Great public figures can bestride the public stage in life—but be buried privately. Kaiser Wilhelm II despised his father, Friedrich III. Having established his legitimacy through his central role in his grandfather, Wilhelm I's, funeral, he refused Friedrich a public funeral and staged a private funeral so perfunctory the widow refused to attend. Otto von Bismarck, to spite Wilhelm II for having fired him, directed that his funeral should be private and at his country estate, denying Wilhelm the grand public display in Berlin he had planned.Footnote ¹

Much more illuminating for historians than private funerals are public funerals for great public figures. In deciding about participants, symbols, and structure, the organizers of public funerals make statements about political values, persons, and policies; participating in a public funeral implies support for those statements. Choosing to organize a public funeral hence transforms a reverent, private ritual into an ostentatious, political demonstration. Historians have focused on official funerals and their symbolic representation of, and support for, the existing political order; however, political movements have also staged political funerals, to challenge existing institutions. So comparing an official funeral and an opposition leader's political funeral offers very differing perspectives on public funerals.Footnote ²

In Imperial Germany, the public funerals of Kaiser Wilhelm I and of Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader Wilhelm Liebknecht provided occasions for the monarchy and the SPD to offer competing views of legitimate governance. These political demonstrations represented not only the legitimate leader and his role, but also models of political citizenship: who should be allowed to participate in Germany's public life and what political actions would be legitimate. Strikingly, for all the significant differences between the two funerals, cultural norms, political pressures, and the logic of demonstrations pushed the organizers to make often similar choices in staging the funerals. The royal court, for example, designed the Kaiser's funeral to bolster a hierarchical authority in which a narrow elite would dominate a politically passive public; yet it, like the SPD, felt compelled to solicit broad public participation in the event. SPD leaders staged Liebknecht's funeral to promote a democratic society with putatively universal, egalitarian participation; yet they, like the royal court, proved unwilling to let just anyone join their parade.

Political funerals, like all human experiences, are not merely experienced but are constructed through the ideologies, discourses, and expectations people bring to them. A funeral's organizers stage it to convey specific meanings. Yet the participants, including spectators, also construct the demonstration through their choices about whether to participate, how to act, and how to “read” the event. Furthermore, media reporting constructs a demonstration for non-participants and may reconstruct it, in retrospect, even for participants. Unfortunately, we seldom have access to participants' perceptions, and twentieth-century depredations have deprived us of much direct access to the intentions of these funerals' stagers. Hence, we must rely primarily on reading closely the funerals themselves and their competing representations in the partisan media, with its multiple voices. Such a reading illuminates the starkly varying constructions of the royal court, the political parties, and the media and gives tantalizing clues as to the reception of those intentions by other participants.Footnote ³

Wilhelm I: The Father of his People

For centuries, various European dynasties used royal funerals to demonstrate the peaceful transfer of legitimate power from one member of the dynasty to another and the normative distribution of status and power. Usually, the primary audiences for a royal funeral were ruling elites and foreign courts. When royal funerals were public events, selected segments of the population were often invited, to validate by their deferential presence the dynastic bequeathal of power and the existing political system. Traditionally, though, Prussia's Hohenzollerns had staged royal funerals not as public demonstrations but as private events, with only foreign dignitaries and the most influential members of the elites able to participate.Footnote ⁴

After King Friedrich Wilhelm III's death in Berlin (June 7, 1840), the royal court organized a modest funeral, modeled on that of his father, Friedrich Wilhelm II. The deceased was lauded as possessing such kingly virtues as justice, piety, mercy, and wisdom, but also as simple and respectable [bieder]. His entire family assembled at his death bed and at the funeral; in good Romantic fashion, all shed copious tears and embraced one another fervently. The court laid him out in military uniform in the royal palace. Because he disliked any elaborate display, he had requested that the general public not be admitted to view his body. The cortege bringing his body from the royal palace to the Dom (Protestant cathedral of Berlin) for the religious service followed a short route lined with soldiers; it included military units, members of the royal court (including servants) in ascending order of status, the new king, visiting royalty and princes, male and female members of the royal family, high government officials, aristocrats, and deputations from various Prussian government agencies and bodies. The king's body was subsequently moved to the royal mausoleum in Charlottenburg, but late at night. The audience for this funeral was the governing elite and representatives of other European ruling families. The court made no attempt to engage the mass of the population in the obsequies.Footnote ⁵

When Friedrich Wilhelm IV died in Potsdam (January 2, 1861), three years after his brother had become regent, he, too, received a modest funeral. His obsequies were held in provincial Potsdam, not nearby Berlin, limiting their size and impact. He, too, was lauded for such kingly virtues as justice, piety, mercy, and wisdom, but also as a friendly, moderate, and intellectual ruler. The family again assembled at the death bed and for the funeral service to mourn the deceased, but they avoided the public displays of tears that had characterized Friedrich Wilhelm III's funeral. The court laid Friedrich Wihelm IV out briefly, in military uniform, in Sanssouci, a royal palace. It allowed the public some access, but it reserved the available time primarily for officers, officials, and other privileged persons. The planned procession from Sanssouci to the Friedenskirche for the funeral service, along a short route lined with soldiers, was identical in make-up to Friedrich Wilhelm III's. Hence, the cortege included representatives of the traditional provincial Stände (assemblies) but not of the new constitutionally based houses of the Prussian legislature. Moreover, while plans envisioned the royal women joining the procession, they were instead sent ahead in wagons “because of the cold.” Substantial crowds viewed the obsequies, but the court made no efforts to accommodate them. Notably, the conservative Neue Preußische Zeitung acknowledged the seemly behavior of these spectators but dismissed them as rubberneckers. The main audience was again Prussian elites and foreign courts, with no effort to engage the masses.Footnote ⁶

