Liebenberg circle

After meeting Eulenburg at a hunting party in 1886, Prince Wilhelm visited Liebenberg every year from then on—officially for the hunt, in fact for the emotional warmth he had not found with his parents or at court—and after his accession in 1888 it became his place of relaxation. They read and made music together; Eulenburg was called the “troubadour” and the Kaiser “the darling”. Talk ranged from the cultivated to the coarse, and the homosexual leanings of some members are now regarded as established. Members also joined the Kaiser’s “northern cruises” to the Norwegian fjords on the imperial yacht Hohenzollern.

The core members were Eulenburg and his brother Friedrich Botho, Richard zu Dohna-Schlobitten, the chief of the military cabinet Dietrich von Hülsen-Haeseler and his brother Georg, intendant of the court theatres, the Berlin city commandant Kuno von Moltke, Emil von Schlitz gen. von Görtz and the Württemberg envoy Axel Varnbüler. Bernhard von Bülow, whom Eulenburg pushed for chancellor, was also linked to the circle. Its influence remained informal, since most members held no key state posts and Eulenburg himself was thought unpolitical, but since John Röhl some historians have seen Eulenburg as the main architect of the young Kaiser’s “personal rule” in the 1890s.

The hawkish journalist Maximilian Harden concluded that German diplomacy had failed in the First Moroccan Crisis of 1905 because the circle had kept the Kaiser from risking war with France, and from 1906 he attacked it by exposing its members’ homosexuality. Who supplied Harden is unclear: Friedrich von Holstein of the Foreign Office, from Bismarck’s camp, is one candidate, while the historian Peter Winzen argues that Bülow fed him material to get rid of Eulenburg, who had been working to replace him. While the trials went on, in November 1908 Hülsen-Haeseler died of a heart attack after dancing in a tutu as evening entertainment at a hunting party held for the Kaiser. He was directing the purge of the officer corps and is also described as an outspoken opponent of Eulenburg, so sources differ on counting him a member of the circle. The army covered up the circumstances. The trials ended without convictions, but the Kaiser dropped his friends and the circle broke up. At home he was mocked as “William the Peaceable”, a coward, and the affair both brought homosexuality into public debate for the first time and fed hostility so strong that some spoke of an “epidemic of persecution”.