The Rest Is History - 469. The Road to The Great War: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)

Episode Date: July 14, 2024

By the end of July 1914, the world hovered on the edge of a cataclysmic world war; Austria was at war with Serbia, Russia with Germany, and an ultimatum had been handed to Belgium. The July crisis had resolved itself in the most calamitous way possible. But how did this state of affairs erupt from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo a month earlier? Even in the wake of their deaths war did not seem inevitable, with diplomats and politicians such as the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey manoeuvring to douse the flames kindled by the Serbian assassin Gavrilo Princip. The fires would, however, prove unquenchable, thanks to the implosion of of the Balkan powder keg beside a declining, desiccated Austro-Hungarian Empire, long fearful of Serbia, the rise of Germany under the eccentric Kaiser, as an industrious powerhouse to rival Britain, and the complex alliances and treaties that forbade the Great Powers any retreat from the coming inferno… Join Dominic and Tom as they set out upon Europe’s road to the First World War - the War to End All Wars - and explain how that devouring conflagration, which would see the end of the world as people knew it before 1914, came to pass. _______ LIVE SHOWS *The Rest Is History BOOK TOUR* To celebrate the launch of our second book, “The Rest Is History Returns”, Dominic and Tom will be appearing onstage in both Oxford and Cambridge in September! *The Rest Is History LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall* Tom and Dominic, accompanied by a live orchestra, take a deep dive into the lives and times of two of history’s greatest composers: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. *The Rest Is History LIVE in the U.S.A.* If you live in the States, we've got some great news: Tom and Dominic will be performing throughout America in November, with shows in San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Boston and New York.  Tickets on sale now at TheRestIsHistory.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. There was a majestic, rapturous, and even seductive something in this first outbreak of the people from which one could escape only with difficulty. And in spite of all my hatred and aversion for war, I should not like to have missed the memory of those first days. As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peacetime,

that they belonged together. A city of two million, a country of nearly fifty million, in that hour felt that they were participating in world history, in a moment which would never recur, and that each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass, there to be purified of all selfishness. All differences of class, rank and language were flooded over at that moment by the rushing feeling of fraternity. Strangers spoke to one another in the streets. People who had avoided each other for years shook hands. Everywhere, one saw excited faces. So that was Stefan Zweig, the great Austrian writer in The World of Yesterday, which he wrote in 1942 in the midst of a second terrible world war about the outbreak of the First World War. And Dominic, we quoted him at the beginning of our last episode, which was the final episode about the murder in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz

Ferdinand. And we're now beginning a kind of sister series to that, where we look at how that murder, that assassination, led Europe to the outbreak of war. And I guess the thing that lots of people think they know is that the war was greeted with great enthusiasm and that it was kind of driven by emotions and feelings of jingoism and that this is an explanation for what happened. But the truth is much more complex, isn't it? It is more complicated. And of course, that reading could hardly be more darkly ironic, because as we said at the end of our Sarajevo series, Stefan Zweig is one of those people.

His writings have come to embody the lost world of the Habsburg Empire, of kind of Europe before the fall, I suppose. That moment that he's talking about is arguably the greatest calamity in human history because it is from that moment, the outbreak of the First World War, that all the horrors of the 20th century were to flow. So obviously the First World War itself, the rise of Nazism, the rise of Bolshevism, the Second World War, the Holocaust, communism, the Cold War, all of these things.

The division of Europe. The division of Europe, exactly. And actually the division of Europe, which obviously cuts right through the world that he's talking about, that Habsburg empire. Yeah. The Austro-Hungarian empire gets divided on either side of the Iron Curtain. The world that belonged together.

Yeah. You know, that's all going to be sundered forever. Well, not forever, but for generations. And so I suppose the moment that war breaks out, people are asking why, aren't they? In your notes here, you quote Rebecca West in The Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and she's at the town hall in Sarajevo. She writes, leaning from the balcony, I said, I shall never be able to understand how it happened. It is not that there are too few facts available, but that there are too many. And that is the challenge really, isn't it? Because,

you know, we did an episode on the cause of the First World War. Is it militarism? Is it nationalism? Is it the Kaiser wearing the wrong deck shoes at cows? I mean, all of these have obviously been advanced as theories. Right. One of them only by you, but let's continue. No, I think distinguished historians have made that proposition. But one way that's become very popular with historians recently, Christopher Clarke and sleepwalkers and various other scholars, is to say, well, actually, you know, let's park the idea that there are broad abstract nouns hovering around.

Let's remind ourselves that actually it's about individuals in contingent circumstances. And this is obviously a kind of pre-internet age. So these are people who are operating far more in the dark than perhaps, I mean, obviously we know they didn't have the internet, but I think we are now so accustomed to an absolute blizzard of facts and news and the idea that people in different capitals can communicate with each other that perhaps we forget that back in 1914, the power players in the various countries, the various great powers and the second division powers were kind of operating a bit in the dark.

A little bit. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, Tom. They're depending so much on telegrams, so they're not ringing each other. That's not possible. They're sending telegrams to their ambassadors who then have to go and call a meeting with somebody else. So it's all kind of Chinese whispers to some extent. I think you're absolutely right.

