Forty-eight years later to the day, in the same Hall of Mirrors, with the Empire now defunct and Europe charred by the bloodiest war the world had ever known, delegates from around the world met for the beginning of the Paris Peace Conference.

What happened in the interim is largely the story of two titanic figures in German history: Bismarck and Wilhelm II. The Iron Chancellor had forged the Empire through the careful application of war, diplomacy, and political virtuosity; and he shaped its constitution in the image of his overbearing and micromanaging personality. He stabilized the new nation by working within a parliamentary system—though the Reichstag could not initiate legislation and its parties were often split apart by Bismarck’s ploys—to conserve the primacy of the Kaiser and his own junker aristocracy, while also making necessary concessions to liberals, warding off socialists, and bringing political Catholicism to heel by creating a national identity that superseded centuries-old sectarian divisions. Guiding the Reich’s foreign policy, Bismarck wove an intricate web of diplomatic arrangements, both formal and confidential, with the primary purpose of depriving the still-smarting France of an eastern ally with which it could open a multifront war against his newfangled nation.

The system worked well enough with one of history’s greatest statesmen at its helm; but upon the death of Wilhelm I—the grandfatherly Kaiser who had been politically and emotionally dependent on Bismarck from before the unification of Germany, and who took a perpetual backseat to his scheming Chancellor—in 1888, followed quickly by that of his son, Friedrich III, yielded the throne to Wilhelm’s young, ambitious, bombastic, and politically-obtuse grandson. The German constitution did not leave room for two personalities as outsized and domineering as those of Wilhelm II and Bismarck; and the latter was compelled to resign in 1890. Nor was it suited to the designs of the new Kaiser, who attempted, with limited success, to neuter the Reichstag and rule autocratically. With little knowledge of the delicacy of Germany’s diplomatic position, Wilhelm abandoned Bismarck’s cautious pragmatism and embraced the nationalistic preening that would drive the Reich, with most of Europe, toward catastrophe. Pursuing a policy of Weltpolitik, with which Germany sought to gain “a place in the sun” by acquiring overseas colonies and undertaking a naval buildup to support them—alarming Britain and France—Wilhelm made his country the bull in the proverbial china shop—with fateful consequences, though of course ones for which Germany was not solely responsible.

The Second Reich would vanish as suddenly as it came into being, leaving it both a golden memory and a utopian aspiration in the minds of a demoralized, listless, and embittered German people.