“The Kaiser and the Jews: Wilhelm II and the Origins of ‘Eliminatory’ Antisemitism”

What are the roots of National Socialism, and how far back into German history must we trace the origins of the Holocaust? At what point in time, and why, did antisemitism in Germany mutate from the mindless prejudice also to be found elsewhere in 19th century Europe to that “eliminatory” antisemitism (Daniel Goldhagen) that was to become state-organised genocide in the Third Reich? The Second Reich (1871-1918) of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II represented the most determined effort in Europe to uphold the “feudal” principles of personal monarchy by divine right, a military code of honour and a social hierarchy dominated by the aristocracy, and to rescue these outdated institutions and values into a world increasingly characterised by trade and industry, burgeoning cities and mass mobility, democracy and socialism, and freedom of expression in the press and in the arts. Nowhere was the clash between ancient and modern attitudes and beliefs more intense than in Imperial Germany.

Kaiser Wilhelm II’s life (1859-1941) spanned the entire history of the first German nation-state from Bismarck to Hitler. He was certainly not representative of German society as a whole, but with his insistence on ruling personally in the manner of his 18th century Prussian ancestors the Sergeant King and Frederick the Great, with his overweening militarism and racial nationalism, his fundamentalist Lutheranism and his contempt for parliamentary politics in all its forms, he personified those “feudal” values that found themselves increasingly threatened by the rising tide of democracy as the 20th century dawned. By tracing Wilhelm’s changing attitudes to his Jewish subjects – or rather to what he imagined them to be – from his childhood through the great crises of his reign to the First World War and defeat and bitter exile, the lecture will pinpoint the years 1917/18 as the moment at which “eliminatory” anti-Semitism, always latent, raised its ugly head – and not just in the Kaiser’s mind.

John Röhl taught modern European, and especially German, history at the University of Sussex from 1964 until his retirement in 1991. He is the author of numerous books on Imperial Germany including The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (1994) which won the Wolfson History Prize and has been translated into Chinese. His three-volume biography of Wilhelm II, published both in Germany and in the UK, is widely accepted as being the standard work on the last Kaiser and his reign.