Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (102 page)

The relationship between the imperial crown and the Bavarian state was a persistent source of tension. In November 1891, during a visit to Munich, William II was asked to make an entry in the official visitors’ book of the city. For reasons that remain unclear, he chose to inscribe the text ‘
suprema lex regis voluntas
’ (the will of the king is the highest law). The choice of citation may well have been linked with a conversation the Kaiser was having at the time when he was asked to sign the book, but it soon acquired an unexpected notoriety. Once again, it was Eulenburg who pointed out the blunder:

It is not for me to ask why Your Majesty wrote these words, but I would be committing a cowardly injustice if I did not write of the ill effects that this text has had in south Germany, where Your Majesty has stationed me to keep watch. [… ] People here discern in it [the assertion of] a kind of personal imperial will over and above the Bavarian will. All parties, without exception, were offended
by the words of Your Majesty, and the remark seemed perfectly made to be exploited against Your Majesty in the most disgraceful way.
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When south German cartoonists sought to disparage the Kaiser’s imperial pretensions, they almost invariably did so by drawing him as an emphatically and incorrigibly Prussian figure. A wonderful drawing for
Simplicissimus
of 1909 by the Munich-based cartoonist Olaf Gulbransson shows William II in conversation with the Bavarian regent at the annual imperial manoeuvres. The setting was in itself charged with significance, because the relationship between the Prussian-imperial and the Bavarian army was a highly sensitive issue in Munich. The caption reads: ‘His Majesty explains enemy positions to Prince Ludwig of Bavaria.’ The stereotypical Prusso-Bavarian contrasts are exquisitely captured in the postures and clothing of the two figures. While William stands ramrod-straight in his immaculate uniform and spiked helmet, in cavalry boots that gleam like columns of polished ebony, Prince Ludwig resembles a human bean-bag. Loose trousers crumple shapelessly down his legs and a whiskery face peers bewilderedly from behind a pince-nez. Everything that is erect and dominant in the Prussian is cosily flaccid in the Bavarian.
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William II was, it must be said, singularly ill-suited to the communicative tasks of his office. He found it impossible to express himself in the sober measured diction that the politically informed public clearly expected of him. The texts of his speeches made easy targets for ridicule. They appeared excessive, pompous, megalomaniacal. They ‘overshot the target’, as one senior government figure observed.
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Images and phrases from his speeches were often picked up and turned against him in the satirical press. Neither William I nor Bismarck had ever been ridiculed with such intensity (though closer parallels can be found in contraband depictions of Frederick William IV around the time of the 1848 revolutions). The legal sanctions against
lèse-majesté
, such as the confiscation of journal numbers or the prosecution and imprisonment of authors and editors, were extensively applied, but they were counterproductive, since they generally had the effect of boosting circulation figures and transforming persecuted journalists into national celebrities.
⁷⁴
Efforts to control the form in which the Emperor’s remarks reached the broader public proved futile.
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William II travelled so frequently and spoke in such a great variety of places and contexts that it
was virtually impossible to control the diffusion of information about his utterances. The Kaiser’s infamous ‘Huns Speech’ in Bremerhaven on 27 July 1900 was a case in point. On this occasion, ugly sound bites from a tasteless improvised speech to troops preparing to embark for China made it into print despite the best efforts of the officials present, stirring uproar in press and parliament.
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The Kaiser – like many a modern celebrity – had learned how to court, but not how to control the media.

52. ‘Imperial Manoeuvres’. Caricature by Olaf Gulbransson from
Simplicissimus,
20 September 1909.

