AN:
Well, *lookie here who´s back with yet another omake*...
This time we are watching the zombified former German Emperor Wilhelm II. from the House of Hohenzollern trying to deal with with his current lot in "life" - and let me tell you one thing:
This omake took a lot outta me
The reason for that was the simple fact that in life and especially before he "got abdicated" ,
Wilhelm II. was not a good man by modern standards.
While not nearly as monstrous as a certain failed painter who came to power in GErmany after him (seriously, those two HATED each other) and while he acted in the sincere belief of serving the best interests of his nation, Wilhelm was still the autocratic ruler of a hegemonic empire with aspirations of German dominance who ordered the "disposal" of indigenious populations and held...
outdated views of certain other beliefs/lifestyles (at least when it behooved him politically - at other times, he acted far more even-keeled towards them).
This coupled with an irascible temper and a nasty case of "Inferiority Complex" left him a very ambivalent character, which begs the question:
How could someone like him ever be someone even close to a "heroic" character or at least someone we could employ with a halfway-clear conscience?
Well, for the sake of this quest I decided to do my level best at portraying him as a deeply broken man who did what he thought was best, but just couldn´t escape from the confines of his upbringing and time. Mind you, I am NOT excusing any of his actions in any form, but maybe explaining why he did what he did can give us and him an idea how to proceed from here.
I hope you´ll be able to enjoy...
Früher war (nicht) mehr Lametta... / Old Man Wilhelm
In a shabby eatery somewhere in Eastern Springfield peddling what they
called "German cuisine" (but what was closer to specifically
Bavarian fare, if anything), an unhealthy-looking man wearing a tattered set of Imperial German regalia that had seen better
years - let alone
days - heaved a weary sigh while sulking at a table in the corner of the
Gasthaus, trying and failing to not mull too much about how far he had fallen since he ascended the throne of his homeland over a century ago.
And truth to be told, His Majesty
Kaiser Wilhelm II. of the German Empire,
King of Prussia, Margrave of Brandenburg, Sovereign and Supreme Duke of Silesia, Grand Duke of the Lower Rhine and Posen, Duke of Saxony, Westphalia and Pomerania, of Lüneburg and Bremen, of Holstein, Schleswig and Lauenburg, Landgrave of Hesse, Prince of East Frisia, Osnabrück and Hildesheim, of Nassau and Fulda, Count of Hohenzollern, Lord of Frankfurt as well as holder of countless more minor titles had fallen far further than most everyone else, including the former owner of
Herrn Simpson´s power plant.
Worst of it all was that in retrospect, most of that fall had at least in part been his own fault.
Succeeding both his ailing father Frederick III. As well as before him his elderly grandfather Wilhelm I. during the
Dreikaiserjahr of 1888, Wilhelm quickly sought to both properly establish Germany as a Great Power in Europe as well as the world at large and to distinguish himself from his father and grandfather as a ruler. To achieve that as quickly and decisively as possible and after one argument too many with the man, he kicked that manipulative old goat von Bismarck from the position of Chancellor to prevent him from puppeteering Wilhelm like he had so obviously done to both previous German monarchs. After that he pushed forth Germany's colonial efforts in the South Pacific and especially Africa as well as massively expanding his navy - both of it to spite his "dear" cousin across the North Sea, the later King George V. of Great Britain.
Thinking of him, Wilhelm once again sighed.
Despite appearances suggesting otherwise, deep down It wasn´t that he
hated his British relatives - if anything, both Wilhelm and his
Großmutter Victoria always had a rather cordial relationship going on including him attending her funeral later on. Her London-ruling descendants on the other hand though never took him seriously at all, with "Uncle Bertie" treating the Kaiser as
just another nephew of his instead of the ruler of another Great Power in Europe, with the old peacock doubtlessly having been riled up by his wife Alexandra as revenge for the Prussian conquest of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark about twenty year before Wilhelms ascension to the throne. Incensed at such arrogance and similar uncourtly behavior exhibited by his fellow monarchs (not to mention that the doctor sent by his grandma to help his birth had proven incompetent enough to cripple the German heir´s arm), Wilhelm grew ever more ruthless in his pursuits of an aggressive stance in foreign politics to show his dear relatives in the other kingdoms as well as the other noteworthy, more minor polities that Germany was there to stay.
