Berlin

This amounted to a major rearrangement of the political chessboard to the disadvantage of the Reich. Alarmed, Germany decided to show Paris that it could not count on its new British partner in a diplomatic crisis. In March 1905, during a pleasure cruise in the Mediterranean, Kaiser Wile disembarked at Tangier to announce that Berlin would protect the independence of Morocco. France immediately protested Berlin’s “interference,” and London, much to Berlin’s chagrin, seconded the protest. Still hoping to isolate France, Germany called for an international conference to determine Morocco’s fate. When the conference convened in January 1906 at the Spanish port of Algeciras, only Austria-Hungary sided with the Reich.

Having inadvertently pushed London and France into bed together, Berlin managed to spur another anti-German coupling on the part of Britain and Russia, old colonial rivals in Central Asia and the Far East. Russia had been looking for support in Europe since its humiliating defeat by Japan in 1905. Germany would have been its natural choice as a partner, given the dynastic ties and strong political affinities between the two authoritarian monarchies. Moreover, Berlin banks had provided much of the funding for Russian economic development, and the German capital was a favorite stopping-off point for Russian aristocrats on their way to the great Central European spas. But precisely because there was so much that pulled Russia toward Berlin, Kaiser Wile’s government did little to nurture the Russo-German relationship. On the contrary, it let Bismarck’s Reinsurance Treaty lapse and gave in to pressures from domestic grain producers for high import tariffs on wheat and rye, which hurt Russian exporters. St. Petersburg thus began working to mend its fences with Britain. The result was the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907, a pairing so odd that only mutual anxiety over German Weltpolitik

could have brought it about. As the kaiser himself was obliged to admit, “Yes, when taken all around, [the Anglo-Russian Entente] is aimed at us.”

Genuinely concerned and nonplussed over the apparent enmity towards Germany in much of the world, Wile decided to combat the trend through personal diplomacy, starting with England. He would show his friends and relatives there that they had nothing to fear from Berlin. On a state visit to Britain in autumn 1907 he held several informal conversations with a pro-German English grandee named Colonel Edward Stuart Wortley. Among other confidences, Wile informed Wort-ley that he had personally drafted the plan by which Britain had been able to defeat the Boers. He claimed also that Berlin, despite considerable pressure from France and Russia, had refused to join a continental alliance designed to help the South African rebels. As for the new German navy, that was designed only to protect German trade, especially in the Far East, where the “Yellow Peril” was giving cause for grave concern. Since British interests were also threatened by the Japanese, said the kaiser, London might be damn glad one day that Germany had a big fleet! The final point, then, was that the English were “mad as hatters” to harbor suspicions against Germany.

Wortley, who was rather a dim bulb, thought Wile’s remarks would do wonders for Anglo-German relations if they were published in a national newspaper. However, before going ahead with publication, he dispatched a text of the comments to Wile for his approval. The kaiser found everything satisfactory, but just to be on the safe side he turned the manuscript over to Chancellor Bülow for vetting. Busy with other matters, Bülow did not bother to read it, and the “interview” came out in the Daily Telegraph

in November 1908.

The kaiser’s observations served to strengthen the growing fear in Britain that the German ruler was little short of a lunatic. In Berlin, the affair caused even greater dismay. Most Germans had always supported the Boers, and they assumed that the kaiser had too, but now he was claiming to have helped to defeat them! Worse, his boastful assertions harmonized all too perfectly with stereotypes of the Germans as pushy political parvenus striving desperately to impress. Berlin’s newspapers, even the promonarchical ones, chastised the ruler for making the entire nation look foolish. Baroness von Spitzemberg aptly summed up the prevailing sentiment in her diary: “[Wile] ruins our political position and makes us the laughing stock of the world. It makes one wonder whether one is in a madhouse.” Various parliamentary deputies took up the kaiser’s gaffe in the Reichstag, criticizing the monarch with a vehemence unprecedented in German political history. Chancellor Bülow, who was partly responsible for the mess, did nothing to defend his sovereign. Instead, he lamely promised to persuade Wile to act with more discretion in the future.