When German Jews were attacked in an antisemitic campaign, Fritz and Vicky had supported them by going to a synagogue in Berlin. Bismarck plotted their destruction, focusing his hatred on Vicky – ‘a wild woman…who terrified him by the unrestrained sexuality which speaks through her eyes’. But the chancellor was fortunate: Fritz was already suffering from throat cancer and filial betrayal. His son Willy, long indulged and funded by his grandfather ‘Wilhelm the Great’, despised his weakened father and liberal mother and could not wait to become absolutist kaiser and arbiter of Europe.
