Peter Winzen. Das Kaiserreich am Abgrund. Die Daily-Telegraph-Affaere und das Hale-Interview von 1908. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2002. 369 pp.

Peter Winzen. Das Kaiserreich am Abgrund: Die Daily-Telegraph-Affäre und das Hale-Interview von 1908. Darstellung und Dokumentation. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2002. 369 S. EUR 88.00 (gebunden), ISBN 978-3-515-08024-8.

Reviewed by Eric Kurlander (Department of History, Stetson University)
Published on H-German (January, 2004)

An Altogether Unfortunate Affair

An Altogether Unfortunate Affair

"You English," Wilhelm II said, "are mad, mad, mad as March hares. What has come over you that you are so completely given over to suspicions quite unworthy of a great nation? What more can I do than I have done? I am a friend of England, but you make things difficult for me. My task is not of the easiest. The prevailing sentiment among large sections of the middle and lower classes of my own people is not friendly to England. But, you will say, what of the German navy? Surely, that is a menace to England! My answer is clear. Germany is a young and growing empire. Germany must have a powerful fleet to protect that commerce and her manifold interests in even the most distant seas. She expects those interests to go on growing, and she must be able to champion them manfully in any quarter of the globe."[1]

The Daily Telegraph Affair is generally considered the most quixotic blunder of a German Kaiser especially prone to quixotic blundering, and it continues to provide ample fodder for historians who wish to blame Imperial Germany's instability on the "personal regiment" of an unstable Emperor William II.[2] In his introduction to this fascinating new document collection, Peter Winzen pleads for a shift in perspective. First, he urges us to reassess the putatively tangential role of the long-time German chancellor, Bernhard von Buelow, suggesting that Buelow and his foreign office sidekick, Wilhelm von Schoen, were more responsible in permitting the publication of the interview than the Kaiser was in giving it. Second, Winzen would have us recognize Germany's resulting isolation in the international arena as a consequence of the Kaiser's untempered remarks, mediated though they were through the press (and, at least in the case of the Hale-Interview, vehemently denied by both the German and British governments). Thus, unlike most traditional accounts, Das Kaiserreich am Abgrund goes beyond the domestic repercussions of the affair, including the Reichstag's censure of the Kaiser and the ensuing demand for greater constitutional constraints, in order to emphasize the Telegraph interview's more dangerous diplomatic ramifications.

But this volume is equally invaluable in integrating the earlier Hale-interview into the proceedings. Indeed, while there are any number of memoirs and monographs that touch on the Daily Telegraph Affair in some capacity, few existing works provide a comparably thorough analysis of the Kaiser's conversation with the American journalist, William Bayard Hale. Yet this July 1908 interview proved to be much more explosive than any of the Kaiser's later public relations gaffes. Racist and imperialist in content, and extremely intemperate in tone, the Hale-interview reflected the Kaiser's true vitriol towards Great Britain and Japan, and, according to Winzen, put Europe "am Rand eines kriegerischen Flachenbrandes" (p. 8).[3] Although its contents were leaked to governments across Europe well before the Daily Telegraph article appeared in October 1908, the interview was never published in full. Nevertheless, widespread British skepticism towards the Kaiser's seemingly more sanguine assertions in the Daily Telegraph are best understood only in the wake of this first interview.

