What Happens When a Mercurial Narcissist Controls a World Power? Kaiser Wilhelm II

What happens when an emotional, mercurial, and extremely narcissistic person gains power on a global scale?

For the past several years, I have kept saying that people in China and the United States who put on shrill voices and make a huge fuss about comparing Trump to Hitler are very boring. To me, that analogy is meaningless and intellectually uninteresting. Because I hold this view, people have constantly called me a Trump fan and accused me of defending him.

But what I mean by “boring” is this: if you knew me personally, you would know that I have always made the following argument in private. If we absolutely must compare Trump to a national leader from modern German history, there is a much more interesting analogy than Hitler: Kaiser Wilhelm II.

This is not some novel or unique idea of my own. Many European historians cannot look at Trump without thinking of Wilhelm II. I also seem to remember seeing a 2018 article in The New Yorker that compared Trump to Wilhelm II.

The emperor really is fascinating. Wilhelm II reigned from 1888 to 1918, the crucial period in which the German Empire went from ascendancy to crisis. He inherited the national foundations laid by Bismarck, and during the early part of his rule, Germany’s rapid industrialization continued. Germany rapidly caught up with and surpassed Britain in steel, chemicals, electrical engineering, and other industries, becoming the strongest industrial country in continental Europe. It also invested enormously in education, scientific research, and technology. The development of its universities and research institutions made Germany the scientific center of the world at the time.

In 1890, Wilhelm II forced Bismarck out of office, ending the foreign policy known for its caution and replacing it with a more aggressive “world policy,” Weltpolitik, intended to make Germany a global competitor for colonies and naval power. The most typical manifestation of this strategy was Wilhelm’s large-scale expansion of the navy, which directly challenged British maritime supremacy.

I admit that European history before World War I really is fascinating. If we get the opportunity, we will make some more serious podcast episodes about the history of the world wars, especially World War I. But what I genuinely want to tell everyone here is that when I call Wilhelm II a mercurial, idiotic narcissist, I am not being sensationalist, nor am I insulting him. Other European monarchs and intellectuals at the time said the same thing.

One of the few talents Wilhelm possessed was his ability to arouse universal outrage. He was especially adept at insulting other monarchs, giving them nicknames, and spreading rumors about them. He would openly mock other national leaders as dwarfs or call them hermaphrodites. He did all kinds of things that other national leaders considered completely inappropriate, shooting his mouth off without restraint.

To give you just one example, which you can read about in his biographies: during a 1909 visit to Germany by Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria, Wilhelm publicly fondled and slapped him on the buttocks, then refused to apologize. Afterward, the Bulgarian prince took a valuable arms contract that he had originally promised to Germany and awarded it to a French company instead.

Despite behaving like this, Wilhelm remained extraordinarily self-confident. He firmly believed that he was highly skilled at personal diplomacy and could formulate German foreign policy through one-on-one meetings with other European monarchs. From an expert’s perspective, or from the perspective of someone like me, an overeducated respectable person within the university system, which is to say the perspective of those liberal professors at the University of Berlin at the time, the emperor was simply a nightmare. He was neither good at interpersonal relations nor good at diplomacy. He was good at lying and shooting his mouth off. He was extraordinarily deficient in the respectable manners that we traditionally think a national leader ought to possess, yet he remained mysteriously self-confident.

When engaging in diplomacy with the Russian tsar, Wilhelm believed that he could manipulate Tsar Nicholas II through his personal charisma and methods. In Wilhelm’s view, Nicholas was a foolish crybaby fit only to grow turnips. Wilhelm firmly believed that he could conquer Nicholas with his personal charm. But in 1897, Nicholas II told him to get lost, and the German-Russian alliance fell apart.

I have recently been reading the correspondence between Nicholas II and Wilhelm II. I know the world war was a serious matter. Tens of millions of people died, the golden age of civilization described by Stefan Zweig came to an end, and European civilization collapsed. I know all of that. But for now, let us just talk about Wilhelm II.

