Speaker 1: What's doing an episode my the podcast that I do.
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans very badly introducing another podcast of Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards, the show where we talk about the worst
Speaker 1: people in all of history, and here to help me
Speaker 1: today is one of the best people in all of history.
Speaker 1: Jamie Lofta. How you doing, Jamie. I'm good. I'm I'm
Speaker 1: I'm having a lovely day. I'm too cold, bruise deep. Oh,
Speaker 1: too cold, bruise deep. Are you feeling optimistic and and
Speaker 1: and positive about the world. I'm feeling like who we
Speaker 1: talk about today is going to might end up actually
Speaker 1: being a pretty good guy. That's a good guy. That's
Speaker 1: how I go into every Bastard's episode. Now, I'm just like,
Speaker 1: you know what, this guy's gonna end up being pretty nice.
Speaker 1: I think I might change my opinion on this fellow.
Speaker 1: I think that I'm going to really have some arguments
Speaker 1: in his name. You you might have a couple because
Speaker 1: the guy we're talking about today is Kaiser motherfucking wilhelm Um. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: your reaction was pretty intense when I told you that
Speaker 1: right before the episode. I was, well, I'm never allowed
Speaker 1: to know in advance, and then I just and then
Speaker 1: I sit down and it's what fresh hell in terms
Speaker 1: of in terms of person, in terms of facial hair
Speaker 1: and turns just in every this is a brutal one
Speaker 1: for me, strictly on a facial hair level. You're not
Speaker 1: a fan of his walrist mustache. Listen. I respect someone
Speaker 1: who makes a choice. Right, he made a choice. You
Speaker 1: had to give him that. I will hand it to him.
Speaker 1: Much like Robert Pattinson in the Lighthouse, he is making
Speaker 1: a choice. Choices don't always work out. Uh, this is
Speaker 1: actually I think this is one of the first subjects
Speaker 1: that I actually like. No affair amount about I took a.
Speaker 1: I took A in high school for some reason. My
Speaker 1: last two years of high school I only learned about
Speaker 1: World War One. That's great. It was love World War One.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm as I stand and we stand, we
Speaker 1: have no Oh the psalm so good. The trench. I
Speaker 1: love that we acted out the assassination of Archduke friends Ferdinand.
Speaker 1: It was a black one of my favorite assassinations. Of
Speaker 1: the assassinations. The fashion, the fashion, the fashion, the trench
Speaker 1: helmets that didn't stop bullets off. You know what, you
Speaker 1: love it. It's also good and underrated World War I
Speaker 1: am oh, yeah, yeah, no, way better than the sequel.
Speaker 1: In my opinion, I totally agree sequel is overhyped. We
Speaker 1: get it, you know. I mean, I'll pick Terminator two
Speaker 1: of a Terminator one. I'll pick Aliens over alien but
Speaker 1: I'm gonna pick World War one over World War two
Speaker 1: every day of the We're gonna pick the Cheetah Girls
Speaker 1: two over Cheetah Girls one. And that's a controversial opinion
Speaker 1: for those I know you don't Rob, I'm still I
Speaker 1: had to tell you who Ariana Grande was last year,
Speaker 1: which is something that I just I still it still
Speaker 1: shakes me to my marrow that that happened. Well, girls
Speaker 1: are wait, no, we can't swark with the show until
Speaker 1: you know who the Cheat Girls are. Who you don't
Speaker 1: know who the cheet Girls are? Of course I don't
Speaker 1: I know, but I'm just always waiting for girls. They
Speaker 1: wish they do, wish they were like the Spice Girls.
Speaker 1: But they're a band that was started by well some
Speaker 1: great uh novellas for young girls. But it's it's like
Speaker 1: Raven Simone. Two of the girls, right, she's the alpha,
Speaker 1: and then two girls from three l W which you
Speaker 1: also don't know what that is. And then a fourth
Speaker 1: girl who has dropped off the face of the planet.
Speaker 1: We don't know what happened to her. The point is
Speaker 1: it was good. The singles were fine, and they wore
Speaker 1: track suits. Oh, I do love track suits. I am
Speaker 1: a big track suit fan. I love people in matching
Speaker 1: track suits. Was they wore like complimentary past ll track
Speaker 1: seas and then the second one they go to Barcelona. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think when uh, when it comes to like you're
Speaker 1: talking about the fashion in World War One and how
Speaker 1: how good it was. I hope when we have our
Speaker 1: next World War that it's basically the same as World
Speaker 1: War One, but we're all wearing track suits like that.
Speaker 1: That is my dream. Imagine the World War three will
Speaker 1: be waged in juicy guture head to to like form
Speaker 1: fitting track suits, comfortable waste bands. By god. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't want those royal ten in bombs tracks. I want
Speaker 1: I want like goddamn Belton like the yeah, the ones
Speaker 1: that have like rhinestones on them, and I'll tell you'll
Speaker 1: know who's on what side. Yeah, yeah, but the color
Speaker 1: of the rhinestones. Yeah, it will be a great war. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that this is actually going to be the
Speaker 1: best World war yet. I feel like we have a
Speaker 1: real chance to make it so. But before we start,
Speaker 1: before we start another world war, we should learn about
Speaker 1: one of the guys who was most behind the First
Speaker 1: World War. Uh Now. One I think it's interesting about
Speaker 1: the Kaiser is that, like most of the people we
Speaker 1: talked about on the show make a decision at a
Speaker 1: certain point to be shitty people who do like horrible, exploitative,
Speaker 1: violent things to other people. Um like, they make a
Speaker 1: choice to be bastards at some point. But there's also
Speaker 1: another less common category of bastards who are just sort
Speaker 1: of born into it. They have bastardy, you know, thrust
Speaker 1: upon them by the circumstances of their family and the
Speaker 1: time they live in, which doesn't like make them mitigate
Speaker 1: the evils they perpetrated or remove their agency entirely, but
Speaker 1: I think it makes them more sympathetic figures than guys
Speaker 1: like Hitler or Saddam who kind of like dove head
Speaker 1: first into that. And Kaiser Wilhelm is like, once you
Speaker 1: understand his whole backstory, you're kind of like, yeah, you
Speaker 1: were a piece of ship, but like, how could this
Speaker 1: story have ended? Well, how could you. Yeah, how could
Speaker 1: you have learned? Who would you have learned how to
Speaker 1: be a good person from? Exactly? Like? How was this
Speaker 1: not gonna suck? Um? And that's the story of Eiser Wilhelm.
Speaker 1: That's a good that will be the name of the biopic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how could this have not sucked? Yeah? Okay, cool? Yeah.
Speaker 1: Kaiser Wilhelm was born of the Hahensallern dynasty, a family
Speaker 1: of German nobles whose history stretches back nearly a thousand years.
Speaker 1: To understand where he comes from, we have to start
Speaker 1: this episode but talking about his father's birth on October
Speaker 1: thirty one. Now this is long before Germany was a thing.
Speaker 1: Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia was born in Potsdamp. His
Speaker 1: father was also named Wilhelm. All of the men in
Speaker 1: this story are named fucking Friedrich Wilhelm. Um. And I
Speaker 1: don't understand why the numbering works the way it does.
Speaker 1: I don't understand any of this. But they're all named
Speaker 1: Friedrich Wilhelm. Is the numbering out of order? It's it's weird.
Speaker 1: I think it's because of like their middle names and
Speaker 1: ship because they have a bunch of names other than
Speaker 1: Friedrich Wilhelm. But they're they're all known as Friedrich Wilhelm. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's very dumb. I don't like when rich
Speaker 1: people try to bamboozle me. Yeah, they have to have
Speaker 1: the same name. God damn it. Yeah, I would love
Speaker 1: it if the reasoning for that was just that the
Speaker 1: common people like couldn't be trusted to learn a new
Speaker 1: king's name. But I know it's something dumber and more
Speaker 1: arrogant than that. It's still it's still like I don't know, like,
Speaker 1: why are there five hundred Hollywood agents named Scott and
Speaker 1: that are all the same man? You know, it's that's
Speaker 1: that's nominative determinism. That's because if you're born Scott, you
Speaker 1: get fast tracked into c A A. You got it.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of you know, the Scots and the Mics,
Speaker 1: and you know, we love them, but do we can
Speaker 1: we tell them apart? No? Now, uh so Prince Friedrich Wilhelm,
Speaker 1: who is the dad of the Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, will
Speaker 1: be talking about this episode. Uh entered the world second
Speaker 1: in line to the throne of Prussia after his brother,
Speaker 1: the Crown Prince, who was also named Friedrich Wilhelm. Um
Speaker 1: His parents had a typically loveless royal marriage. His father
Speaker 1: was in love with Princess Elise reads a Will of Poland,
Speaker 1: but she wasn't noble enough for a hohens All earned
Speaker 1: to marry, so he had to marry one of his relatives, Augusta,
Speaker 1: while vowing that he would never give his heart to her.
Speaker 1: So this is how the relationship that leads to Kaiser
Speaker 1: Wilhelm starts. Now, as you might expect, familial compromises like
Speaker 1: this did not make for the happiest of home lives. Uh.
Speaker 1: In June forty King Friedrich Wilhelm the third died after
Speaker 1: forty three years of ruling Prussia. His oldest son succeeded him,
Speaker 1: and Wilhelm became the Prince of Prussia. So Kaiser Wilhelm's
Speaker 1: dad is now the crown Prince of Prussia. Okay, so
Speaker 1: will the previous Wilhelm? He does? Dad diesel right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he sure does. He sure does. His dad dies and
Speaker 1: his brother who was the same name as him, and
Speaker 1: his dad becomes the king and he is now the
Speaker 1: crown Prince. How does that work? When his dinner time?
Speaker 1: You just shall one. I don't know, I don't know
Speaker 1: how they told each other a part it's it's it
Speaker 1: sucks so much like writing this part sucks because it's
Speaker 1: just incredibly confusing, Like reading about royal I don't understand
Speaker 1: people who like royal families because it makes me just
Speaker 1: want to start punching and never stopped. Yeah. I hope
Speaker 1: that there were some really disturbing nicknames in the mix.
Speaker 1: It seems like the only way that this would work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I I don't know. Um. So, when he was eighteen
Speaker 1: of a very right wing general named Leopold von Gerlach
Speaker 1: told Kaiser Wilhelm's dad that he envied the prince's youth
Speaker 1: for he would no doubt survive the end of this
Speaker 1: absurd constitutionalism. Um. Because there were a lot of democratic
Speaker 1: movements going through the German states at this point, um,
Speaker 1: including Prussia, which is when night they established the Reichstag
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. So, like people are starting to
Speaker 1: get a voice in this period. Monarchs, you know, when
Speaker 1: we talk about the Kaisers, we're not talking about absolute monarchs.
Speaker 1: They have more power than obviously the British royal family,
Speaker 1: but they're not like the czar, like they don't need
Speaker 1: to just make yah. Yeah. Yeah, So Prince Friedrich. The
Speaker 1: Kaiser's dad, was actually a fan of the growing democratic
Speaker 1: movements in Germany. He was a live broll. He was
Speaker 1: a very progressive guy. He believed that the people deserved
Speaker 1: a constitution that would guarantee their rights and protect them
Speaker 1: from like nobles just wanting to do whatever. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: Kaiser's dad's actually a pretty chill dude. He's not like
Speaker 1: the Kaisers or the Prince's prince. He's yeah, he's the
Speaker 1: crown Prince at this point, which is like the next
Speaker 1: in line for the throne. There's a funkload of princes.