Elicited by the British aristocrat, Sir Edward Stuart Wortley, in two installments between November 1907 and September 1908, the Telegraph interview was originally meant to quell British fears of Germany's self-conscious Weltpolitik (pp. 98-101). In this very bounded sense, the Kaiser's remarks were completely in line with Chancellor Buelow's own diplomatic maneuvers. Five weeks before the Wortley interview appeared in the Daily Telegraph, Buelow had given his own, mostly candid, opinions on Anglo-German relations in an interview with Sidney Whitman of the London Standard (p. 26). Subsequently portrayed as a casual talk amongst friends, this interview was very obviously part of a calculated public relations effort by Buelow to deflect attention from Germany's accelerating naval buildup, promoted at all costs by the Kaiser at the behest of the conservative nationalist cabinet minister, Admiral von Tirpitz (pp. 28-29). Buelow was in fact reminded on numerous occasions from officials in the foreign office to read the Wortley interview carefully before considering its publication (pp. 103-105). But as Reinhold Klehmet, the lower level secretary first charged with proofing the manuscript, recalls, Buelow saw nothing untoward in the Kaiser's extraordinary peroration, arguing that the interview's publication, like the chancellor's own remarks to Whitman, "gerechtfertigt sein koennte, nach altem Bismarckschen Prinzip zur Erreichung des einen Ziels der Besserung unserer Stellung zu England alle anderen Ruecksichten, namentlich diejenigen auf Frankreich und Russland, einstweilen bei Seite zu stellen" (p. 30). In retrospect, it comes as little surprise that Buelow welcomed the Daily Telegraph's willingness to publish the Kaiser's undeniably pro-British prostrations.

When the proverbial foreign relations bomb exploded, however, it was the Kaiser who took the brunt of the blast (pp. 139-141). News of Wortley's interview in the German press unleashed an unprecedented torrent of criticism, most of which was aimed at the Kaiser's Personalregiment, his virtually unquestioned constitutional authority in domestic political, military, and diplomatic affairs. More troubling for Buelow's center-right government, these complaints issued from the bourgeois nationalist as well as the reichsfeindlich Socialist and Catholic ranks. Risking Albion's further alienation and justifying, in turn, the Kaiser's jingoistic representation of Germany's "middle and lower classes," the Conservative and National Liberal press made no secret of their disgust at the Kaiser's clumsy effort to win over British public opinion. Of course, the Kaiser had acted perfectly appropriately--and constitutionally--in submitting his interview to Buelow and his press secretary, Otto Hammann, for review. But Buelow was utterly unwilling to defend Wilhelm II's remarks, colluding with his staff to suppress any evidence indicating that the chancellor had read the original manuscript or even been warned (repeatedly) of its sensitive nature. Feeling abandoned and ashamed, the Kaiser fell into a bout of nervous depression.

Still, for all its sound and fury, the domestic political repercussions of the affair never approached the dangerous levels that Wilhelm or Buelow imagined. Within months of the interview, the Kaiser was back to his blustering ways, and the Reichstag had returned to its usual passivity and internal bickering. What had been permanently tarnished was Germany's image abroad, and particularly the reputation of Wilhelm II's ruling camarilla. Through bits and pieces of the Hale-interview, leaked over a period of months, virtually every government of any international moment--Britain and America most prominently, but also France, Russia and Japan--already possessed documentary evidence revealing the "wahren Programms der ambitioesen deutschen Weltmachtpolitik" (p. 89). Admittedly, by 1908 the Russian and the French were probably lost to German diplomacy. Yet despite her tentative foray into the Franco-Russian Entente a year earlier, Britain remained a potential ally in the summer of 1908. Germany's hyperactive foreign policy and naval buildup were an issue, as they had been for the better part of a decade. Many British leaders still wished for detente, however, as Wortley's pursuit of the Kaiser's goodwill and Lord Asquith's efforts to suppress the Hale interview illustrate. In the wake of the Daily Telegraph Affair, however, Asquith, Grey and company had come to realize that the Kaiser and his coterie were hardly men one could do business with, to borrow a phrase from a future prime minister whose goodwill towards Germany was even more poorly rewarded.

