2023-09-29 04:13:31
Between the Nazi propaganda that portrayed him as an aggressive leader and that of the British and French who described him as an irresponsible psychopath, the figure of William II of Germany has been horribly mutilated and taken to cartoonish levels. His volcanic personality and his lack of political views seem to prove them right if he is studied from the outside. Few historians have taken the trouble, like Christopher Clark in ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II: A Life in Power’ (The Sphere of Books, 2023), to look at it from close up, from the very heart of an empire that had been greatly admired before the Great War.
The war made us forget the achievements of that Germany praised for its efficiency and its economic and cultural strength after a powerful developed technological and industrial boom. between 1871 and 1914 thanks to state investment. Cradle of thinkers, painters and scientists, Guillermo always sought to be at the center of all these advances, although he did not always succeed or be interested enough. He did know how to see science as a pillar of his empire and the best image to project himself as the incarnation of a modern, technologically and intellectually more advanced state. The bombs collapsed the carefully constructed façade…
The First World War unleashed the German warmongering that Bismark, using subtlety and crossed balances, had contained for decades. The aggressive foreign policy aimed at reclaiming its “place under the Sun” as a new world power converged in the outbreak of an unknown war in Europe that, ultimately, resulted in a German defeat more in the offices than on the battlefields. However, the book demonstrates that William was, more than the cause of the conflict As always attributed to him, one of the few European leaders who tried to retrace the path through his peaceful international agreements to extinguish the crisis in the Balkans or maintain his commitment, expressed as early as 1888, of “peace with the whole world whenever may be possible”. Furthermore, he was the most opposed in the German military leadership to the use of unrestricted submarine warfare.
In the face of propaganda that defines him as a missing link between nineteenth-century German nationalism and Nazism, a “sadist”, “a bully”, “a pompous madman”, the author of ‘Sleepwalkers’ and ‘The Iron Kingdom’ draws an intelligent monarch but with poor judgment, clumsy outbursts, fearful, insecure and impulsive in reaction to his feeling of weakness. «He would choose an idea, get excited about it, get bored or discouraged, and abandon it. She was angry with the Tsar one week but fell in love with him the next. “He reacted with fury to what he believed were slights or provocations, but panicked at the idea of a real confrontation or conflict.”
“She was angry with the tsar one week but fell in love with him the next”
Clark reflects in the pages of ‘Kaiser William II’ on the role of the Prussian monarch in the course of events. The Kaiser did not intervene as much in politics as is usually understood due to his hyper-prominence. The war only asserted his power. Day by day, week by week, he was progressively removed from decision-making by the military leadership. Despite his title as leader, he was excluded from any active role in the war program and he was unable to act as a constitutional hinge between civil and military authorities. He was, overall, unable to be the leader his country needed in its darkest times.
Caricature of world leaders dividing up China.
“The position of emperor was endowed with broad executive prerogatives, but whether he could exercise them, and how and to what extent, depended on variables that were only partially under his control or not at all,” this professor of History of the University of Cambridge. The ostentatious authority that he showed in the public sphere did not correspond at all to his weight in a system full of complexity and twists and turns. With the appointment of Hindenburg and Ludendorff as leaders of the General Staff, Germany rose as a de facto military dictatorship and the warlord became a chess King ready to receive checkmate.
At the end of the war, the German was the most hated guy in the world and certain accredited politicians, such as the British Prime Minister, demanded his public execution. Following a workers’ revolution in early November 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II fled to the Netherlands. On the 28th of the same month he formally abdicated, ending more than five hundred years of Hohenzollern history in Prussia. He lived in exile until his death in 1941, leaving the prestige of his dynasty in tatters. His hasty escape left a huge void in the German imagination that, as summarized Andreas Graf von Bernstorff In his diary, he led us to think that “only a dictator can help us now, one who sweeps up all this international parasitic scum with an iron broom.” Oh, if we had like the Germans, a MussolinYo!”. They would have it soon.
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