The peaceable Frederick was a liberal and an Anglophile. Taking after her progressive father, Prince Albert, Victoria had been steeped in similar ideals of democracy and religious toleration – ideals her son, as well as an influential faction within the Prussian ruling class, rejected entirely. Wilhelm conflated his complicated emotions about his brilliant but domineering mother with an inferiority complex about the country of her birth. Nationalist sentiment, combined with rapid industrial growth and a surge in militarisation after German Unification in 1871, saw his hostility play out in a
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