Berlin

Thus on October 2, 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm asked his cousin, Maximilian, Prince of Baden, a liberal, to become chancellor and to preside over a belated democratization of the Reich. This move represented a tacit acknowledgment that the four-year effort to preserve undiluted authoritarianism at home through military conquest abroad had failed. The new government hastily drew up a series of reforms making the cabinet responsible to the Reichstag and subordinating the military to civilian control. Max also appealed to President Wilson to broker an armistice based on his Fourteen Points, which, if strictly applied, would have allowed Germany to emerge from the war without losing any of her original territory. (Most Germans, from the kaiser on down, apparently believed that their attempt to steal their neighbors’ land should not oblige them to give up any of their own property, since their effort had been unsuccessful.)

Under normal conditions, the constitutional reforms introduced by Prince Max of Baden would have been heralded by progressive-minded Germans as a great breakthrough, but the shock of impending defeat, coming after four years of sacrifice and promises of victory, made the reforms seem paltry. Rather than gratitude, most Germans felt contempt for a regime whose sudden reformist ardor seemed so obviously designed to save its own skin. As for the kaiser himself, Germans understood that he was hated around the world and that his staying on the throne would constitute an impediment to a favorable peace. President Wilson had made it clear that the Allies wished to negotiate with “authentic representatives of the German people,” which did not include Wilhelm.

Berlin, which had a long history of troubles with the kaiser, was rife with calls for his ouster. Wilhelm had returned to Potsdam on October 1 to preside over the constitutional revisions. There were rumors that he was not safe in his own capital, and he apparently believed them. Toward the end of the month he left again for the front, not out of fear, but in the mistaken belief that he could convince the troops to help him keep his throne. He would not, he said, allow a few hundred Jews and several thousand workers push him from power. He further declared that after the armistice he would bring his army back to Berlin to restore order.

The reality was that he would never see his capital again. His eleventh-hour visit to the German headquarters at Spa proved to be only a way station on his flight into exile in Holland. Throughout his exile, he persisted in the belief that he owed his ouster largely to the perfidy of Berlin and its Jews. Upon the ex-kaiser’s death in 1941, Hitler sought to bring his body back to the Reich capital for a state funeral and burial, which the Führer hoped would allow him to bury the Hohenzollern Monarchy for good along with its last ruler. It turned out, however, that Wilhelm had declared in his will that he would be buried in Berlin only if the Hohenzollern Monarchy had been restored. This not being the case, the kaiser was interred at his exile residence in Doom, with the Nazi high commissioner for the Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, in attendance.

For all the antagonism toward Wilhelm II in Berlin, the revolutionary events that swept him from his throne and into exile began not in the capital but at the naval port at Kiel. In late October the admiral of the fleet stationed there ordered his ships to steam out on a suicidal mission against the British in order to salvage the honor of the German navy. The sailors quite sensibly mutinied. Then they formed a “Sailors’ Council,” which demanded an immediate end to the war and the abdication of the kaiser. It was somehow fitting that the first decisive actions against Wilhelm’s rule were taken in the navy, the branch he had been so keen to develop.

Inspired by the events at Kiel, Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils began sprouting up all over Germany. Munich in the south was a major flash point. There, on November 7, the venerable Wittelsbach ruling house fell victim to an uprising orchestrated by a USPD politician named Kurt Eisner. The fact that Eisner was a Jew from Berlin reinforced the conviction among conservative Bavarians that nothing but evil came from the Prussian capital. To a proud Berliner like Harry Kessler, it was a little disconcerting that his hometown was not, for the moment, on the cutting edge of German history. As he wrote in his diary on November 7: “The shape of the revolution is becoming clear; progressive encroachment, as by a patch of oil, by the mutinous sailors from the coast to the interior. Berlin is being isolated and will soon be only an island. It is the other way around from France: here the provinces are carrying revolution to the capital.”