For sixteen years, from the fall of Bismarck in 1890 to his own forced retirement in 1906, Friedrich von Holstein played a principal role in making German foreign policy. Working beneath the surface at the Wilhelmstrasse, he was known as the “Éminence Grise,” the “Empire Jesuit,” and the “Monster of the Labyrinth.” Holstein preferred this anonymity. Twice, he refused elevation to State Secretary; it would have meant wasting time before the Reichstag, seeing foreign ambassadors, and consorting with men who could not comprehend the intricacy and beauty of the diplomatic web he was constantly, obsessively spinning. In all his years as Geheimrat (First Counselor) of the Political Department of the Foreign Ministry, Friedrich von Holstein met his sovereign, Kaiser William II, only twice.
Holstein had a melancholy childhood. Born in 1837 in Pomerania, he was the son of a Prussian nobleman and retired officer, who, having married into a wealthy family and lost his wife, then married the elder sister of his dead spouse. It was this second wife who at the age of forty-six gave birth to Fritz, her only child. Fritz’s mother became obsessive about his safety. During the revolutionary year of 1848, she took him out of Germany to protect him. He traveled with her and a tutor to France, Switzerland, and Italy, perfecting his mastery of French and Italian. At fifteen, he entered Berlin University to study law. After graduation, he applied for an army commission. He was rejected because of a “weak chest1 and general bodily weakness.” Humiliated, Holstein enrolled in the Prussian Civil Service.
In 1859, citing his skill at languages, Holstein applied for a transfer from the Civil Service to the Prussian Diplomatic Service. Bismarck, who had known his father, stepped in and arranged that Holstein be appointed attaché to the Prussian Ministry in St. Petersburg where Bismarck himself was Minister. Setting off by train in December 1860, Holstein endured three days in a sleigh when his train was blocked by snow. In the ice-bound capital on the Neva, Bismarck, “tall, erect, and unsmiling2... slightly bald with fair hair turning grey, sallow and not yet corpulent,” held out his hand and said, “You are welcome.”
Johanna von Bismarck immediately took the shy, awkward young man into her family, and Holstein was able to observe his patron at close range. Bismarck, although he lived simply, eschewing the court, society, and his fellow diplomats, behaved always as a man of importance. Returning to town one day from the Tsar’s suburban palace at Peterhof, Bismarck and Holstein arrived at the station as the train was about to leave. Seeing them, the trainmen shouted, “Hurry up!” and Holstein instinctively broke into a run. Reaching the carriage door, he looked behind and saw Bismarck, still some distance away, approaching with a slow and dignified tread. The train waited. Climbing aboard, Bismarck said, “I’d rather be late3 ten times over than have to run once.”
Holstein was miserable in St. Petersburg. Awkward, vain, and sensitive, he had never shared the camaraderie of regimental life common to most German, Russian, and other diplomats. He had little interest in women and light conversation, and did not blend into society. He came to dislike Russians, and his experience in the Tsar’s capital produced a lifelong antipathy to Russia. Leaving St. Petersburg, Holstein was sent to posts he preferred: Rio de Janeiro (on leave, he explored the jungle of the Amazon), Washington (from which he went west and hunted buffalo on the Great Plains), Florence, and Copenhagen. In 1871, he was again on Bismarck’s staff; this time in Versailles while German artillery hammered Paris and the Chancellor prepared to make peace with France and proclaim the German Empire. When peace came, Holstein—because of his familiarity with the treaty terms and his impeccable French—remained in Paris as Second Secretary of the German Embassy.
Here, he became caught in a scandal which affected his career. Bismarck was jealous of the ability and popularity of Count Harry von Arnim, the German Ambassador to Paris. Fearing that Arnim might one day be summoned home to replace him as Chancellor, Bismarck decided to remove this potential rival. Secretly, he assigned Holstein to find evidence of wrongdoing on Arnim’s part. Holstein found his ambassador’s signature on a payment of funds to a newspaper to run anti-Bismarck articles. He also discovered that Arnim had improperly removed a number of state documents from the Embassy. On a visit to Berlin, Arnim was arrested. At Arnim’s trial, Holstein was required to testify against his former chief. Arnim fought vigorously, supported by many members of the Prussian nobility. Convicted and sentenced to a year in prison, Arnim escaped to Switzerland, from where he launched a virulent attack on Bismarck and Holstein. Berlin society, unable to make explicit its feelings against the Chancellor, heaped wrath on Holstein and boycotted him from fashionable life. Holstein withdrew, permanently and absolutely, into his work. In 1876, he returned from Paris and settled behind a desk at No. 76 Wilhelmstrasse.
