Preface -- Introduction -- The naming of German warships -- Conventions and abbreviations -- Part I. Rise and Fall of the Battlefleet. Before the empire -- The era of Wilhelm I -- The new emperor -- The Fleet Law era -- The world of the dreadnought -- War -- I -- War -- II -- Afterglow -- Retrospect -- Part II. Technical and Career Data. Ships for the Prussian and German navies -- Summary of capital ship authorisations -- Ship seized by Germany -- Ships for export -- Appendices. 1. Main armament mountings -- 2. Trial results -- 3. Organisation of capital ships and cruisers from 1884.;"The battleships of the Third Reich have been written about exhaustively, but there is little in English devoted to their Second Reich predecessors. This new book fills an important gap in the literature of the period by covering these German capital ships in detail and studying the full span of battleship development during this period. The book is arranged as a chronological narrative, with technical details, construction schedules, and ultimate fates tabulated throughout, thus avoiding the sometimes disjointed structure that can result from a class-by-class approach. Heavily illustrated with line drawings and photographs, many from German sources, the book offers readers a fresh visual look at these ships. A key objective of the book is to make available a full synthesis of the published fruits of archival research by German writers found in the pre-World War II books of Koop & Schmolke, Großmer's on the construction program of the dreadnaught era, Forstmeier & Breyer on World War I projects, and Schenk & Nottelmann's papers in Warship International. As well as providing data not available in English-language books, these sources correct significant errors in standard English sources.