ABSTRACT
In August 1913, a year before the outbreak of World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II traveled to Breslau, the capital of the German province of Silesia (today it is Wroclaw, Poland). His purpose was to visit an exhibit celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the call the Kaiser’s ancestor, the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III, had issued from Breslau to his subjects to oppose Napoleon. A century later this event was understood as having been an important step on the path to the eventual unification of Germany under the auspices of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Gathered to greet the Kaiser inside the exhibit’s most prominent building, an enormous circular hall, were schoolchildren ready to sing to their monarch. The mayor stood at the door, ready to escort him inside. The Kaiser, according to a contemporary newspaper report, ‘fumed that he would rather skip this serenade’.1