Speaker 1: The crown Prince is the one who's going to be
Speaker 1: the king next. Yeah. That's the way it works all
Speaker 1: over in all the different royal families. Right. So the
Speaker 1: Kaiser's dad again, who's also Prince Wilhelm, spent a shipload
Speaker 1: of his youth in England due to a friendship with
Speaker 1: the British royal family that was orchestrated in part by
Speaker 1: our old pal, King Leopold of Belgium. This is actually
Speaker 1: one of the nice things Leopold did because the goal
Speaker 1: of it was basically, I have all these if these
Speaker 1: royal families start fucking and and marrying a bunch, then
Speaker 1: they clearly will never fight in a war. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: what a problem solving. They're like, well, what if this
Speaker 1: whole family fucked each other? That would really solve politics.
Speaker 1: And he was ready for a while there, for a
Speaker 1: while there, for a while there, if he if he'd
Speaker 1: been to the American South, he would have known that
Speaker 1: having a family that fox each other does not stop
Speaker 1: them from shooting at each other. But alas I mean,
Speaker 1: the American South once again coming out on top their
Speaker 1: way ahead of their time in terms of fucking and
Speaker 1: also killing their family. Yeah. Yeah. Now, in eighteen fifty five,
Speaker 1: Prince Wilhelm was invited to Britain without his parents to
Speaker 1: stay with Queen Victoria and her family and proposed to
Speaker 1: the Princess, who was also named Victoria because the British
Speaker 1: royal families justice insufferable with the German um yeah. Now.
Speaker 1: Happily enough, it turns out that the Kaiser's dad and
Speaker 1: his mom, Princess Victoria, were actually a very rare love match, um,
Speaker 1: which doesn't happen often in royal marriages. Um. And they
Speaker 1: weren't closely related, which is also great. So by the
Speaker 1: summer of eighteen fifty eight Princess Victoria, it was pregnant
Speaker 1: and expecting. This was not treated with joy by Queen Victoria.
Speaker 1: She considered this horrid news which would all end in
Speaker 1: nothing because the princess got sick almost immediately and stayed
Speaker 1: ill throughout much of the pregnancy. Queen Victoria was not
Speaker 1: an optimist. Yeah. Um, the royal doctors assured everyone that
Speaker 1: things would be fine, but the princess is midwife, Miss
Speaker 1: Innocent knew what a single look that the pregnancy would
Speaker 1: not end well. Miss Innocent, Yeah, named after Pope Innocent.
Speaker 1: I think, oh, that's what I feel like. I had
Speaker 1: a shirt this so that in junior high. Different meaning
Speaker 1: I had Miss Innocent, Miss Independent after the Kelly Clarkson.
Speaker 1: That was that's another pope. Yeah, Angel, that yet another pope.
Speaker 1: A lot of popes that you had shared space. He
Speaker 1: was the He was of the popes, one of the top,
Speaker 1: I mean, pretty close to being a complete angel. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now we don't know precisely what went wrong with Kaiser
Speaker 1: Wilhelm's birth, but it is certain that the doctors who
Speaker 1: managed the birth fucked up in some way. Um. Some
Speaker 1: of this is due to the fact that the infant
Speaker 1: Kaiser was a breach birth. At that time in Central Europe,
Speaker 1: about nine percent of babies born in breach were stillborn,
Speaker 1: so almost all of the babies born this way died.
Speaker 1: But obviously the Kaiser had the very best doctors. I mean,
Speaker 1: you might argue that his doctors did a great job
Speaker 1: of bringing him through alive, but known at the time
Speaker 1: said so. The princess would later write of the bungling
Speaker 1: way she was treated, And it seems like what happened
Speaker 1: is while they were pulling him out of the birth canal,
Speaker 1: they basically ripped his left arm off of his body
Speaker 1: and fucked it like like they didn't separate, but like
Speaker 1: ripped the muscles and ship. So he has his arm
Speaker 1: is fucked up from the jump. Um. Now, the princess
Speaker 1: was confined to bed rest after the birth for a month,
Speaker 1: but both she and the child survived, albeit not without
Speaker 1: permanent damage. When the birth was announced to the people
Speaker 1: of Prussia by a field marshal, the baby prince was
Speaker 1: described as as sturdy, a little recruit as a heart
Speaker 1: could wish to see, But the obstetrician told a different story.
Speaker 1: The infant was seemingly dead to a high degree. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's described. It is absolutely savage take on that infant.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, really roasting the baby Kaiser. His survival was
Speaker 1: considered close to miraculous. And I'm gonna quote next from
Speaker 1: the book kaiser Villehelm, the Second Germany's Last Emperor by
Speaker 1: John Vanderkist. Three or four days after the birth, Miss
Speaker 1: Innocent drew Dr Martin's attention to the baby's left arm
Speaker 1: hanging lifelessly from the shoulder socket. The father was told
Speaker 1: at once. When he asked the German doctors, they reassured
Speaker 1: him that the damage was only temporary paralysis, which would
Speaker 1: improve with a little gentle massage at first, followed by
Speaker 1: exercises at a later stage. This would prove to be
Speaker 1: optimistic and untrue. Even as an adult, William's left arm
Speaker 1: was six inches shorter than the right. He reminds me
Speaker 1: of Nemo, who Robert from Find the Neim the one
Speaker 1: that gets found. Oh yeah, he is, he is, And
Speaker 1: like Nemo, he grows up to spark a war that
Speaker 1: kills seventeen million people. That is what Anaxar hasn't gotten
Speaker 1: to that that movie yet, But that's how the story goes. Well,
Speaker 1: they're all about revisionist history over there. It's a disaster. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Nemo did become yeah, like a brutal general. He's he's
Speaker 1: actually people blame global warming for the whole like coral
Speaker 1: Reef dying off, but that's simply not the case. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's and also like the Kaiser super anti Semitic didn't
Speaker 1: come up in the movie, but really really really far
Speaker 1: off horrible if you get the feeling that they're just
Speaker 1: cutting away just before something terrible happens. In every scene
Speaker 1: in that movie, he has a copy of the Protocols
Speaker 1: of the Elders of Zion tucked beneath his good finn.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, you know again. I love fun fat,
Speaker 1: I love movie trivia. Uh so. Um, the young Keyser's
Speaker 1: hand looked normal when he grew up, but his the
Speaker 1: actual arm in hand itself, were too weak to hold
Speaker 1: anything much heavier than a piece of paper. Um. He
Speaker 1: spent his life hiding it out. Yeah, it's that's fucking hard. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you look at pictures of him, he's always hiding
Speaker 1: his left arm out of sight in a coat pocket
Speaker 1: or like like kind of up to his side with
Speaker 1: like a glove on. And he had gloves that would help,
Speaker 1: like extend the length of his hand a little bit
Speaker 1: to make it look more normal. I've decided to forgive him.
Speaker 1: Now we're cool. You're you're going to wind up feeling
Speaker 1: very sympathetic throughout a significant chunk of this until we
Speaker 1: get to the parts of it where he's a giant
Speaker 1: piece of shit. Um. Yeah, now. As vander kiss book notes,
Speaker 1: hiding this deformed arm became a guiding motivation for the
Speaker 1: young prince throughout his life. Few photographs showed his left
Speaker 1: arm clearly, let alone the hand. From an early age,
Speaker 1: the art of concealing it from the camera lens became
Speaker 1: second nature to him. It meals he could not manage
Speaker 1: an ordinary knife and fork, but his body guard always
Speaker 1: carried a special combined one while the person sitting next
Speaker 1: to him discreetly cut up his food as if to compensate.
Speaker 1: His right hand had an iron grip, something he would
Speaker 1: often exploit as an adult one, greeting people for the
Speaker 1: first time with a vice like handshake, sadistically turning the
Speaker 1: rings on his fingers inward first, so as to add
Speaker 1: to the other person's discomfort. If these men or women
Speaker 1: were English, he laughed heartily at their winces as he
Speaker 1: made jibes about the mailed fist. Okay, okay, he grows
Speaker 1: up with a bit of a thing he's getting. I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess you have to. It begs the question like,
Speaker 1: if I had power influence as a twelve year old
Speaker 1: with a back brace, would I have oppressed other people?
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yes, I feel like you probably any
Speaker 1: any furious twelve year old that feels out of place
Speaker 1: if they had the It just no twelve year old
Speaker 1: have the ability to He's the rare one. Yeah. If
Speaker 1: I had absolute power at the age of twelve, when
Speaker 1: I was like, uh, like an insecure, fat kid who
Speaker 1: didn't know how to be social, I would have killed millions, millions?
Speaker 1: What what wouldn't I? I know, like I was a
Speaker 1: gigantic walking rectangle for most of my formative years. What
Speaker 1: if I what if someone could have suffered for that? Yeah? Exactly?
Speaker 1: Yea now, um. The Kaiser's hand was not the only
Speaker 1: part of him injured by the circumstances of his birth.
Speaker 1: His neck was also damaged and his head tilted to
Speaker 1: the left his entire life. His left ear was likewise unformed,
Speaker 1: and he was partly deaf and had problems with balance.
Speaker 1: As a result of this, his entire life, he suffered
Speaker 1: from constant ear infections and required a series of surgeries
Speaker 1: which left him eventually completely deaf in his left ear
Speaker 1: and frequently subjected him to intense pain that probably contributed
Speaker 1: to his infamous temper tantrums. There's also a chance that
Speaker 1: he was born profoundly mentally ill, with a specific kind
Speaker 1: of mental illness that is common among royal families as
Speaker 1: a result of in Brady. There's no proof of this,
Speaker 1: um and I kind of think that the other stuff
Speaker 1: explains his temper tantrums and ship more than than porphyria.
Speaker 1: I think it was the name of the illness, but
Speaker 1: it's possibly he had like a brain thing going on too,
Speaker 1: got it now? In short, the Prince who would one
Speaker 1: day become the Kaiser came into this world with very
Speaker 1: serious difficulties to overcome, even for a child born as
Speaker 1: wealthy as a child could possibly be born. His father,
Speaker 1: Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, was a decent guy and handled this
Speaker 1: with love and support, but his grandfather, who was the Kaiser,
Speaker 1: was said to have noted that he wasn't sure if
Speaker 1: he should even congratulate his son on the birth of
Speaker 1: a defective prince. Uh and like one of the German
Speaker 1: generals who's around when the Kaiser is like a little
Speaker 1: kid is like no one with a fucked up arm
Speaker 1: should ever become the Kaiser, Like you shouldn't even be alive.