An emperor for an explosive age

The German Empire, the Kaiserreich, was formally established in 1871. Wilhelm I, its first emperor, ascended the throne that year and reigned until his death in 1888, a total of seventeen years. The Wilhelm II we are discussing was Wilhelm I’s grandson.

You may ask: what about his father? His father reigned for only ninety-nine days before a severe illness, a malignant tumor of the throat, killed him at a relatively young age. Wilhelm II then abruptly ascended the throne.

He reigned from 1888 until 1918, an exceptionally eventful period in German, European, and world history. Many major events occurred during those years, and it was also an explosive period for thought and literature. Let us list a few examples so that you can understand why I am interested in it.

Focusing just on the German-language world, Nietzsche published Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1883, Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, and On the Genealogy of Morality in 1887. Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. Husserl published Logical Investigations in 1900. Max Weber published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1905. Thomas Mann published Buddenbrooks, about the gradual decline of a successful bourgeois family, in 1901. Kafka published The Metamorphosis in 1915. Proust published In Search of Lost Time in 1913.

In other words, Wilhelm II’s reign was an era in which German thought blossomed in every direction, though those directions were, of course, highly fragmented. These works basically comprise all of our personal favorites. So I need to restrain myself. What concerns us here is the political background of the era in which they were written and published, and the personality of the Kaiser who ruled Germany at the time.

Among present-day biographies of Wilhelm II and historical scholarship about him, there is one question that scholars still debate endlessly: was there something wrong with the emperor’s brain?

I am not exaggerating. A longstanding debate in biographical and historical research concerns why Wilhelm’s personality was so inappropriate, so ill-suited to the circumstances, and why his public remarks were so consistently unsuitable. For quite a long time, this research was dominated by the psychoanalytic school because this was, after all, the age of Freud.

Psychoanalysts tended to attribute Wilhelm’s personality problems to an Oedipus complex. They argued that tensions in his relationship with his parents had caused those problems, using psychoanalysis to deconstruct his relationship with them. One important representative of this approach was a scholar named [unclear], who wrote an influential psychobiography of Wilhelm II. He argued that insufficient affection and emotional support from Wilhelm’s parents had led him to develop an immature personality, manifested specifically in irritability, narcissism, and a lack of empathy.

In letters Wilhelm wrote to his mother when he was young, we can see descriptions that might be classified as Oedipal. When he was fourteen or fifteen, for example, he wrote:

Mama, the image of your hands constantly lingers in my mind. I long to kiss your hands. I want to kiss them for a little longer, slowly, savoring the sensation in detail. I want to lean close and smell them, because your hands smell so fragrant and enchanting. I especially want to kiss the soft skin inside your palm, not the back of your hand, the part you allow outsiders to kiss, but the soft and delicate place on the inside of your palm.

His mother thought he was disgusting. Wilhelm II’s mother found the letter disgusting, which I think was a normal reaction. At the same time, however, her reply makes her sound like the sort of parent who constantly puts her child down, a bit like one of those hypercompetitive parents today:

What nonsense are you talking? There are eleven spelling mistakes in your letter. I have marked them in red. Please correct them yourself.

That is the psychoanalytic analysis of Wilhelm II: he had an Oedipus complex.

Later, a historian named John C. G. Rowe came along. Through prolonged and painstaking archival research, research that, in my view, was almost a little crazy, he traced Wilhelm’s personality problems back to an even more fundamental level: Wilhelm’s birth had damaged his brain.

This is also quite funny, because we already know that forceps had to be used when Wilhelm was born. The fetus was in a breech position, with his buttocks facing downward, so the doctors had to correct his position during delivery before the baby could successfully enter the world. The forceps damaged the network of nerves surrounding his arm, and as a result, Wilhelm’s left arm was disabled for the rest of his life. Those are all facts we already know.

So what did this historian do? He wrote a book investigating whether Wilhelm had suffered additional injuries during delivery. He went through every available piece of material connected with Wilhelm’s birth, taking every factor into consideration: what medications women giving birth in the German Empire at the time would have taken, how long a fetus might remain in the birth canal, whether the medical conditions of the era meant forceps could have produced various aftereffects, and the positions of the placenta and umbilical cord.

