{"id":4387,"date":"2015-05-31T14:06:49","date_gmt":"2015-05-31T19:06:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=4387"},"modified":"2015-05-31T14:06:49","modified_gmt":"2015-05-31T19:06:49","slug":"on-the-good-guys-and-bad-guys-of-world-war-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2015\/05\/31\/history\/on-the-good-guys-and-bad-guys-of-world-war-i\/","title":{"rendered":"On the “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys” of World War I"},"content":{"rendered":"

More than a century has now come and gone since the start of World War I.\u00a0 Numerous books and articles have been published to mark the centennial, often differing sharply with each other in their interpretations of the events and personalities concerned.\u00a0 My personal favorite is The Sleepwalkers<\/em><\/a>, by Christopher Clark<\/a>.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been reading quite a bit of the source material myself lately.\u00a0 As I speak German, these have included memoirs of many of the key players on the German side.\u00a0 In reading his book, I noticed that Clark was very familiar with everything I\u2019d read.\u00a0\u00a0 I also noticed that everything I\u2019ve read was a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the material he quoted in detail.\u00a0 Clark also generally refrains from categorizing every historical personality as either a \u201cgood guy\u201d or a \u201cbad guy.\u201d\u00a0 I avoid reading histories written by journalists, because so few of them manage to avoid this moralistic pigeonholing.\u00a0 \u00a0It\u2019s much easier to understand historical events if, as Clark puts it in his introduction, one \u201cremains alert to the fact that the people, events and forces described\u2026 carried in them the seeds of other, perhaps less terrible, futures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not everyone agrees with Clark. \u00a0Even a century later there are others, even among professional historians, who remain obsessed with the question of \u201cwar guilt.\u201d\u00a0 For example, John C. G. R\u00f6hl<\/a>, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Sussex, recently published a life of Kaiser Wilhelm II<\/a>, in which he insisted that Germany\u2019s last Kaiser managed to concoct World War I almost single-handedly.\u00a0 I\u2019ve also seen several articles, such as this one<\/a> that appeared\u00a0on the conservative Australian Quadrant<\/em><\/a> website, that are still harping about \u201cGerman militarism\u201d as if the war had ended yesterday.\u00a0 If the Quadrant<\/em> author is to be believed, the “ideological and cultural pathologies” of Wilhelmine Germany were direct forerunners of Nazism.<\/p>\n

I doubt it.\u00a0 Germany could certainly have broken the chain of events that led to war.\u00a0 So could Austria-Hungary, and so could Russia.\u00a0 The question of who, among these three, not to mention the other belligerents, was really the chief culprit was hardly as obvious in the days immediately preceding the clash of arms as the historians of the victorious powers so often asserted when it was over.\u00a0 Writing two days after Russia had begun her “partial” mobilization in response to Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia, Lord Bertie, at the time British ambassador in France, wrote in his diary,<\/p>\n

It seems incredible that the Russian Government should plunge Europe into war in order to make themselves the protectors of the Servians.\u00a0 Unless the Austrian Government had proofs of the complicity of Servian officials in the plot to murder the Archduke (which they did, ed.) they could not have addressed to the Servian Government the stringent terms which the Austrian Note contained.\u00a0 Russia comes forward as the protectress of Servia; by what title except on the exploded pretension that she is, by right, the protectress of all Slavs?\u00a0 What rubbish!\u00a0 And she will expect, if she adhere to her present attitude, France and England to support her in arms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A day later he wrote,<\/p>\n

