Cambridge historian Christopher Clark's 2000 study of the Kaiser is, despite its brevity, a concise and balanced account of Wilhelm's life into which he incorporates much recent historiography of Wilhelmine Germany. Clark paints a picture of an emperor whose power and influence gradually weakened over time. By the late 1890s, he argues, Wilhelm had 'emerged as a significant factor in high politics, launching ambitious (if often doomed) legislative schemes, intriguing with individual ministers, and gradually hollowing out the authority of the chancellor.' (117) In the realm of foreign policy, however, Clark argues that Wilhelm became increasingly 'marginal'to the real centers of policy making,' particularly after several notable blunders including the Zabern incident and the Daily Telegraph affair, both of which witnessed his impetuous and 'undiplomatic' style, to the horror of professional diplomats.
With regard to the outbreak of war in 1914, however, Clark argues that while Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the German General Staff, 'pressed his sovereign'at crucial moments' in the months leading to war, at no point did the monarch 'surrender the power of decision to the military.' (215) Far from being a warmonger, Clark asserts, Wilhelm was 'reluctant to entangle Germany in a continental war,' (214) and maintained 'his own outlook on policy [that] differed in crucial ways from that of the military leadership.' (216) He never supported the 'preventive war' strategy espoused by top army officials, nor did he regard mobilization as irreversible. Clark points to Wilhelm's attempts to mediate between Serbia and Austria-Hungary as evidence of his 'reluctance to allow Germany to be sucked into a Balkan engagement' in 1914. (218) This initiative was 'overridden by the chancellor,' Clark notes, which provides further proof of the Kaiser's declining stature in affairs of the state'affairs he could 'influence'but did not control.' (218)
What of Wilhelm's involvement in the prosecution of and involvement in the Great War? Clark concludes that the Kaiser's 'capacity to exercise a command function was narrowly circumscribed,' which considerably diluted his influence among Germany's military leaders. Furthermore, he 'lacked an overview of strategic planning' leading up to and including the early stages of the war because, Clark maintains, the general staff regarded him as a security risk and refused to take him in to their confidence. As a result, he was displaced from the center of military affairs, shielded from much bad news from the front, and 'was excluded from the sphere of operational command of the land forces'though he did exercise a more direct'influence on the wartime operations of the German navy.' (227) Clark warns that one should not push the argument that the Kaiser was marginal too far. 'By virtue of his position,' he writes, Wilhelm was a 'figure of crucial importance,' namely for his authority to 'appoint and dismiss 'his' officers and officials.' (228) He concludes that although he was not vital militarily to the day to day running of the war, the emperor was a central figure in the 'processes by which some of the most central policy issues of the war years were resolved.' (244)

This is a great, short study for the student and buff.

I just finished this book, and found it very interesting and useful. It is not intended as a "life" of the Kaiser, but only as an analysis of his rule. I was looking for this kind of focus, so was happy with the book. The author's main thesis is that under the German constitution in effect at the time, the Kaiser had little actual power. While able to influence events, he could not control them. Only in the German shipbuilding plan did the Kaiser play a leading role. The author feels that Wilhelm sincerely wanted to avoid war in 1914. Actually, most of the book is not about the war years, giving the reader a more balanced overview of the reign. It is suggested that Wilhelm was one of the first "media" personalities, partly because of his penchant of making off-the-cuff remarks that continually got him bad publicity. The author discusses these various remarks based on the context in which they were made and the audience they were intended for, in a partially sucessful attempt to show they were not so outrageous as usually presented. While the book is not a whitewash of the Kaiser, the author does try to show he was not the arch-fiend of Allied propaganda. Since this is my personal view, I was in sympathy with the author's approach.

This is an intimate look into the life of "Vicky," the oldest daughter of Queen Victoria, who is married to Frederick, Crown Prince of Prussia ("Fritz"). Vicky was educated by her father, Prince Albert, and was probably the brightest of their offspring. Queen Victoria was an avid letter writer and expected the same from Vicky. There are numerous, appropriate, excerpts from letters written over the years. The author also manages to weave into the story the political & social climate in Europe that affected the events in Vicky & Fritz's lives. After reading this book I have often wondered if events of the early 20th Century (i.e. WWI & WWII) would have been different had Fritz reigned longer than a few months? At the end of the book, you will feel as though you really "know" the Empress Frederick.

It is difficult to raise Vicky from the pages of history, and so easy to merely dismiss her as another royal, married for the sake of politics, but she is so much more, and Pakula uncovers that.

Vicky is a complex woman, brilliant but without the tact that is so necessary at the Prussian court. Her nemeses, Bismarck, and later, her own son, Wilhelm II, ensure that none of Vicky's liberal ideas are ever implemented. Her husband waits 30 years to get on the throne and then dies 9 days later.

The oldest daughter of Queen Victoria had a happy marriage, a husband who adored her, and an absolutely disastrous political life. History would have been so much different had she been allowed to succeed her mother, instead of Bertie.

