How 'bonkers' was Wilhelm II?

Wilhelm II has been labelled, amongst many things:

a “strange peculiar person” (Sigurd von Ilsemann, Wilhelm’s Adjutant, c.1940);
a “bafflingly complex person” (Isabel Hull, historian 2004);
a “Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus” (Miranda Carter, author, 2016);
and the “fabulous monster of contemporary history, the fire breathing unicorn” (biographer JD Charnier, 1934) …

but was he insane?

The overwhelming answer, even at the time, was yes.

Early accusations

Even as a child, people found him wild, charging around breaking things, flying into a rage – which earned him the nicknames: ‘Wilhelm the Sudden’ and ‘Wilhelm the Fierce’.

Age and enthronement did not change him:

Frank Lascelles, British Ambassador to Berlin, could not cope with Wilhelm’s sense of humour: “On the one hand I want to give you a full account of all he said, on the other I am anxious to avoid conveying the impression that His Majesty may be a little mad.”
Edward Grey, the British diplomat, labelled him: “not quite sane, and very superficial”

and many, many more.

Even in Germany at the time:

The family of Bismarck – the famous Chancellor with whom Wilhelm had broken in 1890 – spoke publicly about Wilhelm’s “abnormal mental condition”.
And in 1894, Ludwig Quidde – who would not have dared accuse Wilhelm openly – wrote a book about the Roman Emperor Caligula’s Cäsarenwahnsinn (Ceasar madness – a ‘borderline state’ characterised by suspicion, guile, hypocrisy, pretence, bloodthirstiness and cruelty) … but which everybody realised was really about Wilhelm. You only need to know a fraction of the terrible things that Wilhelm is recorded as saying to realise that the accusation was easy to make.

Next, during the First World War, Wilhelm got it from Germany’s enemies.

French writer Augustin Cabanès’s in Folie d’empereur (1915) – observing the ‘anatomical stigma of degeneration’ in Wilhelm’s ear lobe – declared the entire German royal family a ‘dynasty of degenerates’, and blamed Wilhelm’s madness on his left arm, crippled during birth.
Similarly, Italian psychiatrist Ernesto Lugaro (1915) found Wilhelm to be physically, mentally and morally defective.

Then, after the war, books appeared with titles such as: The Madness of Wilhelm II and Wihelm II as Cripple and Psycopath. German physician Paul Tesdorpf (1919) declared Wilhelm “a pathological degenerate, a lunatic” who suffered from “periodic insanity”; and German historian of the Roman Emperors Ernst Müller, (1925) declared him “a high-bred degenerate and the diagnosis also includes psychopathy and neurasthenia [nervousness]”.

David Freis, writing in Medical History (2018), points out that ALL these accusations had a political motivation – from Social Democrats attacking the monarchy before 1914, to Allied smear propaganda during the war, then to Germany’s post-war desire to absolve itself from the accusation of war-guilt, and finally to the Nazis’ hope for a Fuhrer who was not thus-imperfect and would save Germany.

Historians and Psycho-historians

During the 1960s and 1970s, attention moved away from Wilhelm. These were the years when historians such as AJP Taylor were developing the idea that there was a continuity in German history 1870-1945 which had led it to try to dominate Europe and had resulted in Nazism, and when 'structuralist' historians were arguing that the real influences on German politics were social and economic factors. For them, Willhelm was an almost-irrelevance caught up in the general sweep of a German Sonderweg ('special route').

However, in the 1980s there arose a kind of history called ‘psycho-history’, which tried to diagnose the psychiatric problems of historical characters, and Wilhelm was back in the news again.

Miriam Steiner (1983) put Wilhelm's behaviour down to “extroverted feeling”. In normal people, this is just the desire to meet expected social norms. In Wilhelm, however, she hypothesised, his physical weakness, sensitivity and artistic temperament caused a dissociation with his need to be the perfect monarch and a model of masculinity. He adhered to the male stereotype, but was unable to live up to it: “Wilhelm's personality never achieved a reliable cohesiveness. Threatened by neurotic dissociation, he increasingly displayed the symptoms of hysteria.”
For Thomas A Kohut the problem was a blurring of the psychological boundary between Wilhelm and Germany – Wilhelm believed himself "the emotional and spiritual personification of the German nation”, and therefore took personally and inordinately everything that happened.

