WILHELM II: A SHADOW KAISER?

‘The Beast of Berlin’ was the name of an American film, made in 1918, which depicted Wilhelm II as a militaristic monster. This title reflected public opinion among the Allied Powers at the end of the First World War. ‘Hang the Kaiser!’ was the motto which won Lloyd George the election of 1918. And in Article 227 of the Versailles Treaty the victorious powers in the First World War called for Wilhelm II to be publicly indicted for the ‘most serious infringement of international moral law’. He was never brought to trial, only because the Netherlands, where the ex-Kaiser had fled, refused to extradite him.

The desire to punish the Kaiser for the war was based on the assumption that, as the highest-ranking person in charge of German policy, he was partly to blame for the war, and responsible for its bloody course. This assumption did not seem to be unjustified. After all, Wilhelm II had been astonishing and irritating his contemporaries with his autocratic and militaristic pronouncements for decades. His unpredictable volatility, in particular, raised doubts. Bismarck once disapprovingly remarked that Wilhelm II had an opinion about everything, but that it was a different one every day. And indeed, the Kaiser was known to the people around him as Wetterhahn (weathercock) or Ballon (balloon), who always blew with the prevailing wind.