The Kaiser's kinks
How an emperor's dalliances with a prostitute were hushed up
John Hooper in Berlin Thursday May 24, 2001 The Guardian
"Kaiser Bill" was a bondage enthusiast whose sexual proclivities came within an ace of being exposed in the 1880s, when the son of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck hushed up the affair with a huge payment to a high-class prostitute, according to letters by members of the Bismarck family. Emilie Klopp, who used the pseudonym "Miss Love", was given the equivalent in today's money of £160,000 to ensure that she did not give the press let ters from Kaiser Wilhelm II in which he outlined his sexual preferences in what she called a "particularly spicy way".
The weekly Die Zeit, which published extracts from the letters yesterday, said they shed new light on Bismarck's sensational removal from office less than a year after the hush money was handed over.
The kaiser's discovery that his chancellor was aware of his most intimate secrets could have been the final blow to their always tense relationship, it said.
The first sign of trouble came in a letter "Miss Love" sent in November 1888 to Wilhelm von Bismarck, the chancellor's son, who was the government representative in the city of Hanau. Several years earlier, as a young official in the recently annexed territory of Alsace-Lorraine, Wilhelm had himself been a client of the French-speaking Klopp.
He tried to ignore her request for a meeting to discuss "a matter of the utmost importance", but she moved into a hotel in Hanau to force his hand.
When they eventually came face to face, she explained that she had first had sexual relations with the kaiser three years earlier, before he ascended the throne, when he went to Alsace on military exercises. All he had given her was a photograph of himself.
Later he summoned her to Potsdam where, in the words of Wilhelm's letter to his brother Herbert, the kaiser had "sexual relations with her over a long period". In recompense, she was paid the less than regal sum of 100 marks.
She wanted more, much more. The cost of living in Potsdam in a style fit for an emperor had cost her 20,000 marks, she said.
The kaiser, already married when he first encountered "Miss Love", initially denied her account. Later he admitted it, and a deal was agreed under which Wilhelm von Bismarck handed her 25,000 marks on May 1 1889 in return for the letters and a written statement foregoing all further claims on the emperor.
The letters were doubtless destroyed. But after an earlier discussion with Klopp, the imperial intermediary had reported her saying that the kaiser had written of "highly individual tendencies with respect to the complication of normal sexual intercourse, as e.g. the tying up of the arms".
It turned out that "Miss Love" was no better than Kaiser Bill when it came to keeping a bargain.
She made further claims in 1892, and it was only after her death two years later that the kaiser's aides were able to commit the affair to the files with a note saying: "On the order of His Excellency, to be kept sealed as 'Top Secret'."