Wilhelm II (1859-1941)

Nearly twenty years ago, I reviewed Young Wilhelm, John Röhl’s extraordinarily detailed book about the early life of Kaiser Wilhelm II.  Now, in the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, perhaps it’s an apt time to revisit this story for this blog.

Born on 27 January 1859, Wilhelm was the eagerly anticipated first grandson of Queen Victoria and equally anxiously awaited heir to the Kingdom of Prussia.  Rejoicing was widespread through England and Germany.  Queen Victoria wrote to a German friend “we are proud and happy that it is our child who has given this son to your country”.

However, the birth itself was highly traumatic for all concerned, because the future Kaiser was in a breech position in the womb.  18 year old Princess Vicky went through terrible suffering for 13 hours before chloroform was applied by Sir James Clark, Queen Victoria’s personal physician who had been sent over to Berlin for the birth.  The Royal baby was turned forcefully, and manipulated by the arms in order to be delivered: he suffered a lack of oxygen for about eight minutes during the end stages of the labour, and after birth had to be revived by a series of slaps from the midwife.

As a child, Wilhelm was hyperactive, and possibly minimally brain damaged.  His left arm was paralyzed as a result of the violence of his birth, and was 15 cm shorter than his right.  Sigmund Freud considered that Princess Vicky had deprived her child of her love because of his affliction, and that this resulted in the Kaiser’s personality problems.    Yet the evidence suggests that Vicky, like many parents of disabled children, had mixed emotions – hope, pride, depression, helplessness and desperation.   Both parents seem to have been loving towards their child.  However, perhaps because of extensive medical treatments, Wilhelm did not form a close bond to his mother and later felt that she had not been sufficiently supportive and loving.

Blaming his English mother may have been a convenient move for later German historians seeking to excuse their militarist monarch.  It was more likely that the blame lay with the corrective treatments that were attempted in order to improve the strength and function of his withered arm.  Röhl concludes that, though administered with the best of intentions, they amounted to child abuse.  One method was to insert the boy’s paralysed arm into a freshly killed hare for a so-called “animal bath”.  Another was to tie up the healthy right arm, to try and force him to use his left arm.  His mother recorded how “fretful and cross and violent and passionate” the two year old would become.  As he neared the age of four, he was noted to have a twist in his neck, as if he was turning away from the impaired arm that was such a source of psychological stress for the whole family.  Now he was put in a machine designed to straighten the neck by force.  At the age of six, the tendon on his neck muscle was cut.  Next, it was noticed that he could not straighten his left arm: another operation was threatened, but instead an “arm-stretching machine” was used, together with exercises.  Another approach was daily electrotherapy, but by the age of ten, Wilhelm was so unhappy about these bouts of treatment that it was discontinued.  In all, the poor boy had twelve years of cruel and ineffective treatment.

Wilhelm’s parents had liberal ideas, and tried to bring him up as an Anglophile.  But the tutor he was given from the age of six seems to have been rather brutal, forcing him to learn to ride, on the instructions of the Crown Princess.   Wilhelm was also shaped by the militarist Prusssian society in which he found himself.  He grew to respect a more autocratic approach than the more consensual English style of constitutional monarchy which his mother tried to impart.  When he joined a Guards regiment at the age of 21, he found his natural home among the society of soldiers.

On the death of Kaiser Wilhelm I, Wilhelm’s father only ruled for 99 days before dying of throat cancer.   In 1888, Wilhelm II acceded to the throne at the age of 29.  He rejected Chancellor Bismark’s cautious approach to foreign policy.  In 1890, he dismissed the old Chancellor completely, considering him a “boorish old killjoy”.  Wilhelm exerted more control himself, rather than leaving policy to his Chancellors.  Some of this was beneficial – such as his reforms to the rather traditional Prussian educational system.  Much of it was not – such as his desire to build up a strong navy.

Wilhelm was insecure, unstable, impatient, and lacked focus and direction.  He was arrogant and obnoxious, particularly with his English relatives.  Though he was related to most of the monarchs of Europe, he did not like them, nor they him.  However, he was anxious for his grandmother’s approval, and went to be at her bedside when Queen Victoria was dying in 1901.

Wilhelm was prone to imperialist rhetoric – such as his speech evoking the memory of Attila the Hun when sending troops off to help suppress the Boxer rebellion in China.  He regularly made diplomatic faux pas, such as a disastrous 1908 interview with the Daily Telegraph in which he managed to alienate not only the English – whom he called “ mad, mad, mad as March hares” - but also the French, Russians and Japanese.

