Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Content
- Preface to the English edition
- Introduction
- 1 Kaiser Wilhelm II: a suitable case for treatment?
- 2 Philipp Eulenburg, the Kaiser's best friend
- 3 The Kaiser's court
- 4 The ‘kingship mechanism’ in the Kaiserreich
- 5 Higher civil servants in Wilhelmine Germany
- 6 The splendour and impotence of the German diplomatic service
- 7 Dress rehearsal in December: military decision-making in Germany on the eve of the First World War
- 8 Kaiser Wilhelm II and German anti-semitism
- Notes
- Index
1 - Kaiser Wilhelm II: a suitable case for treatment?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2015
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Content
- Preface to the English edition
- Introduction
- 1 Kaiser Wilhelm II: a suitable case for treatment?
- 2 Philipp Eulenburg, the Kaiser's best friend
- 3 The Kaiser's court
- 4 The ‘kingship mechanism’ in the Kaiserreich
- 5 Higher civil servants in Wilhelmine Germany
- 6 The splendour and impotence of the German diplomatic service
- 7 Dress rehearsal in December: military decision-making in Germany on the eve of the First World War
- 8 Kaiser Wilhelm II and German anti-semitism
- Notes
- Index
Summary
I have the feeling that we are being governed by a herd of lunatics
Max WeberAt the outbreak of war in 1914, a Prussian officer in Brazil wrote to a friend in Germany that people were at last attributing to Kaiser Wilhelm II ‘more greatness than Bismarck and Moltke put together, a higher destiny than Napoleon I’, seeing in him the Weltgestalter - the ‘shaper of the world’.
Who is this Kaiser [the officer exclaimed], whose peacetime rule was so full of vexation and tiresome compromise, whose temperament would flare up wildly, only to die away again? … Who is this Kaiser who now suddenly throws caution to the winds, who tears open his visor to bare his Titanic head and take on the world? … I have misunderstood this Kaiser, I have thought him a waverer. He is a Jupiter, standing on the Olympus of his iron-studded might, the lightning-bolts in his grasp. At this moment he is God and master of the world.
Even if Germany were to lose the war, the officer predicted, ‘the figure of Wilhelm II will stand out in history like a colossus’. He was mistaken. To this day not a single full-scale biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II has come from the pen of a German historian in a university position. Worse still, the prevailing tendency of historical research among the younger generation in Germany precludes any treatment of him - or indeed of the role of any individual in history. That, they declare, is Personalismus, the relapse into a ‘personalistic’ historical methodology which has long since been superseded. The ‘new orthodoxy’ insists on writing the history of the Kaiserreich without the Kaiser, that of Wilhelminism without Wilhelm.
And yet, for a number of reasons, there could hardly be a more suitable case for treatment than ‘The Incredible Kaiser’, the ‘Fabulous Monster’, this ‘most brilliant failure in history’. For one thing, the Kaiser's curious character poses a fascinating riddle in its own right, as we shall see in a moment. Second, it must be remembered that Wilhelm ruled not over Bayreuth, Bremen or Bückeburg, but over the most powerful, dynamic and volatile state in Europe, and he did so for no less than thirty crucial years, from 1888 to 1918 – that is to say for even longer than Bismarck, and two and a half times as long as Hitler.
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- The Kaiser and his CourtWilhelm II and the Government of Germany, pp. 9 - 27Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994