Happy Birthday, Kaiser Wilhelm

Perhaps it is because we are such complicated beings that people try to create some sense of order in the chaos of emotions and thoughts within each person’s life. When you think of the hundreds of thousands of thoughts that enter your mind each day, the many emotions through which you move and the millions of images that enter your visual, auditory and olfactory fields it’s small wonder that people try to organise and label so many experiences, and so many other people. Scientists slot things into categories – gasses, liquids solids, elements, minerals, species etc. etc. – everything labelled and in order to prevent confusion. Perhaps for the sake of clarity, historians sometimes adopt the same method, labelling people as good or bad, black or white, innocent or guilty.


In the annals of history, Kaiser Wilhelm is categorised clearly as either mad or bad. I feel for this man, though very few people seem to have much that is good to say of him and I don’t believe this is simply because he happened to be on the losing side of WW1 – after all, few people write in a critical way of Franz Josef or Karl of Austria. Something about this man arouses either scorn and mockery or dislike, and it is my firm belief that this is because no one hated the Kaiser as much as he hated himself. All that grandiose posturing, the uniforms the huge moustache, concealing the lost little boy whom he remained to the end of his life. He was a bundle of contradictions – playful and bizarre one moment, angry the next; adoring his grandmother and holding her while she died; alternatively adoring and despising his mother, whom he treated appallingly; desperately longing to be loved, while at the same time needing to appear strong and above the rest of mankind; hating and loving and envying England; changing mood from one moment to the next; wanting to feel part of his large extended family, yet so desperately longing for the respect of his cousins that his behaviour was often beyond irrational (as when he threatened to ban his sister from entering Germany simply because she had converted to Orthodoxy, but a short time later was encouraging his cousin, Alix, to convert in order to marry the Tsarevich); and perhaps most strikingly, his genuine sense of his own self-righteous innocence at the outbreak of war.
This would-be powerful man remained a victim of his own insecurities all his life. No wonder he suffered at least two nervous breakdowns.

I have often read descriptions of him as ‘bonkers’ and I think it is rather sad that he is written off so easily. Clearly, he did have many psychological issues that remained unresolved - sometimes he played rather cruel tricks on people or behaved inappropriately (slapping Ferdinand of Bulgaria on the bottom and wondering why he was affronted??), but I don’t think he was deliberately cruel and I think he was capable of a great deal of love – as he showed at his grandmother’s deathbed. He loved animals and children. It must have taken a great deal of determination to overcome not only the physical disability of his left arm, but also the psychological effects of knowing he wasn’t the perfect specimen of a prince that his people expected. He rode brilliantly; he spoke many languages fluently; he was an intellectually intelligent man who loved art and literature and wanted to make Germany a place of learning and culture which extended to all classes. He fell in love with his cousin, Ella, and felt rebuffed that his love was unrequited....and later, when he married, he remained faithful to his wife. I think the speed with which he remarried following the death of his first wife, says something of his need to be mothered....He spent his entire life seeking the approval of the mother whom he treated so badly.

The photographs of him in Doorn after his ‘escape’ from Germany, show the face of a
very sad and broken man. Every time I think of him, I think of Longfellow’s lines:

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
So...Happy Birthday, Willy – the contradictions in your character often seem to be mere exaggerations of the contradictions within us all.