[3] The next year, after his father expressed the wish to give up his post as district administrator (Landrat), Theobald took over the office on an interim basis and in January 1886 secured it by official appointment.

[4] While Bethmann Hollweg's father had conducted his office in the more autocratic style of the Prussian landed Junkers, Theobald drove to the villages and spoke with both landlords and workers.

His rapid professional success had been made possible by his talent for statesmanship, his grandfather's prestige, and by the intercession of Reich Chancellor Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, who had been watching his rise for some time.

Hopefully you will succeed in having a balancing effect, for without gradual assimilation we will arrive at conditions that are quite untenable.His focus early on was directed at the Social Democratic Party's commitment to the existing state structure.

[13] In October 1907 he attended the German Workers' Congress, a general meeting of Christian trade unions, where the appearance of an imperial state secretary was seen as a major step forward.

The German Embassy in London under Paul Wolff Metternich wrote that British King Edward VII considered the new chancellor an "important partner for the maintenance of peace".

Although Wilhelm II had called for the Empire to increase its advocacy of "peaceful and friendly relations with the other powers" in his 1909 speech from the throne,[24] Kiderlen-Waechter's diplomacy in connection with the 1911 Second Moroccan Crisis – when he sent a German gunboat to the African nation over which France had political control – was not in keeping with the Emperor's words.

In foreign policy matters, Rathenau proposed to Bethmann Hollweg a European customs union, a halt to British imperialism in the Mediterranean, then an alliance with Great Britain for the purpose of understanding and colonial acquisitions for Germany.

"[31] Bethmann Hollweg negotiated treaties over an eventual partition of the Portuguese colonies and the projected Berlin–Baghdad railway, the latter aimed in part at securing the Balkan countries' support for a German alliance with the Ottoman Empire.

When Bethmann Hollweg declared in the Reichstag on 3 December 1913 that the Kaiser's uniform must be respected under all circumstances, he gave the impression that he was fully behind Minister of War Erich von Falkenhayn.

At the same time, he had State Secretary of the Foreign Office Gottlieb von Jagow telegraph Prince Lichnowsky, the German ambassador in London, that "everything must be avoided that could give the appearance that we are inciting the Austrians to war".

[38] His confidant Kurt Riezler noted that Bethmann Hollweg expressed early fears that if Austria adopted too expansionist a tone, the conflict could no longer be contained in the Balkans and "could lead to world war".

Believing in Great Britain's neutrality, Bethmann Hollweg telegraphed to the London Foreign Office: "Since Austria is safeguarding vital interests in its action, any interference by Germany as its ally is out of the question.

[43] When the Emperor "threatened to weaken again", the Chancellor and the Foreign Office undermined the proposal calling for restraint by forwarding the letter from the German ambassador in London belatedly and not entirely correctly to Vienna.

The General Staff's strategic route through Belgium (a key part of the Schlieffen Plan for the German attack on France) ultimately undermined all of Bethmann Hollweg's efforts to localize the conflict.

[52] On 3 August Bethmann Hollweg assured British Foreign Minister Grey that the Russian mobilization of 30 July was what had put Germany in such straits that it had demanded that Belgium allow its troops to pass through the country.

For a "scrap of paper" (meaning the 1839 Treaty of London guaranteeing Belgium's neutrality), he said, Britain wanted to wage war against a kindred nation that wished to live in peace with it.

[66] Although Bethmann Hollweg spoke at Headquarters in March 1915 of the liberation of Belgium,[67] he could not meet the demands of the left, which was insisting on a statement of total renunciation, and still continue to be sure of the goodwill of Wilhelm II.

As early as September 1914, Chief of the General Staff Erich von Falkenhayn had called for systematic public education about the unfavorable military situation resulting from the First Battle of the Marne.

On the advice of the Foreign Office, which feared unpredictable consequences abroad, and of several business associations, Bethmann Hollweg refused to allow the government to disseminate the military truth.

[69] While the National Liberals, unaware of the true situation on the front, moved more and more to the right and indulged in ideas of annexations, Bethmann Hollweg noted that partisanship for major territorial demands largely coincided with opposition to suffrage reform in Prussia.

Bethmann Hollweg supported the plan by publicly saying that the name Hindenburg was the terror of the enemy and by prevailing on the Emperor to give him command of the entire eastern front.

In negotiations with Austrian Foreign Minister Stephan Burián von Rajecz in August 1916, the representatives of the Central Powers agreed on an independent constitutional kingdom of Poland, but under pressure from Bethmann Hollweg, it was not to be proclaimed until after the end of the war.

As a result, the OHL was forced to make concessions that included arbitration committees, the expansion of trade unions' powers and a repeal of the act at the end of the war.

In response to demands by the pan-Germans, Wilhelm Solf made the proposal to create a contiguous German colonial empire in central Africa, annexing the Belgian Congo.

Bethmann Hollweg later wrote[98] that Wilhelm was already completely in support of Ludendorff, who claimed that America had "no soldiers" and that if it did, submarine warfare would already have defeated France and England by the time U.S. forces arrived.

[99] It is difficult to argue against Bethmann Hollweg's later statement that the U-boat war had ultimately been waged because a majority in the Reichstag, the Supreme Army Command and the German people had wanted it.

On 27 February 1917 Bethmann Hollweg came before the Reichstag and in a speech that he later called his "most significant" said that he saw the typically German expression of a liberal form of government in a monarchy based "on the broad shoulders of the free man".

Bethmann Hollweg agitatedly explained to him that it was impossible for him to advocate a bill under which a "worker adorned with the Iron Cross First Class would have to go to the polls next to a well-off draft dodger from the same village" with unequal voting rights.

His successor, Georg Michaelis, whose name was put forward by the OHL, prevented the papal peace initiative from advancing when he withdrew concessions, including withdrawal from Belgium.