That emphasis on individuals is really important. There's a brilliant book actually called July Crisis by a guy called Thomas Otte. So for people who've read Christopher Clarke's The Sleepwalkers, if you found it a little bit light and frivolous, Thomas Otte's is the book for you. So he says at the beginning of that book, the decision to mobilize millions of men to send them to do and die in the battlefield were not made by anonymous factors. They were made by real people. And he says, you know, this is what we should look at. Count Berchtold, Theobald von Bettmann-Holweg, President Poincaré in France, Asquith and Gray in Britain, and so on and so forth. These people, you know,

they have the power of life and death over millions and they make the decisions the crucial decisions and the thing is they have always or almost always been completely caricatured in the popular imagination yeah you could argue these are some of the most caricatured people in all history because the classic thing that everybody says about them is that they are nationalistic reactionary warmongering old men who sent young men to die. And that is, I mean, that's something that's very current still today, isn't it? That kind of view of them. Yeah. I literally Googled old men, first world war. And the first thing that came up was a column in the Guardian by George Monbiot. And he ended his column about the first

world war by saying the old men of Europe decided that they would rather kill their children than change their policies. And I think that's just wrong. It's just not right. Yeah, sure. But you can see why people think that, because that is a story that is being told within a year of the outbreak of war. So there's Kipling's terrible lines that presumably are haunted by the fact that his son John dies in the Battle of Luz a year after the outbreak of war.

If any question why we died, i.e. the young of Europe, tell them, because our fathers lied. And then there's the terrible poem that Wilfred Owen writes, who dies right at the end of the war. And he has the myth of Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac. And then the angel appears and says, don't sacrifice him. And in Owen's version, Abraham is offered a ram and told to sacrifice it. But the old man would not so, but slew his son and half the seed of Europe one by one. And then Benjamin Britten wrote Requiem for War about that. So it is part of the culture that derives from the experience of the war itself, isn't it? And it has a power, inherent kind of mythic power.

You know, Owen's use of the Bible there. I mean, it's really resonant. The idea of doomed youth, you know, the anthem for doomed youth. Yeah. Doomed youth and the people who have doomed the youngsters are their elders. Yeah, it's got an enormous power, but it's not right. These aren't actually very old men. So most of the people who make the big decisions are actually in the prime of their lives. They're not reactionary. Many of them are actually political moderates or in Britain, they're liberals. Well, in Germany as well, right?

Because the social democrats in Germany had just won about a third of the vote, I think, in an election. Yeah, and they agreed to go along with the war. Sometimes sort of left-wing historians would say they were fueled by a terrible fear of revolution. But actually, when you get down into the weeds, as it were, of the crucial decisions, the idea of revolution, being frightened of socialism and stuff, that doesn't feature at all. Are they nationalists? It's always said these are wars driven by nationalism. But actually, a lot of the people we'll talk about in this series are not nationalists. They are internationalists. They are cosmopolitan people. We will see how everybody has the wrong surname because, you know, the Austrian guy has a

Russian sounding surname. The Russian ambassador sounds German because these are, as it were, often citizens of the world, very fluent in other languages, friends in other countries, all of that kind of thing. Well, the Kaiser and the Tsar communicate in English. Yeah. And of course, you know, all the various emperors and kings are all descended from Queen Victoria. So it's literally a family affair. Yeah.

When the Russian foreign minister and the German ambassador are talking to each other, they will often talk in French. And the other thing is when these people are having these crucial conversations, as we will see in this series, at the end of the July crisis, so let's say the month or so after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand Sofie, at the end of that period, many of the people we will be talking about have nervous breakdowns, or they literally start crying in front of each other because they are so ravaged by anxiety and agony and guilt and regret about what has happened. These are not warmongers, I wouldn't say, by any stretch of

the imagination. In which case, it only makes the mystery all the greater, isn't it? How these people ended up leading their countries into a war that nobody wanted. Well, some people did want the war. I think we should say that right away. Wars don't happen by accident. Somebody has to will it. Somebody has to make those crucial decisions. One of the points I'd make right at the beginning is we only really do this with the First World War. Up to this point, if you talked about the Crimean War,

the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, the Seven Years' War, whatever, we wouldn't find it inexplicable that these wars happened. I mean, people at the time thought it was perfectly reasonable that wars happened. They might say it's sad that people die, but they knew that war was a completely rational, they regarded it as an explicable tool of foreign policy. They did. But I mean, correct me if I'm wrong here, but they thought that local wars were an acceptable tool of policy.

Yeah. What everyone was terrified of was a general European war. I mean, maybe there aren't. I accept your point that there are certain actors in this who actually are quite keen on a general European conflagration. But most people, I get the impression, have a sense that this will be something terrible. They don't think it's going to be over by Christmas. They know that they are on the edge of a precipice. Well, I think it's fair to say, Tom, nobody gets the war they want.

There are people in the story who want a war. I express myself badly. Nobody wants the war they get. And how they do get it, That is the mystery, isn't it? I will say one other thing, actually. I think it really matters that the trigger is as it is. When we said we were doing a Sarajevo series and we put up pictures when we went to Sarajevo on social media and we said, you know, a fateful place changed the course of world history. Some of the replies people said, not faithful at all. The war was inevitable. You know, it was always coming. I think that's wrong. I think the fact that the victim was who he was, actually two victims. We always forget one of the victims, Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, that the killer was Gavrilo Princip and that it happened in Sarajevo.

