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The debate on the origins of the First World War

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How could the death of one man, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was assassinated on 28 June 1914, lead to the deaths of millions in a war of unprecedented scale and ferocity? This is the question at the heart of the debate on the origins of the First World War. Finding the answer to this question has exercised historians for 100 years.

In July 1914, everyone in Europe was convinced they were fighting a defensive war. Governments had worked hard to ensure that they did not appear to be the aggressor in July and August 1914. This was crucial because the vast armies of soldiers that would be needed could not be summoned for a war of aggression.

Socialists, of whom there were many millions by 1914, would not have supported a belligerent foreign policy and could only be relied upon to fight in a defensive war. French and Belgians, Russians, Serbs and Britons were convinced they were indeed involved in a defensive struggle for just aims. Austrians and Hungarians were fighting to avenge the death of Franz Ferdinand.

Germans were convinced that Germany’s neighbours had ‘forced the sword’ into its hands, and they were certain that they had not started the war. But if not they (who had after all invaded Belgium and France in the first few weeks of fighting), then who had caused this war?

The war guilt ruling

For the victors, this was an easy question to answer, and they agreed at the peace conference at Versailles in 1919 that Germany and its allies had been responsible for causing the Great War.

Based on this decision, vast reparation demands were made. This so-called ‘war guilt ruling’ set the tone for the long debate on the causes of the war that followed.

From 1919 onwards, governments and historians engaged with this question as revisionists (who wanted to revise the verdict of Versailles) clashed with anti-revisionists who agreed with the victors’ assessment.

Sponsored by post-war governments and with access to vast amounts of documents, revisionist historians set about proving that the victors at Versailles had been wrong.

Countless publications and documents were made available to prove Germany’s innocence and the responsibility of others.

Arguments were advanced which highlighted Russia’s and France’s responsibility for the outbreak of the war, for example, or which stressed that Britain could have played a more active role in preventing the escalation of the July Crisis.

In the interwar years, such views influenced a new interpretation that no longer highlighted German war guilt, but instead identified a failure in the alliance system before 1914. The war had not been deliberately unleashed, but Europe had somehow ‘slithered into the boiling cauldron of war’, as David Lloyd George famously put it. With such a conciliatory accident theory, Germany was off the hook. A comfortable consensus emerged and lasted all through the Second World War and beyond, by which time the First World War had been overshadowed by an even deadlier conflict.

The Fischer Thesis

The first major challenge to this interpretation was advanced in Germany in the 1960s, where the historian Fritz Fischer published a startling new thesis which threatened to overthrow the existing consensus. Germany, he argued, did have the main share of responsibility for the outbreak of the war. Moreover, its leaders had deliberately unleashed the war in pursuit of aggressive foreign policy aims which were startlingly similar to those pursued by Hitler in 1939.

Backed up by previously unknown primary evidence, this new interpretation exploded the comfortable post-war view of shared responsibility. It made Germany responsible for unleashing not only the Second World War (of this there was no doubt), but also the First - turning Germany’s recent history into one of aggression and conquest.

Many leading German historians and politicians reacted with outrage to Fischer’s claims. They attempted to discredit him and his followers in a public debate of unprecedented ferocity. Some of those arguing about the causes of the war had fought in it, in the conviction they were fighting a defensive war. Little wonder they objected to the suggestion that Germany had deliberately started that conflict.

In time, however, many of Fischer’s ideas became accepted as a new consensus was achieved. Most historians remained unconvinced that war had been decided upon in Germany as early as 1912 (this was one of Fischer’s controversial claims) and then deliberately provoked in 1914.

Many did concede, however, that Germany seemed to have made use of the July Crisis to unleash a war. In the wake of the Fischer controversy, historians also focused more closely on the role of Austria-Hungary in the events that led to war, and concluded that in Vienna, at least as much as in Berlin, the crisis precipitated by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was seen as a golden opportunity to try and defeat a ring of enemies that seemed to threaten the central powers.

Recent revisions

In recent years this post-Fischer consensus has in turn been revised. Historians have returned to the arguments of the interwar years, focusing for example on Russia’s and France’s role in the outbreak of war, or asking if Britain’s government really did all it could to try and avert the war in 1914. Germany’s and Austria-Hungary’s roles are again deemphasised.

After 100 years of debate, every conceivable interpretation seems to have been advanced, dismissed and then revisited. In some of the most recent publications, even seeking to attribute responsibility, as had so confidently been done at Versailles, is now eschewed.

Is it really the historian’s role to blame the actors of the past, or merely to understand how the war could have occurred? Such doubts did not trouble those who sought to attribute war guilt in 1919 and during much of this long debate, but this question will need to be asked as the controversy continues past the centenary.

After 100 years of arguing about the war’s causes, this long debate is set to continue.

Next: listen to the viewpoints of two leading historians on the causes of the war with our podcast  Expert opinion: A debate on the causes of the First World War

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Last updated 30 november 2016, the historiography of the origins of the first world war.

The debate about the origins of the war remains a vibrant area of historical research. It has been characterised by a number of features. First, from the outset, political concerns shaped the debate, though these preoccupations have become less significant as the war recedes into the past. Second, the debate is international, though with distinct national emphases. This international character owes much to political concerns, but it also reflects how historians work. Third, the debate has contributed to and been shaped by historiographical developments. This article presents these arguments in a narrative of the debate since 1914.

Table of Contents

• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Debate during the War
• 3 Between Politics and History: The Interwar Years
• 4 The Impact of the Second World War
• 5 The Fischer Debate
• 6 New Directions and Fragmentation
• 7 The Outbreak of War Revisited after 100 Years

Selected Bibliography

Introduction ↑.

The First World War has come to mark one of the great ruptures in modern history, the handmaiden of, to name but a small number of examples, new forms of literary irony , violence against civilians, and anti-colonial movements . Historians have devoted considerable attention to the origins of this rupture, veering between arguments stressing the long-term characteristics of international politics that led to war and the contingencies of decision-making in the final weeks of peace in 1914. This debate has now lasted over a century, with each consensus proving fragile and short-lived. The multiplicity of actors, the vast range of sources, and competing methodological approaches to international politics ensure the constant renewal of the subject. From the outset, political interests and contemporary affairs have shaped scholarly perspectives. There has been an intensive exchange of research, arguments, and polemics across national borders. The debate about the origins of the war has reflected, but also informed, changing historiographical fashions.

The Debate during the War ↑

Even before the outbreak of the war, leaders understood the political importance of casting responsibility for the war on their future enemies. Mobilising domestic support for a major war required that the conflict be justified as a defensive reaction to foreign aggression. Although sovereign states retained the right to wage war when they wished, in practice there was a narrow band of justifications for war, ruling out the most egregious kinds of aggression. Countenancing the possibility of war, leaders cast their moves as defensive. In Vienna, Oskar von Montlong (1874-1932) , the head of the Press Bureau at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told the editor of the Reichspost : “We have no plans for conquest, we only want to punish the criminals, and to protect the peace of Europe in the future against such crimes.” Serbian leaders responded, using similar language about criminality and the peace of Europe, to deflect the Austro-Hungarian charge that Serbia harboured a criminal conspiracy. [1] In the final days of the crisis, mobilisation plans subordinated the military advantages of a sudden strike to the political imperatives of justifying a defensive war. The Russian mobilisation on 30 July allowed German leaders to rally different strands of popular opinion, particularly the socialist and trade union movement, to a war of defence against Tsarist autocracy. Raymond Poincaré (1860-1934) , the French president, insisted on keeping troops ten kilometres behind the border so that an inadvertent incident could not sully the government’s claim to its own population and to its British partner, that Germany was the aggressor.

The debate about responsibility was infused with moral claims from the outset, as each side attributed to their enemies the responsibility for violating norms of international politics by waging aggressive war. Foreign ministries issued hastily assembled collections of diplomatic documents, an early example of the assertion that “truth” lay in the archives. [2] Citizens, particularly academics and intellectuals, wrote in defence of their state’s conduct. Without access to the diplomatic documents, scholars interpreted the origins of the war in the context of allegedly long-standing cultural and social differences. Debates about the conduct of war, particularly the early reports of atrocities , and war aims became intertwined with arguments about the responsibility for war. The purpose was to provide from each belligerent’s perspective a seamless account of the war. For example, the claims of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) , the French philosopher, that the war represented a struggle between “civilisation” and “barbarism” accommodated the German violations of Belgian neutrality , the atrocities committed by German troops in Belgium and northern France , and French claims that it was fighting war in defence of right and justice, as well as its own territory. Werner Sombart (1863-1941) explained that all wars resulted from opposing beliefs. The pursuit of power and profit were only the superficial causes of a war that sprang from the conflict between the “merchant”, represented primarily by Britain , and the “hero”, represented by Germany. [3]

Sombart’s work was a response to Allied claims, like those made by Bergson, that the war pitted the “civilised” against the “barbaric”. The Appeal of the 93 , a declaration by leading German intellectuals, began its list of theses by stating, “It is not true that Germany is guilty of causing this war.” The authors dismissed Allied claims that Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859-1941) was a modern “Attila”, by emphasising his efforts throughout his reign to preserve peace. [4] Throughout the war, there was an intensive transbelligerent debate. Information flowed relatively easily across the lines. Writers could get hold of pamphlets written by enemy citizens. Speeches of enemy leaders were reprinted in newspapers – if only to serve as a foil for immediate rebuttal of the claims to moral superiority and political moderation. Debates between the belligerents about the origins of the war also took place in neutral spaces, particularly in the United States until its entry into the war in 1917. Delegations of academics toured neutral states. On occasion, the press in neutral states published important material. In 1918, the Swedish paper Politiken published documents written by the former German ambassador to London, Prince Max von Lichnowsky (1860-1928) and designed for a small circle amongst the German elite. Lichnowsky rejected claims that he had failed to understand Sir Edward Grey’s (1862-1933) foreign policy and his testimony underlined the readiness of German leaders to risk British entry into the war. Allied authors happily seized upon these documents to buttress their arguments that German leaders had pursued a reckless course during the July crisis .

Although the to-and-fro between belligerent politicians and scholars about responsibility dominated debate, other academic and political communities contributed novel perspectives. Edmund Dene Morel (1873-1924) and the Union of Democratic Control argued that secret diplomacy was the fundamental cause of the war – and in making this argument they staked their claims for future parliamentary control of foreign policy. In retrospect, the most important contributions to these debates came from Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) , Bolsheviks, and other socialist opponents of the war. In September 1915, socialist opponents of the war from around Europe gathered at the Swiss town of Zimmerwald . The manifesto, written by a group, including Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) , dismissed the debate about the “immediate responsibility” for the outbreak of the war, maintaining that “one thing is clear: the war, which produced this chaos, is the product of imperialism , of the striving of the capitalist class of each nation to feed their desire for profits through the exploitation of human labour and the natural treasures of the globe.” [5]

Lenin’s writings on the war echoed this interpretation of its origins. He drew on pre-war criticisms of imperialism and the corrupting relationship between capitalism and the state by the British author, J.A. Hobson (1858-1940) , amongst others. Viewing the war as a clash of capitalist imperialist states had obvious political attractions for socialist revolutionaries. It challenged the arguments of socialist supporters of the war that it was waged in defence of the nation. By linking the origins of the war to the suffering of millions, it legitimised Bolshevik demands for dramatic social and political reform. After the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they never sought to defend the record of Tsarist foreign policy and published volumes of incriminating primary sources.

In Germany, the Social Democrats , who had supported the war, and the Independent Social Democrats, who had rejected further war credits from 1917 onwards, formed a provisional coalition government after the Kaiser ’s abdication. Although they represented themselves as a clean break from Germany’s imperial regime, the centrality of assigning responsibility for the outbreak of the war in any peace settlement meant they were constrained from a more open account of the origins of the war. The independent socialist Karl Kautsky (1853-1938) , jailed for his opposition to the war, briefly worked on Foreign Office documents about the July crisis, before the provisional government thought better of its folly and appointed two other figures to help, or more accurately to tone down, Kautsky – the pacifist Walter Schücking (1875-1935) and the diplomat Maximilian Montgelas (1860-1938) .

The question of “war guilt” intensified the political stakes in the historical debate. Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles stated:

The article was inserted by the American delegation, with John Foster Dulles (1888-1959) , the future secretary of state, playing a central role in its drafting. The American concept sought to place claims for reparations on a legal basis, rather than the right of victory. Article 231 therefore underpinned key features of the treaty and the wider political design of the post-war order, including reparations and international law . This made the article an obvious target for German attacks. On receiving the draft text of the treaty, the German foreign minister Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau (1869-1928) denounced article 231 (and some others) as the “war guilt clause” and “shame paragraphs”. He changed the meaning of the article from one of legal and political responsibility to one of moral and national honour. He completed the process of fusing moral and political categories, evident in the earliest debates about the origins of the war. This fusion and the high political stakes made historical research into the origins of the war fraught in the 1920s.

Between Politics and History: The Interwar Years ↑

The German Foreign Office established a specialist section ( Referat ) to attack the “war guilt” clause, as part of its efforts to revise the Treaty of Versailles. Historical research in the former belligerent societies served political agendas. Historians were often willing participants in this highly politicised debate about the origins of the war. They gained prestige and funding from their association with major national causes. The German Foreign Office funded journals and lecture tours, particularly in the United States. As importantly, historians often shared the broad views of their respective foreign ministries. And even those who were sceptical of emerging national narratives about the origins of the war still relied heavily upon sources published under the aegis of the foreign ministries.

