GUGLIELMO II, emperor of GERMANIA and king of PRUSSIA. — Born on 27 January 1859 in Potsdam, died on 4 June 1941 in Doorn (Netherlands). Son of Frederick III of Prussia and Vittoria Adelaide Maria Luisa, he became king of Prussia and emperor of Germany upon his father’s death in 1888. Having ascended the throne, he soon found himself in conflict with Bismarck, whose excessive autonomy in conducting the Empire’s domestic and foreign policy he could not tolerate, owing to his own egocentric conception of kingship.
The Emperor and the Iron Chancellor clashed violently above all on two points. In domestic policy, G. intended to issue various social measures and did not wish to renew the anti-Socialist law—intentions that were unwelcome to Bismarck. In foreign policy, the skillful diplomatic edifice constructed by the Chancellor to secure Russia’s friendship for Germany (the so-called Reinsurance Treaty of 1887) was not fully appreciated by the Emperor and was considered incompatible with the commitments toward the powers that, together with Germany, constituted the Triple Alliance. Cooperation between the Emperor and his Chancellor proved increasingly difficult: in March 1890 Bismarck was forced to resign. The failure to renew the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia favored the alliance between St. Petersburg and Paris. The rash statements often made by the Emperor on the occasion of speeches and newspaper interviews also alarmed England, which feared German expansionism. These fears were reinforced both by the construction of a powerful navy, undertaken by Tirpitz, and by the interest shown by Germany in Africa and Turkey (the Berlin–Baghdad railway), as well as by the open sympathy shown toward the Boers fighting against England in 1899. These attitudes influenced, and in a certain sense determined, the outbreak of the First World War. Of absolutist inclinations, G. did not revoke, although he had promised to do so, the three-class electoral system in Prussia, and he disregarded the motion for peace approved by the Reichstag in 1917. At the end of the war he abdicated and took refuge in the Netherlands, where he remained in exile until his death. During G.’s reign, the condition of the Catholic Church improved substantially. The remaining laws of the Kulturkampf were gradually abolished. In 1904 the law against the Jesuits was also partially revoked.