Berlin

The kaiser, still smarting from his humiliation in the Eulenburg affair, was thrown into a deep depression by the attacks. “What a wretched man am I!” he penned in the margin of a letter from Bülow. “What crime have I committed that God should punish me by making me ruler of this people?” As often, he focused his bitterness on Berlin, where the attacks had been concentrated. What could one expect, he asked, from the “Jewish press carnival” that dominated the capital? To escape the insults he fled to Max von Fürstenberg’s hunting estate at Donau-Eschingen, where some old friends tried to cheer him up by dressing as ballerinas and putting on a dance. Unfortunately, the star of the show, Field Marshal Dietrich von Hülsen-Haeseler, chief of the military cabinet, dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of the performance. When reports of this macabre spectacle reached the capital, they only heightened the doubts that many Berliners harbored about Wile and his entourage.

Despite all the hand-wringing over Wile’s recklessness, however, no substantial political changes emerged from the Daily Telegraph fiasco. The Reichstag made no attempt to curb the monarch’s powers. Prodded by Bülow, Wile issued a formal statement saying he would “guarantee the consistency of imperial policy by safeguarding constitutional responsibilities.” In essence, this was simply a restatement of personal rule: the kaiser, not the lawmakers, would ensure constitutional consistency.

Once the furor over the Daily Telegraph

affair had died down, Wile felt that he could safely sack Bülow, whom he had come to loathe. In November 1909 he dismissed the chancellor for failing to convince the Conservatives in the Reichstag to accept a raft of new taxes, including death duties, which were necessary for financing his Weltpolitik.

Bülow was replaced by Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, a ponderous Prussian civil servant who had spent his life slowly climbing the bureaucratic ladder. Although known as a competent administrator, Bethmann lacked the confidence and adroitness to deal effectively with the kaiser. Upon accepting the chancellorship, he said, “Only a genius or a man driven by ambition and lust for power can covet this position, and I am neither.” His wife was even more frank: “He can’t do it,” she declared.

Before ceding his place to Bethmann-Hollweg, Bülow had urged Wile to appoint a strong state secretary of the foreign office to help manage Germany’s diplomatic affairs. Wile, however, wanted no competition in this department. “Just leave foreign policy to me,” he told Bülow. “I’ve learned something from you. It will work out fine.”

But of course it did not work out fine. Bismarck had once observed that the Kaiser was like a balloon: he drifted all over the place if no one held firmly onto his string. The dangers of erratic and unstable stewardship in Berlin became especially evident over the next three years, which were marked by one international crisis after another. Although the flash points were far from Berlin, the German capital remained at the center of the tension, since it was Germany that believed it had the most to gain by promoting discord among the powers coalescing against it.

The kaiser continued to imagine that Britain was the weak link in the chain of encirclement. Were not London and Berlin, as centers of northern European Protestant culture, natural allies against decadent Latins and boorish Slavs? he asked. The death of King Edward in 1910 added to his hopes for a rapprochement with England. Wile admitted that he was “extremely relieved” when his arrogant uncle departed the scene.

But his relief was short-lived. A new crisis in Morocco in 1911 severely set back Berlin’s hopes for better relations with London. In April of that year France occupied Fez, claiming that this was necessary to protect European interests in the wake of an uprising by local tribesmen. Germany branded the move a violation of the Treaty of Algeciras and called for France to pull back. If Paris insisted on staying put, Berlin demanded as compensation the entire French Congo. To add muscle to its demand, the kaiser dispatched the gunboat Panther to the Moroccan port of Agadir in July. Wile and his advisers fully expected that this would induce Paris to back down, and that London would remain neutral. But once again Berlin miscalculated. France decried Germany’s action as an act of aggression, and Britain immediately expressed solidarity with its ally. David Lloyd George, chancellor of the exchequer and future prime minister, warned that Britain would not accept peace at the price of France’s humiliation.