Wasn't he born feet first? The lack of oxygen during childbirth probably had a great deal to do with his withered arm etc.
Saepe Fidelis,
His was a breech birth, but a lack of oxygen during such a birth affects the
brain and not the limbs.
It was a lengthy and difficult delivery which his mother barely survived. Towards the end, the attending doctors used forceps to remove Wilhelm from the birth canal crushing his arm in the process. With the baby delivered, the attendants' concern was focused on the mother and no one realized that Wilhelm had been damaged for some time. Even if they had noticed the damage right away it's debatable as to whether they could have done anything to mitigate it.
Wilhelm has been forensically psychoanalyzed extensively and I seriously doubt that anything new or penetrating will be posted here. His childhood was both and at the same time smothering and hellish; when you read about his riding lessons you can't help but cringe. By his teens, he was being cultivated by any number of people for various political reasons and their cynical flattery, a problem for any royal, was shameless.
His mother was both willful and clueless. Her loud and public championing of the liberal 1848 German ideals her father, Prince Albert, inculcated put her increasingly at odds with the court and government of Prussia. She was on the "wrong side" of each of the wars Bismarck used to build the German empire, spoke out against the Kulturkampf, and generally made herself a nuisance in a society and culture that generally relegated women to "Kinder, Küche, Kirche".
His father was seen by many as Bismarck's political enemy although there is little proof of that. While Frederick did occasionally speak of the need for reform, he served admirably in both war and peace. In general the Hohenzollerns father-son relationships were worse than most royals, so people may have simply assumed that Frederick would automatically pursue policies opposite of Wilhelm I.
With a high-profile mother loudly critical of the government and a father assumed to be critical of the same, Wilhelm was an easy target for his parents' political opponents. Among the herd of sycophants, contemporaries remarked that Bismarck especially cultivated him, showing Wilhelm diplomatic dispatches and files that his father, the crown prince, wasn't even allowed to see.
In the end, you had a troubled little boy with a very noticeable physical shortcoming being raised in a snakepit that prized masculine accomplishment above nearly all else. We can be sure his mother threw the events of his birth in his face at every opportunity and he most likely would gesture towards his arm in reply. By the time he reached his "tweens" and teens, which the absolutely worst time for it, he was being shamelessly flattered and coddled by influential people outside of his immediate family. His behavior immediately after the death of his father and mother was absolutely frightful and his treatment of his mother after Frederick's death was the worst he could get away with.
It can be said that he began to mature psychologically once he realized the enormity of his actions during the
Daily Telegraph affair, but one's late forties is far too late to begin setting aside childish solipsism. Despite hiding in his bed for a few weeks and keeping a lower profile afterward, there was no real change in the popular perception of Wilhelm as his international reputation had already been made.
Wilhelm was also much less influential in his own government after the
Daily Telegraph fallout crammed a big bit of Reality Sandwich down his gullet. What everyone had been saying privately, that the All-Highest was a well born buffoon, had been proven in spades. He'd definitely lost confidence in himself and his ministers could and did flout his instructions more frequently. I think it's also telling how very passive he was during both the run-up and course of WW1. By 1916, Germany was essentially a dictatorship under Ludendorrf with Wilhelm being little more than a rubber stamp sitting in his hotel room at Spa.
The "Nature or Nurture" question is one that can never be satisfactorily settled because the answer is different for each man. For all but the most saintly or evil, nature and nurture blend together in a personally unique way to form our personalities. Was Wilhelm's withered arm
only or
predominantly responsible for the development of his personality? I'd say no, but it did play some role in shaping him.
In the end, I don't think a Wilhelm without a withered arm would have been substantially different enough. Looking at the time, place, and personalities associated with his upbringing, there were simply too many other factors stacked against him.
Bill