in 1905, wearing the military uniforms of each other's army German foreign policy under Wilhelm II was faced with a number of significant problems. Perhaps the most apparent was that Wilhelm was an impatient man, subjective in his reactions and affected strongly by sentiment and impulse. He was personally ill-equipped to steer German foreign policy along a rational course. There were a number of examples, such as the
Kruger telegram of 1896 in which Wilhelm congratulated President
Paul Kruger for preventing the
Transvaal Republic from being annexed by the
British Empire during the
Jameson Raid. British public opinion had been quite favourable towards the Kaiser in his first twelve years on the throne, but it turned sour in the late 1890s. During the
First World War, he became the central target of British anti-German propaganda and the personification of a hated enemy. Wilhelm exploited fears of a
yellow peril trying to interest other European rulers in the perils they faced by invading China; few other leaders paid attention. Wilhelm also used the Japanese victory in the
Russo-Japanese War to try to incite fear in the west of the yellow peril that they faced by a resurgent
Imperial Japan, which Wilhelm claimed would ally with China to overrun the conventional European Powers. Wilhelm also invested in strengthening the
German colonial empire in Africa and the Pacific, but few became profitable and all were lost during the First World War. In
South West Africa (now
Namibia), a native revolt against German rule led to the
Herero and Nama genocide, although Wilhelm eventually ordered it to be stopped and recalled its mastermind General
Lothar von Trotha. One of the few times when Wilhelm succeeded in personal diplomacy was when in 1900, he supported the
morganatic marriage of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria to
Countess Sophie Chotek, and helped negotiate an end to the opposition to the wedding by Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria. A domestic triumph for Wilhelm was when his daughter Victoria Louise married the
Duke of Brunswick in 1913; this helped heal the rift between the
House of Hanover and the House of Hohenzollern that had followed Bismarck's invasion and annexation of the
Kingdom of Hanover in 1866.
Political visits to the Ottoman Empire during his state visit to the Ottoman Empire, 1898 field marshal uniform at
Dolmabahçe Palace (15 October 1917)|354x354px In his first visit to
Constantinople in 1889, Wilhelm secured the sale of German-made rifles to the Ottoman Army. Later on, he had his second political visit to the
Ottoman Empire as a guest of Sultan
Abdul Hamid II. The Kaiser started his journey with a visit to Constantinople on 16 October 1898; then he went by yacht to
Haifa on 25 October. After visiting
Jerusalem and
Bethlehem, the Kaiser went back to
Jaffa to embark to
Beirut, where he took the train passing
Aley and
Zahlé to reach
Damascus on 7 November. While visiting the
Mausoleum of Saladin the following day, the Kaiser made a speech: On 10 November, Wilhelm went to visit
Baalbek before heading to Beirut to board his ship back home on 12 November. Wilhelm's fiery rhetoric clearly expressed his vision for Germany as one of the great powers. There were two versions of the speech. The
German Foreign Office issued an edited version, making sure to omit one particularly incendiary paragraph that they regarded as diplomatically embarrassing. The edited version was this: The official version omitted the following passage from which the speech derives its name: The term "Hun" later became the favoured epithet of Allied anti-German war propaganda during the First World War. during a visit to
Bremen, in an apparent assassination attempt Wilhelm was struck in the face by a sharp iron object thrown at him. The assailant, identified as Johann-Dietrich Weiland, was adjudged to be insane. The Kaiser was riding in a coach to the railway station when the incident happened at 10:10 pm, and the object thrown "afterward proved to be a
fishplate". The German Emperor was left with a deep wound, an inch and a half long, below his left eye; the Chief of the Naval Ministry would note later, "On the temple or in the eye the blow could have been devastating. The wonder of it is that our All-Gracious Lord felt neither the object flying at him nor, in the rain, the copiously flowing blood; it was those around him who drew his attention to it at first." Despite rumors in the press that the Kaiser had sunk into a depression, he would say in a speech at the end of the month, "nothing is more false than to pretend that my sanity has suffered in some way. I am exactly the same as I was; I have become neither elegiac nor melancholic... everything stays the same."
Eulenberg Scandal In the years 1906–1909, Socialist journalist
Maximilian Harden published accusations of homosexual activity involving ministers, courtiers, army officers, and Wilhelm's closest friend and advisor, Prince
Philipp zu Eulenberg. According to
Robert K. Massie: The result was years of highly publicized scandals, trials, resignations, and suicides. Harden, like some in the upper echelons of the military and Foreign Office, resented Eulenberg's approval of the
Anglo-French Entente, and also his encouragement of Wilhelm to rule personally. The scandal led to Wilhelm experiencing a nervous breakdown, and the removal of Eulenberg and others of his circle from the court. The view that Wilhelm was a deeply repressed homosexual is increasingly supported by scholars: certainly, he never came to terms with his feelings for Eulenberg. Historians have linked the Eulenberg scandal to a fundamental shift in German policy that heightened its military aggressiveness and ultimately contributed to
World War I.
