Dr. Frank Sterkenburgh
Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh is assistant professor of political history at Utrecht University. He specializes in modern German history, especially the staging of political authority after 1871. He is the author of Wilhelm I as German Emperor: Staging the Kaiser (2024), having previously published on this topic in several edited volumes and in the journal German History. With Heidi Hein-Kircher he has edited Modernizing Europe’s Imperial Monarchies: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia in the Nineteenth Century. He is currently preparing a new history of Germany’s Kanzlerdemokratie from Konrad Adenauer to Olaf Scholz.
When did the German Emperor become the German Emperor? This question is not merely a rhetorical one but touches directly on our understanding of how the Hohenzollern monarchy adapted to the new imperial role and what role it played in the founding and consolidation of the new German nation state in and after 1871. For decades, indeed, for well over a century, scholars have contended that only with Wilhelm II’s accession in June 1888, after the death of his grandfather Wilhelm I in March and his father Friedrich III 99 days later, the German-national potential of the imperial role came to its full fruition. But this argument is problematic: it implicitly divides the history of the German Empire in a Bismarckian era – which sees chancellor Otto von Bismarck as the dominant political figure of the 1870s and 1880s – and a Wilhelmine era. . It also obscures the long-term development of the Hohenzollern monarchy before and through 1888 and how its elevation to imperial dynasty fitted in this history. Finally, it leaves intact a nostalgic notion of Germany’s first Kaiser, Wilhelm I, as an unwilling imperial figurehead, who preferred to remain the austere epitome of Prussian virtues, such as frugality, self-discipline and work ethic, instead, and whose reign signified a more tranquil era which was superseded by the upheavals of the Wilhelmine era that culminated in the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy and the German Empire in 1918.
My book, Wilhelm I as German Emperor: Staging the Kaiser (Palgrave MacMillan 2024), presents a fundamentally different understanding of the first Kaiser and in this article I outline its key arguments and historiographical implications.
The central argument and its scholarly Umfeld
By drawing on a wealth of archival sources, including Wilhelm’s personal archive, the Hohenzollern monarchy, the Prussian state and local archives, my book contends that Wilhelm used careful self-staging and cultivation of Imperial Germany’s political culture to forge his public persona as German Emperor. This self-staging gave him a political agency which he could use to offset other emerging centres of political gravity, including Otto von Bismarck and the Reichstag as Germany’s new national parliament. The circumstances of the 1870s and 1880s highly favoured Wilhelm as a political actor. Imperial Germany’s ‘preoccupation with history’ (Matthew Jefferies) enabled Wilhelm to develop a politics of history with a distinct teleological understanding of Brandenburg-Prussian history, whilst its composite nationhood allowed Wilhelm to appeal to regional identities to present himself as the primus inter pares of the new monarchical federation. The fragmented nature of German society, with its distinct sociocultural milieus, allowed Wilhelm to appeal to them with different norms, values, symbols and emotions. The result was that Wilhelm not only defined what the imperial role entailed for his two successors but also ensured the political dominance of the imperial monarchy during and after his reign.
Developing this argument would not have been possible without the vast expansion of scholarship in recent years which has shown how monarchies across Europe successfully reinvented themselves between the French Revolution and the First World War. Indeed, as Frank Lorenz Müller has aptly put it, the ‘Age of Revolutions’ was not followed by an ‘Age of Republics’. His ‘Heirs to the Throne’-project showed how royal heirs across Europe, including Wilhelm, developed soft power as a key means to present the monarchical form of government to the population as the preferable option over republican alternatives. Meanwhile, the ongoing research project ‘Anpassungsstrategien der späten mitteleuropäischen Monarchie am preußischen Beispiel 1786 bis 1918’, carried out at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, shows in great detail how that institution adapted itself to the changing political, social, cultural and economic circumstances of the nineteenth century. These efforts included developing new forms of political agency by members of the dynasty, such as by Wilhelm’s consort Augusta, for whom, as Susanne Bauer has argued, correspondence was a key means to exert her influence. Finally, Jan Markert has demonstrated how the experience of the 1848 revolution was critical for Wilhelm in developing his ‘monarchical project’, in which Prussia would lead German unification to harness nationalism and ensure the monarchy’s political power, a project of which Bismarck would become the executor, not its initiator.
