Through his research and teaching, John Röhl has made a major contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the Wilhelmine period and his achievements are rightly being honoured with this collection of essays by his friends and students. However, the sixty-fifth birthday of an eminent scholar who has tilled the field of the history of the German Empire for some forty years, beginning with his Cambridge doctoral thesis and reaching its latest, though by no means final culmination point in 2001 with the publication of the second volume of his biography of Wilhelm II, covering the years 1888 to 1900, is also a good moment to take stock again of where we are in this field.

This is the purpose of this chapter which, I hope, will also resolve a confusion that may have arisen in the minds of some readers with regard to its subtitle. To be sure, the history of Wilhelmine Germany as history does not have a present and future, only a past. But the history of that period as historiography does have a present and future. Even if historians do not like to look ahead, preferring to leave prediction to the social scientists, I will pluck up all my courage to offer at least a few speculations and hopes about where the field might be going, especially with respect to the decade before 1914 which will be at the centre of Röhl's volume iii.

However, there is the constraint of a strict word limit.