charged with heavy-handed symbolic imagery, in which tempests alternated with shafts of redeeming light where all about was dark, and sublime figures (often members of his own dynasty) floated above the petty conflicts of the day. The aim was to ‘charismatize’ the monarchy and invoke the kind of transcendent, sovereign vantage point from which an emperor should reign over his people. A central theme was the historical continuity of the Hohenzollern dynasty and its Prusso-German mission.
⁶⁵
There was an emphasis on the imperial monarchy as the ultimate guarantor of the unity of the Empire, the point at which ‘historical, confessional and economic oppositions may be reconciled’.
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Lastly, the providential dimension of monarchy was a leitmotif that ran through all the speeches of his reign. God had established him in this exalted office in order to fulfil God’s plan for the German nation. During a very characteristic address delivered in the Rathaus at Memel in September 1907, he urged his audience to remember that ‘the hand of divine providence’ was at work in the great historical achievements of the German people: ‘and if our Lord God did not have in store for us some great destiny in the world, then he wouldn’t have bestowed such magnificent traits and abilities upon our people.’
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The public resonance of William’s speeches was mixed. One central difficulty was that the people who heard his words and those who read them were not the same people. Live audiences were easily impressed. But words that seemed appropriate, or even rousing, before a rustical assembly of Junkers in Brandenburg might appear less so when they appeared in the broadsheets of Munich and Stuttgart. Early in 1891, William told a gathering of Rhenish industrialists in Düsseldorf that ‘the Reich has but one leader and I am he.’ The remark was intended as a stab at Bismarck, who had begun after his retirement to snipe at the Kaiser in the press and was known to be popular among Rhenish industrial circles, but it also caused unintended offence to those in non-Prussian Germany who saw it as a slight to the federal princes. After all, they too were ‘rulers in the Reich’.
⁶⁸

The fact was that William II’s public office was an awkward composite of distinct identities. When he spoke each year to the annual dinner of the Brandenburg Diet, an occasion he was especially fond of, he was in the habit of styling himself ‘Margrave’ in order to invoke the unique historical ties between his dynasty and its home province.
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It was a harmless if somewhat self-dramatizing gesture that went down well with the conservative backwoodsmen of the Brandenburg Diet, but it was deeply unpalatable fare to the south Germans who pored over the published texts of such speeches in the daily press on the following day. The Emperor’s close friend and adviser Philipp zu Eulenburg, who was posted as the Prussian envoy in Munich, explained the problem in a letter of March 1892:

The great eloquence and the manner and style of Your Majesty exert a captivating influence upon listeners and audience – as the mood among the Brandenburgers after Your Majesty’s speech has once again proven. But in the hands of the German professor, a cool assessment of the content gives a different picture… Here in Bavaria, people are ‘
beside themselves
’ when Your Majesty speaks as ‘Margrave’, and ‘the Margrave’s Words’ are printed in the
Reichs
anzeiger [
Imperial
Gazette] – as words, so to speak, of the
emperor
. In the Imperial Gazette, members of the empire expect to hear
imperial words
– they don’t care for Frederick the Great (who referred to Bavaria, as they know only too well, as ‘a paradise inhabited by animals’ and so forth); and they don’t care for Rossbach and Leuten.’
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