Mühlon gained a PhD in law in 1904 and after posts in the German consular service was a director of the Friedrich Krupp conglomerate, concerned with war materials. He resigned from Krupp in late 1914, claiming to have freed himself "from the profession he loathed". In 1915 he became Special Commissioner of the imperial administration of the Balkans (ie representing the Wilhelmstrasse in Bucharest, Sofia, Vienna and Budapest regarding grain and oil negotiations). After ineffectual efforts to shape German policy through gatherings of uper-class liberals and litterateurs Mühlon migrated to Switzerland, from where, on 7 May 1917, he sent a memorandum (later published in France and Switzerland) to Imperial Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg "repudiating the German government and all its works".
In subsequent denunciations he drew on his diary and on a cache of Krupp documents, inevitably (given hysteria as the great Wilhelmine train crash proceeded) being denounced as a traitor, person deserving of assassination, a cad and otherwise a person of unsavoury habits.
During a Reichstag meeting on 16 March 1918 Franz von Papen characterised Mühlon as "pathological" and as a "neurasthenic who could not even come into a room if it contained a few gentlemen with whom he was personally acquainted". By June 1918 he was reported as having "bought a good deal of land and an old country house near Berne" and settled in Switzerland with his family, ignoring call-up for German military service -
Dr Muehlon has thought it best to remain in Switzerland, although by doing so he constitutes himself a deserter, and although the position of deserters in Switzerland is not altogether a pleasant one.Somewhat more pleasant, of course, if you have a private income and are not parked in a wet trench with cadavers and rats while people try to kill you.
Mühlon published his 1914 diaries - Die Verheerung Europas: Aufzeichnungen aus den ersten Kriegsmonaten [The Devastation of Europe: Notes Written During the First Few Months of the War] - now a forgotten best-seller. He was reported as explaining that
Dr Muehlon did not intend to publish the diary until these statements were made about him in the Reichstag and now, when people read the book the world in general will be able to laugh at to scorn the notion that of a mentally unbalanced man having clear, direct, and logical a style ... Nothing appears more clearly from this diary than the fact that Dr Muehlon considers – for excellent reasons – based on fact, which he cites in detail – that Austria, her intolerance and lack of conciliation generally, were mainly responsible for outbreak of the war, and the individual most responsible for rushing Europe into it was the German Emperor.Translations as The Vandal of Europe and as Dr Muehlon’s Diary promoted Mühlon as a successful businessman and as thinker who was "highly sensitive to moral considerations and placed moral values above material success".
Mühlon was in contact with - and often sponsored - figures such as Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Ernst Bloch, René Schickele, Hermann Staudinger, Annette Kolb and Hugo Ball. He was also in contact with 'opposition' inside Germany. In early 1919 he was invited to Munich by the Bavarian government and offered a ministerial post, which he sensibly declined, concluding that "the outlook seems so hopeless that he has decided to remain in Switzerland for the present". He remained in Switzerland until his death, being vilified in 1933 by the Nazis for financial support of the catholic Rhein-Main. Volkszeitung. By 1937 he was being denounced in German courts as "probably the biggest and meanest traitor that has ever been born on German soil" and, like the self-involved and unpleasant Mr Assange, was facing recurrent death threats. His diaries of the early 1940s - humane, perceptive, indignant - are a minor masterpiece that deserves to be better known.
The current significance of Wikileaks - as with Mühlon's revelations - is the consequence of disclosure and what responses to disclosure tell us about public perceptions of diplomacy and 'inner politics' rather than access to anything that's particularly new, exciting or disturbing. (That may change, of course, if future disclosures reveal the identity of informants in Afghanistan and elsewhere and put those people at risk.)
One contact commented to me that he inferred from reading the Economist and New York Times that Sarkozy has a thin skin and that the Karzai administration is riddled with corruption: no great revelations there. Paul Ginsborg and other scholars have indicated for over a decade that there are fundamental grounds for doubting the probity of Italian government: again, we didn't need Assange. Do Middle East states love Iran? Does Iran love them? Not much news there.
What is disturbing is the outrage, approaching hysteria, among some circles in the US - reminiscent of hyperbole about Mühlon - and the naivety, even irresponsibility, evident among fans of Wikileaks.
The Economist commented that -
It's telling that Mr Assange hasn't placed his servers in some technically capable autocracy with a desire to thumb its nose at the world, say Iran or Venezuela. He needs liberal democracies. Their laws guarantee the safety of his information. And when trying to solve what looks like a digital problem, the best path is to consider where the problem is physically vulnerable. Anti-spammers, for example, have finally notched up some successes in the last two years by going after server locations; spammers need servers in places like America, which has reliable networks and vast fields of vulnerable personal computers. But America also has laws, and ways to enforce them.
My gripe against Mr Assange is that he takes advantage of the protections of liberal democracies, but refuses to submit himself to them. If he wants to use the libel protections guaranteed by New York State, then he should live in New York, and commit himself to all of the safety and consequences of America's constitution. If he wants to use Sweden's whistleblower laws, then he should return to Sweden and let its justice system take its course. This, as we've written in the paper, is what distinguishes Mr Assange from Daniel Ellsberg. Mr Ellsberg did not flee America after releasing the Pentagon Papers; he stayed here and stood trial. Regardless of what you think about Mr Ellsberg's motives, he followed the basic tenets of civil disobedience: break a law, then publicly accept the consequences. Mr Assange just protects himself.
Julian Assange has created a legal structure that allows him to answer only to his own conscience. This is an extraordinarily clever hack of the world's legal systems. But it makes his pretense at moral authority a little hard to take seriously. And it also points toward a solution. If America feels threatened by WikiLeaks, then it should lean on its allies—Sweden, Iceland and Belgium—to strip the organisation of the protections it so carefully gathers as it shifts its information around the world. Mr Assange has suggested that he might be hounded all the way to Russia or Cuba. If he has to take all of his servers with him, it wil be harder for him to act so boldly.
