The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)

by Richard J. Evans

In Germany moustaches were more common, but could also be very luxuriant. Friedrich Nietzsche took particular trouble, as his contemporary the Swiss philologist Jacob Mähly (1828–1902) remarked, with the cultivation of ‘his huge moustache, which protected him from any charge of having feminine characteristics about him’. German men were particularly notable for the variety of exotic growths on their faces, from Kaiser Wilhelm I’s bristling mutton-chop side-whiskers to the long forked beard sported by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz (1849–1930) and the famous moustache worn by Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941), with its carefully tended upturned ends.