Notes
- One could parallel Anita Callaway's identification of female music hall and vaudeville artistes as representing a prehistory of recent interest in performance, the body and gender issues, ‘The temperature's rising: tableaux and transformations in Australian culture’ in Joan Kerr and Jo Holder (eds), Past/Present. The National Women's Art Anthology, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1999, pp.76–84.
- Asa Don Dickson (ed.), The Kaiser: A Book About the Most Interesting Man in Europe, New York: Doubleday, 1914, p.162.
- Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2 vols, 1987, 1989.
- For example: John C.G. Röhl, The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany, Terence Cole (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 pp.1–3.
- Stuart Hall, ‘Whose heritage? Unsettling “the heritage”, re-imaging the post-nation’, Third Text, Winter 1999-2000 p.10.
- This topic deserves an essay in its own right. Current historical myths and choices still substantially abjure the provocative, but tenable, article by Helen Boorman, ‘Rethinking the expressionist era: Wilhelmine cultural debates and Prussian elements in German expressionism’, Oxford Art Journal, vol.9, no.2, 1986, pp.3–15, in favour of a clear-cut binary John Wayne-esque myth of good-guy rebellious modern artists versus a conservative German state. Peter Paret, The Berlin Sezession: Modernism and its Enemies in Imperial Germany, Cambridge (USA): Bellknap Press, Harvard University, 1980, sets the tone. One of the few published discussions of Second Reich visual culture, Paret judges its official art as conventional and empty. Yet this evaluation is deeply influenced by the author's family's role as dealers and art publishers in promoting modern art in imperial Germany and their participation in the combative rhetoric of modernism. These skirmishes were themselves steeped in the values of a society which placed martial virtues as central, where ‘radical’ artists sought, as Boorman indicates, to elude the ‘bourgeois’ and materialist as assiduously as any Prussian officer. His family's exile during the Nazi era places a further emotional-moral burden on Paret's negation of official visual culture of the Second Reich. In some ways the Second Reich was the site of a particularly complex interaction/tension/bonding between modernism and conservatism—directly reflected by the persona of Kaiser Wilhelm II. For that reason—as much as more clearly proclaimed political reasons—it is an irritant that must be disavowed to maintain a sane and clean modernist history. Wilhelm II likewise renders modernism unheimlich, subjective, manipulated and non-essentialised, another reason for framing him in an unrelenting negative discourse.
- Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany, New Haven: Princeton University Press, 1995.
- Linda Mizejewski Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle and the Making of Sally Bowles, New Haven: Princeton University Press, 1992.
- ibid, p.215.
- Henry Cornelis (director), Jack Clayton (producer), I am a Camera, 1955, Romulus Productions; Bob Fosse (director), Cy Fleur (producer), Cabaret, 1972, ABC Circle Films; Luchino Visconti (director), Ever Haggiag et al (producers), The Damned [La Caduta degli dei], 1969, Eichberg-Film; Ingmar Bergman (director), Dino de Laurentis (producer), The Serpents Egg, 1977, De Laurentis/Rialto Film; Liliana Cavani (director), Esa de Simon (producer), The Night Porter [Il Portiere di Notte], 1974, Lotar Film.
- Mizejewski affirms that homosexual men were persecuted during the Nazi era, whilst simultaneously the state spectacle of the Nazi regime revolved upon homoscopic display. The image of the perfect, handsome male warrior was constantly on view and constantly celebrated under the rubric of loyalty to the state. One could add that this image of manhood remains prominently on view for all those who engage with the Third Reich, whatever their politics. Moreover due to its extreme visibility and its scopic orientation, German military masculinity can be examined and covertly admired whilst the sexuality of the home team's men, by convention defined as upright and straight, is beyond such observation. Women also were severely oppressed in Nazi Germany. Neither of these well-documented historical issues hinders the ongoing proliferation of myths that ascribe responsibility for the Nazi regime and fascism per se to women and homosexual men.
