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The attack was precisely timed.
Kaiser Wilhelm II had just returned to Berlin from a hunting party at Liebenberg Castle when an article appeared on November 24, 1906 in the Berlin magazine “Die Zukunft” under the heading “Dies Irae” (“Day of Wrath”).
The author, publisher Maximilian Harden, had included a seemingly puzzling passage in it:
“November 1906. Night.
Open field in the Uker area.
The harper: 'Have you read it?'
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The sweet one: 'Already Friday.'
The harper: 'Do you think there's more to come?'
The sweet one: 'We have to reckon with the possibility;
he seems oriented, and when he knows letters that speak of 'darling' ... '
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The sweet one: 'A witches' guild.
Past!
Past!'"
Gretchen, Faust and Mephistopheles in the dungeon - by Moritz Retzsch (1779–1857)
Source: picture alliance / akg-images
Every German educated citizen recognized the template for this exchange of words - Goethe's “Faust”, more precisely the penultimate scene of “Faust I”.
It's about the eve of Gretchen's execution.
Anyone who had graduated from a humanistic grammar school in the 19th century knew that the real culprits for the crime for which the desperate child murderer was to be judged were Faust and Mephistopheles.
The allusion, which at first glance was puzzling, could hardly be misunderstood: the “harper” and the “sweetie” were held responsible for what happened to the “darling”.
The author: Maximilian Harden (1861-1927)
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
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Well-educated circles in the capital of the Reich enjoyed guesswork as to whom Harden might have meant.
The “BZ am Mittag” piqued curiosity: “You ask who is the sweetie and who is the harper?
I can't tell you;
but in every salon of our virtuous city a friend will whisper the names of the two gentlemen behind the fan. "
Everyone at the court of Wilhelm II understood the implications: “The harper” meant the hobby composer and close friend of Emperor Philipp Fürst Eulenburg, owner of Liebenberg Castle in the Uckermark, the “Uker region”.
He actually enjoyed picking up the strings and playing for His Majesty.
“The sweet one”, there was also clarity about this in the highest circles, stood for Lieutenant General Kuno Graf Moltke, adjutant of the emperor, confidante of the family and incidentally (overwhelmed) city commander of Berlin.
"Harper": Philipp Fürst Eulenburg (1847–1921)
Source: picture alliance / akg-images
Eulenburg and Moltke were known to be close friends and belonged to a small group of high-ranking personalities who liked to meet under discreet circumstances, including at Eulenburg's Gut Liebenberg.
There were also catchy letters that at least suggested a homosexual relationship between the two of them, which had previously been a topic of conversation in higher circles.
Harden's article triggered the so-called Eulenburg Affair, which developed into one of the greatest scandals in the German Empire.
Because none other than Wilhelm II himself had the nickname "Liebchen" in the Liebenberger Kreis.
"In the court society began a whisper and whisper full of fear and glee," said Otto Hammann, who was press officer of the Foreign Office at the time: "The story was spicy and promised to be even spicier." Nevertheless, one man apparently didn't notice anything at first Von Harden's attack: the emperor himself. The autocratic monarch naturally did not read a polemical paper like “Zukunft”, and none of his companions had the courage to inform the emperor.
"The sweet one": Kuno Graf Moltke (1847-1923)
Source: Wikipedia / public domain
It stayed that way for the time being, because Eulenburg reached an unofficial agreement with Harden: The publicist would no longer attack the prince publicly if Eulenburg immediately withdrew from the circle of Wilhelm II.
Because that was what Harden was about: by placing the emperor at the center of a homosexual “camarilla”, he wanted to defame his “idea of a 'personal regiment' with instinctively negative associations”, writes the historian and Prussia expert Christopher Clark in his Wilhelm II. -Biography.
Eulenburg gave in to blackmail and spent the following weeks in Switzerland.
Allegedly because of the health of his daughter, he left Berlin without saying goodbye to the Kaiser in person as usual.