On this basis, Rowe reached a controversial but rigorously argued conclusion: there was a considerable possibility that Wilhelm had suffered oxygen deprivation at birth. See? I was not lying when I said this scholar spent all day investigating whether there had been something wrong with the emperor’s brain. It is already a little funny. He was investigating whether oxygen deprivation could have damaged Wilhelm’s nervous system and subsequently produced his distinctive personality traits.

At this point, you must be wondering why these scholars had such inexhaustible curiosity about the emperor’s personality and were so determined to prove what lay behind it.

Every biography tells us that Wilhelm seemed unable to concentrate on any single fixed subject for an extended period. He treated every conversation as an opportunity to express his own ideas. He could barely wait to pour out to other people the endless stream of thoughts emerging in his mind, and those thoughts usually appeared in the form of obsessions.

He would suddenly develop a very strange fixation. He might become intensely interested in the Hittite language, or suddenly begin paying attention to wireless telegraph technology, then abruptly ask the people around him strange questions. One day he might become preoccupied with tariffs and declare in public, in every possible way, “We must impose tariffs, tariffs, tariffs, tariffs,” before ordering all the experts under him to study how to impose tariffs. Or he might suddenly begin pondering questions such as: Why does Standard Oil possess such enormous power? Could we create a Standard Oil of our own?

In any event, the emperor was famously abnormal. For an emperor, his thinking was unstable, and whenever he developed an obsession, he would deliver lengthy public monologues about it. Rowe investigated all of this and concluded that Wilhelm’s brain had been damaged during his birth. Oxygen deprivation, what in medical terminology would be called hypoxemia, had triggered certain neurological reactions.

Mass media and an uneasy federation

Why were so many historians and psychoanalysts interested in Wilhelm II’s personality? I think there are two important contextual issues specific to his era, both related to the development of media at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.

The first was the rapid rise of mass-circulation newspapers. For the first time, heads of state could speak directly through the media to a vast public. In this environment, their statements became highly coveted objects that drew enormous attention, while the same media gave national leaders channels through which to speak.

Consequently, the voice of an individual already inclined toward emotional expression, abrupt changes of subject, and a lack of restraint was amplified without limit and carried into the public sphere. Because Wilhelm’s manner of communication was so shocking by the social norms and standards of etiquette of the time, the media gave his remarks even greater prominence and helped spread them still further.

The second issue was the special nature of the German Empire itself. It was not an empire in that sense; it was a federal state. Established in 1871, the German Empire was not the kind of unified empire we imagine. It was not that unified at all. It was a federal political organization composed of twenty-five states plus one imperial territory, Alsace-Lorraine.

Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony, and the other states each had their own royal houses, parliaments, and legal systems. They did not recognize Prussia’s absolute dominance. The person we call the German Emperor was, in fact, the King of Prussia. In other words, there was federalism in form but Prussian hegemony in substance.

Yet states such as Bavaria were unwilling to regard themselves as Prussia’s vassals. They had joined the German Empire because of security considerations, the war against France, and nationalism, not because they fully accepted Prussian rule. An empire did indeed exist, but it had no completely unified national identity.

In such a complicated political environment, we would expect a monarch to be tactful when he spoke, wouldn’t we? He needed to take that complex context into account. We call him the Kaiser, but in reality, he was a Prussian king.

The problem was that, before certain audiences, Wilhelm’s speeches could be tremendously rousing, hugely successful, and greeted with applause from the entire room. He might give a speech declaring, “Prussia protects all of Germany.” Wow. Within the circles of the Junker aristocracy in Brandenburg, a remark like that would bring everyone to their feet. It would receive a thunderous welcome, with gongs and drums sounding and firecrackers exploding. It was an extremely popular thing to say.

But this rhetoric provoked intense revulsion among bourgeois intellectuals in Munich and Stuttgart: liberal, progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals, university professors, newspaper reporters, and men of letters. They would think: How can this person be so politically incorrect? Your words are undermining our balance of power and disregarding Germany’s pluralistic political structure. You are not inclusive enough toward other Germans, are you?

