The Fall of the Eulenburg Camarilla: At the Intersection of Accountability and Unaccountability in Politics

THE EULENBURG SCANDAL plunged the German ruling elite into a crisis, since it exposed a profound weakness in its legitimation to govern. The constitution of the German Empire did not envision the existence of a camarilla or individual favorites at the court and provided no way to deal with them; Wilhelmine Germans associated such roles in the exercise of power with absolute monarchy and believed they had long since been overcome. In the columns of the Zukunft Maximilian Harden opened a panorama of the power effectively wielded by Philipp Eulenburg as the “favorite” of Emperor Wilhelm II:

Finally Harden learned that Kuno Moltke had once declared, “We have now formed a ring around the Kaiser that no one can break through”; it was then that he realized, as he explained to the court, that “the camarilla was doing damage to the state as a whole,” and that he had to act “as a politician” and intervene himself.”

The Spanish term camarilla had established itself in the political vocabulary of Europe after the reign of Ferdinand VII of Spain. Like the “cabinet” where government ministers and officials met, the room gave its name to the institution.