Vicky, Princess Royal of Great Britain and Empress Frederick of Germany, was raised by her parents Queen Victoria and Prince Albert with a specific purpose. She was to be the instrument by which the divided Germany of her youth was to be unified and remade in the image of Britain, a constitutional monarchy with leanings towards liberal democracy. Vicky did her best to accomplish this, and to a point she succeeded. She was a great and positive influence on her husband Frederick (Fritz) and helped wean him away from the Prussian militarism in which he had been raised. Unfortunately, Vicky was unable to overcome the influence of Otto von Bismarck on her father in law Kaiser William I. Bismarck united Germany, but as an absolute monarchy with only a travesty of representative government. More tragic was Vicky's failure to influence her son and Fritz's heir, the future Kaiser William II. When "Willy" came to the throne after Fritz's tragic death in 1888, he inexorably led Germany down the road to World War I.

Since Vicky failed, why read her story? Because she was a brilliant, brave, charming, stubborn woman dedicated to her principles. She loved her family and both her countries with all her heart. Today she should be remembered as a woman who could have changed so much history for the better had she only had the chance.

Do not expect to read much about Kaiser Wilhelm II in this book. The title is quite misleading---it is about the era of Wilhelm, but few details about him are included here, esp. his role in WWI.

Professor John Röhl of the University of Sussex has written extensively on Wilhelmine Germany, including his collection of essay entitled The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (1994). Röhl asserts that Wilhelm has for many years "been marginalized by professional German historians," who viewed the Kaiser as one "who played no part in shaping the policies of the Kaiserrreich." Other scholars have depicted him as "an aggressive autocrat who must bear a large degree of responsibility for plunging Old Europe into war and catastrophe." (xi) Regarding Wilhelm and the Great War, Röhl implies that his influence was negligible. The Kaiser was never a "full-scale" autocrat, and while he perhaps "dreamed of establishing absolute rule for himself...it remained no more than a dream." Röhl contends that this was particularly true in terms of military power, of which the emperor had very little. (3) However, Röhl shows that the Kaiser was not uninvolved in Germany's diplomatic and military decision-making process, notably at the start of the war. He cites Wilhelm's influence in the rejection of Britain's generous peace proposal in 1912, a move supported by his chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, and one which might have forestalled war altogether. (6)
For Röhl, the Kaiser's involvement in the Great War was heavily influenced by his personality. Wilhelm "never matured," and was seen as a child-like figure at army headquarters. This trait was coupled with a "notorious overestimation of his own abilities, and a refusal to accept constructive criticism. To emphasize the emperor's requirement that he be at center stage at all times, Röhl repeats the apposite bon mot that Wilhelm "insisted on being the stag at every hunt, the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral." (11-13) These qualities did little to endear himself to senior military officers and worked to push the Kaiser to the sidelines of decision making as the war intensified. Röhl holds that Wilhelm's public and private antics brought much scorn down upon himself and the German monarchy as a whole. He opines that
the history of the last hundred years," he opines, "has shown that a monarchy in a modern state can only hope to survive if it restricts itself firmly to its purely representational functions and avoids making any political comment and exerting any influence. That Wilhelm II did precisely the opposite is a matter of embarrassing record. (104)

Röhl concludes that Wilhelm's role in the formation of Germany policies was not insignificant before the war, particularly with regard to the turn-of-the-century naval armaments race with Great Britain, and in the domestic arena-though he was "vulnerable to manipulation by his generals and his military entourage." (166) By late 1914, Röhl declares, Wilhelm's influence began to wane, though the awareness by military leaders of which plans, people or policies the emperor would and would not support acted as "a blocking mechanism," a fact which indicates that the Kaiser could not be completely ignored. (116) Indeed, Röhl reminds his readers that "not a single appointment to an official position, and no political measure, could be undertaken without the express consent of the Kaiser." (117)

This book is a very interesting look into the theory and practice of government under Wilhelm II - particularly in those years of "personal rule" after the dismissal of Bismarck from the chancellorship. The book is essentially a collection of essays devoted to various issues involving the Kaiser and his government. So while it is not structured like a conventional history of this era, or a biography of the Kaiser, an abundance of historical and biographical information is presented.

I enjoyed this book very much - it is very well-written and was a pleasure to read. I think anyone interested in this period of German/European history will find reading this book well worth the effort.

