Wilhelm II
Based on Wikipedia: Wilhelm II
A baby born blue and silent. A frantic midwife spanking him until finally, a weak cry escaped his pale lips. That infant, brain-damaged from oxygen deprivation and with a withered left arm that would haunt him his entire life, would grow up to be the man who more than any other individual pushed Europe into the catastrophe of World War One.
Wilhelm II, the last German Emperor, presents one of history's most compelling case studies in how personal psychology shapes world events. His reign from 1888 to 1918 transformed Germany from Bismarck's carefully balanced European power into an isolated aggressor that helped trigger a war killing seventeen million people.
A Traumatic Beginning
The night of January 26, 1859, Princess Victoria—eldest daughter of Queen Victoria of Britain—went into labor at the Crown Prince's Palace in Berlin. What should have been a routine royal birth became a medical nightmare.
The baby was breech, meaning he was positioned to come out bottom-first rather than head-first. This was dangerous in any era, but especially so before modern obstetric techniques. The attending physician, Eduard Arnold Martin, administered chloroform to ease Victoria's screaming and ergot extract to strengthen her contractions. When the infant's buttocks finally emerged, Martin noticed the pulse in the umbilical cord was weak and intermittent—the baby wasn't getting enough oxygen.
Then came the fateful moment. The baby's left arm was twisted upward behind his head. To free the child, Martin forcibly pulled the arm downward, tearing the brachial plexus—the network of nerves running from the spine through the neck and into the arm. He then grasped this same damaged arm to rotate the infant's body and complete the delivery.
The newborn didn't cry. He didn't move. For several agonizing minutes, Prince Frederick William's heir lay silent and blue while doctors turned their attention to his unconscious mother. Finally, the midwife Fräulein Stahl began spanking the baby vigorously—considered improper at the time—until that first weak cry signaled life.
Modern medical analysis suggests the oxygen deprivation left Wilhelm with what we'd now recognize as minimal brain damage: hyperactivity, impulsive behavior, limited attention span, and impaired social abilities. The nerve damage caused Erb's palsy, leaving his left arm withered and about six inches shorter than his right.
He would spend his entire life trying to hide this disability. In photographs, you'll see him holding white gloves in his left hand to make the arm appear longer, or gripping a sword hilt, or positioning the arm at what he hoped was a dignified angle. The psychological impact ran even deeper than the physical concealment.
A Mother's Obsession, A Son's Resentment
Princess Victoria blamed herself for her son's condition. Her response was to prove he could overcome it through sheer willpower—starting with horseback riding.
The thought that a future King of Prussia couldn't ride was intolerable to her. So beginning at age eight, young Wilhelm was subjected to riding lessons that were more endurance tests than instruction. Over and over, the weeping boy was placed on horseback. Over and over, he fell off. Over and over, despite his tears, he was put back on.
It took weeks before he could maintain his balance.
"The torments inflicted on me, in this pony riding, must be attributed to my mother," Wilhelm later wrote with evident bitterness. This was not a man who remembered his childhood fondly.
His tutor from age six, Georg Ernst Hinzpeter, embodied Prussian discipline. Wilhelm would later say Hinzpeter "was really a good fellow" but questioned whether he was "the right tutor for me." The combination of his mother's relentless physical demands and his tutor's rigid educational program created a personality marked by both desperate need for approval and simmering resentment of those in authority over him.
Most fascinating was Wilhelm's relationship with his English heritage. Through his mother, he was Queen Victoria's eldest grandchild—the first of forty-two. He was sixth in line to the British throne at birth. Yet rather than embracing this connection, he came to view it as something to resist, even despise.
His mother tried to educate him in what she considered British liberal values. Wilhelm rejected this utterly, gravitating instead toward his tutors' support for autocratic rule. He became, in his own words, "thoroughly Prussianized." He began to suspect his parents of putting Britain's interests ahead of Germany's.
The tension exploded in April 1889 when Wilhelm angrily declared: "An English doctor killed my father, and an English doctor crippled my arm—which is the fault of my mother."
Neither accusation was true. But they reveal how deeply his psychological wounds had festered.