An alternative tradition of political funeral as public demonstration had developed in France during the nineteenth century. Because even repressive rulers found it difficult to ban funerals, French republicans and socialists had used their leaders' funerals to demonstrate, occasionally violently, against repressive monarchies. Under the Third Republic, republicans staged elaborate state funerals for major republican figures, to represent republican values and to demonstrate that the Republic's triumph was inevitable and desirable and that the people could be rational, responsible citizens. Despite their orderliness, such funerals were anathema to conservatives, ostensibly because they transformed a potentially hallowed funeral into a political, and often militantly secular, demonstration, but also because they demonstrated broad support for the Republic. The funerals wended across varying Parisian neighborhoods to promote the integration of all French citizens into the republic, but their republican symbolism and secularism made them exclusionary as well.Footnote ⁷

In staging Kaiser Wilhelm I's 1888 obsequies, the royal family chose to make it a public affair, presumably to bolster support for monarchy in an increasingly democratic age. Nineteenth-century European monarchies, including Prussia's, responded to threatening changes by using ceremonials to present themselves to the public in ways that would win popular support. Wilhelm hence instructed that his lying-in-state should take place in Berlin's large Dom, a more accessible place than his father and brother had chosen. The new emperor, Friedrich III, reiterated this instruction within hours of being informed of his father's death. The dowager empress decreed that the lying-in-state would be open to the mass of the population. An elaborate, daytime cortege from the Dom to the Siegesallee (whence the hearse would continue to the family mausoleum at Charlottenburg Palace) would display the deceased and the dynasty before enormous crowds. The dynasty was deliberately aiming at a far broader audience than the narrow circle of elites at whom it had directed earlier funerals. Conscious of the press's role in publicizing such rituals, the court also worked to accommodate reporters' needs.Footnote ⁸

This funeral would hence be a public demonstration. The court and conservatives never described it as a demonstration; however, liberal, Catholic, and foreign newspapers characterized it as such, recognizing that it functioned to mobilize the people to support, by their presence, a carefully staged vision of Wilhelm and of his and various groups' political roles. And observers would inevitably measure the dynasty's political position by how many people participated and how they behaved.Footnote ⁹

The Office of the Court Marshal and the press played the major roles in constructing the funeral. The court modeled the funeral after Friedrich Wilhelm III's, as Wilhelm I had ordered. The dowager empress had some input, but the new ruler, Friedrich, terminally ill, apparently only signed off on a few key issues, leaving the Court Marshal to make most decisions. Reich Chancellor and Prussian Minister-President Otto von Bismarck had no official, and played no apparent, role in planning this dynastic affair. Newspapers and periodicals described the preparations and events to a curious public—but did so in light of their varying perceptions, values, and agendas.Footnote ¹⁰

Kaiser Wilhelm's death (March 9, 1888) elicited numerous obituaries, with a striking tendency to characterize him as a paragon of bürgerlichen (bourgeois) virtues. Notably, the Königlich privilegirte Berlinische (Vossische) Zeitung wrote, “He lit the way for the citizenry in bürgerlicher virtue: in moral purity, in strength of duty, in unpretentious simplicity, in being true to himself.” The Hohenzollerns had long defined duty as a central value of kingship, but the other virtues were scarcely aristocratic or kingly. Moreover, most obituaries described him as exemplifying bourgeois values such as peacefulness, self-control, modesty, piety, and, especially, work (e.g., his frequently cited “last” words: “I have no time to be tired”). They described touching scenes of familial togetherness at his death bed (though he and his wife had fought bitterly for decades). Obituaries could evoke more aristocratic or kingly virtues, such as heroism, strength, and a commitment to justice, but did so much less frequently. The Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung tried to unite all the possibilities, stating, “A knightly hero in war, a supporter of the work of peace, a shining exemplar of the domestic virtues, the former ruler seems the most suitable representative of the national ideal of the emperor …”Footnote ¹¹

Scholars have long debated the “feudalization of the bourgeoisie,” although most now emphasize the bourgeoisie's desire to be close to the state, not the aristocracy.Footnote ¹² Here, though, liberals seem to have been pursuing an embourgeoisement of the monarchy. Their ideal monarch was a modest, moral, hard-working, competent family man who preferred peace but could defend the nation if necessary.

The reference to “the national ideal of the emperor” illuminates a striking aspect of the obsequies: the German emperor's triumph over the Prussian king. The royal family presented Wilhelm primarily as a Prussian king. For example, the insignia displayed during the obsequies were Prussian. Other participants had other agendas, however. The architects who designed the street decorations for the cortege route generally privileged national German motifs, such as an inscription honoring “the creator of the German Reich,” over Prussian motifs, such as the iron cross. Wilhelm's presentation in the press was even more striking. The official Deutscher Reichs-Anzeiger und Königlich Preußischer Staats-Anzeiger usually referred to “Kaiser and King Wilhelm,” but not always. The Prussian royalist Neue Preußische Zeitung, while titling stories “Kaiser and King,” generally referred to the “Kaiser” in the body of those stories. Other papers very seldom referred to Wilhelm (or his successor) as king; they identified him instead as Kaiser, reaffirming the preeminence of his role as German over that as Prussian. Moreover, by focusing overwhelmingly on Wilhelm's role as the German Empire's founder, newspapers further privileged his national and imperial over his Prussian and royal role.Footnote ¹³

