Kaiser Wilhelm II was born on 27 January 1859 in Berlin and died on 4 June 1941, at the age of eighty-two, in exile in the Netherlands. Chronologically, therefore, his life coincided almost exactly with the rise and fall of the first German nation state, which Bismarck founded through the wars of 1864, 1866 and 1870–1 and which came to a dire end with the catastrophe of the Second World War. Wilhelm II was anything but a silent spectator of the momentous events of his lifetime. From his accession in the so-called Year of the Three Kaisers in 1888 until his abdication and flight to the Netherlands on 9 November 1918 he ruled the German Reich and its hegemonial constituent state, the powerful military monarchy of Prussia, not only as its figurehead but in a very direct and personal manner. Indeed, given his parvenu insecurity, aggressively inverted into a superiority complex with an unbounded craving for acceptance, Wilhelm has seemed to some as a ‘representative individual’, a personification of the newly united German Reich.

However that may be, Wilhelm was not a dictator. He was always obliged to come to an accommodation with the incumbent Reich Chancellor and minister-president of Prussia, the Prussian Ministers of State, the Reich secretaries, the Reichstag and the Prussian parliament, as well as the allied governments of the other German kingdoms, grand duchies, duchies and free cities in the federation. Increasingly, too, public opinion, as expressed through political parties, churches, trade unions, special interest groups, pamphlets, press criticism and popular demonstrations, acted as something of a brake on his personal influence. But at the centre of power, and above all in the conduct of personnel, military, foreign and armaments policy, Kaiser Wilhelm’s was very much the determining voice until the decision to go to war in 1914 – a decision in which he took a leading part. It is true that during the First World War his role was quickly overshadowed by that of the generals, but even then he retained the last word on all matters of importance.