All of this, particularly the German military build-up gives a sense of tragic inevitability to the events leading up to the First World War.  But as recent historical accounts have shown, Austria and other countries were also very much to blame.  After the war started, Wilhelm did not play a leading role in German policy. When it finished with the defeat of German and the loss of ten million lives, Wilhelm abdicated and went into exile in the neutral Netherlands, where he died on 4 June 1941.  He had hoped that Hitler would revive the monarchy.  But the Fuhrer blamed the Kaiser for the humiliations of the First World War and kept him at arm’s length.

Wilhelm was not a terrible monarch because he was disabled.  But his impairment did affect his personality, particularly due to the appalling medical treatment he endured, his strained relationship with his mother and hence his dislike of the English, and the arrogant strain in his personality which resulted from his insecurities.

Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948)

“here, with a smile, comes to meet you the very simplicity of a non-dogmatic human being, and the undisguised warmth of his rebellious yet constructive life”

Kurt Schwitters, born to a prosperous middle-class family in Hanover in June 1887, was a unique and subversive individual, who contributed to Surrealism and Dada and Constructivism, who made work as a painter and sculptor and poet, and who pioneered installation art and performance art.   

Why is Kurt Schwitters relevant to a disability blog?  First, because he developed epilepsy as a child, and second, because of his deteriorating health at the end of his life.  According to the biography by Gwendolen Webster, Schwitters’ epilepsy first became evident when he was 14.  He had made a miniature landscape in the garden of his parents’ cottage complete with a hill and a pond, together with roses and strawberries, but local boys destroyed it before his eyes, at which point he had his first seizure.  His epilepsy was very distressing to him, with attacks lasting for up to five hours:

“He could generally sense the approach of a seizure, and the symptoms became obvious to ayone who knew him well.  First he would become nervous and irritable, and complain of a blinding headache.  His head, shoulder and arms would jerk uncontrollably until he collapsed.  As he lost consciousness, he would utter a series of terrible snorts, shrieks and cries, all the time hammering at the surface he lay on with clenched fists.   If he could manage to swallow a tumbler of diluted tincture of valerian before hand this would allay the symptoms to some extent.  When the seizure was over he would fall into a deep sleep for up to sixteen hours.” (Webster, 1997, 7)

The seizures became more frequent, with up to two every day.  As a result of the condition, he missed a year’s schooling, meaning that he was 21 before he finally matriculated.  Epilepsy may also have made him more shy and introverted.  He was described as having a perpetual frown, and of being immersed in a world of his own: literature, music and art became very important to him.  But this did not stop him becoming unofficially engaged to Helma Fischer, an unassuming local girl, who was working as a governess and became one of the two women who were to support him throughout his life.  As a friend was to say later,

“Helma Schwitters deserves a special monument for her unfailingly patient and dedicated attitude to her husband, who laid claim to everything around him.” (Webster, 1997, 109).

She helped him cope with his seizures, and he would try always to take her with him when he went on journeys, for example.  However, she also had difficulties, such as rheumatoid arthritis, which increasingly meant she would be unable to join him in his passion for dancing.  She was also extremely shy, which must have made the gregarious artistic circles rather difficult for her.

Epilepsy  meant that when war broke out in 1914, Schwitters was exempted from service and stayed home in Hanover.  He and Helma married in October 1915, and lived on the second floor of his parents’ house.  At this time, he was studying art in Hanover and elsewhere.  Initially, his style was rather uninteresting and conservative.   In 1916, all adult men were called up, and he was sent to the Wulfel ironworks as a technical draughtsman.  He began new abstract drawings inspired by machines.  The following year, came the tragic death of Kurt and Helma’s first son Gerd, who only lived for 8 days in an incubator.  Together with his association with the Kestner Society of artists in Hannover, this seems to have precipitated a turning point, as seen in the works “Mourning woman” and “Suffering” which he exhibited that year.  Schwitters

“began to stand back from himself and his narrow world by means of abstraction…he  began to see art not as a front behind which he could conceal himself but as a means of self-expression.” (Webster, 1997, 30). 

He began to write and recite poetry in the Expressionist style.    Particularly after he joined the Hanover Succession group of avant garde artists, unconventional behaviour became acceptable – which included his epilepsy.  Either because he had found creative fulfilment, or because he felt he was with like-minded people, after this his seizures began to diminish.  The war was a turning point in modern art:  “Everything had broken down,” said Schwitters; “new things had to be made out of fragments.”  Hence his famous collages.

