William II

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WILLIAM II

WILLIAM II (in German, Wilhelm II, 1859–1941, ruled 1888–1918), German kaiser and king of Prussia.

William II, the last king of Prussia and German emperor, possessed a royal lineage that might well have been the envy of many another European sovereign. He was the eldest grandson of both the first German emperor, William I (r. 1871–1888), and Queen Victoria (r. 1837–1901), and was a descendant of Russian tsars as well. From the moment of his birth in 1859 he was destined for a great future but also beset by handicap, for as a result of his protracted delivery his left arm was paralyzed for life. Although the child learned to accept this misfortune and became remarkably adept at sports, his mother, Victoria, was mortified that her son was less than physically perfect. She made her disappointment evident, and thus began the pronounced estrangement between mother and son that endured until her death when William was forty-two.

William's education from the time that he was seven until he reached eighteen and was ready for a university was in the hands of the stern, unappeasable and relentless Georg Hinzpeter. No wonder that in 1877, when William finally escaped his grasp, he found great pleasure in his new life at the University of Bonn, where, however, he was an indifferent student. After two years he had had enough and took up a military career that was infinitely more to his liking. In the army, he would declare, he found not only his true vocation but also the warm family atmosphere that his mother had deliberately withheld. William's fellow officers greeted him cordially, but very few could detect any real military talent in their future ruler. Government officials, who periodically attempted to introduce William to diplomatic or domestic affairs, similarly found him unimpressive.

By the time William was in his mid-twenties he was an object of some concern. Willful, conceited, lazy, and unjustifiably self-impressed, he was to his father, the genuinely heroic Crown Prince, a bogus "compleat lieutenant" and to Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), the imperial chancellor, a loquacious nullity. The thought of such a stripling on the throne was disquieting, but William II would follow old William I, born in 1797, and the Crown Prince, born in 1831. Young William's succession, it seemed, would be postponed for at least a decade or two, during which time he might somehow manage to become more mature. That optimistic hope fell to pieces in the fall of 1887, when the Crown Prince was diagnosed as suffering from a fatal carcinoma of the larynx. Whether he would live to succeed his ninety-year-old father seemed in doubt. William I died in March 1888, and ninety-nine days later the Crown Prince, who had succeeded him as Emperor Frederick III, expired from his malady. William II, at twenty-nine, was now the German kaiser and king of Prussia.

As ruler, the new kaiser was persuaded that he was endowed by God Almighty with powers and responsibilities and that his authority, thoroughly upheld by both the Prussian and imperial constitutions, was to be personally exercised however he wished. William was avidly supported in this estimation by his entourage, men frequently military by profession, almost entirely sycophantic in behavior, and whose principal qualification for appointment to the entourage was their unquestioning allegiance to the young ruler. This inflation of William II's ego was also served by his wife, the Empress Augusta Victoria (1858–1921), a lackluster, prosaic woman who lived entirely in her consort's shadow. The first casualty of William's personalized monarchy was Bismarck, a man of titanic self-assurance and Caesarian mien, who was sent packing early in 1890. The new chancellor, General Leo von Caprivi (1831–1899), found that the emperor and his entourage could not effectively be resisted, an experience

that his successor in 1894, Prince Chlodwig von Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst (1819–1901), also found to be true. Hohenlohe would last until 1900, when he yielded to Bernhard von Bülow (1849–1929), who was known as "the eel" for his oleaginous manner and suave handling of his imperial master. Although insistent on making full use of his prerogative, William was so inconstant and dilatory, so prone to sudden changes of opinion and to new enthusiasms, he in fact was not the supreme autocrat he believed himself to be. The so-called persönliches Regiment (personal regime) was actually exercised by his aristocratic minions in the military and civil bureaucracy.

The work that William's dutiful servants had to perform was complicated because of the kaiser's incessant, bombastic intrusions. The last kaiser believed himself to be a genius, especially at warfare and diplomacy, two areas he preferred to domestic affairs. Resolutely moral, anti-Catholic, and Francophobe, he wrote France off as racially inferior and eternally inimical to the German Empire. Toward Great Britain, the land of his disliked mother's birth, William was ambivalent. He envied its wealth but loathed what he considered its moral laxity and lust for power. The Slavs, like the French, were a lesser breed, but the Russian tsars, being like himself—autocrats of limitless power—could be useful allies. Since the Italians were beneath notice as Latins and degenerates and the minuscule kings from the house of Savoy little more than hairy dwarfs, only Austria-Hungary was a truly suitable ally for imperial Germany. William greatly admired Emperor Francis Joseph I (r. 1848–1916), and one of the very few consistent strands in his life was his devotion to the Habsburg sovereign. In diplomacy, William fostered the alliance of 1879 with Austria-Hungary, hoped in vain to rope Russia in as an ally, and alienated the British by his offensive behavior and by the construction beginning in 1898 of a vast battle-ship-based navy. By 1914, Germany had no allies other than Austria-Hungary, and that was perhaps more a liability than an asset.

Within Germany, William aspired to make himself popular, and to achieve this aim he began his reign trying to pose as the friend of the working class. This did not capture the multitudes and William eventually grew resentful of the ever increasing rise of the doctrinarily Marxist Social Democratic party, which following the elections of 1912 became the largest faction in the imperial legislature. Meanwhile, William had alienated the second most numerous party, the Catholic Center, by his resolute prejudice against Catholicism, nor did he have many admirers among the middle parties representing the interests of business and commerce. As a result, William's governments staggered through a series of parliamentary crises and the regime was increasingly discredited. William's own stature sank in popularity as a result of these difficulties and also because of a variety of scandals, some of them surrounding accusations of homosexuality involving a number of his closest associates in the entourage. The reign of the last kaiser was not only full of unresolved crises, it was also messy and unedifying.

Finally, William's regime was dreary. The kaiser's court, though splendid and run like clockwork, was a bore. The throne was adamantly opposed to any innovations in the arts and patronized only those who praised the sovereign and delivered traditional works of second- or third-rate quality. There was no place in William's artistic galaxy for Richard Georg Strauss (1864–1949) or Max Liebermann (1847–1935) or Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946).

Germany's antediluvian political system was paradoxically coexistent with one of the most remarkable economic upsurges any nation in Europe enjoyed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Industry prospered and commerce spread around the world. William II is not entitled to any credit on this score, for he was snobbish toward the middle class although he envied their wealth. An occasional entrepreneur, notably the Krupps of Essen or Albert Ballin (1857–1918), the Hamburg shipping magnate, might fraternize with the kaiser, but none was ever part of the inner circle, and William remained as ignorant of economics as he was of almost everything else.

In 1913, William celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his ascension to the Prussian and imperial throne. The occasion was appropriately pompous but also rather contrived, for the sovereign being honored was neither popular nor notably respected. Throughout his reign there were suspicions that he was mentally unbalanced, and many who knew him well believed this to be the case, citing as evidence William's irrepressible loquacity, incessant traveling, astounding tactlessness, and nervous prostration at moments of crisis. William in fact may have been the victim of porphyria, a genetic disorder that has mental as well as physical symptoms. The kaiser's Germany was rich, it was powerfully armed, but it had few friends, a number of notable enemies, and a marked lack of internal political stability. Just a year after the observance of the anniversary, Germany found itself at war, blockaded at sea and outnumbered on land. The fate of Germany, in that ominous moment in its history, rested on a man utterly unequal to the challenge, an emperor who, for all his splendor, was a vacuous, blundering epigone who reduced his splendid inheritance to inglorious ruin.