Berlin

Although Berlin increasingly took homosexuality in stride as another dimension of life in the modern megalopolis, the city could still be scandalized when gay behavior intersected with high politics. This happened with a vengeance in 1907/8 when a group of friends of Kaiser Wilhelm II, known as the Liebenberger Circle, were exposed as homosexuals by the muckraking journalist Maximilian Harden. At the center of the storm was Prince Philipp (“Phili”) zu Eulenburg, a close confidant of the kaiser, who had served as Berlin’s ambassador to Vienna. Eulenburg often entertained His Majesty and other illustrious friends at Liebenberg, his country estate outside the capital. In return, Wilhelm sometimes took Phili along on his ocean cruises. Some of the others caught up in the scandal were Count Kuno von Moltke, commandant of the Berlin garrison; Count Wilhelm von Hohenau, one of the kaiser’s aides-de-camp; and Baron Axel von Varnbüler, Württemburg’s diplomatic representative in Berlin. None of these men was openly homosexual, for they all understood that they could not acknowledge their predilection without social disgrace and possible legal prosecution. They might have continued to pursue their double lives without interference had not Harden, editor of the Berlin journal Die Zukunft, decided that they encouraged the kaiser’s illusions of grandeur. Using inside information about the men’s intimate affairs supplied by Chancellor Bernard von Bülow, who also considered the Liebenbergers a menace, Harden published two articles calling attention to the group’s activities. He did not use the word “homosexual,” but everyone knew what he meant.

Magnus Hirschfeld (second from right), founder of the Institute for Sexual Research

Berlin was plunged into an uproar over Harden’s allegations. All the major dailies covered the story, often adding salubrious details of their own. The only person in town who was unaware of the scandal was the kaiser, who rarely read the newspapers and whose ears were protected from nasty gossip by sycophantic courtiers. His handlers were especially reticent in this instance because they sensed that His Majesty himself harbored homosexual tendencies, albeit deeply repressed. Eventually Crown Prince Wilhelm, fearing that the affair could undermine the monarchy, told his father what was going on. The kaiser was aghast. Telling Eulenburg that he would have to be “cleared or stoned,” he ordered his friend to bring legal proceedings against Harden.

Because he knew how damaging a court case could be, Eulenburg refused to take action against the journalist. Kuno von Moltke, however, was not so cautious, and brought an official action for slander in October 1907. Spectators in the court were treated to a detailed exposition of male orgies among Berlin’s elite guard regiments. The steamy testimony in the Moltke trial prompted some parliamentarians to raise questions in the Reichstag about the moral character of the army and the imperial court. A Center Party deputy declared that the offenses in question were “reminiscent of pagan Rome.” Chancellor Bülow admitted that the case filled him “with disgust and shame,” though he insisted that there was no proof that the army was “rotten at heart” or that the kaiser’s character was anything but “a fair model to the nation.” Berlin “is not Sodom,” he added. Bülow’s lame defense hardly reassured the kaiser, who was enraged that the “band of rascals” in parliament had had the temerity to discuss this issue at all.

The action shifted back to the legal arena in November when the editor of a magazine for homosexuals suggested that Chancellor Bülow himself was “one of us,” his protestations of shame notwithstanding. Bülow promptly sued the magazine for slander. During the course of the trial Eulenburg appeared on behalf of Bülow (he was obviously unaware that the chancellor had been the source of his own humiliating outing) and swore that neither he nor the plaintiff had ever engaged in activities as defined by Paragraph 175 of the Prussian legal code. Although Bülow’s case was successful, Eulenburg’s testimony proved a disaster for the prince, because in yet another trial, this one engineered by Harden to set up Eulenburg, the writer got two Bavarian working-class men to swear that they had had sex with the statesman. In May 1908 Eulenburg was ordered to stand trial for perjury, but the case was broken off without result when the prince suffered a nervous collapse. Eventually he was allowed to return to Liebenberg, where he lived in seclusion and disgrace until his death in 1921. He had hoped for absolution from the kaiser, but Wilhelm could never forgive him for bringing embarrassment on the royal house. Nor, for that matter, could the monarch forgive “his Berliners” for taking such obvious delight in his humiliation.

Red Berlin