After 1890 the representational role of the crown grew exponentially. On one hand this was a function of William II’s definition of his role, his determination to push his legal and extralegal powers to their limits, his delight in public display. On the other it reflected a Germany too internally divided to generate alternate public symbols acceptable outside a relatively limited circle. Men like Ludwig Windthorst or August Bebel generated more anathemas than hosannas. An increasingly bureaucratized political structure threw off a succession of faceless men in frock coats, distinguishable even to contemporaries more by tastes in facial hair than by deeds or attitudes. The army, for all its self-proclaimed role as an agency of national integration, developed no heroes after the elder Moltke. The military’s popularity was collective. Its leaders were seen as part of the institution, not above or outside it. Patterns of ultimate submission to political authority combined with an ethic of “be more than you seem” and a pseudo-aristocratic distaste for the masses to produce military men who, literally and figuratively, took a back seat to their posturing supreme warlord. Nor did an emerging popular culture produce athletes or entertainers with a national following. German editors were as willing as their French or British counterparts to boost circulation by featuring the wardrobes and the behavior of public figures. But in a country of home towns and regional loyalties, it was correspondingly difficult to focus those kinds of interest anywhere but on the numerous royal houses—with the imperial house, of course, at their apex.
This approach had been increasingly difficult to sustain even before the outbreak of war in 1914. William himself was too much a wax figure to sustain the light cast on him by an expanding network of public information. Germany’s appetite for sensation was negative as well as positive. The kaiser’s public persona and his private personality were virtually identical. On stage or off, he was vain, egotistical, shallow: the kind of man who wore better at a distance, who showed better under softer lights than the new German media provided. The repeated scandals that rocked the imperial entourage further diminished the aura of deference necessary to any successful executive. Nor was William able to compensate for his shortcomings as a representational figure by significant, or even exploitable, triumphs in foreign or domestic policy.25
A totem unable to deliver that which is demanded of it risks being sacrificed, or at least displaced. The kaiser’s public involvement in World War I peaked with his Burgfrieden address of August 4: “From this date I know no parties, only Germans.” Once he took the field with his armies as supreme warlord, William’s eclipse was as swift as it was inevitable. Had he remained outside the strategic-operational level, as ostensible coordinator of the Reich’s military and diplomatic efforts, the kaiser might have sustained his image for a few months or a few years. His grandfather had been a legitimate soldier-king who commanded respect from the professionals who served him. By the time of William II’s accession, however, the craft of war had become arcane enough, complex enough, to preclude its mastery by even the most gifted of political amateurs. A quarter-century later, Winston Churchill would be the despair of his chiefs of staff because of his penchant for claiming expertise in operational matters. Adolf Hitler’s grand-strategic insights were vitiated by his insistence on acting as an army-group commander. By 1914 the German army had grown significantly intolerant of men from outside the soldiers’ guild. Here as in so many areas, William was unable to bridge the gap. His reluctance to apply himself seriously to anything was most pronounced in his approach to military affairs. His was a mind that wavered consistently towards matters of haberdashery: the cut of a tunic or the spacing of buttons. His concern for identifying the new Imperial army with Prussia and Germany’s military past, in itself praiseworthy, was no substitute for ongoing, systematic involvement in the strategic, technical, and logistic issues that preoccupied Germany’s military planners in the years before war’s outbreak.26
Added to this was growing resentment within the officer corps at William’s constant occupation of the spotlight, his assumption of undeserved credit for the army’s progress and development. A rising new breed of technocrats, the generation typified by Ludendorff, regarded William as a positive handicap to the conduct of a modern war. Older officers like Hindenburg sustained respect, almost reverence, for the kaiser as an abstraction but at the same time found it easier and easier to disregard his person and his recommendations in practice. By the end of 1914 Bülow and Tirpitz were discussing the possibility of having William II declared insane and hospitalized. His son would become regent, with Hindenburg holding the emergency post of imperial administrator (Reichsverweser). No one doubted who would wield the real power.27
Quick victories on the western front might have encouraged papering over the situation, allowing the kaiser to posture at stage center while the generals congratulated each other behind his back. Instead as it became increasingly apparent that the Schlieffen Plan was encountering snags, no one of importance at OHL had time to entertain the kaiser. William’s relegation to figurehead status during the first three weeks of August was not a conscious, deliberate process. He was the first to notice what had happened. The kaiser’s almost pathetic appreciation of anyone at headquarters willing to spend time with him was commented on by visitors and observers alike.28 His withdrawal into what amounted to a fantasy world of long lunches and heroic anecdotes fresh from the trenches had begun even before the Battle of the Marne.
In the context of William’s shortcomings, Hindenburg’s wartime image was psychologically specific. It focussed on mature male virility. This image seems incongruous in a war that demonstrated more clearly with every passing day that combat was a young man’s province. The Germans, the French, and to a lesser extent the British learned painfully the risks of having forty-year-olds commanding battalions and men in their fifties riding at the heads of regiments. A high proportion of the men Limogé by Joffre in the fall of 1914 were victims not of incompetence, but of fatigue and stress, which sapped their judgment to the point where they made stupid mistakes.29 While the kaiser’s army had no equivalent systematic purge, its front-line units experienced a steady erosion of senior officers rendered dangerous by age. In 1915 the image of youth would be further served by the emergence of the airman as a public, almost a folk, hero. It is worth noting that the Pour le Mérite, historically awarded only to senior, aristocratic, and victorious generals, became by war’s end increasingly common currency among pilots scarcely out of their teens.30
World War I became a conflict between generations. The contrast drawn by so many participants between the old men who made wars and the young men who fought them was rendered even sharper in Germany by the youth movement. Well before 1914 the Wandervögel had challenged the verities and the virility of the older generation publicly and systematically. The outburst of enthusiasm that characterized young Germany’s response to war’s outbreak reflected a desire to establish their generation’s own parameters, to have something distinctively theirs, unclaimable and unsharable by their elders. In this context, Hindenburg was the answer to Langemarck. Typical was the cartoon published in Lustige Blätter in March, 1915. It featured a powerful field-marshal at the point of throwing a caricatured Russian officer bodily across the frontier. Hindenburg’s short-cropped gray hair and prominent stomach suggest not advancing age but a man “in the best years,” unaffected by the inroads of time in anything that mattered. The two symbols would coexist uneasily through the Weimar era until officially united in Adolf Hitler’s carefully staged 1933 Potsdam extravaganza fusing “the Marshal and the PFC.”31