"Dear": Kaiser Wilhelm II. (1859–1941)
Source: pa / dpa / dpa-ZB
In the issue of “Zukunft” of April 13, 1907, for example, he wrote about the “nuisances” in the emperor's vicinity who were “wimps” and avoided foreign policy conflicts: “They did not dream of world fires;
it's warm enough already. ”With this he once again served the homophobia of the middle class.
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Two weeks later, Harden Eulenburg came out openly as gay: "Prince Friedrich Heinrich von Prussia (a cousin of Wilhelm II, whose homosexuality had become public in January 1907; the editor) had to because he suffers from inherited perversion of the sexual instinct, renounce the men's championship in the Order of St. John.
Is there a milder statute in the chapter of the Black Eagle?
There is at least one
person
whose
vita sexualis is
no healthier than that of the exiled prince. "
"A Grüppchen": Title page from the "Lustige Blätter" (1907)
Source: picture-alliance / akg-images
Even now, none of the courtiers dared to inform Wilhelm.
His eldest son, however, the crown prince of the same name, now got wind of the matter;
he went to his father and informed him that it was "his hardest walk," he later wrote in his memoir.
The emperor raged and had Eulenburg reported, "that all the highest the same expects a message about whether and what steps you have taken to initiate a judicial transfer against certain suspicions in one of the last articles of the 'Future'." Thereupon Eulenburg reported, "the harper" Voluntary disclosure for violation of Section 175 of the Criminal Code (“unnatural fornication between persons of the male sex”).
His goal was to get rid of the allegation through an official investigation.
On the contrary, that was understood at court and in interested circles as an admission of guilt.
Kuno von Moltke, "the sweet one", who was also put under pressure by the emperor, took his leave of his own accord, but then initiated a defamation process against Harden.
However, the hoped-for support from the emperor, in whose immediate vicinity he had served for 14 years, did not materialize - the former city commandant lost.
"Dirty laundry";
from: "The True Jacob" (1908)
Source: picture alliance / akg-images
The consequences were clear: "Kuno Moltke had to hand in the farewell because of perverse transgressions," wrote Hildegard Baroness Spitzemberg, who was always well informed about court matters, in her diary.
And she mused: "How long will Philipp Eulenburg, who is considered to be the most engraved, last?"
In the matter, the 64-year-old, who was considered a sharp-tongued critic of Wilhelm II, was on Harden's side: “It was high time that His Majesty did something to free himself from this intimacy, the reputation of which would have rubbed off on himself . ”In fact, Wilhelm II now undertook a liberation: He removed all of Eulenburg's friends, whether gay or not, from his surroundings.
Even Eulenburg herself could not "hold on" much longer after Moltke's departure - just as Baroness Spitzemberg had speculated.
In 1908, with the greatest public interest, criminal proceedings for perjury (he had denied a sexual relationship with Moltke under oath) were opened against him.
The proceedings were soon interrupted because the defendant was incapable of standing and finally dropped in May 1909.
Eulenburg went to Bad Gastein for a cure for a deposit of 100,000 marks, or around a hundred average annual income.
Although he later returned to Schloss Liebenberg, he withdrew completely from social life and practically never appeared in Berlin;
he died in 1921.
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Kuno von Moltke had surreptitiously compared himself to Harden - under pressure from Reich Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow, who did not want the scandal to escalate any further.
But in public, as with Wilhelm II, the former city commandant and confidante of the imperial family was regarded as
persona non grata
;
he died in Breslau in 1923.
The emperor, who was said to have homophile tendencies from time to time, and who on the other hand cultivated extramarital relations with noble women as well as courtesans, relied more than ever on demonstrative masculinity.
The loss of his best friend Eulenburg had shaken him deeply, which he overcompensated from now on - at least one possible interpretation.
That didn't help him much.
The historian Thomas Nipperdey summed up: "The reputation of the emperor and the ruling class were badly shaken."
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