Our Fritz: Emperor Frederick III and the Political Culture of Imperial Germany by Frank Lorenz Müller (review)

The title of this book reminds us that Germany’s Crown Prince Frederick William— who reigned for ninety-nine days as Emperor Frederick III before succumbing to cancer in 1888—enjoyed immense personal popularity during his tragically foreshortened lifetime. Often called “Our Fritz,” he might appropriately be described in history books as the Counterfactual Kaiser. Long considered in contemporary writings and in subsequent historical literature as a failed liberal alternative to Germany’s fateful post-1871 course, the Crown Prince and his British wife Victoria fell victim—so the story goes—to the longevity of his nonagenarian father, to the machinations of people such as Otto von Bismarck, and, finally, to the disease that killed him at age fifty-seven. The counterfactual speculations begin with Frederick William’s marriage to the daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and they continue with King William I’s abdication ideas in September 1862; the Crown Prince’s Danzig speech of 1863, in which he criticized his father’s government; and Frederick William’s supposed friendships with assorted liberal politicians and advisers. What might have happened, so the counterfactual query asks, had Frederick William succeeded to his father’s throne earlier?

In an elegantly written and convincingly argued analysis, Frank Lorenz Müller demonstrates that this familiar question is itself ahistorical and misleading and is based largely on a political mythology that has its roots in Frederick William’s own lifetime. Building on the earlier analyses of scholars such as J. Alden Nichols and Patricia Kollander, the author simultaneously demythologizes Frederick William the man and delineates the origins and character of the mythology that came to surround him. He shows that Frederick William was a bundle of contradictions, a man who uncomfortably combined vaguely constitutional-liberal sentiments with assertively dynastic and monarchist convictions. In Bismarck’s own words, “I know pretty much all the princes in Europe, but I do not know a single one whose view of his princely vocation is as exalted” as that of the crown prince (100). At the same time, there was nothing especially remarkable about Frederick William’s liberal views; according to Müller, the crown prince was “entirely in tune with the predominant liberal sentiment of the day” (74). But his ideas of liberalism were moderate at best, similar to the ideas of Rudolf von Bennigsen or Johannes Miquel, and based on the notion that Prussia/Germany should be a constitutional, but not a parliamentary, monarchy. In any case, given his diffidence, passivity, fatalism, and political isolation, he was never in a position to serve as an effective ally of the anti-Bismarck liberal opposition between the 1860s and the 1880s.

The author states that his book pursues “two concentric aims.” It seeks to provide new biographical insights into the life of post-1871 Germany’s second emperor; at the same time, it “hopes to add to our understanding of the Hohenzollern monarchy within the politics and society of nineteenth-century Prussia and Germany” (7). He succeeds spectacularly with his first aim and, to a great extent, with the second as well. Throughout his study, Müller carefully locates the details of his subject’s life within a broader thematic and analytic context. In the book’s opening chapter, he shows how the impressionable and malleable crown prince was shaped, cosseted, and ultimately dominated by three individuals, all of whom were more vigorous and assertive than he: his father, William I; Otto von Bismarck; and, above all, his unpopular wife Victoria, to whom he was almost frenziedly devoted and to whose wishes he almost always deferred. Indeed, he comes across in the book as far weaker, far less resolute, far more indecisive, and certainly more fatalistic than even the older biographical literature suggests. Moreover, in one of the book’s most fascinating sections, the author contends that Frederick William...