The Young Emperor Takes the Throne
Wilhelm's grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I, died in March 1888. His father Frederick III, already suffering from incurable throat cancer, reigned for just ninety-nine days before succumbing to the disease. At twenty-nine years old, Wilhelm II became German Emperor and King of Prussia.
He inherited not just a crown but a kingdom shaped by Otto von Bismarck, the legendary "Iron Chancellor" who had unified Germany through what he called "blood and iron"—a series of wars against Denmark, Austria, and France. For nearly three decades, Bismarck had dominated German politics through a careful balance of alliances and calculated restraint in foreign affairs.
Bismarck thought he could dominate the young Kaiser as he had dominated the old one. He was catastrophically wrong.
Wilhelm I had been content to leave daily administration to his chancellor, treating the constitutional provision for imperial executive power as largely ceremonial. Wilhelm II had no such intentions. He meant to rule, not merely reign.
The conflict was also generational. Bismarck represented the old order of patient diplomacy and balance-of-power politics. Wilhelm wanted Germany to have its "place in the sun"—a phrase that would come to symbolize aggressive imperial expansion. Where Bismarck moved carefully, Wilhelm was impetuous. Where Bismarck consulted, Wilhelm commanded.
Bismarck himself recognized the danger. "That young man wants war with Russia," he complained to an aide, "and would like to draw his sword straight away if he could. I shall not be a party to it."
In March 1890, less than two years after taking the throne, Wilhelm dismissed Bismarck. The magazine Punch published a famous cartoon titled "Dropping the Pilot," showing Bismarck descending a ship's ladder while young Wilhelm watched from the deck above. It captured a truth the artist may not have fully understood: German foreign policy was now being steered by a man whose emotional development had been shaped by childhood trauma and who possessed, in the words of modern medical analysis, "impaired social abilities."
The "New Course" and Its Consequences
Wilhelm called his approach the "New Course." In many respects, it achieved remarkable results.
Germany's colonial empire expanded significantly, acquiring territories in China and the Pacific including Jiaozhou Bay (a strategic port on the Shandong Peninsula), the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Caroline Islands. German industry surged ahead until the nation became Europe's largest manufacturer. Scientific innovation flourished under imperial patronage.
But these achievements were consistently undermined by Wilhelm's personality.
He had a habit of making what can only be called catastrophically tactless public statements. He would threaten other nations without consulting his ministers. He gave interviews to foreign newspapers that horrified his own government. His erratic behavior was not just embarrassing—it was dangerous, because he was speaking as the head of state of Europe's most powerful military nation.
Three major initiatives in particular helped isolate Germany from the other great powers.
First, Wilhelm initiated a massive naval buildup. Britain, an island nation dependent on sea power for survival, had long maintained the world's dominant navy. The British viewed Germany's naval expansion as an existential threat. An arms race ensued that poisoned relations between the two countries—particularly painful given Wilhelm's British heritage and his complicated feelings about it.
Second, Germany repeatedly contested French control of Morocco, leading to two international crises (in 1905 and 1911) that pushed France and Britain closer together.
Third, Germany backed the construction of a railway through the Ottoman Empire to Baghdad, directly challenging Britain's dominance in the Persian Gulf region.
The result of all this activity was paradoxical. Germany became more powerful in absolute terms while becoming weaker in relative terms. By the second decade of the twentieth century, Germany could count only Austria-Hungary—itself a creaking multi-ethnic empire—and the declining Ottoman Empire as reliable allies. Britain, France, and Russia had aligned against it.
The July Crisis
On June 28, 1914, a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo. The assassination set off a chain of events that would destroy the old European order.
Austria-Hungary wanted to punish Serbia. Serbia was protected by Russia. Germany was allied with Austria-Hungary. France was allied with Russia. Britain had informal agreements with France. The alliance system that had been intended to maintain peace had instead created a situation where a single spark could ignite a continental conflagration.
Wilhelm's role in the crisis was characteristic of his reign: impulsive, provocative, and ultimately disastrous.
On July 5, Wilhelm gave Austria-Hungary what became known as the "blank check"—a guarantee of German military support for whatever action Austria-Hungary decided to take against Serbia. This unconditional commitment removed any incentive for Austria-Hungary to moderate its demands. It was exactly the kind of diplomatic brinksmanship that Bismarck had spent decades avoiding.
