Wilhelm II

Wilhelm II, German Emperor: The Kaiser Who Talked Too Much

In October 1908 the *Daily Telegraph* published a set of remarks by the German Emperor that he had meant as an overture of friendship to Britain. He claimed to stand among the minority of Germans well disposed toward the English, and then delivered the line that outlived him: "You English are mad, mad, mad as March hares." The article detonated in Berlin as loudly as in London. It wounded Wilhelm's self-confidence so badly that he sank into depression, and it permanently reduced his influence over German policy. In a few hundred words it caught the whole man: the impulse, the flourish, the wreckage.

The Arm and the Mother

His entry into the world, at the Crown Prince's Palace in Berlin on 27 January 1859, was a breech delivery in which the attending physician wrenched the infant's left arm, producing a brachial plexus injury and Erb's palsy. The arm remained roughly six inches shorter than the right for the rest of his life. Modern medical readings of the case suggest that a hypoxic episode caused by a chloroform overdose may have inflicted minimal to mild brain damage, which some historians connect to his hyperactivity and erratic manner. What is not in dispute is the psychological weather it created. He was the eldest of Queen Victoria's forty-two grandchildren and sixth in line to the British throne at birth, and his mother, Victoria, Princess Royal, intended to raise him as a British liberal. He blamed her in part for his damaged arm, resisted the education she designed, and grew steadily more Prussian and more estranged from her. David Fromkin described the result as a love-hate relationship with Britain in which the half-German side of him was permanently at war with the half-English side.

An Education in Two Countries

From the age of six he was tutored by Georg Ernst Hinzpeter. He attended the Friedrichsgymnasium in Kassel, finishing in January 1877, then spent four terms at the University of Bonn reading law and politics as a member of Corps Borussia. At around twenty-one he was commissioned a lieutenant in the First Regiment of Foot Guards at Potsdam, and the army supplied what neither Kassel nor Bonn had: a world in which he was unambiguously first. Contemporaries granted him a quick intelligence; they also recorded a cantankerous temper that repeatedly cancelled it out.

His grandfather Wilhelm I died on 9 March 1888. His father reigned as Frederick III for ninety-nine days before throat cancer killed him. On 15 June 1888, aged twenty-nine, Wilhelm became German Emperor and King of Prussia.

Dropping the Pilot

Otto von Bismarck had assumed the new Kaiser was a lightweight who could be managed. Within two years he learned otherwise. The two collided over domestic policy, particularly the anti-Socialist laws, and the rupture came when Bismarck opened coalition talks with the Catholic Centre Party without consulting the Emperor, which Wilhelm read as a constitutional trespass. Bismarck was dismissed in March 1890. Wilhelm called what followed the New Course and designed it so that no chancellor would dominate him again: Leo von Caprivi, then Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe, then Bernhard von Bülow, each weaker in the office than the last. He intended to rule as well as reign, and he had rejected Bismarck's cautious foreign policy in favour of vigorous and rapid expansion.

Ships, Telegrams, Crises

Wilhelm's ruling passion was a navy to rival Britain's. He ordered his commanders to read Alfred Thayer Mahan's *The Influence of Sea Power upon History*, sketched warships by the hour, created a separate Naval Cabinet in 1889, and in 1897 installed Alfred von Tirpitz at the Imperial Naval Office. Tirpitz's Risk Theory held that a battlefleet concentrated in the North Sea would force British concessions. The naval bills of 1897 and 1900, followed after 1906 by the ruinous expense of dreadnought construction, had strained German finances severely by 1914 and had made Germany Britain's most feared enemy, the exact reverse of the intended effect.

The diplomacy matched the shipbuilding. In 1896 he cabled congratulations to Paul Kruger for repelling the Jameson Raid, inflaming British opinion. On 31 March 1905 he staged a theatrical landing at Tangier to declare support for Moroccan sovereignty, a direct provocation to France that produced the Algeciras Conference and left Germany more isolated than before. Then came the *Telegraph* affair.

