Theobald Von Bethmann Hollweg

German imperial chancellor before and during World War I who possessed talents for administration but not for governing.

A member of a Frankfurt banking family, Bethmann Hollweg studied law at Strassburg, Leipzig, and Berlin and entered the civil service. He was appointed Prussian minister of the interior in 1905 and state secretary in the Imperial Office of the Interior in 1907. He succeeded Bernhard, Fürst (prince) von Bülow, who resigned as chancellor on July 14, 1909.

Bethmann’s domestic policies were mildly liberal for their time and place, but he almost invariably yielded to persons more extreme and more forceful than himself. In foreign policy, his negotiations with the British over reduction of naval armaments came to nothing because of the opposition of German admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, supported by William II (Kaiser [emperor] Wilhelm II). Bethmann’s secretary of state, Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter, created the Moroccan (Agadir) crisis (see Moroccan crises) of July–November 1911, in which Germany backed down before France and Great Britain. Bethmann and Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, worked successfully to prevent the expansion of the Balkan Warsinto a major conflict between Austria-Hungary and Russia; this was probably Bethmann’s greatest success in foreign affairs.

At home, the enactment of his legislation for enlarging the army did not reduce anxiety about Germany’s international situation. Although he believed that a democratic monarchy based on a Reichstag majority was inevitable, he was not an enthusiast of parliamentary government, and his half-hearted efforts to reform the Prussian suffrage were ineffective.

Having no desire for war, Bethmann nonetheless is thought to have initiated the July crisis of 1914 with the “blank check” to Austria-Hungary for measures against Serbia. Subsequent German warnings to Austria-Hungary and its prospective opponent Russia could not prevent the outbreak of war.