The Innocence of Kaiser Wilhelm II And the First World War (Audible Audio Edition) Christina Croft Jack Wynters Books
Download As PDF : The Innocence of Kaiser Wilhelm II And the First World War (Audible Audio Edition) Christina Croft Jack Wynters Books
Almost a century after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, Kaiser Wilhelm II is still viewed as either a warmonger or a madman, as the hundred-year-old propaganda posters remain fixed in the general consciousness. Was he, though, truly responsible for the catastrophe of the First World War, or was he in fact a convenient scapegoat, blamed for a conflict which he desperately tried to avoid?
The Innocence of Kaiser Wilhelm II And the First World War (Audible Audio Edition) Christina Croft Jack Wynters Books
For the many years that I've been reading about Royalty, I have never been particularly fond of Kaiser Wilhelm II. From his erratic behavior, to his bombastic nature and seemingly cruel treatment of his mother, I thought there was no way to explain or justify these instances. So, as I read this book, I was rather surprised to hear accounts of his generosity, thoughtfulness and his willingness to preserve the peace in Europe during a particularly turbulent period of history. Very well documented and researched, the author provides so many accounts of the other side of the Kaiser but she never side-steps the truth of the man in this particular era. She doesn't make the mistake of viewing Victorian Era Royalty in the eyes of a modern society and provides the context we need to make sense of this particular period in history. Ms. Croft is famous for painting things in a new light, and her book on the Kaiser is up to the task. I was particularly interested in the way British propaganda furthered the particularly negative view on the Kaiser. There is a lot of new/uncovered information here, that keeps you turning the pages for more! It's worth remembering that there are two sides to every story and this is the Kaiser's story. Well rounded, interesting and refreshing, this is a book you don't want to miss! For those of you who might just be beginning to read into the subject, the author presents a Who's Who at the beginning of the book so you can refer back to it for reference, which I find very helpful.Product details
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The Innocence of Kaiser Wilhelm II And the First World War (Audible Audio Edition) Christina Croft Jack Wynters Books Reviews
I think the author goes a little overboard forgiving the Kaiser some of his actions. He put his mother out of the home she has restored for over 20 years within months of his father's death. Ms Croft tries to justify that and I think it was just wrong. It was not the traditional home of German Emperors and his parents took a neglected palace and with their own funds restored it to former glory. I agree he is not the warmonger he si often presented to be but he did have issues and the author kind of denies those issues.
Insightful....majestic in its authority!!
Finally a biography of the last 20th century Hohenzollern monarch that is without the British and American wartime propaganda hyperbole & deception that previous biographical efforts repeat ad infinitum and ad nauseam in an attempt to make them real. This book comes at a time when more of the conventional wisdom about the period , the man and the war itself is , by the revelation of previously ignored or secreted facts, beginning to fall apart under the intense light of rationalist scrutiny.
Interesting concept - Kaiser comes across as someone who meant well, but set into motions the wheels of German military machine which, eventually kicked him out as serving his purpose.
The Kaiser was a good man, and not the cause of WWI as historians have portrayed him. England and France, who were jealous of Germany's economy, were the cause of WWI
What a pleasure to read a biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II without the passel of negative qualities so assiduously attributed to him by many historians who never tire of telling us about the Kaiser's troubling relationship with his mother, the 1908 Telegraph interview, his "Hun" speech, etc., etc. Rarely mentioned is his groundbreaking social legislation which, building on Bismarck's efforts, became the model for Europe. Never mentioned are the Kaiser's many efforts to limit the carnage during the course of the War, or his appeals for peace which were declined.
The Kaiser was an informed, intelligent observer of the political scene, but the victors write history and the false notion that Germany started the War required a guilty, malevolent, glory-seeking Kaiser. It was England - NOT Germany - who started the First World War. In fact, it was Germany, alone among the Powers, who made strenuous efforts to prevent it.