I think they are massively important in explaining why things happen as they do. Right. So people who want to hear more about the murder, we've just done a four part series. So let's assume that they are dead. Yeah, well, they are. And the reverberations are spreading out from Sarajevo towards Austria and across Europe. So how do we go from an assassination happening? And it's a terrible thing, but assassinations, as we said in the previous series, lots of people are getting killed yeah we listed all the kind of various members of royalty and the presidents and so on who were assassinated in the 20th century so what is it about this assassination that is different right well let's start from the very beginning so the news reaches

vienna as we described at the end of the last series news reaches vienna within hours so we talked about stefan zweig in our sarajevo series We had a scene there of him being in a park and the band stopping playing. That is literally what happens. And it is a bit of a myth that the Austrians didn't care. It's often said, oh, Franz Ferdinand wasn't very popular. Who cared? That's not right. When you look at the press coverage, the newspapers, editorials talk about the monstrous of it all, our heir to the throne, the person on whom we'd placed all our hopes. Some newspapers in the Habsburg monarchy have big pictures of the orphaned children, and they will play a part in the popular sort of discourse in Austria-Hungary in the next few days. So it is a shocking event in and of itself. It is not nothing. I think it's sometimes dismissed, the assassination.

Oh, there are loads of assassinations. And of course there are. But even in that context, it's still a shocking thing. And right away, the Viennese papers say, well, this isn't actually like an anarchist assassination. This is the fault of another country and of Serbia. They point the finger at Serbia. And of course, Tom, as we described last time, they're not wrong. The killers almost certainly were groomed by terrorist groups that were embedded in Serbian politics and the Serbian army.

They were helped across the border by Serbian intelligence. And as we described in the last series, the Serbian prime minister almost certainly knew that something was up before the crime happened. What is worse, from the Austrian point of view, is that the people in Serbia are openly delighted by the killings. So they are really shocked by this, the Austrians. The ambassador and his consuls and whatnot, they write back to Vienna and they say people are celebrating, people are having toasts in the coffee houses, they're laughing and

singing Serbian patriotic songs and whatnot. And the Serbian prime minister gives a really inflammatory speech the day after the assassinations where rather than sort of saying, oh gosh, what a terrible thing to have happened. We want to distance ourselves from this. The Serbian prime minister, Nikola Pasic, says, if the Austrians try to exploit this, we will defend ourselves and we will fulfill our duty to our country. And that obviously sends quite the wrong message as far as the Austrians are concerned. Right. And remember as well, the Austrians have already been extremely anxious about Serbia.

So we talked in the previous series about Austria-Hungary. Austria-Hungary has been in decline all through the reign of its current emperor, the 84-year-old Franz Joseph. It is this very strange empire, dual monarchy, half of it Austria, half of it Hungary, both sides governing a load of Slavs, Romanians, Italians, and whatever, Ukrainians. It kind of works. You can live your whole life under that system and be very happy and say, this is a great system.

I love it. But people have a tremendous sense of anxiety about decline and about fragmentation. And they look across their border at Serbia, which has doubled in size in the last two years. And the Serbs make no secret of their antipathy to Austria-Hungary, their belief that South Slavs living in the empire's borders should actually be part of Serbia. And there have been people, as we talked about in the previous series, within Austria-Hungary, most famously the head of their general staff, their chief general, who is a guy called Franz Conrad von Hützendorf, who have been saying, let's have a crack at the Serbs.

Let's launch a preemptive strike. You know, we have to settle this because they will eat away at our empire. So he had, remember we said he'd pressed for war 25 times in the course of the previous 12 months. And the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had resisted, which is part of the irony because he then gets cast as a kind of bellicose warmonger, but the opposite was the case. He was very much the spokesman for the Peace Party. Yeah. So with Franz Ferdinand gone, the person who's going to be the key decision maker is actually an old childhood friend of his. Now, all the Austrian people in this story, Tom,

have absolutely splendid names. Would you like to have a go at the Austrian foreign minister's name or would you like me to do it? Shall I have a crack? Go for it. I'll give it a go. Leopold Anton Johann Sigismund Josef Kosinus Ferdinand Graf Berchtold von und zu Ungarschitz. Is that right? Ungarschitz. Ungarschitz.

Freitling und Pöhlitz. Yeah. Count Berchtold for short. So Count Berchtold, he's actually in many ways a very attractive man. He's a Hungarian magnate, so he has loads of lands in Hungary. He loves literature. He loves art and horses. Doesn't everyone in Austria-Hungary?

