When my son did history in his final year of high school, his major school project for the year was a paper on the origins of World War I, which he attributed to the German Kaiser. His teacher, reminding me again of why no one should stake their school career on subjects that are affected by the personal opinions of the marker, didn’t agree and gave him a relatively poor mark. Since university entrances in years of grade inflation are a precarious issue, it was always something that has remained a live issue with me, since I thought my son was actually right, and certainly right enough to have done better in a high school paper. Which brings me to this article by Joh Derbyshire on The Legacy of the Mad Kaiser.
According to Derbyshire, the most villainous person of the twentieth century was Lenin, a most worthy choice. But who then was second?
As a candidate for runner-up in the 20th-century villain pageant, I would nominate Kaiser Wilhelm II, the monarch of Germany from 1888 to 1918. This comes from reading John Röhl’s concise biography of the Kaiser, published this summer.
There is not much in the way of evidence in the article, so I may have to get the book, but there is this:
There is ample documentation in Röhl’s book of the Kaiser’s eagerness for war, for victory over France and Russia. He was sure that Britain, the third member of the Triple Entente, would not intervene. His ambassadors in London, and British government ministers, and his royal British relatives, kept trying to set him straight; but what was their knowledge of Britain compared with his?
And, of course, it was his government that sent Lenin to Moscow in a sealed train in 1917. We are all overrun by history. Sweet and seemly it is to live in uninteresting times.
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