Speaker 1: So like this is not his parents are really good
Speaker 1: and really loving, but like he also grows up in
Speaker 1: this very unforgiving culture that cannot tolerate physical imperfection, right,
Speaker 1: I mean and and being I feel like especially for
Speaker 1: like young god, just an emasculated twelve year old. Is
Speaker 1: there anything with more more potential for danger? Yeah? No
Speaker 1: not not really no. So the princess was a devoted
Speaker 1: and loving mother. In a letter to his grandmother, Queen Victoria,
Speaker 1: the kid who would become Kaiservillehelm was Queen Victoria's first grandchild,
Speaker 1: um So. In a letter to his grandmother, his mother wrote,
Speaker 1: your grandson is exceedingly lively, and when awake, will not
Speaker 1: be satisfied unless kept dancing about continually. He scratches his
Speaker 1: face and tears his caps and makes every sort of
Speaker 1: extraordinary little noise. I am so thankful, so happy. He
Speaker 1: is a boy I longed for one more than I
Speaker 1: can describe. My whole heart was set up on a boy,
Speaker 1: and therefore I did not expect one. So kid is
Speaker 1: very deeply loved and and has you know, kind of
Speaker 1: your best case scenario for parents in this period of time.
Speaker 1: Sure he was a preached birth, but at least he
Speaker 1: wasn't a girl child. We would have hated that. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I think, um, I don't get that feeling
Speaker 1: from her. I get the feeling more that she just,
Speaker 1: like number one, like one of your jobs as a
Speaker 1: princess in this period is to like give birth to
Speaker 1: an air like they had daughters, and she treated the
Speaker 1: daughter as well like they like they weren't like didn't
Speaker 1: hate their daughters. Yeah. Well, there's there's just a lot
Speaker 1: of ship built up around having a son to continue
Speaker 1: the line, and the fact that her first child was
Speaker 1: a son like that takes a lot of the pressure.
Speaker 1: That's good for her because then people stop giving her
Speaker 1: ship exactly. I think that's a big part of why
Speaker 1: she feels that way. It's also you know, like even today,
Speaker 1: like my friends who get married have expressed preferences like, oh,
Speaker 1: I hope it's a boy, I hope it's a girl.
Speaker 1: For whatever whateverything they want to do with the kid. Um, Like,
Speaker 1: I don't get the feeling that like she was being
Speaker 1: shitty by saying that what you do when you hear
Speaker 1: about these are well, no, yeah, it's weird like these are.
Speaker 1: Their first kid was a girl, and like his bizarre
Speaker 1: like his His wife wrote to him that like, um,
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry basically that I wasn't able to provide
Speaker 1: a son, and he was like, no, no, it's fine.
Speaker 1: We have a son. The son belongs to Russia. This daughter,
Speaker 1: you know, is ours, So we get to really just
Speaker 1: like oil her and enjoy having a child and we'll
Speaker 1: we'll have the sun later. So I don't you get
Speaker 1: a mix of reactions from the royal fairs as far
Speaker 1: as yeahs, as far as that situation goes, I guess
Speaker 1: that's one of the better ways it could shake. All right.
Speaker 1: So we know a lot about the life in particularly
Speaker 1: the childhood of the Kaiser, more than we know about
Speaker 1: the life and childhood of literally anyone else I've ever
Speaker 1: talked about on this show. Um, because he was born
Speaker 1: to be king. So every scrap of correspondence from his
Speaker 1: parents and his teachers and his relatives about him and
Speaker 1: from himself has been saved and is in archives. Um.
Speaker 1: So it's fair to say there's more detail on the
Speaker 1: early life of this guy than any other person I've
Speaker 1: covered on the show. Um, which is probably why I'm
Speaker 1: more sympathetic about this guy, because when you have that
Speaker 1: much detail to draw on, like, it's hard not to
Speaker 1: feel some sympathy for Again, when you know that much
Speaker 1: about kids, miserable childhood one way, that's tough. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: why they made finding names with a monster. They're like, well,
Speaker 1: he lost his mother young, he got he got kidnapped
Speaker 1: by the ocean, and he had a he had a
Speaker 1: difficult fin so we should forgive him for his sins. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for his rabid anti Semitism. I mean, I can't say
Speaker 1: it enough. It's really impossible to override the six So
Speaker 1: Prince Wilhelm was baptized on March five, eighteen fifty nine.
Speaker 1: Queen Victoria was unable to attend and was represented by
Speaker 1: Lord Ragland, the British commander during the Crimean War and
Speaker 1: one of the guys in charge of the Light Brigade.
Speaker 1: He's that dude, So that's who like represents his grandmama
Speaker 1: at the at the at the baptism. Well that's nice. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In general, the future Kaiser had a very British upbringing.
Speaker 1: His nurse Mrs Hobbs was English. His chief doctor, Sir
Speaker 1: Benjamin Brody, was also British. The most British has names
Speaker 1: I've ever heard. Very Yeah, this kid is half British.
Speaker 1: You have to remember that because like his mom is
Speaker 1: an English princess, his grandmother is the fucking literal Queen Victoria,
Speaker 1: and he has he's raised but like he grew up without.
Speaker 1: He spoke English perfectly with almost no accent um. Like,
Speaker 1: you can listen to his speeches by this guy in
Speaker 1: English and it you can barely notice the accent. So
Speaker 1: that's yeah. It's impossible to overstate how intermarried and intermingled.
Speaker 1: The royal families that helped launch World War One were
Speaker 1: Prince Wilhelm, the guy who became the Kaiser, was also
Speaker 1: the Prince of Orange and in line for the throne
Speaker 1: of England. His current like great grandson, who's alive today,
Speaker 1: is a hundred and seventieth in line for the British throne.
Speaker 1: Um Over in Russia, the czar's wife was a German
Speaker 1: princess and the Czar and the Kaiser were cousins. All
Speaker 1: of the monarchs in charge of the primary belligerence in
Speaker 1: World War One shared grandparents and aunts and where cousins
Speaker 1: and had grown up together. Those are my favorite letters
Speaker 1: I wish I haven't, like it's been like almost ten
Speaker 1: years now, but like the reading through the letters between
Speaker 1: cousins where they're like, are we going to start a war?
Speaker 1: Like are we gonna? Are we going to get all
Speaker 1: these people killed? It's so funny. It's so bizarre, being
Speaker 1: like what if I could just write my cousin Tammy
Speaker 1: and be like, so, like how attached are we to people?
Speaker 1: What do we like four to six million of our
Speaker 1: young men? Like can we just do you feel able
Speaker 1: to just it's so bizarre knowing that their cousins that like,
Speaker 1: for the most part, know each other, Like it's just
Speaker 1: very weird. Yeah, and and love each other. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: We're like there's those like the letters between Wilhelm and
Speaker 1: this the bizarre. They're so bizarre. It's just yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what's not bizarre, Jamie? What Robert? The products
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Speaker 1: Now let's get back to talking about Prince Wilhelm's miss
Speaker 1: shapen arm. Um a little fin it won't him? Right? Yeah?
Speaker 1: His damaged arm was a matter of serious concern for
Speaker 1: the German royal family or Prussian at this point royal family.
Speaker 1: His nurse rubbed massage oil on it daily to try
Speaker 1: and stimulate growth. Wilhelm's doctors ordered that his arm be
Speaker 1: tied to the side of his leg for an hour
Speaker 1: a day in order to try to force it to
Speaker 1: grow normally. Oh my god, he is a back brace
Speaker 1: for his arm. Oh, we were getting to the back brace. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: the infant prince had almost no feeling in the limb
Speaker 1: and barely noticed most of this. Uh. While most of
Speaker 1: his treatments were ineffective but benign, some were really brutal.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote now from the book kaiserville Helm
Speaker 1: the Second, A concise life by John Roll. When the
Speaker 1: infant was six months old, Professor Bernhard von Langenbeck of
Speaker 1: the Charite hospital in Berlin prescribed animal baths twice a
Speaker 1: week will help. His left arm was inserted into the
Speaker 1: body of a freshly slaughtered hair for half an hour
Speaker 1: and the hope that the wild animals warmth and vigor
Speaker 1: would be transferred to the arm. No, this stuck him
Speaker 1: arm deep in a dead animal. No, you're just like
Speaker 1: he's how is how would this grow up to be
Speaker 1: a good person? This is like biblical curses. They're flusting
Speaker 1: upon a baby. Shove a fresh bloody corpse on the
Speaker 1: literal infant child's arm for an hour. How does that?
Speaker 1: There's someone in the room like, we've got to make
Speaker 1: sure that this is remembered, because what if it works
Speaker 1: ever sence and it's never gone wrong? Amazing God, that's
Speaker 1: again brutal. He's the Prince of Prussia, so this is
Speaker 1: like the best doctor you can get at the time
Speaker 1: in the country. Germany at this point is renowned as
Speaker 1: having some of the best doctors on the world. That's
Speaker 1: really like the height of medical science. What has happened
Speaker 1: that everyone else? I honestly, I would rather die at
Speaker 1: four than have that be my medical regimen. I would
Speaker 1: brother have died years ago. It's terrible. Now, perhaps the
Speaker 1: most damaging treatment came at the direct orders of Queen Victoria.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote now from John Vanderkist's biography, Queen
Speaker 1: Victoria's a piece of ship, by the way, just as
Speaker 1: it heads up. I did the I went to I
Speaker 1: went to England over the summer brag and we did
Speaker 1: the Buckingham Palace tour um because I just didn't I
Speaker 1: just wanted to see what it was like. And the oh,
Speaker 1: the revisionism on like there's there's no mention of Wilhelm,
Speaker 1: there's no mention of you know, it's just too messy.
Speaker 1: They're like, she was really nice. She hated when her
Speaker 1: husband died. Thanks for the forty dollars. Well, here's a
Speaker 1: little bit more about Queen Victoria. Hit it the princess.
Speaker 1: We're talking about kaiservillehelms mom it on babies, and within
Speaker 1: a few days of his birth she had started breastfeeding him,
Speaker 1: to the revulsion of her mother in law. Knowing Queen
Speaker 1: Victoria's views on the subject were one with hers, she
Speaker 1: the mother in law, wrote to the Queen asking for
Speaker 1: her approval in putting it into this odious habit, much
Speaker 1: to the young mother's disappointment, her baby was promptly handed
Speaker 1: over to a wet nurse whose milk irritated his bowels
Speaker 1: and caused regular stomach upsets. So the Queen of Prussia
Speaker 1: and Queen Victoria both hate breastfeeding because they think it's
Speaker 1: a gross, commoner thing to do, and so they make
Speaker 1: somebody whose milk makes Kaiser Wilhelm sick breastfeed the baby.
Speaker 1: You know what, my mom did the same thing, except
Speaker 1: with formula. So you know, my mom was just like, um,
Speaker 1: you stay away from me. Here's some mestly, here's some
Speaker 1: nestly chemicals. Good luck with your life now. Years later,
Speaker 1: his grandmother, the Empress Augusta, his other grandmother, would la
Speaker 1: too Kaiser Wilhelm and tell him that his mother had
Speaker 1: refused to breastfeed him because she found his arm disgusting.
Speaker 1: Oh but Helm was nice, that mom was She's just
Speaker 1: a bitch who hates his mom. And it's like he like,
Speaker 1: I said, how does this kid not grow up fucked up?
Speaker 1: Like like I don't like women on. I don't like
Speaker 1: woman on woman conflict. It's not fair. We don't need it.
Speaker 1: It makes me upset. Although my grandma did that though
Speaker 1: to my mom. Yeah, it's it's less damaging when the
Speaker 1: babies that are getting like manipulated by the funked up
Speaker 1: people aren't growing up to be the emperors of Germany. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's not. I mean just regular people are the best.
Speaker 1: Yea damage as it is. Yeah, don't give anyone any power.