Publishing massive collections of documents became a central feature of interwar research and debate. In the 1920s, the German Foreign Office published over forty volumes of documents in the series Die Grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette . A three-man team edited the collection. The series started in the 1870s following the Franco-Prussian War and the volumes became denser as they entered the 20 th century. A concern to downplay German acts of aggression influenced the selection and editing of documents. Some of Wilhelm II’s revealing marginal comments on diplomatic traffic were omitted, while other documents were falsified.

Other states followed suit. Political concerns were at the fore. Pierre de Margerie (1861-1942) , the French ambassador to Berlin, warned Prime Minister Aristide Briand (1862-1932) in 1926 – in the era of Franco-German rapprochement – that France would lose the contest for world opinion unless it followed suit. As in Die Grosse Politik the selection of documents reflected political imperatives. Harold Temperley (1879-1939) , a British historian who worked on the British Documents on the Origins of the War , noted that, “We cannot, of course, tell the whole truth.” [6] The Soviet publication of diplomatic documents was designed to damage the reputations of all the great powers. The lead editor was M.N. Pokrovsky (1868-1932) , one of Russia ’s first Marxist historians. He joined the Bolshevik party after the 1917 revolution and played an influential role in developing education policy. The documents were translated into German – but not into English or French – under the guidance of Otto Hoetzsch (1876-1946) , a leading German expert on Russian politics. Financed by a German loan, four Austrian historians edited eight volumes of Austro-Hungarian diplomatic documents.

The volume of documents in these collections overwhelmed other sources produced in the interwar period. Archives and personal collections of papers were generally inaccessible – or else made public through the publication of memoirs. These publications therefore had considerable weight in shaping the debate over the origins of the war. First, the choice of German and French historians and officials to start the series in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war pushed the search for the origins back from the immediate context of the July crisis and the years immediately preceding the war. This gave rise to a narrative that emphasised the flaws of the international order, rendering war a likely outcome of decades of great power rivalries. Second, the study of the origins of the war became the study of diplomatic history. Without access to significant materials from other ministries or personal papers, historians generally worked on the assumption that the key decisions were made in the foreign ministries. This downplayed the role of military and economic groups in making foreign policy. Sources for public opinion were available – in 1931 Malcolm Carroll (1893-1959) published his important study of French public opinion and foreign policy – but these were under-utilised. Third, the publication of so many volumes ensured that historians often had access to several accounts of the one event or discussion. The comparison and weighing of different diplomatic sources meshed with the traditional strengths of critical analysis by historians and with the emphasis the profession placed on documents as the repository of historical “truth”.

By the late 1920s, historians were busily digesting the mass of documents. American historians – most prominently Bernadotte Schmitt (1886-1969) , Sidney Fay (1876-1967) , William Langer (1886-1959) , and Harry Elmer Barnes (1889-1968) – were at the fore of the debate. For the first time since the outbreak of the war, historians began to achieve some critical distance from the subject, even if they were working with documentary materials shaped by the political struggles over article 231. Reviewing books by Pierre Renouvin (1893-1974) , a veteran and leading French diplomatic historian, and by Eugen Fischer (1881-1964) , an historian working for the Reichstag’s War Guilt Section, Schmitt suggested that the “debate can be conducted with ample knowledge and good temper”. [7] Renouvin warned against “establishing a dogma”. It was, he declared, “the historian’s task not to fix responsibilities, but rather to furnish explanations and to make clear the circumstances which guided the development of international politics.” [8] Renouvin’s own contribution, La crise européene et la grande guerre , published as part of the series on European history, Peuples et civilisations , held German and Austro-Hungarian leaders primarily responsible for the outbreak of war. Their willingness to risk war and German leaders’ belief in the inevitability of war – rather than the Russian decision to mobilise on 30 July – were decisive in bringing about war. This confirmed his findings in an earlier volume on the July crisis. Renouvin’s style remained remarkably dispassionate, especially given the loss of his left arm, as a result of injuries suffered in April 1917. [9]

The most comprehensive analysis of the origins of the war, written by the former editor of Corriere della Sera , Luigi Albertini (1871-1941) , was published during the Second World War. It represented the culmination of the diplomatic history approach of the interwar years. Supported by Luciano Magrini (1885-1957) , the former foreign correspondent of Corriere della Sera , Albertini’s study dissected minutely individual decisions, which he saw as “the chain of recklessness and error, which brought Europe to catastrophe.” Albertini attributed the “final, definite responsibility” to the German military planners, whose mobilisation plans ensured war, while also castigating the political miscalculations of leaders in Vienna and Berlin, who hoped for localised war but were prepared to risk a general European war. But he did not shy away from criticisms of other leaders – Sergei Sazonov’s (1860-1927) misunderstanding of mobilisation plans or Grey’s failure to warn Germany more clearly about Britain’s likely entry into a European conflict, for example. [10]

Even if historians distanced themselves from politics, the wider political context inevitably shaped questions and perspectives. Some British historians, such as William Dawson (1860-1948) , funded by the German Foreign Office’s War Guilt Section, revised their wartime argument that Prussian militarism was the root cause of the war, and now emphasised the anarchical character of the pre-war order. The shift away from the “German war guilt” thesis was intertwined with international political developments, notably the reintegration of Germany into the international community and appeasement in the late 1920s and 1930s. [11]

The Impact of the Second World War ↑

On 28 May 1940, Philip Noel-Baker (1889-1982) , Labour MP, Olympic medallist, and later Nobel Peace Prize winner, told the House of Commons that

Noel-Baker, a conscientious objector during the First World War, was one of many to make the association between the Nazi regime and Prussian militarism. On 25 February 1947, the Allied Control Council abolished the state of Prussia, “which from the early days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany”. The aggressive, expansionist foreign and military policies of the Third Reich compelled contemporaries to think anew about the relationship between German domestic politics and the origins of major European wars from the 1860s to the 1940s.

The relationship between academic and political debate is illustrated by two contributions to the debate. The first example is A.J.P. Taylor’s (1906-1990) survey, The Course of German History , completed in September 1944 and published the following year. Taylor, a member of the Labour Party, had written a chapter on the Weimar Republic, part of a “compilation”, as he put it, “to explain to the conquerors what sort of country they were conquering”. The chapter was rejected for its allegedly pessimistic reading of German history, so Taylor responded by writing a full survey. His aim was to locate Adolf Hitler’s (1889-1945) regime within the course of German history. The First World War and its origins became a central part of this narrative. In typically irreverent and suggestive style, Taylor argued that the origins of the war were primarily rooted in the crisis-prone politics of the German Empire after 1906. Foreign policy setbacks – the formation of the Triple Entente between 1904 and 1907 and an over-reliance on the Austro-Hungarian ally – and the increasing fragility of Bismarckian constitutional settlement of 1871 increased the willingness of German leaders to pursue highly risky policies. He disputed that any single person “ruled at Berlin”, but he contended that the elites saw war as a solution to the growing domestic problems. Success in war served domestic agendas, buttressing authoritarian elites against democratic reforms. [13] His masterpiece, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918 , took a different approach, analysing the international system and paying little attention to domestic pressures, but he concluded that the incompetence of Wilhelm II and Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg (1856-1921) and the aggressive ambitions of German generals caused the war.

Of course, the advent of the Second World War could lead to conclusions radically different from Taylor’s. After 1945 German historians faced the task of giving an historical context for the Third Reich, while also renewing German historiographical traditions. The German historian and veteran of the First World War Gerhard Ritter (1888-1967) published Machtstaat und Utopie in 1940, a partially disguised attempt to separate the Nazi regime from its self-proclaimed roots in German history. “How infinitely important a task is it for the historian,” Ritter wrote to Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954) in September 1946, “to assure the continuity of our historical thought and this to prevent a chaos of political and moral desperation, which could result from the catastrophic and abrupt end of our traditions, and still to possess the necessary flexibility in order to be able to sustain a real new beginning.” [14] Imprisoned between November 1944 and the end of the war, Ritter completed his four-volume history of German militarism in the 1950s and 1960s, but it derived from debates amongst historians between 1933 and 1945 about the place of the Third Reich in German history.

Ritter sought an answer to the question of how the German people, “for centuries the most peaceful in Europe”, had found a leader in Adolf Hitler, “a violent adventurer” and the “destroyer of the old order of Europe”. For Ritter, Hitler represented a perversion of politics, the subordination of politics to war. The roots of the Hitler regime, Ritter suggested, lay in the triumph of military over political considerations, which brought about the destruction of the political order and moral conventions. This process began, according to Ritter, in the late 19 th century, as “military patterns of thinking came to invade the ideology of the middle class”. The Schlieffen Plan, which privileged technical military considerations over what was politically possible, represented the triumph of the military over politics. Ritter criticised Bethmann Hollweg and others for their unquestioning acceptance of the primacy of military necessity over political judgement. While this contributed to the outbreak of war in 1914, he argued that neither German political nor military leaders sought war and dismissed the value of the question of “war guilt”. As the volumes were published after the war, he also saw them as a contribution to the debate about strategy in an age of nuclear war. [15]

Ritter’s broader strategy was to locate the Third Reich within the broad sweep of the growth of modern mass politics in Europe after 1789, while also divorcing the movement from conservative German traditions. While Wilhelm II and Bethmann Hollweg were not fully excused from their follies: they were cast as moderates, overwhelmed by modern militarism before and during the war. Bismarck and the Prussian conservative state were rescued from the opprobrium heaped upon them by the Allies and critical foreign historians, such as Taylor. Within the West German historical profession in the 1950s, the origins of the war lay in the anarchical international system and modern militarism. As continental rivals moved towards cooperation and integration in the early 1950s, a Franco-German Historians’ Commission, including Renouvin and Ritter, recommended that textbooks adopt the interwar interpretation of the origins of the war. [16]

The Fischer Debate ↑

It was in this context that the Fischer controversy broke. Certainly the most passionate debate since the early 1920s, the Fischer controversy was perhaps also the most nationally bounded debate on the origins of the war. Fritz Fischer’s (1908-1999) thesis about German plans to initiate a war and then to pursue expansionist war aims hardly came as a surprise to historians outside the Federal Republic. Before examining the political context and consequences, Fischer’s thesis requires a brief summary. From the time of the infamous War Council meeting in December 1912, he argued, German leaders planned a war of aggression. The drive to war resulted from increasing anxiety amongst German elites about the deterioration of the domestic and international stability of the Empire. Crucially, Fischer argued, German leaders had brought this situation upon themselves. At home, they stalled on constitutional changes, while German isolation in international politics was the result of menacing moves over Morocco and the Balkans after the turn of the century. It was a case of self-encirclement. He showed how military and political leaders prepared for war from late 1912, increasing the size of the army and fostering aggressive nationalist public opinion. This interpretation significantly reduced the interpretive weight placed on the international system. His interpretation derived from a methodological move, from the primacy of foreign policy to the primacy of domestic politics. On this reading, foreign policy was primarily the product of domestic political pressures. Given the importance of the primacy of foreign policy in German historiography, Fischer’s thesis represented an assault on cherished approaches as well as comforting explanations of the origins of the war.

In later works, he elaborated his arguments about the German elites’ failure to introduce constitutional reform and the temptations of an aggressive foreign policy. This was the fundamental driving force of the history of the German nation-state between 1871 and 1945. The implications of this argument were already evident in his books on German war aims and pre-war foreign policy. This account challenged the efforts of Ritter and others to separate the Nazi regime from the continuities of German history. As the title of one of Fischer’s books put, “ Hitler war kein Betriebsunfall ” (“Hitler was no accident”). [17]

Conservative historians, notably Ritter and Egmont Zechlin (1896-1992) , criticised Fischer’s use of sources, his methodological assumptions, and the political consequences of this revisionist account of the origins of the war. They argued that many of the documents could be interpreted in alternative ways. Indeed, complex disputes over the interpretation of the War Council meeting continue to the present day. Although historians on both sides of the debate claimed that documents provided access to historical “truth”, the complex context of each document made singular interpretations difficult. The author’s intentions were also open to interpretation. Wilhelm II’s marginalia could be read either as evidence of his plans for war or of his impulsive tendencies. Ritter criticised Fischer’s methodology. Although his own work had dissected the role of the German military in pre-war politics, he worked from the assumption that foreign policy was a response to international, not domestic political, conditions. The anxieties of German leaders before 1914 were the product of isolation and encirclement, cemented by the Anglo-Russian entente of 1907. Some German historians – and the American Paul Schroeder – argued that the entente powers, in particular Britain, were the most expansionist states in the decades before 1914. In global terms – then an unusual perspective for a scholar of European power politics – the expansion of the British and French Empires made Germany relatively weaker.