- Mizejewski, Divine Decadence…, pp.25, 33ff.
- The naming of Röhl's project as a deconstruction of Wilhelm is indebted to the review written by Karina Urbach, Historical Journal, vol. 42, no.4, 1999, p.1183 where she identifies Röhl's project as the antithesis of the archetypal Victorian testamentalising biography.
- Nicolaus Sombart, Wilhelm II: Sündenbock und Herr der Mitte, Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1997, pp.99–102.
- Paul Klebinder (ed.), Der Deutsche Kaiser in Film, Berlin: Verlag Paul Klebinder, 1913.
- Nicolaus Sombart, “The Kaiser in his epoch’, in John C.G. Röhl and Nicolaus Sombart (eds), Kaiser Wilhelm II: New Interpretations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, p.297.
- Karl Kreimeier, The UFA Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company, New York: Hill and Wang, 1996 p.34.
- Henry Fischer, Private Lives of Kaiser William II and his Consort: Secret History of the Court of Berlin, from the Papers and Diaries of Ursula, Countess von Eppinghoven (pseud.), 3 vols, New York: World Publishing Company, this edition c.1909–1913, vol.1, pp.69–71. This is a pseudonymous quasi-erotic text of uncertain origins, the editor is an American journalist and the author may be fictional, it is an index of popular cultural gossip around the Kaiser. However its basic assessments of Wilhelm's character and sexuality are borne out by sources only made available to scholars in the 1990s.
- Henri de Noussane, The Kaiser As He Is or the Real William II, New York: Putnams, 1905, p.93. De Noussane's accounts of the size and the management of Wilhelm's uniform collection duplicates and affirms the description cited above in Fischer, Private Lives….
- William Stead, cited in Dickson, The Kaiser…, pp.164, 168–69.
- ibid, facing p.76.
- Röhl, The Kaiser…, p.20.
- Judith L. Goldstein, ‘Lifestyles of the rich and tyrannical’, American Scholar, Spring 1987, pp.236, 245–46.
- Gaddafi with his regiment of female body guards like Wilhelm or Karl Lagerfeld [re]makes women to his own specifications.
- Since 1945 only two articles about her have been published by English-speaking academics: Andreas Dorpalen, ‘Empress Augusta Victoria and the fall of the German monarchy’, American Historical Review, vol. 58, no. 20, 1952, pp.17–38; and Juliet Peers, ‘White roses and eating disorders: a feminist re-reading of Kaiserin Auguste Viktoria of Germany (1858–1921)’ in Franz Oswald and Maureen Perkins (eds), Europe: Divided or United, Perth: Australian Association for European History, Department of History, University of Western Australia and Southern Highlands Press, 2000, pp.89–107.
- See Adrienne Munich's cited article at note 69 for the sexual-political symbolism of the Savoy operas. For a typical example of Röhl's frequent reference to Auguste Viktoria's age and supposed ugliness see John C.G. Röhl, ‘The Emperor's new clothes’ in John C.G. Röhl and Nicolaus Sombart (eds), Kaiser Wilhelm II: New Interpretations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, p.43. As well as being a crude sign of age in a woman, dried, wrinkled, aged-looking skin is a side effect of the loss of fluids in intense bulimic purging. Röhl does not consider this possibility. Present-day fetish and sexually-alternative expression in dress refuse the mainstream Anglo-European cultural codes that confine older women in a submissively neutral and bland dress aesthetic and exclude older women from wearing clothes that express overt allure, glamour and draw attention to the self. Röhl's anxieties about Auguste Viktoria reflect these issues.
- John C.G. Röhl, Young Wilhelm: The Kaiser's Early Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 365.
