Bernhard von Bülow

Chancellor of Germany (1900-1909)

• Born: May 3, 1849
• Birthplace: Klein-Flottbek, Holstein (now in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany)
• Died: October 28, 1929
• Place of death: Rome, Italy

During twelve years of high office, first as foreign minister and then imperial chancellor, Bülow virtually shaped the expansionism that Emperor William II of Germany embraced as the guiding principle for both foreign and domestic policy. Bülow believed in Weltpolitik as the guarantee of German national security and interest. He acquired the sobriquet the Eel for his skill in advancing this policy.

Early Life

Bernhard von Bülow (BYEW-loh) was born into a prominent Prussian Junker (aristocratic) family with connections across northern Germany and Denmark. His father was a distinguished diplomat, much acclaimed for his handling of the Schleswig-Holstein Question after 1850. Young Bernhard was much influenced by his father and bowed to his wishes in most things, including following in his footsteps to an even more distinguished career as diplomat and statesman.

Bülow grew up in Frankfurt in the 1850’s and 1860’s, living a few streets away from Otto von Bismarck, whom Bülow came to admire and regard as the greatest statesman in German history. The families were friends. The Bülows played host to many notable personalities, German and other. In 1861, Bülow entered the nondenominational Frankfurt gymnasium, where he was taught by Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish masters. The headmaster was Tycho Mommsen, younger brother of Theodor Mommsen, the great classical scholar. The Bülows had many Jewish friends in Frankfurt, including banker Mayer Rothschild, who could recall the time when Frankfurt Jews were locked up in the ghetto at night. Bülow gained an appreciation of diversity from such connections. He eventually married an Italian Catholic even as he shared the evangelical Pietist tradition that characterized much of the Prussian aristocracy and regretted that his Jewish friends would not see the light and become Christian.

Frankfurt was an important influence. In the romantic atmosphere of preunification Germany, the city represented “the grandeur, but also the tragedy of German history.” From growing up there he acquired the nationalist beliefs that became the central philosophy of his intellectual and professional life. In his mind these beliefs connected directly to the tradition that German imperial unity began with Charlemagne more than a thousand years before.

Bülow wanted to enter the university in Bonn after passing matriculation examinations in 1867. His father feared the influence of the Student Corps in that Rhenish setting and directed his son to Lausanne, Switzerland, instead. The following year, Bülow entered the University of Leipzig, and in 1870, Berlin, where he remained. During those student years, he undertook walking tours of Germany, the Austrian Empire, and Italy, acquiring an abiding affection for those regions in the process.

In 1870, Bülow joined the Royal Hussar Regiment on the outbreak of war with France. He served with courage, if not distinction, and was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1871. “Oh, glorious, splendid days!” he recalled near the end of his life. “My heart bleeds when I think of them now, and then remember the wretchedness and shame of the present.”

The war ended with France humiliated by defeat and German unification declared in a ceremony at Versailles outside Paris. Bülow’s German nation was reality at last, and he devoted his life to its service. Bismarck was architect of the new Germany and its first chancellor, and worked to establish its place in Europe. In his turn, Bülow would work to make the German Empire a colonial world power. A career that spanned the great age of European imperial expansion convinced Bülow that a centuries-old Prussian dictum applied equally to the larger German stage: that to survive and prosper, the German Empire must become a world power. He worked toward this end from the moment he began his diplomatic career right through his nine years as imperial chancellor.

Life’s Work

Bülow left the hussars at his father’s insistence to enter the foreign service. His career followed conventional patterns. Between 1875 and 1897, he served successive diplomatic posts in St. Petersburg, Vienna, Athens, Paris, and Bucharest, each with success, and gained increased respect with each experience. He ended this run with an ambassadorship in Rome, which led directly to the Wilhelmstrasse as secretary of state for foreign affairs in 1897 and to the chancellery three years later. There were several amorous adventures along the way (but without scandal), until he met, and in 1886 married, an Italian aristocrat with an annulled marriage, Marie Anna Zoe Rosalia Beccadelli di Bologni, Princess Camporeale. Meanwhile, Bülow expanded his range of acquaintances among Europe’s great statesmen, including Benjamin Disraeli and William Ewart Gladstone of Great Britain. Prince Aleksandr Gorchakov of Russia, a pivotal diplomatic figure in the middle third of the century, he knew from his Frankfurt days.

In 1897, Bülow was relatively unknown outside diplomatic circles, and it was widely speculated that his appointment as foreign secretary was a foreign policy move. This might even have been true. Relations among the Triple Alliance members Germany, Austria, and Italy were slipping. Bülow had been a very popular ambassador in Rome, and his elevation to the Wilhelmstrasse would be read in Rome as a positive move to strengthen the alliance. Moreover, he was known to have been a longtime admirer of Bismarck, the alliance architect, a fact that increased the symbolic importance of his appointment. Regardless of whether it was his doing, the alliance continued to hold together, at least long enough to allow Germany to stumble into a general European war in 1914.

As foreign secretary and chancellor, Bülow pressed forward with Kaiser Wilhelm’s Weltpolitik , specifically through pressuring the other colonial powers to grant Germany access to overseas colonies. During Bülow’s time, German overseas interests expanded into Asia and further into Africa. In 1899, he successfully negotiated acquisition of the Caroline Islands, for which he was made a count. In 1900, he was named minister-president of Prussia and chancellor of the German Empire, from which position he pushed Weltpolitik even harder.