The controversy owed much of its febrile atmosphere to the political stakes. Recent research has shown that Fischer had already viewed the conservative German historical profession with suspicion, even contempt, during the 1930s. At this point, Fischer was certainly open to certain Nazi ideas and he was appointed professor of modern history at the University of Hamburg in 1942. The defeat in 1945 and his experience as a prisoner of war had a profound impact on Fischer’s attitude to the study of German history – if not to the dominant conservative, middle-class German historians. “Only now did I become aware of the fateful effects that the tradition of unconditional obedience … had on German history,” he later remarked. [18] Historical research and writing had a national pedagogical purpose; history would instruct the people on the development of the baleful authoritarian tradition in German political culture. Where Ritter and his allies sought to rescue a “useable past”, to use Charles Maier’s term, Fischer sought to press the past into service as a warning, as a call to political and social reform. In this respect, the two camps shared a similar, if negative, goal, namely avoiding a return to a dictatorship.

Conservative German historians, however, charged Fischer with undermining the Federal Republic’s place integration into the Western community of nations and domestic political stability. Not only did they challenge Fischer’s thesis in reviews and the press, but they also sought to hinder planned tours of the United States to promote his work.

By the 1970s, Fischer’s thesis had become the new orthodoxy. The weight of evidence and the clarity of his argument undoubtedly contributed to his success. Yet the success of any historical argument also owes much to wider political and social contexts. Within West German universities, a new generation of graduate students adopted a more critical perspective on German history. They tended to emphasise the long-term continuities that culminated in the Third Reich. Studies of the German Empire were a proxy for engagement with the history of the Nazi past. A new generation of German historians went much further than Fischer in emphasising the domestic roots of the origins of the war. Hans Ulrich Wehler (1931-2014) , based at Bielefeld, was the most prominent of these historians. He introduced new approaches from the social sciences, which saw domestic politics as a struggle between different economic and social groups. Social elites – business people, agrarians, the officer corps, and the mandarin class – forged alliances to retain power and wealth at the expense of workers, peasants, and other social groups. They thwarted constitutional reform. Yet these elite alliances were beset by contradictions. An expansionist imperialist policy offered the elites in the German Empire a means to escape these contradictions and to stifle domestic reform – but at the risk of war. Wehler’s survey of the German Empire traced the origins of the war back to the authoritarian features of Bismarck’s 1871 constitution. Whereas in the interwar period, historians saw in Franco-German antagonism the original flaw of the international system, Wehler and others now located the source of the problems in the German constitution.

Amongst French historians there was a similar change in emphasis, away from the diplomatic history practised by Renouvin in the interwar period towards a greater interest in the economic and social bases of foreign policy. This change, however, had its origins in the application of Fernand Braudel’s research in long-term historical processes to the study of the “forces profondes” of international politics. Between the late 1960s and mid-1970s, Renouvin himself and Jean-Baptiste Duroselle (1917-1994) supervised important works on French imperial expansion, economic relations, and public opinion. Yet their impact on the historiography of the origins of the war was less marked than that of Fischer’s students and the Bielefeld school. In part, the French studies did not deal directly with the political decisions of the July crisis and in part they confirmed existing interpretations that French policy had contributed towards creating the conditions for war, but had not actively sought war. [19]

A second source for Fischer’s success was the support he received in Britain and the United States. His arguments confirmed the general thrust of post-Second World War scholarship on the origins of the war. His engagement with American and British academics was important in inspiring his own criticisms of the methodological assumptions within the German historical profession. Invitations to lecture at universities and the translations of his books gave additional validation to his research. James Joll (1918-1994) , one of the most important post-war British historians of international relations, introduced Fischer’s work to a broad Anglophone audience in the influential journal Past & Present and wrote the preface to the English translation of Der Griff nach der Weltmacht . [20] Joll argued that Fischer’s focus on the domestic political impulses behind foreign policy would lead historians to revisit the foreign policies of other great powers. And they did, broadening the source-base and asking new questions. The works of Zara Steiner on Britain, John Keiger on France, and Dominic Lieven on Russia, published by Macmillan in the series Making of the Twentieth Century offered outstanding interpretations of other nations’ foreign policies before 1914. But one consequence of Fischer’s thesis was that it reinforced the argument that German foreign policy had been the most aggressive and destabilising in Europe before 1914 and that the other powers had reacted defensively to the German challenge. By the late 1970s a new orthodoxy about the origins of the war was established, emphasising the primary responsibility of German leaders for ending peace in Europe and the flawed domestic political development of the German nation-state after 1871.

New Directions and Fragmentation ↑

Although the Fischer thesis remained a source of debate amongst German historians, the erosion of the orthodoxy that had emerged in the 1960s and 1970s had diverse sources, often outside Germany. For example, two British historians, Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, began to dismantle the Sonderweg thesis. British social historians were not inclined to idealise British historical developments, against which German history could be measured and found wanting. In the immediate term, the questioning of the Sonderweg by social historians had little impact on research in international history. Rather than a full-fronted assault on the Fischer thesis, the cornerstone of the new orthodoxy, changing historical interpretations, emerged across a range of different issues. This reflected the increasing breadth of research into international history, but it also contributed to a fragmentation of the field.

Political developments continued to shape historians’ perspectives. Of course not every changing perspective can be attributed to contemporary political currents. Rarely do historians adopt an openly “presentist” frame of reference for their research. Present debates tend to work in more suggestive ways, opening up new questions rather than providing easy templates. George Kennan’s (1904-2005) well-known characterisation of the First World War as the “seminal catastrophe” of the 20 th century came during the height of the Second Cold War during the 1980s, when fear of nuclear war stalked the world. Political scientists investigated the “cult of the offensive” before 1914, with one eye on the influence of military planners on foreign policy. [21]

Yet the end of the Cold War arguably had a more profound impact, raising new questions. First, the relatively peaceful ending of the Cold War suggested that long-term great power confrontation did not inevitably issue in a general war. Indeed political scientists, such as John Mueller, wrote of the “obsolescence of major war”, which they traced back to the experiences of the First World War. Historians began to ask not why war broke out in 1914, but why and how peace between the great powers had been maintained for over four decades. Holger Afflerbach questioned the argument of his doctoral supervisor, Wolfgang Mommsen (1930-2004) , that political and military leaders viewed war as inevitable. Instead, he and Friedrich Kießling identified a topos of “improbable war”. Questions have their own built-in assumptions. By reframing the question around the preservation of peace, historians have directed their attention to stabilising elements in international politics. This has informed revisionist accounts of a wide range of topics, from the alliance system to popular movements.

Second, the failure of many realist scholars to predict the outcome of the Cold War led international relations theorists to revisit assumptions about international politics. From the early 1990s, scholars developed constructivist approaches to international politics, challenging realist ideas about anarchy, the distribution of power, and the articulation of the national interest. As Alexander Wendt put it neatly, “anarchy is what states make of it”. Tracing the impact of this new departure in international relations scholarship on historical research is difficult for various reasons. Historians have long been aware of the importance of perception and what James Joll called the “unspoken assumptions”. Whereas Joll was primarily interested in how these assumptions shaped individual decisions, notably during the July crisis, the constructivist approach invites historians to consider how understandings of the international system are shared between key actors. It directs attention to the normative environment, adding a further layer to analyses based on power and interest. Although we may see norms as being pro-social – facilitating cooperation and conflict-resolution – certain norms, such as honour, can incentivise violence and war. Explaining the outbreak of war can also involve charting how the normative environment broke down in the final years of peace. [22]

The end of the Cold War accelerated processes of globalisation, which had begun in the 1970s. By the 1990s, historians were busily drafting agendas for global history. The late 19 th and early 20 th centuries offered a rich seam for global historians. On many measures, the world was “more global” in 1913 than in the early 21 st century. Capital flows, trade, migration, and cultural exchange reshaped the world after the American Civil War. Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels Petersson called this the era of “classical globalisation.” [23] Yet globalisation in the early 20 th century produced a puzzle of sorts for historians of international relations. The credo of globalisation theories in the 1990s suggested that growing economic interdependence and cultural exchange made wars – certainly between the major powers – irrational in any sense of material gain or security. Similar arguments had been well rehearsed before 1914 and yet the great powers had gone to war. Kevin O’Rourke and Richard Findlay contend that the First World War brought 19 th century globalisation to an “abrupt end”, but they also suggest that the war was not the result of inherent tensions in the global economy. Rather, the war “still appears as somewhat of a diabolus ex machina ” in their account. [24] Interdependence could produce conflict as well as harmony. Some recent works have begun to tease out the relationship between globalisation and erosion of peace. Sebastian Conrad’s work on German identity and globalisation before 1914 showed how national identity was sometimes strengthened through antagonistic encounters with others in a globalising international system. Nicholas Lambert argues that British naval planners intended to exploit commercial interdependence to bring about Germany’s economic collapse, while Jennifer Siegel has shown how the financial interdependence between Russia and France strengthened the political alliance between the two states. [25]

Since the 1980s historians of British foreign policy have questioned narratives centred on the European balance of power and the German threat to British security. Keith Wilson argued that British decision-makers viewed Russia as the primary threat, privileged the maintenance of empire over the balance of power in Europe, and had a military posture dedicated to imperial defence, not European wars. [26] The historical debate reflected in some ways the broader debate in Britain about its relationship with Europe. Scepticism about British participation in the European project had existed since the end of the Second World War, but during the 1980s this scepticism migrated from the Labour to the Conservative party. Eurosceptics on the right continued to emphasise themes such as the defence of parliamentary sovereignty, but they also sought to present Britain as a global, rather than a European, power. In the late 1990s, Niall Ferguson and John Charmley published two of the most trenchant criticisms of British foreign policy before 1914. Both argued that Britain should have stayed out of the war and that a Europe under German hegemony – the Kaiser’s European Union in Ferguson’s telling phrase – would have been compatible with British interests. According to Charmley, Grey had an unfounded fear of the German Empire, while Ferguson followed Wilson’s argument that Grey appeased Russia to stave off a threat in central Asia – but at the cost of encircling Germany in Europe and creating conditions that made war more likely. [27] Since the 1990s, this argument has rumbled on and has encountered some strong rebuttals. Nonetheless, it has had implications for the broader discussion of the origins of the war, emphasising the relationship between the emerging global balance of power and the anxieties of German leaders who feared the Empire was being relegated to a second-rate European power.

One consequence of Germany’s dominant position amongst the Central Powers was the relative neglect of Austro-Hungarian foreign policy in discussions of the question of the origins of the war. This neglect was compounded by the assumption that the multi-ethnic empire was inevitably doomed to collapse, its foreign policy largely a study in myopia and wishful thinking. Recent historiography has been generous in assessing the stabilising function of the Austro-Hungarian Empire . The ponderous decision-making process and the labyrinthine bureaucracy look less odd as Europeans grapple with the complexities of the European Union. Paradoxically the more positive view of the Austro-Hungarian Empire has gone hand in hand with more sustained criticism of its foreign policy-makers, who overestimated the challenges posed by national minorities. Samuel Williamson – in the Macmillan series mentioned above – argued that leaders in Vienna were responsible for pushing for war in 1914. In other words, German support was essential for the Austro-Hungarian attack on Serbia, but Leopold von Berchtold (1863-1942) , Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf (1852-1925) , and other key figures in Vienna had their own agendas and were not mere pawns in German machinations. [28]

The renewed attention to Austria-Hungary’s foreign policy – at least in English-language surveys of international politics before the war – reflects a shift in historians’ geographical perspectives. Narratives centred on Anglo-German antagonism or the hereditary enmity of the French and Germans were rooted in the wartime experience, but the focus on western European tensions marginalised the fault lines, conflicts, and accommodations in eastern Europe and the Balkans. The violent break-up of Yugoslavia , the expansion of the European Union, tensions between Russia and its neighbours, and the growth of Turkish power in the eastern Mediterranean has reshaped how historians view European history. As historians have integrated research beyond the Western Front into their analyses of the war, international historians now pay more attention to the agency of the Balkan states, the vicissitudes of Ottoman politics, and Russian ambitions in the region – supplementing the work of previous generations of historians, who had examined British, German, and French imperial projects. Sean McMeekin’s work has done much to shift historians’ attention to the conflicts between Russia and the Ottoman Empire , though his claims about Russian responsibility for starting the war have been heavily criticised, notably in Dominic Lieven’s recent thoughtful account. [29] This work also raises broader questions about the normative environment and hierarchies of states in Europe. Mustafa Aksakal’s important study of Ottoman foreign policy on the eve of its entry to the war in November 1914 shows how intellectuals close to the Committee of Union and Progress lost faith in the claims of great powers to uphold international law, while Michael Reynolds examines how geopolitical rivalry and the principle of nationality were mutually constitutive in Russian-Ottoman relations. [30]

Fresh agendas and debates also resulted from new methodological approaches to international history and the opening up of further archival material. The fall of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union led to the opening up of new archival material. This included the return of archival material about military planning to Germany, which spawned a minor cottage industry centred on the Schlieffen Plan. [31] The rise of cultural history in the 1980s, with its emphasis on language, mentalities, and representation, had much to offer international historians. Equally Joll’s work on unspoken assumptions and constructivist theories of international relations showed that international historians could contribute to the breadth of cultural history. And yet, for various reasons, the fields of international and cultural history remained distant. The fruitful collaboration between military and cultural historians has been followed by valuable cultural history approaches to international relations. These studies may not explain the moment of decision about war and peace – the diplomatic twitch, as David Reynolds puts it – but they deepen our understanding of the complexity of international relations, how power was constructed, and how people imagined the questions and choices they encountered in foreign policy. [32]

The breadth of scholarship produced since the 1970s had not only chipped away at the Fischer thesis; it had also enlarged historians’ understandings of foreign policy making before 1914. The clarity of Fischer’s thesis had less purchase against the background of the evident complexity of international politics. In historiographical terms, this complexity had resulted in the fragmentation of the study of international history. The emphasis on complexity also reflected an understanding of the openness of history, of the possibilities in international politics before 1914. Without a singular thesis to bind together the study of international history, historians engaged each other on more narrow grounds, such as German military planning or British naval policy before 1914.