I mean, this is very much the impression I get. I think they do, by law. Some people probably are more into the strudels and stuff. I don't know. A charming cavalier, says Tomasotti. He was seen as a man of conciliation and moderation and he had grown up with franz versland berchtold's wife had been one of sophie's best friends ever since they were girls okay so it's personal for him so it's personal he hears the news and he's at his castle which is now in the czech republic basically bucklau and he rushes by train to vienna and he goes straight into a

meeting with general conrad so again it's a bit like, for our American listeners, for example, it's like the atmosphere after 9-11. They're right in a crisis meeting, what are we going to do? And Conrad says, he's still kind of Dick Cheney figure, and he says, okay, I've been telling you for years, we have to do this. If you have a poisonous adder at your heel, you stamp on its head, you do not wait for the lethal bite. And Bertolt wrote in his diary, he said, Conrad, who's quite a gloomy figure because he's got this tangled love life,

hasn't he, with Gina. Yes, he just writes love letters to her that he never sends. That he never sends. He's got a big scrapbook. So Conrad, with a faraway look of melancholy on his fine featured face, he concluded emphatically with three words,

war, war, war. So there we have one kind of leadership group who clearly do want a war. They don't want a world war, but they want a war against Serbia for what they see as completely understandable and justifiable reasons. All across the Austrian diplomatic service, and especially in Belgrade, people are saying, come on now, enough. We can't just let ourselves be humiliated on the world stage at the assassination of our heir and his wife. You've got to punish that. And because issues of prestige, national prestige, will be a running theme throughout the story, won't it? And people are anxious that if that prestige is damaged, it will be bad for them.

And so therefore, planning a war of aggression in a way is a defensive measure. Right. The Austrians see this as completely defensive. They say we have been provoked and provoked and provoked. And if we do not act now, when would we ever act? And do you know what, Tom? I don't think you have to be particularly Austrophile to see why that would seem illogical. I mean, put it this way. We did a podcast series

about JFK. Imagine the Cubans had assassinated JFK. It had been proved. Would Washington have just said, oh, well, we'll let it go. We'll file a complaint at the International Criminal Court. Of course they wouldn't. Well, I mean, it's so interesting, isn't it? Because Kennedy was obsessed by this. So Barbara Tuchman's book, The Guns of August, he was obsessed by it. And he felt that he was trying to learn the lessons for that during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And then I think LBJ, likewise, he was determined not to generate a kind of First World War scenario after Kennedy's death. So he was very anxious about that because he had the lesson in front of him. Well, they don't have that lesson, right? This has not happened before. They don't have that lesson. So they don't know what's going to happen.

So we're talking about 28th, 29th of June. There's lots of talk in the Austrian foreign ministry and elsewhere, settle accounts, as they put it, with Serbia. But of course, what does that mean? Does it mean that you crush it or does it mean you annex it? What do you do? And also, what does it mean for the rest of Europe? In the world of alliances, what are the consequences?

And right from the start, the amazing thing, the really extraordinary thing about the Austrian response is they don't really think about that second question at all. All the historians who've written about it talk about their tunnel vision. They are just thinking about Serbia and they think, well, the rest of the world can take care of itself. We're not going to worry about that now. And I think part of that is they clearly feel very embattled and encircled. And they just think we can only concentrate on one thing at a time. And we're just going to think

about Serbia and the rest will take care of itself. And then the second thing, I think they have a tremendous sense of sort of a ticking clock. Time is running out. And if we don't act on this right now, we can't have those conversations. So we haven't got time. Right. Because the longer they leave it, the more the shock of the assassination will fade on the international stage. Yeah. And the less sympathy there will be for any armed measures.

Yes. I also think they don't really think about the possibility of a world war because they are convinced that the Serbs will back down. They had issued two ultimatums to Serbia before in very recent years, one in 1908 over the annexation of Bosnia, and one in 1913 over the Serbs after the Balkan Wars had occupied Albania, and the Austrians told them to get out. And both times the Serbians had backed down. And Count Burke told this very urbane cosmopolitan, not a warmonger at all, but he says to his colleagues, listen, these people are just like anarchic, horrible children. And if you're

firm with them, they will back down and go away. And that's what we have to do. Well, unless they can appeal to another parent figure, which presumably lurks to the east in the form of Russia. Exactly. So Serbia does have this patron, Russia, their close allies. However, again, the Austrian Foreign Service say Russia is not ready for war. They're in the middle of a big rearmament program. They won't want to go to war until they finish that. Plus, they've had standoffs with the Russians before. So people often say, why is it this crisis rather than previous crises that causes the First World War? Because the Russians, for example, had backed down in 1908 when Austria had annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. Well, the thing is, the Austrians say the Russians backed down too. The Serbs backed down,

the Russians backed down when you are strong. And of course, they are drawing from this the wrong lesson. They're thinking that if you back down twice, you'll back down a third time. Of course, there's always the possibility that if you've already backed down twice, you will say to yourself, never again. Because then your prestige will be damaged and that might threaten your security and the dominoes fall. Exactly. So by two days after the assassination, the Austrians had pretty much made up their minds.