But why would the mighty British Empire decide to confront Germany? The answer is that since unification of a bewildering patchwork of kingdoms, fiefdoms and principalities in 1871, the German economy became a powerhouse that was nothing short of spectacular. By the turn of the century, Germany had overtaken her European neighbors in virtually every conceivable economic/military category. By 1908, Germany was on schedule to surpass Great Britain in the export of finished goods and it did not take a crystal ball to see that German trade and industry would soon overshadow and eclipse Great Britain. The economic statistics to support this are overwhelming. Typical is the following from the Encyclopedia Britannica
The economy, 1890–1914
The speed of Germany’s advance to industrial maturity after 1890 was breathtaking. The years from 1895 to 1907 witnessed a doubling of the number of workers engaged in machine building, from slightly more than one-half million to well over a million. An immediate consequence of expanding industrial employment was a sharp drop in emigration; from an average of 130,000 people per year in the 1880s, the outflow dropped to 20,000 per year in the mid-1890s. The surplus population continued to leave Prussia’s eastern provinces, but the destination was the growing and multiplying factories of Berlin and the Ruhr rather than the Americas. Earlier British fears of German competition were now fully justified. While Britain produced about twice as much steel as Germany during the early 1870s, Germany’s steel production exceeded Britain’s in 1893, and by 1914 Germany was producing more than twice as much steel as Britain. Moreover, only one-third of German exports in 1873 were finished goods; the portion rose to 63 percent by 1913. Germany came to dominate all the major Continental markets except France.
An English historian noted that
“With the end of the [Boer] war, it was assumed that the reasons for the hostility between Germany and Britain would diminish and calm down. After all, the two nations still had close trading ties, many Germans and British attended the other country’s universities, the British Left had closer relations with the German Social Democrats than any other European left-wing party, and of course there were the blood ties of the royal family. But in one section of the British press the antipathy did not go away. In the right-wing papers a new kind of story about Germany began to appear, suggesting that it had long-term hostile intentions against Britain, and noting with some anxiety that Germany was overtaking Britain its population was bigger, its shipbuilding outstripping the British for the first time. The stories were true by 1913, Germany would have a population of 65 million to Britain’s 46 million; and while Britain’s GDP had been 40 percent bigger than Germany’s in 1870, by 1913 it would be 6 percent smaller.”
Other sources such as the International Monetary Fund speak of the economic “colossus” and the cultural renaissance that was Germany in the years after 1871. In fact, if there was a “place in the sun” (Bülow) anywhere in the world, it was Germany in 1914.
The fact is that “hegemony” was actually the British motive. It was Great Britain who felt her world hegemony - won and maintained by battleships, boots, and bullets - to be threatened by an ascendant Germany just as she had once felt threatened by the rise of various European Powers, especially France. This traditional British policy - euphemistically termed “balance of power” by British apologists has been described many times, many ways by Britain’s own diplomats and statesmen. Colonel William Robertson of the British War Office Intelligence Department stated the case as well as any
“For centuries past we have thwarted . . . each and every power in turn which has aspired to continental predominance; and concurrently, and as a consequence, we have enlivened our own sphere of imperial ascendancy . . . A new preponderance is now growing, of which the centre of gravity is Berlin. Anything . . . which would assist us in opposing this new and most formidable danger would be of value to us.”
Thus the fateful British decision was made just as it was made earlier in the case of Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Holland, and France. It was not taken suddenly, nor was it shouted from the rooftops or trumpeted in banner headlines. Driven by the burgeoning German economy and navy, it crystalized slowly over the years as Great Britain came once more to the decision to apply her traditional solution to the problem of rising challengers.
It is possible - even probable - that England would have accepted the “new preponderance” even as she had little choice but to later accept the new preponderance from America when this was grandly announced by the 1909 circumnavigation of the globe by Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet. But the Franco-Russian Alliance was handy and available. Russia was in the process of recovering from her calamitous confrontation with Japan and was completing a thorough modernization of her armed forces - the largest in the world by far. The French army was larger per capita than that of Germany and was poised on the Lorraine border itching for action and bursting with élan. Encouraged by the prospect of being aided by this impressive Franco-Russian land Armada, England decided yet again upon yet another of her balance-of-power schemes.
