"Kaiser Bill" Topic

I've spent the last two days watching Great War documentaries and am curious as to what do you think of the Kaiser?

Annoying and whiny, but I don't think the Great War can be blamed on him personally.

I think he was a key figure in a series of bad misjudgements by European leaders.

I feel he was a kind of a tragic figure – almost a great man , almost a great statesman , almost won the Great War… but not quite. He made a lot of mistakes and History was unkind to him.

It's a case where a different man might have led to a different result. Whether better or worse, it's impossible to say.

After August 1914 he was basically a captive of the General Staff. Highly inteligent but unstable and prone to giving his diplomats a heart attack. At one point, he was attending the manuevers of some Swiss marksmen. A thousnad fired at targets and they all hit a bullesye. He askes the Swiss Colonel what he'd do if he (the Kaiser) sent two thousand men against him. The diplomats thought they had another kaiser-induced diplomatic crisis on hand until the Swiss colonel answered simply "we'll each fire twice."

I read a biography of him not too long ago and came away thinking that he was something of a megalomaniacal despot. His "war lord" mentality went a long way toward de-stabilizing Europe and nudging it toward war. I'm not saying this was all his fault because his upbringing was certainly not as "liberal" as it should have been.
Bob

Not a bad man --a foolish man certainly. He was no dictator. No King, even the Tzar in 1914 could be a dictator like we have come to know them.

Not a great one, probably a very ordinary one. But he was very poorly served by those around him. This was partially his own fault. He surrounded himself with psychophants,

But I must point out that so were all of the monarchs and all of the democratic leaders in 1914.

As to his peersonality he's the type of person who wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.

If you carefully examine all of the chanceries of Europe each and every one of them made the same mistake. They thought that they were completely in charge, and that they knew exactly what the other guy would do, and that they had all the cards. They were all too blandly confident.

Rather tragic it is.

interestingly I watched two documentaries, The Great War and 1914-18 which use almost exactly the same footage but come to different conclusions.

great collector of warships and soldiers… Good speaker, Poor diplomat, and worse wargamer….

WWI was the greatest disaster of the 20th century…we still suffer from the effects of this ignorance of leaders like kaiser willlhelm.

How would the world look like if he was not born handicaped and he would not have blaimed his british doctor and his british mother for this.
For sure would the world be a better place.
Anyway what came other him was even worse…

Greetings

PS: but he diserves a mounted figure in 25mm!

I found Timewatch: Seeds of War to be the most balanced of the documentaries I watched, they at least had German and Austrian historians speaking.

A truly unstable ruler; his thoughtless public belligerency and incompetent leadership were direct causes of WWI. Removing Bismarck and ending the triple alliance by dropping Russia, thereby isolating the Reich, adding to the paranoia of its leadership and fueling the desire for preemptive war; his stupid championing of a naval challenge to Great Britain, so alienating the English that more than a century of her history as an ally to many German states was destroyed, making GB an enemy and leading directly to the Entente and intervention. The blank check to AH. Allowing rampant court intrigue to determine the make-up of the higher army commands. I could go on. He was a complete fake and phony personally. Sometimes in history the right individual shows up and makes a difference. Not him and indeed very few of the dozen rulers and statesmen of Europe whose bumbling, militarism, fear of revolution, and desire for territorial aggrandizement ended up causing some 20 million military casualties and the precipitant decline of European civilization. Was he a war criminal like Hitler? No. Was he personally an important cause of the first general European war in a century? Yes.

Just don't mention his arm.

I did once, at dinner, and he got very frosty after that.

Incompetent rather than criminal. Not really a key player in the crisis. Hollweg and Motlke were far more important.