Wilhelm II. Archäologie und Politik um 1900 (Wilhelm II: Archaeology and Politics circa 1900) investigates three interconnected facets of the personality and activities of the last German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ruled the German empire from 1888 until his abdication in 1918. These three facets are Wilhelm's personal interest in archaeology, his promotion of it as a scientific discipline, and his own publications in the field. In their Introduction, editors Beigel and Mangold-Will clarify that the novelty of their approach does not lie first and foremost in addressing these three aspects individually; they acknowledge that most of Wilhelm's biographers to date have at least mentioned his enthusiasm for archaeology, generally attributing it to his father's influence or his humanistic education, and that Wilhelm's support of German excavations in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East has been discussed in histories of archaeology and studies of German imperialism. Rather, Wilhelm II. Archäologie und Politik um 1900 is unique in two respects. First, it takes seriously Wilhelm's historical and archaeological writings in exile, previously ignored or dismissed as a ‘dilettantish hobby’; second, it examines all three facets of his archaeological activities holistically, within a broader political context. The volume's overall aim is not to ‘restore Wilhelm's reputation as a scientist’, but to understand his diverse and lifelong interest in archaeology as an ‘historically relevant aspect’ of his personality, motivated by political considerations and by the desire for scientific confirmation of the legitimacy of his rule (p. 7).
Wilhelm II. Archäologie und Politik um 1900 draws its inspiration from a conference of the same name, held in early June 2012. Some of its nine chapters are expanded versions of the original conference papers; others are new contributions. The above-mentioned Introduction, which positions the volume's contents in relation to existing scholarship and highlights its main arguments, is counterweighted by a Conclusion whose contents are effectively summed up in its subtitle, ‘Wilhelm II: Archaeology as a scientific legitimation of rule in the ambivalence of modernity’. In Chapter 2, the sole English-language contribution in this otherwise German-language volume, historian Marchand offers a useful overview of German archaeology in the Wilhelmine era. The remaining chapters are arranged chronologically. Chapter 3 (by Steinbach) considers Wilhelm's engagement with the world of German academia, from his early education to his final years. Chapters 4‒6 (by Vieweger et al., Mangold-Will, and Petersen, respectively) address various aspects of Wilhelm's state visit of 1898 to the Holy Land, which took him to Constantinople, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Baalbek. Chapters 7 and 8, by Beigel and Franzen respectively, turn to Wilhelm's activities following his abdication, in particular his enthusiastic involvement in the gatherings and publications of the Doorner Arbeits-Gemeinschaft (DAG), a scientific society that grew up around Wilhelm's close friendship with the ethnologist Leo Frobenius. DAG conferences were held annually in Doorn, Wilhelm's residence in exile in the Netherlands, from 1927 to 1938.
Through these chapters, Wilhelm II is revealed as a paradoxical combination of naïveté and sophistication, idealism and pragmatism, enthusiasm for novelty and adherence to tradition. He was fascinated by scientific experiments and technological novelties, especially photography, and preferred modern languages to Latin and classical philology. Academic representatives of these and other similarly traditional faculties, irritated by his lack of respect for academic protocol and his evident preference for applied (as opposed to pure) research, considered him ‘intellectually shallow, lacking in stamina, theatrically erratic, inappropriately didactic’ (p. 16). They nevertheless stood to gain from some of his initiatives in the sphere of education and research, notably the ‘tremendously esteemed’ German-American professorial exchange programme, established in 1905 as ‘the result of direct negotiation between the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, and Kaiser Wilhelm II’ (Irish, Reference Irish2015: 313). Other initiatives promoted directly or indirectly by Wilhelm focused more specifically on the applied sciences, especially engineering and chemistry. He was a tenacious supporter of Germany's technical universities, obtaining political representation for them in the Prussian House of Lords, and conferring on them the right to award doctorates in the field of engineering. He also founded the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, now the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science, a non-profit, publicly-funded association of German research institutes dedicated to the pursuit of scientific excellence.
These efforts were matched, perhaps even exceeded, by Wilhelm's promotion of archaeological research. Marchand identifies two developments during the period 1898‒99 which ‘underlay Germany's adoption of an unprecedented (and since unequalled) form of state intervention in support of archaeological endeavors’ (p. 17). One was the founding, under Wilhelm's royal protection, of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (DOG), which ‘increasingly became a funnel for state monies […] to support German excavations and museum acquisitions’; the other was the signing of a secret treaty between the German and Ottoman Empires, the terms of which allowed Berlin's museums to retain half the artefacts uncovered during their excavations (p. 17). In combination, these two developments ‘unleash[ed] a torrent of new projects in the Near East’ (p. 18), including those from which Berlin's Pergamon Museum continues to derive much of its reputation: excavations at Baalbek, Jericho, Miletus, Nineveh, Pergamon, and Uruk, and the acquisition of the monumental Ishtar Gate from Babylon.
Importantly, Wilhelm's enthusiasm for archaeology extended well beyond financial and political support. His state visit to the Holy Land incorporated tours of ruins and excavation sites at Baalbek, Capernaum, and Caesarea, among others. In addition, he enjoyed regular visits to an excavation site on Corfu, where the remains of a late antique temple had been progressively uncovered from 1910 onwards. Together with his ‘favourite archaeologist’ Wilhelm Dörpfeld, formerly one of Heinrich Schliemann's co-workers, Wilhelm II measured the objects uncovered with a metre rule engraved on his walking stick, and instructed the workers in which direction to dig (p. 30). He even participated in the dig himself, equipped with a small trowel, for up to eight hours at a time, so wholly absorbed in his work that he had no interest to spare for any tidings from home, much to the consternation of his military and political entourage (p. 90).