Was England justified in confronting Germany? Was it reasonable for England to expect other nations to blithely accept the prospect of a British naval blockade? At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Lloyd George informed Colonel House that “Great Britain would spend her last guinea to keep her navy superior to that of the United States or that of any other power. No Cabinet could officially continue in the Government in England that took a different position.” To this House responded drily that “We do not intend to have our commerce regulated by Great Britain whenever she is at war.” This was a reasonable response from House and it was no less reasonable coming from Kaiser Wilhelm or Tirpitz.
Certainly, nations have gone to war for far less. For Great Britain, there were the traditional reasons such as that cited by Colonel Robertson (above) and others, and there were larger historical precedents as well. Some two thousand years earlier, Rome’s leaders decided that Carthage was getting too big for her britches. This resulted in the Punic Wars, Hannibal’s revenge, and the disappearance of Carthage from the world map. Centuries before this, Persia decided that Greece should be taken down a notch or two. This resulted in the revenge of Alexander the Great and the demise of the Persian Empire. There were also the more relevant precedents of William the Conqueror in 1066 and William of Orange in 1688. Now, in the 20th century, the conservative Tory Press played on fears about the growing strength of the German Hercules. They raised the spectre of the German navy landing an army somewhere on the English coast, and the alarming prospect of being governed by nummer 10, Downinge Strasse.
But however history judges England, it is time for England and the world to acknowledge the radical diplomacy with (mainly) France and Russia carried on by King Edward VII, and the secret Anglo-French, Anglo-Russian, Anglo-Belgian military planning conducted by Edward Grey, which led directly to the outbreak of the Great War of 1914 - 1918, a war in which Great Britain did indeed play the decisive, dominant role which was fully commensurate with her 1914 status as the largest, most powerful Empire in the history of the world.
Germany was innocent in 1914 as German leaders like the Kaiser and the Chancellor have maintained from the start. This viewpoint is increasingly put forward by such books as "The Pity of War" by Niall Ferguson; "How the First World War Began" by Edward E. McCullough; "The Sleepwalkers" by Cristopher Clark; "The Darkest Days" by Douglas Newton; "Fatal Fortnight by Duncan Marlor. Writers like Christine Croft and books like "The Innocence of Kaiser Wilhelm II" will help make the point. Highly recommended!
Very few historians can divorce themselves from allied propaganda in WW I. Christina Croft makes a fine and neededcontributiin to humanizing Kaiser Wilhelm II and debunking many myths. Those who are interested should read this book and visit Huis Doorn in Holland where Wilhelm conducted himself with dignity in exile.
For the many years that I've been reading about Royalty, I have never been particularly fond of Kaiser Wilhelm II. From his erratic behavior, to his bombastic nature and seemingly cruel treatment of his mother, I thought there was no way to explain or justify these instances. So, as I read this book, I was rather surprised to hear accounts of his generosity, thoughtfulness and his willingness to preserve the peace in Europe during a particularly turbulent period of history. Very well documented and researched, the author provides so many accounts of the other side of the Kaiser but she never side-steps the truth of the man in this particular era. She doesn't make the mistake of viewing Victorian Era Royalty in the eyes of a modern society and provides the context we need to make sense of this particular period in history. Ms. Croft is famous for painting things in a new light, and her book on the Kaiser is up to the task. I was particularly interested in the way British propaganda furthered the particularly negative view on the Kaiser. There is a lot of new/uncovered information here, that keeps you turning the pages for more! It's worth remembering that there are two sides to every story and this is the Kaiser's story. Well rounded, interesting and refreshing, this is a book you don't want to miss! For those of you who might just be beginning to read into the subject, the author presents a Who's Who at the beginning of the book so you can refer back to it for reference, which I find very helpful.
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