Schwitters’ career as an artist in Hanover and Berlin flourished after his one man show in  Berlin’s Dr Sturm gallery in 1919.  He went on to make contributions to the Dada movement, with his collages, an approach known as Merz (from the word Commerz in an advert incorporated into the first of his collages), and with his performances and particularly Ursonate  - poems recited for their musical qualities rather than their meaning.  His work was so pioneering that critics thought he was mentally ill and mocked him.  This did not prevent him becoming influential in European and American art circles.  In the late 1920s, he also had success as a typographer.    From 1923 onwards, Schwitters was developing an elaborate installation in the family home in Hanover, which he named the Merzbau: room after room was converted into a grotto-like sculptural environment, which he originally described as a Cathedral of Erotic Misery.  It contained unlikely items such as friends’ underwear and a bottle of his urine.

At this time, Schwitters was actually rather healthy, although he was also obsessed with his health. He took his stock of medicines with him in a suitcase wherever he went, adding to them rather than discarding any, and ended up with a huge stock of remedies.    Although by now he was only having about one seizure a year, the Nazi hostility to disabled people – as shown by their eugenic policy and anti-disability propaganda – scared him, because he worried he would be confined to an asylum.   The Nazis would include him in their exhibitions of Entarte Kunst (Degenerate Art) which toured Germany from 1933.

Alongside the Entarte Kunst exhibitions, aware of growing hostility towards Jewish friends and other artists, and now hearing that the Gestapo wanted to “interview” him, Schwitters and his son left for Norway in 1937, leaving Helma behind in Hanover to look after the family property.  In Norway, he built another Merzbau in his garden, near Oslo.  Helma came several times to visit her family.  But after Schwitters left Norway for Britain in June 1940, he was never to see his wife again.

On arrival in Britain, Schwitters joined the thousands of other refugees who were interned as enemy aliens.   Aged 53, he was to endure nearly 18 months of miserable conditions in Edinburgh, York, Bury and finally the Isle of Man.  These conditions and the anxiety of internment exacerbated his epilepsy, and  his health deteriorated from now on.  However, he continued making art, painting portraits of camp staff and other inmates, and making possibly the world’s first porridge sculptures.  He became a celebrated and much loved inmate, for quirks like his habit of leaning out of a window to bark like a dog every evening before retiring to bed.   His compatriots would learn his Ursonates and for in years to come, any reunion of inmates would include recitations.

After release, Schwitters moved to London, where he struggled to survive and continue making art.  His health was not good, with symptoms of breathlessness and high blood pressure.   However, he was now part of a wider artistic community again, and he was also receiving food parcels from admirers in America – which also gave him materials for new collages (apparently he also enjoyed using Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts wrappers).  A fantastic exhibition at Tate Britain in 2013 showed the work Schwitters made at the end of his life in Britain.   

In London he met a young neighbour, a telephonist called Edith Thomas, whom he nicknamed Wantee (because she was always offering him cups of tea) and who called him Jumbo (because he was so tall).  She was to remain his companion throughout the rest of his life.

The end of the war was to bring depressing news: not only was his beloved wife Helma dead from cancer, but also his Mertzbau installations were destroyed in Allied bombing raids.  Nor was Schwitters allowed to emigrate to America.  Instead, in summer 1945, he and Wantee moved to the Lake District, where the mountains reminded him of Norway.    Schwitters and Wantee endured a comically severe landlady, but made friends with many locals, and he painted portraits again to gain an income, and made his own work, inspired by the landscape.  However, his health was steadily worsening. He suffered two strokes, a severe haemorrhage, broke his leg, and was several times near death. 

Despite this, in March 1947, he decided to recreate the Merzbau in a local barn, financed by a grant of $1000 from MoMA in NY.   After the destruction of so much of his work, he was determined to leave something for posterity.  As colder, damper weather set in during late 1947, this work became more and more difficult.    Schwitters could by now only work for 3 hours a day.  Even so, he wouldn’t stop to allow a window and a floor to be put in to make the barn more comfortable, saying “There is so little time, there is so little time.”   

As the days became shorter, he worked on by candlelight.  In early November, he passed out and hit his head on a piece of stone on the floor, which left him with head wound and two black eyes.  He was heartened to receive the good news that he would shortly become a British citizen, finally allowing him to travel abroad again.  In December, he had trouble breathing on the way back from the Cinema in Windermere, but he still went to the barn to work.   He collapsed again, and was taken to Kendal Hospital, where he finally died on 8 January 1948.