Among intellectual groups influenced by liberal constitutional thought, especially intellectuals in southern Germany, Wilhelm was seen as someone who constantly shot his mouth off, was politically incorrect and extremely crude, and was destroying Germany’s liberal constitutional tradition.

At the same time, we can read about how intensely Wilhelm reacted whenever he heard intellectuals criticizing him. His close friend Prince Philipp of Eulenburg described in a letter how deeply Wilhelm cared about the voices attacking him in the newspapers. When Wilhelm heard or read those criticisms, he would suffer a mental collapse, go mad on the spot, and even take to his bed.

We can speculate that if Wilhelm II had possessed a smartphone, he would have been finished. He certainly would have spent twenty-four hours a day posting on social media and tweeting.

Wilhelm asked his friends in bewilderment:

Why don’t I have freedom of speech? Why do these intellectuals say they support freedom of speech for everyone else, but then deny freedom of speech to me? Why can an ordinary German postman speak freely while I, the emperor, am not allowed to shoot my mouth off?

I think this confusion arose because, although the analogy is of course not entirely exact, the German Emperor was not an absolute monarch like the Emperor of France or the Emperor of China. He was not an absolute monarch. In my view, his role may have been more like that of an American president. He was the King of Prussia within a federal system, so he had to maintain a balance and respect the sovereignty of the rulers of the other states. Although he was commander in chief, he could not exercise the powers of supreme command with complete freedom.

He frequently used crude and aggressive language. Such language infuriated highly educated German intellectuals and the respectable classes, but ordinary people could welcome it. When discussing war, he often said startling things that sounded extremely blunt, such as, “We Germans kill and leave no one alive.” Professors at the University of Munich regarded rhetoric like this as indecent and shocking, but the broader public might not have found it nearly so offensive.

Wilhelm also once called French Impressionism “sewer art” and “art from the gutter.” To members of Berlin’s bourgeoisie, who regularly visited museums and art galleries and possessed a high capacity for cultural consumption, remarks like that were crudely unacceptable. But to many ordinary Germans, did they not make a certain amount of sense? Those people might also have said, “Isn’t modern art just a load of garbage?”

Within the arena of public opinion dominated by newspaper editors, intellectual elites, and the so-called educated classes, Wilhelm’s behavior appeared grossly uncultivated. But at the level of popular opinion, in the feelings of the broader public, he often received thunderous applause.

He was always restless and overenergetic, moving around everywhere, fiddling with objects, taking off his helmet and putting it back on again. If we watch the surviving footage of the Kaiser today, we find that he is often the most active person in the frame. Many ordinary Germans interpreted this hyperactivity as vitality. It was intellectuals and scholars who spent the following century trying to diagnose whether the emperor was ill.

The Daily Telegraph affair

The most famous public-relations crisis involving Wilhelm II best illustrates how incapable he was of controlling his tongue and how much his indiscretion drove German public opinion out of its mind.

Even if you think everything Wilhelm did up to this point was trivial and could simply be laughed off, with only a group of liberal intellectuals becoming hysterical because they thought the emperor was indecent, his tendency to shoot his mouth off and talk too much was still dangerous. In a highly sensitive international media environment, he mixed diplomacy and national interests with his private emotions.

The crisis was the 1908 Daily Telegraph Affair. The interview began as a private conversation between Wilhelm and a man named Wortley Montagu at Highcliffe Castle. Montagu was a personal friend of Wilhelm. He later organized their conversation into an interview transcript and submitted it to The Daily Telegraph.

Strictly speaking, Wilhelm was not set up by the British. Before publication, the article had been submitted to him for review and his approval requested. Wilhelm also knew that his loose talk had caused trouble before, so he passed the manuscript to the German chancellor at the time, von Bülow, hoping the chancellor could confirm whether it was fit to publish.