And in doing so, he ended up ruining everything.
The Scramble for Africa (with its diplomatic formalization during the Congo Conference of 1884 to `85), the Agadir and Moroccan Crises, the
Bagdadbahn, the League of the Three Emperors, the Boxer rebellion as well as his very own
Hunnenrede afterwards (which in a twist of irony seemed to have inspired the name of the eatery he was currently mulling in, in fact) - no matter which steps Wilhelm took to assert Germany's place in the sun, it all seemed to backfire horribly and only further isolate Germany…just as that old goat had warned him during his resignation (in some of his more petty moments, Wilhelm wondered if Bismarck had somehow
planned for things to implode diplomatically after his departure - after all,
Bismarck always had a plan).
Frustrated at it all and trying to distract himself from his crown´s heavy weight crushing his spirits, the monarch´s eyes came to rest up upon the ravishing tales from the untamed American frontier, where hardy men lived free of the burden of rulership and could just live as they saw fit - him possibly having met the great Annie Oakley at his own coronation and her having shot a lit cigarette out of his mouth might have helped his interest as well, though both his undead state as well his advanced age in life seemed intent on making remembering some things clearly exceedingly difficult at times. True, many of those vagrants were also bloodthirsty butchers who ravaged, burned and pillaged across the countryside with a brutality more befitting their Indian adversaries than civilized Whites such as them, but nonetheless Wilhelm couldn´t help fantasizing how it would feel to ride alongside the likes of Billy the Kid, the James brothers, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Aber ach!,
da lag der Hund begraben, for the arm injury Wilhelm had suffered during his own birth thanks to that
Quacksalber Grandmother Victoria had sent breaking it out of sheer incompetence left him unable to do much of anything requiring both hands, let alone actual riding. So all that remained to him in terms of pastime (what little he could eek out while ruling Germany, at any rate) was to read everything available on "cowboy-ing" as the fires of conflict continued smoldering both on the world at large and in Europe in particular.
On the 28th of June 1914, the match to ignite those fires was lit in earnest as a young Serbian extremist assassinated the Austro-Hungarian heir in Sarajevo.
At first Wilhelm had been loathe to go to war over "some damned foolish thing in the Balkans", as Bismarck had so eerily predicted would engulf the continent soon enough, but after Austria-Hungary had forced the issue in a diplomatic and political
blunder by delivering an admittedly harsh ultimatum to goad Serbia as well as their protector Russia into declaring war on them, he had little choice but to uphold his alliance with the Dual Monarchy and send his people into war against his own extended family. All the talks to his troops how it´d be a short war and they´d be "back by Christmas" shattered like glass all too quickly though, for the supposed "miracle weapon" brought forth by the
Oberste Heeresleitung in the form of the "Schlieffen plan" fell utterly flat in the wake of a drastically more Germanophobic political climate than anticipated and so, his soldiers marching into neutral Belgium to circumvent the powerful French fortifications west of Alsace-Lorraine did nothing for Germany but spur the Brits into declaring war on them and more than doubling the frontlines for what was quickly shaping up to be an utter slog of a "modern" war.
Feeling his bile rise at the memories of what he had allowed to happen, Wilhelm swallowed hard.
When word had reached him about unofficial "truces" between soldiers of both sides to celebrate the Birth of Christ Himself together as fellow Christians, he had been so very tempted to not only allow it but also to use it to open talks to the other rulers - some of which were FAMILY, it deserved repetition - and find a way to cease hostilities in a manner that allowed everyone to save face. But once again his damnable
pride got in the way of sensibility, demanding that they - most of all George, of course - be made to bow before German might and finally accept that he was their equal in the world, damnit!
