ruled from the palace in Berlin for a mere ninety-nine days, and his premature death paved the way for the accession of his thirty-year-old son, Kaiser William II. That year – 1888 – was later known as the ‘year of the three Kaisers’.33 It was also the beginning of the end for imperial Berlin.
It was a tragedy for Germany that William came to power, and although there is no doubt that he was bright and quick witted, he was also vain, arrogant and rash.34 Some of this might have been due to his difficult youth; his mother nearly died in childbirth and by the time anyone attended to the infant his wrenched and twisted arm was beyond repair. As he grew the poor boy was forced to endure painful shock treatments, take disgusting quack medicines and have frequent baths in the blood of freshly slaughtered animals to try to bring the withered arm back to life. The prince forced himself to ride despite constantly falling off his horse because of his lack of balance, and he learned how to hide his arm under ever more grandiose uniforms or by resting it on the hilt of his sword.35 The need to overcome his physical weakness combined with the belief that he had been chosen to rule by God made him arrogant and something of a bully. His friend Eulenburg noted his sheer blood lust during his hunts in the Romintern Forest and his delight in watching ‘the panting desperate brutes as they hurl themselves perpetually against the farthest hedges’. It was not uncommon for William to kill 1,000 animals in a week, and when he was forty-three he put up a monument to commemorate the bagging of his 50,000th beast.36 He was rude to important guests at court whom he often teased in an offensive, even sadistic manner; he sometimes forced visitors to do gymnastics on the deck of his yacht, the ‘perpetual floating casino’, and would push them when they were bending over or kneeling down. He became known as the ‘showman of Europe’, the ‘crowned megalomaniac’, the man who ‘wanted every day to be his birthday’. Max Weber called him the ‘Imperial Clown’; Bismarck complained that he was like a balloon pushed around by sudden gusts of wind, and even the once indulgent Queen Victoria called him a ‘hot-headed, conceited, and wrong-headed young man, devoid of all feeling’.37
When his father died the young prince moved fast to wipe out all traces of his memory and take control of his city. Robert von Dohme remembered how, on the very day of Frederick’s death, William cordoned off the palace and imprisoned his mother in her rooms for allegedly sending vital documents to England. He rifled through state papers, erasing the memory of his hated parents and destroying anything which might threaten his authority. Then he filled the palace with his sycophantic friends. His lust to increase Germany’s imperial might and to compete above all with England meant that the military was given a free hand in the city, and civilians had to get used to being jostled by arrogant officers in the streets. William had always disliked Berlin and he was happy to fill it with his own kind. Berliners found themselves increasingly identified in the rest of the world with the most arrogant, militaristic, expansionist tendencies of the Prussian army. Liberals were silenced, and the ‘Red Radicals’ were forced underground.
The pervasive presence of the military was the product of the foundation of the empire itself. The new state had been created not by the German people but by the army, by the Junkers, by Bismarck and by ‘blood and iron’. Instead of turning into a liberal democratic state Berlin had become the centre of an ever larger military machine. By the time the foolish young Kaiser had pushed his people to the brink of world war it was too late for them to regain control of their own destiny. On the surface the imperial period was stable and prosperous, but the seeds of its own destruction had been sown during the militaristic ceremony which marked its birth in the Hall of Mirrors in 1871.
‘In Berlin’, it was said, ‘the air stinks of powder.’ Whereas the sight of uniformed officers in Piccadilly or on the Champs-Élysées usually meant that some state occasion was underway, it was the norm in Berlin. The army had always shaped the life of the city, but despite the old parade-ground atmosphere the military had remained decidedly separate from civilian life under the Soldier King and Frederick the Great and William I. The officers had formed a tight-knit group of pious, frugal and unostentatious men devoted to the Protestant Church and to their monarch – they had not played polo, for example, because it had made the distinction between rich and poor too obvious. They had led quiet, even reflective lives; the old Count Helmuth von Moltke, whose family had been poor, had translated Gibbon’s Decline and Fall to meet the expenses of his appointment to the General Staff. Most had been forced to wait until their forties or even their fifties before they could afford to marry. Exclusive regiments like the Guards or the Cavalry lived by Frederick II’s dictum that ‘only nobles are noble enough to command’, and no amount of money, power, prestige, social or political influence could overcome the barrier of birth; indeed the old Kaiser had known all 3,000 of his aristocratic officers personally. This old way of life was transformed under William II.38
Within a few years of taking the throne William expanded the officer corps to 20,000 men; indeed the strength in officers and men increased by almost 100 per cent between 1880 and 1913.39 There would have been a great deal to be said for widening the social base of recruits if it had led to a more moderate, meritocratic system, but it had the opposite effect. The power of the aristocrats was never really broken; in 62 per cent of the Prussian regiments more than 58 per cent of officers were nobles, while sixteen regiments had an exclusively aristocratic officer corps. Although middle-class recruits could now hold junior positions up to the rank of colonel, noble Prussian officers held most General Staff posts, numbering 625 officers by 1914; the Minister of War, von Heeringen, criticized plans to expand the Prussian army because it would lead to the inclusion of social groups which were ‘not really suitable for supplementing the officer corps’, exposing it to ‘democratic influences’. Jews were treated with barely concealed contempt; there was not a single Jewish regular officer in the entire Prussian army between 1878 and 1910.40 Bourgeois officers fortunate enough to obtain a commission renounced their backgrounds and slavishly copied the manners, ideas and activities of their aristocratic fellows. The army encouraged this by developing a policy of indoctrination and coercion which taught them how to think and behave. National pride was the order of the day and, as the Polish writer Józef Kraszewski put it, the army ‘is a school which teaches without fail’.41 New recruits were told that the army was ‘the only fixed point in the whirlpool, the rock in the sea of revolution that threatens us on all sides, the talisman of loyalty, and the palladium of the prince’. Albrecht von Roon told his men: ‘The army is now our fatherland, for it is the only place which has not yet been infiltrated by impure and restless elements.’ Recruits were expected to swear an unswerving oath of loyalty, which by the early twentieth century had led to an abdication of personal responsibility far beyond anything in equivalent armies in western Europe. This would reach absurd heights during the Nazi period, when officers still refused to act against Hitler even though they knew he was leading the nation to ruin because they had sworn an oath. They had forgotten the lesson of Tauroggen.42
The new Wilhelmine officers were insufferable. The great historian Eckhard Kehr wrote that ‘the Prussian lieutenant, who up to this time had been on the average relatively modest’, had turned into ‘the unbearable prig of the Wilhelmine era’. The writer Wesenhof declared, ‘everyone knows that Berlin is an eastern city, which means it lacks taste … but the fact that the French, English or Italians are full of themselves is not nearly so irritating to the foreigner as the arrogant stance of a Prussian officer or bank director’. Most nineteenth-century visitors were amazed by the sheer number of rude uniformed men who pushed people around on the streets. The American ambassador James Gerard wrote that
on one occasion I went to the races at Berlin with my brother-in-law and bought a box. While we were out looking at the horses between the races a Prussian officer and his wife seated themselves in our box. I called the attention of one of the ushers to this, but [he] said he did not dare ask a Prussian officer to leave, and it was only after sending for the head usher and showing him my Jockey Club badge and my pass as an Ambassador that I was able to secure possession of my own box.
Even after minor disputes on the street he noted how officers would ‘instantly cut the civilian down’.43 When the Kaiser went to the opera or the theatre his entourage of officers would not only take up most of the seats but would delight in disrupting the proceedings. Soldiers could send enormous packages