Count Berchtold goes to see the 84-year-old monarch Franz Josef at the Schönbrunn Palace. And he says, come on, we've made up our minds. Let's do this. And the monarch says, sure. Okay. I agree with you. Unfortunately, we will need to get the prime minister of Hungary on board. We can't just go straight into this because of course the dual monarchy system. And the prime minister of Hungary is a guy called Istvan Tisza. He's another kind of count landowner. He's from the Magyar gentry. He's a very impressive man, Tom. He was educated at Heidelberg and he's got a PhD from Oxford. He's very rich. He's very ruthless. He's very clever. he's a fanatical defender of hungarian interests magyar interests he's devoted to the monarchy but he's always looking to get a better deal for the hungarians and the one thing that he doesn't want is more slavs in the empire because that will

dilute the hungarian presence you see so count tisa says i don't like the idea of attacking serbia i don't want a whole load of new Slavs in the empire. He actually says that very afternoon, so the afternoon that Berchtold has gone to see Franz Josef at Schönbrunn, they meet and Count Tisza says, it would be a fatal mistake to make the abominable deed of Sarajevo a pretext for settling scores with Serbia. So you might think that with that, the chances of war are gone. The Austrians have talked about it for two days and bang, you're not going to have it. But Berchtold and the other people think, no, we can persuade this Hungarian guy because we will invoke our great friend, our great ally, the richest and most powerful country in Europe,

and they will sway him and they will persuade him to join us. And that country, Tom, is of course, Germany. Germany at last. Okay. So I think we should take a break now. And when we come back, Dominic, let's look at how the Austrians approached Germany in the context of their plans for attacking Serbia. But before we do that, let's look at what the Austrians approached Germany in the context of their plans for attacking Serbia. But before we do that, let's look at what is it that makes Germany a great power? And are there possibly any entertaining figures at the head of the German Empire? Are there indeed? Any entertaining figures who might rank as friends of the show?

You know, spoiler, there are. So don't go away. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. So, don't go away. Add free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets. Head to therestesentertainment.com. That's therestesentertainment.com. Hello and welcome back to The Rest Is History. And Dominic, we are moving from Vienna to Berlin, to the heart of the German Empire. And I guess that for most people, the cause of the First World War, certainly if you're British, will be tied up with an image of Germany as a militarist land, a land of shaven-headed Junkers wearing helmets with terrifying spikes on, a general sense of militarism. But that would be unfair to Bill Helmine Germany, wouldn't it?

I think it probably would be a bit unfair. First of all, there is some truth in it, but it would be a bit unfair. People who've been listening to the rest of his history for the last three decades will know that we once did an episode about Wilhelmine Germany with Katja Heuer, a great friend of the show, and she was painting a picture of it. And it's a really interesting and complicated place. So Germany has only existed since 1870. It was created in the Franco-Prussian War and created, of course, in France at the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. If you ever look at the painting, Google it. An amazing scene. Very medieval. All the German princes are there, generals, Bismarck. Because it's echoing the First Reich,

which was the Empire of Charlemagne, and now you have the Second Reich. Yeah, exactly. And they have a lot to be proud of. So they are a very militaristic country. The army has lots of privileges. The army is embedded in the politics of that world. Because, Dominic, just to re-emphasize this, it is the army that has given Germany its rank as the most dominant military power, not just in Central Europe, but in Europe. Yes. Displacing the power that previously had held that status, which was France. Yes, exactly. And France had not only been kind of richly humiliated by that kind of ritual in Versailles,

but it had also been shorn of Alsace and Lorraine. Yes, it absolutely had. And what's more, I think, Germany is still a conglomeration of countries, I suppose you could say, which all happen to speak German. Some are Protestant, some are Catholic. They're very different kind of traditions. But the army, as so often, the army is a kind of, you know, it's an imperial institution. The army embodies German-ness in a way that other things maybe don't really do to the same extent. So the army really matters. But there is more to Germany than its army. It has the world's biggest socialist party. We talked about them at the start of the show.

Social Democrats, yeah. The fact that they've won a third of the seats. They have. It has the strongest trade union movement in Europe. It has by far the most developed welfare state of any major European country. So in other words, the Kaiser's Germany, it's definitely not the Third Reich. It's not a dictatorship. It's not Sparta. I mean, it has Spartan elements, but it's also, I mean, it's an intellectual powerhouse and therefore it's a scientific powerhouse and therefore it's an industrial

powerhouse. Yeah. It's the world of Thomas Mann and scientists. Exactly. Yeah. And so as a result of that, Germany has rivaled France and maybe surpassed it militarily. And it is starting to rival and perhaps surpass Britain industrially. Yeah. In a way that actually terrifies people, as we will see. But of course, at the top of this system, it's a very colourful person.

One of history's great loose cannons, system, it's a very colourful person. One of history's great loose cannons, I think it's fair to say. And is he a friend of the rest of his history, Tom? I think he is. I think he has accompanied us throughout many, many years of this podcast. He always pops up and it's great to have him back. Yeah, Kaiser Wilhelm II. And he is the person, I guess, that most of the people listening to this podcast will say, ah, now they've got to the culprit.