Then Wilhelm went on vacation.
By the time he returned and grasped the seriousness of the situation, the machinery of mobilization was already grinding forward. Wilhelm made some belated attempts at mediation, but he had helped set in motion forces he could no longer control. By early August, most of Europe was at war.
The Emperor Sidelined
What followed was perhaps the ultimate irony of Wilhelm's reign. The man who had insisted on personal rule, who had dismissed Bismarck to assert his own authority, who had made himself the face of German aggression—this man found himself increasingly irrelevant once the war he had helped cause actually began.
Wilhelm was a lax wartime leader. He left virtually all strategic and organizational decisions to the German Supreme Army Command. By August 1916, this delegation had effectively created a military dictatorship under Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. The Kaiser had become a figurehead in his own empire.
Germany won stunning victories in the East, forcing Russia out of the war and extracting enormous territorial concessions in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. But on the Western Front, the war ground on in the trenches, consuming a generation of young men from all the warring nations.
In 1918, Germany's position collapsed. A final offensive in the spring failed. The Allies, reinforced by American troops, pushed the German army back. By autumn, Germany's military leaders informed Wilhelm that the war was lost.
Abdication and Exile
On November 9, 1918, facing revolution at home and defeat abroad, Wilhelm II abdicated. The Hohenzollern dynasty's five-hundred-year rule over Prussia and its predecessor states ended not with a bang but with a whimper—the Kaiser fleeing to neutral Netherlands while Germany collapsed into chaos.
The new Weimar Republic was born in humiliation. The Treaty of Versailles stripped Germany of territory and imposed crippling reparations. Many Germans never accepted the legitimacy of the democratic government that had signed the armistice and the peace treaty. They called the new leaders "November criminals."
Wilhelm lived out his remaining years in exile at Huis Doorn, a manor house in the Netherlands. He occupied himself with gardening, wrote self-serving memoirs, and nursed grievances against those he blamed for his downfall—which included almost everyone except himself.
When Nazi Germany occupied the Netherlands in 1940, Wilhelm remained at Huis Doorn. Adolf Hitler, who had served as a corporal in the Kaiser's army, offered the former emperor a return to Germany with honors. Wilhelm declined. He died on June 4, 1941, and was buried in the Netherlands according to his wishes—he had stipulated that his body should not return to Germany until the monarchy was restored.
It never was.
The Question of Responsibility
How much did Wilhelm II's damaged psyche contribute to the catastrophe of World War One? Historians have debated this question for over a century.
Some argue that structural factors made the war nearly inevitable: the alliance system, imperial rivalries, nationalist movements, military planning that prioritized rapid mobilization over diplomacy. The war would have come regardless of who sat on the German throne.
Others point to Wilhelm's specific decisions and provocations. A more careful leader might have restrained Austria-Hungary. A more diplomatic ruler might not have alienated Britain, France, and Russia simultaneously. A more stable personality might not have repeatedly created international incidents through careless public statements.
The truth likely incorporates both perspectives. The structures made war possible; personalities made it actual.
What seems undeniable is that Wilhelm II's traumatic birth left marks that never healed. The oxygen deprivation that may have affected his brain development. The nerve damage that withered his arm. The mother who blamed herself and tried to cure him through ordeal. The tutors who channeled his insecurities into Prussian militarism. The emotional wounds that curdled into resentment of his English heritage.
All of this shaped the man who, at a crucial moment in history, gave Austria-Hungary a blank check and then went on vacation.
Seventeen million people died in the war that followed. The empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottomans collapsed. The peace settlement created conditions that would lead to an even more terrible war two decades later. The twentieth century's trajectory of total war, genocide, and totalitarianism was set in motion.
And it started, in some measure, with a breech birth in Berlin on a January night in 1859, when a desperate doctor pulled too hard on a baby's arm.
``` The essay is approximately 2,500 words (roughly 12-15 minutes of reading), opens with a dramatic hook about the traumatic birth, varies paragraph and sentence length for audio listening, explains concepts from first principles (like what a breech birth is), and draws thematic connections between Wilhelm's psychological damage and his catastrophic foreign policy decisions—linking nicely to the Substack article about leaders' mental states affecting nations.