William II , German Wilhelm II , in full Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert , (born January 27, 1859, Potsdam , near Berlin [Germany]—died June 4, 1941, Doorn, Netherlands), German emperor (kaiser) and king of Prussia from 1888 to the end of World War I in 1918, known for his frequently militaristic manner as well as for his vacillating policies.

In 1881 William married Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, a plain, unimaginative woman with few intellectual interests and no talents, who bored him and encouraged his reactionary tendencies but all the same represented a point of stability in his life. During their marriage, Augusta gave birth to six sons and a daughter.

Difficult as William’s relations with his mother were, she left a deep and lasting mark on him. He was never able to shake off the respect instilled into him for liberal values and habits of life. To be the tough warrior-king did not come naturally to him, yet this was the role to which he felt he must live up, and the result was that he overdid it. Inclination and a sense of duty—inculcated by a Calvinist tutor—were alternating in him continually, each managing to frustrate the other. The tension between the two, superimposed on his physical disability, ultimately explains his taut, restless, and irresolute character.

William was the eldest child of Crown Prince Frederick (later Emperor Frederick III ) and of Victoria , the eldest child of Britain’s Queen Victoria . He was born with a damaged left arm. The limb never grew to full size and some historians have claimed this disability as a clue to understanding his behaviour. More influential, however, in influencing his behaviour was his parentage. His father was honourable, intelligent, and considerate but had neither the will nor the stamina needed to dominate. His father’s lack of stamina was not shared by his mother, who had acquired from her father, Albert , seriousness of purpose and from her mother emotion and obstinacy. Her intellect was hopelessly at the mercy of her feelings, and she took rapid likes and dislikes. She tried to force on her son the outlook of a 19th-century British Liberal and bring him up as an English gentleman. The result, however, was to make him sympathetic to those who were urging him to fulfill the ideal that the Prussian people had formed of a ruler—firm, brave, frugal , just and manly, self-sacrificing but also self-reliant.

Emperor of Germany

In 1888 William’s grandfather William I died at the age of 90. Liberals had long hoped, and conservatives feared, that when Frederick came to the throne, he would alter the constitution by making the chancellor responsible to the Reichstag. But by the time Frederick became emperor, he was dying of cancer. Thus, William, who showed little sympathy for his parents in their bitter crisis, found himself kaiser at the age of 29.

Coronation of William II, 1888. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Removal of Bismarck In March 1890 William drove Otto von Bismarck into resigning as chancellor. Bismarck had found brilliant answers to the problems facing him when he first took office but in doing so had given the Prussian upper classes a veto on political change and had made France Germany’s implacable enemy. At 75 years of age, he was unable to solve the social and political problems confronting Germany at the end of the century. William’s action would have been justifiable if he himself had been in possession of a solution. As it was, however, he dropped vague plans for helping the working classes as soon as he ran into court opposition, and he allowed Bismarck’s successors to decide against renewing his 1887 Reinsurance Treaty with Russia. Superficially, this decision again could be justified, but it opened the way for Russia in 1891 to make an alliance with France. For four years after Bismarck’s departure, Leo, Graf (count) von Caprivi, as chancellor, tried unsuccessfully to find a policy that would be acceptable both to the Reichstag (lower house of the parliament) and to the ruling classes. He was followed as chancellor by the aged Prince Chlodwig von Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, who fared no better. In 1897 William appointed the debonair Bernhard von Bülow as foreign secretary and in 1900 made him chancellor, intending that Bülow would persuade the Reichstag to accept the policies that the kaiser and the upper classes chose to adopt. This did little or nothing to bring about the political changes that Germany’s very rapid industrialization called for. Instead, Bülow was allowed to divert attention by an exciting foreign policy.