Holstein’s capacity for work was exceptional even by Prussian standards. From eight A.M. until late at night, he sat at his desk, tirelessly reading files and incoming memoranda, remembering everything, committing his thoughts to paper in the form of analysis, suggestions, corrections, and comprehensive, malicious gossip.
He remained Bismarck’s man. Bismarck had given him his start in the Diplomatic Service, Bismarck had used him in the Arnim affair, Bismarck brought him back to Berlin in 1876, and now Bismarck made Holstein his private listening post and backstairs operator at the Foreign Office. Holstein performed this service eagerly. He was devoted to the Chancellor, whom in his journals he called “The Chief.” He also served as Bismarck’s private secretary during extended visits at the Chancellor’s country estates, where he resumed his St. Petersburg role in the family as “Faithful Fritz.” He was one of the few men who never bored the Chancellor. Holstein knew when to speak and when to keep quiet. When he spoke, it was in stimulating, pithy language. When he wished, he could draw on a spiteful and petty sense of humor which Bismarck enjoyed. On these visits, Holstein renewed his acquaintance with the Chancellor’s sons, Herbert and Bill, whom he had known as adolescents in St. Petersburg and who now alternated with Holstein as their father’s personal secretary. Holstein’s friendship with Herbert became particularly close.
Holstein’s position as Bismarck’s favorite was an open secret at the Foreign Office, although the extent to which he enjoyed the Chancellor’s confidence and the ways in which he earned further confidence revealed themselves only gradually. Beginning in the early 1880s, Bismarck authorized him to carry on an extensive private correspondence, dealing directly with ambassadors, ministers, and others in German embassies around the world, enabling him to provide the Chancellor (and himself) with political and personal information which did not find its way into official diplomatic communications. Year after year, his private letters and telegrams—clever, analytical, probing—went out to embassies in London, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Constantinople. The responses kept Holstein well informed of the talents and personal shortcomings of every member of the Diplomatic Corps, from veteran ambassadors to youthful attachés. Holstein carefully directed incoming information to points where it would do him the most good.
Holstein’s special position was unaffected by the superior office of State Secretary. In 1881, Holstein’s friend Paul von Hatzfeldt, whom Holstein described as “incredibly able intellectually,4 but... a weak nature destined to be dominated,” became State Secretary; Holstein was his principal advisor. In fact, in those years neither Hatzfeldt nor Holstein conceived German foreign policy; that was the prerogative of Bismarck whether he sat in the Chancellor’s Palace in Berlin or wandered among his oaks at Varzin. As Bismarck’s health declined after 1883 and his retreats to the country were prolonged, Holstein’s power increased. Because Bismarck rarely set foot in No. 76 Wilhelmstrasse, the presence of Holstein, the trusted agent, his suspicious eye watching every movement, was all the more valuable. From the beginning, Bismarck brushed off criticism of Holstein. “He is very sensitive,”5 the Chancellor told an earlier State Secretary, the elder Bernhard von Bülow. “I owe him many a useful warning, many a clever idea, and many a piece of good advice.” Later, when an important German diplomat complained about having to deal with Holstein, Prince Bismarck had told him coldly, “I see.6 Then I cannot help you. I must have one man on whom I can depend entirely and that is Holstein.” Herbert Bismarck shared his father’s warm appraisal of “Faithful Fritz.” Bill Bismarck, the Chancellor’s younger son, was more skeptical. “You want to know what I think7 of Holstein?” he once replied to a question from the younger Bernhard von Bülow. “Well, that’s a complicated matter. Father thinks him exceptionally useful and places implicit faith in him. Mother spoils him and gives him the best bits at the table. As for me, I don’t deny his great talent, nor his brilliant French and English, or his quickness and cleverness.... But there are two things which do not please me about him. He suffers from an almost pathological delusion of persecution. As he is very sensitive and suspicious, this delusion is constantly finding new fuel. And so he is always stirring up my father who, in any case, is suspicious enough and always irritable with people....”
When Herbert Bismarck became State Secretary in 1885, Holstein’s special status and warm relationship with the Bismarcks, father and son, did not change. He continued to occupy an office adjoining that of the State Secretary, wading through a sea of reports from embassies and legations, writing his own memoranda, appearing unbidden, at his own discretion, through a private, unlocked door, at Herbert’s desk. As time went on, Holstein’s daily contact with Herbert made him increasingly critical of his old friend’s arrogant, boorish behavior.