Kurt Schwitters died in obscurity, aside from the appreciation of his friends and fellow artists.  But nevertheless, Schwitters had confidence that he was a great artist, and that he would one day be rediscovered and celebrated, as has indeed come to pass.  His Merzbarn was moved to the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, and he has became one of the most influential twentieth century artists.  Naum Gabo said

“It needs a poet like Schwitters to show us that unobserved elements of beauty are strewn and spread all around us, and we can find them everywhere in the portentous as well as in the insignificant, if only we care to look… to me, his collages are a constant source of joy.” (Webser, 1997, 395)

Kurt Schwitters’ own final message was this:

“If you people of the future really want to do me a special favour, then try to appreciate the most important artists of your time. It’s more important for you and more pleasurable to me than if you discover me at a time when I have long been discovered.” (Webster, 1997, 401)

Further reading

Webster Gwendolen.  Kurt Merz Schwitters: a biographical study.  University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1997.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

"O you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you & I would have ended my life — it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me."

One of the acknowledged masterpieces of romantic music is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which finishes with the great Ode to Joy, Schiller’s verses about international harmony set to a memorable and moving tune.  Even when poorly played, as when I saw it recently at Geneva’s Victoria Hall, it’s an amazing work of great power, requiring an enlarged orchestra and several choirs.  Yet when it was premiered on 7 May 1824 to a tumultuous reception, it is said that Beethoven, his back to the audience, had to be turned around to see the applause which he had been unable to hear, being totally deaf by this point in his life.

Born in Bonn, he was the son and grandson of musicians, and was soon recognized as having innate talent himself.  His upbringing was chaotic, his mother died, and his father's music teaching was brutal.  Because his father was also a feckless drunk, Beethoven looked after his two younger brothers and supplemented the family income by playing in the court orchestra.   By 13, he had published two sonatas and attracted support from the Elector of  Bonn.   Thanks to this assistance, in 1792 Beethoven went to Vienna to study with Haydn.  He quickly established a reputation as a piano virtuoso, and from 1795 began publishing his own compositions, soon earning enough from them to cover his living expenses.  After 1800 there followed the works of his middle period, known as his “Heroic” period, which comprised the great symphonies, piano sonatas, the violin concerto and the opera Fidelio.

But aged 26, at exactly the same time as his career began to took off, Beethoven began to lose his hearing.  As he explained to a friend: "I must confess that I lead a miserable life. For almost two years I have ceased to attend any social functions, just because I find it impossible to say to people: I am deaf. If I had any other profession, I might be able to cope with my infirmity; but in my profession it is a terrible handicap."  He was not just hard of hearing, he also suffered from tinnitus, a perpetual and distracting ringing in his ears.   No wonder that his first thoughts were of suicide, as he explained in letters to his brother.  In the Heiligenstadt testament, written on 6 October 1802, he talks about his loneliness: 

"O how harshly was I repulsed by the doubly sad 
experience of my bad hearing, and yet it was impossible for 
me to say to men speak louder, shout, for I am deaf." 

But he changed his mind, and decided instead to dedicate his life to music: he had seven more symphonies to come at this point in his career.  After 1811, he never played in public, and by 1814 he was totally deaf, unable to hear either music or speech.

A side effect of Beethoven’s deafness is that more is known of his everyday life than of those of his contemporaries.   If you wanted to talk to Beethoven, you wrote down your questions or comments in a bound volume – a Conversation Book – of which 400 were known to have been filled in, although 264 were later destroyed.   The surviving Conversation Books give a unique insight into his discussions with friends and colleagues.

Beethoven seems to have been a rather irascible character.  He refused to play if people were not paying attention.  He had no respect for rank.  The Archduke Rupert was forced to announce that the usual rules of court etiquette did not apply to Beethoven.  But nevertheless, Beethoven had a close circle of devoted friends who supported him.  He fell in love with aristocratic ladies on several occasions, but unfortunately as a commoner he had no hope of marrying one of them.

In the years after 1816, Beethoven was sick and produced little.  But he recovered, and another period of amazing creativity followed, partly influenced by renewed study of Baroque masters such as Bach and Handel.  In this last phase of his career, he composed the late string quartets, Missa Solemnis, Diabelli Variations, and the Ninth Symphony – all while completely unable to hear a note.

