Well before 1914, the coming of a major European war was widely anticipated among the international cultural community. This was certainly so in Germany. The last decade before 1914 witnessed the spread of a fatalistic expectation that sooner or later a major war was bound to occur and that it made little sense to try to stem the tide. Even so, it is surprising to find just how widespread was the feeling among writers, artists and intellectuals that war, or a warlike cataclysm, was in the offing. Some, like Friedrich von Bernhardi, even championed preventative war by 1912 in order to defend imperial Germany's position in the world against rival powers and in order to secure a propitious future for German culture in a world that seemed likely to be dominated by just a few empires. In order to maintain the position of German culture in the future, it was argued, Germany needed to become a world power as well.

Many other writers welcomed the idea of war as a way of providing relief from the boredom and sterility of bourgeois materialist culture. George Heym's well-known poem ‘Der Krieg’, written in 1912, is perhaps the best-known expression of this feeling. Privately Heym conceded that ‘if only a war would come, then I would be healthy again … everything is so boring’. In 1913 Stefan George, who was by no means a warmonger, envisaged that war might come about as a purge for the decaying civilization around him and wrote that ‘ten thousand must die in this Holy War’.