Because it's the Kaiser who caused the First World War, his insane lust for conquest, his ambition to dominate Europe. He glories in suffering. What a terrible man. At the end of the First World War, people in Britain would say, you know, hang the Kaiser. Kaiser is solely responsible. But there are scholars, aren't there, who do still make that case? Oh, there are. Just to say, this is still very much a live issue in history departments. Not all scholars would make that by any case,

Tom. But let's let people make up their own minds. I think what is certainly true is he is an enormously colourful and strange figure, isn't he? So he was born in 1859 and he's the oldest of queen victoria's 42 grandchildren because his mother is british yes because his mother is is vicky who is queen victoria's sort of her favorite child in many ways her daughter who was sent off to marry prince friedrich wilhelm of prussia so in 1859 she is delivered of this boy Wilhelm and everything goes wrong straight away the birth was awful incredibly traumatic he was a breech baby he was almost asphyxiated and the doctors kind of completely panicked god knows what they were doing but they basically tore all the nerves in his neck he's kind of getting him out and as a result his left arm was left completely useless so you

know famously when you see pictures of him he's always hiding his left arm or it's sort of tucked into his jacket or it's in his pockets or something and i guess if you're a psychologist and germany and austria are the great homes of psychology as well you would say that perhaps there's some compensation going on in the fact that he will grow up to become you know he'll love a uniform he will but you know become, you know, he'll love a uniform. It will. But you know what? It doesn't actually end there. So there's a guy called John Ruhle. He hates the Kaiser, doesn't he? He hates the Kaiser, but he basically devoted about a thousand years of his life to writing about the Kaiser in this six million page trilogy.

And he talks in that about basically when the Kaiser was a little boy, I mean, he wasn't the Kaiser then, when Wilhelm was a little boy, his doctors twice a week would plunge his arm, now this will sound weird, into the body of a freshly slaughtered hare. They would put his arm in because they thought it would impart his arm with the vigour and vitality of this dead hare. I'm really surprised by that because I had Germany down as, you know, the home of cutting edge science and medicine. What you're forgetting, Tom, is it is also the home of horrendous spas and spa treatments. I haven't forgotten that. I mean, people who

listened to our episode on the Night of the Long Knives will know that we love a spa town in a German political tragedy. But I mean, that really is something that's quite Spartan. Yeah. Oh, it is. It doesn't seem the cutting edge of early 20th century science, which is what I would associate Germany with. 1860s Prussia, I don't know. Oh, I suppose it is. Yes, I suppose it is earlier, but it still seems odd.

Are you after more advanced progressive medicine? They've got it. Yeah, go on. What else do they do? They've got a machine for stretching your head. Oh, no. So they would put this, when he was like a toddler, they would put him in this machine and sort of, I don't know, it's the opposite of a vice.

It kind of stretches your head out. Oh. Anyway, they've got that. Kind of Heath Robinson device. Scatty haired professors. Yeah, Heath Robinson device. It didn't do him any good. So for years, he's got this pungent pus oozing from his right ear.

And basically, it oozed continually until his late thirties when eventually they said, look, his eardrum's got to go. They took his eardrum out. I'm really starting to feel sympathy for him. If you're not feeling sympathy already, his mother, Vicky, British, but behaves very poorly because she said to him, you're a cripple. Your conversation is beneath you. He was five years old when she told him this. And then she said, no lady will ever have you with your black finger. What's his black finger? I think that's his arm.

Oh, that's not good parenting, is it? Imagine saying that to your son. I mean, mad. He must have very bad mental health. He's very poor mental health because he also has these terrible tutors who force him to work. He has to start work at six o'clock in the morning and work all the way through till 10 o'clock at night. Now, Tom, you and I do that now, preparing episodes of The Rest is History. We do. But we didn't do that when we were seven. So you said about the Kaiser's mental health. He once said to one of his friends, something is missing in me that other people

have. All poetic feeling in me has been dead and has been killed. God, he really needs better help. Yeah, he definitely does. But also, Tom, did you see this? Christopher Clarke, who's also a biographer of the Kaiser, but more sympathetic than John Rowe, talks in his book, The Sleepwalkers, about the Kaiser's, what he calls his insane burblings. So in your notes, you have this under a heading, which is in black print, so I won't miss it. The Tom Holland of the diplomatic world. I don't know what you mean by that. What are you saying? Are you saying I have inane burblings?

You love a scheme. You love a wheeze. You love an inane burble. You know? Do I? Oh, okay. Would you deny that? Can you look me in the eye and deny that, Tom?

I don't think they're inane burblings. I think they're to the point. Well, I mean, the Kaiser, I'll tell you about his insane burblings. In the late 1890s, he suggested founding a German colony in the middle of Brazil in the Amazon rainforest called New Germany. And he told everybody to encourage immigration. Everyone ignored him, obviously. In 1899, so just a few years later, he said, actually, I've changed my mind.

I think we should have a German colony in Mesopotamia, in the desert in Mesopotamia. He tried to partition China in 1900. Three years after that, he suddenly stunned his aides by saying, Latin America is our target. And he ordered the admiralty to prepare invasion plans of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and New York. Okay. That's all very interesting, but I still want to come back to, in what way is that like me? Mad schemes. Ill-thought-out schemes, Tom. I think that's the claim. Do you not want to do a podcast about Chatham High Street? I do, and we're going to.