The Outbreak of War Revisited after 100 Years ↑

The centenary predictably saw a wave of publications, many of which addressed the origins of the war. Two of these works – Christopher Clark’s Sleepwalkers and Thomas Otte’s July crisis – represent the most comprehensive analyses of the outbreak of the war since Albertini’s work. They both combine research across a mass of published primary and archival sources in several languages with a command of the sprawling secondary literature.

Weighing in at well over 500 pages each, the two books offer space for different interpretations of key moments and individuals. Otte is critical of the “recklessness” of statesmen in Vienna, Berlin, and, to a lesser extent, St Petersburg. Leopold von Berchtold, the Habsburg Foreign Minister, and his fellow diplomats at the Ballhausplatz , Otte argues, suffered from “tunnel-vision”, which reduced Austro-Hungarian foreign policy to Balkanpolitik . Otte frequently describes Berlin’s crisis diplomacy as “reckless”, while the Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, appears as “marginal” in many key decisions. On the other hand, Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, is a man of action, perspicacious, and committed to peace, even if the foundations of his diplomacy was flawed due to the recklessness and uncompromising stance of others. [33] Clark offers an alternative reading of the crisis. Despite having been charged with ignoring the question of responsibility and claiming to abjure the “finger-jabbing” prosecutorial stance, so common to many histories of the outbreak of the war, he does not shy away from trenchant judgements on key figures. The French president, Raymond Poincaré, discredited the Austro-Hungarian charges against Serbia and dissembled during the final days of peace. Grey, he argues, consistently prioritised the maintenance of the Triple Entente over the peaceful resolution of the crisis, which meant that his string of conference proposals in late July were half-baked, while he also failed to restrain Russian moves, even after its partial mobilisation on 25 July. Meanwhile the Russian decisions for partial and then full mobilisation fuelled the escalation of the crisis, while “the Germans had remained, in military terms, an island of relative calm throughout the crisis”. [34]

Although these differences of interpretation relate to some of the most fundamental debates about the July crisis and suggest a wide gulf between Clark and Otte, in many respects their overarching interpretations have a considerable amount in common. First they both emphasise the contingent character of the July crisis, how the accumulation of individual decisions led to outcomes often at odds with the intentions of the authors of those decisions. Both books, to use Clark’s phrase, are “saturated with agency.” Second, despite the stress on individual decisions, they tend to view the crisis in systemic terms. By emphasising “how” the European powers came to war in 1914, rather than “why”, Clark shifted the focus from the intentions of decision-makers to the impact their decisions had within a tightly ordered international system, eventually sundering the pre-war order. While Otte warns historians against judging decisions against some putative norms of a given international order – the Great Power order of the early 20 th century – his own careful analysis, showing how considerations of alliance, détente, and relative military power shaped assumptions and led to disastrous miscalculation, is an instructive model of how to place individual decisions within a systemic context. Third, both express doubts about the conceiving of the July crisis in terms of national “policies”. In Clark’s view, policy implies a coherence, which was impossible to achieve in the polycratic regimes and porous transnational connections of the era, while Otte repeatedly notes the divisions between military and civilian leaders, even within individual foreign ministries, that hampered the articulation of clear strategies. Again, this reflects Clark’s reframing of the question in terms of “how”, rather than “why”. The historian exploits their vantage point to show how the system operated and collapsed. Perhaps most fundamentally, both agree that no single belligerent or individual should shoulder the bulk of the responsibility for the outbreak of war. Their differences are ones of emphasis and detail.

Whether these books will provide unity to a fragmented field of research remains to be seen. They demonstrate how questions about individual issues in international politics can contribute to the broader debate about the origins of the war. The success of Clark’s book, particularly in Germany, has also aroused a public debate about the origins of the war. His work is often read against that of Fischer, the last high-profile public contribution to the debate in Germany. As ever, contemporary political events lurk in the background. Clark mentions, at various points, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Dayton Accord during the Yugoslav Wars, and the crisis in the Euro-zone. The first two are directly related to his argument about the impact of individual moments and contingency on historical processes – the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria-Este (1863-1914) and the ultimatum issued to Serbia. The publication of the German translation coincided with the Euro-crisis, which in turn raised questions about Germany’s position in Europe. History remains inescapable in political debate. For some, Clark’s thesis of shared responsibility between the belligerents for the outbreak of war will give succour to those who want to cast aside Germany’s role in two world wars and adopt a more assertive reading of the national interest. For others, the burden of “war guilt” cripples Berlin’s leadership, damaging European institutions as well as German interests. As new challenges and questions arise in future international politics, it is likely that historians will continue to revisit the origins of the war with new questions and fresh arguments.

William Mulligan, University College Dublin

Section Editor: Annika Mombauer

• ↑ Hantsch, Hugo: Leopold Graf Berchtold, volume 2, Graz 1963, p. 564.
• ↑ This argument draws on Mombauer, Annika: The Fischer Controversy, Documents, and the Truth about the Origins of the First World War, in: Journal of Contemporary History 48/ 2 (2013), pp. 290-314.
• ↑ Sombart, Werner: Händler und Helden. Patriotische Besinnungen, Munich 1915, pp. 3-5.
• ↑ Ungern-Sternberg, Jürgen von: Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg, Der Aufruf “An die Kulturwelt”. Das Manifest der 93 und die Anfänge der Kriegspropaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg, Stuttgart 1996, pp. 141-145.
• ↑ Lademacher, Horst (ed.): Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung, The Hague 1967, p. 166.
• ↑ Cited in Wilson, Keith: Introduction: Governments, Historians, and Historical Engineering, in: Wilson, Keith (ed.): Forging the Collective Memory, Berg et al. 1996, p. 17.
• ↑ Schmitt, Bernadotte: The origins of the war, in: Journal of Modern History 1/1 (1929), p. 112.
• ↑ Renouvin, Pierre: How the war came, in: Foreign Affairs (April 1929), p. 384.
• ↑ Renouvin, Pierre: La crise européene et la grande guerre (1904-1918), Paris 1934, pp. 109-117, 181-183; Renouvin, Pierre: Les origines immédiates de la guerre, Paris 1925; on Renouvin, see Duroselle, Jean-Baptiste: Pierre Renouvin et la science politique, in: Revue française de science politique 25/3 (1975), pp. 561-574.
• ↑ Albertini, Luigi: The Origins of the War of 1914, 3 volumes, London 1953, volume 2, pp. 485 and 579.
• ↑ Pogge von Strandmann, Hartmut: Britische Historiker und der Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges, in: Michalka, Wolfgang (ed.): Der Erste Weltkrieg. Wirkung, Wahrnehmung, in: Analyse, Munich 1994, pp. 929-952.
• ↑ “Civil Estimates”, 28 May 1940, vol 361, online: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1940/may/28/civil-estimates-1940#S5CV0361P0_19400528_HOC_274 (retrieved 8 November 2016).
• ↑ Taylor, A.J.P.: The Course of German History. A Survey of the Development of German History since 1815, London 1962, pp. vii-xi, 176-193.
• ↑ Schwabe, Klaus: Change and Continuity in German Historiography from 1933 into the Early 1950s: Gerhard Ritter (1888–1967), in: Lehmann, Hartmut (ed.): Paths of Continuity: Central European Historiography from 1933 to the 1950s, Cambridge 1994, p. 104.
• ↑ Ritter, Gerhard: The Sword and the Scepter. The Problem of Militarism in Germany, 4 volumes, Coral Gables, Florida 1969, volume 1, pp. 11-13, volume 2, pp. 117, 194-195, 275.
• ↑ Mombauer, Annika: The Origins of the First World War. Controversies and Consensus, London 2002, p. 123.
• ↑ Fischer, Fritz: Hitler war kein Betriebsunfall, Munich 1991.
• ↑ Petzold, Stephan: The Social Making of a Historian: Fritz Fischer’s Distancing from Bourgeois-Conservative Historiography, 1930-1960, in: Journal of Contemporary History 48/2 (2013), p. 284.
• ↑ Renouvin, Pierre: Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Introduction à l’histoire des relations internationales, Paris 1964; ibid., p. 569.
• ↑ Petzold, Social Making of a Historian 2013, p. 286; Joll, James: The 1914 debate continues: Fritz Fischer and his critics, in: Past & Present 34 (July 1966), pp. 100-113 and Joll’s preface to Fischer, Fritz: Germany’s war aims in the First World War, London 1967.
• ↑ Kennan, George: The decline of Bismarck’s European order. Franco-Russian relations, 1875-1890, Princeton 1981; Snyder, Jack: The ideology of the offensive. Military decision-making and the disasters of 1914, Ithaca 1989.
• ↑ Kießling, Friedrich: Gegen den Großen Krieg. Entspannung in den internationalen Beziehungen 1911-1914, Munich 2002; Reynolds, Michael: Shattering Empires. The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918, Cambridge 2011; Clark, Christopher: Sleepwalkers. How Europe went to war in 1914, London 2012, pp. 240-241; one of the most impressive engagements by an historian with a wide range of international relations theory can be found in Jackson, Peter: Beyond the Balance of Power. France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War, Cambridge 2013.
• ↑ Osterhammel, Jürgen/Petersson, Niels P.: Globalization. A Short History, Princeton 2009, pp. 81-90.
• ↑ Findlay, Richard/O’Rourke, Kevin: Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium, Princeton 2007, pp. xxiv–xxv.
• ↑ Conrad, Sebastian: Globalisierung und Nation in Deutschen Kaiserreich, Munich 2006; Lambert, Nicholas: Planning Armageddon. British Economic Warfare and the First World War, Cambridge, MA 2012; Siegel, Jennifer: For Peace and Money. French and British Finance in the Service of the Tsars and Commissars, Oxford 2015.
• ↑ Wilson, Keith: The Policy of the Entente. The Determinants of British Foreign Policy, 1904-1914, Cambridge 1985.
• ↑ Ferguson, Niall: The Pity of War, London 1998; Charmley, John: Splendid Isolation? Britain, the Balance of Power and the Origins of the First World War, London 1999.
• ↑ Watson, Alex: Ring of Steel. Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914-1918, London 2014; Williamson, Samuel: Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War, Basingstoke 1991; Kronenbitter, Günther: Krieg im Frieden. Die Führung der k. u. k. Armee und die Großmachtpolitik Österreich-Ungarns 1906-1914, Munich 2003.
• ↑ McMeekin, Sean: The Russian Origins of the First World War, Cambridge, MA 2011; Lieven, Dominic: Towards the Flame. Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia, London 2015.
• ↑ Aksakal, Mustafa: The Ottoman Road to War in 1914. The Ottoman Empire and the First World War, Cambridge 2008; Reynolds, Shattering Empires 2011.
• ↑ Zuber, Terence: Inventing the Schlieffen Plan. German War Planning, 1871-1914, Oxford 2002.
• ↑ Reynolds, David: International History, the Cultural Turn, and the Diplomatic Twitch, in: Cultural & Social History 3/1 (2006), pp. 75-91.
• ↑ Otte, Thomas G.: The July Crisis. The World’s Descent into War, 1914, Cambridge 2014, pp. 43, 169.
• ↑ Clark, Sleepwalkers 2012, pp. 445-449, 493-506, 510.
• Albertini, Luigi: The origins of the war of 1914 , London; New York 1952: Oxford University Press.
• Clark, Christopher M.: The sleepwalkers. How Europe went to war in 1914 , New York 2013: Harper.
• Fischer, Fritz: War of illusions. German policies from 1911 to 1914 , New York 1975: Norton.
• Joll, James: The 1914 debate continues. Fritz Fischer and his critics , in: Past & Present 34, 1966, pp. 100-113.
• Mombauer, Annika: The origins of the First World War. Controversies and consensus , Harlow; New York 2002: Longman.
• Mombauer, Annika: The Fischer controversy, documents and the 'truth' about the origins of the First World War , in: Journal of Contemporary History 48/2, 2013, pp. 290-314.
• Mombauer, Annika (ed.): Special issue. The Fischer controversy after 50 years , in: Journal of Contemporary History 48/2, 2013.
• Mulligan, William: The trial continues. New directions in the study of the origins of the First World War , in: The English Historical Review 129/538, 2014, pp. 639-666.
• Neilson, Keith: 1914. The German war? , in: European History Quarterly 44/3, 2014, pp. 395-418.
• Otte, Thomas: July Crisis. The world's descent into war, summer 1914 , New York 2014: Cambridge University Press.
• Petzold, Stephan: The social making of a historian. Fritz Fischer's distancing from bourgeois-conservative historiography, 1930-60 , in: Journal of Contemporary History 48/2, 2013, pp. 271-289.
• Ritter, Gerhard: The sword and the scepter. The problem of militarism in Germany , volume 2, Coral Gables 1970: University of Miami Press.
• Ritter, Gerhard: The sword and the scepter. The problem of militarism in Germany , volume 3, Coral Gables 1972: University of Miami Press.
• Ritter, Gerhard: The sword and the scepter. The problem of militarism in Germany , volume 4, Coral Gables 1973: University of Miami Press.
• Ritter, Gerhard: The sword and the scepter. The problem of militarism in Germany , volume 1, Coral Gables 1969: University of Miami Press.
• Schwengler, Walter: Völkerrecht, Versailler Vertrag und Auslieferungsfrage. Die Strafverfolgung wegen Kriegsverbrechen als Problem des Friedensschlusses 1919/20 , Stuttgart 1982: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt.
• Wilson, Keith M.: Forging the collective memory. Government and international historians through two World Wars , Providence 1996: Berghahn Books.

