The World полностью

Germany was booming, in one sense the most modern state in Europe, its Reichstag filled with middle-class socialists; its industries, particularly steel and chemicals, overtaking those of Britain and France. In another sense it was antiquated, ruled by the absolute prerogative of the Prussian king, surrounded by high-booted Junkers, to whom he said he would ‘always be mindful that the eyes of my forefathers look down upon me from the next world and I shall one day have to answer to them for the glory and honour of the army’. Willy believed his power was bestowed by God. ‘Forever and forever there’s only one real Emperor in the world,’ he wrote, ‘and that is the German regardless of his person and qualities but by right of a thousand years’ tradition. And his Chancellor has to obey!’

Bismarck had to buy Willy’s love letters off Miss Love, but Willy soon resented the chancellor’s dominance. ‘I am accustomed to being obeyed,’ said Willy. ‘I don’t enter into discussions.’

Willy gathered around himself a coterie of harsh Junker generals and worshipful, secret homosexual friends, led by his favourite Count ‘Phili’ zu Eulenburg, singer, poet and spiritualist, and a married father of six, who was twelve years older. When they met at a shooting house party in 1886, they were instantly dazzled by one another. Together they sang Nordic mystical ballads, rowed on lakes, shared seances, discussed race and gossiped about Ludwig of Bavaria, where Phili was a diplomat. But most of all they planned the Wilhelmine reign. Kaiserin Dona was immediately jealous, accusing her husband of having an affair with Phili.

The kaiser ignored her, confessing he was happiest with ‘the nice young men’ of his Potsdam regiments. He prized his summer cruises on the yacht Hohenzollern with male company, indulging in manly pranks that usually involved rectums and sausages. At sea in 1894, Phili was awoken by the ‘loud, laughing, shouting, pealing voice of the Kaiser outside my door: he was chasing the old excellencies Heintze, Kessel, Scholl, etc., through the corridors of the ship to bed’.^*

Eulenburg adored Willy, whom he called Liebchen – Darling – even to his face, and ‘the kindest of Kaisers, most sympathetic of friends’ for whom he ‘yearned’; Willy called him ‘my bosom friend, the only one I have’. Yet the repressed kaiser knew little of the secret lives of Phili’s intimates. When rumours about one of them, Count Kuno von Moltke, commandant of Berlin, reached Willy, he stopped another of the coterie. ‘The Liebchen accosted me in the Tiergarten the day before yesterday,’ wrote Baron Axel von Varnbüler. ‘After he duly admired my yellow boots and colour-coordinated riding costume, he asked me “Do you know anything about Kuno?”’

Willy mocked Bismarck’s alliance with Russia, which was designed to ensure peace and prevent the encirclement of Germany. ‘That young man wants war with Russia,’ complained Bismarck, ‘and would like to draw his sword straight away if he could. I shall not be a party to it.’ Now Phili saw his Darling as the ‘personification of Germany’, and praised the way ‘The kaiser combines in himself two different natures –the chivalrous … and the modern.’ He now advised Willy to dismiss the domineering old monster. In March 1890, when kaiser and chancellor clashed about workers’ rights, Willy duly dismissed Bismarck, appointing in his place a more compliant general.

Willy wanted to be ‘my own Bismarck’, making full use of the awesome powers of kaiserdom. Abroad, his dream, he told Eulenburg, was German domination, ‘a sort of Napoleonic supremacy … in the peaceful sense’, but he also embraced the racial ideologies of Teutons (Germans) versus Slavs (Russians). Phili had had an affair with Gobineau, the racist ideologue, and Willy embraced his theories about the Aryan master race, which were becoming popular.

Willy sustained Bismarck’s alliance with Austria–Hungary, recently joined by Italy, but his bombast sowed confusion and alarm: he was both jealous of Britain’s liberalism and power (represented by his mother and her brother Bertie) and awestruck by its empire and navy (represented by his revered grandmother Victoria).