Historical analogies and Kaiser Bill

Kaiser Bill

Historian Fritz Stern wrote a helpful essay dealing with historical analogies, Imperial Hubris: A German Tale Lapham's Quarterly Winter 2008:

The great French historian and resistance martyr, Marc Bloch, is supposed to have said that history was like a knife: You can cut bread with it, but you could also kill. This is even more true of historical derivatives like analogies; they can provide either illumination or poisonous polemic. The first requirement for an acceptable historical analogy is plausibility; the two situations compared must have striking similarities, and the image of the historic antecedent must be as clearly understood as possible. This becomes an unlikely presupposition when the analogy is proposed by partisans working in an age of stunning historical ignorance. Nowadays, politicians and partisans use analogies instead of arguments, convenient shorthand for their defenses of dubious policies.

And he reminds us of the most overused analogy in foreign policy:

Perhaps no single analogy has been so often and so perniciously invoked as “Munich.” (How many remember what actually happened?) The Munich Conference of September 1938 was the culmination of Anglo-French attempts to anticipate or accept Hitler's demands, to recognize the "injustices" visited upon Germany at Versailles, and to make efforts above all to avoid another war. Some proponents of appeasement — members of the ruling classes, ill-guided conservatives who hoped to preserve their own power—may have had a sneaking admiration for the decisive leader as the great anti-Bolshevik shield. Meanwhile, the European left and a few realistic conservatives (Winston Churchill is the heroic example) insisted that Hitler aimed for European hegemony and that only resolute will and the threat of force could stop him. To label American critics of an escalating involvement in Vietnam or Iraq as “appeasers” or proponents of "Munich" is dangerous nonsense, all the more so because the analogy may obscure the actual dangers that confront the United States.

The bulk of the essay is a discussion of German Emperor Wilhelm II ("Kaiser Bill") and his leadership in the First World War and the runup to it. As he points out, Kaiser Bill's effective power decreased greatly during the war:

After three years of unimaginable carnage, Wilhelm had been reduced to an instrument of a military dictatorship run by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff, whom he had been forced to appoint and whose virtually unlimited power rested on their ever present threats of resignation. They enjoyed the confidence of Germany’s ruling classes and were determined to reject all compromise, always putting their faith in one more push that would deliver the ever elusive goal of total victory.

Abdicating his throne at the insistence of Ludendorff in November 1918, he continued to be a destructive (if then minor) figure in German history:

The Kaiser finally went into exile in the Netherlands — not by his will, but because the army leaders insisted that he go. As he left, he blamed "Ludendorff, Bethmann, and Tirpitz for having lost the war," a triumvirate itself consumed by hatred of one another. Until his death in exile in 1941, the Kaiser spread venomous poison where he could: The Jews were to blame, as were the socialists—he alone was right. Reflecting and encouraging the sentiments of all too many Germans, he saw in Hitler the new man chosen by providence, a savior after the treachery that had caused Germany’s defeat.

Tags: deutschland, germany