Mulligan, William: The Historiography of the Origins of the First World War , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2016-11-30. DOI : 10.15463/ie1418.11016 .

This text is licensed under: CC by-NC-ND 3.0 Germany - Attribution, Non-commercial, No Derivative Works.

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Goodbye to all that (again)? The Fischer thesis, the new revisionism and the meaning of the First World War

This is a revised text of the 39th Martin Wight Lecture, given at the University of Sussex on 6 November 2014.

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JOHN C. G. RÖHL, Goodbye to all that (again)? The Fischer thesis, the new revisionism and the meaning of the First World War, International Affairs , Volume 91, Issue 1, January 2015, Pages 153–166, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12191

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What is the truth about the nature of the First World War and why have historians been unable to agree on its origins? The interpretation that no one country was to blame prevailed until the 1960s when a bitter international controversy, sparked by the work of the Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer, arrived at the consensus that the Great War had been a ‘bid for world power’ by imperial Germany and therefore a conflict in which Britain had necessarily and justly engaged. But in this centennial year Fischer's conclusions have in turn been challenged by historians claiming that Europe's leaders all ‘sleepwalked’ into the catastrophe. This article, the text of the Martin Wight Memorial Lecture held at the University of Sussex in November 2014, explores the archival discoveries which underpinned the Fischer thesis of the 1960s and subsequent research, and asks with what justification such evidence is now being set aside by the new revisionism.

One hundred years ago, on 4 August 1914 to be exact, my motherland Great Britain declared war on my fatherland Germany. The German army had invaded neutral Belgium with the intention of crushing first France and then Russia and eliminating both as Great Powers ‘for all imaginable time’, as the German Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg put it in his September Programme in 1914. Just 25 years later, on 3 September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany a second time when Hitler, hand in glove with Stalin, fell upon Poland, so in effect restoring Germany's 1914 common frontier with Russia in the east.

My Scottish grandfather served in the British Army in the First World War, surviving the sinking of his ship by a German U-boat off the Algerian coast to stand as a Labour candidate for parliament in three general elections in the 1920s. My father was in the Wehrmacht's counter-espionage service, the Abwehr, in Hungary and survived the advance of the Red Army to become the headmaster of a large grammar school in Frankfurt am Main in the American zone. And I did my National Service in the Royal Air Force and was stationed in occupied Germany before going up to Cambridge to read history at Corpus Christi College. Three generations, three survivors of the Anglo-German agony of the first half of the twentieth century. In 1964 I was appointed to the University of Sussex as lecturer in the School of European Studies, whose founding dean was none other than the Olympian figure of Martin Wight, whose distinguished contribution to the study of international relations we are commemorating in this series of lectures. It is perhaps fitting, therefore, that I should have the privilege of giving this talk in Martin Wight's honour on the centenary of the seminal catastrophe of the First World War, the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of war in 1939, and the 25th anniversary of the reunification of a democratic Germany within the framework of a peaceful Europe.

It does not take much imagination to see the First and Second World Wars as two acts in the same drama. The immediate cause of war in 1939 might have been different from that in 1914, but with the German attack on France in May 1940 followed by the invasion of Soviet Russia in June 1941 the similarities between the two conflicts became unmistakable. It was, as General de Gaulle remarked in 1940 in one of his first speeches from London, as if the Schlieffen Plan had been put into operation all over again. In both cases we see a German Reich bent on the conquest of Europe—and the determination of the other nations, led first by Britain, then by the peoples of the ‘bloodlands’ of Eastern Europe and finally by the United States, to resist such subjugation, however terrible the cost. These were no ordinary wars, but, as Winston Churchill observed at the beginning of what rapidly became known as the Great War, ‘a struggle between nations for life or death’. 1

Yet this interpretation has recently been challenged by a wave of revisionism, exemplified by the astronomical success—especially in Germany, where it has sold many hundreds of thousands of copies—of the book The Sleepwalkers by our colleague Christopher Clark. 2 He and the other revisionists largely exonerate the Kaiser's Germany from responsibility for the First World War. While claiming to argue that war broke out by accident, with no one government more at fault than any other, in practice Clark places the blame to a large extent on little Serbia, followed by Russia, France and Britain in that order, presenting Austria-Hungary as doing its genuine best to avoid war and simply omitting altogether the evidence of any German intention to bring the war about.

This is a revival of an interpretation expressed in Lloyd George's dictum of the interwar years that in 1914 ‘the nations of Europe slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war’. By the late 1920s, the Churchillian belief that Britain had been right to enter the war to defend its vital interests and those of the rest of Europe from German aggression had given way in Britain to a mood of disillusionment fuelled by the writings of John Maynard Keynes, the war poets and Robert Graves's book Goodbye to all that . It had all been a pointless waste, and the carnage had only gone on for four and a half years because no one had known how to stop it. In a tragic twist, this British mood accorded perfectly with the insistence of the German right in the Weimar Republic on a revision of the punitive Treaty of Versailles on the grounds that its claim that Germany had deliberately brought about war in 1914 was nothing but a Kriegsschuldlüge , a war guilt lie. An uneasy consensus emerged; but the consensus of the interwar years was based not on any research but on wishful thinking—pacifist on one side, revanchist on the other. Serious research into the causes of the Great War then became impossible with Hitler's rise to power when critical books were burned, democratic historians forced into exile (and worse), and British historians—the tiny handful with knowledge of the language and the ability to decipher the German Schrift —lost all hope of gaining access to the German archives.

As far as German intentions in and before 1914 are concerned, then, the new revisionism seems to me to be taking us back to the state of knowledge of the interwar period. Politically, of course, this is nowhere near as dangerous as was the campaign against the ‘war guilt lie’ which acted as a rallying cry of the nationalist right in the Weimar Republic, for Germany is today a stable and peaceful democracy. But in terms of scholarship I find the new revisionism dismaying, as it involves the sidelining or suppression of so much of the knowledge we have gained through painstaking research over the past 50 years. That evidence, collected, sifted and argued over, had come to be accepted by the international community of historians as ‘the German paradigm’: that is to say, as the overarching interpretation placing the German problem at the centre of both world wars. So the new revisionism does more than simply challenge the view of the continuity between the two world wars; it raises fundamental questions about the nature of historical evidence itself. Once proof of German plans to unleash war in 1914 with the intention of dominating the Continent had been discovered, were historians still free to assert that no such intention existed and that war had broken out by accident after all? Is the question of Germany's responsibility for the First World War, once so toxic, simply a ‘blame game’, as Christopher Clark has called it? Is one interpretation as good as any other, the evidence to be used on a take it or leave it basis? Or is historical evidence more akin, say, to Galileo's observation of the circular motion of the moons of Jupiter, incontrovertible proof, however faint, of a henceforth irrepressible truth? With this rather bold cosmological analogy I am referring, as you will realize, to the discoveries made in the archives in the late 1950s by the Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer: discoveries that changed our perception of the First World War for ever—or so we thought.

Let me tell you the inside story of how the truth came to light in the aftermath of the Second World War, highlighting the contribution we at this university have played and continue to play. General Patton's army, sweeping through southern Germany (and, incidentally, liberating my family and me in Thuringia), came upon the records of the Auswärtiges Amt, the German foreign office, and took them across the Atlantic to Virginia. The British discovered the German naval records in the Harz Mountains and brought them over to London. The files of the German civilian government were discovered by the Red Army and transported to Moscow. The Americans and the British made copies and eventually returned the originals to the Federal Archive at Koblenz, the Military Archive in Freiburg and the Foreign Office, then in Bonn and now in Berlin. 3 So these files were becoming available just when I was beginning my own research at Cambridge in 1961. Much more difficult was gaining access to the files that had finished up in Moscow and were returned not, of course, to the Federal Republic but to the communist German Democratic Republic, by that time behind the Berlin Wall. It was only after several failed attempts that I was given permission to work on those records located in Potsdam and Merseburg.

In the course of my three-month research visit to the GDR in the summer of 1963 I met several young scholars from the West who were to become lifelong friends and whose work profoundly influenced my own as, together, we explored the large white expanses on the map of imperial Germany. Among them were Volker Berghahn, now the doyen of German history in the United States, and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, Helmut Böhme and Imanuel Geiss, who were working closely with Fritz Fischer in Hamburg. Fischer's sensational book Griff nach der Weltmacht had just then revealed the extent of Germany's war aims throughout the First World War, strongly suggesting that it had sought war in 1914 in order to attain those aims. 4 It was through Hartmut Pogge that I met Fritz Fischer in Oxford in 1963. At a reception that evening the impish, always mischievous historian A. J. P. Taylor asked me what I thought of Fischer's book and told me, before I could answer, that it reminded him of a Mahler symphony in the way it just went on and on repeating the same old thing. But then Taylor would say that, wouldn't he? There were not many laughs in Griff nach der Weltmacht .

Not long after my own appointment to Sussex, Hartmut Pogge came to join me here, and so for a number of years Sussex University was recognized as a centre of excellence for the study of imperial Germany and the First World War. In 1968, at the height of the controversy surrounding his book on German aims in the Great War, which had just been translated into English, we invited Fischer to give a lecture at Sussex. He arrived a little late and, to our dismay, announced that he would first need to have a sleep. When we protested that a packed auditorium was waiting to hear his talk, he reassured us that it would only be for five minutes—he had learnt to nap like this in the war, all he needed was for a couple of cushions to be laid on the floor of my office in the Arts Building and he'd be as right as rain. A few moments later the three of us were striding along the corridor to the lecture theatre, where he gave a magisterial survey of Germany's aims in the two world wars, stressing their similarities but also pointing to the differences. 5 Our close relationship continued until Fischer's death in December 1999. I was proud to accept his offer to deputize for him at Hamburg University in the turbulent summer semester of 1973, and in the following year he was back at Sussex to receive an honorary doctorate of letters.

Fischer's revelation of the geographical similarities between Hitler's policies in Eastern Europe and the terms imposed on the Bolsheviks by Hindenburg and Ludendorff at the ‘forgotten peace’ of Brest-Litovsk in 1918 came as no great surprise. The shock came with his discovery in the Potsdam archive of Bethmann Hollweg's war aims programme of 9 September 1914. 6 The ‘general aim of the war’, so this document began, was ‘security for the German Reich in west and east for all imaginable time. For this purpose France must be so weakened as to make her revival as a great power impossible for all time. Russia must be thrust back as far as possible from Germany's eastern frontier and her domination over the non-Russian vassal peoples broken.’ An indemnity was to be imposed on France so large as to prevent it from maintaining an army for 20 years. It was to cede the Vosges Mountains, the only coal and ore field it possessed, and a coastal strip from Dunkirk to Boulogne. Taking up a pet idea of the Kaiser's, Bethmann suggested that that coastal strip should undergo what we would now call ethnic cleansing, with the French population being replaced by German veterans. Belgium would be partitioned, with some provinces incorporated into Germany, and Antwerp and the Channel ports given over to the imperial navy. In the east, Poland and several other huge areas of Russia were to be turned into German vassal states. Economically, the entire continent would come under German control.

Churchill (along with Lord Haldane, once its most pro-German member), Sir Edward Grey and others in the British cabinet were surely right to insist that Britain could not stand aside to allow France to be crushed. The seizure of Antwerp and the Channel ports, the settlement of German veterans as farmers along the coast facing Dover, the reduction of France to a dependent satrap without an army and without coal, the entire continent from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, from Finland to Malta, united in a German Mitteleuropa, a ring of German satellite states from Estonia to the Caucasus, a railway line that was to stretch via Baghdad to Egypt and the Persian Gulf, agents on their way to revolutionize the world of Islam and ensure, as the Kaiser put it on 30 July 1914, that ‘England shall at least lose India’, German warships and U-boats in Brest and Bordeaux, Madeira, the Azores and the Cape Verde islands, the Belgian Congo in German hands—in such a world, proud Great Britain would have become an insignificant and impoverished island in the Atlantic. Far from being a ‘false war’, as Niall Ferguson has claimed, the First World War was, just like the Second, for Britain too a fight for life or death. 7

Bethmann Hollweg had begun to formulate his so-called September Programme in mid-August 1914, perhaps even earlier. The implication seemed to be that Germany had initiated the war in order to attain hegemony in Europe and superpower status on the world stage. In the wake of Fischer's revelations, the hundreds of diplomatic documents generated by the crisis of July 1914 were collated and scrutinized again for clues of German intentionality. 8 What was striking was the casual manner in which Germany's momentous decision to support Austria-Hungary in a war against Serbia had been taken. The Kaiser was sailing at Kiel when he was told of Franz Ferdinand's assassination. He ordered the regatta to continue, spent the night on his yacht before returning to Potsdam, and then he allowed six days to elapse before scribbling the words ‘now or never’, ‘the Serbs must be eliminated and that right soon !’ on a report from Vienna. 9 The Supreme War Lord's marginal note acted as a welcome signal to the army, the navy and the statesmen in the Wilhelmstrasse that ‘this time’ the monarch would not ‘topple over’. 10 When the Austrian envoy Count Hoyos arrived in Berlin with two letters asking for support should the planned attack on Serbia lead to war with Russia, Under-Secretary Arthur Zimmermann told him that in Berlin's estimation an escalation into a European war was a 90 per cent near-certainty if Austria ‘did something’ against Serbia. 11 Yet support for the invasion of Serbia was forthcoming without further discussion as if it had been a foregone conclusion.

