Friedrich von Holstein

German diplomat

• Born: April 24, 1837
• Birthplace: Schwedt an der Oder, Pomerania (now in Germany)
• Died: May 8, 1909
• Place of death: Berlin, Germany

A controversial chief adviser on German foreign policy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Holstein has sometimes been blamed for Germany’s diplomatic isolation in the years leading up to World War I.

Early Life

An only child, Friedrich von Holstein passed a sickly and lonely boyhood while living on his family’s estate and in the family’s Berlin town house. His adolescence was spent with his parents and private tutors at European health resorts, where he became fluent in English, French, and Italian, before attending the University of Berlin. Physically unfit to follow the example of his father’s army career, Holstein was briefly and unhappily in the Prussian government’s legal division. Through the influence of a neighboring family friend, Otto von Bismarck, Holstein was admitted to the diplomatic service in 1860 and sent as attaché to the legation at St. Petersburg, where Bismarck was then Prussian minister.

In 1863, Holstein passed his foreign service examination and was assigned to Rio de Janeiro but was recalled to Berlin by his patron, Bismarck, who had become Prussian minister-president. In the Danish War of 1864, Holstein served as one of Bismarck’s liaison officers to Prussian army headquarters and was later sent to London for the 1864-1865 Conference on the Danish Question.

An 1865-1867 sojourn in the United States began as a travel leave with the purpose of self-discovery, as his father’s accidental death in 1863 had left Holstein without family but with some inherited wealth. Photographs of the young baron depict a slender man of medium height with conventionally bearded good looks but a somewhat wary expression. He combined adventures on the Western frontier with a vague assignment at the Washington legation. His friendship with the unconventional young wife of Senator Charles Sumner was later magnified by gossip into an improbable tale of scandalous romance. More prosaically, Holstein began, in the United States, an ultimately unprofitable business enterprise, which continued after his 1867 return to Germany, caused him to leave diplomatic service in 1868, and apparently consumed most or all of his inheritance.

When the Ems Telegram in July of 1870 foreshadowed the Franco-Prussian War, Holstein put himself at Bismarck’s disposal and was sent to Italy as the chancellor’s private agent to organize anti-French republican activists there in case King Victor Emmanuel II supported Napoleon III. During the 1871 Prussian siege of Paris, Holstein served as Bismarck’s unofficial contact with Communard leaders in order to weaken the French government’s position in the preliminary peace negotiations.

After the war, Holstein remained in France as chief secretary for Germany’s Paris embassy, soon headed by the baron’s new chief, Count Harry von Arnim, a political ambassador of great influence and aspirations. Arnim intrigued to overthrow the new French republic as a step toward himself replacing Bismarck as chancellor. His exposure led to sensational trials involving, among much else, purloined state documents. A courtroom charge that Holstein had taken the missing papers made headlines, and his subsequent vindication was not as widely remembered as the false but memorable accusation. Holstein entered the public mind as a man suspected.

Life’s Work

In 1876, Holstein was promoted to the Berlin foreign office, where he spent the rest of his career. He became head of an information apparatus for whatever Bismarck needed to know as well as a conduit for some of what Bismarck decided to do. The baron gradually became a work-absorbed bureaucrat. Rustic in dress and slightly grotesque in the special glasses his eyes came to require, he avoided government social functions and lived simply in three small rooms in an unfashionably remote suburb, though sometimes hosting a few personal friends, generally at Borchardt’s restaurant.

Occasionally rude to his superiors, jealous of his prerogatives though considerate of the clerical staff, and with no clear public role, Privy Councillor Baron Holstein seemed to be a consequential official, simply because he possessed important information. The possibilities for blackmail in the German society of the time were abundant, and speculation grew about the basis for Holstein’s influence. The result was the Holstein legend, since discredited, of an intelligence chief with spies everywhere and a “poison cupboard” of secrets about those in high places—a dim-sighted but dangerous “mole.” Bismarck, among many, fed the rumors, when he described “the man with the hyena eyes” as useful because “sometimes I must do evil things.”

In the foreign policy field that was much, though not all, of his job, Holstein followed Bismarck’s views almost entirely for about five years. By the mid-1880’s, however, his own anti-Russian sentiments increasingly diverged from Bismarck’s insistence on a “bridge to St. Petersburg.” Like others in German politics, Holstein assumed that the 1888 accession of Kaiser William II would hasten the day of Bismarck’s retirement. The baron’s efforts to postpone the break while preserving his own position were at least made with the knowledge of both parties.

It is sometimes claimed that from Bismarck’s dismissal by the kaiser in March of 1890 to Holstein’s own resignation in April of 1906, Holstein was “the real master” of German foreign policy. This exaggerates Holstein’s control and underrates the extent to which he was forced to yield to the judgment of his superiors, the impulses of the kaiser, and the pressures of the Navy League and the colonial enthusiasts. The chancellorship of Leo von Caprivi (1890-1894) was the administration most influenced by Holstein, especially in the 1890 decision to abandon the Russian reinsurance treaty in order to have a free hand for pursuing an alliance with England. However, the generous territorial exchanges of Caprivi’s treaties with England were merely seen by the British government and press as “trying to buy our friendship.” England showed no interest in joining the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy.