Speaker 1: Nobody turns out great. No, everyone's a disaster. Like every
Speaker 1: now and then. Every now and then you get a
Speaker 1: Danny DeVito, but most of us don't turn out obsessed
Speaker 1: with Danny DeVito. I love Danny. What about Billy Zane.
Speaker 1: I don't know anything about Billy Zane. Is he nice?
Speaker 1: He's nice? Good? Good for Billy Zane. Everyone. Let's replace
Speaker 1: Congress with Danny de Vito and Bill you know what,
Speaker 1: the only two white men we can support at this point. Now.
Speaker 1: In eighteen sixty, when the Prince was one year old,
Speaker 1: his doctors began giving him daily electro magnetic therapy, applying
Speaker 1: constant galvanic current to his neck for hours every day
Speaker 1: to attempt to stimulate blood flow in his arm. Electrocuting
Speaker 1: the infant kaiser for hours a day did not work either.
Speaker 1: No kidding, God, it's just like your child has a disability.
Speaker 1: We're four pages in and we haven't stopped talking about
Speaker 1: the funked up ways they damaged This kid trying to
Speaker 1: heal his arm feels so I I God, it is
Speaker 1: hard not to feel for you, Like, that's a lot
Speaker 1: to deal with. Your family's electrocuting you because they find
Speaker 1: you to be gross. That's yea a nightmare. That's a
Speaker 1: cross to bear that it certainly is. On January second,
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty one, King Friedrich Wilhelm the fourth died and
Speaker 1: Prince Wilhelm's grandfather became Kaiserville Heelm the First. Uh. He
Speaker 1: was sixty three at the time. Two years later, in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty three, when the Prince who would become the
Speaker 1: Kaiser that we're talking about, I know this is confusing. UM,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call, like when I say King Friedrich Wilhelm
Speaker 1: the Fourth, he's also a Kaiser Wilhelm. I'm only going
Speaker 1: to call the kaiserville Helm from World War One that
Speaker 1: we're talking about this episode the Kaiser for the sake
Speaker 1: of like making this makes sense. Um. So when the
Speaker 1: future Kaiser was four, his doctors presented him with a
Speaker 1: terrifying and barbaric machine designed to help him treat another
Speaker 1: one of his ailments um see. Four years after birth,
Speaker 1: Wilhelm had developed torture callis caused by the healthy muscles
Speaker 1: on the right side of his neck pulling his head
Speaker 1: downwards in that direction. Now, this would obviously be way
Speaker 1: too visible an ailment to possibly let the King of
Speaker 1: Prussia have the future King of Prussia have. So to
Speaker 1: treat this, his doctor's prescribed him what his mother called
Speaker 1: a head stretching machine that sounds safe an hour a
Speaker 1: day every day, and in a letter to Queen Victoria,
Speaker 1: the prince's mother described it thus lee a belt around
Speaker 1: his waist to the back of which an iron bar
Speaker 1: is affixed. The bar leads up the back of to
Speaker 1: something which looks exactly like a horse's bridle. The head
Speaker 1: is then fixed in this and positioned is desired by
Speaker 1: means of a screw, which is just the iron bar.
Speaker 1: Why this is oh, I feel I'm sad, Robert, this
Speaker 1: sucks now. The young prince eventually went through facial surgery
Speaker 1: to correct this, which alleviated the problem at the cost
Speaker 1: of some permanent disfigurement. Uh. He was also subject to
Speaker 1: an arm stretching machine, which was used on him for
Speaker 1: years and was similar to the next stretching machine are
Speaker 1: medieval torture devices. This is not helpful. Yeah. The thing
Speaker 1: that actually did help his arm to grow somewhat was
Speaker 1: a course of regular jim nat sticks um, which figure
Speaker 1: like like just actual exercise. Yes, that one didn't seem
Speaker 1: to help there. It's so I'm like, I mean, these
Speaker 1: these these doctors have to have at least the foresight
Speaker 1: to give the arms stretching machine a confusing name so
Speaker 1: you don't notice it's an arms stretching machine. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm only referred to as the arms stretching machine, but
Speaker 1: it probably had a fun German nickname, a doctor sue
Speaker 1: sounding thing. Yeah. Now, in spite of all this horror,
Speaker 1: Wilhelm's early childhood was considered He remembered it at least
Speaker 1: as fairly pleasant. His mother and father were both doating parents,
Speaker 1: which was unusual Imprussian families of that era. He was
Speaker 1: the baby of the global royal family and for a
Speaker 1: time Queen Victoria's favorite grandchild. Starting in eighteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: he began to regularly visit his aunts and uncles and
Speaker 1: cousins in Great Britain. John Vanderkiss describes him as a
Speaker 1: spirited child. Quote. On his way to Saint George's Chapel Windsor,
Speaker 1: he threw his aunt Beatrice's muff out the carriage window.
Speaker 1: Beatrice was only five years old at the time and
Speaker 1: in no position to exercise any authority over him. Queen
Speaker 1: Victoria's youngest child, she wasn't always remained her mother's baby,
Speaker 1: a name her nephew soon picked up. When she told
Speaker 1: him petulantly that he must address her as an aunt.
Speaker 1: He snapped back aunt baby, then board. During the long
Speaker 1: marriage service, while most of his relations were shedding emotional tears,
Speaker 1: he pulled his dirk, which is a knife, from his
Speaker 1: stocking and threw it noisily across the chapel floor. When
Speaker 1: his young uncle's Arthur and Leopold remonstrated with him, he
Speaker 1: bit them in the legs. What a sweet kid, I mean,
Speaker 1: I gotta love that he he bites King Leopold of Belgium,
Speaker 1: the slaughterer of the Congo, in the leg for yelling
Speaker 1: at him for throwing a knife during a wedding, which
Speaker 1: is awesome. That actually does sound like what you would
Speaker 1: have done. Yes, little little knife thrower might have bonded
Speaker 1: over knife throwing. I love throwing knives when if I
Speaker 1: anytime I get really drunk, I'm gonna throw knives. I
Speaker 1: you know, I I know that to be true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's great. I think I also had a shirt that
Speaker 1: said aunt baby in middle school. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: these phrases are bringing or bringing back some some memories.
Speaker 1: Aunt baby, that's actually a sick burn for that is
Speaker 1: a sick birdie he was. He was not not witless
Speaker 1: heads quick. Yeah, that's quick for like a four year
Speaker 1: old too not bad to be baby, I can't. I
Speaker 1: have no punch ups. That's great. Hell yeah kid now.
Speaker 1: In eighteen sixty four, the prince's father, who was the
Speaker 1: Crown Prince, fought in the Prussio Danish War and returned
Speaker 1: home a war hero. Um The future Kaiser's father would
Speaker 1: again win laurels in the Franco Prussian War of eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy one, which is what led to the establishment of
Speaker 1: the German Empire. Some of the Prince's earliest strong memories
Speaker 1: the future Kaiser's strong Memories, where his father is sending
Speaker 1: back captured battle flags and glorious reports of conquests from
Speaker 1: the front lines so he grows up like with some
Speaker 1: of his earliest memories being his dad being a legitimate
Speaker 1: war hero. Um like, he was really close to the front.
Speaker 1: Obviously not in as much danger as an infantrymen, but
Speaker 1: he was like participating in battles and leading troops in
Speaker 1: combat and stuff. So as he grew into an adolescent,
Speaker 1: the young Prince gradually overcame many of his physical limitations.
Speaker 1: He learned how to swim and row, and was quite
Speaker 1: good at it. His grandmother, Queen Victoria, was ever on
Speaker 1: the watch for signs of pride from her first grandchild.
Speaker 1: She told the Crown Princess to bring him up simply, plainly,
Speaker 1: and not with that terrible Prussian pride and ambition which
Speaker 1: grieved dear Papa so much, and which he always said
Speaker 1: would stand in the way of Prussia taking that lead
Speaker 1: in Germany, which he ever wished her to do. If
Speaker 1: only the Germans were more British, if only the Germans
Speaker 1: were more were more humble like us. All we did
Speaker 1: was conquer a quarter of the world's land surface, unlike
Speaker 1: these arrogant Germans, notoriously chill and tolerant British. Yes, yeah, now,
Speaker 1: the Prince's parents seemed to have listened to this advice.
Speaker 1: Starting in mid eighteen sixty six, when the future Kaiser
Speaker 1: was seven and starting school, George hins Peter was chosen
Speaker 1: to be his tutor. Now hints Peter was a Calvinist,
Speaker 1: which means he believed that only a predetermined elect few
Speaker 1: ever got into heaven, and the vast majority of humanity
Speaker 1: was destined for hell no matter what they did. As
Speaker 1: you might expect, he was a gigantic dick. He also
Speaker 1: looked exactly like the dude who played Taiwan Lanister on
Speaker 1: Game of Thrones. Sophie looks up his picture, like exactly
Speaker 1: like him. It's really weird, now, hints Peter's educational program
Speaker 1: involved twelve hour days of mixed study and exercise. It was,
Speaker 1: in his words, based exclusively on a stern sense of
Speaker 1: duty and the idea of service. The character was to
Speaker 1: be fortified by perpetual renunciation, the life of the prince
Speaker 1: to be molded on the lines of old Prussian simplicity,
Speaker 1: its ideal being the harsh discipline of the Spartans. Now
Speaker 1: it's here I should say a few words about Prussia.
Speaker 1: Prussia no longer exists as a state or as political
Speaker 1: entity in any way. Prussia's disillusion was one of the
Speaker 1: British requirements for the end of World War Two. Prior
Speaker 1: to that, Prussia was the most powerful German state and
Speaker 1: the source for all of our modern stereotypes of Germany
Speaker 1: and Germans as disciplined, sterned, humorless and militaristic. The Prussian
Speaker 1: military was one of the chief military forces in Europe
Speaker 1: for centuries and became world famous for their discipline and skill.
Speaker 1: During the U s Revolutionary War, a Prussian nobleman, Baron
Speaker 1: von Steuben, built the entire American military from scratch. The
Speaker 1: core of our military's organization to this day is still
Speaker 1: based along Prussian lines, So it makes sense that the
Speaker 1: young prince would be raised in a strict, militaristic, spartan way. Um.
Speaker 1: But while Prussian discipline made for an effective military, it
Speaker 1: also made for profoundly damaged young men, which is why
Speaker 1: we got yeah hints. Peter declared that the growing Wilhelm
Speaker 1: could never ever receive any kind of praise, approval, or
Speaker 1: encouragement for any reason. He was ordered to eat dry
Speaker 1: bread for breakfast. When he and his siblings hosted their cousins.
Speaker 1: They were required to give them cakes and cookies without
Speaker 1: eating any sweets for themselves, no matter how well yeah
Speaker 1: this guy, this is so fucked up. This is like
Speaker 1: calculated ship. Yeah yeah yeah. No matter how well Prince
Speaker 1: Philhelm performed, George hints Peter never gave him so much
Speaker 1: as a kind word. The impossible was expected of the
Speaker 1: pupil in order to force him to meet the nearest
Speaker 1: degree of perfection. Naturally, the impossible goal could never be
Speaker 1: achieved Logically, Therefore, the praise which registers approval was also excluded. God,
Speaker 1: yeah it does with a whole love from your child.
