From Duels to the Courtroom: A Gentleman's Sense of Honor and the First Moltke-Harden Trial

IN THE SPRING OF 1907 drastic evidence appeared to show how badly the German monarchy was adapted to the era of the mass-circulation press. While international newspapers had been debating Harden's campaign against the Eulenburg camarilla for a long time, there was one person who for months had heard nothing about the disaster threatening to engulf him and his best friends: Emperor Wilhelm. German journalists published desperate appeals for someone to enlighten the monarch. Everyone believed that containment of the scandal depended on the sovereign receiving a comprehensive explanation quickly. Since the country's top-ranking officials, the chancellor and the chief of the Imperial Military Cabinet, had no desire to deliver the catastrophic news, however, in the end Crown Prince Wilhelm had to inform his father about the allegations. It was the first political act performed by the heir to the throne, for which he was duly praised by the press, although significantly he had become aware of the scandal himself only by accident. Much too late and under enormous pressure from a waiting public, the emperor held one crisis meeting after another with Chancellor Bülow, Military Cabinet Chief von Hülsen-Haeseler, Secretary for the Interior von Bethmann- Hollweg, und Superintendent of Police von Borries; as a result of these meetings Eulenburg and Moltke were relieved of their diplomatic and military duties with immediate effect. This step had great symbolic significance for the public, which felt it signaled that royal favor had been withdrawn from the two men in an appropriately formal manner. At the same time it looked like a prejudgment of the moral issue at stake, for if His Majesty had dealt so mercilessly with his closest friends then “there must have been something” behind the reports.

At this point Maximilian Harden had achieved his original political goal, namely destroying the influence of the Eulenburg camarilla. He told Friedrich von Holstein that he intended to say nothing more. The scandal could now have been over, for the entire European public was not yet up in arms over it. A handful of individuals had the power to end it, or at least it would have gone down in history by another name than the “Eulenburg scandal.” Presumably the peace offer made by Harden did not reach the court.