During the Great War scoffing at Germany's absurd-looking, ultraPrussian Kaiser Wilhelm II and questioning his sanity did wonders for Allied morale.
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One hundred years ago this week Sydney's The Globe and Sunday Times War Pictorial hoped "KAISER MAY COMMIT SUICIDE."
"In the case of the Kaiser, says Dr. Neipp, a Swiss scientist, we have a nature exceptionally endowed with intellectual faculties enough to have made him a good officer or public servant if he had been born in private life. But his childhood and youth were passed in the intoxication of the Prussian triumphs of 1866 and 1870, which turned his head until Teutonic pride was cubed in his brain, at the same time that willpower degenerated to such a degree that it was not equal to restraining the abnormal growth of unbridled ambition.
"To do him justice, it must be allowed that this pathological condition of the Kaiser's intelligence is probably due in a great measure to the state of his physical health, arising from hereditary faults. The symptoms of congenital ailments are numerous – one arm atrophied, swellings of the joints and ear trouble. The Kaiser suffers from agonising headaches and frequent insomnia.
"Dr. Neipp concludes that the Kaiser is a hyper-acute slave to caprice, and liable to intermittent attacks of melancholy, madness or dangerous lunacy. The professor is of opinion that the Kaiser will either put an end to himself or finish in an asylum."
