The Origins of the First World War: Controversies and Consensus (Making History)

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The First World War: Inevitable, Avoidable, Improbable or Desirable? Recent Interpretations on War Guilt and the War’s Origins’, German History, vol. 25, No 1, 2007, pp.78-95 The “war-guilt” debate is, without a doubt, one of the most protracted historical controversies of modern history. Why did Franz Ferdinand's violent death unleash a war of previously unprecedented horror and scale? This murderous act resulted in the July Crisis, “the most complex [event] of modern times, perhaps of any time so far,” and ended in “the most complicated of all wars,” leading to a hundred-year controversy and a heated quest to identify “guilt” among some of the participants. Footnote 9 That question seemed easy to settle when the war had just broken out: everyone was certain, of course, that their war was a defensive one. In the wake of the Allies’ victory, it was also easy to attribute “war guilt” to the losers. But over the next hundred years, the term guilt would fall out of fashion; at the same time, the question of deciding who had been responsible would remain a topic of fraught debate. It would be an exaggeration to claim that the long debate about the war's origins had been entirely settled before the centenary, but there were nonetheless broad agreements that had been hard fought for during decades of debate. From imperial army to Bundeswehr: Continuity and change in the role of the military in German history (2004) The Fischer controversy, documents, and the ‘truth’ about the Origins of the First World War (2013-04) The German Reich was not “guilty” of World War I. Such a category did not exist then, for, according to the code of European state wars, sovereign states had the “ ius ad bellum” as long as they could claim a violation of their interests. In 1914, this right to war applied least to Great Britain because the United Kingdom could not claim an immediate interest of coalition obligation for an intervention in a local war (between Austria-Hungary and Serbia). Only the British entry into the war turned the original conflict into a global disaster. Footnote 114

Guilt or Responsibility? The Hundred Year Debate on the Origins of the First World War (2015-12-31) Now we’ve talked a lot about guilt, responsibility, culpability, and that’s essentially what this long debate has always been about – trying to attribute guilt, starting of course in the war itself and then at Versailles, it was very much about war guilt for the obvious reasons of needing someone to shoulder the reparations and being responsible. But how useful do you think it is to talk about war guilt now that we’re a hundred years or more removed from these events – should historians attribute responsibility and guilt? Ever since the First World War started, historians have debated why it began; we’re now looking at a hundred year debate; we’re looking at mountains of documents; thousands of books written on the topic; and yet even now historians don’t agree on why war started in 1914. John has worked at the University of Sussex for all his academic life – and why are you so interested in the topic? According to Gerhard Hirschfeld and Gerd Krumeich, the German Reich had “maneuvered itself into a cul-de-sac from which it could not find a way out, but it certainly was not solely responsible for the escalation of the crisis.” Footnote 80 Whether or not Germany acted out of a sense of strength or weakness hardly mattered, in the end, for the outcome of the crisis. Its potential enemies were strengthening their military might, and there is certainly a good deal of evidence suggesting that Germany's leaders feared a time in the not-too-distant future when Russia would be too strong to defeat. Because of its geographic position (i.e., flanked by two hostile powers) and with no alternative to the only plan for deployment in the event of a two-front war, fear of an uncertain future outweighed the fear of a war that one believed one could somehow envision (leaving aside the fact that such visions ultimately fell far short of reality). In the summer of 1914, Germany's leaders were still confident in their momentary advantage over their adversaries: it is thus possible that they combined feelings of superiority with fear of their potential enemies, and that they were motivated by both in equal measure.Das Bild Helmuth von Moltkes in der Biography’, in Michael Epkenhans, Stig Förster and Karen Hagemann (eds), Militärische Erinnerungskultur. Soldaten im Spiegel von Biographien, Memoiren und Selbstzeugnissen, Paderborn, Schöningh 2006, pp.132-151 The Library's buildings remain fully open but some services are limited, including access to collection items. We're She has published widely on German military planning in the years before the First World War, and has contributed to the historiographical debate on the nature of the Schlieffen Plan. She has edited primary sources on the origins of the First World War, and published a German language book on the July Crisis of 1914. She is currently working on a comparative history of the Battle of the Marne of 1914 to be published by Cambridge University Press. Even a hundred years ago the Versailles verdict was not without its critics, of course, particularly in Weimar Germany, whose leaders and citizens saw themselves unfairly punished for a war they thought had been defensive in nature. There were also critical voices outside of Germany that assigned responsibility not to Berlin, but rather to Paris and St. Petersburg. But in the main, such revisionists were drowned out by those who blamed Germany until a more conciliatory consensus, reached by the 1930s, blamed impersonal forces, rather than German decision-makers, for the outbreak of the war. Footnote 10 This was an acceptable position for most. Soon an even more terrible war shifted the focus away from 1914, and in the aftermath of World War II, explaining the inhuman horrors of an even more deadly conflict overshadowed the once so bitterly debated question of the origins of World War I. Footnote 11