On 5 July 1914 Kaiser Wilhelm assured the Austrian ambassador Count Szögyény that Germany would stand by Austria-Hungary if Russia declared war, which meant, since Germany's only extant war strategy was the Schlieffen Plan as modified by Moltke, war against France too. That afternoon Bethmann Hollweg, Zimmermann and the leaders of the army and navy were summoned one by one to the palace; all agreed and said they were ready. This is how the notorious ‘blank cheque’, handing over control of the crisis to Vienna, was issued. One can understand German historians even today wringing their hands at the obvious disconnect between the offhand manner in which the decision was made and the horrendous global consequences that followed. Pandora's box was burst well and truly open. 12 Or was this perhaps not the moment of decision at all, but rather the putting into effect of a plan agreed long before?

The diplomatic and military documents show that Bethmann Hollweg's concern in the July crisis was not to avoid war but to ensure that war, if it came, would be fought under the most favourable conditions. 13 To that end he had to represent Germany as the victim of attack by Russia, much as Bismarck had painted France as the aggressor in the Ems Telegram in 1870. Bethmann hoped thereby to achieve three vital goals: the German people would be ready to fight a supposedly defensive war, Germany's ally Italy would join in the fray, and—the greatest prize of all—Britain would remain neutral. The first of these goals was attained beyond his wildest dreams; but it was the only one.

In his paradoxical effort to provoke a defensive war, Bethmann had to act as if Germany had no foreknowledge of the Austrian plan to attack Serbia—a barefaced lie. So early on 6 July, at the Chancellor's insistence, the Kaiser set off on his annual cruise up the coast of Norway. Other leaders went on holiday too—the Foreign Secretary on his honeymoon, the Chief of the General Staff to take the waters (the second time in as many months) at Karlsbad, Tirpitz to his place in the Black Forest, the Quartermaster-General Count Waldersee to a family funeral, the Kaiser's brother Prince Heinrich to St Moritz and two of his sisters to Eastbourne. Bethmann himself retired to his estate of Hohenfinow, though he made a few surreptitious trips to the office in Berlin.

Apart from living the lie that no one in Berlin had any inkling of the conflict about to unfold, Bethmann's motive in sending the Kaiser packing was to prevent him from ‘toppling over’ when things got critical, as he had done on previous occasions, most recently in 1912. True, he would have to be back in Berlin to sign the mobilization order and the declaration of war, but until then it was best to have him out of the way. As that moment approached, he cynically suggested, the imperial yacht could perhaps circle around in the Baltic Sea to be closer to home? In fact, and very tellingly, the Hohenzollern , instead of sailing to the North Cape as usual, dropped anchor at Balholm just north of Bergen, from where it could be back in Kiel within two days. 14

Kaiser Wilhelm had on several occasions over the previous year urged the Austrians to attack Serbia without delay. 15 In July 1914 he may well have hoped that the Serbian crisis would end without general war, while securing Austria's preponderance in the Balkans and thereby a massive shift in the balance of power in favour of the Central Powers. But he was just as happy to see the escalation of the crisis into a European war, for which the army, after the increase in its strength in 1913, was now fully prepared. However, he was more afraid than any of his advisers of Britain's involvement, and it is interesting to speculate whether he would have tried to prevent all-out war had he remained in Berlin throughout July. We do know that Bethmann and Jagow, the Foreign Secretary, initially withheld from the Kaiser the dispatches from Prince Lichnowsky in London warning that Britain would never countenance the ‘crushing’ of France, and when he became aware of the danger on his return to Berlin, Wilhelm did indeed propose that Austria should ‘halt in Belgrade’ in the hope of preventing a further escalation. 16 But Bethmann saw to it that the proposal was delayed until the Austrian bombardment of Belgrade had begun, and the Prussian War Minister von Falkenhayn told the Supreme War Lord to his face that the ball was now rolling and not even he could stop it. 17

Wilhelm was in any case reassured on receiving a message from his brother Prince Heinrich, who had left his family on holiday in Switzerland and turned up in London on 25 July 1914. 18 From there he sent a note to his cousin George V asking for a meeting, and on Sunday morning, 26 July, the two cousins spoke briefly at Buckingham Palace. As Heinrich reported to his brother, the King, in a hurry to get to church, had said: ‘We shall try & keep out of it, we shall probably remain neutral.’ Wilhelm's relief was palpable. ‘I have the word of a king, and that is enough for me,’ Grand Admiral von Tirpitz disdainfully records him as saying. 19 After his fateful encounter with the King, Heinrich came down to Sussex where two of his sisters, Queen Sophie of Greece and Princess Margarethe of Hesse, were on holiday with their children. He urged them to leave for home immediately as war was coming. 20

Once more confident that Germany could fall upon France and Russia without fear of British involvement, the Kaiser, egged on by the Kaiserin and her six sons, looked forward eagerly to war. ‘Beaming faces everywhere,’ reported a Bavarian general from the Prussian war ministry when news of Russia's mobilization arrived. Lichnowsky sent agitated telegrams from London in a last-ditch attempt to halt the disaster, but when one such dispatch arrived holding out the hope of British neutrality the Kaiser called for champagne. ‘His bearing and language are worthy of a German Emperor! Worthy of a King of Prussia!’ Falkenhayn noted with tears of pride in his eyes. Admiral von Müller also congratulated Wilhelm and the Chancellor on rallying the nation behind the war. ‘The mood is brilliant,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘The government has succeeded very well in making us appear as the attacked.’ 21 In no other capital would such triumphalist language be heard.

But if the evidence of German responsibility for the immediate outbreak of war is so compelling, we must ask: when was the decision for war arrived at, and why have we still not been able to reach agreement on a question of such crucial importance? The answer lies partly in 100 years of cover-up and obfuscation, but partly also in the genuinely sorry state of the archival record after two world wars.

Research into the origins of the Great War suffered a severe blow when the German army records were destroyed in a massive Allied bombing raid on Potsdam in April 1945, just days before Hitler killed himself. That it was nevertheless possible to reconstruct the intentions of the general staff from the scattered evidence available was demonstrated by the dissertation written at this university by Annika Mombauer, which shows that Moltke was demanding ‘war the sooner the better’ for some two years prior to 1914. 22 In a letter that came to light only after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Moltke wrote after his dismissal as Chief of the General Staff: ‘It is dreadful to be condemned to inactivity in this war which I prepared and initiated.’ 23 But where are Moltke's papers that would put his role in starting the war beyond all doubt? The answer is that they are in the hands of an anthroposophic cult in Basel dedicated to the belief that Moltke was the reincarnation of the ninth-century pope Nicholas I and would himself be reborn one day (under another name, of course) to lead Europe along the true path. Incredible as it may seem, the sect has actually published the post-mortem letters the Chief of the General Staff ‘dictated’ from beyond the grave to Rudolf Steiner, who passed them on to Moltke's widow. 24

More frustrating still is the loss of the papers of Bethmann Hollweg himself. If only we knew what was on his mind in July 1914, the debate on the causes of the First World War would be settled overnight. Whether his papers were deliberately destroyed in some Nazi rearguard action to keep them from the advancing enemy, or were used as winter fuel or toilet paper by Red Army soldiers, is unclear. Both explanations are plausible in the Götterdämmerung of the Third Reich's collapse, which saw the remains of Frederick the Great disinterred in Potsdam, first transported to Hermann Göring's cellar and then dumped in a mine shaft in Thuringia (not far from where my family and I were liberated by the American Army on our flight from Hungary) in 1945. Frederick's bones were eventually reburied in Potsdam in 1991 after Germany's reunification. However it happened, the loss of Bethmann Hollweg's papers is irreparable.

All the greater the excitement, then, when word spread that the Chancellor's close assistant Kurt Riezler had kept a diary which was safely in the hands of his daughter in New York. Surely now we would learn the truth, one way or the other! Riezler's diaries were eventually published in 1972—but our hopes were dashed, and the controversy surrounding what should have been vital evidence splutters on to this day. 25 For not only had the first volumes of the diary covering the pre-1914 years been destroyed—possibly in the 1960s at the height of the Fischer controversy—but the published entries for July 1914 had obviously been rewritten by Riezler after Germany's defeat in 1918 to provide an apologetic gloss on Bethmann's policy. 26

However, there was one ray of sunshine in all this archival mist and murk. Of the 20 or so men in Berlin actively involved in the conspiracy to bring about war in 1914, one had indeed kept a diary which has survived intact. The journal of Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller, who as head of the Kaiser's naval cabinet was the most influential naval officer after Tirpitz himself, was published in a bowdlerized form in 1965. 27 It contained one entry, dated 8 December 1912, which suggested that the decision to back Austria in its conflict with Serbia had been taken not in 1914 but some 18 months earlier, at the end of 1912. In a eureka moment on discovering this passage, I saw the intriguing possibility that the First World War had broken out not by accident over a Balkan imbroglio but intentionally as the result of a deliberate (though disastrous) long-term policy.

What did Müller's diary for that Sunday morning in December 1912 say that suggested such a dramatic explanation? It recorded that at a hastily summoned ‘war council’ (the sarcastic term for the meeting used by Bethmann Hollweg) of his top generals and admirals, Kaiser Wilhelm II began by declaring that Austria would have to deal forcefully with the Serbs if it was not to lose control over the Slavs throughout its empire. If Russia then supported the Serbs, which it evidently would, war would be unavoidable for Germany too. So far Germany had assumed that it would be free to ‘fight the war with full fury against France’. But now, that very morning, news had arrived from Lichnowsky in London that ‘England, if we attacked France, would unconditionally spring to France's aid, for England could not allow the balance of power in Europe to be disturbed’. In the light of this development, the Kaiser stated, the fleet must prepare itself for war against England, with submarines ready to sink English troop transports off Dunkirk and conduct mine warfare in the Thames. Müller's diary goes on to hint at the heated debate that ensued between the generals and the admirals. Moltke declared: ‘I believe a war is unavoidable’ and ‘the sooner the better’; Grand Admiral Tirpitz, on the other hand, pressed for a ‘postponement of the great fight for one-and-a-half years’, until 1914, when the Kiel Canal would have been widened to take dreadnought-class ships. 28

Suspecting that the published text had been tampered with, I wrote to the Military Archive in Freiburg to ask for a microfilm copy of the original—this was in the days before xerox machines—and when the film arrived I went cap in hand to see my dean, Martin Wight, to ask for funds to have a photographic print-out made in the university library. And sure enough, the handwritten version revealed that, like the generals and unlike Tirpitz, Admiral von Müller himself was a staunch proponent of immediate war. His diary entry did not end, as claimed in the published version, with the dismissive words: ‘This was the end of the conference. The result amounted to almost nothing.’ It ended, rather, with the comment that revealed Müller's own bitter disappointment that Germany had again backed away from immediate war. ‘The Chief of the Great General Staff says: War the sooner the better, but he does not draw the logical conclusion from this which is: To present Russia or France or both with an ultimatum which would unleash the war with right on our side.’ 29 I sent the authentic text to Fritz Fischer in Hamburg, who was himself coming to the conclusion that the imperial German government had, and I quote, ‘wanted this great war and prepared for and provoked it accordingly’. 30 The so-called ‘war council’ of 8 December 1912 became the keystone of Fischer's second book, War of illusions , in much the same way that Bethmann's September Programme had provided the central evidence of his book on war aims. 31

For the past 50 years, Müller's diary has been at the centre of an international controversy and there is still no agreement as to its significance: Christopher Clark, for example, judges the ‘war council’ to have been a mere ‘episode’ without consequence. 32 How can this be? Why is this undoubtedly authentic evidence being ignored or discounted by so many historians?

