Books: Child or Fool?

THE KAISER (461 pp.)—Joachim von Kürenberg—Simon & Schuster ($5).

The man who shapes up in The Kaiser of Prussian-born Biographer Joachim von Kürenberg is a vastly different fellow from the monster who was hanged in effigy throughout the U.S. in World War I. It is not simply that the author remembers Wilhelm II’s good points; it is the fact that he had so many weak ones. Kürenberg’s book makes the going a bit sticky for people whose knowledge of modern European history is shaky, but it will bring many a surprise to readers who vaguely remember Wilhelm as the Iron Hohenzollern who had something to do with bayoneting Belgian babies. Most of all, it will shake the beliefs of those who are still under the impression that the Kaiser personally started World War I.

Behind the Trappings. For a Prussian prince, Wilhelm began life in 1859 with a crushing handicap. He was born with a crippled left arm and rapidly picked up the inferiority complex that went with it. He was afraid to ride, used a special knife-fork gadget at meals, and exercised his right arm relentlessly to make up for the weakness of the other. As if one physical handicap were not enough, he suffered from a “scrofulous” ear sickness that made a court physician advise an insurance company not to write a policy on his life. Later, many highly placed Germans said privately that their Emperor was insane, and a high official of the Foreign Office suggested to the British ambassador that he “treat the Kaiser as either a child or a fool.”

The Kaiser was too complex to be either all of the time, but there were times when he could seem like both. To a sculptor working on a monument to Wilhelm’s parents (Kaiser Friedrich and Kaiserin Victoria), the Kaiser sent an order saying that “Prussian eagles, even when sitting, must be represented as if they were flying.” No great soldier himself, he worried his general staff, as Author Kürenberg puts it, by “losing himself more and more in external trappings, designing new uniforms and braidings or inventing cords and silver whistles for dispatch riders.” He could be arrogant enough to tell King Alfonso of Spain publicly to go back and put his uniform on right, so incredibly undiplomatic as to say at the death of his uncle, King Edward VII of England: “An outstanding political personality has suddenly disappeared from the European stage … I believe that on the whole it will make for more calm in European politics.” But Edward’s mother, Queen Victoria, always claimed that the Kaiser was her favorite grandson, and she died in his arms in 1901.

Over the Border. Wilhelm went through chancellors as though they were unsatisfactory valets. The first to go was the great Prince Bismarck, who had fashioned the German Empire in the first place. Few of them ever had much good to say for the Kaiser, and one of them, Hohenlohe, remarked that only his refusal to take offense kept him from sending in his resignation “at least once a week.” By 1914 the Kaiser himself must have prayed for another Bismarck. That he did not want war seems quite plain from the real pressure he put on Austria and Russia to avoid bringing it on. As the “Supreme War Lord,” he worried, fussed and pored over maps, but actually had little to do with running the war. When, in 1918, revolution began in Germany, he was shocked to dis cover that the army refused him its loyal ty. He was even more shocked when Field Marshal von Hindenburg advised him to abdicate and duck over the Dutch border to safety.

On the day of the armistice, Nov. 11, the Kaiser asked his Dutch host: “What do you think of it all?” The Dutchman, ill at ease, was silent, but the man who was no longer Kaiser knew how to clear the air: “And now, my dear Count, I should like a cup of tea, hot English tea!”