Berlin

Germany had gained its first colonies under Bismarck, but the Iron Chancellor had not thought of the Reich as a global power. It was otherwise with Wilhelm II, who announced on the twenty-fifth anniversary of German unification in 1896 that “The German empire has become a world-empire.” As if to prove this assertion, he immediately challenged Great Britain by encouraging South Africa’s President Paul Kruger and his Boers in their rebellion against British control of the Gape. Wil-helm’s “Kruger Telegram” (1896) provoked indignation in Britain, whose press raged in unison over “German impudence.” Queen Victoria chided her grandson for “a very unfriendly gesture” that had “made a most unfortunate impression” in England. But the initiative went down well in Berlin, where the newspapers for once had nothing but good to say about the kaiser’s leadership. “Our press is wonderful,” exulted State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Baron Adolf von Marschall. “All the parties are of one mind, and even Auntie Voss [the liberal Vossische Zeitung

] wants to fight.”

In the early years of the century Berlin also managed to irritate America, which the kaiser had been trying to woo with flattery and courtly gestures. Seeing America’s young president, Theodore Roosevelt, as a Yankee version of his own swaggering self, Wilhelm ordered a medal struck in the president’s honor. His government presented the people of the United States with a bronze statue of Frederick the Great, proposing that it be erected on Pennsylvania Avenue. But Germany’s actions spoke louder than its awkward gestures of friendship. In 1901 it tried to dislodge America from Samoa, which Germany had colonized in the late 1870s along with the United States and Britain. A year later Berlin sent gunboats to the Caribbean to punish Venezuela for defaulting on some debts. Although Germany disclaimed any intention of occupying Venezuelan territory, Washington was not pleased to see German vessels operating in its “lake.” President Roosevelt let it be known that he thought the kaiser a “jumpy” fellow, perhaps even mad. And in view of Germany’s sudden incursion into the Caribbean, some Americans proposed that the United States reciprocate Wilhelm’s gift of Frederick the Great with a statue of James Monroe for Berlin’s Unter den Linden.

Still, it was not Washington but London that was most alarmed by Germany’s aggressive new tack. King Edward VII, who took the throne in 1901, was considerably more anti-German than his mother. He considered his German nephew a bully and a coward, “the most brilliant failure in history.” He worried that Wilhelm would find extensive support for his bluster among his fellow Germans, who seemed fully to share their monarch’s desperate need to make a splash.

Wilhelm was aware of Edward’s view and reacted with understandable bitterness. “My uncle never seems to realize that I am a sovereign,” he complained, “but treats me as if I were a little boy.” Wilhelm resented it, too, that King Edward condescended to visit Berlin only once, though he was always running off to France. Apparently Edward and his English relatives imagined Berlin (in Wilhelm’s words) to be “a beastly hole.” When the king and his entourage finally did visit Berlin, they expressed surprise, according to an exasperated Wilhelm, at discovering “that Berlin actually had streets on which one could find hotels and big stores. . . . The worthy British seem to have got the impression that they were going to the Eskimos in the farthest backwoods or to the Botokunden

.” The Kaiser’s sense of being unjustifiably looked down upon by his English relatives closely matched the feeling that many Germans had about the English. Remarking on Britain’s arrogance, Professor Theodor Schiemann at the University of Berlin complained that “England is still the state which has least adjusted to the fact that Germany is an emerging world power. . . . [But Berlin is prepared] to compel that recognition.”

Prepared indeed. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Kaiser’s government decided to get Britain’s attention in the most dramatic way possible, short of laying siege to the Tower of London. The Reich would build a battle fleet potent enough to challenge Britain’s supremacy on the high seas.

This represented a major strategic departure for Germany. Prussia had unified the nation with battalions, not boats. During the Franco-Prussian War the entire Prussian navy, consisting of four ironclads, had remained at anchor in Wil-helmshaven, fearful of confronting the French. In the early years of the empire, military spending had been focused on the land army, not on the tiny imperial navy. Few Germans, least of all landlubber Berliners, could have been convinced when their ocean-loving kaiser had suddenly proclaimed, in 1891, “Our future is on the water.”