Fleet Street and the Kaiser: British Public Opinion and Wilhelm II

Abstract

The author traces the reactions of the British press to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany between his accession in 1888 and his death in 1941. Rather than concentrating only on the later phases of Germanophobia leading up to and during the First World War, the piece takes a holistic view of the initial popularity of the young Kaiser, who was sometimes held up as a positive example to the perceived indolence of Britain's own Prince of Wales. Fleet Street acknowledged Wilhelm's dynamism and personal charisma, even coining new terms such as ‘kaiserish’. Wilhelm successfully popularized himself by entering his yacht in Cowes Week and attending the death-bed of his grandmother, Queen Victoria. Nevertheless, attempts to cultivate a positive media image backfired in incidents such as the Daily Telegraph Affair of 1908. The deteriorating international situation and perceived militarism of Imperial Germany led to an increasingly bad press for the Kaiser. Using the concept of the ‘representative individual’, the author argues that Wilhelm came to embody both the positive and negative perceived traits of his nation. Nevertheless, despite his attempts as a modernizing populist monarch to manipulate the foreign press, in the end he became its victim. It did not require much official British pressure once the First World War broke out for Fleet Street to attack the Kaiser's personality. Only in death—and in contrast to the new and more virulent threat of National Socialism—were Fleet Street's obituaries kinder to the memory of the Kaiser they had loved to hate.