Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile 1900–1941 by John C.G. Röhl (review)

The third volume of John Röhl’s massive biography of Wilhelm II was published in German in 2008. Six years later it has appeared with minor changes in a lucid English translation by Sheila de Bellaigue and Roy Bridge. Throughout his prolific career, Röhl has promoted the notion of the Kaiser’s “personal rule”—an interpretation of him that was already in use among contemporaries. This volume, which brings the biography to a close, covers the period from 1900 until Wilhelm’s death in 1941. In Röhl’s reading, the foundations of the Kaiser’s personal rule were in place by the turn of the century. For that reason, the emphasis in this volume falls heavily on Wilhelm’s impact on German foreign policy, particularly as it related to Anglo-German relations. The bulk of the account thus traces the growing diplomatic isolation of Germany through a series of international crises that the emperor either brought about or exacerbated. The account culminates in the summer of 1914, when the European war brought a dénouement to Wilhelm’s aggressive vision of German hegemony on the European Continent and a German colonial empire to rival Great Britain’s.

Readers who have read other volumes of the biography in German or English will be familiar with both the virtues and limitations of this vast project, which now totals nearly four thousand pages. The underlying scholarship is breathtaking in its scope and thoroughness. There is likely not a relevant archival holding in the world that the author has not found. The result is a study that reveals the thoughts, moods, motives, actions, tastes, sentiments, private affairs, and psychic and bodily condition of the German emperor in meticulous detail. That the biography reads like an indictment is no coincidence, for the biographer has approached the project as a forensic enterprise. The evidence that he presents is, he writes, like “fingerprints or DNA evidence in a criminal case” in which the investigator’s object is “finding out the truth” (xxvii–xxviii). Röhl’s conception of his own role helps explain the massive detail and the profusion of extended quotations: the larger the body of evidence, the more persuasive the case. Much of the indictment rests on self-incrimination, for the Kaiser was not modest in describing his own significance in the formulation and execution of German policy. The biographer has thus built a formidable case that Wilhelm was a disaster in office and that his impact was everywhere deleterious. He was foolish, mercurial, obsessed, insecure, prejudiced, megalomaniacal, delusional, paranoid, insensitive, and tasteless. The fact that such a man exercised virtually untrammeled power in Germany represents the key, in Röhl’s eyes, to the German catastrophe of the twentieth century.

The massive structure of the biography invites this conclusion, if it does not force it on the reader. While the treatment of the emperor is comprehensive and stunning in its detail, the other major figures in the story receive no such attention; they are for the most part extras in this drama. Thus the most unpersuasive features in the whole work relate to context. In the 1970s, historians began to argue that Wilhelm was not the all-powerful ruler that he imagined himself to be; and this interpretation probably represents the dominant view today. It holds that the politicians with whom the emperor surrounded himself, like Bernhard von Bülow and Theobold von Bethmann-Hollweg, might well have been selected for their flattery and pliability, their “sychophanitic spinelessness” (125); but they managed to manipulate the monarch into policies that they themselves favored. Röhl has spent much of his life opposing this argument. Wilhelm, he insists, was a free agent who responded to his drives and whims but otherwise exercised “almost overwhelming personal power” (75). This hypothesis now requires, however, that the biographer...