- The only published dissonance to Röhl's thesis—on the grounds of the incompatibility of his vision of gender to present day postmodernism, feminism and queer studies—is my ‘White roses and eating disorders…’. For a political questioning of the firm dialectics of Röhl's narrative see Patricia Kollander, ‘Empress Frederick: last hope for a liberal Germany?’, Historian, vol.62, no.1, 1999. Nicolaus Sombart explictly sought to address the misrepresentations and misunderstandings in Röhl's interpretation of Wilhelm II, by deploying social anthropology and present-day theorisations of kingship and the state in his Wilhelm II: Sündenbock und Herr der Mitte; he also wondered (pp.7–9) about the psychic motivation behind a project, so massive in its scale as is Röhl's, coloured so explicitly by an unrelenting hate for its subject. German scholars in particular have misunderstood Sombart's arguments against Röhl, regarding them as an irresponsible questioning of the ‘Great Historian’. This misreading of Sombart's project again suggests that Röhl's scholarship represents a ritual of validation and affirmation exchanged between the academic and his readers. That the rejected discourse by Sombart follows a more recent form and style of academic methodology underlines the extremely conservative values behind Röhl and his supporters.
- Judith Hughes, in her Emotions and High Politics: Personal Relations at the Summit in Late Nineteenth-Century England and Germany, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, p.30, sees the complex relationship to Auguste as symbolising Wilhelm's difficulties in dealing with his own feminine elements. Her arguments contrast with those recent scholars who emphasise the personal and sexual alienation of the couple and see in Auguste a fearsome right wing God's policewoman (relating to the broader picture of the left-bohemian's difficulty with feminine figures). Hughes's brief definition of the emotional-gender reciprocality of the couple is more insightful and fruitful. Only if a more flexible interpretation of male-female relationships is constructed can the relationship of the Emperor to the Empress begin to make sense. Primary documentation around the couple has been heavily edited and surveilled by scholars who scrutinise Wilhelm from the perspective of emphasising political, expansionist continuity between the Second and Third Reich. Recent historians are delimited by rigid interpretations of gender and sexual identity. Little first-hand material by Auguste Viktoria is published. The most comprehensive quotations are published by her daughter, who, to counter modern historians’ emphasis upon alienation, outlined a traditional romantic love bond between her parents. Whilst Viktoria Luise's interpretation of the relationship is more conservative than mine, her documentation of sites of personal interchange not acknowledged by academics indicates the subjective and selective elements of professional historians’ uses of sources.
- Maurice Leudet, The Emperor of Germany at Home, London: Hutchison, 1898, p.142.
- Margaret Cunliffe Owen, Imperator et Rex: William II of Germany, London: Harrap, 1904, pp.255–56; see also Ernst Evers, Auguste Victoria Das Lebensbild der deutschen Kaiserin, Potsdam: Stiftungsverlag, 1908, p.140.
- De Noussane, The Kaiser..., p.103.
- Röhl, Young Wilhelm…, pp.357–58.
- Ada Leslie letter to ‘Pollie’, 30 November 1887, from website ‘Letters from a Victorian Governess/Companion to Royal Families written during the period 1883–1894 from India/Prussia/Greece’, http://barnardf.demon.co.uk; Anne Topham, A Distant Thunder: Intimate Recollections of the Kaiser's Court, New York: New Chapter Press, 1992, pp. 81–82, Fischer Private Lives…, vol.3, p.80. Ada Leslie and Anne Topham were English language governesses in Wilhelm's household during the 1880s and 1900s respectively.
- Evers, Auguste…, p.140.
- Fischer, Private Lives…, p.81.
- Since the rise of Charles Frederick Worth in the 1860s, the right of a man to arbitrate upon women's dress was accepted in mainstream Victorian society and to the present day with international star couturiers. However the dress designer asserted a professional expertise as art practitioner over his clients, paralleling the romantic and aesthetic movements’ empowerment of the practitioner against the patron. Wilhelm conversely returned the control that fashionable women previously had abrogated to the celebrity designer back to the client, or in his case back to the husband of the woman who was to wear the dress or hat. Whether Wilhelm desired this control/ supervision as an artist-designer (he was deeply and personally engaged with the visual arts, music and theatre—only now mainstream historians judge his efforts to have negligible value—to disavow the Kaiserreich) or in relation to gender performance and/or sexual orientation cannot be ascertained from the current shape of published sources. However either possible motivation deserves serious art-historical scrutiny.