That's the difference. Yeah. Because none of these things happened, but we are going to be doing an episode on Chatham High Street. Right. But anyway, so he's always come up with alliance projects as well. So he will say, listen, Chris Clark has a very amusing list with Russia and France against Japan and Britain,

with Japan and the United States against Britain, Russia and France against Japan and Britain, with Japan and the United States against Britain, Russia and France, with China and the United States against Japan and Russia. He's like a man with a load of cards and he's mixing them up. But to be fair, Dominic, to be fair to anyone who's played the game Diplomacy, I mean, this could be quite kind of shrewd. This is what you do in the game. It is. You're constantly making alliances and then stabbing people in the back. He loves this, you see. And what he will do is he will have his dinner parties. We talked once

in our History's Most Disastrous Parties episode about his disastrous hunting trip with Dietrich Graf von Hülsenhäisler, who dressed up as a ballerina and died in mid-pirouette. So these people will gather. And when they're dressing

as ballerinas and dying, the Kaiser is saying to them, why don't we team up with the Portuguese and invade Paraguay? You know, he'll be just wittering this nonsense. So Chris Clark says he was an extreme exemplar of that Edwardian social category. The club bore who is forever explaining some pet project to the man in the next chair. And of course, the man in the next chair, because he's the Kaiser of Germany, the man in the next chair is usually a visiting royal, a head of state. The American ambassador, that kind of thing.

Yeah, who will always be horrified. King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, who was actually German, the Kaiser smacked him on the bottom in public. And apparently he left Berlin white hot with hatred, having been so humiliated. Do you know, I'm feeling fonder and fonder of the Kaiser with each anecdote. King Leopold of the Belgians, so this is the Leopold who disgraced himself in the Congo. He went to Berlin for the Kaiser's birthday party. And the Kaiser at that thought it was amusing banter to say,

I fancy having a crack at the French. If you join me i will give you the crown of old burgundy and leopold was so upset by this apparently that when he left the party he's wearing his helmet the wrong way around i just think he's being a snowflake there but of course the kaiser's great target is britain now he is half british by blood so you could say what's going on there and the the answer is obvious. He hated his parents, who were real Anglophiles, because they'd been putting his head into a machine and forcing his arm into the dead body of a hare. And do you think he associates this with Britain,

kind of torture by medical contraptions? This is the British way of parenthood. Yeah, I think the great thing with the Kaiser that makes him so entertaining a character is that on the one hand, he clearly worships Britain. He thinks Britain is the exemplar. He wants to go yachting with British officers. And this is the whole point of the wrong shoes at cow stuff. Yeah. He does not want to be snubbed by the British. No. He wants to be admired by them. And actually he is quite admired by the British, isn't he? So at the funeral of Edward VII, who Wilhelm really hates. Called him Satan. There you go. I mean, that's hatred. But he gets the loudest cheers from the crowd.

Yeah. He's a character, you see. The British love a character, don't they? Yeah. He's often disgracing himself in Britain because he gave a disastrous interview to the Daily Telegraph in which he said, the English are as mad as March hares. They don't like me, but they should love and respect me. They're absolutely mad, I tell you.

Mad. And they printed this. and it was incredibly embarrassing. And basically, this was one of the many occasions when his own foreign office sort of banned him from giving more interviews because they said he's totally unreliable. I think what it is, as I said, he's Queen Victoria's oldest grandchild. Britain is, as it were, to some extent, the mother country. He wants his own country, Germany, to be taken seriously. He wants to be taken seriously himself when he goes to Britain. And the whole wrong shoes thing, there is a sense that everybody's laughing at him the whole time. And of course, for somebody who basically is still the little boy, who, you know, his left arm is useless, he has been

hideously tortured by his doctors, all of that, you can absolutely understand why that would eat away at your self-confidence. It's also the kind of the languid period, isn't it, of Britain's affectation of effortless superiority, which is expressed in men's tailoring and everything that we were talking about in our episode on that, and the yachting and the regattas. Britain is setting the rules on how people at the top end of society should behave. And clearly, this is something that burns the Kaiser up. Yeah, absolutely it does, Tom. Now, does all this matter? That's the question. Does this matter in this series? Now, if you're John Rule, his biographer, you say it does matter, that the

Kaiser is eaten up by hatred and has become a monstrous figure, a bully and a braggart, and that he will direct policy. On the other hand, even historians who are quite tough on Germany, someone like Max Hastings, he says ultimately the Kaiser is quite a comic figure. He is a uniformed version of Kenneth Graham's Mr. Toad. And the thing is, the Kaiser is not a dictator and he's not an absolute monarch. And there are lots of examples, often very amusing, of his staff just completely ignoring him, you know, laughing at him behind his back. This is why you're comparing him to me.

Thanks. No, not at all, Tom. I will have my revenge, Dominic, even if it plunges Goldhanger into world war. Not at all. Do you see this wonderful story about him writing a letter to Theodore Roosevelt in 1908? So he wrote a letter to Theodore Roosevelt,

and the German ambassador refused to give it to Roosevelt. And he said in private to the other ambassadors, it's not appropriate for the emperor of Germany to write to the president of the United States as an infatuated schoolboy might write to a pretty seamstress. I don't know what was in the letter. Scorching stuff. Anyway, the one thing we can say about the Kaiser that is admirable, he is a great friend, as we talked about in our Sarajevo series,

of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie. So when other people are snubbing Sophie because she's only a duchess or whatever she was, countess, the Kaiser is actually really good on this. And the Kaiser says, no, no, you can come as equals to my castle. We can shoot loads of birds together. In that way, he is quite like me. Really? Kind.

Ultimately a kind person. Ultimately a kind person. I don't stand on ceremony. No. When I invite people to shooting parties on my Scottish estate. No, you don't. No, you don't, Tom. It's one thing I've often said about you.