Monarchs traditionally had “subjects,” but participants and observers avoided such terminology in Wilhelm's obsequies. While the new Kaiser referred to “my subjects” in a (published) letter to Bismarck, he did not use the term in his proclamation “To my people!” The official Deutsche Reichs-Anzeiger had referred to “subjects” in discussing Friedrich Wilhelm IV's 1861 funeral but spoke of masses and the public in 1888. Other papers in 1888 did not describe participants or spectators as subjects but as the people and the public or masses and crowds. In printing the Berlin city government's address to Friedrich, which included the traditional profession of the “subjects' loyalty,” the Königlich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung embedded it within a column on Friedrich's role that used Bürger (citizen) and its compounds fifteen times, even referring to the new Kaiser as “ein Bürger unter Bürgern.” While Bürger has a range of meanings in German, here the paper was implicitly rejecting the inequality inherent in “subject” and asserting a fundamental, and potentially political, equality of Kaiser and citizens. The paper subsequently referred to Wilhelm as “erster Bürger des Staates.” The Kölnische Zeitung also referred to the citizenry (Bürgerschaft).Footnote ¹⁴

This range of terminology suggests a society caught among competing models of political agency. Frequent references to masses and crowds suggest considerable ambivalence about the people joining together and acting in large numbers. References to people and public, on the other hand, accord with the fact that the court had felt compelled to stage this funeral not just for elites but for the whole people. The Reich Constitution of 1871 had assigned the Reich jurisdiction over citizen rights (Staatsbürgerrecht), making the concept of citizenship available, but few were yet thinking explicitly in those terms. Nonetheless, popular agency would pop up in the course of the obsequies in ways that could suggest that the people were responsible citizens.Footnote ¹⁵

In preparing those obsequies, the court continued the traditional royal reliance on elaborate display. Pomp and magnificence counted as princely virtue, signs and sources of greatness that would elicit the homage the ruler deserved. They were central to legitimating and maintaining royal rule.Footnote ¹⁶

Within the Dom, the court hence invested in florid decorations that expressed the wealth, power, and aura of the monarchy. Court officials used laurel and palm leaves profusely, traditional symbols of victory, peace, and resurrection. They laid Wilhelm out, like his father and brother, in military uniform with selected medals and surrounded by imposing symbols of his royal, Prussian office. Senior military officers took turns standing watch, twenty-four hours a day, over his body. This mixture of the extravagant, symbolic, and military represented the Kaiser as one who disposed of power legitimately and forcefully. The newspapers (except the socialist press) responded to the pomp with extended, breathless, deferential description.Footnote ¹⁷

The royal court asked the city of Berlin, as was expected of cities blessed with a royal procession, to decorate the funeral route lavishly. The city, lacking time and expertise, delegated planning to the local Architects' Association, which commissioned individual architects to decorate specific stretches of the route. The association also issued guidelines to building owners for decorating buildings along the route. The architects, not the court or the city, hence determined the messages the decorations would convey. They constructed numerous decorative, temporary objects of wood, plaster, and canvas, which, along with bleachers for spectators, created a sumptuous but theatrical air. While many of the motifs evoked the funereal, others emphasized the deceased's imperial and national character (e.g., a statue of Germania, imperial crowns, and eagles).Footnote ¹⁸

The court failed in its effort to define the terms of individuals' access to the Kaiser's lying-in-state and hence the status of individuals relative to the monarch. The dowager empress ordered that anyone in mourning clothes, “without regard to person,” could view the Kaiser's remains and that no tickets allowing privileged access were to be issued. This decree implied the equality of all, from aristocrat to beggar, in the face of the monarch. It provoked the New York Times correspondent to exclaim, “it could not be more thoroughly democratic in America.” The decree could not stand. Aristocrats had long defended their privileged position against royal absolutist efforts to make all equal before the monarch; they were not going to queue up on equal footing with clerks and ditch diggers, nor wait hours in bitter cold. Within twenty-four hours the Court Marshal's Office was giving people with connections, aristocrats, and senior officials special tickets for privileged access to view the Kaiser's remains. The dynasty, needing the aristocracy as political prop, acquiesced in privileged aristocratic access. Some newspapers noted considerable bitterness in the waiting crowds over such privileging, but neither the press nor the dowager empress commented explicitly on this flouting of royal decree.Footnote ¹⁹

The military also enjoyed favored access, reflecting widespread perceptions of it as politically privileged and superior to the mass of other Germans. Senior army officers and their ladies secured privileged access quickly, but junior officers and their ladies, cadets, and eventually whole military units also did so. German conservatives adulated the military, while some nineteenth-century German liberals argued that only those who served in the army deserved full citizenship. So the press saw this privileging as perfectly legitimate.Footnote ²⁰

Legislators did not share in such privileging. Members of the Reichstag and the Prussian House of Deputies demanded the privileged access to the Dom being accorded to aristocratic, military, and bureaucratic elites. The Court Marshal's Office initially refused, asserting, disingenuously, that it could not override the empress's order. In the eyes of royal officials, the people's elected representatives did not deserve the same access as aristocrats or enlisted men. Only after bitter complaints did the empress decree that legislators and their ladies could enter late one evening after the Dom had been closed to public access; however, crowds of soldiers and civilians, struggling to get into the Dom that evening, blocked most legislators from gaining access. This disrespect for the people's elected representatives outraged legislators and liberal observers.Footnote ²¹

The behavior of the 200,000 plus Germans who viewed the Kaiser's remains proved to be mixed. For three days, enormous crowds waited for hours in brutal winter weather, demonstrating apparent devotion to the monarchy. Individuals occasionally proved unwilling to wait. Some servants and coachmen used petty bribery to get into the Dom. Moreover, the police and army occasionally had to resort to physical force to control the huge crowds, which periodically surged through police barriers. Fearful of “the crowd,” newspapers occasionally expressed distress at chaotic scenes; however, the conservative, liberal, and Catholic press generally touted the masses' presence as demonstrating their love for the monarchy and the existing order.Footnote ²²

