Historiography of Wilhelmine Germany

Historians’ writings on Wilhelm II have tended to coalesce into three debates:

1.  Wilhelm II’s character: was he insane? 

2.  Wilhelm II’s rule: how much of an autocratic ruler was he? 

3.  Is there any continuity with Hitler’s Germany (the Sonderweg debate)? 

1.  Wilhelm II’s character: was he insane? 

This is a fascinating debate, which I have written in more detail about here. 

Wilhelm was continually accused of being ‘mad’, and it is interesting to see during his lifetime how his presumed insanity was used by Social Democrats to attack the monarchy before 1914; then as Allied smear propaganda during the war; next as an argument to absolve Germany from the accusation of war-guilt; and finally for the Nazis’ contention that Germany needed a saviour who was not thus-imperfect. 

More recently, after a lull in the 1960s, psychiatrists as well as historians have continued to wonder what was going on in Wilhelm’s head – Christopher Clark (2009) has pointed out how:

“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)."

For us, however, what matters much more than speculations based on circumstantial evidence is what Wilhelm did, and the effect that his erratic and horrible behaviours had on his contemporaries, both at home and abroad. 

Going Deeper

The following links will help you widen your knowledge:

How 'bonkers' was Wilhelm II?  looks in more detail at the issue of Wilhelm's mental state

2.  Wilhelm II’s rule: how much of an autocratic ruler was he? 

This is for us a much more relevant issue. 

Wilhelm’s assessment of his power

In a speech of 1891 he declaimed: “There is only one person who is master in this empire and I am not going to tolerate any other”, and in a letter of 1896 to his Chancellor, Prince Hohenloe, he wrote:

“A Prussian Minister is in the fortunate position of not having to worry whether his Bills succeed or not.  He is not appointed to office at the behest of this or that party in the Chamber [Bundesrat/Reichstag].  On the contrary my ministers are chosen quite freely by me through All-highest confidence; and so long as they enjoy that confidence they do not have to bother about anything else at all.  They are, quite simply, better off than they would be in the other constitutional States.  I should be glad if you would draw the attention of the Ministry to this point from time to time, for in their morally corrupting contacts with the Parliaments, on or other of them might suddenly be seized with sudden fits of constitutionalism.”

What is more, whilst one might suspect that these are deluded self-preenings, people at the time in Germany believed it too.  In 1900 the Protestant pastor and social reformer Friedrich Naumann declared that “all policy, foreign and internal, stems from the will and word of the Kaiser”, and in 1902 Wilhelm’s fierce critic, the publisher Maximilian Harden wrote that: “All the most important political decisions of the past twelve years have been taken by [the Kaiser]”. 

Between the Wars

Between the Wars it suited a Germany furious at what it called the Kriegsschuldlüge ('War Guilt lie') to lay on Wilhelm the responsibility for the First World War and its failure.  And in 1919 the Frankfurt-based neurologist Adolf Friedländer argued that understanding the Kaiser’s insanity was a “psychological and spiritual need” for “every thinking German” in order for the new Germany to “mentally overcome the Kaiser, the Hohenzollern”. 

After the Second World War

After the Second World War, people re-assessed what they had thought about the First World War – could it realistically all be blamed on one man? 

These were the years when historians such as the British historian AJP Taylor (1954) and the German historian Fritz Fischer (1961) were advancing the idea that there was an underlying current in 19th and 20th century German history which led it to try to dominate Europe.  At the same time most historians in the 1960s and 1970s tended to agree with German sociologist Max Weber (1908) that “there is far too much talk about the personality of Wilhelm II; the faulty political structure is the root of the evil”, and with Marxist 1930s historian Eckhart Kehr that the real influences on German politics were social and economic, and that the real power-brokers were the rich industrialists and rural Junkers (nobles) who lobbied the government to thwart democracy. 

For these ‘structuralist’ historians (such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and his ‘Bielefeld School’ of social historians) Wilhelm was a “feeble figure” and all-but-irrelevant. 

John Röhl

However, starting in 1979 with a conference he organised on the island of Corfu, John Röhl came to Wilhelm’s rescue!  His three-volume, 4,000-page study of Wilhelm’s Kaiserreich (1993-2008) posited a Kaiser who did not just interfere successfully in government decision-making, but usurped government decision-making through his ‘kingship mechanism’ (his power to appoint, promote and dismiss ministers), his Immediatsystem (which allowed petitioners to go direct to him rather than through ministers), and his Kommadogewalt (command of the military).  Röhl introduced the concept of ‘negative personal rule’ – that the government of Imperial Germany became a place where ministers and officials simply did not bother to propose policies which they knew he would not like. 

Röhl’s portrayal has been has not been wholly accepted:

• In 1980 two British historians, Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, suggested that there were forces ‘from below’ in German society which called the tune on government decision-making, and to which government had to respond. 

• Isabel Hull (1982) emphasised the importance of Wilhelm’s entourage in government decision-making. 

• In 1990, German historian Wolfgang Mommsen suggested that Wilhelm’s influence changed during his reign, from a “heyday of personal rule” (1893-97); to 1908-14, when he retreated into military affairs; and ending with the War years “during which Wilhelm’s personal influence was virtually eliminated”.  Mommsen also contended that powerful lobby groups such as the Prussian conservatives and the League of Industrialists had a significant say in government decision-making. 

• Christopher Clark (2012) argued that Wilhelm’s power was informal, not constitutional; that he did not always get his own way; and that, as time went on, his erratic behaviour caused influence to shift away from him towards his ministers and the Reichstag. 

Nevertheless, Röhl’s analysis was so huge, so well-researched, that – although it is probably now not possible to portray Wilhelm as an all-dominant, autocratic ruler – neither is it any longer possible to deny that his personal influence over Germany’s government was massive … and, as Isabel Hull concludes: “whether that then qualifies as ‘personal rule’ is of secondary importance”. 

3.  Is there any continuity with Hitler’s Germany (the Sonderweg debate)? 

After the Second World War, historians were forced to confront the question: ‘What the hell just happened in Germany?’  Many historians rejected the idea that this was all the work of one madman, and there grew up instead the idea of a Sonderweg – that Germany’s historical development had gone down a (catastrophic) ‘special route’ which had led it to Nazism and two world wars. 

How far in history did this ‘special route’ stretch back?  AJP Taylor thought to the revolutions of 1848.  The American historian William Shirer thought to the Protestant revolution of the 16th century. 

Many German historians never accepted the idea of a Sonderweg continuity at all – for them, Nazism was an aberration not a culmination.  And in 1980 Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn fairly much ended the Sonderweg debate by arguing that there is no ‘normal’ route of historical development, so how can there have been a ‘special route’ for Germany?  For them, it was simply bad history to try to shoehorn a multitude of different factors and millions of people over decades of time into a single "exaggerated linear continuity between the nineteenth century and the 1930s". 

Nevertheless, the debate did cause historians to look back to see if there WERE any continuities between Wilhelmine Germany and Germany’s future history:

• In 1960, the German historian Gerhard Ritter – although he disagreed with the idea of a Sonderweg – found “much darker shadows” than he had expected in Wilhelmine era. 

• Fischer (1961) argued that a nationalist expansionism embedded in Wilhelmine Germany had deliberately provoked the First World War. 

• Wehler and the structuralists emphasised the ongoing influence of a “premodern aristocratic elite” upon Germany’s development. 

• Other historians traced Nazi antisemitism back to a 19th century völkisch (ethnic nationalist) movement, and

• The German historian Michael Stürmer (1983) argued that Germany’s geographical position in the centre of Europe between a powerful West and a powerful Russia was a constant which provoked an assertive German foreign policy.