Hence the Daily Telegraph Affair and associated Hale-interview do much to reveal the Byzantine nature of German diplomacy on the eve of the First World War, along with the unhealthy paranoia and fatuity of its leaders. Just as Buelow had betrayed the Kaiser by permitting his interview to be published and then denying any knowledge or responsibility, with regard to the even more damaging Hale-interview the Kaiser was equally disingenuous, claiming "jeglicher politischer Aeusserungen enthalten zu haben" (p. 91). Though intended to defuse growing hostilities between Great Britain and Germany, the Daily Telegraph Affair did precisely the opposite, destabilizing Germany's domestic and foreign policy and promoting a desperate situation where the elites who dominated the Kaiser's government began to see war as the best possible exit strategy. In a damning statement, reminiscent of Fritz Fischer's classic attack on Wilhelmine elites four decades ago, Winzen concludes that the "spoettische Aufnahme des Kaiserinterviews im Ausland hat vor dem Hintergrund der als unertraegliche Bedrohung empfundenen Einkreisungskonstellation die Kriegbereitschaft in Deutschland im Sinne einer wachsenden Akzeptanz eines militaerischen Befreiungsschlages gefoerdert, und zwar sowohl in den Kreisen der buergerlichen Intellektuellen als auch in den massgeblichen politischen Gremien des Reichs" (p. 88).[4]

In this sense Das Kaiserreich am Abgrund is hardly a revisionist work. It begins, after all, by questioning John C. Roehl's assertion of Wilhelm II's central role in foreign policy. Rather, Winzen's interpretation follows Wolfgang Mommsen's recent book, War der Kaiser an allem Schuld?, reasserting the destructive role of the aristocratic elites arrayed around the Kaiser.[5] Like Mommsen, Winzen also links Germany's aggressive foreign policy decisions to a wide-ranging fear of domestic social progress and parliamentary reform among reactionary Junkers and the leading strata of the industrial Buergertum. There is much to recommend a renewed emphasis on the Primat der Innenpolitik in Wilhelmine Germany, insofar as the irresponsibility of Wilhelmine elites promoted an increasingly rudderless imperialism, which helped plunge Europe into war. But Winzen's conclusions verge even more precipitously than Mommsen's on resurrecting a traditional Sonderweg approach to Imperial German politics, an interpretation which Roehl, Geoff Eley, and others would seem to have revised rather successfully in the past quarter century.[6]

This small qualification aside, Das Kaiserreich am Abgrund is a welcome addition to the field. It provides a wealth of previously unpublished material, including 130 documents and three appendices, all expertly chosen and exhaustively annotated. The excellent decision not to translate the English documents and to organize the volume chronologically offers the reader a profound sense of authenticity and historicity. Winzen's thorough analysis, moreover, is exceptionally well informed, rigorously argued, and based on an exceedingly rich and immediately accessible assembly of primary sources. For these reasons Das Kaiserreich am Abgrund is an indispensable resource for scholars and teachers working on Imperial Germany and the origins of the First World War.

Notes

[1]. Excerpted from Stuart Wortley's interview with the Emperor Wilhelm II in the London Daily Telegraph, October 28, 1908.

[2]. For the most prominent exponent of the Kaisercentric view, see John C. Roehl, The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

[3]. Here Winzen follows Thomas G. Otte in a (relatively) recent article illustrating the degree to which the Kaiser's (perceived) hostility and inconstancy solidified Britain's commitment to a continental policy of encirclement alongside France and Russia. See Thomas G. Otte, "'An Altogether Unfortunate Affair': Great Britain and 'The Daily Telegraph Affair,'" Diplomacy and Statecraft 5, no. 2 (July 1994), pp. 296-333.

[4]. See Fritz Fischer, Griff Nach der Weltmacht: Das Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschlands (Duesseldorf: Droste, 1962).

[5]. See Wolfgang J. Mommsen, War der Kaiser an allem Schuld? Wilhelm II und die preussisch-deutschen Machteliten (Berlin: Propylaeen Verlag, 2002).

[6]. See John C. Roehl and Nicholas Sombart, eds., Kaiser Wilhelm II, New Interpretations: The Corfu Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Also see Geoff Eley's now classic analysis of popular nationalism in the Wilhelmine period, Reshaping the German Right (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1991).

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Citation: Eric Kurlander. Review of Peter Winzen, Das Kaiserreich am Abgrund. Die Daily-Telegraph-Affaere und das Hale-Interview von 1908 and Winzen, Peter, Das Kaiserreich am Abgrund: Die Daily-Telegraph-Affäre und das Hale-Interview von 1908. Darstellung und Dokumentation. H-German, H-Net Reviews. January, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8678

Copyright © 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.