Shortly before his dismissal Prince Bismarck had had to confront the truth of a fundamental flaw in the structure the Reich he had created: that a monarch without the protection of ministerial clothing was in danger of being exposed to merciless public scrutiny and criticism. Never was that danger greater than in the system of personal monarchy as practised by Wilhelm II under Bülow’s chancellorship. The conflict between the Kaiser’s anachronistic notions of divine right and the byzantine attitudes this engendered in the statesmen and the military, on the one hand, and the highly literate mass culture of Germany’s burgeoning cities on the other was, by the turn of the century, producing an unstable compound that needed only a spark for it to explode and rock the monarchy to its foundations. The frustration and humiliation increasingly felt by all segments of society at the obvious setbacks in the country’s foreign standing since Bismarck’s fall were well expressed in the letter the great sociologist Max Weber wrote in December 1906 to the liberal parliamentarian Friedrich Naumann:

From late 1906 the widely felt bitterness with Wilhelm’s personal rule discharged itself in a long series of court scandals at the centre of which stood the Kaiser’s best friend, Philipp Eulenburg, and the so-called Liebenberg round table.