Yeah. That you will associate with people from all backgrounds, won't you? I certainly will. Lovely. And also the other thing I love, of course, is a yachting holiday in the Baltic. Yeah. That you will associate with people from all backgrounds, won't you? I certainly will. Lovely. And also the other thing I love, of course, is the yachting holiday in the Baltic.

Yeah. He loves that as well. He's on one when he finds out the terrible news that his friend Franz Ferdinand and Sophie have been murdered.

On the afternoon of Sunday the 28th of June is in the Baltic on his yacht in the Kiel Regatta. And the Kiel Regatta is actually a brilliant place of kind of

Anglo-German friendship. There's lots of kind of drinkier toasts and bants. I do like the way that yachts will be appearing regularly throughout the build up to the First World War. Oh, good. That's nice. This is another example of it.

Yeah. He learns the news in a very Edwardian yachting way. So he's about to set off on his yacht and a motor launch comes alongside, blowing its horn urgently. And on the motor launch is Admiral Georg von Muller, who is the head of his naval cabinet. And he throws up his cigarette case and a guy catches the cigarette case, opens it. It's a note for the Kaiser and it says, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie have been murdered. And the Kaiser, the blood drains from his face. He turns pale and he says, I don't know why he says this, but this is what he says.

He says, everything has to start again. And he's very upset. I think often when people tell this story, even very great historians who write this story sometimes forget that the Kaiser is not just a joke. He is actually a human being and that this was one of his only friends. And he's genuinely upset about it and troubled. And is a fellow royal who's been assassinated. Yeah.

In a world when, you know, royals are often being assassinated, right? So it's a frightening thing. So we know that he scribbles in the days after the assassination, the Serbs need to be sorted out. This is something that is on his mind. On the other hand, he's written that about almost every country in Europe in the last 10 years or so. And the thing with the Kaiser is he's very bellicose,

and he's always coming up with these mad ideas, podcasts about Chatham High Street, you name it. However, he actually has no record of starting a war. He has never invaded anybody. He's never attacked another European country. The Germans have been involved in southwest Africa very horrifically. But that campaign, actually, they'd got there, they'd started all that business before he even became emperor. And of course,

all European countries are behaving badly in Africa. And in the context of Europe, he's friends with Franz Ferdinand, who is a man of peace. A peace advocate. He has repeatedly sided with Franz Ferdinand about that. And he once made a joke to Franz Ferdinand. He said, you Austrians, I wish you'd stop rattling with my saber. Yeah, very good. I'm also a man of peace, Dominand. He said, you Austrians, I wish you'd stop rattling with my saber. Yeah, very good. I'm also a man of peace, Dominic. So again, another point of resemblance.

There's very much a Franz Ferdinand Wilhelm II vibe at the heart of this podcast, isn't there, Dean, I think? Yeah, I think there is. So I think the Kaiser is actually quite typical of a lot of the Germans in this period.

So we will talk in a later episode about their chief general, the man who masterminds the opening German campaigns of the First World War, who is General Helmut von Moltke, the younger. Moltke has always said to the Austrians, if there is ever a war, we will stand beside you, but don't start it. Please don't start a war. We'll be there for you. One day, the Teutons and the Slavs will fight it out. Of course, loads of people believe this in the late 19th, early 20th century, because it's the age of kind of racial thinking and social Darwinist thinking.

But Moltke had said explicitly, there will one day be a war, which will be a struggle between Germandom and Slavdom, but the attack must come from the Slavs, i.e. let them start it, but we can't start it. So that is the situation. In fact, the Austrians, as they're sitting there, surrounded by Sascha Torte with their enormous moustaches saying, let's have a crack at the Serbs, their big worry is the Germans will let us down. The Germans are all talk and they'll never follow through. I mean, that traditionally has been the image of the Germans, that they are kind of dreamy idealists.

And I guess there's a kind of legacy of that, even as they kind of go, you know, attacking the French and so on. Yeah. But the Austrians are absolutely set on this. General Conrad, Count von Berchtold, they think if we do not take this chance now, it is the end of our empire. And actually, I think they also think we owe it to Franz Ferdinand, that sure, he was a man of peace and he gave the Serbs every possible latitude and they rewarded him for it by murdering him.

And now we have to avenge him. So Count Berchtold says, I'm going to send my chief of staff. He's a younger guy. He's called Count Alexander Hoyos. He's young, but he's very experienced and he's a kind of hardliner. I will send Hoyos to Berlin to discuss with the Germans in person. And they give him two documents. One is a kind of general memorandum. The other is a personal letter from the Emperor Franz Joseph to the Kaiser explaining exactly what he wants. And it's on that letter, Tom, that the fortunes of Europe will turn. So let's finish today's episode. And in the next episode, you can find out what the impact of those two letters are on the Kaiser, on the alliance between Germany and Austria, and by extension, how people who are opposed to Germany and Austria in Russia, in

France, and even in Britain will react. So that'll be coming out very soon. But if you want the next episode and all of this series on the road to the outbreak of the First World War, then you can get them all in one go by signing up to The Rest Is History Club, which you can find at therestishistory.com. Until then, goodbye. Auf Wiedersehen. I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment

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