On his appointment as chancellor, speculation was again rife as to why he had been chosen to replace the aging Prince Chlodwig Karl Viktor Hohenlohe. It was not enough that William II was pleased with Bülow’s work in the Wilhelmstrasse. Remembering Bismarck’s conflict with the young emperor and subsequent abrupt dismissal by him, the Berliner neueste Nachrichten reckoned that a “cautious and versatile diplomatist such as Bernhard von Bülow appears to be best adapted” to dealing with the temperamental William, who would not tolerate a rival in the formation of foreign policy. More than once over the next nine years, Bülow was accused of being merely executor of the emperor’s will.

Of course Bülow was an executor, but not merely. In defending himself against the charge, Bülow argued simply that emperor and chancellor must trust each other and agree on a common policy. Failure to do this (plus the monumental egos involved) had driven Bismarck from office. The defense was simple enough to be correct, and simple enough also to be dissembling. It more than justified Bülow’s sobriquet as the Eel. Actually, Bülow and William believed equally that the growth of Germany as a world power was necessary to preserve and expand German national interests. Delivering a skillfully compelling and ultimately successful justification before the Reichstag of Germany’s actions in China was among his early achievements in promoting Weltpolitik and was but one instance when he spoke for the emperor and for himself.

As chancellor, Bülow was responsible also for domestic policy. He was accused of being an “agrarian,” of structuring domestic policies that favored the landed Junker aristocracy at the expense of the nation. He responded that he was an agrarian only in being himself a landowner, and that as chancellor his duty was to all sections of the nation, social and economic. Historians do not agree that he practiced very assiduously what he preached, and his book Imperial Germany written during this period contains some rather strikingly “agrarian” arguments in the sense implied by his critics. All the same, some credit is due Bülow for the rapid expansion of material Germany during the first decade of the twentieth century. Also he did rise above domestic particularism sufficiently to hold together the diverse elements that composed the government’s Reichstag majority.

Throughout his chancellorship, whether on foreign or domestic issues, Bülow was William’s partner (critics naturally preferred “servant,” and indeed William took this view in his more pompous moods). At the same time, Bülow’s dedication to state interests compelled him to disagree with his sovereign when conscience deemed it necessary. This was in the best Junker tradition, and, despite frequent rumors to the contrary, William allowed Bülow’s disagreement so long as it was not substantive, as Bismarck’s had been.

In 1905, Count Bülow was raised to the rank of prince in part as a reward for success in dealing with the French. The title left no doubt that Bülow was in favor with William. In 1906, on the occasion of the passage of a finance bill that Bülow shepherded through the Reichstag, the emperor publicly backed his chancellor against public speculation that he was to be fired.

The test of Bülow’s independence came over the kaiser’s infamous Daily Telegraph “interview,” published in London on October 28, 1908, in which William made many ill-considered remarks. Both British and German opinion was aroused. Bülow loyally took responsibility for the interview and tendered his resignation. William would not accept it. Bülow then let it be known in a Reichstag speech that the emperor was not persuaded of the disastrous consequences of the interview, had learned his lesson, and in future would “observe that strict reserve, even in private conversations, which is equally indispensable in the interests of a uniform policy.” Bülow emerged from the incident both unscathed and appearing to have chastened his sovereign. He was worthy of being named the Eel and had proved to be the person to handle William. No other chancellor came close to him in this regard.

Bülow, however, was not so adroit in evading the consequences of a disastrous budget proposal laid before the Reichstag the following year. The liberal-conservative bloc that sustained him broke up, and he remained in office only long enough to shepherd a mutilated budget through the assembly. In July, 1909, he left office, his public career ended.

Significance

Bülow was a cultured, sophisticated aristocrat with more than mere pretensions of intellectuality. His knowledge and grasp of German literature, philosophy, and political thought were considerable, and his marriage to the Italian princess Camporeale, at one time a piano student of Franz Liszt, indicated a cosmopolitan outlook as well. Beneath all of this ran the deeply German nationalist and imperialist sympathies that both informed and directed his work and career, and indeed his life, making it both possible and inevitable that his contribution to German history would be the enhancement of an eventually destructive power. To the extent that Germany was responsible for World War I, the fault lies as much with Bülow as with his imperial master.

Bibliography

Barkin, Kenneth D. The Controversy over German Industrialization, 1890-1902. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Includes a fairly involved discussion of Bülow’s tariff legislation and his effect on Germany’s industrialization.

Bülow, Bernhard von. Letters of Prince von Bülow. Translated by Frederic Whyte. London: Hutchinson, 1930. This work presents letters from Bülow’s period as chancellor. The selection is reasonable, but it was not Whyte’s purpose to praise Bülow.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Memoirs. Translated by F. A. Voigt. 4 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1932. Extremely informative but self-justifying, as such memoirs frequently are. Yet no more detailed account exists of Bülow’s life, and a full appreciation of him, and his historic role, is impossible without these memoirs.

Kitchen, Martin. The Political Economy of Germany, 1815-1914. London: Croom Helm, 1978. Provides a good overview of Bülow’s role in the economy of Germany during the time he was in office.

Mombauer, Annika, and Wilhlem Deist, eds. The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. A collection of essays about the final years of Wilhelm’s reign (1900-1918), including information about Bülow’s chancellorship.

Mommsen, Wolfgang J. “Domestic Factors in German Foreign Policy Before 1914.” Central European History 6 (March, 1973): 3-43. Sets forth some of the complications in German foreign policy arising from expanding industrialism, internal political conflict, and the emotional surge toward colonialism.

Steiner, Zara. The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1898-1914. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968. A useful analysis of European relations balanced on the fulcrum of Anglo-German rivalry during Bülow’s time as foreign secretary and chancellor.

Turner, L. C. F. Origins of the First World War. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970. Another general work on the period that focuses on the causes of World War I. Bülow’s role is discussed throughout.