July 1914

Archduke Franz Ferdinand was a personal friend. After the assassination on 28 June 1914, Wilhelm offered Austria-Hungary the support history calls the blank cheque. His subsequent behaviour was characteristically volatile. Reading Serbia's reply to the Austrian ultimatum on 28 July, he wrote: "A brilliant solution - and in barely 48 hours! This is more than could have been expected," believing the pretext for war had evaporated. It had not; Vienna already had its declaration in hand. On 30 July, told Russia would not halt mobilisation, he concluded that England, Russia and France had agreed among themselves to wage a war of annihilation against Germany. Informed that the Schlieffen Plan made it impossible to turn the attack eastward, he snapped at the younger Moltke: "Your uncle would have given me a different answer!"

The Shadow Kaiser and the Woodpile

The war stripped him of the authority he had spent thirty years accumulating. By 1916 Hindenburg and Ludendorff ran Germany as a de facto military dictatorship while the Emperor performed ceremonies; historians describe him in this period as a shadow Kaiser, out of sight and relegated to the sidelines, veering between defeatism and dreams of victory. In November 1918 he hoped to keep the Prussian crown and surrender only the imperial one, but the constitution bound them together. Prince Max of Baden announced his abdication on 9 November without his consent, and Wilhelm accepted it only once General Groener told him the army would not fight for his throne. He crossed into the neutral Netherlands on 10 November and signed the abdication at Kasteel Amerongen on 28 November, ending five centuries of Hohenzollern rule in Prussia.

In May 1920 he bought Huis Doorn near Utrecht. Fifty-nine railway carriages carried furniture, tapestries and Frederick the Great's snuffboxes out of his former palaces to furnish it. There he read the Bible aloud to his staff each morning, walked, chopped wood until thousands of trees were stumps, took his siesta, answered correspondence, learned Dutch, excavated the Temple of Artemis on Corfu, and in 1922 published memoirs denying any responsibility for the war. Article 227 of the Treaty of Versailles provided for his prosecution; the Dutch refused extradition. He was appalled by the Night of the Long Knives and by Kristallnacht - "For the first time, I am ashamed to be a German" - yet sent Hitler congratulatory telegrams on the surrender of the Netherlands and the fall of France, and in his final years embraced the conspiracy theory that Anglo-American Freemasonry and the Jews had caused both world wars. He declined Churchill's 1940 offer of asylum and died of a pulmonary embolism at Doorn on 4 June 1941.

Why Wilhelm Is Called a Genius

The word attaches to Wilhelm through the office rather than the mind, and the honest verdict is that it does not fit. The raw material was real enough: contemporaries credited him with quick intelligence and rapid understanding, and he had a genuine appetite for modern technology and science. The ship sketches, the naval reorganisation, the Corfu dig were not affectation. But Thomas Nipperdey's assessment is the one that has stuck: superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, lacking any deeper seriousness or sense of sobriety, balance and boundaries, uncontrollable and scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate for applause and success. That last clause ruins any claim to genius. Intelligence that cannot learn from consequences is merely speed.

What Wilhelm did possess, and what is sometimes mistaken for brilliance, was a startlingly modern instinct for public spectacle: the Tangier landing, the newspaper interview, the telegram fired off to seize a moment. He grasped before most monarchs that a sovereign could perform on a world stage, and he performed relentlessly. The performance, however, was undisciplined and attached to no strategy, which is why it yielded the Kruger telegram, Algeciras and the *Telegraph* affair rather than advantage. John C. G. Röhl, his most exhaustive biographer, treats him as the key figure for understanding Imperial Germany's recklessness and downfall - indispensable to the story, that is, not admirable within it. In 1913 the *New York Times* called him the greatest factor for peace that the age could show; eighteen months later he was the central target of British anti-German propaganda. Both verdicts were judgements of theatre, not of intellect.

Legacy

Wilhelm's will forbade the return of his body to Germany unless the monarchy was restored first, a condition never met, so the Nazi authorities buried him in a small mausoleum in the park at Doorn. The house is now a museum whose director stated plainly in 2018 that it does not honour him. Historiography has moved through three phases: court apologists who made him a martyr, mid-century scholars who judged him wholly incapable of power, and postwar historians working toward something colder and more exact. The modern consensus grants him less control than the propaganda of 1914 assumed and more responsibility than his memoirs admitted. He remains the emblem of a state that mistook noise for strength.

Achievements

• German Emperor (1888–1918)
• King of Prussia (1888–1918)
• Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece
• Grand Cross of the Military Order of Maria Theresa
• Order of the Black Eagle
• Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav‎
• Educated at University of Bonn and Friedrichsgymnasium Kassel