The war that began 100 years ago this August ended with a popular demand to "Hang the Kaiser. " Wilhelm II, emperor of Germany, was regarded as the epitome of Prussian militarism, arrogance and aggression. He was held responsible for the outbreak of the war and for the ruthless way in which it was waged by Germany. The victorious powers—Britain, France, Italy and the United States—attempted to put him on trial. In the end, mainly because the government of Holland, whence the Kaiser had fled, refused to extradite him, he was spared prosecution. He would live for an additional two decades, long enough to see the outbreak of another world war.

Wilhelm II

By John Röhl
Cambridge, 1,562 pages, $65
Wilhelm II in 1918, the year of his abdication. The Granger Collection
The "revisionists" got to work in the 1920s, adjusting the Kaiser's reputation and Germany's as well. Historians such as S.B. Fay ("The Origins of World War") challenged the notion of German war guilt, arguing that responsibility for the catastrophe of World War I should be distributed more widely. Decades later a very different cohort of scholars, including Fritz Fischer and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, put Germany back in the dock but insisted that it was the German elites rather than one individual who were to blame. More recently, the work of Christopher Clark has generated a more positive view of Prussia, emphasizing its progressive potential, and has put forward the argument that Germany's responsibility for the war, though not inconsiderable, must be seen in the context of the aggressive behavior of other actors, especially Serbia and Russia. The cumulative effect, over time, has been if not to exonerate the Kaiser then at least to reduce his importance in the grand scheme of things.
Amid these scholarly currents, the historian John Röhl has steered a steady course, seeing Wilhelm as "the central figure" of his epoch. Mr. Röhl, the son of a German father and English mother, is well-positioned to draw a full portrait of Wilhelm and to capture the complicated relationship with Britain that underlay so much of his thinking. The scope of Mr. Röhl's enterprise is staggering. "Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile, 1900-1941," at more than 1,200 pages of text, is the final volume of a biographical project that began with "Young Wilhelm" (1999) and "Wilhelm II: The Kaiser's Personal Monarchy, 1888-1900" (2004).
Mr. Rohl's first two volumes have been garlanded with praise, and rightly so. The third—published in Germany in 2008 and now substantially revised—is a fitting capstone to a major work of history. Mr. Röhl's narrative, relying in part on new primary-source material, draws ever wider circles, illuminating the Kaiser himself, his family and entourage, the imperial elite, German society as a whole, and, not least, the fragile dynamics of Europe's balance-of-power politics.
One theme of Mr. Röhl's account is the centrality and malevolence of the Kaiser in the last phase of empire. The "Kingship mechanism" that he established in the 1890s—cutting back the powers of Parliament and his ministers—persisted throughout his reign. "The hyperactive and hypersensitive monarch," Mr. Röhl reminds us, was not only Germany's emperor but the King of Prussia and Supreme War Lord. He "could not and would not be bypassed." The Kaiser "had the final say on all significant matters, most notably on all appointments to high office and in decisions affecting war and peace." Wilhelm's chief minister, Bernhard Bülow, was frequently reduced to "using the methods of the courtier" to get things done.
Wilhelm's constant interference in the political process was resented not only by the liberals, the left and parliamentarians of many stripes but also by his own conservative ministers and advisers. "The Kaiser," Friedrich von Holstein, the éminence grise of the German foreign office, remarked, "has gradually become accustomed to Sultanesque methods of rulership." The leader of the National Liberal Party, Ernst Bassermann, condemned "what in this country is called Personal Rule."
Mr. Röhl vividly depicts the Kaiser's unfortunate personality, which alarmed friend and foe alike. At root deeply insecure, Wilhelm postured tirelessly. His bumptiousness gave constant offense, whether he was kicking an unamused king of Bulgaria in the bottom, cutting through the braces of his adjutant general with a pen-knife in jest, or literally dragging the commanding general of the Guard Corps into a room by the ears.
His political clumsiness was legendary, for example when he sent German soldiers off to suppress the Boxer Rising in 1900 with the injunction that "no Chinaman will ever again dare so much as to look askance at a German. . . . Whoever falls into your hands will fall to your sword." His diplomatic initiatives were often still-born, such as the attempt to wean the Russian czar away from his French alliance in 1905, a move that—given its potential to alienate Russia's ally France and Germany's partner Austria-Hungary—was disowned by the ministers in both St. Petersburg and Berlin. This event is reminiscent of the Kaiser's disastrous decision not to renew the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1890, which helped to isolate Germany.
A particular flashpoint was the royal court, the clique of toadying "paladins" surrounding the monarch. Mr. Röhl's descriptions of the Kaiser's often campily overwrought entourage are frequently hilarious and sometimes tragicomic. Take Count Dietrich von Hülsen-Haeseler, the head of the military cabinet, who appeared in front of the Kaiser at a dance in 1908—as one witness recorded—"in a brightly-coloured balldress and a large hat decked with ostrich feathers, holding a fan coquettishly in his hand." After completing his waltz, the count stepped backward through the hall, blowing farewell kisses before collapsing dead just outside the glass door.