The Fischer Controversy after 50 Years’, special issue of The Journal of Contemporary History, April 2013, 48 (2) She would be interested to hear from prospective PhD students wishing to research a topic in modern German or European history. Publications MonographsDiplomatie und Kriegsausbruch', in Gerhard Hirschfeld et al (eds), Enzyclopädie Erster Weltkrieg, 2nd edn, Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, 1015-1020. On the eve of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in 2014, the debate once again became heated as new revisionist publications sparked controversy. Having researched Germany’s decision making in and before 1914 for more than 20 years, I wanted to contribute to the conversation. Helmuth von Moltke, the overlooked architect of the war And yet, it was not the mere fact that he was pushing for war that makes Moltke interesting, so much as the fact that he advocated a conflict in defiance of his own fears about the likely outcome of such hostilities. For, while Moltke proclaimed the need for an immediate resort to arms loudly and repeatedly to the senior policymakers in the German government, it is, nevertheless, quite clear from Dr Mombauer's work that he actually harboured very considerable doubts about the validity of the advice that he was giving. Despite all of his professions that Germany had to go to war soon because the 'favourable' military circumstances in which the Reich then found itself would inevitably fade away, the Chief of the Great General Staff nevertheless expected the coming war, even if it were to be launched immediately, to be a long and arduous one. Indeed, he was painfully conscious that in an age of 'people's wars', conflict between great powers pitted not only armies, but entire populations and economies against each other, had the potential to lead the combatants to financial ruin, and would almost certainly be of prolonged duration. Yet, he never shared this knowledge with Germany's civilian politicians, even though he was aware that they expected a future European war to last months rather than years. Moreover, this decision to keep his fears to himself was a deliberate one, for he knew full well that Germany's political leaders would only accept his logic about the desirability of war if they were unaware of what the reality entailed. Such was the 'criminal irresponsibility' of his actions: he promoted a war that he was far from certain could be won by deliberately creating false expectations of the likely outcome. Der Moltke Plan. Modifikation des Schlieffenplans bei gleichen Zielen?’, in Hans Ehlert, Michael Epkenhans and Gerhard P. Groß (eds), Der Schlieffenplan. Analyse und Dokumente, Paderborn, Schöningh 2006, pp.79-99 Annika Mombauer's research interests are in nineteenth and twentieth-century European history, in particular Imperial Germany and the origins of the First World War, in the history of the First World War and in its historiography.

Julikrise und Kriegsschuldfrage – Thesen und Stand der Forschung', Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, Spring 2014This interpretation went counter to my conviction that Germany’s and Austria-Hungary’s decision-makers had deliberately provoked a crisis, using the assassination of Franz Ferdinand as a pretext. To me, the evidence was clear. They were willing to risk escalating a localised war with Serbia (whom they suspected to have been behind the assassination), knowing that this could bring Russia, France and Britain into the conflict. I published my book Die Julikrise in 2014 to present my research-based counter-argument to the centenary revisionist interpretations. I argued that all the major powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Britain, France and Russia) had some responsibility for the escalation of the July Crisis but that the German and Austro-Hungarian governments deliberately provoked this crisis without flinching at the possibility of unleashing a major war. Die Julikrise has sold more than 6,000 copies and is also available in Danish and Turkish. Crucially, the book, and other publications in history journals and public forums, have given me a platform to engage in public debate. My work forms part of secondary teacher professional development in the UK and contributes to secondary school curriculums and textbooks in Germany and the UK. It provides one of many interpretations of the origins of the war (which I happen to think is the right one, but with which not everyone agrees!), enabling pupils and students to evaluate different viewpoints and come to their own conclusions. Historians of the Great War found themselves in high demand in 2014. The looming anniversary naturally prompted publishers to commission titles that were designed to make a splash, cause debate, and spark public interest. The market was consequently flooded with publications that attempted to explain why war had broken out in 1914. Few could have predicted, however, the full extent of public and media interest in World War I. Nor could one have expected that the question of the origins of the war, in particular, would once again be paramount and the subject of widespread, heated debate. Sean McMeekin: History never repeats itself in exactly the same way. I see the appeal of these analogies -- that China is Germany. But, of course, China could equally well be Russia in 1914. The Russian economy was growing at a rate of about 9 percent a year in 1914. In fact, in many ways, Russia on the eve of World War I was a far better analogy for China today. Supposedly, even if you believe the traditional historiography the whole problem is the growth of Russian power and that was what was actually destabilizing Europe -- not the growth of German power. So, sometimes even when we try to learn from history, we draw the wrong analogies and the wrong lessons.