Moroccan Crisis :
John Bull walking off with
Marianne, turning his back on Wilhelm II, whose sabre is shown extending from his coat One of Wilhelm's diplomatic blunders sparked the
Moroccan Crisis of 1905. He made a spectacular visit to
Tangier, in Morocco on 31 March 1905. He conferred with representatives of Sultan
Abdelaziz of Morocco. The Kaiser proceeded to tour the city on the back of a white horse. The Kaiser declared he had come to support the sovereignty of the Sultan—a statement which amounted to a provocative challenge to French influence in Morocco. The Sultan subsequently rejected a set of French-proposed governmental reforms and invited major world powers to a conference that advised him on necessary reforms. The Kaiser's presence was seen as an assertion of German interests in Morocco, in opposition to those of France. In his speech, he even made remarks in favour of Moroccan independence, and this led to friction with France, which was expanding its colonial interests in Morocco, and to the
Algeciras Conference, which served largely to further isolate Germany in Europe.
Daily Telegraph Affair The Daily Telegraph Affair of 1908 involved the publication in Germany of an article from the British newspaper that included a series of wild statements and diplomatically damaging remarks. Wilhelm had viewed the article, which was based on discussions he had had with Colonel
Edward Stuart-Wortley in 1907, as an opportunity to promote his views on Anglo-German friendship, but due to the content and emotional tone of many of his statements, he ended up further alienating not only the British but also the French, Russians and Japanese. He was quoted as saying that he was among the minority of Germans friendly to Britain; that during the
Second Boer War, he had rebuffed the French and Russians when they asked Germany to help them "not only to save the Boer Republics, but also to humiliate England to the dust
"; and that the German naval buildup was targeted against the Japanese, not Britain. One especially memorable quotation from the article was, "You English are mad, mad,
mad as March hares". The effect in Germany was quite significant, with serious calls to modify the constitution to limit the emperor's powers. The
Daily Telegraph crisis deeply wounded Wilhelm's previously unimpaired self-confidence, and he experienced a severe bout of depression. He kept a low profile for many months after the scandal broke, although in July 1909 he took the opportunity to force the resignation of the chancellor, Prince von Bülow, whose defence of him in the Reichstag had been aimed primarily at shifting blame from himself for not stopping the publication of the article. As a result of the scandal, Wilhelm had less influence in domestic and foreign policy for the remainder of his reign than he had previously exercised.
Naval arms race with Britain Nothing Wilhelm did in the international arena was of more influence than his decision to pursue a policy of massive naval construction. A powerful navy was Wilhelm's pet project. He had inherited from his mother a love of the British
Royal Navy, which was at that time the world's largest. He once confided to his uncle, the Prince of Wales, that his dream was to have a "fleet of my own some day". Wilhelm's frustration over his fleet's poor showing at the
Fleet Review at
his grandmother's Diamond Jubilee celebrations, combined with his inability to exert German influence in South Africa following the dispatch of the Kruger telegram, led to Wilhelm taking definitive steps toward the construction of a fleet to rival that of his British cousins. Wilhelm called on the services of the dynamic naval officer
Alfred von Tirpitz, whom he appointed to the head of the Imperial Naval Office in 1897. The new admiral had conceived of what came to be known as the "Risk Theory" or the
Tirpitz Plan, by which Germany could force Britain to accede to German demands in the international arena through the threat posed by a powerful battlefleet concentrated in the
North Sea. Tirpitz enjoyed Wilhelm's full support in his advocacy of successive naval bills of 1897 and 1900, by which the German navy was built up to contend with that of the British Empire. Naval expansion under the
Fleet Acts eventually led to severe financial strains in Germany by 1914, as by 1906 Wilhelm had committed his navy to construction of the much larger, more expensive
dreadnought type of battleship. The British depended on naval superiority and its response was to make Germany its most feared enemy. In addition to the expansion of the fleet, the
Kiel Canal was opened in 1895, enabling faster movements between the North Sea and the
Baltic Sea. In 1889 Wilhelm reorganised top-level control of the navy by creating a
Naval Cabinet () equivalent to the
German Imperial Military Cabinet which had previously functioned in the same capacity for both the army and navy. The Head of the Naval Cabinet was responsible for promotions, appointments, administration, and issuing orders to naval forces. Captain
Gustav von Senden-Bibran was appointed as the first head and remained so until 1906. The existing Imperial admiralty was abolished, and its responsibilities divided between two organisations. A new position was created, equivalent to the supreme commander of the army: the Chief of the High Command of the Admiralty, or , was responsible for ship deployments, strategy and tactics. Vice-Admiral
Max von der Goltz was appointed in 1889 and remained in post until 1895. Construction and maintenance of ships and obtaining supplies was the responsibility of the State Secretary of the Imperial Navy Office (
Reichsmarineamt), responsible to the Imperial Chancellor and advising the on naval matters. The first appointee was Rear Admiral
Karl Eduard Heusner, followed shortly by Rear Admiral
Friedrich von Hollmann from 1890 to 1897. Each of these three heads of department reported separately to Wilhelm. ==World War I==