The socialist press claimed that there was rampant homosexuality among the figures closest to the Kaiser, especially his favorite, Count Philip von Eulenburg. In the prevailing view of the time, these stories were meant to suggest that the fortunes of the country were in the hands of a sinister cabal.
As the monarch himself saw it, the fortunes of the country were in his hands alone, not least at moments of crisis. And indeed, Mr. Röhl says, understanding the Kaiser fully will help us to grasp "how the world came to be plunged into the seminal catastrophe of the Great War." He offers a detailed account of the Kaiser's actions in July 1914, when Austria-Hungary, infuriated by the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and by Serbian foot-dragging, issued an ultimatum demanding that Belgrade provide evidence of its willingness to cease interfering in the affairs of the Habsburg Empire and effectively hand over the investigation of the crime to Vienna.
We see the Kaiser on the royal yacht, receiving telegrams and reading dispatches, often writing angry comments in the margins. When a dispatch from Paris suggests that the French are eager for peace, he scribbles "rubbish!" and "mumbo jumbo!" He is aware of the growing danger of war and makes last-minute attempts at mediation. But by Aug. 2, the steady escalation had led to the inevitable: Germany, fearing a Russian attack and following the legendary Schlieffen Plan, demanded transit through Belgium to crush France before France could come to the aid of her ally. Brussels refused. Britain declared war on Germany two days later.
It is clear from Mr. Röhl's account that the Kaiser had a love-hate relationship with Britain, whose navy and empire he deeply admired but also feared. The notion that he was the victim of a British-run conspiracy, initially led by his uncle Edward VII, to "encircle" Germany and destroy him runs all the way through the volume. This is a well-known aspect of the Kaiser's thinking, but Mr. Röhl excavates long-running German plans for a naval showdown with Britain that reveal the Kaiser's duplicity beneath a veneer of affability toward London.
The Kaiser's belligerence drove him to see enemies everywhere, from the Japanese yellow peril in the Far East and the "Yankee" threat across the Atlantic to the menacing Triple Entente of Russia, France and Britain. For this reason, so the argument runs, Wilhelm embarked on war in 1914 before the encircling coalition was ready to strike and supported extreme annexationist aims throughout the conflict, only accepting defeat when it became clear that the enemy coalition was too strong and that his army was refusing to fight.
Wilhelm became increasingly anti-Semitic in the period covered in this volume, particularly after defeat in 1918; he believed the Jews to be behind an international conspiracy to destroy Germany. In his cranky retirement, he demanded that Germans not "rest until these parasites have been destroyed and exterminated [ausgerottet]." Mr. Roehl ends his biography with the Kaiser's funeral in (German-occupied) Holland in June 1941, attended by Hitler's commissioner for the Netherlands.
Amid the great strengths of Mr. Röhl's multi-volume biography, there are some significant flaws. First of all, it is far too long—a staggering 3,828 pages in all. Of course, one can see that Mr. Röhl needs space to tell his story and develop his ideas, and his publishers are to be congratulated for their generosity. It cannot be right, however, that many of his paragraphs run for over a page, some for nearly three, often simply reproducing a lengthy extract from a private letter or dispatch.
Second, the alleged central role of the Kaiser—a major theme in Mr. Röhl's chronicle—is plausible enough for parts of the earlier period of the Kaiser's reign, but the claim is more questionable for the last period. By Mr. Röhl's own evidence, Wilhelm was largely shut out of decision-making during the critical July Crisis of 1914, for all his furious dispatch-reading. Indeed, his advisers had urged him to take the July yacht trip, in part to get him out of the way. The major decisions of the crisis were taken by the chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, and by the military, which was guided by rational if misguided considerations. The Kaiser was mostly a cipher during the struggle itself, with little influence on the deployment of the army, rather more on the use of the fleet.
Whether or not one agrees with all of Mr. Röhl's judgments, the reader must bow to his scholarship, dedication and stamina. He has seen the job through to completion over 40 years. The effect of his narrative, above all, is to add complexity to a figure who is often caricatured, showing him to have been far-sighted on some matters—such as the immense power-potential of the United States—and staggeringly stupid on others, not least the pursuit of policies that reinforced rather than broke Germany's deadly "encirclement."
Mr. Röhl gives fresh prominence to Wilhelm's role in the grand scheme of things, and, to that extent, confounds his critics, especially in Germany, who have questioned the way he has pursued a "personalized" focus on Wilhelm at the expense of a study of the wider structures of the German state and society. That said, even Mr. Röhl's narrative shows that the Kaiser's influence waned as war approached and that the course of European history would probably have been as horrific without him.
—Mr. Simms is the author of "Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453
to the Present."