This enthusiasm for archaeology, the study of ancient things, may seem at first glance to sit oddly with Wilhelm's equally lively interest in scientific and technological progress. However, the apparent contradiction is resolved once we realize that archaeology, for Wilhelm, was never solely about the past. Rather, archaeological discoveries offered material support for Wilhelm's understanding of himself, his position as German emperor, and the significance of the German monarchy in global historical context. In her chapter ‘Wilhelm II's State Visit to the Near East: Archaeology and the Legitimation of a Hohenzollern Universal Monarchy between Orient and Occident’, Mangold-Will compellingly illustrates the centrality of both archaeology and history to Wilhelm's complex self-presentation during his visit to the Holy Land. His speech in Damascus, best known for his controversial declaration of perpetual friendship between himself as German emperor and the world's ‘300 million Mohammedans [Muslims]’, and the authorized publication documenting his visit, both relied heavily on comparisons with historical figures from the era of the Crusades, namely ‘the great Sultan Saladin’ and the German emperor Friedrich II, two men widely recognized within Europe as exemplars of piety, chivalrous behaviour, and religious tolerance (pp. 59, 72 note 30). Wilhelm's claim to these same attributes was further cemented by his visits to relevant historical and archaeological sites: the ruins of Caesarea, for example, doubly significant as a place central to biblical happenings and the site of a fortification during the Crusades.
Both geographically and chronologically, Wilhelm's ambitions for archaeology extended well beyond his visit to the Holy Land. Mangold-Will concludes her chapter with an examination of his 1938 publication ‘Monarchy in ancient Mesopotamia’, in which Wilhelm revealed his conviction that monarchy as a system of governance and belief in the doctrine of divine right had both originated in prehistoric Mesopotamia. He further insisted that these cultural elements, so crucial to his own legitimacy, had been transferred through processes of vaguely defined biological assimilation from ancient Sumerian to Semitic-Akkadian and thence to Babylonian culture, reaching ‘a new zenith’ in the figure of Hammurabi, whom Wilhelm identified as ‘a Babylonian predecessor to King Friedrich Wilhelm I, the founder of the Prussian state’ (p. 63). For Wilhelm, archaeological finds were thus potential ‘building blocks’ for the (re)construction of a cultural ‘bridge’ between East and West, a necessary precondition for his theory of ‘cultural transfer from the Orient to the Occident’ (p. 88). One such ‘building block’, a relief of a snake-haired Gorgon or Medusa excavated on Corfu in 1911, is discussed in detail in Beigel's chapter ‘The Pride of the Dilettante: Wilhelm II and the Gorgon’. This Gorgon proved a source of enduring fascination to Wilhelm, who interpreted it as depicting a pre-Grecian, probably Phoenician deity subsequently adopted by the Greeks.
Wilhelm's theories, although idiosyncratic, did not develop in a vacuum. He was heavily influenced by Dörpfeld, one of a minority of scholars at that time arguing for a Phoenician presence on Corfu, and by Frobenius, whose theory of a fundamental dichotomy between the ‘Hamitic’ and ‘Ethiopian’ cultural circles prophesied the eventual downfall of the former (including England and France) and the rise of the latter (including Germany and Russia). Wilhelm eagerly adopted this dichotomy, formulating it as a distinction between ‘the French and English’, who were ‘not whites at all, but blacks’, and ‘the Germans’, ‘the western face of the Orient’, who shared the supposedly Oriental characteristic of needing to be ruled ‘by individuals, be they Khans, Emirs, Sultans, Kaisers, Tsars, dictators, [or] Shahs […] [but] never by parliaments or popular representations’ (p. 95). The self-evident manner in which Wilhelm (and, indeed, Frobenius) combined elements of archaeology, cultural and physical anthropology, ethnology, history, racial theory, and current political concerns underscores the multidisciplinary character of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archaeology. It also demonstrates that archaeology, no less than any of the other disciplines mentioned, was socially constituted, and that particular archaeological theories, methods, debates, and discoveries cannot be fully understood unless they are considered in historical context.
Wilhelm II. Archäologie und Politik um 1900 thus speaks to a diverse range of interests. As a study of the relationship between archaeology, imperialism, and nationalism in a German context, it is a welcome complement to J.L. Hare's recent monograph Excavating Nations ( Reference Hare 2015 ) . While Hare focuses on archaeology as practiced in the German-Danish borderlands, Mangold-Will and Beigel's edited volume deals primarily with archaeological work conducted beyond Germany's national and imperial boundaries. The fact that this work was concentrated in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East leads naturally to a focus on relationships between Germany and the Muslim world, a topic of particular interest in light of the centenary of the First World War (for example, Zürcher, Reference Zürcher2016). Contributors to Wilhelm II. Archäologie und Politik um 1900 also take seriously ‘the economic base that has oriented archaeological research (including funding, patronage, and so on)’, something Moro Abadía (Reference Moro Abadía2010: 229) has called for as part of ‘a sociology of archaeological knowledge that transcends the idea of archaeology as a separate realm of the “social” world’. Finally, individuals and organisations discussed in Wilhelm II. Archäologie und Politik um 1900 have relevance for studies of the history of archaeology more broadly; for example, the Austrian ethnologist and archaeologist Robert von Heine-Geldern, a member (albeit briefly) of the DAG, published extensively on prehistoric migrations of Austronesian peoples and is thus of considerable interest to historians of archaeology in the Pacific (for example, Spriggs, Reference Spriggs2017).
Many-faceted, readable, and instructive, Wilhelm II. Archäologie und Politik um 1900 is a valuable contribution to the history of German archaeology in particular and the history of science more broadly. Recommended.
