Making of a German Constitution : a Slow Revolution

200 • The Making of a German Constitutionrestored, but that the King of Prussia should never again become German Kaiser, andthat the German capital should be transferred from Berlin to Kasel, in the interests ofthe Reich’s political and geographical equilibrium’. 65 Surely, this betrayed an earlierambition and did not simply crop up in the aftermath of the First World War.By the 1890s, the regime was in trouble. Junkers had been routed from the topjobs even in Prussia, and worse, landowners also were holding up Wilhelm’s billsin the Reichstag. 66 The Kaiser’s rift with the Bundesrat and the Reichstag also costhim diplomatically, which turned out to be his last card in the end. Edward VII ofEngland’s dynastic diplomacy was successful because it was supported by the government’s(Parliament’s) policy, in an era when the international differences could onlybe overcome on the basis of vital interests. Wilhelm II handicapped himself in thisregard and was left with only personalistic diplomacy. As Moltke observed, it was vitalinterests that determined the policies that states adopted, and no longer the exchangeof visits between royal families. 67 Behind the scenes, chancellors wrote patronizinglyof Wilhelm’s character, sentiments that took the form of insincere gush in person.Passing Wilhelm off to Bülow in 1897, Eulenburg wrote: ‘Only if you handle theKaiser psychologically correctly can you be of use to the country’. 68 Of Wilhelm,he emphasized that he needed to be praised, that he loved fame and was jealous; ‘hebelongs to those who become mistrustful if they do not hear recognition from importantpeople’. 69 ‘Above all’, Eulenburg wrote in another letter, ‘don’t forget the sugar.’ 70Since John Röhl revived research interest in Wilhelm II, scholarship has dulynoted his declining prestige and public reputation. In his examination of jubilees,Bernd Sösemann has shown the precipitous loss of monarchical aura and the corrosionof monarchical sociopolitical capital. 71 Roderick McLean has examined theKaiser’s declining prestige amongst the European nobility. 72 Isabel Hull has arguedthat men like Tirpitz and Ludendorff, who were more loyal to the national statethan to the crown and the social order it represented, were ‘the advance guardin the triumph of military-cultural actionism over the monarchy’ in the years immediatelypreceding the First World War. 73 This research has, in turn, broadenedthe scope of our understanding of political culture in turn-of-the-twentieth-centuryGermany, but, at the same time, has kept the more fundamental transformation ofthe German constitution hidden deeper by focusing on the person of Wilhelm II. Infact, while it was Wilhelm II’s fate, like that of Louis XVI of France, to have thephase of steep monarchical decline occur on his watch, in reality the imperial officewas in jeopardy of obsolescence from its somewhat temporary-expedient origins, atleast in constitutional terms. More than any other element, that decline resulted notonly from tidal waves of bürgerliche legislation, but the Kaiser’s inability to get hismeasures through the legislative branch from the mid-1890s onward, including hismilitary spending bills.The trend toward civil legislation that began in the states and led to the formation ofRechtskreise gained steam in the North German Confederation, and the constitutionalpractice of adopting and adapting state reformations into the Reich constitution was