Then there was a whole series of coincidences. The chancellor was vacationing on an island. This gave rise to a controversy in German history: had the chancellor actually read the manuscript and tacitly approved it, or, as he later claimed, had he never read it at all? The chancellor subsequently refused to defend the Kaiser. For that reason, some people believe Wilhelm was set up by his own chancellor.

But whatever happened and however we interpret it, Wilhelm himself did try to follow constitutional forms by seeking formal approval for the interview.

So what nonsense did he say?

Throughout the interview, Wilhelm repeatedly declared his love for the British:

Why are you always targeting me? I love Britain. I am British to my very bones. Look at me. I am British. I like staying in Britain. I like your [unclear], and I like your beautiful gardens. I deeply loved my grandmother, Queen Victoria. I was at her side when she died.

Then he started talking about international politics and pontificating. He discussed the Boer War between Britain and South Africa, saying that he had tried to help Britain at the time, had offered the British advice on how to fight, and had told them how they could win. But not only had the British failed to listen; they had also refused to give him credit.

Wilhelm then said that the British were as mad as March hares when it came to Germany. After that, he made another outrageous statement: most Germans simply did not like Britain, but he personally did.

You can understand what happened, can’t you? Once The Daily Telegraph published the interview with the German Emperor, the Germans completely lost their minds. Everyone, not just the intellectuals this time, went crazy on the spot.

I do not even need to analyze the interview. You can hear the problem just from that summary of its contents, can’t you? It was an extraordinarily childish attempt to transform a diplomatic relationship into a private emotional relationship. Wilhelm was effectively saying to the British: “I love you. Why don’t you understand me? I clearly wanted to help you. Why won’t you British thank me?”

He was also extremely careless. As German Emperor, he publicly declared that he had provided Britain with military advice on how to defeat another country in a war. Whether from the perspective of Britain, Germany, or any other country, that was inappropriate. You simply cannot do that.

Finally, he said that most Germans disliked Britain. This infuriated the German public, because many Germans responded: “What gives you the right to speak for us? What is wrong with you? We do not hate Britain.”

The interview caused an enormous uproar and bewilderment in Britain, but it also provoked public outrage in Germany. German public opinion came close to a complete breakdown over it. People believed that the Kaiser was like a runaway horse, speaking irresponsibly on the international stage as though he personally represented German foreign policy. This way of speaking could produce serious diplomatic and geopolitical consequences.

Under Wilhelm II, the question constantly discussed by those who controlled the discourse of the newspapers was: How can we make our emperor shut up? How should we deal with a head of state who is incapable of restraining his own speech?

What happened next was also quite funny. The intense backlash pushed Wilhelm into a state of depression and frenzy. After the remarks appeared in the newspaper, he vanished from public view and became silent and withdrawn. He hid beneath his bedcovers and almost completely stopped making public appearances.

This continued until several years later, around 1910, when he made another outrageous statement, saying something like, “The Prussian eagle is spreading its wings and soaring over Europe.” Once again, he caused a huge public controversy and uproar.

I am telling you: if you find him hilarious and then read a biography of Wilhelm II, you will discover that this man never grew. He did not learn. He was incapable of learning a lesson. He would make an outrageous statement, receive public criticism, and then collapse beneath his bedcovers, wailing and sobbing.

But he did not change, you know? His biography is not a coming-of-age novel. It is not a Bildungsroman. This man simply remained the way he was.

Another crucial point is that Germany in Wilhelm II’s era possessed a robust public sphere. That public sphere differed from what we have today. I mean specifically that it differed from the United States today.

The United States now has a fragmented public sphere. We see liberal media outlets concentrating their criticism on Trump. For example, The New York Times and MSNBC loudly criticize him and say, “Oh, Trump is Hitler,” and so on. Trump can remain completely unaffected by this. He does not even have to listen. He can listen only to Fox, read only Twitter, and look only at the handful of conservative media outlets he follows.

Germany at that time, however, had a fairly robust and unfragmented public sphere. Newspaper reporters and readers, university professors, men of letters, intellectuals, and public commentators jointly constituted a space in which rational debate, public criticism, clashes of opinion, and supervision of power could take place.