The royal family invited to the funeral service (March 16, 1888) those whom they thought counted. Foreign royalty would have places of honor nearest the coffin. The regulations followed the court's protocol list in determining who among the court and aristocracy would participate and where they would be positioned. Special representatives from foreign governments and senior diplomats would attend the service, along with senior military officers, government officials, and deputations from imperial and Prussian governmental offices and bodies.Footnote ²³

Representatives of three major institutions contested their failure to receive invitations. Having received no invitation, the President of the Reichsgericht, which sat in Leipzig, appealed to the Reich Justice Office. The latter asked the Court Marshal to give him a place—not because he was head of an important institution that represented the empire's character as a Rechtsstaat but because he had enjoyed the Kaiser's personal confidence. The royal court approved his participation. The legislators in the Reichstag and the Prussian House of Deputies also asked to be included. The Court Marshal rejected their request, though the presidents of the two chambers would be included (unlike in Friedrich Wilhelm IV's funeral). The legislators appealed to the new emperor, Friedrich III, widely seen as “liberal”; however, the emperor declared (the Reichstag President reported) that the legislators could not be included in the obsequies because “one could not provide for them a place worthy of the Reichstag.” The Kaiser could have provided them a worthy place—but only at the expense of aristocrats, military officers, and government officials. He did allow each legislature's presiding committee to attend the funeral service, but traditional elites still had priority over the people's elected representatives.Footnote ²⁴

Religion played a major role in the obsequies, vividly expressing the nineteenth-century alliance of throne and altar. The press emphasized Wilhelm's piety and reported on the royal family's religious services and prayers after his death. Christian motifs predominated among the decorations outside the Dom, implying divine sanction for monarchy. Wilhelm, head of Prussia's Protestant state church, had stipulated the minister, hymns, and texts for his Protestant funeral. The court preacher's funeral sermon presented Wilhelm as a servant of God. This trope bolstered the monarchy by emphasizing that every human being was a servant to those above him, Wilhelm to God and every other German to Wilhelm. The minister emphasized that one should expect true happiness only through religion and in the next world. Foreign and some German correspondents did note disapprovingly that a rifle salvo in Wilhelm's honor muffled the benediction and last hymn.Footnote ²⁵

The dynasty planned the subsequent cortege to represent the nature and distribution of power. It began with military units, to represent the Kaiser's connection to the military and to power, followed by clergy to represent the Kaiser's connection to the divine. The Kaiser's servants followed, in ascending order of status, to represent the Kaiser's importance through their number and, in some cases, their aristocratic status. Government ministers (another kind of servant) followed, holding the Prussian royal symbols of office. Then came the hearse and the Kaiser's riderless horse, followed by the Prussian Royal Banner, symbolizing the deceased's royal office and dignity. The new Prussian King, and therefore German Kaiser, should have come next, as the funeral's central purpose, politically, was to represent the unbroken continuity of that office and dignity in the person of the heir and new ruler; however, Friedrich, terminally ill, could not brave the day's sub-freezing temperatures. So Crown Prince Wilhelm, who would soon be King and Kaiser, took his place. After the Crown Prince came the kings (of Saxony, Romania, and Belgium—the latter two foreign), then the Hohenzollern and foreign princes (including the crown princes of Britain and Russia). In the vast procession that followed, aristocrats preceded commoners, and executive-branch officials preceded the three legislators.Footnote ²⁶ Most spectators would have found the punctilious ordering of retainers, aristocrats, and officials indecipherable, but the cortege made the major political points clearly: the monarchy was at the center of society, governance, and power; power would continue to pass down, legitimately, within the Hohenzollern line; traditional ruling elites were still the preeminent political citizens; those of noble blood outranked mere commoners.

Late-nineteenth-century German gender norms sharply limited even royal women's roles in the obsequies. Women were prominent in the private sphere—the death-bed scene and subsequent religious services in the palace. When the Kaiser's body was moved from the palace to the Dom, however, his grandsons joined the procession, but his daughter could not. Women could attend the funeral service in the Dom but had to sit in the galleries. Unlike in 1840 and 1861, the court gave royal women no place in the cortege. Instead, they had to go to the mausoleum separately from the cortege, which contained no women. These limitations on women's roles reflected societal gender norms that had become so powerful that they trumped even royal status.Footnote ²⁷

The representation of males was also striking. Scholars have recently emphasized “hegemonic masculinity,” a set of virtues—strength, self-control, competence, courage, military prowess—that males, and especially rulers, were expected to demonstrate and that served to delegitimize those, such as women and homosexuals, who putatively could not share them. Such virtues were ascribed to Wilhelm I. Yet newspapers noted repeatedly instances of males—generals, officials, commoners—responding to the Kaiser's death with moistened eyes, crying, or even sobbing. By the later nineteenth century, “real men” were not supposed to cry, so the liberal and conservative press represented these actions as understandable lapses of masculine self-control that only the extraordinary impact of Wilhelm's death could have elicited. Conservative and National Liberal newspapers often presented Friedrich, whom they mistrusted politically, as particularly subject to such losses of control. Some even reported him sobbing uncontrollably in his mother's lap—like a child. The press represented quite differently Crown Prince Wilhelm, whom everyone expected soon to ascend the throne as the real Kaiser. He had been quite close to his grandfather, and Alfred Graf Waldersee noted in his diary that the crown prince had tears on his face at his grandfather's death; however, the press never presented him as crying or sobbing—quite the contrary. The Neue Preußische Zeitung, for example, reported, “Quite alone, visibly deeply moved, but composed in a manly fashion, … Crown Prince Wilhelm strode behind the coffin …” Contemporaries chose to represent the future Kaiser to the public as emotionally engaged but a paragon of masculine self-control.Footnote ²⁸

