Staging a monarchical-federal order: Wilhelm I as German Emperor

Abstract

This article argues that the German emperor Wilhelm I drew on self-staging, symbolic acts and monarchical federalism to establish himself as the new polity’s figurehead after 1871. By drawing on cultural approaches to political history, this article demonstrates that because the imperial office was embedded in a federal context and institutional and geographical dominance was therefore ruled out, Wilhelm used travel, ceremonial and speeches to appeal to the German population via their regional monarchs for popular support. In so doing, Wilhelm deliberately cultivated the empire’s monarchical-federal political structure to accommodate the German states’ differing responses to the king of Prussia now being German emperor and the nascent popular cult around his persona. In addition, this article argues that Wilhelm’s aim was not just to generate popular support for himself, but also to provide a monarchical understanding of the polity and oppose other political centres of gravity, in particular the Reichstag and its parliamentary understanding of the German Empire. As such, this article demonstrates that self-staging and symbolic acts provided the first Kaiser with a distinct political agency, thereby challenging scholars’ assumptions of Bismarck’s personal and political dominance. It shows that Germany’s composite nationhood was not a limitation to Wilhelm’s establishing the Hohenzollern dynasty as Germany’s imperial monarchy, but rather that his self-staging, symbolic acts and monarchical federalism were crucial for this purpose. It thus questions the historiographical notion that this shift did not happen until Wilhelm II’s 1888 accession and his German-national conception of his public persona, the office and the German Empire.