Kaiser Wilhelm II
Germany's last emperor, whose vanity and reckless bluster helped wreck Bismarck's diplomacy, provoke Britain, and steer Europe into the First World War.
He was Queen Victoria's eldest grandson, and he spent his life trying to prove he belonged at the head of the table. Wilhelm II, who ruled Germany from 1888 to 1918, inherited the most powerful army on the continent and a diplomatic system built to keep Germany safe. He dismantled the second and squandered the first. Vain, thin-skinned, and prone to bluster he could not take back, he did more than any single person to convert Bismarck's cautious empire into the isolated, encircled power that stumbled into 1914.
The man and the wound
Wilhelm was born in 1859 after a breech birth that damaged the nerves of his left arm, leaving it withered and roughly six inches shorter than the right. He hid it in photographs, resting a gloved hand on a sword or cane, and compensated in temperament: a cult of uniforms, medals, and martial swagger that struck even friendly observers as overcompensation for something. His moods were volatile, his attention short, his need for admiration bottomless. Diplomats who dealt with him came away describing a clever, restless mind with no ballast.
Firing the pilot
In 1890, two years into his reign, Wilhelm forced out Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor who had unified Germany and then spent twenty years keeping its rivals divided. A British cartoon captured it as "Dropping the Pilot." Bismarck's system rested on a web of treaties, including a secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia meant to prevent a two-front war. Wilhelm let it lapse. Within four years Russia and France had signed the alliance Bismarck had dreaded. Then Wilhelm reached for Weltpolitik, a demand for colonies and a "place in the sun," and ordered Admiral Tirpitz to build a battle fleet capable of challenging the Royal Navy. Britain, which had no quarrel with Germany, took the hint and drifted toward France and Russia. The encirclement Wilhelm feared, he helped to build.
Figurehead of his own war
In July 1914, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Wilhelm handed Austria-Hungary the notorious "blank cheque," assuring Vienna of German support against Serbia, then left on his annual North Sea cruise as the crisis hardened into war. Once the shooting started, the emperor who loved uniforms found he had little say in the fighting. By 1916 real power had passed to the generals, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who ran a de facto military dictatorship while Wilhelm signed what he was handed. When defeat and revolution came in November 1918, the army told him bluntly that it would no longer march for him. He abdicated on 9 November and fled by train into the neutral Netherlands.
He lived another twenty-three years in comfortable exile at Doorn, chopping down trees and blaming Jews, foreigners, and everyone but himself for the catastrophe. He died in 1941, having watched Hitler overrun the country that had sheltered him. The Hohenzollern dynasty that had ruled Prussia for five centuries ended with a man who wanted, above all, to be taken seriously, and was.