In August 1887, Eulenburg wrote to Prince Wilhelm about a séance he had recently organized, that "I was overjoyed that we find ourselves in agreement in this area as well, and it has shown me clearly yet again how very lucky I have been to meet Your Royal Highness!

"[5] The German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck blocked the planned appointment, writing about Eulenburg that "I like him personally; he is amiable, but politically he has little sense of what is important and what is not; he allows himself to be influenced by carping gossip, passes it on and this way needlessly puts people’s backs up.

[15] To block this alleged Catholic plot, Eulenburg insisted that the Reich government never co-operate with the Zentrum in any way or form, and insure that the pro-Prussian Liberal party stayed in power in Bavaria.

"[19] As the best friend of the new emperor and his closest advisor, many people started to court Eulenburg as a man who could bring access to the Kaiser, most importantly Friedrich von Holstein, the director of the Political Department at the Auswärtiges Amt.

I'm longing for old Philine...have to see her [Eulenburg; his gay friends always used the terms "her" and "she" to describe him] because of the feeling that now this gap [Dörnberg's death] has opened up in our beloved circle, we must hold on to each other doubly, more firmly...Then I'll move over to Munich with P. on the 8th -- the family will not follow till later".

[32] Wilhelm welcomed Bigelow's report, which led him to comment to Eulenburg on the correctness of Caprivi's policy of allowing German Poles to study in Polish-language schools, which he believed was winning opinion in Russian Poland towards Germany.

[40] Bülow's nickname was "Bernard the Obliging", as he was a man who almost never disagreed with Wilhelm even if he believed him to be wrong, and in the words of the German historian Ragnild von Fiebig-von Hase his "...mostly charming, often also ridiculous flatteries were essentially the result of falseness and a shallow, but also extremely ambitious character".

Additionally, both Bülow and even more so Eulenburg were strong believers that the egoistical Wilhelm II was indeed correct in his self-estimation of himself as an almost godlike being chosen by fate to make Germany the greatest nation in the world.

[44] Holstein accused Eulenburg of believing "instinctively...to an autocratic regime no matter whether it be Russian patriarchal or despotisme éclairé on the French model" and that "every political, military and legal question is best decided directly by the Kaiser".

[44] In response, Eulenburg wrote to Holstein a mystical letter saying: "I am convinced that the Guiding Hand of Providence lies behind this elemental and natural drive of the Kaiser's to direct the affairs of the Kingdom in person.

[49] If Hohenlohe and his followers went public with their complaints against the Kaiser for dismissing them, Wilhelm would declare martial law and appoint Field Marshal Alfred von Waldersee as chancellor with Bülow again as foreign secretary.

[53] To his mother Eulenburg wrote about the Yellow Peril painting: "The Kaiser has given me a magnificent engraving of the wonderful allegorical picture executed by Prof. Knackfuss from His Imperial Majesty's sketch: the peoples of Europe are represented as female figures, are called upon by St. Michael to defend the cross against unbelief, heathenism, etc.

As it spread throughout society by virtue of these groups' social prestige, it took on attributes of a paradigm...Aesthetic anti-Semitism found its way into the aristocracy and conservative bourgeoisie not through aggressive agitators like Ahlwardt, Dühring, Fritsch or Stöcker but rather in poetic shadings and nuances.

In a dispatch back to the Kaiser, Eulenburg complained that he was the "sole Aryan" in the entire concert hall and stated his ears were pained to hear of "the indescribable mishmash of German spoken with Austrian, Bohemian and Hungarian accents with international cliquishness".

[65] Rothschild, who possessed great wealth was ostracized by the Austrian aristocracy because he was a Jew (the fact that he was also gay contributed to his feeling like an outsider), and he often paid aristocrats to be his friends, which is how he met Eulenburg.

[1] Thus, the growth of the welfare state from 1897 onwards and the introduction of navalist politics represented by the Tirpitz Plan intended to win Germany "world power status" were closely connected as part of the effort to stabilise the regime.

"[80][82] Eulenburg added that he sent a doctor to try calm Wilhelm down as he was trapped in a seemingly permanent state of rage—spending every waking moment violently ranting and raving nonstop about his hatred of the Chinese and the bloody revenge he was planning to take on them—but to no avail.

After being tipped off by Holstein, Harden started to run a series of articles in his newspaper Die Zukunft charging the "Liebenberg Round Table", a clique of homosexuals obsessed with the occult headed by Eulenburg, were dominating the Imperial court.

[30] In the aftermath of the First Moroccan Crisis which ended with the Reich humiliated at the Algeciras Conference, Harden's accusations that German foreign policy was being run by a clique of homosexuals who were too "soft" to make the necessary decisions to go to war had a wide resonance.

Despite his homophobic attacks on the Liebenberg Round Table as a degenerate gay clique mismanaging foreign policy, Harden had surprisingly liberal views on homosexuality and often called for the repeal of Paragraph 175.

[109] Eulenburg testified that Ernst's daily beer consumption was "excessive, even by Bavarian standards" and claimed that his accounts of sexual encounters between himself and him were unreliable, coming from someone who spent so much of his time in a drunken daze.

[109] Eulenburg explained the trial as part of a Catholic plot to destroy him, as he was a leading defender of the "Protestant empire" and so he claimed that the Jesuits wanted to discredit him in order to enable Bavaria to break away, a remark that sparked enormous controversy as it suggested that Germany was and should be a Protestant-dominated state.

[110] During the trial, it was revealed that Eulenburg had engaged in witness tampering for he had sent his servant Georg Kistler with a letter he had written to meet Riedel telling him not to mention what they had done together in the 1880s and that he was safe from prosecution for the statute of limitations for violating Paragraph 175 had expired.

[104] Harden went on to write: "To clear ourselves of shame and ridicule, we will have to go to war soon, or face the sad necessity of making a change of imperial personnel on our own account, even if the strongest personal pressure had to be brought to bear.

[114] But he wrote that Germany was the principal cause of international tensions, writing that: Our Battle Fleet – not the British one – has sparked off the naval arms race among the Great Powers, with the result that even Austria is now engaging in the dreadnought gamble.

[114] Eulenburg argued that the great expansion of the German Navy was unnecessary as Germany was "neither an island nor a boat, but a beautiful green field on the Continent in which the sheep, guarded by the military sheepdogs, get fat while the oxen engage in politics.

Using existing railroad lines stretching from Madrid to Siberia and Persia, the nearly completed Baghdad railroad and the Cape-Cairo Railway, the English could be so seriously threatened in Asia and Africa as to make them think twice before they exploit their naval advantage in far-away places against members of the continental European coalition... Our standing German Army would become almost fantastically strong if even one quarter of the billions spent on the Navy were used to expand it, so that it would act as a tremendous magnet to the Powers of the coalition and attract and bind them to the strongest Power despite their unwillingness to lose their independence.

"[117]Eulenburg argued that the money saved by cutting back on the Navy would allow every German town to have an Army garrison "which would act as an ever-alert military police force against the excesses of Social Democracy".

In the footsteps of Bismarck, who managed to persuade the German people in 1870 that they have been too deeply humiliated by France not to draw the sword.So we now build dreadnoughts, and the Kaiser and his government never stop singing us their song of peace, which we must safeguard as if it were the Holy Grail.Therefore war.

"[121] In a letter of 21 March 1918 about the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Eulenburg wrote: "In whatever way we win, our victory must and will engender the most dreadful hatred of us, so that, with our great-grandchildren in mind, we must fashion frontiers which can provide a certain guarantee of safety in the military as well as the economic sphere.