Berlin

Kaiser Wilhelm had a different vision. Having as crown prince fallen under the influence of the populist court preacher Adolf Stocker, Wilhelm fancied himself a man of the people who could win over the workers through additional social reforms. And he certainly could not countenance the prospect of a civil war. “It would be lamentable if I were to color the beginning of my government with the blood of my subjects,” he told his ministers. Thus he insisted that the Anti-Socialist Law be allowed to lapse and he rejected Bismarck’s call for a dissolution of the Reichstag.

Beyond such matters of policy, Wilhelm and Bismarck also fell out over the fundamental question of who was going to run Germany. Bismarck was used to getting his own way without “interference” from the monarch, but this was a monarch who wanted to rule as well as to reign. Each man resented the other’s efforts to make policy independently. Bismarck became extremely vindictive toward the new sovereign, telling all who would listen that Wilhelm was not up to the job of ruling Germany. Berlin, it seemed, was not big enough for both these egocentric personalities.

In the increasingly bitter standoff it was Bismarck who eventually had to go because the system that he had created ordained it: the emperor hired and fired chancellors, even Iron Chancellors. After a series of confrontations in spring 1890, Bismarck offered his resignation (as he had often done in the past), and this time the kaiser accepted it. “My dear prince!” Wilhelm wrote, “It is with the deepest emotion that I see from your request of March 18 that you have decided to resign from the position you have occupied for so many years with incomparable success.” As consolation for sacking him, Wilhelm promoted Bismarck to colonel-general of the cavalry, made him Duke of Lauenburg, and gave him a life-sized portrait of the young monarch.

As Bismarck left Berlin to begin his rural retirement, the local citizenry displayed an outpouring of warm sentiment for the old man. People crowded shoulder to shoulder along the route his carriage took from the Chancellery to the Lehrter railway station. Baroness von Spitzemberg recorded in her diary:

Like a flood the crowd surged toward the carriage, surrounding, accompanying, stopping it momentarily, hats and handkerchiefs waving, calling, crying, throwing flowers. In the open carriage, drawn by the familiar chestnut-colored horses, sat Bismarck, deadly pale, in his cuirassier uniform and cap, [son] Herbert at his side, before them a large black mastiff [popularly dubbed the Reichshund]—all three covered with flowers, to which more were constantly being added.

There may have been an element of ambiguity in the cheering, however: after all, the people were cheering a man who was leaving

. The Berliners’ enthusiasm was undoubtedly fueled partly by relief, for it was well known that the old chancellor and the new kaiser could not work effectively together and that Bismarck’s standoff with the Reichstag threatened to precipitate a dangerous crisis of state.

It did not take long, however, for the German people, Berliners included, to begin deifying their former chancellor. Once he was safely in retirement, he became a symbol for the inner unity that Germany still so sorely lacked. In the end, as one of his biographers has noted, the Iron Chancellor filled Germans’ “need for a romantically conceived national hero, a liberating myth on the order of Siegfried, Frederick Barbarossa, and Frederick the Great capable of elevating them from the mundane routine of daily life and resolving insecurities born of a fast-changing economy and society.” To honor the great man, cities and towns throughout Germany named streets or squares after him and staged fawning celebrations on his birthday.

Berlin was quick to join in the Bismarck cult. When the former chancellor passed through the capital on a triumphant “great German tour” in 1892, people once again turned out in their thousands to cheer. The celebrants seemed willing to forget how he had castigated the city and worked to emasculate its citizenry. Yet not all were so forgiving. Many workers stayed away from the 1892 celebrations, and the progressive liberals in the city assembly voted to boycott the municipality’s birthday greeting. In 1894, the Reichstag voted down a proposal to send birthday salutations to the former chancellor.

Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church), circa 1930

Despite their reverence for Bismarck, most Berliners seem to have taken his death in 1898 in stride. According to the drama critic Alfred Kerr, the city hardly paid attention to the great man’s passing. People danced “like crazy” and the beer gardens were packed. Kerr attributed this behavior not to a lack of respect for authority but to the people’s healthy sense of priorities; after a long day’s work they wanted to relax, not to mourn.