At the outbreak of war in 1914, a Prussian officer in Brazil wrote to a friend in Germany that people were at last attributing to Kaiser Wilhelm II ‘more greatness than Bismarck and Moltke put together, a higher destiny than Napoleon I’, seeing in him the Weltgestalter - the ‘shaper of the world’.

Even if Germany were to lose the war, the officer predicted, ‘the figure of Wilhelm II will stand out in history like a colossus’. He was mistaken. To this day not a single full-scale biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II has come from the pen of a German historian in a university position. Worse still, the prevailing tendency of historical research among the younger generation in Germany precludes any treatment of him - or indeed of the role of any individual in history. That, they declare, is Personalismus, the relapse into a ‘personalistic’ historical methodology which has long since been superseded. The ‘new orthodoxy’ insists on writing the history of the Kaiserreich without the Kaiser, that of Wilhelminism without Wilhelm.

And yet, for a number of reasons, there could hardly be a more suitable case for treatment than ‘The Incredible Kaiser’, the ‘Fabulous Monster’, this ‘most brilliant failure in history’. For one thing, the Kaiser's curious character poses a fascinating riddle in its own right, as we shall see in a moment. Second, it must be remembered that Wilhelm ruled not over Bayreuth, Bremen or Bückeburg, but over the most powerful, dynamic and volatile state in Europe, and he did so for no less than thirty crucial years, from 1888 to 1918 – that is to say for even longer than Bismarck, and two and a half times as long as Hitler.