The acclaimed historian Christopher Clark follows Kaiser Wilhelm's political career from his youth at the Hohenzollern court through the turbulent decades of the Wilhelmine era into global war and the collapse of Germany in 1918, to his last days. Through original research, Clark presents a fresh new interpretation of this contentious figure, focusing on how his forty-year reign from 1888 to 1918 affected Germany, and the rest of Europe, for years to come.