The German Question, Part Eighty-Three

"Kaiser Wilhelm & World War I" Part Two/M "The Germans At War"
"The Kaiser After The War"

This will be the last part in this section, and I'm only doing it to sort of tidy up a bit before I move on. Next I'll deal with the very important peace treaties and post-war activities. If you thought the Austrians were now out of the "German" picture, they're not, as they are about to re-enter the "German Question."

Kaiser Wilhelm II fled to the Netherlands and lived in the city of Doorn, where he became something of a country squire. The Kaiser chose to remain in residence there, as Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands would not agree to his extradition, in spite of repeated calls to prosecute Wilhelm for not honoring the treaty with neutral Belgium. It wasn't long before Wilhelm was blaming others, like Jews, for his abdication and the German defeat. In a terrible portent of the Nazi era, he expressed the desire for German Jews to be destroyed and even mentioned a method to do so....gas. Later, however, when the Nazis took power, Wilhelm, still in the Netherlands, retreated from some of his extreme views, perhaps mellowing as his rule grew more distant in time, and perhaps too, because he learned of Nazi thuggery early on. Wilhelm disagreed with the persecution of Germany's Jews during the 1930s (that is, prior to the gas chambers), even admonishing one of his sons for his support of such, and declaring that the persecutions made him "ashamed to be German." Unfortunately, Wilhelm returned to his more extreme views not long before his death, seeing Jewish persecutions as a backlash against Jews for trying to rule the world. No mention of the maniac in power in Germany then. Talk about trying to rule the world!

Early on, Wilhelm seems to have believed Germans would demand a return of the monarchy, but once Hitler came to power, he realized the Nazis and Hitler would never agree to that. He promised never to return to his homeland until the monarchy was restored, and he kept that promise.

In World War Two, with German armies victorious against France and many other European nations (except Wilhelm's nemesis, England), the former Kaiser died just prior to Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Wilhelm was laid to rest in the Netherlands, where his body still remains to this day.

WORD HISTORY:
Note: In the last installment, I mentioned how Frisian, Low German, and Dutch are closer to modern English than standard German is, due to sound shifts. I just want to clarify, English too has had sound shifts, and grammatical changes, but these took place after Anglo-Saxon was established in England. I "suppose" many English speakers would say that the changes in English have "modernized" the language; I would say it "streamlined" English, as conjugations and grammar became far less complex, although English pronunciation versus spelling confuses the hell out of people trying to learn English. The "ough" of "though" is pronounced like a long "o," but the same "ough" of "tough" is pronounced as if "uff." Throw in the "ough" of "through," and you have a word pronounced like "threw." These kinds of things are enough (there's that "uff") to drive a foreign speaker crazy! Anyway, there is no doubt about it, standard German, for instance, is more similar to the English somewhat before Shakespeare's time. If you have followed the "histories" here, you have probably noted how similar modern German and Dutch words are to the English of those times, and most certainly before, as up until about 1100 A.D., they were all really just dialects of one another. English verbs often ended in "en," just as modern German verbs still do. Germans still use the equivalent "thee," "thou," "thine;" words still familiar to us in English, but not used on an every day basis by most English speakers, unless you belong to certain quaint religious groups. These words are now more confined to old hymns, passages from old Bibles (those not yet put into modern English), or, of course, from Shakespeare or other authors from times now gone by. Further, German grammar is VERY complicated compared to English, something for which English speakers should be thankful, thrust me! The German dialects I mention so often are not standard, and in some cases they have followed some of the simplifications of their English relative, although they still tend to use their forms of "thee" and "thou." With, for example, "thine," still used in standard German as "dein" (pronounced pretty much like English "dine), some German dialects have dropped the "n," giving them the word equivalent to English "thy."

Spitz-This word for a breed of dog is related to "spit" (noun for "skewer, pointed stick or metal used to roast food, especially meat"). It goes back to Old Germanic "spituz," which meant "sharp, pointed." This gave Old High German "spizza," and then "spiz," which then became modern German "spitz," all with the meaning of "pointed, sharp." The dog type, bred in the then German area of Pomerania in the 1800s (perhaps 1700s?), was supposedly so named because of its "pointed" snout. This dog type name was then borrowed into English in the 1840s. The Indo European ancestor of this word is too uncertain for me. Some sources say "spei" was the Indo European root, but that is not universally even accepted as a root, so I'll leave it there. The main thing is, we have the word in English, and we have these wonderful dogs. My dog, "Rocky," aka "Rock," was mainly "Spitz." He died at nearly 16 1/2 years old in August 2006. I miss him EVERY DAY! He was "my boy."