Wilhelm’s political agency as emperor: strategies, spaces and temporalities
But Wilhelm’s ‘monarchical project’ did not end with the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871. Rather, it was then that it came to full fruition and self-staging was central to Wilhelm exerting his imperial political agency. Central to this were ‘strategies of legitimacy’ (Volker Sellin): specific roles in which Wilhelm presented himself, which he could do separately or in conjunction, depending on circumstances and intention. These included presenting himself as a victorious military monarch, who actively commanded troops in wartime, such as during the Franco-Prussian War, and an emperor who personally governed, presided over cabinet meetings, and opened the Reichstag, to demonstrate the monarchy’s political primacy. It also included a politics of history in the form of authorized biographies, monuments, and museums to show how his dynasty, aided by the army, led Prussia to eventual German unification. Equally important was the projection of the German Empire as a monarchical federation, to show it as an alternative to democratic conceptions of the nation state. It also included grand ceremonial in Berlin and elsewhere, to stage the socio-political hierarchy as Wilhelm understood it. Many of these strategies were subsequently taken up by his two successors, particularly Wilhelm II, whose assertive execution of the imperial role was less his own conception but built on what his grandfather had started.
These strategies were deployed by Wilhelm in ever-larger spatial contexts. The smallest of these was his study in his palace at Unter den Linden. There he would receive political, military and court officials in a study cramped with mementos, a subtle hint to his visitors of his longevity, and with an active interest in affairs of state and society. Larger spaces were those for ceremonials, whether inside in a palace or outside, where Wilhelm intervened frequently in the placing of attendees, giving priority to monarchs and the military and only thereafter democratically elected officials. The German Empire constituted a space too: through a regular, annual rhythm of visits and travels, Wilhelm visited every state, allowing him project monarchical federalism across Germany. The medial sphere was a separate space of which Wilhelm the utility as early as the 1850s. Aided by Louis Schneider, formally his reader and librarian, but in practice his spin doctor, Wilhelm set out to craft his public persona through authorized biographies, newspaper and magazine accounts, showing himself to be pious, a devout family man and exemplary officer.
Cultivating different notions of temporality was equally important to Wilhelm’s self-staging. For a society which experienced ever more acceleration, Wilhelm’s daily appearances at the window of his study in his palace at Unter den Linden, and sitting there at his desk at night, visible from the street, reading state papers, showed him as the stable and reliable fixed point for society, the human element in an ever-more bureaucratic state, governing an ever-more complex society, and a sovereign hard at work for the wellbeing of his people. Wilhelm’s longevity also enabled him to cultivate the dominance of history in the German culture, merging the biographical arch of his life with that of Prussian-German history in the nineteenth century, stretching from Prussia’s defeat in 1806 and the triumph over Napoleon in 1814 and 1815, to German unification following the wars against Denmark, Austria and France between 1864 and 1871. As Wilhelm became older, his biography and the nineteenth century became inextricable linked in popular perception. This also explains why, when Wilhelm died in March 1888, many contemporaries thought the nineteenth century had ended.
Afterlife: death, transfiguration, and renewes assesment
If Wilhelm was thus a successful German Emperor, why, then, is the image of him in scholarship and cultural memory that of a backward-looking figure and the epitome of Prussian virtues? The answer lies in the watershed moment his contemporaries experienced with his death, which gave rise to two myths of his persona. First, once Wilhelm II had ascended the throne, he set out to create the myth of his grandfather as ‘Wilhelm the Great’, a heroic and politically assertive monarch. This not only helped to legitimize his own understanding of the imperial role, but also to counter the nascent Bismarck-myth which presented the former chancellor as the dominant political actor of the early empire. Secondly, and in response to this first myth, there emerged the image of Wilhelm as the embodiment of Prussian virtues, such as frugality, austere work ethic and sense of discipline. This myth not only provided a nostalgic idealization of his reign, but also served as political, social, and cultural criticism of Wilhelm II and the changes to the social and economic make up of German society from the 1890s onwards. But whereas the former lost its justification with the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy in 1918, the latter myth could endure, exactly because of the many watershed moments in German history, allowing for constant contrasting an unpleasant present with a presumably better past.
If we thus want to understand how the Hohenzollern dynasty succeeded in becoming the imperial monarchy and the role it subsequently played in German politics, we need to take Wilhelm I seriously as a political actor. His self-staging and cultivation of the political culture of the German Empire gave him a political agency which allowed him to define the imperial role, and the new national polity as a monarchical state, whilst consolidating the imperial monarchy as a centre of political power next to the chancellor and the Reichstag. His strategies of legitimacy defined the imperial role for his two successors, making clear that not with Wilhelm II, but with Wilhelm I the German Emperor became the Kaiser in political practice. Such continuities notwithstanding, Wilhelm’s conduct must also be seen within the specific context of the 1870s and 1880s: confronted with the necessity to integrate the imperial monarchy in the new nation state and its constitutional, institutional and federal structures, Wilhelm sought to juxtapose it from a democratic understanding of that new nation state. But it was Wilhelm II who took this juxtaposition to its conclusion, leading ultimately to the collapse of what his grandfather had established.
COVER IMAGE: The equestrian statue of Wilhelm I opposite the Berlin Schloss. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
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