Use of metaphors of family was frequent—if ambiguous. The press usually presented Wilhelm as the father of his people and his country, placing him in a position of patriarchal dominance and his subjects in the dependent role of children. Yet the cortege offered a different definition of family. Normally, close family members would follow immediately after the hearse. In Wilhelm's cortege, however, immediately after the crown prince and before the Kaiser's other grandson came three only distantly related monarchs. These royals constituted what the conservative Die Post characterized as a “family of ruling monarchs,” with priority over the Kaiser's biological family—and over German officials and officers.Footnote ²⁹

To provide the appropriate setting for the cortege, the Berlin city government organized a Spalier (formal rows of men lining both sides of a route). “The Spalier,” it announced, “is to protect the security and dignity of the procession.” Hence, only men who were reliable protectors because already socially and politically integrated through membership in approved groups could form the Spalier. Various groups competed for the right to participate. The city chose students, veterans, nationalist gymnasts, guild members, and, as representatives of the workers, men from the state-based Health Insurance Offices and the state armory, not from autonomous worker organizations. The press (conservative to liberal) emphasized the war veterans, who had defended the country, and students, who would lead it in the future, giving both privileged positions. The people's role here was more than merely passive. If all the court wanted was a barrier, it could have just ordered troops to line the route, as in 1840 and 1861. The dynasty solicited major social groups to participate in 1888 because their voluntary presence would legitimize Friedrich, the monarchy, and the political order.Footnote ³⁰

Notably, both workers and members of the bourgeoisie, the core of the modernizing economy and society, had circumscribed roles. Workers were represented only through state institutions, not through their chosen representatives. Deputations from the Academies of the Sciences and of the Arts and from universities represented the educated middle classes, but only at the procession's tail end and only as state officials. Business elites had no official role whatsoever.

While court and press constructed the obsequies, they could not control how people would respond. French republicans constructed Léon Gambetta's public funeral as an integrative event to create support for the republican order. Yet not all spectators showed the desired respect. Moreover, police spies reported, the most common popular reactions to the funeral seemed to be gossiping about Gambetta's sex life and about the inadequate pomp, compared to earlier monarchies, that the republic had brought to his funeral. German spectators could, similarly, “read” Wilhelm's obsequies in different ways. As we lack police reports on the popular reactions to the Kaiser's (or to Wilhelm Liebknecht's) funeral, we have to rely on inference from newspaper reports.Footnote ³¹

People's motives for viewing the Kaiser's remains and the cortege appear mixed. Newspapers often insisted that people came solely to honor a beloved leader. The liberal Königlich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung, for example, asserted, “Not curiosity and a yearning for frivolous pageantry drew these imposing masses of people here, but rather a deep-seated pain, which is disseminated equally through all strata of the population, and a veneration of the eminent deceased.” Yet some members of the elite brought their opera glasses to the funeral service—where they were “freely used.” Seeing while being seen apparently ranked higher among such people's motivations than a solemn attention to the deceased. Several papers noted that many in the crowd, after the cortege had passed, lingered to gape at the VIPs—before making off with a souvenir from the decorations. The Allgemeine Zeitung (Munich), while very respectful of the Kaiser, commented acerbically on the excessive pomp and how indispensable it was to many in the crowd. The paper suggested that too many were moved not by respect for the deceased or for the existing order—but by voyeurism.Footnote ³² The Kaiser's obsequies were the biggest spectacle that Berlin had ever seen. Presumably, not every participant came solely to honor the Kaiser and not everyone who did want to honor the deceased would have stood for hours in the bitter cold if they had not expected an imposing spectacle.

Yet supporters of the monarchy needed to characterize those who attended the Kaiser's obsequies as worthy, responsible people whose presence demonstrated support for the monarchical order. Many middle- and upper-class Germans expected the worst of the masses, and especially of “the crowd.” Some articles about the lying-in-state did express concerns about the “pushing, surging, howling mob from the lowest strata of society.” Yet the massive crowds could scarcely serve as a legitimation of the monarchy unless they were presented as upstanding individuals. Hence, the press virtually always characterized both members of the Spalier and others lining the route in laudatory, often effusive, terms, such as “a calm, worthy seriousness” or “in … exemplary order and calm.” The conservative press was most explicit in emphasizing the participants', including spectators', (tacit) support for the monarchical order, but most other papers explicitly or implicitly presented the same image. The papers also asserted that the obsequies were inclusive, that people “of all social strata” were united in their grief and, implicitly, their support for the existing order.Footnote ³³

Some liberal papers, however, used the crowd's behavior to argue for something different: the political maturity of the citizenry and, implicitly, their right to a greater public role. The Frankfurter Zeitung offered a paean to the self-motivated citizen: “No decree from above was necessary to give the 16th of March some external impression of a national day of mourning; [rather] freely from the heart, under the impact of true pain, the most sublime demonstration that Germany has yet seen took place.” The Kölnische Zeitung asserted that the enormous size of the crowds and the limited number of police meant that “only the citizenry itself can provide for calm and order.” Such celebrations of popular autonomy and responsibility constituted implicit attacks on the conservative claim that hierarchy and control were necessary. Conservatives had been appalled when Friedrich III decreed no official national mourning but left it to individual Germans to judge how they would express their grief at the Kaiser's passing. Conservatives were adamant that the masses could not be trusted to make their own decisions but must be subject to elite tutelage. These liberal newspapers, which had enthusiastically welcomed Friedrich's decision on mourning, were using the funeral not to bolster monarchical rule, as the court had intended, but as proof that the people were capable of responsible agency, of ruling themselves. The people, not the court, made the obsequies “the most sublime demonstration,” the people, not the police, made it a model of orderliness.Footnote ³⁴

