Kaiser and Fuhrer: A Comparative Study of Personality and Politics (review)

Waite’s comparative psychobiographical study of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler seeks both the similarities and differences between the leaders of Germany’s last two empires. According to Waite, for each, rulership “served the therapeutic function of enabling him to avoid . . . psychic disintegration by indulging his need for grandiosity and power,” but “Adolf Hitler was fundamentally an evil person and the Kaiser, for all his faults, was not” (347). Waite, the hopeful rationalist, concludes that Hitler’s regime “could not endure because it was built on the treacherous sands of duplicity, deceit, and degradation” (347).

Waite builds his book on the basis of his earlier psychobiography of Hitler, The Psychopathic God (New York, 1977), and extensive primary and secondary source material on the Kaiser. For the latter, he is especially reliant on Thomas Kohut’s psychohistorical study Wilhelm II and the Germans (New York, 1991). As in his previous book on Hitler, Waite amasses an impressive amount of eclectic reading in the psychoanalytic literature.

In this book, Waite attempts to combine the Freudian approach reproduced from The Psychopathic God with the self psychology of psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut. Although this pairing is generally effective (there is a helpful discussion of the relevant distinctions between narcissistic and borderline personalities), Waite does not address the differences between the two theories. For example, the Freudian link between homosexuality and paranoia upon which Waite founds much of his analysis is at a variance with the self psychological view of the psychodynamics of (homo)sexuality. Along the same lines, it is surprising that Waite cites Pflanze’s article on Otto von Bismarck, based on the “character armor” research of Wilhelm Reich, but he ignores Pflanze’s complete reworking of the analysis on the basis of self psychology in the second edition of Bismarck and the Development of Germany (Princeton, 1990).¹ ‘It is also troubling that on occasion, Waite has failed to correct earlier errors in his Hitler book. Once again, for instance, we read of “Max de Crensis” (263) and not Max de Crinis, the real Nazi psychiatrist who has been the subject of not inconsiderable mention in recent historical literature about Hitler and the Third Reich.

Waite rightly decries reductionism in psychohistorical studies, and he by and large avoids it. There is also a nice fit between the analysis of Hitler’s psychopathology and Waite’s argument for the mix of “personalist” intention and “structuralist” indirection in Nazi governance and policy. Although Waite emphasizes biography, his work also occasionally addresses broader historical and historiographical issues in a way that underscores the importance of taking the irrational, the subjective, and the unconscious in history seriously. It is all the more disappointing, therefore, that the structure of Kaiser and Führer sometimes tends to bury such nuggets instead of highlighting them.

The book’s first chapters start compellingly with historical material from its subjects’ adult lives, but the inclusion of much of the psychohistorical analysis in the last two chapters (“Psychological Dimensions”; “Kaiser and Führer: The Childhood Experience”) and in eight addenda scatters the material, lessens the reader’s attention, and reduces the book’s impact. Given his unique attempt at a comparative psychobiography using two major psychoanalytic approaches, combined with the work of other psychoanalysts and psychohistorians, Waite could have made an even greater contribution to the (psycho)historical literature through a comprehensive methodological introduction or conclusion aimed especially at scholars and students.