The German newspaper industry was extremely well developed during Wilhelm’s reign. Because Germany was highly regionalized, local newspapers in different places had loyal readerships. Consequently, whenever Wilhelm made some outrageous statement at the national or international level, such as “I love Britain, but Germans don’t love Britain,” “The Prussian eagle soars through the sky,” or some other reckless and indecent remark, the German public sphere could respond with a highly unified and forceful wave of criticism and resistance.

When newspapers drove Wilhelm to a breakdown and sent him hiding silently beneath his bedcovers, it was not simply because the emperor was too emotionally fragile. The power of public opinion to impose sanctions was much more concentrated then than it is today.

Today, online personalities, opinion leaders, and political camps are highly fragmented. As long as you can shut yourself inside an information cocoon, you can completely ignore criticism from people in other information cocoons. Wilhelm had no way to hide back then. He could not retreat into an information cocoon; he could only retreat beneath his own bedcovers.

By way of comparison, I believe that we, the ordinary public responsible for supervising public power, would certainly rather have powerful political leaders hide beneath their bedcovers and cry than hide inside information cocoons and laugh, wouldn’t we?

Personal diplomacy and the Willy–Nicky Telegrams

Relations among the great European powers at the time depended more heavily on credibility, popular reputation, and personal relationships, especially at the very highest levels. It was a political era in which elite relations depended more heavily on interpersonal ties.

Many European monarchs and heads of state were related to one another, knew one another personally, and could communicate directly by letter or telegram. At the beginning of ’26, for example, didn’t we see Trump take a text message that French President Macron had sent him in connection with a European meeting, screenshot it, and post it directly on Twitter? Some media outlets criticized him for being somewhat indecorous. Fundamentally, however, we members of the public did not regard it as an earth-shattering violation of the rules, something he absolutely should never have done.

Wilhelm lived in an era when national leaders were linked to national leaders, and monarchs to monarchs, through marriage and kinship. A ruler’s unstable personal style could therefore create much more serious diplomatic risks. When we examine Wilhelm’s personality in that context, we find that the diplomatic risks he had to bear were far greater than those faced by Trump today.

One week Wilhelm would fly into a rage at the tsar; the next, he would be infatuated with him and declaring his affection. He might explode in fury over the slightest perceived insult or provocation. At the time, that was far more explosive than it would be today.

World War I can be narrated in many different ways. Its history is extremely complicated, countless times more complicated, in my view, than the history of World War II. World War II has a relatively black-and-white narrative: there is a just side and an unjust side. World War I has no comparably clear and straightforward narrative.

As for books about World War I, I recommend The Sleepwalkers. I have recommended it many times before.

Among the various narratives of the war, one crucial thread is connected to Wilhelm II: the Willy–Nicky Telegrams. “Willy” refers to Wilhelm; it was his nickname. “Nicky” was the nickname of Tsar Nicholas II. The telegrams were exchanged between the two monarchs.

During the most intense phase of the July Crisis in 1914, we see the monarchs of two great European empires sending each other intimate telegrams in the tone of bosom buddies, as though they were brothers walking arm in arm. The telegrams genuinely do not read like the formal, polite documents exchanged between heads of state. Their tone is intimate and their wording earnest, full of warmth and familiarity. We read exhortations such as, “Please think twice,” and, “Please do not take the risk of ordering mobilization.” They are signed, “Your dearest Willy.” It looks like brotherly affection between monarchs.

On the one hand, we can acknowledge that the telegrams appear extremely intimate. In reality, however, they had also been rigorously revised, checked, and reviewed by the respective diplomatic and bureaucratic systems of the two states.

As readers, we cannot simply start shipping them, right? We cannot innocently treat the telegrams as the spontaneous expression of a private friendship. That private friendship was itself a carefully designed and repeatedly deliberated expression of the national will.

This is why I said at the beginning that discussing Trump in this context is, in my view, even more interesting. Today, when we hear the highly personalized, emotional, almost chatty expressions that emerge during Trump’s phone calls with leaders of other countries, they remind me of the telegrams between Wilhelm and Nicholas.

