This brief life of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria’s eldest grandson, who led the powerful German Reich into the abyss of war in 1914, is based on some fifty years of original archival research, the results of which I have published, first in German and then in English, in three large volumes totalling some 4,000 pages. The present book summarises the salient points of the much more detailed biography in miniaturised form and, while providing an interpretation of the last German emperor’s personality and policy in its own right, can also be used as a vade mecum to the more substantial work by anyone wanting further information. The notes provide a guide to the relevant pages in the three-volume biography.

Inevitably, given the Kaiser’s central role in the decision-making of his powerful empire, the book is also intended as a contribution to the current very lively centennial debate on the origins and nature of the First World War. When this slender book was published in Germany in 2013, historical scholarship had long since reached something of a consensus on the trajectory underlying German history from unification under Otto von Bismarck in 1871 to utter destruction under Adolf Hitler in 1945. In this generally accepted interpretation, the dynamic energy generated by the united Prusso-German empire at the heart of Europe was by the end of the nineteenth century perceived by its neighbours as an existential challenge to the European system of states, to which first France and Russia and then Great Britain responded by drawing closer together, eventually to form the Triple Entente – a development regarded in Germany in turn as ‘encirclement’ and increasingly as an unacceptable constraint on her rightful future development. To have managed this burgeoning ‘German problem’ would have required exceptional wisdom, restraint and tact on all sides, and particularly in Berlin – qualities that were spectacularly absent under the erratic personal military monarchy of Kaiser Wilhelm II.