Speaker 1: And see what that's such a god? Why did I
Speaker 1: feel like sometimes parents? I mean again, if this is
Speaker 1: just like every bad parenting technique turned up to an
Speaker 1: eleven for amazing how many different bad types of parenting
Speaker 1: he receives from really everyone but his parents, but his
Speaker 1: so many sets of stops. Yeah, god, that's so brutal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, watch your cousin eat a piece of that.
Speaker 1: I feel like that happens to kids sometimes as as punishment,
Speaker 1: you know, like oh, look everyone's gonna get birthday cake,
Speaker 1: but you whatever, you ship on the floor, so you
Speaker 1: gotta eat a cracker. I'm not. Some of those people
Speaker 1: there grow up to be shitty managers at a sonic.
Speaker 1: But since they don't have Germany, they don't inherit the
Speaker 1: German military, so it's not a huge problem. There's a
Speaker 1: version of Wilhelm had he been from you know, like
Speaker 1: from a normal class of person, where he would have
Speaker 1: just been a perfectly happy manager of the lids that
Speaker 1: didn't talk to his family that much. No, no, and
Speaker 1: he would have denied his employees lunch breaks for shitty
Speaker 1: reasons just because he's got some hurt in his heart. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the damage would have been contained, right, right. Not that
Speaker 1: we condone this behavior from lids managers, we don't, but
Speaker 1: but I prefer people like Wilhelm become lids manage jeers,
Speaker 1: the Imperial German army managers. Okay, okay, I'm listening. Yeah now,
Speaker 1: Every Wednesday and Saturday, Hints Peter and Wilhelm would visit
Speaker 1: museums and art galleries. They would also visit factories, foundries, workshops,
Speaker 1: farms and the like. The goal was to show the
Speaker 1: would be kaiser what life was like from the manual
Speaker 1: laborers who actually built his country. To Hints, Peter's credit.
Speaker 1: He also wanted the royal family to gain an understanding
Speaker 1: of social inequality and the suffering of workers. Wilhelm was
Speaker 1: required to remove his hat and deliver a thankful speech
Speaker 1: at every place of business they visited after their tour.
Speaker 1: So Hints Peter did a lot of the job of
Speaker 1: raising Billhelm, and that had positive and negative echoes. As
Speaker 1: we'll see, one of his big demands was that the
Speaker 1: prince developed and express an opinion of every single person
Speaker 1: he met. This was part of Hints Peter's plan to
Speaker 1: get the young man to express his views at all
Speaker 1: times so that he would not be dominated by his
Speaker 1: advisers in the future. This one would wind up backfiring
Speaker 1: on the entire planet now as he grew into a
Speaker 1: young boy queen Victorian to some unpleasant changes taking over
Speaker 1: her darling grandson. He is inclined to be selfish, domineering
Speaker 1: and proud, but I must say they are not his
Speaker 1: own faults, as they have been hitherto more encouraged than checked.
Speaker 1: Hints Peter todt Wilhelm to ride a horse by letting
Speaker 1: him fall off of it repeatedly, ignoring the Prince's tears
Speaker 1: and forcing him back on the horse for weeks until
Speaker 1: he got good at riding one hand, and he was
Speaker 1: said to be an excellent horseman. So he learns how
Speaker 1: to one hand and ride a horse. It's almost like
Speaker 1: they should have just let him learn how to do
Speaker 1: things with one hand the entire time, rather than the
Speaker 1: torture machines, rather than the evil torture machines. Jamie, you're
Speaker 1: anti torturing babies. Agenda has been clear for quite some time,
Speaker 1: and I think you might be biased on this, thank
Speaker 1: you know what, It's true, And people have been calling
Speaker 1: me out a lot. They're like, no, but what if
Speaker 1: we did torture the babies. How will you know until
Speaker 1: you've tried it? How will you know until you've tried it? Right?
Speaker 1: And that's fair. I haven't tried it yet. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: uh sure of course, yeah yeah, Well who are they
Speaker 1: gonna tell exactly what are they going to do? Not
Speaker 1: because they can't speak English. I'm about to get a kitten,
Speaker 1: so um, you know, um, it's gonna be there. There
Speaker 1: is a specific type of torture that you have to
Speaker 1: do to young kittens if you want them to be affectionate,
Speaker 1: which is that from a very young age. Do you
Speaker 1: know what the cat gun is? The cat gun? It's
Speaker 1: when you hold your cat like a gun, with its
Speaker 1: back legs as the handle and its front legs like
Speaker 1: a four grip, and you pretend it's a little machine gun.
Speaker 1: If you do that from the time that they're what
Speaker 1: if you do that when they're a kitten, then they
Speaker 1: grow up just knowing that people are going to pick
Speaker 1: them up and funk with them, and they're fine with it.
Speaker 1: You know, you hold it with anything that you hold
Speaker 1: with two hands, You're like, you know, like a machine gun.
Speaker 1: There there, you pretend it's yeah, it just feels natural
Speaker 1: and right, I'm bringing you to the hospital. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's how you raise a baby kitten. And then they
Speaker 1: grow up being very affectionate because they just know that
Speaker 1: people pick them up and do weird things to them,
Speaker 1: and it's fine, that's nice. I almost dressed my dog
Speaker 1: up like a gun for Halloween, but I didn't want
Speaker 1: it to be interpreted as political, so I changed it
Speaker 1: to a knife. You radical pro knife agenda has also
Speaker 1: been clear for some time. I have been in favor
Speaker 1: of knives. Look someone in the eye, just I just
Speaker 1: want eye contact now. When Wilhelm was ten in eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine, he was awarded the Order of the Black
Speaker 1: Eagle oppression chivalric award that was supposed to be very
Speaker 1: prestigious but kind of loses its luster to me when
Speaker 1: awarded to children. He received fucking a hundreds of awards
Speaker 1: and orders and knighthoods and dukedoms over the course of
Speaker 1: his life. We're going to ignore basically all of them,
Speaker 1: although his biography is always note whenever he was given
Speaker 1: a new one. He was also inducted into the first
Speaker 1: Infantry Regiment of the Guards and made a German officer
Speaker 1: when he was ten years old. Um so, yeah, he's
Speaker 1: he's in the military from a very young age. Um
Speaker 1: and he's he's continually gifted more military units and made
Speaker 1: honorary member and commander of different military regiments in the
Speaker 1: Prussian Army over the course of his childhood. This is
Speaker 1: like like getting micro machines was for me, right right,
Speaker 1: Like they become that they're nice to have, but eventually
Speaker 1: they become meaningless. Yeah, he loves he loves these. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he loves his military universe made up of real men.
Speaker 1: In eighteen seventy, France and Prussia went to war Prussia one,
Speaker 1: and Germany was born. From here on out. The Kaisers,
Speaker 1: the Kings of Prussia, where kings of the entire German Empire.
Speaker 1: Now they were like twenty two other kings in Germany,
Speaker 1: but the Kaisers were like the chief kings of all
Speaker 1: of them. So, uh, that's the story. As we go
Speaker 1: in to our second ad break, Uh, still life, we're
Speaker 1: all kind of on the future Kaiser side at this point.
Speaker 1: I like. I like that, Robert, you choose moments to
Speaker 1: go to ad breaks where I feel I'm at the
Speaker 1: peak of I'm on the edge of my seat and
Speaker 1: my hand is on my wallet as well. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: could have gone another way, but it went wallet. You know,
Speaker 1: you have a weird habit with that wallet of of
Speaker 1: holding it out before ad breaks. Yeah, my hands trembling.
Speaker 1: I'm helpless in the face of capitalism. I need the products,
Speaker 1: I need the services. Pull out your credit cards, everybody,
Speaker 1: ignore what the actual products are and just immediately buy
Speaker 1: them without a thought. Don't even put in the discount, cut,
Speaker 1: don't even put in the discount. Well, no do because
Speaker 1: then we get then it helps us. Sorry, it's good
Speaker 1: for the show. Here they go. We're back after Franco
Speaker 1: Prussian War happens, and the prince's mother, the Crown Princess,
Speaker 1: who was you know, British and not Prussian, was very
Speaker 1: concerned about all of the war focus in her son's childhood. Um. Again,
Speaker 1: she wanted relations between Britain in Prussia to be good,
Speaker 1: and she knew there was always a chance that there
Speaker 1: would be war between them. So she was very concerned,
Speaker 1: like everyone in Europe about prussia militarism, and she didn't
Speaker 1: want her son to say, grow into a man whose
Speaker 1: ambition helped Europe plunge into a war that killed seventeen
Speaker 1: million people. She didn't want that to happen, I guess
Speaker 1: for effort, at least, it occurred to her that it
Speaker 1: might happen. This could be a problem. Um So she
Speaker 1: sent the future Kaiser off to Germany in January of
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy one to remove him from Prussia in these
Speaker 1: negative military influences for a while. Now. That month, she
Speaker 1: wrote to Queen Victoria about her son's pleasant, amiable ways.
Speaker 1: She admitted that he was not possessed of brilliant qualities,
Speaker 1: nor any strength of character or talents, but he is
Speaker 1: a dear boy and I hope and trust he will
Speaker 1: grow up into a good and useful man. I've described
Speaker 1: a lot of my boyfriends that way. I think I'm
Speaker 1: just like, he looks like ship. He like can't seem
Speaker 1: to stay clean for some reason. You know, he's nice.
Speaker 1: I don't know, one day grow up. I'm trying to
Speaker 1: raise him as best I can. Of course. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you know I get it. I get it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And you know, at some point, you know, the Kaiser
Speaker 1: read these letters his mom wrote about him to his grandma.
Speaker 1: Has to have done some damage. That sucks. If you like,
Speaker 1: that's like going into your mom's text and finding out
Speaker 1: how disappointed she actually is. You're like, oh, yikes, Okay. Now,
Speaker 1: the Prince loved his time in England. He spent a
Speaker 1: lot of it making butter and cheese at the Royal
Speaker 1: Dairy and looking over Britain's incredible collection of old wooden ships.
Speaker 1: He really, he really liked England. He was set for
Speaker 1: most of his life. He said that he would be
Speaker 1: happier as an English country gentleman than as the King
Speaker 1: of Prussia. It was probably true. I was like that
Speaker 1: tracks yeah, yeah, we all wish that had been the case. Well,
Speaker 1: honey baby. In eighteen seventy four, fifteen year old Prince
Speaker 1: Wilhelm started classes at Castle Polytechnic, a public school. Now
Speaker 1: this was hugely controversial amongst and by public school, I
Speaker 1: mean and like the sense of only rich, non noble
Speaker 1: kids got to go there, not in the sense of
Speaker 1: everybody from all walks of life went there. But they
Speaker 1: weren't royals, they weren't like aristocrats. It wasn't like exclusy enough. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And this was very controversial among his family, many of
Speaker 1: whom were horrified of the idea of a noble child
Speaker 1: competing against commoners for grades. But Hince Peter thought it
Speaker 1: would be good for the prince, he knew was not
Speaker 1: all of that bright to be humiliated by getting bested
Speaker 1: by his social inferiors. For some reason I do not grasp,
Speaker 1: he thought that this would push the prince to develop
Speaker 1: a sense of superiority over common people. Like it's one
Speaker 1: of those things where at the start where it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you want him to realize that, like he's not the
Speaker 1: smartest person them. Okay, this could actually be really heavily.