To ordinary civilians and irrelevant bystanders like us, they present the appearance of brotherly intimacy, of people walking arm in arm. In reality, they occur within a precisely functioning institutional machine.

Of course, some of the rigid, rule-bound intellectuals and university professors I encounter, people whose cerebral cortices are rather smooth, may be able to criticize this sort of diplomacy only in a stereotyped, purely rational way. They say that it is insufficiently professional, proper, or respectable.

But when we read history, we discover that the way Trump does politics today is, how should I put it, at least not unique, right? Politics can also operate through forms of language that appear intimate and casual. This blurred boundary between private tone and state diplomacy has appeared repeatedly throughout history.

The basic consensus among Germany’s political elites at the time was that since Wilhelm’s personality had been placed at the center of power, it had to be restrained. The Kaiser’s public remarks had to be reviewed, and his everyday conduct had to be closely monitored.

A powerful system of control gradually formed around Wilhelm to prevent him from causing disasters in his daily life or personally intervening in the operations of government in ways that might shake the foundations of the system. The upper echelons of the empire spent enormous amounts of time, resources, emotion, and energy managing the emperor himself, while Wilhelm was constantly subject to constraints imposed by the people around him.

Belligerent words and an unstoppable war machine

Wilhelm’s everyday language was often filled with politically incorrect and belligerent posturing. He sounded extraordinarily tough. Yet when real war drew near, especially in 1914, when the shadow of a Europe-wide war descended, his reaction was not to charge straight ahead, but almost to panic.

On the one hand, he displayed fear. On the other, he suddenly revealed an ambition to stop the war.

To understand the contrast, we can go back to 1905, when Wilhelm had a conversation with King Leopold of Belgium. Wilhelm told Leopold that Germany feared France might attack Germany in the future. If that happened, Germany hoped Belgium would side with Germany. If Belgium supported Germany, Germany would give it part of the territory seized from France. But if Belgium refused to offer support, Germany would have no choice but to annex large portions of Belgian territory.

These remarks left King Leopold so shocked and enraged that, when he rose to leave, he put his helmet on backward. Even more absurdly, Wilhelm had openly threatened Leopold at Leopold’s birthday banquet.

Just imagine the scene. Leopold was so furious that he put his helmet on backward and rushed back to his private palace. His wife asked him, “Darling, how was your birthday banquet?”

And he replied, “Oh, don’t ask. One of the guests at my birthday banquet threatened to invade my country.”

The conversation provides an excellent illustration of Wilhelm’s habitual loose talk and provocative belligerence. But when war genuinely became imminent in 1914, his reaction changed.

When Wilhelm first saw Serbia’s reply to the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum, his initial reaction was: “Oh, this looks all right. We can turn the page on this. It’s nothing serious. Everyone can go home.” For a time, he believed the crisis could end there.

By early August, the situation had reached the crucial question of whether to order military mobilization. Russia had already begun mobilizing. Under Germany’s established war plans, once Russia began posing a threat from the east, Germany would turn and attack France because France was Russia’s ally. Germany now had to decide whether to issue a formal mobilization order.

At this critical moment, Wilhelm was still unwilling to abandon his final glimmer of hope. He fantasized that Britain could be persuaded to remain neutral and even hoped Britain would intervene to keep France out of the conflict. This was almost a Don Quixote-like fantasy, wasn’t it?

At the crucial juncture when war seemingly had to be fought, Wilhelm ordered his chief of the General Staff, Moltke, to halt military mobilization. He ordered German troops to stop marching.

Moltke replied:

That is impossible, Your Majesty. The German army is enormous. We have already begun deployment along the established railway routes. The entire war machine has started moving. You cannot simply tell it to stop. Railway transportation, troop movements, and front-line deployments have already entered an irreversible state. This war has to be fought.

Now look at Wilhelm’s reaction. What did he say to Moltke, his general and chief of the General Staff?

If your uncle were still alive, he would have given me a different answer.

