Kaiser Wilhelm’s guide to ruining a country

The role of personality in politics is the theme of this awe-inspiring biography. This is the third volume, 1,562 pages long, of John Röhl’s life of the Kaiser. It has been brilliantly translated — the labyrinth of imperial Germany navigated by many headed subdivisions in each chapter — by Sheila de Bellaigue.

The fruit of what Röhl calls a ‘dark obsession’ with the Kaiser, it had its origin when, writing about Germany after the fall of Bismarck at the apogee of social and institutional history in the 1960s, he realised that he was analysing not a modern government but a court society. Personalities and dynasties were as important as classes and parties. One of the outstanding biographies of the past 20 years, based on research in almost as many archives as the Kaiser had palaces, it is also a guide to how to ruin a country.

This volume deals with the years from 1900 to the Kaiser’s death in exile in the Netherlands in 1941.