Speaker 1: Oh no, you want him to get a sense of
Speaker 1: superiority of people over learning that they're better at school
Speaker 1: than him. How did this track to you, Peter, I
Speaker 1: get it. It tracks to me because it's just I
Speaker 1: feel like that's like a way for Wilhelm to realize
Speaker 1: exactly how powerful he is. He's like, Oh, I'm dumb
Speaker 1: as rock and it doesn't fucking matter. I'm still If
Speaker 1: I don't like how much smarter someone is than me,
Speaker 1: I'll just have him killed. Yeah. Maybe, yeah, that may
Speaker 1: that may have been kind of the reasoning there. I
Speaker 1: don't like that, I get it, but I think I
Speaker 1: get Yeah. Now, at school, Wilhelm started his days at
Speaker 1: five am and didn't end them until nine pm. So
Speaker 1: this is this is a brutal school schedule. He was
Speaker 1: a decent student, He got okay grades, but he was
Speaker 1: not exceptional. His best friend at Castle with Siegfried's summer
Speaker 1: a jew on top of the class. Now this is
Speaker 1: noteworthy that because, as we'll cover, the Prince grew into
Speaker 1: probably Germany's second most anti Semitic leader of all time.
Speaker 1: Oh wait, who's number one? I'm kidding, Okay, Now he's
Speaker 1: not wanted anything. He's number two. And I will say
Speaker 1: this in fairness to the Kaiser. There is a big
Speaker 1: gap between two and one. In most anti Semitic German
Speaker 1: leader the contest, there's a sizeable gap between the two.
Speaker 1: Where is Jojo Rabbit? Yeah, I can't wait to see that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I saw it the other day. I liked it. It
Speaker 1: looks good. I just haven't had a chance to get
Speaker 1: down to the theater. M fun it's it's a romp.
Speaker 1: And Jamie says it's a romp. Check it out people
Speaker 1: with TD plays Hitler. I'm so, I'm so easily bothered
Speaker 1: by like child actors. And they got a good one. No,
Speaker 1: I hate most children. Um, they're okay, Well, let's take
Speaker 1: us to the next level. It's good. It's good though.
Speaker 1: I liked it. Yeah, now is probably the right time
Speaker 1: to talk about the prince's bizarre feelings towards his mother. Now,
Speaker 1: Freud would tell us that it's not unusual for young
Speaker 1: boys to have a childish sort of infatuation with their mother. Um,
Speaker 1: but even by Freudian standards, Wilhelm was fucking odd. And
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not that she is the only person
Speaker 1: that was nice to him. Yeah, I'm still gonna say
Speaker 1: this is I'm just gonna read this quote from the biography,
Speaker 1: Kaiser Vilhelm A concise life, and you can tell me
Speaker 1: what you can help. Ana. This is a long one, Jamie,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot to unpack here. Horny. I let
Speaker 1: me just read the quote and we discuss it. Quote.
Speaker 1: In the winter of eighteen seventy seventy five, Wilhelm began
Speaker 1: a series of letters to his mother in English, naturally
Speaker 1: recounting a recurring dream. He was having letters that are
Speaker 1: remarkable not only for their evidently incestuous character, but also
Speaker 1: for their fetishistic emphasis on her gloved left hand. A
Speaker 1: poignant cry for unconditional acceptance and love, if ever there
Speaker 1: was one, I have got the little secret, which is
Speaker 1: for you alone. Visit a peculiar dream, he wrote to Vicky,
Speaker 1: his mom, on March eighteen seventy five, shortly after her
Speaker 1: visit to Castle for his sixteenth birthday. I dreamt last
Speaker 1: night that I was walking with you in another lady
Speaker 1: and walking you were discussing who had the finest hands,
Speaker 1: whereupon the lady produced a most ungrateful hand, declaring that
Speaker 1: it was the prettiest, and turned us her back. I,
Speaker 1: in my rage, broke her parasol. But you put your
Speaker 1: dear arm around my waist, led me aside, pulled your
Speaker 1: gloved hand off your dear left hand, which I so
Speaker 1: often kissed at castle, and showed me your dear beautiful hand,
Speaker 1: which I instantly covered with kisses. Wilhelm hoped that his
Speaker 1: dream would become reality. I wish that you would do
Speaker 1: the same when I am at Berlin alone with you
Speaker 1: in the evening, and he continued craving reassurance. Pray, write
Speaker 1: to me what you think about this dream. It is
Speaker 1: quite true as I have written it, you say, I
Speaker 1: always think of you, my dear mamma. I sometimes dream
Speaker 1: of you. I am so glad that soon we will
Speaker 1: sit together in your dear library and sit together. But
Speaker 1: this dream is alone for you to know, he insisted.
Speaker 1: Several days later, the dream recurred. I am very glad
Speaker 1: that you liked my little secret about your dear hands.
Speaker 1: Since then I have again dreamt about you. This time
Speaker 1: I was alone with you in your library when you
Speaker 1: stretched forth your arms and pulled me down to your
Speaker 1: chair so that my head rested on your left arm.
Speaker 1: Then you took off your gloves and laid your hands
Speaker 1: gently on my lips for me to kiss it, asking
Speaker 1: me at the same time. If I remember dreaming about you,
Speaker 1: I instantly seized your hand and kissed. Then you gave
Speaker 1: me a warm embrace, putting your right arm around my
Speaker 1: shoulder and neck, and got up and walked around the
Speaker 1: rooms with me. No, no, no, that's odd, that's that's peculiar.
Speaker 1: He's just like writing his mom being like, I want
Speaker 1: to fuck you? Is that I want to fuck your hand?
Speaker 1: Well that's well, I think, well that's like very telling,
Speaker 1: right that he's like fixated on hands and arms. That
Speaker 1: makes sense because of his life is obsessed about so
Speaker 1: of course that the man becomes this like erotic fixation
Speaker 1: left a left hand fetish if you will, Oh, that's
Speaker 1: just like baby boy, put it in your journal and
Speaker 1: then light it on fire. Do not send it by
Speaker 1: send them to mama. Ah and wait, so we so
Speaker 1: we there was Ah. He sent a letter and then
Speaker 1: presumably got a reply that was like, oh, yeah, tell
Speaker 1: me more. Yeah, we're going to get into that a
Speaker 1: little bit. Now. I've read a few biographies of Wilhelm,
Speaker 1: and most of them mentioned this weird fixation, but they
Speaker 1: kind of breeze past it, um like they'll note it
Speaker 1: was weird, but they don't go into that much detail.
Speaker 1: Ralph's book is the one I found that really does
Speaker 1: the best job of highlighting how fucking peculiar this all was.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to continue quoting. Yeah, I mean the
Speaker 1: hand fixation is very telling. Yeah, he could hardly wait
Speaker 1: for his dream to be fulfilled. In eight days, he wrote,
Speaker 1: we will go to Berlin and then what I dream
Speaker 1: about we will do in reality when we are alone
Speaker 1: in your rooms without any witnesses. This is the second secret.
Speaker 1: And he's like fourteen or fifteen, he's yeah, he's he's
Speaker 1: like a little horny teenage for mama. Okay, okay, sorry,
Speaker 1: keep going. This is the second secret. For you. Pray,
Speaker 1: write to me what you think about it, and promised
Speaker 1: to do so really as you did in my dream
Speaker 1: to me, for I do so love you. The correspondence
Speaker 1: continued in this vein for several months. In May eight
Speaker 1: seventy five, he urged his mother again to keep your
Speaker 1: promise you gave me at Berlin. Always give me Alane
Speaker 1: the soft inside of your hand to kiss. But of
Speaker 1: course you keep this as a secret for yourself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's definitely, He's like, your left hand is a pussy
Speaker 1: like that's his energy. Okay, so keep going. With less
Speaker 1: than four weeks to go before the holidays, he wrote,
Speaker 1: thanking her for her most recent letter. How glad I
Speaker 1: was to see the promise written down that I could
Speaker 1: kiss your hands as much as I liked. Be sure
Speaker 1: of it, I shall do it shortly before they reunion.
Speaker 1: Wilhelm could hardly contain his excitement, calculating that it was
Speaker 1: now only days or eighty four hours, or in five
Speaker 1: thousand forty minutes or in three two four hundred seconds
Speaker 1: before he would be able to embrace his mother again
Speaker 1: in pot Stem and kiss her sweet beautiful hands. Yeah hands, Robert, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the man loves his mom wants to touch mommy's hand.
Speaker 1: I well, here's my question, what is she replying to this?
Speaker 1: Because it doesn't sound like she's saying, please stop talking
Speaker 1: about sucking my hands. I think we can forgive the
Speaker 1: Crown Princess for not knowing how to respond to her
Speaker 1: teenage son's sexual obsession with her hands. I'm just trying
Speaker 1: to get a feel for like, is she weirded out
Speaker 1: by it but doesn't know how to handle the situation,
Speaker 1: or is she like this is cool, She's weirded out.
Speaker 1: You know. At first she's like, okay, yeah, you can
Speaker 1: kiss my hands, and she tries to move the letters
Speaker 1: along to something more normal, and then she tried politely
Speaker 1: ignoring it. She would return his letters to him with
Speaker 1: like the spelling corrected and stuff, correcting his grammar and stuff.
Speaker 1: Not really, but how he wants to her, like, if
Speaker 1: you're gonna suck my hands, say say it right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can safely say. She felt very strange about it,
Speaker 1: and eventually she did what she thought was the responsible
Speaker 1: thing and pushed her son away just a little bit
Speaker 1: to try and like get some distance boundaries. Yeah that
Speaker 1: He found this deeply painful. Um. This led to a
Speaker 1: start of a split between mother and son, which many,
Speaker 1: like people who like write about the Kaiser, have seen
Speaker 1: as the seeds of the split between Germany and Britain.
Speaker 1: As the future Kaiser began to push back against the
Speaker 1: British site of his ancestry since his mother was British.
Speaker 1: So well, it's all significant repercussions. I mean, you can't
Speaker 1: blame her, she said, like, what do you do? What
Speaker 1: do you do you do? Someone shut up about wanting
Speaker 1: to kiss your hand like that. Yeah, it's predicament. That's
Speaker 1: what a predicament. And then you think back of like, well,
Speaker 1: maybe if everyone wasn't complaining about this kid's hands his
Speaker 1: whole life, he wouldn't have this weird horny hand thing.
Speaker 1: And again, this is why you shouldn't have kings or
Speaker 1: leaders with any kind of significant amount of power like this,
Speaker 1: because like they grow up with something like this weird
Speaker 1: hand thing is something that like, you know, Wilhelm couldn't
Speaker 1: help that he felt that way. It was where like
Speaker 1: he was like this was going to happen. His mom
Speaker 1: kind of drawing away from him wasn't unreasonable. Him having
Speaker 1: really complicated feelings about England as a result of this
Speaker 1: wasn't unreasonable. But he with the German Army as his inheritance,
Speaker 1: so it became an issue. He doesn't have too much
Speaker 1: to lash out with you just like take your mom's car, Like, yeah, God,
Speaker 1: I think that so far, the villain of this story
Speaker 1: is power. I know it'll be exactly but at all
Speaker 1: it's still mostly power. Even though like there are points
Speaker 1: at which he does make choices that make him into
Speaker 1: a villain. The primary villain is still power. If he
Speaker 1: had just been a normal dude, and like, gotten some
Speaker 1: fucking therapy. I get the feeling just knowing kind of
Speaker 1: everything about his life. I get the feeling with a
Speaker 1: competent therapist. He could have been a decent man who
Speaker 1: would have raised a relatively healthy family and not damaged school.
