My ancient Dr Smith's Smaller Latin–English Dictionary defines a Laudatio as ‘a praising commendation, a eulogy or a panegyric’, and that is what I intend to write in the next few pages. This pleasant task has its difficulties. I have no distance, either temporal or personal, from the subject. I propose to comment on the work of a distinguished colleague, who is a direct contemporary (we started graduate study together) and a friend. I am also quite unashamedly an admirer. What John Röhl has accomplished demands that ‘praising commendation’ which Dr Smith suggested. His is an unusual career, which indeed deserves to be heartily commended.

The electronic catalogue at the University of Pennsylvania's Van Pelt Library lists eleven titles under John Röhl's name. All of them deal with the political history of the German Empire from 1888 to 1918. John Röhl has spent his entire career and his very considerable intellectual energies on ‘Germany after Bismarck’, as he called his first book. Thirty years of history have been the subject of nearly forty years of research and writing. The ratio of life to subject must be unusual, though not unique. In American history, crowded with practitioners as it is, careers spent on the Civil War, Jacksonian Democracy, the New Deal or the Second World War occur frequently and there the ratio of life to subject is even more dramatic.