And with that, he had spit in the face of an opportunity to enter the history books as a man of reason and instead doubled down on consigning a whole generation of good, young men to a gruesome death or at the very least disfigurement in the rat-infested, muddy, gas-choked trenches of this man-made hell on Earth.
To make a long and sordid story slightly less so, with every month past that wasted chance at peace in their time the fighting became more gruesome, the death toll higher and the frontlines more static - to be perfectly frank, the only thing trying to gas fellow Europeans into surrendering achieved in Wilhelm´s mind was that embarrassing instance where maybe 100 half-dead Russians managed to scare 7000 of his men into believing their enemies were the truly dead risen once more from the grave to take revenge against the living (remembering that whole debacle, Wilhelm couldn't help but chuckle mirthlessly at his own sorry state). The two mess-ups weighing heaviest on the risen-again German´s mind though were the whole issue surrounding his decision to double down on unlimited submarine warfare in the wake of the
Kriegsmarine sinking that one British passenger ship as well as that idiot Zimmermann´s telegraph to Mexico forcing the issue some more (really, with overambitious lickspittles like him it was no wonder that the OHL made a power grab and effectively neutered Wilhelm´s political power later into the war) and of course…
Here, Wilhelm shed some tears remembering his single-most damning atrocity on a personal level.
The death of his beloved cousin Tsar Nicholas II. of Russia as well as his entire family at the hand of Lenin and his band of Socialist butcherers.
To this day Wilhelm utterly despised himself for letting that Red Devil loose onto his own cousin´s people, but the utter stagnation on the Eastern Front coupled with the US smashing their own fresh troops against the fatigued Western Front made such a callous move seem
needed to relieve his troops and so the Kaiser gave his okay to unleash those godless Leftist bastards on an unsuspecting, already-wounded Russia.
No longer able to hold in his bottomless grief, the German bit out "
Ich wollte doch nur, dass diese roten Hunde dich dazu bringen, dich aus dem Krieg zurückzuziehen…aber doch nicht, dass sie dich und deine Familie abschlachten wie Vieh… bitte verzeih mir, Nicki - wo auch immer du bist…"
"Sir? Are you alright?"
Suddenly, Wilhelm was stirred out of his depression momentarily by a voice full of worry and looked up from his half-eaten meal, looking into the eyes of a rather plain-looking waitress.
Quickly nodding as to ease the poor woman´s worries, the former German Emperor with a slight smile.
"It's nothing,
Fräulein - just an old man lamenting one too many of his countless failures costing him far too dearly"
"Well," she replied, trying to break the ice. " If it makes you feel better, I know quite a bit about failures. Penny for your thoughts?"
Sighing, yet humoring the woman´s genuine kindness, Wilhelm asked ,"Have you ever unwittingly gotten your favorite relative and his own family killed during…
nun, let´s call it `an
disastrously belligerent family squabble´ and leave it at that, shall we?"
At that, the waitress visibly balked, struggling for words before composing herself again.
"My god, that's horrible - and here I thought shooting my brother-in-law on the lower back during a hunting trip was bad…definitely was for him, given how
sore he´d been for weeks afterwards," she finished with a little smirk.
Blinking and then smiling at the seemingly deliberate pun, Wilhelm nodded gratefully.
"Thank you for trying to cheer up an old man, Miss - but if you don't mind, I'd like to be alone with my thoughts again for a little longer."
"Sure. Can I get you something else?"
"Now that you mention it,
Fräulein: I have not yet had the pleasure of experiencing one of these `doggy bags´ you can apparently order at eateries these days"
After the waitress explained the nature of this foreign concept to Wilhelm with a giggle (apparently it simply was a coy way of asking to take any leftovers home with you - why anyone would do that in the first place eluded the former Monarch, though) and left to prepare everything, he quickly returned to his somber musings about all his mistakes (including secretly funding several different mercenary outfits to search for sources of esoteric power rumored to exist across the world to give Germany a much-needed edge…what a waste of resources THAT had turned out to be) and especially how little making them had ended up saving Germany from defeat because despite the millions of good men thrown into the meatgrinder of war and all the underhanded measures, on November 11th of 1918 Germany surrendered to the terms written in the so-called "Peace Treaty" of Versailles.