I cannot believe in war unless Russia wants it.\u00a0 The Military party in Germany may think the present moment more favourable for Germany than it is likely to be later, when the reforms in the Russian Army will have been carried out and the strategic railways, converging on the Russo-German frontier, will have been constructed, but I cannot think that the German Emperor and his Government desire<\/em> war.\u00a0 I do not believe that they were accessories before the fact to the terms of the Austrian Note to Servia.\u00a0 If, however, the Emperor of Russia adhere to the absurd and obsolete claim that she is protectress of all Slav States, however bad their conduct, was is probable, Germany will be bound to support Austria, and France will have to help Russia.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fact, that’s exactly how it looked to Kaiser Wilhelm himself.\u00a0 As he\u00a0noted in his memoirs, it was clear that if Germany fulfilled her treaty obligations to defend Austria against a Russian attack, it would certainly bring France into the war.\u00a0 The Germans knew they would be facing a two front war, and reacted accordingly.\u00a0 He also confirmed Bertie’s surmise about the conflict between the German civil and military officials in the days leading up to war.\u00a0 In his words,<\/p>\n

The foreign office… was so\u00a0hypnotized by the idea of “peace at any price,” that it completely ruled out war as a possible element of Entente policy, and was therefore unable to correctly assess the signs that war was possible.\u00a0 Therein lies yet another proof of Germany’s desire to preserve the peace.\u00a0 This attitude of the foreign office gave rise to certain contradictions between it and the General Staff and the Admiralty, who gave warning\u00a0as their duty required, and advised preparations for defense.\u00a0 These difference persisted for some time.\u00a0 The Army could never forget the fact that it was the fault of the foreign office that they had been surprised.\u00a0 And the diplomats were piqued that war had come in spite of their efforts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The memoirs of the Kaiser and some of the other key players in the war and the events leading up to it are often dismissed with a wave of the hand as mere justifications after the fact.\u00a0 In fact, while self-justification is a typical motive, memoirs can’t simply be invented out of whole cloth, and invariably reveal a great deal about the character of the authors, regardless of how they choose to construe the facts.\u00a0 Wilhelm was no angel.\u00a0 He was paranoid,\u00a0a narcissist, became an anti-Semite, especially after the war, and had an unfortunate penchant for bombast and bluster.\u00a0 However, he was not the rabid warmonger portrayed by R\u00f6hl and many others, either.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most damaging indictment of Germany was written by her ambassador in Great Britain before the war, Prince Karl Lichnowsky.\u00a0 His assessment, currently available under the title, The Guilt of Germany for the War of German Aggression<\/em>, pointed out the folly of Germany’s crash naval building program in alienating England.\u00a0 He saw the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, as a man dedicated to preserving the peace, and an honest broker in his dealings with Germany and the other European powers.\u00a0 Grey had suggested a conference of the powers, similar to the one that had preserved the peace of Europe during another spat over the Balkans a couple of years earlier, as a way to avoid war.\u00a0 Lichnowsky considered Germany’s decision to refuse this offer suicidal, and a major contributing factor to the onset of war.\u00a0 His assessment of Grey and British policy in general was probably a great deal more accurate than that of the Kaiser and the German foreign office.\u00a0 Their paranoia about the supposed perfidious, anti-German intrigues of England’s\u00a0King Edward VII and his foreign secretary is evident in the Kaiser’s as well as several other memoirs.\u00a0 However, in spite of that, one cannot simply ignore the reply of von Jagow, German foreign secretary at the time, which is also included in the volume referred to above.\u00a0 According to Jagow,<\/p>\n

We could not agree to the English proposal of a conference of Ambassadors, for it would doubtless have led to a serious diplomatic defeat.\u00a0 For Italy, too, (Germany’s ally at the time in the Triple Alliance with Austria, ed.) was pro-Serb and, with her Balkan interests, stood rather opposed to Austria… The best and only feasible way of escape was a localization of the conflict and an understanding between Vienna and Petrograd.\u00a0 We worked toward that end with all our energy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In retrospect, this “way of escape” may have appeared a great deal more “feasible,” in view of the fact that the actual alternative turned out to be Germany’s crushing defeat in the World War, but that outcome did not yet seem inevitable.\u00a0 In fact, Germany did seek to localize the conflict, as is evident from the source material.\u00a0 As for the German naval building program, I doubt that its aim was really to outstrip or seriously threaten British domination of the seas.\u00a0 Again, one cannot simply dismiss what has been written about the subject on the German side.\u00a0 According to the one man most often associated with the program, Admiral von Tirpitz, Germany’s battle fleet was necessary in order to protect her coast against a combination of France and Russia or any other two naval powers other than Great Britain.\u00a0 She never aimed at more than an 8 to 5 ratio of naval power in favor of England, and would have been satisfied with 3 to 2.\u00a0 There is no credible evidence that Tirpitz or the Kaiser aimed at anything beyond this.<\/p>\n