- Viktoria-Luise, Duchess of Brunswick and Lüneburg, Princess of Prussia, Deutschlands Letzte Kaiserin, Gottingen: Gottinger Verlagsanstalt, 1972, p.112.
- De Noussane, The Kaiser…, pp.102–03.
- Hilton Als, ‘Mother’ in The Warhol Look: Glamour, Fashion and Style, Pittsburg: Andy Warhol Museum, 1997, p.214.
- Fischer, Private Lives…, vol.2, pp.500–03.
- Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes, New York: Random House, 1981, p.260.
- Letters, Crown Princess to Queen Victoria, 10 July 1879, Queen Victoria to Crown Princess, 17 March 1880 and Queen Victoria to the Crown Princess, 9 March 1881 in Beloved Mama: Private Correspondence of Queen Victoria and the German Crown Princess 1878–1885, London: Evans Brothers, 1981, pp.50, 69, 97 respectively.
- Dickson, The Kaiser…, p.169.
- Hermann Petrich, Unser Kaiser und unsere Kaiserin, Berlin: Schriftenvertriebsanstalt, 1906, p.8.
- Topham, A Distant Thunder…, pp.7–8.
- Thomas A. Kohut, Wilhelm II and the Germans: A Study in Leadership, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, p.112; Isabel V. Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II 1888–1918, Cambridge: University Press, 1982, pp.69–70.
- Lamar Cecil, Wilhelm II: Prince and Emperor, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989, p.358.
- Kohut, Wilhelm…, pp.112, 282.
- This was the title of an early internationally best-selling biography of Wilhelm (J. Daniel Chamier, A Fabulous Monster, London: E. Arnold, 1934).
- Valerie Steele, Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp.74–76.
- Joachim von Kürenberg, The Kaiser: A Life of the Last Emperor of Germany, London: Cas-sell, 1954, p.174.
- On public occasions Wilhelm frequently uttered extravagant compliments about his wife, which Röhl now discounts as empty and hypocritical (for example, Röhl, Young Wilhelm…, pp.452–53) and appeared as her chivalrous courtly partner. The representation of Auguste and Wilhelm's relationship demands further analysis, but this disavowal of the relationship is shadowed by anxieties about a couple who can render heterosexual marriage and the family as a performance rather than an essentialised social building block.
- Hull, The Entourage…, p.17.
- ibid, p.18.
- Leigh Bowery was predominantly, but not exclusively, homosexual. However he consciously sought to offend the sacred cows of separatism and radical politicised visions of homosexuality when he included Nicola in performances at gay festivals and performance spaces.
- Hilton Ais, ‘Cruel story of youth’ in Roger Violette (ed.), Leigh Bowery, London: Violette Editions with Thames and Hudson, 1998, pp.20–21; also Nicola Bowery interviewed by Cerith Wyn-Evans in the same source, pp.148–59.
- ibid, p.20.
- Shale Preston, ‘Beating Foucault to the punch: Dickens, death, limit experience and the pleasure of killing Nancy’, Australasian Victorian Studies Journal, vol.4, 1998, p.94.
- Hannah Pakula, An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick, London: Phoenix, 1998, pp.383–84.
- Röhl, Young Wilhelm…, p.365.
- Darwinian and eugenicist philosophies have been assiduously and most visibly deployed in German history, but the Germans themselves can equally perform the role of the Other for non-Germans.
- Sombart, The Kaiser…, pp.297–309.
- Hull, The Entourage…, pp.20–22.