The most recent English language biographical study of Wilhelm is The Last Kaiser: The Life of Wilhelm II by Giles MacDonogh (2001). MacDonogh seems to have set out deterministically to write something other than an "indictment" of Wilhelm. He asserts that historians have been unduly critical against the emperor for eighty years, which has prompted him to examine Wilhelm "in a light which, if not ridiculously positive, [is] at least a little more indulgent than that which as coloured attitudes in the past." (viii) While MacDonogh's study is not "ridiculously positive," it does tend to minimize Wilhelm's culpability for the various blunders historians commonly associate with his reign. While he concurs with other scholars of Wilhelmine Germany that the emperor was "a mass of contradictions," (1) MacDonogh also minimizes the Kaiser's documented anti-Semitism, and strongly implies that the "cases brought up against the emperor" such as the Kruger telegram (1896), the "Hun Speech" of 1900, and the Daily Telegraph Affair (1908), were handled "reasonable, and in some cases well" by the Kaiser. (7) This attempt to show that Wilhelm did not act maliciously, criminally or incompetently is what differentiates The Last Kaiser from its predecessors.
In MacDonogh's account of Wilhelm's wartime role, he reaches a familiar conclusion: "it would be impossible to make out that he played the role of 'Supreme Warlord' between 1914 and 1918." (3) He shows that Wilhelm "wavered over the preventive strike" long advocated by the General Staff, and "each time he looked in to the abyss he drew back in horror and countermanded" his generals' orders for such an attack. (9) This gives the kaiser too much of a benevolent, conscientious role for the time. MacDonogh portrays a Kaiser swept up with the emotions and events of August 1914, a leader who allowed himself to be carried into the war. By the first weeks of the conflict, "he had become increasingly peripheral." (367) This declension culminated in January 1917 with Bethmann Hollweg's removal at the insistence of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, at which point Wilhelm "was no more than a shadow emperor. No one listened to him." (391) Probably true.....
Despite showing far more sympathy toward his subject than other biographers of Wilhelm II have done, MacDonogh echoes many of their conclusions. "It is perhaps right that we condemn William," he suggests, "for if the First World War was not his undertaking, the finger of blames points over and over again to the failure of German diplomacy in which he tried so hard to play a positive role." (460) MacDonogh seems reluctant to assign Wilhelm much direct blame for the origins of the Great War or how it was conducted. On the contrary, most students of the last Hohenzollern ruler of Germany concur with the concise biographical entry in The Oxford Companion to Military History (2001): Kaiser Wilhelm II was "seduced by...nationalism and militarism," and came to discover that "leading a cavalry charge on maneuvers...is not the same thing as presiding over a beleaguered state engaged in total war." The last German Kaiser "lacked the strength of character and consistency of purpose which his role demanded, and if he cannot be blamed for leading Germany into war, he may be more justly censured for what one historian has called 'a childlike flight from reality' in the crisis of 1914."

I actually feel a little bit guilty giving this book only 3 stars! It is clear from the endnotes that Mr. MacDonogh did a prodigious amount of research, almost all of it in the primary German sources. There are many amusing and interesting bits and pieces.....little details concerning the way William dressed and ate; many clever and sarcastic comments about their contemporaraies made by William and Bismarck; a description of how William passed the time of day after he was forced to abdicate (he loved to chop wood, and at his first "home" in exile, Amerongen, he managed to chop up some 14,000 trees- giving away most of the wood to the poor). And even though it is interesting to read about many of these things, the end result is oddly unsatisfying. It is almost as though the author found lots of fascinating material, knew he had to include it, but couldn't turn everything into a coherent whole. Mr. MacDonogh quotes so many contrasting opinions that we are left with all of the following: William was an anti-Semite; William was not an anti-Semite; William was brilliant and could have been another Frederick The Great; William was lazy; William had boundless energy and was always traveling and making speeches; William was mentally unbalanced; William could have done more to prevent the slide into WWI; William's hands were tied by the military and by right-wing members of the government; William wanted an alliance with the British; no he didn't; William wanted an alliance with the Russians; no he didn't.....I think you get the idea! In the end, we are left with no clear picture of William as a person or as a ruler, nor are we left with a clear picture of what was going on in Germany in the crucial years leading up to 1914. Imagine that Georges Seurat started to paint a portrait of someone, but by the time the picture was finished it had mutated into a Jackson Pollock! That's probably the best description I could give you of how I felt by the end of this book...

The book is good because it examines one of the figures who was instrumental in shapping the 20th century. The author proves that he was very erratic with his forighn policy and his views on the world. The author also disproves the misconception that it was his imperial ambitions that led to the first World War and points out that it was the militarism of prussian aristocrats.

This is a short biography of Germany's Last Emperor, William II.
As stated previously, it is short and a summary of his life.
The story includes his own downfall, leading Germany to the
Weimar Republic and then Nazi Germany.

The book does its best work in describing William's early life,
and his frosty relations with his English mother and relatives.
This led to alienation from the English royalty and prevented
Germany from forming an alliance with Great Britain, and a more
liberalized regime in Germany.

The book describes William's views on Jews, French, Russia, and
Great Britain. This was not a positive side to his personality.
Also detailed is his relationship to his mother, wife, and various mistresses, with a possible homosexual relationship with
his best friend. The author does not go into detail into this
last aspect, because there is not much evidence. His choice of
people to lead his Empire resulted in the First World War.

This book was relatively interesting, but if you really want to dig into the detail about Wilhelm II's life, you'd be better off with Lamar Cecil's two volume work. There really wasn't much new news in here, and Van der Kiste treated his subject pretty lightly, all things considered. Excellent bibliography, though.

The author of this book accuses Michael Balfour in his biography of Wilhelm II of being "sympathetic" to his subject. This book is not. I found the book fun to read, tho it is not well footnoted and its bibliography is not a first-rate one, in my view. I suspect there are better biographies of Wilhelm II than this one. I read Balfour's The Kaiser and His Times, but I was not overly impressed by it, either. Does anyone know what is the best biography of Wilhelm II?