Speaker 1: He would have been a perfectly like, you know, in
Speaker 1: in offensive, like whatever guy. He just would have been
Speaker 1: a guy. I don't think he was inherently moved to
Speaker 1: commit acts of horrible evil, but he did. And yet Yeah,
Speaker 1: Now Wilhelm reached adulthood and did the normal things that
Speaker 1: Prussian kids did. At that point. He joined the military,
Speaker 1: He went to military school, he got command of his
Speaker 1: first military units. Now he was noted by everyone is
Speaker 1: having no real ability to focus on the finer points
Speaker 1: of strategy and tactics, but having a deep and abiding
Speaker 1: love of making men march around in fancy uniforms. It
Speaker 1: became instantly apparent that the prince would not be the
Speaker 1: great warlord that his father was. Now, on the twenty
Speaker 1: seven March eighteen seventy nine, Wilhelm's eleven year old younger brother, Waldemar,
Speaker 1: died from diphtheria, along with one of his aunts, Wilhelm
Speaker 1: had been jealous of the little boy, who was widely
Speaker 1: seen as his parents favorite, but he was a dutiful
Speaker 1: mourner for his brother and held an all night vigil
Speaker 1: at the coffin. He described the family pain as deep
Speaker 1: and cruel beyond words, which is a reasonable way to
Speaker 1: react to the death of an eleven year old um.
Speaker 1: But a few months later Wilhelm was back to acting
Speaker 1: like a dick to his mom. His little brother had
Speaker 1: owned a cat, which his mom had adopted once he died,
Speaker 1: and she loved the animal and it clearly gave her
Speaker 1: some comfort in the absence of her beloved boy. While
Speaker 1: they were out vacationing, the housekeeper of one of their
Speaker 1: vacation homes shot the cat, cut off his nose, and
Speaker 1: hung it up against a tree. This because it was
Speaker 1: his job to ensure the pheasant population of the property
Speaker 1: stayed healthy so the nobles could hunt. Wilhelm's mother and
Speaker 1: sisters were horrified, but the prince defended the keeper, saying
Speaker 1: the cat murder had been laudable zeal in the pursuance
Speaker 1: of his duty. So we're seeing as he grows into
Speaker 1: a young man, this guy has some emotional depth issues,
Speaker 1: some difficulty understanding why certain certain things are horrifying to
Speaker 1: other people. Um, poor, I just like feeling for his mom,
Speaker 1: just like his moms with me, And he won't stop
Speaker 1: mutilating animals. What Yeah, what do I do know? Her
Speaker 1: son didn't do it? That the guy who killed the
Speaker 1: cat mutilated it to scare off other cats. Oh okay,
Speaker 1: that's still not okay, But okay, it's not okay. Um,
Speaker 1: it is pretty normal. Like you know, I have I
Speaker 1: have friends and family with farms, and like, if you
Speaker 1: kill a coyote on your farm and you have livestock,
Speaker 1: it's not abnormal to like hang the corpse of the
Speaker 1: coyote up to scare off other coyotes to protect your
Speaker 1: cows and ship. Like, it's something that people do when
Speaker 1: they're trying to maintain a population of prey animals. A
Speaker 1: very Game of Thrones. Yeah, it's fucked up, but it's
Speaker 1: like it's also like life in the rural world. Although
Speaker 1: killing somebody's pet cat to protect a pheasant population, I
Speaker 1: would argue is not the healthy way to deal with that.
Speaker 1: Maybe keep the cat indoors. Yeah, Like, there there was
Speaker 1: a clear solution to that, and it was a pack
Speaker 1: of Yeah, it's not like a pack of wild wolves. Like,
Speaker 1: there are other ways that this could have been handled.
Speaker 1: The worst case scenario is that there were a couple
Speaker 1: more cats around. Yeah. Boy. Now, as a young adult,
Speaker 1: Wilhelm fell madly in love with his cousin Ella, but
Speaker 1: Otto von Bismarck was not a fan of the pairing. Now,
Speaker 1: Bismarck is a guy will probably do an episode on
Speaker 1: at some point. He's one of the most important people
Speaker 1: who's ever lived. He was the actual mind behind the
Speaker 1: formation of the German Empire. He engineered the Franco Prussian War,
Speaker 1: and is again probably the single man most responsible for
Speaker 1: making Germany a thing unit on that motherfucker. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: a very important, influential guy. Yeah, as he's a dick,
Speaker 1: but he's also he's also very smart and very capable. Um, Like,
Speaker 1: he's not one of these powerful people who's also an idiot.
Speaker 1: He knows what the funk he's doing. Now, the Kaiser Prince,
Speaker 1: Wilhelm's grandfather was the monarch of Germany. But Bismarck made
Speaker 1: a lot of the critical decisions. Um, he was kind
Speaker 1: of them. He was kind of the it's not fair
Speaker 1: to compare Prince Wilhelm's grandfather or father to George W. Bush.
Speaker 1: But Bismarck is kind of like a Dick Cheney type,
Speaker 1: you know, the power behind the throne um and Otto
Speaker 1: von Bismarck was worried that Ella was too closely related
Speaker 1: to Kaiser Wilhelm, so he didn't, you know, let that
Speaker 1: relationship uh come to pass. So Kaiser saw this as
Speaker 1: Ella rejecting him, and he wrote to Hints Peter that
Speaker 1: he thought his fucked up arm had made him unlovable,
Speaker 1: which was a normal thing for him to feel, considering
Speaker 1: that his grandmother had told him that his fund up
Speaker 1: arm made him unlovable. Now, thankfully there was another princess
Speaker 1: waiting in the wings, Donna Augustineberg. She was a low
Speaker 1: rent princess, basically the Safeway Select equivalent of a hollands
Speaker 1: All learn Um, the family of the Kaiser's Bismark. She
Speaker 1: was not yeah, yeah, she's not like a high level princess.
Speaker 1: But Bismarck liked that she was not closely related to Wilhelm.
Speaker 1: He called her a Holstein cow and thought that she
Speaker 1: would inject fresh blood into the hawns All learn line,
Speaker 1: which was plagued by an illness. Yeah that's not that description,
Speaker 1: but not super into that, okay, but good to know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when the marriage was announced, hints Peter was a static
Speaker 1: that his dearly beloved problem child was going to marry
Speaker 1: someone who understands him and sympathizes with him in his weaknesses.
Speaker 1: Hints Peter was on record as saying that Wilhelm needed
Speaker 1: people around him who gave him unconditional love and admiration
Speaker 1: because he just couldn't exist without it. Um. And one
Speaker 1: of the weird notes is that, like, I think we
Speaker 1: can all look at how hints Peter had him raised
Speaker 1: as like profoundly abusive. Um. But Kaiser Wilhelm loved hints
Speaker 1: Peter till the day he died, and wrote him letters
Speaker 1: up until the older man's death, like almost on a
Speaker 1: daily basis, he would write like desperately seemed to crave
Speaker 1: this man's affection and approval. Um, it's devastating. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fucked up man, this kid, Like how does that?
Speaker 1: There's no way this guy ends up healthy, you know.
Speaker 1: And again it's like if you're just in a regular
Speaker 1: person with daddy issues, you're just one of the many
Speaker 1: bunch of daddy issues with power, who people are gonna die?
Speaker 1: Real problem. Now, this gets it. One of the things
Speaker 1: I think is wildest about the very idea of a
Speaker 1: monarchy when you really look into the letters everyone around
Speaker 1: the future Kaiser was writing, as both Rolf and Vanderkiss,
Speaker 1: the main biographers who were sources for this episode, did.
Speaker 1: It's obvious that one of the people who knew Wilhelm
Speaker 1: when he was young knew ahead of time that he
Speaker 1: was going to be a terrible Kaiser. The best anyone
Speaker 1: would say about him was that he could be sweet
Speaker 1: and charming, but nobody thought he was gifted in any
Speaker 1: intellectual capacity. Um As he grew older, his family wrote
Speaker 1: increasingly about his startling arrogance, his inability to take advice
Speaker 1: or criticism, and his frequent tendency to snap into blind rages.
Speaker 1: So everyone's like, oh, this guy shouldn't be king, but
Speaker 1: he's gonna. Boy, that'll suck when that inevitably happens. That's
Speaker 1: a shame. There's no other possible thing we can have
Speaker 1: than than a monarchy. Too bad, Jesus Christ. Okay, all right,
Speaker 1: yeah that is I mean, that doesn't make me slight.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously we're in a terrible version of democracy.
Speaker 1: But like, at least there's some things aren't inevitable from
Speaker 1: that far away. No, it's an iterative sort of thing. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: the prince's parents hoped that the marriage would have a
Speaker 1: soothing effect on his worst characteristics, but unfortunately, his wife,
Speaker 1: Donna was one biographer describes as a reactionary bigot whose
Speaker 1: small minded views only reinforced his own yeah to make
Speaker 1: matters where she despised the British, which helped push Prince
Speaker 1: Wilhelm further away from his mother. She was against liberal
Speaker 1: politics and the growing mood towards democratization in Europe. She
Speaker 1: treated the Crown Prince and Princess Wilhelm's parents coldly and
Speaker 1: further pushed them away from him. Wilhelms started referring to
Speaker 1: his family as the English colony and complained that his
Speaker 1: father treated him as if he were a dumb child.
Speaker 1: Now Otto von Bismarck also took advantage of the growing
Speaker 1: rift between Wilhelm and his parents. Well. The Crown Prince
Speaker 1: wanted Germany to draw closer to England. Bismarck was deeply
Speaker 1: suspicious of the British. He'd spent his entire life, building
Speaker 1: an intricate series of alliances that he believed would render
Speaker 1: Germany essentially impossible to invade. Under Bismarck's guidance, the German
Speaker 1: Empire had forged a strong defensive pact with Russia and
Speaker 1: Austria Hungary. This meant that roughly eighty percent of Europe
Speaker 1: would be on one side, Germany side if a war
Speaker 1: broke out, which would essentially make it impossible to have
Speaker 1: nobody's going to go to war with like, Like, the
Speaker 1: Russian Empire at this point is one sixth of the
Speaker 1: world's land mass, so like in Germany has by all
Speaker 1: accounts the best army in Europe. So nobody is going
Speaker 1: to war against that, Like, it's just impossible. Nobody would
Speaker 1: make a decision that's stupid and they're all cuzos um.
Speaker 1: But Bismarck doesn't have much faith in royal diplomacy, which
Speaker 1: would prove to be wise. He had faith in if
Speaker 1: we have essentially this is the nuclear arms race of
Speaker 1: its day, is having an alliance that that no one
Speaker 1: could dare to fight. And so that was bismarck strategy, Like, well,
Speaker 1: as long as we're in good with Russia, nobody will
Speaker 1: funk with us, and that ensures peace in Europe. And
Speaker 1: he's right. As long as Russia's allied with Germany, there
Speaker 1: are no wars between European states and like a mass scale. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: there are some very persistent rumors that Wilhelm was homosexual. Um,
Speaker 1: it seems more accurate to say that he might have
Speaker 1: been bisexual. Um. He fell in love with a guy
Speaker 1: named Yuhlenberg, another noble, who Wilhelm described as my bosom friend,
Speaker 1: the only one I have. Now it's very unlikely either
Speaker 1: boy ever consummated their attraction, but for years they were inseparable.