At least the people making the diagnoses in the 1980s – unlike those previously – had proper qualifications to do so, but their theories were still based on hearsay and anecdote at a distance of three-quarters of a century.

Nevertheless the temptation to psycho-analyse has continued. More recently Isabel Hull (2004) has seen in Wilhelm’s restlessness, travelling, and inability to listen, a psychological “conspiracy against self-understanding”; and the all-time expert on Wilhelm, John Röhl, suggested (1989) that Wilhelm was the victim of a ‘psychosyndrome’ (possibly ADHD) brought on by a ‘neuroticization’ due to his upbringing – “if not clinically insane, at least deeply disturbed”.

And you will probably have read in modern school textbooks suggestions that Wilhelm may have been a repressed homosexual.

The explanations for his condition (whatever it was) are as varied as the conditions suggested:

He was poisoned by the excessive use of chloroform on his mother during birth
Mental symptoms related the Erb’s Palsy (now called Kaiser Wilhelm Syndrome) – the nerve damage in his left arm caused during a rough breech birth
Possible brain damage at birth
A distant and overbearing mother, who blamed herself but despised him for his physical disability and/or who tried to make him an English gentleman when he wanted to be a Prussian Prince
Painful electrotherapy for his withered arm
Feelings of inadequacy on account of his withered arm
A cruel and domineering tutor Georg Hinzpeter who thought him worthy only to be a machine-minder
A recurring ear infection “which almost drove him mad”
A boring and anxious wife he could not wait to get away from

… and so on.

Conclusions

What do you reckon to all this? Christopher Clark (2009) struck a note of caution. Wilhelm II was truly a HORRIBLE person. Röhl’s 1987 description of him is exhaustive and totally damning: rude, racist, sexist, narcissistic, boastful, as antisemitic as Hitler, violent in word and deed, lacking in any social restraint – and it has been easy, even natural, for people (especially his political enemies) to label such a person ‘mad and bad’.

Clark suggests that such labelling is a post-hoc rationalization prompted by disapproval or distaste at a particular mode of behaviour, and comments:

“This helps to explain why the 'diagnosis' of Wilhelm II has historically tended to follow contemporary trends in popular science: 'nervous debility' in the 1890s; 'dynastic degeneracy' in the early Republican era; Freudian paradigms in the 1920s and periodically thereafter; 'repressed homosexuality' from the 1970s; neurology in the 1980s and now, in the gene-obsessed turn of the twenty-first century, 'the gene of George III' (i.e. porphyria)."

Such easy labelling, suggests Clark, can prevent us looking for explanations “in terms of rationality and context”. ‘Why did such-and-such happen – oh, he was mad’ can mean we miss important truths.

Was Wilhelm insane, then?

Wilhelm’s entourage, led by Philipp Eulenberg, Wilhlem’s confidant and general Mr Fix-It – the group of friends who, it turned out in 1907, were actually in love with him – did not speak of madness, but they worried frequently about “a breakdown of his nerves”.

Miranda Carter puts it much less kindly:

“The Kaiser’s darkest secret was that every few years – after his meddling and blunders had exposed his incompetence or resulted in a crisis – he would suffer a full-blown collapse. His entourage would scrape him off the floor, and he would retire to one of his palaces, where, prostrate, he would weep and complain that he’d been victimized. After the moaning came the pacing, in uncharacteristic silence. Occasionally he would give way to tears. Gradually he would recalibrate his sense of reality –– or unreality – and after a few weeks would bounce up again, as boisterous and obstreperous as ever.”

It is of note that, in his Memoirs, Wilhelm himself admitted that he suffered from his nerves, and had had nervous breakdowns. But, he said, when it happened, he went to bed, had a long sleep, and woke “as good as new”.

What is the significance of this for historians?

Probably none whatsoever. What matters for historians is what Wilhelm DID, and the deleterious effect his erratic and intrusive behaviours had on his contemporaries, both on the domestic and world stage.