page_title: Wilhelm II, German Emperor
section_title: Personality
hierarchical_section_title: Wilhelm II, German Emperor / Personality
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Hamburg, Kaiser Wilhelm II. im Tierpark Hagenbeck 1909. Kaiser Wilhelm II. im Gespräch mit den Aethiopiern bei Carl Hagenbeck in Hamburg. 12183-09 [Äthiopier im Tierpark Hagenbeck] Abgebildete Personen: Wilhelm II.: Deutsches Reich, Kaiser, II., Deutschland Hagenbeck, Karl: Gründer des Tierparks in Stellingen bei Hamburg, Deutschland (GND 118700502)
context_page_description: Wilhelm II, anglicised as William II, was the last German Emperor and King of Prussia. His reign lasted from 15 June 1888 to 9 November 1918. Despite cementing Germany’s status as a global power by building a blue-water navy and promoting scientific innovation, his tactless public statements and reckless foreign policy antagonized the international community and ultimately plunged his country into the First World War. When Germany was defeated in November 1918, he was forced to abdicate, thereby bringing an end to the Hohenzollern dynasty’s three-hundred year rule.
  As the eldest grandchild of Queen Victoria, Wilhelm's first cousins included George V of the United Kingdom and many princesses who, along with Wilhelm's sister Sophia, became European consorts. For most of his life before becoming emperor, he was second in line to succeed his grandfather Wilhelm I on the German and Prussian thrones after his father, Frederick. His grandfather and father both died in 1888, the Year of Three Emperors, making Wilhelm emperor and king. He dismissed the country's longtime chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, in 1890.
context_section_description: Historians have frequently stressed the role of Wilhelm's personality in shaping his reign. Thus, Thomas Nipperdey concludes he was:
  gifted, with a quick understanding, sometimes brilliant, with a taste for the modern,—technology, industry, science—but at the same time superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through to the end, without any sense of sobriety, for balance and boundaries, or even for reality and real problems, uncontrollable and scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate for applause and success,—as Bismarck said early on in his life, he wanted every day to be his birthday—romantic, sentimental and theatrical, unsure and arrogant, with an immeasurably exaggerated self-confidence and desire to show off, a juvenile cadet, who never took the tone of the officers' mess out of his voice, and brashly wanted to play the part of the supreme warlord, full of panicky fear of a monotonous life without any diversions, and yet aimless, pathological in his hatred against his English mother. 
  Historian David Fromkin states that Wilhelm had a love–hate relationship with Britain. According to Fromkin
  "From the outset, the half-German side of him was at war with the half-English side. He was wildly jealous of the British, wanting to be British, wanting to be better at being British than the British were, while at the same time hating them and resenting them because he never could be fully accepted by them".
  Langer et al. (1968) emphasise the negative international consequences of Wilhelm's erratic personality:
  "He believed in force, and the 'survival of the fittest' in domestic as well as foreign politics ... William was not lacking in intelligence, but he did lack stability, disguising his deep insecurities by swagger and tough talk. He frequently fell into depressions and hysterics ... William's personal instability was reflected in vacillations of policy. His actions, at home as well as abroad, lacked guidance, and therefore often bewildered or infuriated public opinion. He was not so much concerned with gaining specific objectives, as had been the case with Bismarck, as with asserting his will. This trait in the ruler of the leading Continental power was one of the main causes of the uneasiness prevailing in Europe at the turn-of-the-century".
caption: Wilhelm talking with Ethiopians at the Tierpark Hagenbeck in Hamburg in 1909
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