Not all Germans shared the widespread distress at the Kaiser's death. Under the repressive Anti-Socialist Laws, surviving Leftist periodicals published circumspectly or abroad. That press downplayed the obsequies' significance. The Berliner Volksblatt focused, caustically, on the chaos and police incompetence attendant on the lying-in-state. The exile press was openly critical. The Londoner Freie Presse vituperatively attacked Wilhelm for his bloody repression and wars of aggression, calling him “a dying mass murderer.” Der Sozialdemokrat emphasized his repressiveness, along with the bad faith he had shown toward revolutionaries who had surrendered to him in 1849. It also asserted that anybody in Germany who dared to express doubts about his rule or who failed to participate in the “patriotic demonstrations” for him faced denunciation. None of these papers bothered to describe the funeral. Public funerals are intended to be integrative, to bring people together, but in practice they are often exclusionary. Wilhelm's funeral was in theory integrative, but the political Left felt excluded because it utterly repudiated what the Kaiser stood for, monarchical, authoritarian government and a property-based economic system.Footnote ³⁵

Wilhelm Liebknecht: A Son of the People

Wilhelm Liebknecht's funeral (August 12, 1900) was the great public funeral of pre-1914 German Social Democracy, as its supporters held a great demonstration and challenged imperial authority in the royal capital. The Social Democrats could not command great public spaces, but the police-president of Berlin consented to their conducting Liebknecht's remains through the streets, before hundreds of thousands. His funeral far outshone even that of his revered coworker, the “counter-Kaiser” August Bebel, because Bebel died in Zurich, Switzerland, producing a fundamentally different event than the imposing demonstration that characterized Liebknecht's funeral in the heart of Red Berlin. The sources on Liebknecht's funeral that have survived suggest that SPD leaders organized the solemnities against the Kaiser's funeral—to demonstrate socialist honor and popular responsibility.Footnote ³⁶

Bebel's denomination as the counter-Kaiser and the ways Liebknecht's funeral countered the Kaiser's reflect the adversarial relationship between Social Democracy and the existing social, political, and economic orders. Historians have debated whether to consider Social Democracy a sub-, alternative, or oppositional culture. To varying degrees they have emphasized the way it drew on the dominant culture's forms (e.g., gymnast associations) and content (e.g., discipline as a virtue), or the way it defined an alternative to the dominant culture rooted in Social Democratic values and goals, even as it adapted elements from that dominant culture, or the way it directly challenged existing norms and forms. Overall, Liebknecht's obsequies tend to support the image of Social Democracy as an alternative culture that challenged but was still enmeshed in the dominant culture.Footnote ³⁷

Liebknecht's obituaries reflect this ambiguous relationship, as they often praised the socialist Liebknecht for bourgeois virtues. Social Democratic papers certainly emphasized his egalitarianism, internationalism, and commitment to the proletariat; however, they also emphasized his duty, diligence, and self-discipline, indeed all the elements the Königlich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung had in 1888 defined as the central bourgeois virtues in characterizing Kaiser Wilhelm. Moreover, dismissing opponents' accusations that the SPD sought to destroy marriage and the family, they lauded his devotion to family life. They also referred to him repeatedly as a “soldier of the revolution” and as a “fighter.” Some “bourgeois” character traits, such as diligence and discipline, are useful to any political movement; however, Social Democrats were positioning Liebknecht as thoroughly respectable in terms their potential supporters and even opponents could accept, even as they left no doubt that he had been deeply committed to and had deployed his virtues for socialism.Footnote ³⁸

For all the Social Democrats' internationalism, nationalism figured in Liebknecht's obsequies. The Social Democratic press emphasized Liebknecht's and the movement's commitment to international understanding and cooperation. The presence of delegations from foreign socialist movements was a source of great pride, and those delegations had a prominent place in the cortege and as funeral speakers; however, Bebel asserted in his funeral oration that Liebknecht had been “the incarnation of internationalism, which did not prevent him from being, simultaneously, a good German, not in the sense of the official, but rather of the democratic Germany.” The Social Democrats remained true to their internationalism and democracy while acknowledging the power of national identity.Footnote ³⁹

The SPD believed in its right to demonstrate for its ideals, in contravention of unjust laws if necessary, so SPD leaders had long sponsored funerals that they intended to be (illegal) demonstrations. Before 1908, the police in Prussia and many other German states could deny permission for any demonstration of which the authorities disapproved; they virtually always denied Social Democratic groups permission to demonstrate. Like many other repressive regimes, they usually granted permission for a funeral procession because it is difficult to deny a family the right to bury its dead according to social norms; however, when the Prussian state allowed a cortege, it set rigid conditions (e.g., no red funeral-wreath sashes, no red banners). It had also decreed that only a clergyman could speak in a religious cemetery—and virtually all Germany's cemeteries were religious. Even three graveside words by a layman could constitute an illegal speech that would bring a fine or incarceration. The SPD protested bitterly that such police measures were impious, unjust attacks on family and friends' right to honor their dead. Yet the party also crowed whenever an SPD funeral drew large crowds and thereby illegally, if justly, “formed itself into a splendid demonstration.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Religion played a central role in conflicts over Social Democratic funerals. Anti-clericalism had been growing in Europe since the eighteenth century, as many saw the organized churches as corrupt tools that elites used to mislead the people with other-worldly fantasies. French liberals' and socialists' increasing preference for being buried without benefit of clergy provoked outrage among conservatives and the devout because it directly challenged cherished religious and political beliefs. Similarly, decisions by some German Social Democrats to forego a Christian funeral could elicit clamoring counter-demonstrators and abuse, including spitting on the coffin. The SPD denounced the “rabble (Pöbel)” who engaged in such practices, citing their behavior as evidence of Christian education's abject failure and the need for Social Democracy.Footnote ⁴¹