The most common argument is that, since neither the Chancellor nor the Foreign Secretary was present at the ‘war council’, the meeting must have lacked decision-making status. The excitable Kaiser was simply shooting his mouth off, as was his wont when surrounded by his military and naval entourage; the Chancellor was soon able to ‘nullify’ its effects and ‘put the Kaiser in his place’. 33 Thus there was no connection between the ‘war council’ of 1912 and the decision for war in 1914. 34

But this is a travesty of what actually happened, and in particular of Bethmann Hollweg's role. In late 1912, Serbia's victories in the Balkan war and its drive to the Adriatic had led to a determination in Vienna to eliminate the resurgent Slav state, and that in turn raised the acute issue of how Berlin should react if Russia, to preserve the military balance and under pressure from public opinion, then intervened to support Serbia. By early November 1912, Moltke, Bethmann Hollweg and Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter, Jagow's predecessor as foreign secretary, had all decided to support Austria come what may, and it was the Kaiser who pursued a ‘policy of non-intervention at any price’, insisting as late as 9 November 1912 that ‘ under no circumstances will I march against Paris and Moscow ’ to halt a Serbian advance to the Adriatic. It was Bethmann who managed to bring the reluctant monarch round, who then, on 22 November 1912, together with Moltke, duly promised both Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Austrian Chief of the General Staff Germany's wholehearted support. 35 Not until he received Lichnowsky's warning on 8 December 1912 that Britain would not stay neutral did the Kaiser change his mind and ‘topple over’. So the famous ‘war council’ was not the point at which war in 18 months was decided on, as Fischer had assumed, but rather the point at which an earlier decision for an immediate war was put on hold at least until the army had been enlarged and the Kiel Canal widened, work which was scheduled for completion in summer 1914.

Bethmann Hollweg and Kiderlen-Wächter were anything but doves in the winter crisis of 1912. Earlier this year, in the archive in Karlsruhe, I discovered the record of a meeting of the foreign affairs committee of the Bundesrat, the Federal Council of the German states, held on 28 November 1912, that is to say ten days before the ‘war council’ summoned by the Kaiser. This meeting was attended by Bethmann Hollweg and the Foreign Secretary, the Deputy Chancellor Clemens von Delbrück, the head of the Reich Chancellery Arnold Wahnschaffe and the Prime Ministers of Bavaria, Saxony, Württemberg, Baden and Mecklenburg, together with their permanent envoys in Berlin—a meeting, that is, of 14 of the most influential civilian statesmen of the German Reich. In this august gathering the Reich Chancellor himself made a speech culminating in the dire warning that:

If Austria has to fight for its position as a Great Power, regardless of the cause, then we must stand at her side so as not to have to fight alone at a later stage with a weakened Austria beside us … We cannot permit our ally to suffer any humiliation. We wish to avoid war for as long as that is possible with honour; if that should prove impossible, we shall face it with … firm resolve. 36

Not one of the statesmen present raised the slightest objection. Clearly, the decision to support Austria-Hungary in its impending conflict with Serbia had the approval not just of the Kaiser but of all of Germany's leaders, civilian and military alike. This explains why, 18 months later, on 5 July 1914, the blank cheque could be handed to Austria without further ado.

Nor could those leaders have been unaware of the likely consequences of their complaisance. On 2 December 1912, Bethmann, speaking in the Reichstag, repeated his pledge to support Austria and triggered exactly the same chain reaction as was to occur in July 1914. 37 The French cabinet under Raymond Poincaré ordered the ambassador in London, Paul Cambon, to pose the question to Sir Edward Grey: what would the British government do if Austria attacked Serbia, if Russia was drawn into the conflict, if Germany intervened against Russia in support of Austria and, finally, if France was forced to support Russia? On 4 December 1912 the British cabinet met and, as Prime Minister Asquith informed the King, authorized Grey to question the German ambassador ‘as to the meaning of some of the Chancellor's expressions’. 38 Grey left Lichnowsky in no doubt that:

If a European war were to arise through Austria's attacking Serbia, and Russia, compelled by public opinion, were to march into Galicia rather than again put up with a humiliation like that [in the Bosnia annexation crisis] of 1909, thus forcing Germany to come to the aid of Austria, France would inevitably be drawn in and no one could foretell what further developments might follow.

It was Lichnowsky's dispatch stressing that, ‘despite the fact that there were no secret agreements with France, it was for England of vital necessity to prevent that country from being crushed by Germany’, that panicked the Kaiser into ‘toppling over’, that is to say backing down for now. 39 Taken together, the Kaiser's ‘war council’ and Bethmann's meeting with the civilian leaders of the German states on 28 November 1912 demonstrate that the Reich's determination to support Austria in whatever action it decided to undertake to eliminate the perceived threat from Serbia was, from November 1912 onward, an agreed determinant of German foreign policy.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the dynamic German Reich on its fateful trajectory from Bismarck to Hitler had become too powerful for the existing European states system to accommodate. Between 1904 and 1907 the great peripheral empires of Britain, France and Russia drew together in an effort to contain the rising power at the centre of the Continent, but no one in the German ruling elite, neither civilian nor military, considered the country's current status ‘as a European continental power of second rank’, as Tirpitz phrased it in October 1913, to be acceptable in the long term. ‘World power’ was what it deserved and was determined to attain, even if the attempt led to its ‘downfall’. 40 We must ask: if Germany was so successful and getting stronger every year, why not simply wait and let time do its work? Why the mad gamble of world war? The answer is that Germany's steady advance towards hegemony was threatened both by the rising tide of democracy at home and (as we have seen) by the decline of its ally the multinational Habsburg empire, especially after the resurgence of Serbia in the Balkan wars. Berlin's decision of November 1912 to shore up Austria-Hungary even if this was to lead to general war was rescinded in the ‘war council’ of 8 December, to be sure, but that decision was only put on hold; the thinking behind it did not change. By 1914, the conviction was widespread in German political circles that the country's chances of a rapid victory were now better than they would ever be. The looming civil war in Ulster would prevent Britain from coming to the aid of France, France itself was mired in financial and military crisis, and Russia would not be ready to fight a war for many a year. Germany's own army had been enlarged and honed to perfection, the Kiel Canal had been widened and deepened to take dreadnoughts, and a press campaign was under way to build up Russia as the enemy. The German general staff may or may not have had prior knowledge of the plan to assassinate Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. 41 What is clear is that they had already decided to act, and could not have wished for a more welcome pretext.

The Fischer controversy of the 1960s was always more than just an academic dispute about scraps of paper in the archives. 42 It marked the point at which civil society in the Federal Republic admirably turned its back on a difficult past to embrace western values and share its destiny with that of its neighbours. The transformation was profound and lasting, making Germany a model democracy and its people the most peace-loving in Europe. The reunification of the country 25 years ago would hardly have been acceptable to its neighbours without such a transformation. This is why, at the political level, I find the current wave of revisionism sweeping through the German media so disappointing. A farcical looking-glass war is being fought out in which the Fischer thesis is being branded a uniquely British ‘blame game’, and the—brilliant but (in respect of German intentions) flawed—work of an Australian-born historian at Cambridge is being celebrated by German nationalists as providing absolution from the supposedly unjust ‘war guilt lie’ of Versailles. In this context it is a relief to see Germany's leaders, notably President Joachim Gauck in his moving speeches at Liège, Louvain and Mons on 4 August 2014, showing genuine remorse for the outrage of 1914. In my darker moments it feels as if the arcane detective work we few truth-seekers are undertaking in the archives is no match for the overriding (and perfectly understandable) popular longing in Germany for a guilt-free national myth similar to the proud histories the British and French people can construct for themselves. But, as an Arabic proverb has it, even God cannot change the past, and the past has an awkward habit of leaving an indelible record on scraps of paper.

When Hitler launched his attack on France in May 1940, driving the British Army into the sea at Dunkirk, it was not only Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill who thought they had seen it all before. In exile in Holland, Kaiser Wilhelm wrote in jubilation to an American admirer: ‘The brilliant leading generals in this war came from my school, they fought under my command in the [First] World War as lieutenants, captains and young majors. Educated by Schlieffen they put the plans he had worked out under me into practice along the same lines as we did in 1914.’ 43

Winston Churchill to Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg, 29 Oct. 1914, cited in The Times , 30 Oct. 2014.

Christopher Clark, The sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2012); publ. in German as Die Schlafwandler. Wie Europa in den Ersten Weltkrieg zog (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2013).

This intriguing story is well told in Astrid M. Eckert, The struggle for the files: the Western Allies and the return of the German archives after the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht. Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914/18 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1961).

An extract from the lecture is printed in John C. G. Röhl, ed., From Bismarck to Hitler: the problem of continuity in German history (London: Longman, 1970), pp. 146–9.

Fritz Fischer, Germany's aims in the First World War (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), pp. 103–6.

Niall Ferguson's book The pity of war (London: Allen Lane, 1998) has been translated into German as Der falsche Krieg. Der Erste Weltkrieg und das 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999).

The authoritative edition of the diplomatic documents in German was that by Imanuel Geiss, ed., Julikrise und Kriegsausbruch 1914 , 2 vols (Hanover: Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschehen, 1963–4).

For an account of Kaiser Wilhelm II's role in the crisis of July 1914 see John C. G. Röhl, ‘The curious case of the Kaiser's disappearing war guilt’, in Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson, eds, An improbable war? The outbreak of World War I and European political culture before 1914 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007), pp. 75–92.

Kaiser Wilhelm II to Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, 6 July 1914, cited in Fritz Fischer, War of illusions: German policies from 1911 to 1914 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1975), p. 478.

Alexander Hoyos, ‘Meine Mission nach Berlin’, appendix to Fritz Fellner, ‘Die “Mission Hoyos”’, in Wilhelm Alff, ed., Deutschlands Sonderung von Europa 1862–1945 (Frankfurt am Main, Bern and New York: Verlag Peter Lang, 1984), p. 311. An English translation of the key passages is included in Annika Mombauer, ed., The origins of the First World War: diplomatic and military documents (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 190–1.

See Jörn Leonhard, Die Büchse der Pandora. Geschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2014).

For the collection of the 428 most pertinent international documents brought together in English translation, see Mombauer, The origins of the First World War .

The thinking behind curtailing the imperial cruise at Balholm in the Sognefjord was made clear by Freiherr Moriz von Lyncker, head of the Kaiser's military cabinet, in letters from the Hohenzollern to his wife. See Holger Afflerbach, ed., Kaiser Wilhelm II. als Oberster Kriegsherr im Ersten Weltkrieg. Quellen aus der militärischen Umgebung des Kaisers 1914–1914 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2005), pp. 125–31.

See esp. the Kaiser's conversations with the Austrian Chief of the General Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorff and the Austrian Foreign Minister Count Leopold Berchtold in September and October 1913, in John C. G. Röhl, Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1859–1941: a concise life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 145–6.

Röhl, Kaiser Wilhelm II , pp. 156–7.

Falkenhayn, diary for 28 July 1914, cited in Holger Afflerbach, Falkenhayn. Politisches Denken und Handeln im Kaiserreich (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1994), p. 154.

For details of Prince Heinrich of Prussia's fateful mission to London on 25–27 July 1914, see John C. G. Röhl, Wilhelm II: into the abyss of war and exile, 1900–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 1058–62.

Röhl, Wilhelm II , p. 1064.

The Hessian family returned to Germany accompanied by Queen Sophie, but she left the Greek children in Sussex, where they were stranded at the outbreak of war until a Royal Navy frigate was able to take them to Athens.

In the published version of Müller's diary this entry for 1 August 1914 has been falsified to read: ‘In both speeches the completely justified claim is made that we are the attacked’. See Walter Görlitz, ed., Regierte der Kaiser? Kriegstagebücher, Aufzeichnungen und Briefe des Chefs des Marine-Kabinetts Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller 1914–1918 (Göttingen, Berlin and Frankfurt: Musterschmidt-Verlag, 1959), p. 38.

Annika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the origins of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Annika Mombauer, ‘A reluctant military leader? Helmuth von Moltke and the July Crisis of 1914’, War in History 6: 4, 1999, pp. 417–46.

Moltke to Field Marshal Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, 14 June 1915, cited in John C. G. Röhl, ‘Germany’, in Keith Wilson, ed., Decisions for war 1914 (London: UCL Press, 1995), p. 27.

Thomas Meyer, ed., Helmuth von Moltke 1848–1916. Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Wirken , vol. 2: Durch Rudolf Steiner vermittelte Post-mortem-Mitteilungen Helmuth von Moltkes für Eliza von Moltke 1916–1924 (Basel: Perseus Verlag, 1993).

Karl Dietrich Erdmann, ed., Kurt Riezler. Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972).

See Bernd Sösemann, ‘Die Tagebücher Kurt Riezlers. Untersuchungen zu ihrer Echtheit und Edition’, Historische Zeitschrift , no. 236, 1983, pp. 327–69, and Erdmann's reply in the same issue, pp. 371–402. See further Bernd Sösemann, ‘Die “Juli-Krise” im Riezler-Tagebuch’, Historische Zeitschrift , no. 298, 2014, pp. 686–707; Fritz Fischer, Juli 1914: Wir sind nicht hineingeschlittert. Das Staatsgeheimnis um die Riezler-Tagebücher (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1983); Bernd F. Schulte, Die Verfälschung der Riezler Tagebücher. Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte der 50er und 60er Jahre (Frankfurt, Bern and New York: Verlag Peter Lang, 1985).

Walter Görlitz, ed., Der Kaiser … Aufzeichnungen des Chefs des Marinekabinetts Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller (Göttingen, Berlin, Frankfurt and Zürich: Musterschmidt-Verlag, 1965).

