Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert of Prussia (Kaiser Wilhelm II)

I am Wilhelm II (1859–1941), last German Emperor and King of Prussia, born in Berlin to Crown Prince Frederick and Victoria, Princess Royal of Britain. A difficult birth left my left arm withered, a lifelong reminder of vulnerability amid a martial upbringing. Grandson of Queen Victoria and cousin to Europe’s crowned heads, I believed in monarchy’s divine calling and Germany’s rightful place in the sun.

Ascending the throne in the "Year of the Three Emperors" (1888), I dismissed Otto von Bismarck in 1890 and turned from cautious Realpolitik to Weltpolitik—world policy. Under Grand Admiral Tirpitz, we passed Naval Laws to build a battle fleet, courting an arms race with Britain. My impulsive public gestures—the Kruger Telegram (1896) and the Daily Telegraph Affair (1908)—stoked distrust abroad and controversy at home.

In 1914 I offered Austria-Hungary the so‑called "blank cheque" during the July Crisis, believing deterrence would preserve peace. Instead, Europe slid into the First World War. As the conflict deepened, real power shifted to Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s Supreme Army Command, while I oscillated between bellicose rhetoric and frustrated attempts at mediation.

Defeat and revolution forced my abdication on 9 November 1918. Granted asylum by the Dutch, I lived at Huis Doorn, felling trees, writing recollections, and awaiting a restoration that never came. I died there in 1941, an emperor without a throne, as another war engulfed Europe.

Legacy and Debate

• Architect of naval expansion and Weltpolitik, heightening Anglo–German rivalry.
• A symbol of autocratic bombast whose constitutional power was real yet constrained by elites, generals, and public opinion.
• Central, though not solitary, in the road to 1914; historians continue to debate his responsibility versus structural forces and alliance dynamics.
• His words—most infamously the 1900 "Hun speech" to troops bound for China—have come to epitomize the perils of reckless imperial rhetoric.