The imperial office lacked, as we have seen, a secure foundation in the German constitution. It also lacked a political tradition. There was, most strikingly, no imperial coronation. William II recognized this deficit. He saw more clearly than his predecessors how completely the Prussian Crown had failed to establish itself as a point of reference in the public life of the German Empire. He came to the throne determined to fill out the imperial dimension of his office. He travelled constantly among the German states; he glorified his grandfather as the warrior-saint who had built a new dwelling for the German people, and he instigated new public holidays and memorial observances to shroud, as it were, the constitutional and cultural nakedness of the Prussian throne in the mantle of a national history. He projected himself to the German
public as the personification of the ‘imperial idea’. In this unceasing effort to create the imperial crown as a political and symbolic reality in the minds of Germans, the speeches played a crucial role. They were instruments of ‘rhetorical mobilization’ that secured for the Kaiser-king a unique prominence in German public life.
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For William personally, they offered compensation for the situation of political constraint and disempowerment in which he so often found himself. Indeed, they were, as Walther Rathenau, author of one of the most insightful reflections on this monarch, observed in 1919, the single most effective instrument of his imperial sovereignty.
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How successful William was in achieving his objective is another question. On the one hand, the more striking indiscretions provoked waves of hostile published comment. As the most visible (or audible) sign of the sovereign’s independence, they became the primary focal point for the political critique of ‘personal rule’.
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Over the longer term, their effect was a gradual erosion of the political status of pronouncements from the throne. It became increasingly common, especially after 1908, for the government to disassociate itself entirely from unwelcome speeches on the grounds that these were not binding programmatic utterances, but simply personal expressions of opinion by the monarch, a disclaimer implying that the political views of the Emperor were of no wider political consequence.
⁸⁰
As the Viennese correspondent of the
Frankfurter Zeitung
observed in 1910, a comparison between William II and Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria-Hungary revealed how counterproductive was William’s over-use of the public word: the Habsburg dynast, it was noted, was a ‘silent emperor’ who always distinguished between his private person and his public office and never used the public forum to make personal utterances of any kind, and yet ‘anyone who tries in Austria to talk about their emperor as we hear [ours] discussed at every table in Germany will soon be in serious trouble.’
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It is, on the other hand, notoriously difficult to get the measure of public opinion, and we should be wary of any judgement that relies exclusively on newspaper commentaries –‘published opinion’ and ‘public opinion’ are not the same thing. The Emperor may have lost ‘the aura of the sovereign who is above criticism,’ wrote one foreign observer in the autumn of 1908, when William II was engulfed in a scandal over tactless utterances published in the London
Daily Telegraph
. ‘But with all the personal magnetism that he possesses, he will always retain an
immense ascendancy in the eyes of the mass of his subjects.’
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William’s invocations of divine providence were the laughing stock of the quality papers, but they struck a sympathetic chord with the more plebeian theological tastes of many humbler Germans. By the same token, his outspoken denunciations of avant-garde art appeared ludicrous and retrograde to the cultural intelligentsia, but made sense to those more numerous cultural consumers who believed that art ought to provide escapism and edification.
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In Bavaria, the ceremonies of the ‘imperial cult’ (parades, unveilings and the jubilee celebrations of 1913) attracted the mass attendance not only of the middle classes, but also of peasants and tradesmen.
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Even within the Social Democratic milieu of the industrial regions, there appears to have been a gulf between the critical perspective of the SPD elite and that of the mass of SPD supporters, among whom the Emperor was perceived as the embodiment of a ‘patriarchal-providential principle’.
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The conversations recorded by police informers in the taverns of Hamburg’s working-class districts registered some disparaging, but also many supportive and even affectionate comments about ‘our William’.
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Substantial (if not precisely quantifiable) reserves of imperial-royalist capital did accumulate in German society. It would take the social transformations and political upheavals of a world war to consume them.

On 16 October 1906, a down-and-out drifter by the name of Friedrich Wilhelm Voigt pulled off an extraordinary heist in Berlin. Voigt had spent much of his life in prison. Having left school at the age of fourteen following a conviction for theft, he had taken an apprenticeship with his father, a cobbler in Tilsit on the eastern margins of the Prussian state. Between 1864 and 1891, he was convicted on six occasions for theft, robbery and forgery, for which he spent a total of twenty-nine years behind bars. In February 1906, after serving a fifteen-year sentence for robbery, he was a free man once again. Having been refused a residence permit by the Berlin police authorities, he settled illegally in a tenement near the Schlesischer Bahnhof railway station, where he found a place as a ‘night-lodger’, sleeping in a bed that was occupied during the daylight hours by a factory worker on night-shift.