Meanwhile, Russia used its diplomatic “free hand” for the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1893-1894, a blow to German security on two fronts which caused wide criticism of the kaiser’s new advisers, including Holstein. When Chlodwig von Hohenlohe succeeded Caprivi as chancellor, Holstein was often reduced to ineffective protests against the kaiser’s insistence on the 1895 Triple Intervention, which alienated Japan, the needless Kruger Telegram of 1896, and the naval construction program begun by Alfred von Tirpitz in 1898.

Holstein’s renewed attempts at an English alliance expired in fruitless negotiations between 1898 and 1901. The Anglo-French Entente Cordiale of 1904 was a heavy blow to Holstein’s policy direction, but the Far Eastern War between Russia and Japan did give Germany some diplomatic opportunities. Holstein supported the kaiser’s hope of attracting Russia and perhaps even France into an anti-British front. At the same time, Holstein pressed on Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow and the kaiser a policy of detaching England from the Entente Cordiale by challenging French claims in Morocco.

The kaiser’s speech in Tangier escalated this move into a crisis, and a war between France and Germany seemed an imminent possibility. Holstein argued that Great Britain would not support a France whose Russian ally was temporarily helpless and that therefore France would back down. He urged going to the brink of war, but the responsibility for going over the brink was not one the kaiser wished to take. The Algeciras Conference of 1906 found Great Britain ready to support France, the United States unexpectedly pro-French, and Italy predictably neutral. That left the Austro-German alliance diplomatically isolated. Such a conspicuous failure of German diplomacy caused foreign office reverberations leading to Holstein’s resignation on April 16, 1906.

Significance

Friedrich von Holstein was a career foreign officer who became an important foreign policy adviser following Bismarck’s dismissal. As such, he never possessed the real authority of policy decisions because he had no political power base. On the whole, his advice was better than the inconsistent policies of his superiors. Holstein worked in the unfavorable atmosphere of an autocratic regime on the way to the scrap heap of history. The kaiser, with his frequent delusions of grandeur, was surrounded by irresponsible flatterers who isolated him from reality. Too outspoken and abrasive for such an entourage, Holstein tried to promote sensible policies by influencing the monarch’s key advisers. Inevitably his efforts were gossiped about as part of the court circle intrigues, and, after the defeat of 1918, memoirs of the fallen regime often made Holstein the scapegoat for the diplomatic blunders leading to the lost war.

Holstein’s papers and modern research have vindicated his character from the charges of base motives. Of the men in the kaiser’s government, he was certainly above average in ability, patriotic dedication, honesty, and courage, and less given to malice or feline remarks. That comparison does not elevate him to a place among leading statesmen. His long apprenticeship under Bismarck did not qualify Holstein as a diplomatic sorcerer.

On balance, Holstein’s record shows an impressive command of European and world problems; he foresaw more clearly than most the danger to Europe of the growing power of Russia. However, he was unable to comprehend effectively “the other side of the hill.” He lacked the penetration, vision, and intuitive human understanding of great statesmanship. If by that standard Holstein failed, so also did the Germany and Europe of his generation.

Bibliography

Berghann, V. R. Imperial Germany, 1871-1918: Economy, Society, Culture, and Politics. Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Berghann Books, 2005. Comprehensive and accessible survey of Germany history, organized thematically. Includes a chapter on foreign policy before and after World War I.

Bülow, Bernhard von. Memoirs of Prince von Bülow. Translated by F. A. Voigt. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1931-1932. References to Holstein are widely scattered but plentiful, negative, and frequently malicious. Bülow presents Holstein not as a masterful gray eminence but as incompetent, disagreeable, and emotionally unstable.

Feuchtwanger, Edgar. Imperial Germany, 1850-1918. London: Routledge, 2001. Chronicles the political development of Germany during this period, including the country’s aggressive foreign policy before World War I. Contains information about Holstein.

Gooch, George Peabody. Studies in Modern History. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968. This essay by a widely respected historian, revised from a 1923 article, had great influence in establishing the Holstein legend for a generation of students and presents a readable collection of anecdotes.

Haller, Johannes. Philip Eulenburg: The Kaiser’s Friend. Translated by Ethel Colburn Mayne. 2 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930. Holstein’s attempts to influence Wilhelm II through the kaiser’s adviser are well presented. Haller’s biography is a frame for Eulenburg’s collection of expansive letters and recollections. An appendix gives Eulenburg’s specific comments on Holstein.

Holstein, Friedrich von. The Holstein Papers. Edited by Norman Rich and M. H. Fisher. 4 vols. London: Cambridge University Press, 1955-1963. These four volumes collect the relevant data on which much of Rich’s biography is based. Volume 1 includes a useful introduction as well as Holstein’s autobiographical sketches. Volume 2 contains Holstein’s diaries, and volumes 3 and 4 contain his correspondence.

Hull, Isabel V. The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1888-1918. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. The kaiser and Eulenburg are at the center of this comprehensive account, but Holstein’s relation to the group is established in this study, which includes a useful examination of some of the Holstein-Eulenburg letters from a different perspective.

Rich, Norman. Friedrich von Holstein. 2 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1965. A long-awaited work, this is the only full-length biography of Holstein. The narrative follows Holstein’s viewpoint, but objective judgment is maintained. A historical context of considerable detail makes the book especially useful to scholars of German and diplomatic history.

Seligmann, Matthew S., and Roderick R. McLean. Germany from Reich to Republic, 1871-1918: Politics, Hierarchy, and Elites. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Information about Holstein is included in this history of Germany during the era of of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Otto von Bismarck.