Before Liebknecht's funeral, the SPD laid him out in the parlor of his home. The police granted special permission to keep the body there beyond the legal time limit, enabling the party to maximize turn-out by holding the funeral on a Sunday. His parlor overflowed with wreaths but was too small for any public service. Vorwärts emphasized the simplicity and hominess of the decor. A stream of people viewed the body that Sunday morning. Vorwärts described them as average workers, not movement elites (who presumably had paid their respects earlier).Footnote ⁴²

Having received police permission for Liebknecht's cortege, the SPD touted it as a demonstration and sought to maximize the audience for the political statements it wished to make. The police refused permission to route the cortege through the central, government district, where the Kaiser's had taken place, so party leaders chose a fifteen-kilometer route across much of the city, to the municipal cemetery at Friedrichsfelde (chosen in part because police could not ban lay speakers there). They routed the procession through affluent as well as worker districts, to confront Germans of all classes with the numbers and discipline of the organized working class.Footnote ⁴³

The SPD took an ambiguous stance toward display in staging the funeral. The party had many fewer options for display than the royal family. They could command neither a large public space nor the streets, so formal decorations would be absent. The authorities banned red funeral-wreath sashes and red flags (though the wreaths consumed every red flower in Berlin, while Social Democratic women flaunted red dresses or accessories). The SPD hence chose to emphasize the simplicity of the funeral arrangements, arguing that the very absence of decoration was a virtue. Vorwärts announced proudly, “They alone [the people] decorate the streets … this living arch, more magnificent than any wood daubed over with false gold.” Nonetheless, the party press could not resist trumpeting the beauty and enormous number of wreaths that people all across Germany and Europe had sent to honor Liebknecht. Moreover, the party noted the symbolic weight of wreaths that often represented the collected pennies donated by hard-pressed workers. And Vorwärts trumpeted the palm and laurel leaves on display, traditional symbols of peace and victory that the royal court had also used.Footnote ⁴⁴

This cortege was putatively egalitarian and democratic, but not just anyone could join. It did not consist of aristocrats, officers, and officials, but of the (working) people. Vorwärts exclaimed that one did not have to be able to afford mourning clothes to honor the great proletarian leader. If one had to work that Sunday, one came in work clothes, and “It truly did not dishonor the solemnities.” Workers were not supposed to march as individuals, however; rather, the SPD declared that one should march as one of an organized group, usually of Social Democratic voters or of union members, who presumably were reliable. Moreover, the Bremer Bürger-Zeitung commented, “The ‘whole of Berlin’ was on the march, not ‘tout Berlin,’ such as would flock together for a sensational social event, for a court festival or a gala performance, no the whole of Berlin, the working people of the capital city, the workers with their wives, the small artisans and businessmen who are swelling the ranks of Social Democracy.” And the Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung wrote, “Even the bitterest opponent could see that Social Democracy had at its command the best elements in the working class.” While including upstanding working people, the papers were symbolically excluding from the politically acceptable the upper classes and the “worse” elements of the working class.Footnote ⁴⁵

Liebknecht's cortege represented not the transfer of power from one individual to another but the continuation of a broad movement. Before the hearse were thousands of voters from Liebknecht's electoral district, not his servants but his putative masters. Immediately behind the hearse were wagons with wreaths, symbolizing not royal power but the wide popular support he and the worker movement enjoyed. Then came wagons with his male relatives and friends and deputations of Berlin voters, symbolizing his ties to the people. Immediately behind the wagons walked his worker-movement “comrades in arms,” symbolizing past and continuing struggles. Then came SPD parliamentary deputies, two liberal deputies (Freisinnige Vereinigung), and delegates from German and international worker-movement groups, followed by group after group after group of popular supporters. Estimates of the marchers ranged up to 150,000. The SPD organized the march so that the tens of thousands of marchers assembled near his apartment. Tens of thousands more marchers assembled along the march route at designated points for each worker-movement group; each group added itself as the march passed its assembly point, so that, one liberal newspaper reported, the procession “swelled like an avalanche.” Liebknecht had passed away, but the movement would march on—and grow and grow and grow.Footnote ⁴⁶

The SPD welcomed the people into the event. As usual in a demonstration, spectators, hundreds of thousands of them, were participants as well—but in this case explicitly. Their presence on the streets was the only decoration the event needed. And to convince perhaps 100,000 marchers and a couple of hundred thousand spectators to give up a sunny August Sunday to honor a socialist leader demonstrated that Social Democracy was a movement to be reckoned with. Additionally, the Bremer Bürger-Zeitung noted wryly, “the bourgeoisie took part in its fashion,” drawn to stare from its windows, in amazement or fear, at the imposing demonstration.Footnote ⁴⁷

The funeral service and the cortege were wholly secular, but the organizers echoed traditional ritual. No religious ceremony took place for the anti-clerical Liebknecht, but Bebel's funeral oration and the graveside speeches were analogous to a funeral sermon and graveside prayers. They offered hope of salvation, but in this world through the worker movement's future success. As in a religious funeral, music played a prominent role, with three choirs and various bands; however, apparently, no religious hymns were sung. The reported music included instrumental art music, such as Chopin's funeral march; sentimental songs, such as “When Two Hearts Part,” which asserted connection; and songs of struggle, such as “A Son of the People,” which emphasized workers' honor and militant determination. Worker choirs sang the songs. Those in or watching the cortege hummed or sang along with “A Son of the People,” a song that positioned Liebknecht and all other sons of the people as equals, while suggesting that Liebknecht the politician was subordinate to the people.Footnote ⁴⁸