And what a farce that one had been - while the British and Americans (as well as the Italians, but their involvement had been little more than an afterthought even against their primary Austro-Hungarian foes and so they mattered little in the end) had been in a
comparatively more forgiving and reconciliatory mood towards Germany at least (although some of that was probably just a pragmatic attempt to keep the nation healthy enough to keep growing powers like the victorious Russian Bolsheviks in check), in the end the French took charge of the peace talks and chose to utterly gut "the Huns" economically, politically and militarily to sate their need for vengeance or the whole Franco-Prussian War and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in its wake. Forced democratization (with his own cousin Max von Baden stabbing Wilhelm in the back by just deciding
his own Kaiser's abdication while that one had been in the Belgian city of Spa, forcing Wilhelm to flee into the Netherlands and beg his wife´s family for sanctuary - but that's what one got trusting
liberals…), the demilitarisation of the Rhineland combined with just a general cutting down of the German armed forced to a pittance of what it used to be, the dissolution of the German colonial empire, inexcusably harsh restrictions on who the loser could enter diplomatic talks with, a carving-up of Prussia itself (with most of its Western half being granted to the newly-established
Polish nation, thus leaving Ostpreußen detached from the mainland entirely), excluding German negotiators entirely from the talks, hefty reparations that left the German economy completely anemic…with all those humiliations and more in mind, was it any wonder that the functionally enslaved German people continuously raged against what they saw as an illegitimate government?
Not to Wilhelm at least, but since he had sworn to only ever return to Germany once the monarchy had been reestablished, it ceased to be his problem and so he spent his exile becoming proficient enough at logging to the point where he even won at least one tournament in that discipline, while the lands his family had once ruled tore itself apart.
And yet - if only he had known what inhuman evil would arise in his place, the former Kaiser would have returned after all to fight it.
At first Wilhelm had been begrudgingly pleased, when a strong and proudly German force started opposing those Red devils dragging the nation into a state perilously close to outright civil war, but the sheer brutality against anyone not fanatically loyal to their Austrian-born leader as well as their utterly brain-dead conspiratory ramblings about "the German Army in the Weltkrieg having been stabbed in the back by Socialist politicians and their secret masters" (as much as Wilhelm genuinely disliked parties like the KPD and SPD for their brain dead naivety and economically-jealous rhetoric as well as for the Tribe of Judah for their iron-tight grip on finance and concerning religious practices, it was clear to him that that jumped-up postcard painter lacked any realistic view on just how desperate the situation at the frontlines had become during the last weeks of the War and was simply looking for excuses to whip the uneducated, boorish masses into a frenzy with his insane leaps of logic) quickly caused any enthusiasm the former monarch might have had to die a quick and ignoble dead. This dislike for that self-obsessed private only grew over the years, when the sheer depth of his psychotic hatred for everything "Un-German" in his mind (big words for someone originally from
Austria and who didn't fit his own narrow definition of what makes one "German" one bit) and eventually caused Wilhelm to disown his very own son after that
Bengel decided to throw his own clout behind the
Mistkerl´s cause in a mad bid to restore the Monarchy and wouldn´t listen to his father´s warnings that something like that would never happen. But Friedrich would not listen…neither would those idiots from the
Zentrumspartei and with that, that
monster seized complete control over the nation in short order.
The coming years only served to make Wilhelm utterly ashamed of being German for good, for as much as he did during his own reign advocate for harsh measures against other cultures including the Tribe of Judah and did in fact outright order to get rid of the Herero and Nama people in what used to be German West Africa, but the sheer callous, indifferent industrial way those blackguards in Berlin went about it sickened him to his very core - they didn´t even spare Veterans of the Great War who had fought, bled and died with the same fervor as their Christian brothers in arms just for being the "wrong kind". Because of this "new Germany´s" savagery, Wilhelm had it written down in his last will that he would not be buried in Germany and that there would be no insignia of their brutish regime at his own funeral.
