Das Ende der Kaiserherrlichkeit: Die Skandalprozesse um die homosexuellen Berater Wilhelms II. 1907–1909 by Peter Winzen (review)

Virtually all the main figures on both sides of the Eulenburg affair enjoyed gay sex, according to Peter Winzen. Much of this is known from previous studies, but Winzen adds new suspects, providing suggestive evidence that Philip Eulenburg’s main enemies had themselves engaged in homosexual activities in the past. The book’s principal contribution is to bring Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow out of the shadows, claiming that no one less than the chancellor himself was behind the vindictive persecution of Eulenburg. Bülow was terrified that Eulenburg, the Kaiser’s closest confidant, was plotting to unseat him and assume the chancellorship himself. While covering his tracks with exceptional care, he therefore began to feed the journalist Maximilian Harden with salacious details about the court camarilla. Harden, who had a gay past himself during his early life in the theater, always claimed that he was not objecting to the homosexuality of the Eulenburg set, but merely to their siege wall around the Kaiser, behind which they strove to control national politics. Indeed he had printed articles in his journal Die Zukunft urging the repeal of §175 of the Criminal Code. But he allowed his relentless campaign against Eulenburg to become a series of sex scandals, designed to shock or titillate the prurient public. To its credit, the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts deplored the homophobic tone in the courtroom.

Winzen resists the temptation to write a sensationalistic volume about the affair. This impressively researched study instead provides a carefully footnoted, blow-by-blow account of a witch hunt, leaving no stone unturned—though the author is perhaps too ready at times to speculate about acts that took place in private. For example, Winzen asserts that Gustav Steinhauer, a policeman and former servant of a gay friend of Eulenburg’s, frequently visited the latter’s home at Liebenberg and therefore “must have been involved not infrequently in homosexual intercourse” (254). The main evidence for this seems to be that his marriage ended in separation.

Winzen makes quite a persuasive case for Bülow as the éminence grise. He is not the first to suggest this. Christopher Clark has noted that the compromising information passed to Harden came “possibly also from Bülow” (Kaiser Wilhelm II [London, 2000], 106). Winzen feels more certain of this, even though the evidence he offers is not conclusive. A remark by the justice minister’s daughter would appear to clinch the argument. In 1931 she recalled her father telling her: “I was just at Bülow’s. He let the cat out of the bag today,” which convinced the minister that Bülow was squarely behind Harden’s attacks (161). Yet recent scholars have not been wholly persuaded. Nicolaus Sombart viewed the Eulenburg Affair as “a typical case of homosexual hatred from a latent homosexual” (Wilhelm II. Sündenbock und Herr der Mitte [Berlin, 1996], 203). John Röhl more judiciously describes it as “an attack on favouritism, which is symptomatic of monarchical systems in the stage of decay” (The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany [New York, 1996], 69).

Harden was doggedly determined to win, paying out 3,000 marks to a detective in 1908 and promising his lawyer a 5,000 mark bonus if he won the case. The trials took a heavy emotional toll on him, causing both apoplectic and fainting fits (curiously, the Kaiser is said to have reacted in a similar fashion). Eulenburg’s own dire appearance, as he was wheeled into the courtroom on a stretcher, may have been a sham, though he was also prone to faint under especially tricky questioning. What were Harden’s motives in all this? He claimed early on that he was seeking to bring about the abolition of §175 because homosexual charges were invariably successful against the lower orders of society, while noble or...