The Kaiser: Warlord of the Second Reich by Alan PalmerReview by: Norman RichThe American Historical Review, Vol. 84, No. 1 (Feb., 1979), pp. 194-195Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1855778 .

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194 Reviews of Books

Schoningh zur Geschichte und Gegenwart.) Pa- derborn: Ferdinand Schoningh. I977. Pp. 359. DM 38.

That Otto von Bismarck, after his fall from power in 1890, criticized his successors and, indirectly, Kaiser William II mercilessly and implacably up to the last year of his life has always embarrassed historians. Motivations of petty spite and revenge did not fit the image of the great man. Con- sequently there has never been a serious, full-scale examination of the phenomenon. Wolfgang Stribrny now fills that gap with a detailed study of Bismarck's activity and reactions to that activity.

Stribrny finds that the old man's motives were patriotic rather than petty: Bismarck warned against moving away from Russia and relying solely on Austria-Hungary in foreign affairs, ad- vice that neither administration nor public were prepared to heed; he denounced bureaucratic ab- solutism and advocated strengthening the Reichs- tag against the crown in domestic affairs. Stribrny attributes Bismarck's failure to stress the latter point consistently after 1892 and his reversion in i893-94 to a right-wing crisis policy aimed against the Reichstag to a basic conservatism. It is more likely that the motives behind Bismarck's actions were tactical ones. An economic downturn brought the full force of Caprivi's reduction of the grain tariff to bear upon the agricultural interests of the Junker ruling class, and Bismarck took ad- vantage of the situation to encourage its rage against government and crown. Although the Right was in the minority in the Reichstag, it was still in control in the Prussian Landtag, army, bureaucracy, and court.

William II himself was probably the target of Bismarck's attacks in these years-through his ministers, his policies, the court, and army in- trigues. Stribrny barely mentions the Leckert-Lut- zow-Tausch cases of 1896-97, which revealed that the Prussian political police agitated in favor of Bismarck and against the government. It was in order to discredit the Kaiser and place him under wraps that Bismarck worked consistently to create a political crisis.

Stribrny feels that the old man would have done better to try, as elder statesman, to educate the public peacefully to develop a more active and responsible attitude toward politics. But such an educational program-of doubtful impact at best-would be a long-term affair, and Bismarck, already seventy-five in I890, had little time left. The personal instability of William II, the head of the authoritarian German power structure, was a present threat that Bismarck attempted to meet. He failed in this attempt, however, as he had failed previously to maintain himself in office, although Stribrny correctly points out that Bismarck per-

manently dampened the Kaiser's popularity. The German middle classes that comprised Bismarck's loyal following were not capable of rebelling against authority; they merely wanted to be able to venerate all of their leaders equally and undis- turbed. Nor were the Junkers, bureaucrats, and professors, who rallied most strongly to Bismarck and against the Kaiser's government, really ca- pable of seizing the initiative or providing respon- sible leadership. Thus his campaign was probably doomed from the start.

It was brave of the old man to take on everybody in his old age, but it was also willful. In this respect Bismarck was not unlike the elderly Gladstone, who split the Liberal Party over the Irish problem. Although Bismarck's encouragement did not pro- voke the Junkers to seize political initiative from the crown, it did help to make them, in later years, more intransigent, self-centered, and less manage- able by the government in a progressive sense. Mid-Victorian heroes accomplished brilliant things but also did a lot of damage one way or another;

J. ALDEN NICHOLS

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

ALAN PALMER. The Kaiser: Warlord of the Second Reich. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1978. Pp. 276. $14.95.

Although Alan Palmer's brief biography of Wil- liam II is obviously addressed to the general reader, it is more scholarly than most books of this kind and is based almost entirely on collections of contemporary documents, published and unpub- lished. Unlike many popular biographers, Palmer has not indulged in succulent speculations about the emperor's psyche or sex life, and with com- mendable restraint he has adhered to the most reliable or at any rate the most plausible evidence available to him.

Palmer thinks that William himself, as well as many later commentators, may have exaggerated the significance of his withered left arm, although he concedes that "the physical and psychological effects of this crippled arm undoubtedly left their mark on his character" (p. 3). He quotes William's tutor, Georg Hinzpeter, who- recalled that what particularly impressed him "in this good-looking but girlish boy, whose delicate softness was turned into almost complete frailty by the embarrassing uselessness of his left arm, was his resistance . .. to every attempt which would have forced his inner self in one direction or the other" (p. 12), a round- about way of saying that William never learned the art of self-discipline. To the disappointment of his parents, "he became-and remained-an

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Modern Europe I95

arch-dabbler, a dilettante who showed promise but never fulfillment" (p. 13). Palmer is probably correct in assuming (since there is no reliable evi- dence to the contrary) that William was neither promiscuous nor homosexual, but he is certainly wrong in suggesting that the emperor was some- thing of a prude. In his table talk and comments on official documents, William used the crudest kind of barrack-room language, and the fact that he attempted to impose a puritanical moral code on men under his command was surely only an- other example of his hypocrisy and delight in bul- lying others.