Speaker 1: In his biography of Wilhelm, Emil Ludwig wrote that Uhlenberg
Speaker 1: was the first to open the gates of the garden
Speaker 1: of romance to the young man who had been forced
Speaker 1: into the part of hard bitten Prussian prince and was
Speaker 1: now taking leave of an adolescents poor alike and love
Speaker 1: and the dreams of youth. God, so it's really hard
Speaker 1: not to feel for this guy, like he's it's rough man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's got he's got a lot of forces working against him.
Speaker 1: It's oh, it's not all Yeah, he's disabled. Bi sexual
Speaker 1: abuse victim. Um, they just yeah that he and his
Speaker 1: boyfriend should just move away. Oh yeah, funnily they'd gotten
Speaker 1: a house in Paris or something together, so nice that
Speaker 1: painted pictures, yeah, yeah, and he was Wilhelm had like
Speaker 1: some aptitude for art. He was described by someone as
Speaker 1: a gifted artist who never found his art, so like,
Speaker 1: he was good at a bunch of different things, but
Speaker 1: he never really well, no, because Hitler was shitty at it,
Speaker 1: like Wilhelm. You get the feeling if he'd like gotten
Speaker 1: some actual if it had been made, um a real like,
Speaker 1: if people had made a point of really giving him
Speaker 1: some serious art training, he would have figured out what
Speaker 1: he was into. It could have been really talented. What
Speaker 1: if this was the point where you found out that
Speaker 1: I actually thought Hitler's aret was really good man, that
Speaker 1: he was like, oh yeah, like yeah, no, Hailer was
Speaker 1: a Terrowartis we agree on that Jamie Loftis has a Hitler.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not gonna lie, I would actually love
Speaker 1: to have an original Hitler for they're talking about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I love haunted things. You do love haunting things.
Speaker 1: That's very absolutely oh my god. So so he would
Speaker 1: but he was like he was a better artist, you know,
Speaker 1: I just he seems to have been good. He just
Speaker 1: never quite like found something that he was really into,
Speaker 1: throwing his whole interest behind. And obviously he had to
Speaker 1: be the Kaiser. So there was a lot of other
Speaker 1: ship on his time for painting when you're the kind,
Speaker 1: time for painting when you're the cut some time for painting,
Speaker 1: but not enough. Now Bismarck saw Wilhelm as a pliant,
Speaker 1: multiple dummy he could direct in whichever direction he chose.
Speaker 1: The key for Bismarck was to deepen the rift between
Speaker 1: the prince and his father in the mid eighteen eighties,
Speaker 1: who went behind the crown Prince's back and made the
Speaker 1: future Kaiser the chief envoy of the German Empire. Now
Speaker 1: this by all right should have been his father's job,
Speaker 1: but Bismarck worried the crown princes English sympathies would look
Speaker 1: bad to the Russians, since Russia and England had just
Speaker 1: fought a war over the Crimea, so he pushed Wilhelm
Speaker 1: into the role. Wilhelm's father complained that this was a
Speaker 1: terrible idea in view of the immaturity as well as
Speaker 1: the inexperience of my eldest son, together with his tendency
Speaker 1: towards overbearing this and self conceit, I cannot but frankly
Speaker 1: regarded as dangerous to allow him at present to take
Speaker 1: part in any foreign affairs. Yeah, Principal was a terrible diplomat.
Speaker 1: His arrogance came off badly, and he had a nasty
Speaker 1: habit of insulting the world leaders he talked to. He
Speaker 1: botched his first meeting with the Russian Czar by basically
Speaker 1: giving him approval to conquer Constantinople, something the Zar didn't
Speaker 1: think he needed to prove he didn't need to get
Speaker 1: from an upstart boy who wasn't even kaiser yet. Yeah. God,
Speaker 1: what a du fist. Yeah. So the Prince's career did
Speaker 1: not start with great promise, but at least he was
Speaker 1: everyone everyone knew was happening, um, I will say, though
Speaker 1: he enjoyed some fringe benefits of the gig is envoid
Speaker 1: of Russia. According to vander Kiss book quote, he relished
Speaker 1: the attention paid to him his chief envoy of the
Speaker 1: German Empire, and he was deeply impressed with the bearing
Speaker 1: of the young infantry recruits on parade at the winter palace. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: he betrayed rather more than he intended when he wrote
Speaker 1: in a tale about the physical appearance of the soldiers,
Speaker 1: a very nice looking lot, but the fact that hardly
Speaker 1: any of them had any hips made their white capes
Speaker 1: look as though they had been poured into their slim bodies.
Speaker 1: He doesn't understand when to like, not be horny over ship.
Speaker 1: You're oversharing many on main all the time. Be yeah,
Speaker 1: He's like, yeah, at least make a like a fake account,
Speaker 1: don't you. Paul amid Romney write these under another name.
Speaker 1: He is being horny on the main it's so such
Speaker 1: a bad look. Like I'm fine with it, Like no judgment, bro,
Speaker 1: but like, don't judge it. Don't be horny on the main. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you are being a horny in your official job as
Speaker 1: international diplomat, which is probably inappropriate that the line. That's
Speaker 1: the line Bill Holm now VILLELM also had mistresses, but
Speaker 1: he was no better at managing them than he wasn't
Speaker 1: managing international diplomacy. In eighteen eighties six, he arranged to
Speaker 1: have two of his mistresses follow his train out of
Speaker 1: Berlin and made him in a small village in Austria.
Speaker 1: The women did so, but when they arrived, he refused
Speaker 1: to reimburse them for their travel costs. And I should
Speaker 1: know now that he was the wealthiest man in Germany. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I fail. Well, that's just dating a rich guy,
Speaker 1: is Yeah, like the women going to be great and
Speaker 1: then and then it turns out that they're they're fucking mean.
Speaker 1: Miser's left. Yeah. Yeah. The women left in a rage,
Speaker 1: and one of them stole one of the Prince's monogrammed
Speaker 1: cuff links, so she displayed around town to prove that
Speaker 1: she's had liaison with the prince. When the Kaiser realized this, yea,
Speaker 1: I flew southwest for this ship and runs us today. Now.
Speaker 1: When the Kaiser realized this, he begged them to come back,
Speaker 1: and he offered to pay for their travel costs. They returned,
Speaker 1: and finally yea, and the ensuing threesome was so loud
Speaker 1: that it woke up other guests in the hotel. People
Speaker 1: could actually hear them talking post coitus. A number of
Speaker 1: random Austrians heard the future Kaiser complaining to prostitutes about
Speaker 1: his parents. He called his dad a conceited popularity seeker
Speaker 1: under Jewish influence. He also loudly insulted Austria, his nation's
Speaker 1: closest ally, as rotten, close to dissolution all the Austrian
Speaker 1: He called the Austrian people useless pansies and Gorman's no
Speaker 1: longer fit for life. I hope those I hope that
Speaker 1: the sex workers got like an emotional support bonus. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like, that's not what you huh. Well, he made
Speaker 1: one of them pregnant and she blackmailed him, and she
Speaker 1: get a shipload of money out of it. Was like,
Speaker 1: this guy's a loser, Stop there, man. Word of all
Speaker 1: this got back to the Austrian Crown Prince, which sparked
Speaker 1: another international incident. This all voted particularly ill for the future.
Speaker 1: In the space of a year, the young prince had
Speaker 1: insulted both of his nation's chief military out the Emperor,
Speaker 1: his grandfather was ill and near death, and right as
Speaker 1: his grandfather starts dying, his father also gets sick, which
Speaker 1: would prove to be throat cancer. So none of this
Speaker 1: bodes well for the future piece of Europe. Right, They're like,
Speaker 1: oh no, then is the only one who will live? Okay.
Speaker 1: In eighty eight, the Emperor died and the Crown Prince
Speaker 1: became Kaiser, the Crown Prince, you know, the Kaiser's the
Speaker 1: future Kaiser's dad. He would only rule for ninety nine days,
Speaker 1: and he was very ill for all of them. By
Speaker 1: the time he died on June fifteenth, eight Now, Crown
Speaker 1: Prince Wilhelm had already been taking on and botching many
Speaker 1: of his dad's duties. That same day, Kaiser Wilhelm ascended
Speaker 1: to the throne of the German Empire. So in part two,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about what happened once he was
Speaker 1: in charge. All right over, Jamie, you got some plug
Speaker 1: doubles to plug? I got some plug ease. I'm releasing
Speaker 1: a podcast on Thanksgiving called My Year and Mensa is
Speaker 1: about what the title is about. It's about My Year
Speaker 1: and Mensa, how I got in and how I almost
Speaker 1: got bullied out. Uh. And then you can listen to
Speaker 1: the beg Del Cast every week. Uh. You can follow
Speaker 1: me on Twitter at Jamie Loft to help, and that's
Speaker 1: what you can do. That's what you're able to do
Speaker 1: at this time now. Um, you can find me on
Speaker 1: Twitter and Instagram and at Bastard's Pod. You can find
Speaker 1: me personally on Twitter at I right, okay, where I
Speaker 1: am not horny on maine. Um, that's inappropriate, especially with
Speaker 1: all of the diplomacy I have to do with the
Speaker 1: Russian army, right, yeah, I mean would make you a
Speaker 1: terrible kaiser. It would make me a terrible kaiser. And
Speaker 1: my whole job is to become a very good Kay. Yeah,
Speaker 1: your fence to as horny as hell? Yes? Oh my god,
Speaker 1: it is nothing but thirst postings, sameless can it's I
Speaker 1: muted it now, Jamie. What is a fence to what
Speaker 1: I'm gonna jump off the balcony? I cannot possibly excite
Speaker 1: to you. What a fence? It's a fake Instagram. That's
Speaker 1: where you it's where you do your horn I don't
Speaker 1: actually have one, which is what everyone who has one sets,
Speaker 1: but um, but it's like where you post, you know,
Speaker 1: you post, you know, the illusion on the main right,
Speaker 1: you're like, I'm so happy, everything's great, and then you
Speaker 1: post depression memes and thirst posts on the fence to
Speaker 1: that's where you're like you're you're, you're, you know, two extremes. See.
Speaker 1: I write my thirst posts on a sheet of paper
Speaker 1: and then I cut my finger and block them out
Speaker 1: with blood, and then I burned them in a bonfire
Speaker 1: at night in order to wipe my shame in front
Speaker 1: of God in the heavens. I know, but unfortunately that
Speaker 1: is a spell. That means it's in a book somewhere
Speaker 1: far away. So your thirst posts are uh, they're they're
Speaker 1: documented somewhere. You shouldn't drop blood on it. That that's
Speaker 1: that activates the curse. Damn it. I'll send you some.
Speaker 1: If you want to activate a curse, buy some T
Speaker 1: shirts from t public dot com. All of our shirts
Speaker 1: come cursed. Um, so that's good. Um, the episode is over, okay,