Holstein’s defense against those with whom he felt uncomfortable was to withdraw. After Herbert’s rifle-shooting incident in the garden of the Reichschancellory, Holstein wrote to a cousin: “I have described this scene8... because it explains to you a good deal about myself.... With rough types like Herbert and his family, there is only one way of avoiding the alternative between degradation and conflict, namely to withdraw on one’s own accord. That is what I have done, and at first it gave me rather a jolt. But when I see how others are treated I am glad I made a clean break. I hardly think that he would shoot through my window.”
Gradually, the First Counselor began to oppose the Chancellor’s conduct of foreign policy. Bismarck’s policy had always been to keep in step with Russia; Herbert was encouraging this relationship to an extent which Holstein thought dangerous. Since his days in St. Petersburg, Holstein had not liked Russians. Now he felt that expansion of Russian power and increase in Russian prestige must be prevented. He urged maximum support of Austria. Through Hatzfeldt, who had been transferred to London, he tried to stir up British antagonism toward Russia. At first, Holstein refused to admit even to himself that he was attempting to thwart the Chancellor’s policy. His explanation was that he was simply establishing a counterweight to Herbert’s excessive pro-Russianism and that he, not Herbert, was conducting policy in accordance with the real intentions of the Chancellor. “I have sometimes gone beyond9 the intentions of the Big Chief, have occasionally even used my ways of reaching his goals,” he told his journal. But by early 1886, with Herbert in the State Secretaryship, Holstein was alarmed. “For the first time in twenty-five years,10 I mistrust Bismarck’s foreign policy,” he wrote on January 13, 1886. “The old man is led by his son and the son is led by vanity and the Russian embassy.” Holstein vigorously opposed the secret Reinsurance Treaty of 1887, concluded with Tsar Alexander III behind the backs of the Austrian Emperor, the German Reichstag, and the Foreign Office bureaucracy. To Holstein, this network of interlocking alliances stemmed primarily from an old man’s love of intrigue. Holstein’s opposition was not hidden from either Bismarck, but father and son both believed that, whatever his opinions on policy, “Faithful Fritz” would continue personally loyal. When the younger Bülow once asked Herbert how he could tolerate Holstein’s anti-Russian prejudice, Herbert smiled and said, “Holstein has once and for all11 a jester’s privilege.”
Holstein foresaw the coming clash between the restless young Kaiser William and the aging Chancellor. Increasingly, the calculating First Counselor began to correspond with Count Philip von Eulenburg, the Kaiser’s friend. Through Eulenburg, he also was linked with young Bernhard von Bülow, son of the former State Secretary of the 1870s. By the time Bismarck fell, Holstein had made his own arrangements. He was offered the State Secretaryship and turned it down; he proposed Marschall instead. There were objections that with a new and inexperienced Chancellor and a new and inexperienced State Secretary, German foreign policy would founder. Holstein assured all worriers that the foreign policy of the Empire was in safe and experienced hands. He meant his own.
Neither Caprivi nor Marschall spoke French, the universal language of diplomacy, and they could not communicate easily with foreign ambassadors. Caprivi was honest and stubborn and Marschall gradually acquired confidence, but even two years later, in 1892, the Austrian Ambassador declared that without Holstein’s approval, neither Chancellor nor Foreign Minister would make a move.
The decision not to renew the Reinsurance Treaty, the capstone of Bismarck’s great arch of secret diplomacy, threw the retired Chancellor into a rage. The result, he predicted accurately, would be to force an isolated Russia into the arms of an isolated France. Within his circle, he rumbled threats to reveal that the secret treaty had existed, undermining Austrian confidence in German fidelity. (Bismarck made good on this threat in 1896; by that time it made little difference.) Holstein’s switch in allegiance and his part in the nonrenewal of the treaty were never forgiven. Herbert, especially, regarded “Faithful Fritz” as a traitor. During the week after the resignation of both Bismarcks, when Holstein had gone to the files and brought the secret treaty to Caprivi, Herbert, still moving his belongings out of the building, flew into a rage. He sent for Holstein. “You have been guilty of something12 which in past circumstances I should have obliged to punish most severely. All I can say is that you have been in too big a hurry to regard me as a back number.” Soon after, when Herbert met Holstein on the stairs, he gave his former friend a deep bow and passed without a word. After Herbert’s departure, tension between the two men grew, reaching an intense, mutual enmity. For many years after Prince Bismarck’s dismissal, when Berlin was divided into the Court Party and the Bismarck Party, Holstein was a target of lively hatred by the latter without ever involving himself with the former. Until Prince Bismarck’s death in 1897, Holstein’s frantic concern was to prevent any reconciliation between the Kaiser and the Bismarcks. In any Bismarck restoration, Holstein knew, the first head to roll would be his own.
