This was an impressive display of working-class discipline but also another indication of the SPD’s strategic caution. Some of the radicals thought that the strikes and demonstrations in 1910 meant that Berlin’s masses were about to rise up and overthrow the kaiser, but they mistook restlessness for revolution. It would take the misery of four years of war, capped by the humiliation of defeat, to turn the capital of German imperialism into the capital of the German revolution.
Kaiser Wilhelm II proclaims war from a balcony of the Royal Palace, August 1, 1914
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DISCORD IN THE CASTLE
Berlin, the Reich capital, must and will take the lead in terms of discipline and willingness for sacrifice.
—Anton Wermuth,
Lord Mayor of Berlin, 1914
ON AUGUST 1, 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II announced to a cheering crowd of Berliners that Germany was mobilizing for war against Russia. Three days later the cast of enemies also included France and Great Britain, and young men began boarding trains to take them off to battle. After a peace of forty-three years, Berlin was again on a war footing, but this war would be much different from the ones that had turned the Prussian Residenzstadt into Europe’s newest national capital. World War I, largely the fruit of Germany’s desperate desire for world-power status, would destroy the German empire forever and wreck Berlin’s bid to match London as a great imperial city. Intended also to pull the nation together and to shore up authoritarian rule at home, the war would divide the country as never before, giving impetus to a revolution that ended five hundred years of Hohenzollern rule in Prussia. As the national capital, Berlin was the nerve center of the German war effort but also the place where social divisions and organizational inadequacies were most sharply revealed. The city would emerge much chastened from the long ordeal—less on the make than on the mend.
A Place in the Sun
Germany had gained its first colonies under Bismarck, but the Iron Chancellor had not thought of the Reich as a global power. It was otherwise with Wilhelm II, who announced on the twenty-fifth anniversary of German unification in 1896 that “The German empire has become a world-empire.” As if to prove this assertion, he immediately challenged Great Britain by encouraging South Africa’s President Paul Kruger and his Boers in their rebellion against British control of the Gape. Wil-helm’s “Kruger Telegram” (1896) provoked indignation in Britain, whose press raged in unison over “German impudence.” Queen Victoria chided her grandson for “a very unfriendly gesture” that had “made a most unfortunate impression” in England. But the initiative went down well in Berlin, where the newspapers for once had nothing but good to say about the kaiser’s leadership. “Our press is wonderful,” exulted State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Baron Adolf von Marschall. “All the parties are of one mind, and even Auntie Voss [the liberal Vossische Zeitung] wants to fight.”
In the early years of the century Berlin also managed to irritate America, which the kaiser had been trying to woo with flattery and courtly gestures. Seeing America’s young president, Theodore Roosevelt, as a Yankee version of his own swaggering self, Wilhelm ordered a medal struck in the president’s honor. His government presented the people of the United States with a bronze statue of Frederick the Great, proposing that it be erected on Pennsylvania Avenue. But Germany’s actions spoke louder than its awkward gestures of friendship. In 1901 it tried to dislodge America from Samoa, which Germany had colonized in the late 1870s along with the United States and Britain. A year later Berlin sent gunboats to the Caribbean to punish Venezuela for defaulting on some debts. Although Germany disclaimed any intention of occupying Venezuelan territory, Washington was not pleased to see German vessels operating in its “lake.” President Roosevelt let it be known that he thought the kaiser a “jumpy” fellow, perhaps even mad. And in view of Germany’s sudden incursion into the Caribbean, some Americans proposed that the United States reciprocate Wilhelm’s gift of Frederick the Great with a statue of James Monroe for Berlin’s Unter den Linden.
Still, it was not Washington but London that was most alarmed by Germany’s aggressive new tack. King Edward VII, who took the throne in 1901, was considerably more anti-German than his mother. He considered his German nephew a bully and a coward, “the most brilliant failure in history.” He worried that Wilhelm would find extensive support for his bluster among his fellow Germans, who seemed fully to share their monarch’s desperate need to make a splash.
Wilhelm was aware of Edward’s view and reacted with understandable bitterness. “My uncle never seems to realize that I am a sovereign,” he complained, “but treats me as if I were a little boy.” Wilhelm resented it, too, that King Edward condescended to visit Berlin only once, though he was always running off to France. Apparently Edward and his English relatives imagined Berlin (in Wilhelm’s words) to be “a beastly hole.” When the king and his entourage finally did visit Berlin, they expressed surprise, according to an exasperated Wilhelm, at discovering “that Berlin actually had streets on which one could find hotels and big stores. . . . The worthy British seem to have got the impression that they were going to the Eskimos in the farthest backwoods or to the Botokunden.” The Kaiser’s sense of being unjustifiably looked down upon by his English relatives closely matched the feeling that many Germans had about the English. Remarking on Britain’s arrogance, Professor Theodor Schiemann at the University of Berlin complained that “England is still the state which has least adjusted to the fact that Germany is an emerging world power. . . . [But Berlin is prepared] to compel that recognition.”
Prepared indeed. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Kaiser’s government decided to get Britain’s attention in the most dramatic way possible, short of laying siege to the Tower of London. The Reich would build a battle fleet potent enough to challenge Britain’s supremacy on the high seas.
This represented a major strategic departure for Germany. Prussia had unified the nation with battalions, not boats. During the Franco-Prussian War the entire Prussian navy, consisting of four ironclads, had remained at anchor in Wil-helmshaven, fearful of confronting the French. In the early years of the empire, military spending had been focused on the land army, not on the tiny imperial navy. Few Germans, least of all landlubber Berliners, could have been convinced when their ocean-loving kaiser had suddenly proclaimed, in 1891, “Our future is on the water.”
In order to enlighten his people on the need for a strong navy, Wilhelm relied upon the propagandistic genius of his new secretary of the Imperial Naval Office, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. A huge man with a fierce forked beard, Tirpitz was an avid student of the American strategic theorist Admiral Mahan, who held that sea power was the key to world power. Having earned his high rank by winning bureaucratic battles within Germany’s military establishment, Tirpitz fully appreciated the challenge inherent in convincing the German people of Mahan’s wisdom.
The kaiser’s government brought its first major naval spending bill before the Reichstag in 1898. It faced opposition not only from the Social Democrats, who ritually rejected most military outlays, but also from the Conservatives, who preferred to spend money on the army. To muster support for the bill, Tirpitz sought the endorsement of former chancellor Bismarck, but the old man was willing to back only a minor increase in naval power. If the Germans ever had to fight the British, Bismarck believed, they should “slay them with the butt-ends of [their] rifles.” Tirpitz had better luck among nationalist academics, whom he wooed with guided tours of Germany’s main naval base at Wilhelmshaven. The professors obligingly wrote newspaper articles explaining the life-and-death imperatives of a high-seas fleet. By identifying a large fleet with the nation’s economic development, the admiral also won the support of commercial and industrial interests across the Reich, especially in Berlin. As the debates on the naval bill progressed in the Reichstag, Tirpitz made a point of inviting key legislators for chats in his office on Leipzigerplatz. To overcome conservative deputies’ reservations about investing in a navy, he pointed out that a big fleet could be a rallying-point for the forces of order against the SPD. As a result of this expert political spadework, the First Naval Bill passed the Reichstag with a vote of 221 to 139. It provided for a naval force of nineteen battleships, twelve large cruisers, thirty small cruisers, and an array of support vessels.