There is a great deal of additional material\u00a0in Tirpitz’ memoirs of interest to students of events leading up to the outbreak of war.\u00a0 For example, he could not understand why Germany had not simply mobilized in response to the Russian mobilization, and left the moral odium of an actual declaration of war to its enemies.\u00a0 In his words,<\/p>\n

Did not (German Chancellor, ed.) Bethmann really consider the enormous disadvantages which were created for us by our not leaving the act of declaration of war to the enemy?… my feelings revolted at our having to assume the odium of the attacking party in the face of the world, on account of the jurists of the Foreign Office, although we could not at all intend to march into Russia, and although we were in reality the attacked party.\u00a0 I therefore asked the Chancellor, as the meeting broke up, why the declaration of war had to coincide with our mobilization?\u00a0 The Chancellor replied that this was necessary because the army would immediately send troops over the frontier.\u00a0 The reply astonished me, because at the most it could only be a question of patrols.\u00a0 But through these days Bethmann was so agitated and overstrained that it was impossible to speak with him.\u00a0 I can still hear him as he repeatedly stressed the absolute necessity of the declaration of war, with his arms uplifted, and consequently cut short all further discussion.\u00a0 When I asked Moltke afterwards the actual relation between the crossing of the frontier and our declaration of war, he denied any intention of sending troops over the frontier forthwith.\u00a0 He also told me that he attached no value to the declaration of war from his own point of view.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thus the riddle, why we declared war first, remains unsolved for me.\u00a0 It is to be assumed that we did it out of formal legal consciousness.\u00a0 The Russians began the war without any declaration, but we believed that we could not defend ourselves without such a statement.\u00a0 Outside Germany there is no appreciation for such ideas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s for sure!\u00a0 In retrospect, it’s hard to find fault with his reasoning.\u00a0 Unfortunately, I can’t write a complete history of the start of World War I in a blog post.\u00a0 Suffice it to say that I agree with Clark that the notion that it was all Germany’s fault, with Kaiser Wilhelm the “bad guy” extraordinaire, is nonsense.\u00a0 There was plenty of blame to go around.\u00a0 What’s the point?\u00a0 I suppose that I tend to be dubious of the\u00a0value of morality tales posing as history.\u00a0\u00a0In reality, there are\u00a0no good guys and bad guys.\u00a0 The terms \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cbad\u201d are artifacts of the human tendency to attribute objectivity to moral judgments.\u00a0 In fact, they do not exist as things-in-themselves, but are better understood as subjective impressions in the minds of individuals.\u00a0 I read history to gain an understanding of why things happened the way they did, and what motivated individuals to act the way they did.\u00a0 That information is often lost in works that seek to portray certain individuals as \u201cgood,\u201d and others as \u201cbad.\u201d\u00a0 Understanding of real human beings and the complexity of human motivations and behavior\u00a0are\u00a0sacrificed\u00a0when one seeks to create\u00a0a collection of wooden puppets that all fit neatly in one of these two moral pigeonholes.<\/p>\n

\"worldwar1\"
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More than a century has now come and gone since the start of World War I.\u00a0 Numerous books and articles have been published to mark the centennial, often differing sharply with each other in their interpretations of the events and personalities concerned.\u00a0 My personal favorite is The Sleepwalkers, by Christopher Clark.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been reading quite … Continue reading “On the “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys” of World War I”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[96,59,20,8,44],"tags":[302,301],"class_list":["post-4387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-foreign-affairs","category-germany","category-history","category-military","tag-war-guilt","tag-world-war-i"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-18L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4387"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4389,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4387\/revisions\/4389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}