During the second week of October 1906, Voigt assembled the uniform of a captain of the I Foot Guards Regiment from garments and equipment purchased in second-hand shops across Potsdam and Berlin. On the morning of 16 October, he collected his uniform from where he had deposited it in the left-luggage store at Beusselstrasse station and walked to the Jungfernheide Park to change clothes. Attired as a Prussian captain, he headed downtown by S-Bahn. At around midday, when the guards were changing across the city, Voigt stopped a detachment of four soldiers and a non-commissioned officer who were on their way back to barracks from doing guard duty at the military swimming baths on Plötzensee. The NCO ordered his men to stand to attention while Voigt informed them that he was taking command under the authority of a cabinet order from the king. Having dismissed the NCO, Voigt collected a further six guardsmen returning from duty at a nearby rifle range and led ‘his’ troops to Putlitzstrasse station, where they all caught a train to Köpenick. On the way he treated them to beer from a station kiosk.

Arriving at the council chambers, Voigt placed guards at the main entrances and made his way with some troops to a suite of administrative offices where he ordered the arrest of the senior city secretary, Rosenkranz, and the mayor, Dr Georg Langerhans. Langerhans, who was himself a lieutenant in the reserve, leapt to his feet at the sight of Voigt’s epaulettes and made no attempt to resist when he was told he was to be escorted under guard to Berlin. The council police inspector was found snoring in his office – it was a warm autumn afternoon in this quiet suburban district – and Voigt treated him to a stern reprimand. The municipal cashier von Wildberg was ordered to open the cashbox and transfer the entire contents – 4,000 marks and 70 pfennig – to Voigt, who presented him with a receipt for the sequestered sum. Voigt ordered a detachment of his guards to escort the arrested officials to Berlin by rail and report to the military post at the Neue Wache in Unter den Linden. Minutes later, he was seen leaving the building in the direction of Köpenick station, where he disappeared from view. He later revealed that he spent the next hour getting back to Berlin, shedding his military clothes and settling himself in a city café with a view of the Neue Wache. From here he was able to watch the confusion unfold as the guards arrived with their bewildered prisoners. On 1 December 1906, after spending six weeks at large, he was arrested and sentenced to four years of imprisonment.

Voigt’s exploit generated huge contemporary interest. Within days it was being lampooned on the stage of the Metropol theatre. There was extensive international press coverage. The story of the conman in captain’s uniform who walked away with the Köpenick council cashbox under his arm soon established itself as one of the most beloved and enduring fables of modern Prussia. It was dramatized for the stage in numerous versions, the most famous being Carl Zuckmayr’s wonderful
Hauptmann von Köpenick
of 1931, and later adapted for the screen in a sparkling and atmospheric film starring the amiable Heinz Rühmann in the eponymous role. Among those who profited from the story’s popularity was the perpetrator himself. Voigt was freed from Tegel prison after serving less than half of his sentence, thanks to a royal pardon from William II. Within four days of his release, he was making public appearances in the Passagenpanoptikum, a gallery of urban amusements on the corner of Friedrich and Behrensstrasse in the centre of Berlin. Having been forbidden to make further such appearances by the Prussian authorities, he mounted a highly successful tour to Dresden, Vienna and Budapest, where he was already a celebrity. Over the next two years, Voigt appeared in nightclubs and restaurants and at fairs, where he retold his story and signed postcards bearing his photograph as the Captain of Köpenick. In 1910, there were further tours in Germany, Britain, America and Canada. Such was his notoriety that he was modelled in wax for Madame Tussaud’s gallery in London. From the sales of his memoirs,
How I Became the Captain of Köpenick
, published in Leipzig in 1909, Voigt acquired sufficient means to purchase a house in Luxembourg, where he settled permanently in 1910. He remained in Luxembourg throughout the First World War and died in 1922.
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