What Berliners did not know when their new emperor took the throne was that he had already developed a certain distaste for the national capital. Early on he had come to associate the city with the dominion of his parents and the political ideas they represented. For his taste, Berlin harbored far too much irreverence toward royal authority, far too much “spirit of rebellion.” Despite the conspicuous presence of the military in its streets, Berlin was also, in Wilhelm’s eyes, too civilian, and too feminine. In 1878 he wrote to a friend, in his idiosyncratic English: “I never feel happy, really happy, at Berlin. Only Potsdam that is my ‘el dorado’ . . . where one feels with the beautiful nature around you and such kind nice young men in it.”
Wilhelm symbolically registered his disdain for Berlin as soon as he became emperor. In honor of his coronation the city government commissioned a fountain depicting Neptune (the kaiser was known to love the ocean) surrounded by adoring sea goddesses and allegorical representations of the rivers of Europe. When Mayor Max von Forckenbeck and a delegation of notables called upon Wilhelm to present their gift, the emperor refused to shake the mayor’s hand or to greet the delegates. These men, after all, were mere civilians, and liberal civilians at that. The kaiser’s rebuff quickly became the talk of the town; for years afterward Berliners responded to acts of ingratitude with the phrase: “But I didn’t offer you a fountain!”
Wilhelm may not have been able to abide the leading politicians of Berlin, but he much admired the father of modern Germany, Count von Bismarck, whom he had been careful to cultivate when he was crown prince. Yet soon after taking power the new kaiser began to fall out with the Iron Chancellor. A divergence of perspectives on social policy was one of the factors in their split. By the late 1880s, Bismarck had concluded that his efforts to reconcile Germany’s working classes to the authoritarian state through a mixture of “Butterbrot und Peitsche” (buttered bread and the whip) had failed. Miners in the nation’s coalfields were waging devastating strikes for higher wages; the SPD was growing apace and making effective alliances with other opposition parties in the Reichstag. Berlin itself, with its huge working-class population and obstreperous Reichstag delegation, seemed to him like a growing cancer, likely to infect and destroy the political system he had created. In 1890 he decided that the only way to deal with the fractious workers was to throw away the buttered bread and lay on the whip. More specifically, he proposed extending the Anti-Socialist Law indefinitely and, if labor protested, bringing in troops to discipline them. Since the Reichstag was proving increasingly difficult to manage, balking at his efforts to destroy the Socialists, he decided that this body should be abolished and replaced by a chamber beholden to the large landowners and industrialists. He planned, in other words, a kind of state coup against the existing political system, and he was willing to risk a civil war to carry it out.
Kaiser Wilhelm had a different vision. Having as crown prince fallen under the influence of the populist court preacher Adolf Stocker, Wilhelm fancied himself a man of the people who could win over the workers through additional social reforms. And he certainly could not countenance the prospect of a civil war. “It would be lamentable if I were to color the beginning of my government with the blood of my subjects,” he told his ministers. Thus he insisted that the Anti-Socialist Law be allowed to lapse and he rejected Bismarck’s call for a dissolution of the Reichstag.
Beyond such matters of policy, Wilhelm and Bismarck also fell out over the fundamental question of who was going to run Germany. Bismarck was used to getting his own way without “interference” from the monarch, but this was a monarch who wanted to rule as well as to reign. Each man resented the other’s efforts to make policy independently. Bismarck became extremely vindictive toward the new sovereign, telling all who would listen that Wilhelm was not up to the job of ruling Germany. Berlin, it seemed, was not big enough for both these egocentric personalities.
In the increasingly bitter standoff it was Bismarck who eventually had to go because the system that he had created ordained it: the emperor hired and fired chancellors, even Iron Chancellors. After a series of confrontations in spring 1890, Bismarck offered his resignation (as he had often done in the past), and this time the kaiser accepted it. “My dear prince!” Wilhelm wrote, “It is with the deepest emotion that I see from your request of March 18 that you have decided to resign from the position you have occupied for so many years with incomparable success.” As consolation for sacking him, Wilhelm promoted Bismarck to colonel-general of the cavalry, made him Duke of Lauenburg, and gave him a life-sized portrait of the young monarch.
As Bismarck left Berlin to begin his rural retirement, the local citizenry displayed an outpouring of warm sentiment for the old man. People crowded shoulder to shoulder along the route his carriage took from the Chancellery to the Lehrter railway station. Baroness von Spitzemberg recorded in her diary:
Like a flood the crowd surged toward the carriage, surrounding, accompanying, stopping it momentarily, hats and handkerchiefs waving, calling, crying, throwing flowers. In the open carriage, drawn by the familiar chestnut-colored horses, sat Bismarck, deadly pale, in his cuirassier uniform and cap, [son] Herbert at his side, before them a large black mastiff [popularly dubbed the Reichshund]—all three covered with flowers, to which more were constantly being added.
There may have been an element of ambiguity in the cheering, however: after all, the people were cheering a man who was leaving. The Berliners’ enthusiasm was undoubtedly fueled partly by relief, for it was well known that the old chancellor and the new kaiser could not work effectively together and that Bismarck’s standoff with the Reichstag threatened to precipitate a dangerous crisis of state.
It did not take long, however, for the German people, Berliners included, to begin deifying their former chancellor. Once he was safely in retirement, he became a symbol for the inner unity that Germany still so sorely lacked. In the end, as one of his biographers has noted, the Iron Chancellor filled Germans’ “need for a romantically conceived national hero, a liberating myth on the order of Siegfried, Frederick Barbarossa, and Frederick the Great capable of elevating them from the mundane routine of daily life and resolving insecurities born of a fast-changing economy and society.” To honor the great man, cities and towns throughout Germany named streets or squares after him and staged fawning celebrations on his birthday.
Berlin was quick to join in the Bismarck cult. When the former chancellor passed through the capital on a triumphant “great German tour” in 1892, people once again turned out in their thousands to cheer. The celebrants seemed willing to forget how he had castigated the city and worked to emasculate its citizenry. Yet not all were so forgiving. Many workers stayed away from the 1892 celebrations, and the progressive liberals in the city assembly voted to boycott the municipality’s birthday greeting. In 1894, the Reichstag voted down a proposal to send birthday salutations to the former chancellor.