The kaiser and the paperweight: how Cecil Rhodes helped inspire the first world war

(theguardian.com) - The German monarch’s imperial ambitions were fuelled by the British colonialist – as the story behind a recently discovered relic reveals. It was discovered, dusty and damaged, on a warehouse shelf. Recorded simply as a “paperweight” in the depot inventory, it was just one small piece among 30,000 personal items salvaged from Kaiser Wilhelm II’s palaces more than a century ago, and sent on to him in a convoy of 64 railway coaches as he abdicated and fled to the Netherlands after Germany’s defeat in the first world war. But Cornelis Van der Bas, conservator at the Huis Doorn museum, a mansion where Wilhelm reluctantly spent the last two decades of his life in exile, had recognised the trinket in the archive, inscribed “Von Cecil Rhodes Grab, December 1905” (From Cecil Rhodes’ grave), as something more. “It had special meaning for him,” Van der Bas said. For Van der Bas, based on his subsequent research and the past work of scholars such as Wilhelm’s biographer John CG Röhl, the relic, rediscovered in April, offers a vital insight into the relationship between the kaiser, a quixotic and vainglorious man, and Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist and one of the richest men in the world in the late 1800s, that would soon have seismic repercussions across the globe.