The Eulenburg Camarilla: Francophiles, the Pro-Peace Party, and “the Homosexual International”

FROM TODAY's PERSPECTIVE it may seem strange, almost grotesque, to view entire institutions such as a diplomatic corps or the military as sexually suspicious. The Belle Époque was the age of prestige politics, however, and the Eulenburg scandal had introduced sexual morality as a category available for interpreting the tense international relations of the time. As I will show below, this was only the culmination of a whole chain of incidents involving national prestige, from the Schnaebele affair in 1887 and the seizure of a German mail steamer in 1899 during the Boer War to the Venezuela crisis of 1902. All these apparently simple local events developed into questions of national honor, and for this reason they help to focus attention on the social dimension of international relations, which has not yet been thoroughly studied.

When political and military historians seek to identify the origins of the First World War, they frequently mention a “pro-war” party within the leadership of the government, armed forces, and diplomatic corps in the German Empire. Although this term makes little sense without a counterpart, only the bare outline of a “peace party” has been made out until now, if at all. At the same time, contemporaries suspected the existence of these two influence groups and believed they conducted important debates within the arcane sphere of government. “This one wants peace,” observed the anonymous author of “Unser Kaiser und sein Volk” critically in 1906, “while that one considers a ‘bright and cheery little war’ a national necessity.” Here, too, Maximilian Harden succeeded in establishing the framework in which the European press discussed and interpreted the question. He declared that the Wilhelmine peace party was in fact the Eulenburg camarilla and made this seem plausible in the columns of his journal Die Zukunft by claiming there was a link between a desire for peace damaging to Germany's national interests and homosexuality: They “don't dream of a world in flames, they are warm enough already.” Harden expressed himself even more clearly in court in late 1907.