The uncle Wilhelm referred to was the famous elder General Moltke from the wars of German unification. At that moment, Wilhelm believed that if the emperor issued an order, the army simply had to obey.

He therefore firmly ordered the generals at the very front of the German advance to stop. They had already entered Luxembourg, violating its neutrality, but had not yet set foot in Belgium. The emperor genuinely ordered them to take off their packs, sit down where they were, and wait for further instructions.

They remained deadlocked like that for several hours, until news finally arrived that Britain was not going to act as Wilhelm had imagined. The war machine then started moving again.

This scene is extremely important. It demonstrates that Wilhelm’s habitual belligerent rhetoric, threatening posture, and exaggerated self-expression gave way, when a genuine conflict arrived, to panic, hesitation, and an attempt to withdraw. But within the modern machinery of the state and its system of military mobilization, once verbal recklessness combined with institutional inertia, it was too late to change one’s mind.

At that point in 1914, Wilhelm believed that, as emperor, he could speak whenever he wished, issue commands whenever he wished, and slam on the brakes whenever he wished. In reality, the Kaiser was using the logic of nineteenth-century personal authority to understand a twentieth-century institutionalized war machine.

We can also see that his psychological state was not simply belligerent or peaceful. It was a highly unstable, complex structure that swung between conflict and hesitation. Many contemporary political observers noticed this.

What did the contrast mean for international politics? It greatly increased uncertainty within the international system. No one could determine how much real power Wilhelm still possessed within Germany’s decision-making structure. No one could predict what he would say or do next. This unpredictability itself became part of the risk.

For a long time, that uncertainty left Austria-Hungary confused within the alliance because it did not know whether Germany would firmly support its actions. From a more macroscopic perspective, we can say that 1914 revealed a rule of international politics: in an alliance system where allies lack mutual understanding and stable expectations, and where each side is uncertain how the other will behave, crises are more likely to break out. By contrast, alliances in which the parties know one another thoroughly, coordinate closely, and form stable expectations are more likely to prevent wars from escalating out of control.

Germany was ultimately compelled to enter the war in 1914 and chose to give Austria-Hungary its full support. By 1915 and 1916, the conflict had rapidly turned into a war of attrition. The battles of Verdun and the Somme produced enormous casualties. Britain’s naval blockade began to affect Germany, which gradually fell into shortages of resources and tight food supplies. Rationing systems appeared in the cities.

By 1916 and 1917, the military leadership centered on Hindenburg and Ludendorff had seized real power. Germany shifted from a constitutional monarchy to, in a certain sense, a military-dominated regime. At the same time, social conditions were deteriorating. The “Turnip Winter” of 1916–17 became a symbol of food shortages.

In any event, the fighting simply went on and on. By the autumn of 1918, the front began to collapse. The military crisis ultimately became a political crisis.

In October and November 1918, large-scale unrest broke out within Germany: the November Revolution, followed by sailors’ mutinies, while workers’ and soldiers’ councils established governing authority in various places. The authority of the monarchy completely disintegrated.

This connects to an earlier episode of our podcast called “Why Didn’t Germany Become a Marxist Country?” This was also roughly the period in which Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were active, the period of activity by German Marxists.

By November 1918, Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate, and the German Empire came to an end. The Weimar Republic was subsequently established. Wilhelm went into exile in the Netherlands and spent the rest of his life in Doorn. There he read, commented on events, and wrote memoirs, attempting to defend his historical role. He did not believe that he was the source of the defeat and tended to blame other people. He did not understand what had actually happened in 1918.

At least in my observation, Wilhelm II was not a tyrant, nor was he a strategist. He was an uncertain and unstable personality placed in a position of immense power. He had an extremely conspicuous personality that was crude, reckless, and rash, a personality that could very easily be caricatured.

That crude, reckless personality appeared at a historical moment when the stakes were extraordinarily high. The interaction between those two things has left scholars, commentators, and World War I enthusiasts debating endlessly, all the way up to the present day, whether Wilhelm II’s eccentric personality in some sense ignited the flames of World War I.