Müller, diary entry for 8 Dec. 1912, first published in a falsified form in Görlitz, ed., Der Kaiser , pp. 124–5. See John C. G. Röhl, ‘Admiral von Müller and the approach of war, 1911–1914’, Historical Journal 12: 4, 1969, pp. 651–73.

The truncated ending of Müller's diary entry has led to endless confusion and has been used by generations of historians to question the significance of the ‘war council’. See e.g. Christopher Clark, Kaiser Wilhelm II: a life in power (London: Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 269–71.

Fritz Fischer, ‘Vom Zaun gebrochen—nicht hineingeschlittert’, Die Zeit , no. 36, 3 Sept. 1965, and Weltmacht oder Niedergang (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1965).

Fischer, War of illusions , pp. 160–4.

Clark, The sleepwalkers , pp. 329ff. and 333, with notes 53–5 on pp. 626ff.

Clark, The sleepwalkers , quoting Erwin Hölzle, Die Selbstentmachtung Europas. Das Experiment des Friedens vor und im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Musterschmidt-Verlag, 1975), pp. 180–3.

While rightly recognizing that no firm decision for ‘war in 18 months’ had been reached, other historians, notably Klaus Hildebrand and Jörn Leonhard, have pointed to the growing readiness for war revealed by the ‘war council’, which was especially alarming given the powerful influence wielded by the military within the Berlin ruling elite. See Klaus Hildebrand, Das vergangene Reich. Deutsche Außenpolitik von Bismarck bis Hitler (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1995), p. 289; Leonhard, Die Büchse der Pandora , pp. 65ff.

See Röhl, Wilhelm II: into the abyss of war ad exile , pp. 694–8.

Bethmann Hollweg, speech in the Bundesratsausschuss für die Auswärtigen Angelegenheiten, 28 Nov. 1912, Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe, 233/34815. The final version of the speech, distributed on the following day to the governments of the participating states, was redacted and typed out in the Auswärtiges Amt, but it accurately reflected the Chancellor's words spoken at the foreign affairs committee. The Austrian military attaché, Freiherr von Bienerth, reported that the bellicose final paragraph had been virtually dictated to the Chancellor by Moltke. See Röhl, Wilhelm II: into the abys of war and exile , p. 901.

Bethmann's speech of 2 Dec. 1912 in the Reichstag is cited in Clark, The sleepwalkers , pp. 328ff.

H. H. Asquith to King George V, 5 Dec. 1912, cited in Keith Wilson, ‘The British démarche of 3 and 4 December 1912’, in Keith Wilson, Empire and continent: studies in British foreign policy from the 1880s to the First World War (London: Mansell, 1987), p. 143.

Lichnowsky, report of 4 Dec. 1912, Die Große Politik der europäischen Kabinette , XXXIII, no. 12481, cited here from Prince Karl Max von Lichnowsky, Heading for the abyss (London: Constable, 1928), pp. 167ff. For Grey's own account, see British documents on the origins of the war, 1898—1914 , vol. 9, part II, no. 327. The importance Grey attached to the conversation can be judged from the fact that he sent a copy of his account to the King and the cabinet as well as to the ambassadors in Berlin, St Petersburg, Paris and Vienna. See Wilson, ‘The British démarche ’, pp. 141–8.

Tirpitz, speech of 9 Oct. 1913 to senior officers of the Reichs-Marine-Amt, printed in Michael Epkenhans, ed., Albert Hopman. Das ereignisreiche Leben eines ‘Wilhelminers’. Tagebücher, Briefe, Aufzeichnungen 1901 bis 1920 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004), p. 343 n. 261.

See the mysterious instruction issued by the Quartermaster-General of the German General Staff, Count Georg von Waldersee, to the military plenipotentiaries of Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg on 16 June 1914, not to send any further written reports to their respective war ministries: Röhl, Wilhelm II: into the abyss of war and exile , p. 1015.

For the best account in English of the Fischer controversy, see Annika Mombauer, The origins of the First World War: controversies and consensus (Harlow: Longman, 2002); also Annika Mombauer, ed., The Fischer controversy after 50 years , special issue, Journal of Contemporary History 48: 2, April 2013.

Kaiser Wilhelm II to Poultney Bigelow, 14 Sept. 1940, cited in Röhl, Kaiser Wilhelm II: a concise life , p. 192.

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How useful is the 'Fischer Thesis' in helping to explain the origins of the First World War? Fischer's Thesis was thought to be controversial due to the much-accepted Lloyd George's theory to why World War One happened

Ross Dewhurst- Cartmel College

How useful is the ‘Fischer Thesis’ in helping to explain the origins of the First World War?

Fischer’s Thesis was thought to be controversial due to the much-accepted Lloyd George’s theory to why World War One happened.  George’s theory was that power more or less took Germany into starting World War One. But with Fischer going against George’s theory it brought much controversy from older historians as they had accepted his theory. But Fischer did get backing by some historians into believing that his thesis was correct. Fischer’s thesis is that Germany wanted to seek power on a par with countries that were strong in Europe.  Fischer said that he believed Germany would try to seek this power with or without force, i.e. war. Fischer conceded that German leaders thought the only way to get this European dominance was to have a European war to achieve this. Fischer stated in his thesis that he believed that his theory about the German leaders long existed before World War One actually began.

This is a preview of the whole essay

        Firstly I will start with my opinion of what I think of Fischer’s Thesis. I agree with Fischer’s Thesis for several reasons. My first reason behind why I agree with Fischer is that countries such as Great Britain and France were major powers in Europe leading up to the First World War. Due to this I agree with Fischer’s statement that Germany wanted to seek this power that these countries had and would go about by using force if necessary. Germany had the means to do this due to them being behind these countries and as Fischer states that they would try and get this power with or without applying necessary force in the form of War.  Germany began the war against France and Great Britain and from this you can say that German Leaders did concede in that the only way to end countries with large amount of power was to take them to war. My next reason as to why I agree with Fischer’s thesis is due to the fact he states that Germany had planned this long before the war began. I agree with this as I think that Germany, as stated earlier wanted the power of the likes of France but knew they couldn’t attain this from them. So from them knowing this (Germans) I agree with Fischer that they planned this attack before they actually decided to go to war. My final reason why I agree with Fischer’s thesis is that he states that the Germans were trying to make the British think they had been provoked by the French. I agree with this as the Germans held the British as a major super-power in Europe and a threat if they went against them in the war. By trying to make the British think the French started World War One instead of Austria they would join sides with the Germans and share the power that they had.

        But Fischer’s Thesis does have its limitations and its critics. Due to the controversy that Fischer caused with his thesis he was criticised heavy by German polititians and by fellow historians. One of his major critics has Ritter, who suggested that he had written his thesis outside that proper historical context. Ritter claimed that Germany wasn’t an aggressive country compared to other European countires of that time and argued that, ideas of struggle were popular at that time in the twentieth century in European country governments. Ritter also criticised Fischer by saying that he had got his time-scale inaccurate. Ritter criticised this as he argued that the German officials had published Hollweg’s September programme after the World War One had begun. Fischer stated in his book World Power or Decline that they had published Hollweg’s programme outlining Germany’s war aims before the war began. Ritter also backed up this criticism with proof that other European countries with power had been making up similar plans like Hollweg’s programme. Fischer claimed that there were lines of similar plans between the second and third Reich and from this Germany started World War One. Ritter criticised this immensely saying that how could there be similar plans between the two Reich’s even though they were both similar to Nazi policies.

        The Germans thought that the surrounding countries, which it wished to gain control over, i.e. France and Russia, encircled them causing the Schlieffen Plan to be created. This plan was made in order take France out in the first six weeks of the war before Russia had time to react to this, as France and Russia were strong allies. With Germany hoping to do this it would enable them not to fight the war on two fronts being that if a European War came about they would have an easier chance of winning it. This plan failed when it came into action due to several troops being absent from the western front of field causing poor communication among troops allowing the French to locate their position.

        To conclude I agree strongly with the Fischer’s Thesis in regarding to how World War One started, but it does have several weak points as outlined in this essay.

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In Memoriam

Fritz Fischer (1908-99)

Volker R. Berghahn | Mar 1, 2000

Fritz Fischer, professor emeritus at Hamburg University and one of the most influential historians of modern Germany since 1945, died on December 1, 1999 at the age of 91. He was named an Honorary Foreign Member of the AHA in 1984.

Born on March 5, 1908 in Upper Franconia in southern Germany, he embarked upon the long road of a German university career, finally obtaining a full professorship at Hamburg University in 1948. Originally a specialist in 19th-century German Protestantism, he had been briefly associated with Hans Frank's "Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany" under Hitler, but belonged to those German academics and intellectuals who came out of World War II determined to build a different Germany and to wrench the German historical profession away from its nationalist-conservative past.

This opportunity came when Fischer was given access, in the 1950s, to the East German archives at Potsdam, where he came across an explosive set of files relating to war aims and annexationist plans that the Reich government had drawn up in World War I. It was not merely the extent of Germany's territorial ambitions that moved him to develop his provocative hypotheses, but also the suspicion that the German government might have started the war in the first place in order to realize its expansionist program on the European continent. His book on this theme, titled Griff nach der Weltmacht (1961; trans. 1967, rather less grippingly, Germany's War Aims in the First World War ), caused a huge public uproar. His German colleagues had just about accepted that Germany had been squarely responsible for unleashing World War II, but they fiercely resisted Fischer's notion of German responsibility for World War I. Gerhard Ritter, the doyen of West Germany's historians, spoke of the "self-obscuration of German historical consciousness." He continued to hold that all powers were more or less equally guilty of pushing Europe over the brink.

Fischer held his ground against these attacks, repeatedly pulling from his pocket, during televised debates with fellow historians and journalists, yet another official memorandum or telegram proving his point. Meanwhile students from all faculties at Hamburg University flocked to his lectures, easily filling the large Auditorium Maximum, and some of them stayed on to write a doctoral dissertation under his supervision. Several of them made important contributions to the history of the German Empire in their own right and some historians of German historiography have spoken of a "Fischer School," whose members went to bat for their mentor's cause.

The politicization of the Fischer Controversy went so far that at one point some of his colleagues persuaded the Bonn government to withdraw promised financial support for a lecture tour by Fischer in the United States. Angry American historians thereupon found the money themselves to pay for the trip.

As criticism continued, Fischer decided to present his subsequent archival findings concerning Germany's aggressive foreign policy and the origins of World War I in a second 800-page tome, titled Krieg der Illusionen (1969, trans. 1973, this time literally, War of Illusions ). In this volume he also advanced the theory that in December 1912, at an infamous "War Council," Wilhelm II and his military advisors had made a decision to trigger a major war by the summer of 1914 and to use the intervening months to prepare the country for this settling of accounts. In the 1970s Fischer published further, shorter studies and essays elaborating on the myopia and political failures of Germany's elites. He became one of the most explicit advocates of the Sonderweg thesis, i.e., the argument that Germany had taken a special path into the 20th century, and also threw himself into the controversy over the authenticity of diaries that Kurt Riezler, the private secretary of Reich Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, had kept during the July Crisis of 1914.

Some of Fischer's more radical hypotheses have been challenged and modified by subsequent research published after the heated arguments of the 1960s had subsided. This time American and British historians had a major share in effecting this shift that has resulted in a more complex picture of Wilhelmine society and politics. But if his more specific findings on who was responsible for the outbreak of World War I have been revised, very few people doubt today that, as Fischer had argued, the Kaiser and his advisors played a crucial role in the escalation of the international crisis of July 1914, although they were in the best position to de-escalate. Nor does anyone deny that the exorbitant annexationist plans of the German monarchy in World War I were ominous harbingers of Hitler's ruthless imperialism 25 years later.

The repercussions of Fischer's work upon the political development of postwar Germany have been his first lasting achievement. His books helped to pave the way for West Germany's abandoning the territorial revisionism of the Adenauer era and to facilitate the emergence of Brandt's Ostpolitik . For the first time since the Wilhelmine period, Germany became willing to recognize the existing frontiers in Europe and to pursue a policy of reconciliation toward those countries of eastern Europe that had suffered from German expansionism in two world wars. The lesson had at last been learned from the disastrous course that German foreign policy had taken in the first half of the 20th century.

There is yet another mark that Fischer's work left, this time on the historical profession of the Federal Republic. Methodologically speaking, his books may have been rather traditional, focusing as they did on high politics and decision-making elites. But his challenge to interpretations of German history that had entrenched themselves in early postwar Germany encouraged a younger generation of historians who were not members of the "Fischer School" to move beyond Fischer's kind of political history and toward the analysis of the country's social and economic structures and political-cultural traditions since 1871. The history of the German Empire became a major field of research, attracting also many non-German scholars, and the work they undertook has yielded very fruitful results as well as fresh arguments.

If the imperial period offers rich material also to the teacher of modern European history on both sides of the Atlantic today, it is in no small degree thanks to the breach that Fischer made, and the courageous stand that he took, in rejecting the historiographical orthodoxies of the early postwar period. His achievements as a scholar and as a man of firm convictions and great integrity were recognized by the many honorary doctorates that he received from universities around the world. The president of the Federal Republic awarded him the Bundesverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse.

Fritz Fischer is survived by his wife Margarete, his two children, and five grandchildren.

—Volker Berghahn teaches at Columbia University.

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