A few years ago, friends of mine moved to Löwenberger Land in Brandenburg. During my visits, I always noticed the Liebenberg estate and castle, which we passed on our way from the train station. At some point I started researching this place and found out some amazing stories.

Libertas Schulze-Boysen, a member of the “Red Chapel” resistance movement, lived here for a time. The estate was also used by the heads of state of the German Empire, the Third Reich and the GDR for hunting parties. Today, however, I would like to tell you about the grandfather of the resistance fighter: Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg and Hertefeld, Count of Sandels.

In 1886, Philipp zu Eulenburg met Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, who was to become Prussian King and German Emperor two years later as Wilhelm II. A close emotional friendship quickly developed between Wilhelm and the diplomat Eulenburg. Herbert von Bismarck, son of the Chancellor, said at the time that the Kaiser loved no one more than Eulenburg.

Biographers of Wilhelm II attest a homoerotic component to his relationship with Eulenburg, without assuming that there was actually a homosexual relationship between the two. Eulenburg will not have seen himself as a homosexual either, although he himself writes in letters of sexual acts with other men.

A clique of noblemen who were devoted to the Kaiser arose around Eulenburg and Wilhelm, the so-called Liebenberg Circle. This group of men met regularly for joint hunts, especially in Löwenberger Land, and for the Kaiser’s annual trips to Norway, where women were expressly not welcome. The members of the circle sometimes maintained sexual relations with each other and spoke to and about each other in letters as “Tütü” or “Phili”. The Kaiser was often referred to as “Liebchen” (darling).

The meetings of the Liebenberg Circle could be cultivated, but also quite vulgar. There was music, singing, laughter and all kinds of performances. For example, the member Georg von Hülsen made the following suggestion to Count Görtz for one of their meetings:

“You must be presented by me as a trained poodle! – That is a ‘hit’ like no other. Think: ‘shorn’ (tricot) at the back, a long black or white woollen coat at the front, a marked anus at the back under the real poodle’s tail and, as soon as you ‘make up’, a fig leaf ‘at the front’. Think how wonderful when you bark, howl to music, shoot a gun or do other antics. That’s just ‘great! […] I can already see S[a] M[ajesty] laughing like us.”

(Source: Hülsen an Görtz, 17. Oktober 1892. In: Eulenburg, Korrespondenz, Bd. 2, S. 953. Siehe auch Röhl 1988, S. 24.)

I am just picturing the Kaiser following this spectacle. Anyone who has spent even an hour with Wilhelm II will know that he was prone to eccentric self-promotion and military uniforms. His speeches were martial and bristled with masculinity on display. Throughout his life, the Kaiser tried to cover up a disability in his arm that he had had since birth and for which his mother, a daughter of Queen Victoria, was ashamed and because of which he had to undergo brutal procedures in vain as a child to compensate for it.

One has to imagine Wilhelm in a field of tension in which he was expected to represent Germany  as an immaculately and vigorously emperor. And in which, on the other hand, he sought a friendly, intimate closeness. Wilhelm found precisely this in Eulenburg and the Liebenberg Circle.

The clique members thus also very quickly advanced to become his closest advisors, had great influence on political decisions and were regarded by the public as a subsidiary government. They were involved in Bismarck’s resignation and pushed for a more balancing, less bellicose stance in foreign policy. This did not please everyone in the Empire and led to one of the great scandals of the pre-war period: the Harden-Eulenburg affair. However, I will report on this in another story about Liebenberg.