Otto and Herbert von Bismarck did not return. Year after year, Friedrich von Holstein sat at his desk in his little room on the ground floor at No. 76 Wilhelmstrasse. He unlocked the door himself in the morning, took his seat, and began a day which would last at least twelve hours. He worked slowly and deliberately, hampered as time passed by the growth of cataracts. He was disturbed only by messengers, who knocked softly, entered bowing, deposited or picked up documents, and departed noiselessly. Time passed and his routine never varied. Sitting at this desk, he watched Imperial chancellors come and go, state secretaries relieve each other, ministers and ambassadors march past. He alone remained. Never seen, he became a legend. Chancellors and state secretaries were dependent on him. He did everything for them, drafting their reports to the Emperor, writing their speeches, sending their dispatches, preparing memoranda, never relinquishing his own secret correspondence authorized years before by Bismarck, sharing it with no one. His memory astonished and terrified Foreign Office clerks; he knew what every document contained, what action had been taken, where every piece of paper was filed.
Holstein paused at midday for half an hour, when he ate a light lunch sent over from the Hôtel du Rome. At nine P.M., he turned off his desk lamp, which had a heavy red shade to protect his eyes, locked his door, and walked to a side entrance of the Restaurant Borchardt, No. 48 Französischstrasse. Here, a private room was held for him. Holstein was a gourmet and lover of fine wine. His instructions to the kitchen were as careful and precise as the orders he issued to diplomats; the chef and headwaiter appeared before him with as much apprehension as the clerks at the Wilhelmstrasse. Toward midnight, he ordered a cab. Other guests were delayed to permit him to pass down the hall and into the street alone.
Over the years, the social boycott of Holstein collapsed. Handsomely crested invitations began to arrive, but Holstein imposed his own boycott on society. Living in solitude in three small rooms in the Grossbeerenstrasse, he extended hospitality by inviting people to small supper parties at Borchardt, or, to show particular favor, to accompany him on one of his favorite long walks through the countryside around Berlin. The Kaiser and the Court were included in Holstein’s boycott. On the Emperor’s birthday, a huge reception massed all the dignitaries of the government and all the foreign ambassadors at the Berlin Palace. Naturally, First Counselor Baron von Holstein was always invited. The answer was always the same: “Geheimrat Holstein begs to be excused.13 He does not possess court dress.” So reclusive was Holstein that in 1893, when William II had been on the throne for five years, he had not met Holstein. “I hear that I have an excellent official14 in the Foreign Office, Herr von Holstein,” the Kaiser said one day to the Austrian Ambassador. “Unfortunately, I haven’t yet succeeded in making his acquaintance.” Holstein wished to maintain this distance. Once, hearing that the Kaiser was coming to the Foreign Office, Holstein hastily invited Baron Hermann von Eckardstein, a German diplomat assigned to London, temporarily in Berlin, to join him for lunch. Over the meal, Holstein talked for three hours, then strolled with his guest to Unter den Linden and asked a policeman whether the Kaiser had driven past. Learning that he had not, Holstein continued to walk with Eckardstein for another hour, then sent the younger man ahead to the Foreign Office to be sure the coast was clear. Ultimately, in November 1904, after William had been on the throne for sixteen years, he finally met Holstein socially. Bülow, then Chancellor, arranged a dinner. When they met, William talked about duck hunting.
