re: #243 The Ghost of a Flea

It would be hard to tease out what parts of his eccentricity were heritable traits and what were developed as a consequence of his upbringing.

They did absolutely insane stuff to him as a kid as part of “medical” treatment to make his short arm normal—at one point, a treatment was sticking his arm in a freshly-killed horse, I shit you not. But on top of that he was brought up in the Prussian military tradition and went through all the discipline and hazing that was just considered a normal aspect of making a German noble….you know, the old “isolate and brutalize the boy-children to make them martial.”

His upbringing was essentially a political football. Bismarck feared the liberal influence of his parents (his mother was a daughter of Queen Victoria) once his father became Kaiser. So he tried to influence the young prince against his parents, liberalism, etc. etc. And Bismarck essentially helped create a autocratic monster who believed in monarchial absolutism, Prussian superiority, and militarism. Of course, said autocrat was not going to stand by as a figurehead monarch to let the chancellor run things like his grandfather had so Bismarck was sent packing soon after Wilhelm came to power.

An interesting what-if would have been what happened if cancer had not killed Wilhelm’s father when it did. A longer reign there might have had some interesting European political ramifications.