Kaiser Wilhelm's All Quiet On The Western Front

World War 1 was caused largely by Kaiser Wilhelm’s war-mongering actions in the 1890s and early 1900s. Throughout his time as the kaiser, he attempted to disrupt alliances, challenged world powers, and influence smaller countries with his beliefs. The kaiser only appears once, briefly, in All Quiet on the Western Front, to inspect soldiers and hand out iron crosses. Despite that fact, he is still an important aspect of the novel because without his actions that actively encouraged war, World War 1 would likely not have happened. Wilhelm II was born in 1859 to Emperor Frederick II and Victoria, the daughter of QUeen Victoria. He was born with a damaged left arm, and the limb never fully grew. Many have speculated that his disability was part

His presence in the book takes up only about two paragraphs, and he says nothing, he justs inspects the soldiers and hands out the iron crosses. However, after the kaiser leaves, Paul and his friends take a moment to discuss him and his presence at the camp, and Albert says, “But what I would like to know is whether there would have been a war if the Kaiser had said No.” And Paul responds, saying that he’s sure that there would have been, because the Kaiser had been against the war from the beginning. But then Tjaden wonders how a war gets started in the first place, and Albert responds with, “Mostly by one country badly offending another.” This is significant to the overall story and to the Kaiser’s role in it, because we learn that the Kaiser has been, or says he has been, against the war from the start. Despite the fact that he said he was against the war, in all of his time as the Kaiser leading up to the war, he made political moves that were almost obviously advocating for a war. As a man who had grown up, raised by leaders, and supplied with the best academic and military education he could get, he must have known that eventually his actions would lead to war. So clearly he must have thought that Germany and his leadership skills were stronger than the other countries’, and when he realized they weren’t he had to tell his country that he was against the war in order to save face. The soldiers in All Quiet on the Western Front even make a good point about why the war happened in the first place, and why the Kaiser didn’t seem to do much to stop it. Kat says, “Every full-grown emperor requires at least one war, otherwise he would not become famous.” That would be why the Kaiser had tried to start the war in the first place, for fame and