Funeral orations by Bebel, Paul Singer, and various foreign representatives focused on work, struggle, internationalism, and hope. Bebel's (the most personal, honoring his long partnership with Liebknecht) highlighted Liebknecht's role in the revolutions of 1848 as observers had highlighted Wilhelm I's role in the War of Liberation against Napoleon—two very different emancipatory struggles. Bebel and Singer lauded Liebknecht's life-long commitment to the poor and oppressed and all the labor he expended in their cause. They characterized Liebknecht's life and that of the Social Democratic movement as one of struggle against a brutal status quo and its unfeeling representatives, as did several of the foreign delegates. All the speakers trumpeted the internationalism for which Liebknecht had stood and which was central to Social Democracy's self-image. Bebel and Singer concluded by reassuring their listeners that the cause for which Liebknecht had fought was just and its ultimate triumph certain.Footnote ⁴⁹

Liebknecht's funeral was gendered, but differently from Kaiser Wilhelm's. As had Wilhelm's female relatives, Liebknecht's participated in the private mourning, but their public role was limited; they stood on a balcony to watch the departing cortege and then went separately to the cemetery. Non-familial women could march in Liebknecht's cortege, however, as part of worker-movement groups. The socialist press also emphasized manliness. They did report that many men (even “tough fighters,” the Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung wrote) had tears in their eyes. Liebknecht's demise, like the Kaiser's, had to be so confounding that even the manly were moved. Nonetheless, Liebknecht himself was characterized in accord with notions of hegemonic masculinity: a fighter, strong, courageous, a patriarch. And Vorwärts, in describing those viewing the coffin, wrote, “No unmanly, slavish kneeling … Standing tall.” When the coffin was being closed, the paper added, “No one disturbed the work with moaning or sobbing and wailing.” Social Democrats had to honor both the deep emotional engagement of the masses with Liebknecht and the demands of manly self-control.Footnote ⁵⁰

Liebknecht's supporters, like the Kaiser's, insisted that only affection for the deceased motivated participants. Liebknecht's funeral was, they asserted, such as no ruler could ever secure because the movement could not command anyone to buy a wreath or to attend. The masses of honest, hard-working people came in their hundreds of thousands only out of sincere love and respect and acted responsibly of their own accord. The party press asserted that people could not have come out of sensationalism because, as the Arbeiter-Zeitung of Vienna put it, “When sons of the people are buried, there is little for idle curiosity to see.”Footnote ⁵¹

Crucially, the SPD emphasized the discipline and decency of participants. Many Germans feared the proletariat as dangerous classes, liable to explode in disorder or even violence. To secure workers' equal right to participate in public life, the worker movement had to disprove that stereotype by having workers visibly perform as upstanding, orderly citizens. In the Kaiserreich, that meant acting with almost military discipline. In describing Liebknecht's funeral (as other proletarian demonstrations), the SPD emphasized their supporters' self-discipline and “exemplary orderliness.” The party issued exact instructions: people should march only in groups—not as individuals. They must obey the 1,000 parade marshals the SPD had appointed. They must join the procession where instructed, marching in rows of six. While the marchers could appear in work clothes if necessary, virtually all appeared in their Sunday best. Conservative and liberal papers sneered that this attire proved capitalism was not impoverishing the workers, but to the workers it demonstrated their competence, dignity, and worthiness. Discipline and dignity were central values of the dominant culture. Yet any movement seeking power arguably needed them, and Social Democrats were deploying them in pursuit of socialist ends.Footnote ⁵²

As with Wilhelm's funeral, various newspapers redefined this demonstration to accord with their political values. The liberal Vossische Zeitung could, as did others, acknowledge, “Everywhere, exemplary orderliness reigned.” Such papers also noted, however, that, despite the SPD's proletarian pretensions, Liebknecht had (as editor and parliamentarian) lived affluently and many in the cortege wore elegant top hats and frock coats. The Allgemeine Zeitung argued that the crowds recognized the disparity, citing one worker who said of a sumptuous wreath, “That set someone back more than fifty cents.” Both Die Post and Jugend jibed that the party of equality could not, in practice, run an egalitarian funeral but had laid out the procession just as rigidly according to status as any bourgeois or aristocratic group. Jugend went on to note ironically, “The party of equality and fraternity is even more strictly disciplined than the dissolute bourgeoisie, which at such an event would just allow a farrago of folk to wander along!” Die Post also insisted that turning a funeral into a political demonstration was tasteless and impious, a base exploitation of the deceased's lifeless body—characterizations the paper had not used when praising Wilhelm's ostentatious funeral. Finally, it and other papers insisted that only curiosity drew the large crowds.Footnote ⁵³

The social conservative Maximilian Harden's Die Zukunft offered a surprisingly sympathetic description of the funeral. At a (presumably fictional) Sunday evening salon, a naive young officer reported on seeing “something very remarkable,” Liebknecht's funeral. He emphasized the size of the crowd, their sincere mourning (not mere curiosity, as there was “nothing to gape at”), and exemplary order. Stunned to see an alternative culture, he described the spectators as “a totally different public” from those who watched military parades. Referring to an earlier speaker's dismissal of those opposing German intervention in the Boxer Rebellion as “a petty rabble without a fatherland,” he commented that that rabble was “really a people … that fundamentally has nothing in common with us, that thinks other thoughts and dreams other ideals.” Another speaker cited Benjamin Disraeli's Sibyl as showing that every modern nation is really two peoples, the well-to-do and the poor, as alien to one another as people from different continents. Talk then turned to raillery, but when it was interrupted by people in the street singing “A Son of the People,” the host closed the balcony door, commenting, “It's really gotten rather cold.” While constructing the funeral to show that Social Democracy's rise was far more important than the issue of the day, German intervention in far-away China, Harden was also acknowledging the Social Democrats' self-perception as sincere, responsible men and women who offered a distinct alternative to the existing order.Footnote ⁵⁴