From 1825, when he was completing the string quartets, Beethoven was again seriously ill.  He died on 26 March 1827, following hepatitis.  His funeral was attended by 20,000 people, among then Franz Schubert, who was one of the torchbearers and who was himself to die the following year.  Ludwig van Beethoven's life may have been frustrating and troubled, but his work puts him into the first rank of composers, alongside Bach and Mozart.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

"To discover relationships and similarities between things that no one else sees. Wit can in this way lead to invention"

The aphorism is the one pleasure in life where less is always more. I have always liked this literary form, which R.J.Hollingdale tells us must be brief, must be isolated, must be witty, and must be philosophical. Although the aphorism has a central place in French thought - consider Pascal or La Rochefoucauld - my favourite aphorists are German: Friedrich Nietszsche, Karl Kraus, Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. But the first place is reserved for the man who pioneered the aphorism in Germany, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who was also that country's first professor of experimental physics.

Born in Oberramstadt, the youngest of the seventeen offspring of a Lutheran clergyman, Lichtenberg was a weak and sickly child. He grew up with a malformation of the spine, perhaps due to tuberculosis, which made him a hunchback. He explained,

“My head lies at least a foot closer to my heart than is the case with other men: that is why I am so reasonable.”

During his life he had a multitude of real and imagined ailments, leading him to suggest:

"If Heaven should find it useful and necessary to produce a new edition of me and my life I would like to make a few not superfluous suggestions for this new edition chiefly concerning the design of the frontispiece and the way the work is laid out.”

Despite all this, he had many romances. His private life was unusual, and remarked on by his neighbours and contemporaries. For several years he lived with the teenage daughter of a weaver. After she died aged 18, he then took up with a washerwoman's daughter, with whom he had seven children, and whom he eventually married. But as he said

"Every man also has his moral backside, which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum"

Like another hunchbacked hero of mine, Antonio Gramsci, Lichtenberg jotted his thoughts into a series of notebooks, which he called "Waste Books":

"Tradesmen have their 'waste book' in which they enter from day to day everything they buy and sell, everything all mixed up without any order to it, from there it is transferred to the day-book, where everything appears in more systematic fashion ... This deserves to be imitated by scholars. First a book where I write down everything as I see it or as my thoughts put it before me, later this can be transcribed into another, where the materials are more distinguished and ordered."

However, Lichtenberg never published his approximately 4000 observations, of which perhaps the most famous is

"To err is human also in so far as the animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so."

Nor did he create his own system of philosophy. However, his writing is perpetually stimulating and insightful. As Goethe said of him;

"We may use Lichtenberg's writings as the most wonderful dowsing rod: wherever he makes a joke, there a problem lies hidden."

One Lichtenberg aphorism, taken daily after breakfast, would be the dietary supplement I would prescribe to stimulate thought and ward off boredom.

Lichtenberg's career was spent as a mathematician and physicist at the University of Göttingen, where his lecture-demonstrations were immensely popular. I was delighted to learn that his students included Novalis, the German romantic poet immortalised by Penelope Fitzgerald in The Blue Flower. After teaching several young English aristocrats, Lichtenbeg was invited to visit Britain, after which he became an ardent Anglophile.

While in England, Lichtenberg became a great favourite of the King and Queen: it is said that on one occasion King George III (who was of course German himself), caused a great excitement by coming to Lichtenberg's lodging at 10am one morning and asking to see "Herr Professor" to continue their fascinating conversations.

In London, Lichtenberg marvelled at the acting of Garrick, and wrote a book which described Hogarth's engravings in meticulous detail. He shared Hogarth's fascination with people's behaviour and interactions: he has been described as a "spy on humanity."

Back home, Lichtenberg conducted scientific research into astronomy, electricity, and lightning:

"That sermons are preached in churches doesn’t mean the churches don’t need lightning rods.”

Among his experiments, he noticed and described the electrostatic principle that would lead to the invention of the photocopier 150 years later. The great Alessandro Volta paid him a visit to discuss electricity in 1784. But although elected Fellow of the Royal Society, Lichtenberg made no significant scientific discoveries himself, writing:

"I would have given part of my life to know what the average height of the barometer was in Paradise."

Aside from his disability, and his writing, I relate to Georg Christoph because he was as much a procrastinator, as a polymath: he never got around to writing his novel either. His little asides often anticipate other people's advances - as when he considers whether blind people might read letters with their fingers. Typically, although he probably was the first conceiver of the hydrogen balloon, he never got around to trying it out. Perhaps his lasting impact on the world was his proposal of what is now the standard paper size system (A3, A4, A5 etc). His Aphorisms deserve to be more widely known:

"Let him who has two pairs of trousers turn one of them into cash and purchase this book."

Further reading

Lichtenberg GC, Aphorisms, edited by RJ Hollingdale, Penguin Classics, 1990.

Stern JP, Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions, 1959.