Unfortunately, in his admirable attempt to be brief, Palmer's coverage of many events of Wil- liam's reign tends to be somewhat superficial. I was disappointed by his analysis of the English alliance negotiations, his inadequate linkage of the Moroccan Crisis of 1905 and the bid for a new alliance with Russia, and his apparent failure to see the ramifications of Witte's visitation after Russia's defeat by Japan. I also thought Palmer was far too kind to Eulenburg and that he did not give sufficient credit to Harden and other oppo- nents of William's "personal regime. "

Particularly questionable, in view of the evi- dence Palmer himself presents, is the subtitle of his book: Warlord of the Second Reich. His chapter deal- ing with William's role in the First World War is entitled "War Lord on Sufferance," a far more accurate designation. Moreover throughout his reign, whenever there seemed to be a serious threat of war, this saber-rattling exponent of German militarism displayed a most unwarlordlike loss of nerve. During the first Moroccan crisis, for ex- ample, when France's major ally, Russia, was im- mobilized by defeat in Asia (the most favorable opportunity for Germany to launch its "grab for world power," to use Fritz Fischer's phrase), Wil- liam accepted a major diplomatic defeat rather than risk a foreign war. Although his army was far and away the most powerful in Europe, the em- peror feared his forces were not adequately pre- pared and in any case could not be sent out of the country so long as there was a socialist menace at home. "Shoot down the socialists first," said this model monarch, who in I890 had aspired to go down in history as the Labor Kaiser. " Behead them, put them out of action, if necessary mas- sacre the lot-and then war abroad! But not be- fore" (p. I I6).

Palmer concludes his book by quoting Edward VII, who described his nephew as "the most brilliant failure in history." William II was indeed a failure, but brilliant?-only if brilliance be de- fined as an almost unerring instinct for saying or doing the wrong thing.

NORMAN RICH

Brown University

HELMUT HIRSCH. Der "Fabier" Eduard Bernstein: Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des evolutionaren Sozialismus. (Internationale Bibliothek, number 104.) Berlin: VerlagJ. H. W. Dietz Nachf. 1977. Pp. 159.

Eduard Bernstein (I850-I932) was a German So- cial Democratic writer and parliamentarian who is best remembered as the first "revisionist. " Helmut Hirsch's new book and a companion volume by Thomas Meyer, Bernsteins konstruktiver Sozialismus, are signs of renewed interest in Bernstein's work in West Germany. Participants at a recent West Ger- man conference on "The Historical Achievement and Contemporary Significance of Eduard Ber- nstein" spoke of a "Bernstein Renaissance."

Hirsch's contribution to the "Bernstein Renais- sance" is a short book (25,000 words plus appen- dixes) about Bernstein's contacts with members of the Fabian Society. Bernstein met many of the leading Fabians during his London exile (i888 to I9OI), and he corresponded with several of the Fabians after his return to Germany in 90oI. Hirsch was careful and thorough in his research. During his own exile from Germany, Hirsch earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago, so he is at home with the many English- language sources that he used for his study. He consulted manuscript collections in several coun- tries as well as the published sources.

The broader question to which Hirsch addresses himself is whether the Fabians caused Bernstein to become a revisionist. Bernstein did write his initial critiques of Marxism while he was living in Lon- don, and he developed a respect for the Webbs and other Fabians at that time. Many of Bernstein's contemporaries and some of his biographers (for example, Pierre Angel and Bo Gustafsson) have concluded that Bernstein's Fabian acquaintances converted him to revisionism. Bernstein himself acknowledged that he had learned a great deal from the Fabians, but he denied that he had in any sense been converted to revisionism by them.

Hirsch concludes that Bernstein did in fact be- come a Fabian while in London, thus attributing more influence to the Fabians than do the authors of the most relevant English-language studies, Pe- ter Gay and James W. Hulse. Both Gay and Hulse find ample evidence that Bernstein was influenced by his experiences and his observations in Eng- land, but Hulse comments in Revolutionists in Lon- don (ig70) that "Fabianism was only one segment of the English scene, and not the one which [Bern- stein] admired most" (p. 139). Hirsch provides some new evidence for future biographers, but his work, taken by itself, is inconclusive, partly be- cause of a division of labor between himself and Thomas Meyer. Hirsch was to trace the personal contacts between Bernstein and the Fabians, while Meyer would analyze Bernstein's writings for text-

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