Fighting a Philosophy

As the First World War recedes from living memory, our fascination with what George F. Kennan called “the seminal catastrophe of man-kind” in the twentieth century remains undimmed. Perceptions shaped by vivid accounts of the war's genesis and unfolding, from Liddell Hart's The Real War (1930) and A. J. P. Taylor's The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 (1952) to Barbara W. Tuchman's August 1914 (1962) and Laurence Lafore's The Long Fuse (1965), likewise endure in the English-speaking world, amplified a further forty years on, though scarcely displaced, by Hew Strachan's monumental The First World War (vol. 1, 2001), and reinforced by a straightforwardly nostalgic appetite for commemorations and military histories, memoirs, and literary reconstructions.

In sharp contrast, Germany over the same period has had to come to terms with her troubled past in a difficult process of self-scrutiny. Fritz Fischer's pioneering work on Germany's war aims, Griff nach der Weltmacht (1961), was followed more contentiously in Krieg der Illusionen (1969) by even more minutely detailed evidence. Drawing on all currently available documents of the erstwhile belligerents assembled by Imanuel Geiss in Julikrise und Kriegsausbruch 1914 (2 vols., 1963/1964), Fischer made a formidable case that Germany had been actively planning war with expansionist aims against France and Russia from 1912, gambling on British neutrality. This compelled most German historians, and in their wake prominent politicians and the reading public, to revise the comfortable belief that — in the Great War at least — all the powers were equally guilty.