- Illustrated Petrich, Unser Kaiser…, p.7. Another fascinating photograph (in the British Royal Collection) c.1882–1883 depicts Wilhelm in his Hussar uniform cradling his infant son in the manner of a Virgin and Child, seeming to admire the child in his arms. In turn baby Wilhelm lovingly fingers the braid on his father's uniform. The tender intimacy of the reciprocal gestures/glances of father and son is noticeable. Taken in context with other photographs discussed in this article, the maternal warmth displayed by the soldierly-dressed Wilhelm may not be accidental.
- A letter of 10 June 1882 from his grandmother to his great-grandmother Queen Victoria suggests that the photograph was taken within a month of baby Wilhelm's birth (Beloved Mama…, p.121).
- Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, New York: Viking, 1990, pp.78–79.
- Dated thus on the mount, however this example was published after June 1888 because Wilhelm has ascended the imperial throne and the caption names him as Kaiser.
- Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire and Victorian Writing, Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1995, pp.195–96.
- Adrienne Munich, ‘To capture the heart of a queen’, Centennial Review, 28, Winter 1984, pp.23–44.
- ibid, p.29.
- In another patriotic postcard, five generations of imperial German males are shown—with the three living men being watched by images of the two dead Kaisers.
- Sombart suggests the image depicts the symbolic start to the German military year, the Paroleausgabe, the annual oath taking, reiterating the ritual implications of this photograph (Wilhelm II: Sündenbock…, p.118).
- Gail Bedermann, Manliness and Civilisation: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States 1880–1917, Illinios: University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp.234–39.
- The most reliable account of his birth injuries is in Röhl, Young Wilhelm…, pp.1–18.
- Jürgen Manthey, ‘Prinz im Reich der Schneekönigin’, Merkur, vol.60, no.6, 1996, p.481.
- Sombart, Wilhelm II: Sündenbock…, pp.37–38; Sombart indicates that this name ‘Green Carnation’ is more frequently used in relation to Oscar Wilde (p.232).
- Röhl, The Kaiser…, p.52. Freud spoke of the withholding taking place after Wilhelm's birth not in utero as Mann implied, (although Mann's ‘Wilhelm’ was also neglected in childhood by his mother). In the novel the neglectful mother is self-absorbed in her beauty, thus normalising Wilhelm's mother's extraordinary feminist intellect, which in turn had been disappointed in having produced a hyper-soldierly son not the desired artistic or intellectual ‘genius’, who would flatter her sense of feminist mission and reconcile her to the abject state of motherhood.
- J. Alden Nicholls, The Year of Three Kaisers: Bismarck and the German Succession 1887–1888, Illinios: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p.120.
- Evers, Auguste…, p.69.
- Her aunt Amalie lived in exile in France refusing to reconcile to Prussian sovereignty. This chosen destination placed her in a political context. Another aunt, Henriette, broke rank with the aristocratic code and married a middle-class man, a teaching academic in the discipline of medicine, another feminine refusal of the military ethos—and especially the German military as socially acceptable focus of female desire—that brought her into social disrepute in Germany.
- Röhl, Young Wilhelm…, pp.359–60, 364; Pakula, An Uncommon Woman…, p.369.
- Louise-Sophie, Princess of Prussia (Princess Friedrich Leopold), Behind the Scenes at the Prussian Court, Desmond Chapman-Huston (ed.), London: John Murray, 1939, pp.xvi, 31.
- Fischer, Private Lives…, p.366.
- Mizejewski, Divine Decadence…, p.212.
- Isabel Hull has made this point already (The Entourage…, p.17) about Wilhelm's gender identity, although she prefers to emphasise the hopeless, sham qualities of the performance, upholding meta-narratives of German a priori defeat. I suggest that anxieties about gender and identity, as well as the more familiar and acceptable grounds of political/human rights and twentieth-century history ensure the necessity of emphasising failure in Wilhelm's performance.