Volume 35, Number 2 · February 18, 1988
The Kaiser and the Kritik
By Gordon A. Craig
Kaiser, Hof und Staat: Wilhlem II und die deutsche Politik
by John C.G. Röhl
Verlag C.H. Beck, 262 pp., DM39.80
Max Weber and German Politics: 1890–1920
by Wolfgang J. Mommsen, translated by Michael S. Steinberg
University of Chicago Press, 498 pp., $50.00
Max Weber zur Politik im Weltkrieg: Schriften und Reden, 1914–1918 (Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung 1, Band 15)
edited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen, in collaboration with Gangolf Hübner
Verlag J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 864 pp.
Max Weber and his Contemporaries
edited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen, edited by Jürgen Osterhammel
The German Historical Institute and Allen and Unwin (London), 591 pp., $50.00
In the early 1920s at regular intervals the Sunday illustrated supplements used to print photographs of an energetic-looking elderly gentleman with aggressively pointed mustaches, wearing a Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers, and stout boots and standing in front of a pile of logs. He was generally accompanied by a group of well-fleshed men of his own age, some in frock coats, others in shirt sleeves, with one of the latter rather sheepishly holding either an ax or a crosscut saw. The caption usually read 'The Woodcutter of Doorn.' I was puzzled by the recurrence, with slight variations, of this awkward group portrait and also by the exclamations of anger and the derisive snorts of 'Kaiser Bill!' that it elicited when I showed it to my elders, but, long before I had come to understand that the gentleman with the mustaches was the late emperor of Germany, the newspapers had lost interest in him, and his picture stopped appearing.
Review, 5595 words
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