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Praised for a thoughtful reassessment of Frederick the Great in his previous book, Giles MacDonogh tackles another controversial figure in German history, Kaiser Wilhelm II. William (as his British biographer calls him throughout) has often been dismissed as an anti-Semite and a reactionary whose policies, particularly the buildup of the German navy, inevitably led to World War I. MacDonogh's readable and thorough synthesis of current scholarship depicts a more complex man with far more in common with his English mother, Queen Victoria's daughter Vicky, than is usually acknowledged. "He had inherited her memory, her lack of snobbery, openness, vivacity, moodiness, over-estimation of her own importance, her cleverness without wisdom," writes MacDonogh, characteristically listing both good and bad traits without moralizing. William's mixed feelings about his mother indelibly shaped his attitude toward Great Britain: he strove from the moment he became emperor in 1888 for an alliance with England, yet seemed compelled to undermine it due to "a combination of admiration and envy, animosity and affection." Born in 1859, his botched delivery resulted in a withered left arm, the first in a lifelong series of painful physical and mental ailments that may well have been responsible for the intemperate outbursts that have damaged his posthumous reputation. MacDonogh reminds us that William's worst threats--to tear up the German constitution, to have his enemies shot--were never carried out. After Germany's defeat in 1918, he abdicated and retired to a manor house in Holland; he may have disliked Jews, but he viewed the Nazis with distaste and until his death in 1941 gave no indication he supported the Third Reich. MacDonogh's detailed account of William's life and times doesn't so much revise the conventional portrait as add nuance, and it will be welcomed by aficionados of old-fashioned narrative biography.
--Wendy Smith
From Publishers Weekly
Wilhelm II, the infamous "Kaiser Bill" of WWI, has long been seen as the principal instigator of that catastrophe. In the first biography of the kaiser in over 30 years, historian and journalist MacDonogh (Frederick the Great) intends to set the record straight by examining events usually adduced as evidence against the intelligence and character of the last Hohenzollern monarch. Wilhelm's dismissal of the chancellor, Bismarck, generally attributed to a young, incompetent kaiser's jealousy, is here construed as a necessary and long-overdue act. Wilhelm's withered left arm, the result of incompetent obstetricians and seen by Freud as the source of the emperor's compulsion to prove his masculinity, was actually only a slight handicap that Wilhelm overcame with great strength of character, attests MacDonogh. The author also shows that in the prewar crises, the kaiser could be seen as the most far-seeing and level-headed person in the higher reaches of the imperial German government, and that he endeavored to head off the impending war. Moreover, charges of anti-Semitism are complicated by the fact that the Nazis called him a "Jew-lover" based on his sometime amity with Jewish businessmen and intelligentsia. Though adroit at winning popular acclaim, the kaiser had an unfortunate tendency toward bombast that led him time and again to dissipate whatever support he had won. The last kaiser of the Second German Reich emerges from these pages as a talented man who would have made an excellent professor of archeology but unfortunately was doomed to rule one of the world's great national powers. 8 pages b&w photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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