Berlin

Despite the new emperor’s unseemly behavior, most Berliners were excited to have a young, healthy, and energetic monarch on the throne. Wilhelm II seemed cut to order for the city he would rule for the next thirty years. He was restless, dynamic, and openly ambitious. He admired wealth and conspicuous consumption. A study in contradictions, he was at once a stickler for tradition and a crusader for innovation, especially in science and technology. And finally, just like his capital, he was afflicted by an inner self-doubt that he tried to disguise through displays of bombast and strutting pomposity.

Wilhelm’s troubled character derived in part from a physical deformity he had incurred at birth. A breach baby, he had been pulled from Vicky’s womb with such force that his left arm was wrenched from its socket, severing some ligaments. Ever after, his withered and misshapen limb dangled uselessly at his side. His parents’ desperate attempts to correct the malady only made matters worse. Doctors wrapped his arm in the carcasses of freshly slaughtered rabbits, administered electric shock treatments, and made him wear a kind of straitjacket designed to prevent him from turning his head to the left. Most wounding of all, his mother proved incapable of hiding her disappointment in a child who was not perfect in every way. The boy reacted to the lack of maternal affection by searching for affirmation in a much different world: the military garrisons of nearby Potsdam. As an adolescent he spent as much time as he could among soldiers of the imperial guard, an inclination heartily endorsed by his grandfather, whom young Wilhelm had come to worship as a replacement for his parents.

What Berliners did not know when their new emperor took the throne was that he had already developed a certain distaste for the national capital. Early on he had come to associate the city with the dominion of his parents and the political ideas they represented. For his taste, Berlin harbored far too much irreverence toward royal authority, far too much “spirit of rebellion.” Despite the conspicuous presence of the military in its streets, Berlin was also, in Wilhelm’s eyes, too civilian, and too feminine. In 1878 he wrote to a friend, in his idiosyncratic English: “I never feel happy, really happy, at Berlin. Only Potsdam that is my ‘el dorado’ . . . where one feels with the beautiful nature around you and such kind nice young men in it.”

Wilhelm symbolically registered his disdain for Berlin as soon as he became emperor. In honor of his coronation the city government commissioned a fountain depicting Neptune (the kaiser was known to love the ocean) surrounded by adoring sea goddesses and allegorical representations of the rivers of Europe. When Mayor Max von Forckenbeck and a delegation of notables called upon Wilhelm to present their gift, the emperor refused to shake the mayor’s hand or to greet the delegates. These men, after all, were mere civilians, and liberal

civilians at that. The kaiser’s rebuff quickly became the talk of the town; for years afterward Berliners responded to acts of ingratitude with the phrase: “But I didn’t offer you a fountain!”

Wilhelm may not have been able to abide the leading politicians of Berlin, but he much admired the father of modern Germany, Count von Bismarck, whom he had been careful to cultivate when he was crown prince. Yet soon after taking power the new kaiser began to fall out with the Iron Chancellor. A divergence of perspectives on social policy was one of the factors in their split. By the late 1880s, Bismarck had concluded that his efforts to reconcile Germany’s working classes to the authoritarian state through a mixture of “Butterbrot und Peitsche” (buttered bread and the whip) had failed. Miners in the nation’s coalfields were waging devastating strikes for higher wages; the SPD was growing apace and making effective alliances with other opposition parties in the Reichstag. Berlin itself, with its huge working-class population and obstreperous Reichstag delegation, seemed to him like a growing cancer, likely to infect and destroy the political system he had created. In 1890 he decided that the only way to deal with the fractious workers was to throw away the buttered bread and lay on the whip. More specifically, he proposed extending the Anti-Socialist Law indefinitely and, if labor protested, bringing in troops to discipline them. Since the Reichstag was proving increasingly difficult to manage, balking at his efforts to destroy the Socialists, he decided that this body should be abolished and replaced by a chamber beholden to the large landowners and industrialists. He planned, in other words, a kind of state coup against the existing political system, and he was willing to risk a civil war to carry it out.