…a last request those
Schweinehunde had still violated, as Wilhelm had been incensed to find out when he had crawled out of his grave and had seen their accursed cross
carved into the lid of his very coffin (the fact that his body had been moved from Haus Doorn in the Netherlands to…
somewhere in the United States of all places in the decades since his dead didn´t even register to him at first). This outrage coupled with the trauma of having been dead for however long admittedly upset him so much that upon being revived by Herrn Flanders´ mournful prayers for his late wife, Wilhelm had started babbling utterly ridiculous
Schwachsinn like
taking God´s name in vain with his blasphemous ramblings (oh, and of course claiming that he wanted to create a "Fourth" Reich -
as if he´d ever consider that bastard´s "Germany" a proper successor to his own Empire…the mere idea nearly made him vomit in disgust again) - luckily though, after both of them calming down a bit, Herr Flanders had graciously agreed to house him for the time being as well as get him to meet his superior, one Abe Simpsons who apparently effectively controlled most of this town called "Springfield" via ownership over the major means of electricity for the citizenry.
And now, after the rush of "living" again (figuratively speaking, of course) had started to give away to the cursed reality of his situation, here Wilhelm was - trying and failing to both drown his woes in what the Americans dared calling "beer" (and more than once wincing at his palate supplying the idea of tastes that had no business existing at all, let alone within any kind of human food) as well as making sense of his return to Earth. No matter how hard he wracked his brain, he
ums "Verrecken'' simply couldn't remember what kind of afterlife he used to be consigned to (aside from glimpses of him meeting that fool Bismarck again - who OF COURSE "greeted" him with a glance that screamed "I told you so" - as well as Cousin Nicky). Mercifully enough, he also didn´t remember anything falling under the purview of "eternal damnation", so the Almighty seemed to not have found him irredeemable enough despite all he had done. This left the old monarch wondering if the Lord had sent him back to atone for his sins - but how to best do that? Despite his claims to Ned, Wilhelm didn´t really feel up to taking over any office of power again just yet and while some of of the task Herr Simpson had had him oversee did prove to be engaging enough, he still felt lost in this new world full of corrupt businessmen jockeying for power and prestige behind the veneer of civility an ailing US government was struggling to maintain (to say nothing of the fact that for whatever reason, things in the world felt…
wrong on a fundamental level - as if
some things didn´t quite fit together). With that in mind, he had drifted to this pretend-German eatery named after one of his own less-glamorous-in-hindsight moments in search of direction, but nothing was forthcoming.
"Sorry to bother you, Miss", he suddenly heard a familiar-sounding male voice say in the background, "but have you seen an old guy speaking German around here somewhere?"
Before the waitress could respond though, the voice added, "No wait, don't bother, I can see him - Mr. Fredricksen! Sorry to hound you down, but Mr. Simpson asked me to get you."
Hearing his current fake name, "Wilhelm Fredricksen" looked up from his table and saw Carl Carlsson, one of Herrn Simpsons "foremen", beckoning for him. A bit confused, he stood up and approached the man.
"What does Mr. Simpson need me for this time? Maybe oversee the building of fortifications to keep ruffians away?", Wilhelm saluted eagerly with a clack of his heels, old Prussian instincts "coming to life" again (as the saying went).
"Naah, nothing that dramatic…at least not for now, I guess. No, he wants you to accompany him to that Kamp thingy where his grandchildren are right now."
At this out-there request, Wilhelm blinked a bit.
Seeing his confusion, Carl elaborated.
"Dunno quite why, but he said something something about `getting you outta your funk by letting you stretch legs´"
"...ah, fair enough, I guess - although I don't quite know how I am supposed to stretch my legs…"
Apparently, he had said something wrong, because Mr. Carlsson rolled his eyes and slapped his forehead, while the waitress chuckled a bit. And so, after paying for his meal and taking his "doggy bag" with a polite bow, the former German monarch followed the African-American man into the late evening.
