When war broke out in August 1914, intellectuals on both sides exchanged fire in a barrage of manifestos and pamphlets, seeking to discover the underlying causes of the catastrophe, not in mundane political events, but in the dominant ideologies and native intellectual traditions of the Great Powers. For many observers, the Great War was more than anything a “war of ideas.” In Germany, an impressive array of thinkers sought to elucidate the deeper meaning of the war by arguing that the crisis of 1914 was a truly world-historical conflict rooted in the mutual antagonism that existed between two fundamentally different forms of life, a confrontation that the sociologist Werner Sombart famously summed up as the battle between the rapacious “Händler” of materialistic Britain and the idealistic German “Helden,” between a shallow, degenerate “civilization” and a spiritually profound Kultur.

Allied intellectuals conceived the war in similarly apocalyptic terms, a struggle pitting “humanity” against “un-humanity.” The Oxford historian Ernest Barker thought Germany was pervaded by a “spirit of mastery” that asserted the right of the strong to rule the weak in the struggle for existence. Many other commentators observed that brutality permeated all levels of German life, “from the Cancellarial [sic] spluttering about ‘hacking through’ a practically defenceless neutral State, to the unembarrassed air with which a sixteen-stone Berliner will crowd a woman out of the corner seat in a tram.”