In this fashion, the “Gray Eminence” and “Empire Jesuit” ruled his secret empire. Dedicated to work, worshipping power, he was furtive, crotchety, and suspicious. His mind was brilliant and complex—and also cantankerous. The more natural and obvious a thing was, the more Holstein suspected it. In his memoirs, Eckardstein recalled: “How often has it happened15 in important negotiations which he had himself initiated and in which he was personally interested, that I have been instructed to break off as soon as it appeared that the other party was ready to meet his wishes. I found that as a rule I could reckon on Holstein being willing only so long as the other side was unwilling.” Holstein’s web encompassed the whole of German diplomacy. He expanded his private espionage system, encouraging officials anxious to further their careers to keep him supplied with the sort of personal information on their superiors and colleagues which they knew Holstein liked and could use. He was master of malicious gossip and gleefully passed along poisonous innuendo. Holstein himself was easily offended; when excited in this way, he never looked anyone in the eye and made spasmodic clenching movements with the fingers of his right hand. He never forgave slights or insults. “The fellow didn’t bow to me16 today,” he would complain, refusing to accept the excuses that the offender had been across the street, was shortsighted, and had been looking in the opposite direction. Once offended, he was relentlessly vindictive. “As I perceive you are working... against me,”17 he once said to Philip Eulenburg, “I shall be obliged to show my claws in some way.” Even the Kaiser was not exempt from Holstein’s demand for absolute loyalty: “If His Majesty does nothing18 against... [a Foreign Ministry official whom Holstein disliked], he ranges himself with my enemy.” The extreme to which Holstein could go was illustrated by his treatment of Johann Maria von Radowitz, who served as German Ambassador to Turkey and Spain. When Radowitz accepted a Star to wear on his breast on the same honors list which produced for Holstein only a Cross to be worn around the neck, Holstein never forgave Radowitz and followed his career with pathological hatred. “His rage was all the more senseless,”19 Bülow noted, “because since the Arnim case, Holstein has never been out in society, never put on a decoration, and does not even possess evening dress.”
Holstein’s influence on foreign policy remained powerful until his fall in 1906. Philip Eulenburg gave Holstein credit: “Neither Caprivi, nor Hohenlohe,20 nor Bülow ever promulgated an edict on even the most insignificant political matter without Holstein putting in an oar. Caprivi’s and Hohenlohe’s foreign policy was pure Holstein.” The reason, Eulenburg explained, was that “Holstein’s great talents21 [were considered] to be indispensable. No one could replace his understanding of complex questions of international importance.... In the Emperor’s and the Government’s interests, he had to be humored, as one humors a bad-tempered, erratic, positively dangerous sporting dog for the sake of his good nose.”
Bülow, working closely with Holstein for nine years as State Secretary and Chancellor, treated the First Counselor warily. “The situation [at the Wilhelmstrasse] was made more difficult22 for me by the intrigues of Holstein,” he sighed. “With all his unusual qualities, [he] was an incomparable intriguer... filled with pathological mistrust.” Bülow also used a canine simile: “Holstein was like the watchdog23 which is very good at protecting the house against thieves and burglars, but of which one can never be sure whether he will bite his master’s legs.” In his Memoirs, Bülow chose a fiercer beast: “In his blind and petty hatred,24 old Geheimrat von Holstein, who for over thirty years had stood closer to the great Prince [Bismarck] than most others, seemed to me a cunning wolf who ought to be behind bars and not at liberty.” Eulenburg’s description was cruelest: “Bülow and I25 used to call him the ‘weasel,’ for that animal never stops until it has slaughtered the whole henhouse.”
Holstein believed in a cautiously friendly German policy toward Britain. He shared the view of his old preceptor, Bismarck, that Germany, situated between France and Russia, must concern itself with the balance of power between the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy and the emerging anti-German Dual Alliance of France and Russia. Someday, Britain might be persuaded to join the Triple Alliance. In the interim, it was enough for Britain to maintain its Splendid Isolation. Holstein did not consider the possibility that Britain might join Germany’s enemies; the antagonisms between Britain and France, and Britain and Russia were so deep that the First Counselor could not imagine that they could ever be bridged.
Accommodation with Britain assured German predominance in Europe, but also required moderation of German ambitions overseas. Germany must not alarm and provoke Great Britain by an aggressive colonial policy or by an extravagant increase in the size of the German Navy. In the 1870s and 1880s, Britain had assisted in the training of the small German fleet; in the 1880s Britain had endorsed Bismarck’s brief excursion into colonialism. In overseas trade, German ships and traders enjoyed the protection of the Royal Navy and access to British colonial markets. Holstein saw no need to push for more.
It was on Holstein’s advice that Caprivi, soon after becoming Chancellor, wrote a warm personal note to Lord Salisbury saying that he looked forward to friendly relations and close cooperation with the British Prime Minister. The German government, wary of a return to power of Gladstone and the Liberals, wished “to keep in mind the need26 to lighten Lord Salisbury’s task to make possible his retention in office,” Caprivi wrote at the same time to Hatzfeldt in London. Hohenlohe’s advent as Chancellor did not affect either German policy towards England or Holstein’s influence at the Wilhelmstrasse. Before 1897, nothing occurred to change his belief that Britain would never join France and Russia; British antagonism towards those powers remained too strong.