Kaiser Wilhelm II: A Concise Life
By John C.G. Röhl
Cambridge University Press, £16.99
John Röhl, Emeritus Professor of History at Sussex University, has won lavish and well-deserved praise for his three-volume biography of the Kaiser which runs to some 4,000 pages and draws on fifty years’ research in archives all over Europe. Now he has produced a slim volume which presents the masterpiece in miniature form in under 200 pages of narrative. The portrait may be much smaller in size, but it provides, no less vividly than the much larger work, an utterly convincing likeness of a man who was by turns fearsome, endearing, self-pitying and ludicrous.
In boyhood he was tortured by well-meaning doctors as they toiled unsuccessfully to cure various disabilities, of which a useless left arm is the best known. For that they prescribed ‘animal baths’: twice a week the arm was thrust into the body of a freshly killed hare for half an hour. His mother, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, shrank from close contact with the ‘ cripple’, and denigrated him mercilessly. She wrote him off at the age of eleven as ‘ very arrogant, extremely smug [and] unbelievably lazy and slovenly’. A further insult—‘so ignorant’—followed later. His hatred of her never wavered throughout his later career. The British royal curse of porphyria may have descended to him from his great-great grandfather, George III. Sudden rages would replace tender charm.
‘Where is this person to find love and faith, which he will need more than anyone else?’, asked his despondent tutor, who signally failed to turn his charge into ‘a great man’ as his parents had commanded. Wilhelm found love, not in his marriage or in his mistresses (with whom he played bondage games), but in an intense friendship with a homosexual courtier who adored him as ‘my dearly beloved Kaiser’. From handsome, sexually promiscuous Count (later Prince) Philipp zu Eulenberg he received devotion and blind political loyalty in a relationship which appears to have had no sexual element.
Eulenberg recruited friends and associates to his beloved’s service. The Kaiser found himself at the centre of a gay coterie who called him das liebchen and exposed him to the constant threat of scandal which became lurid reality after 1906 with a succession of sensational court cases, though the heart attack which killed a highly placed general while he was dancing in an attractive ball gown—causing the Kaiser a nervous breakdown—did not become general public knowledge.
The Kaiser’s gays formed the nucleus of a substantial personal political entourage through which he ruled, largely disregarding the Reichstag, government departments and other formidable institutions (particularly in Prussia) with which he was supposed to share power under the terms of the German constitution. He had his own military, naval and civil cabinets. It was a recipe for confusion and incompetence. Nothing could have been further removed from the settled procedures followed by his royal British cousins in their dealings with elected politicians. Europe’s most advanced industrial economy appeared to be retreating to the seventeenth century in its style of government under a volatile monarch who believed passionately in the divine right of kings.
Like the members of his gay team, the Kaiser was completely unstable, veering wildly from one flight of fancy to another in pursuit first of European supremacy and then of a leading world role to the horror of Germany’s professional diplomats and politicians. Meeting him, leaders of other countries thought he must be mad, reacting to him as they would do to Hitler a generation later (hatred of Jews poured forth from this earlier fanatic too).On a visit to Germany in 1903 the United States President Teddy Roosevelt encouraged the Kaiser to pursue his dreams of expansion in eastern Europe. Wilhelm wrote on his briefing paper for the meeting,’ That’s where the Russians are. No, south America is our goal, old boy’. At much the same time what Rohl describes as ‘fantastic operational plans’ were drawn up for the transport of an army of 100,000 men across the Atlantic where it would shell New York City from Long Island. This did not prevent the Kaiser from proposing at other points that the United States and Germany should carve up the British Empire between them.
He seemed to relish the prospect of bloodshed. In July 1900 he told troops departing for China to behave ‘ like the Huns under their King Attila a thousand years ago… Whoever falls into your hands will fall to your sword’. It was impossible to know what this impulsive ruler would say or do next.
It is hardly surprising that this reckless man, in command of the greatest armed forces in the world, should have been blamed for the outbreak of conflict in 1914. Yet when Europe stood on the brink of war, the Kaiser drew back. He was reported ‘ to have pronounced in favour of maintaining peace’. Thirsting for war, his generals, assisted by key officials in his ramshackle government, conspired to thwart him. They held back letters and distorted diplomatic reports, particularly those from London. Even so, the Kaiser still lurched towards the paths of peace. Rohl concludes, ‘ he saw more clearly than his army chiefs and diplomats the danger that British participation in a continental war represented for the German Reich’.
The sharp, distinctly unflattering portrait of the Kaiser which emerges from this brilliant short book is the more convincing because of the scrupulous fairness with which John Rohl has treated his unappealing subject and the extraordinary circumstances that shaped him.