Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The post-war order quickly turned out to please nobody in east-central Europe. The region’s reorganization along national lines had already taken place on the ground before the leaders of the victorious powers began their peace deliberations in Paris in January 1919. In all likelihood this offered the only possibility of stability, but the chances of success were not good. The region was simply too ethnically mixed to permit strong homogeneous nation states. In Poland, Czechoslovakia and a new Romania swollen with ex-Hungarian territory, around a third of the populations were ethnic minorities. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was, as its name suggested, a mishmash of peoples, who below the elites often nurtured long-held historical grievances towards each other rather than embrace the new Yugoslav idealism.12 In the post-war settlement’s favour, it has been pointed out that Europe’s political reorganization halved its minorities, from 60 million to 30 million. Treaties imposed on the new states were supposed to guarantee minority rights.13 Yet this misses the crucial point that both Wilsonian propaganda’s espousal of the ‘self-determination of peoples’ and the war itself had raised national aspirations to fever pitch. Minority status in a continent constructed upon the basis of nation states was far less attractive or acceptable than under the old empires. By one reckoning, even though minority numbers had declined, ethnic conflicts in the territory of what had been Austria-Hungary nearly doubled after 1918, from nine to at least seventeen. Older antagonisms, such as that between the Czechs and Germans of Bohemia, were joined by new national struggles as Czechs and Poles in Teschen, Germans and Croatians in Yugoslavia, and Romanians and Germans in Romania all squared up to each other.14

  President Wilson made a fatal mistake in placing the ‘self-determination of peoples’ at the centre of his post-war vision. The slogan made effective wartime propaganda and contributed to his popularity and moral authority, but it also ensured that his post-war order would be immediately discredited in many eyes. The reason for this was simple: so mixed were the peoples of east-central Europe that not everyone could be permitted to exercise this new right. There would be winners and there would be losers, and Realpolitik dictated that the latter would be the two ethnic groups cowed by defeat, the Germans and the Magyars. Both peoples had just reason to feel deeply aggrieved with Wilson. The American President had indicated in speeches and in his responses to the Central Powers’ peace notes in 1918 that his war was with autocrats, not their peoples. While ‘surrender’ would be demanded of the old imperial regimes, he had warned on 23 October, a genuinely representative government could expect ‘peace negotiations’ on the basis of the Fourteen Points. The Germans had duly revolted, but half a year later there had been no negotiations, just a ‘Diktat’, which their representatives had been permitted to comment upon before the victors’ final ruling. The Hungarians’ experience was more turbulent and less to Wilson’s liking, comprising a moderate revolution, a Bolshevik takeover, and then a right-wing autocracy led by a former Habsburg admiral, but they received similar treatment at the Allies’ hands. The terms imposed on both powers were, as even members of the Allied delegations recognized, devastating. Germany’s Foreign Minister, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, said after he had read the voluminous list of demands, conditions and losses to which his country was expected to bow under threat of invasion that Wilson and his associates should have saved their time. A single clause would have sufficed: ‘L’Allemagne renonce à son existence.’15

  Versailles and Trianon constructed the post-war order at the expense of Germans and Hungarians, a fact that explains why neither country’s government ever accepted it. The non-application of its central organizing principle, national self-determination, to the losers was later confirmed when German Austrians, who in October 1918 had assumed they would join Germany, were forbidden by the victors from doing so. At Versailles, Germany was refused access to the League of Nations, the international body supposed to bind the new post-war world, and it lost 13 per cent of its territory and 10 per cent of its population. Hungary did even worse, losing a staggering 67.3 per cent of its territory and 73.5 per cent of its inhabitants.16 Of course, most of the subjects transferred were Romanians, Slovaks, Alsace-Lorrainers, Danes or Poles who could plausibly, if not always correctly, be presented as desirous of joining Romania, Czechoslovakia, France or Poland. In ambiguous areas like Masuria and Upper Silesia in Germany’s east, plebiscites were held to determine the wishes of their inhabitants. Nonetheless, there were grievous injustices, most notably the transfer of unambiguously German Danzig to the League as a free state (a measure taken to give Poland access to the sea). The territory transfers and refusals to permit German Bohemians to ‘self-determine’ and join with Austria, or Austrians with Germany, left 13 million Germans outside the Reich’s borders. Outside interwar Hungary were Magyar minorities totalling 3.23 million people.17 The anger felt in the heartlands at the territorial loss was nothing compared with the intense bitterness of compatriots with property and livelihoods there who sold up or were forced out. From the Polish Corridor, the strip of formerly German land allocated to Poland that cut East Prussia from the rest of interwar Germany, 575,000 of the 1.1 million Germans who had resided there in 1919 had six years later moved to the new German Republic.18 In the west, as many as 200,000 of the 300,000-strong German population left or were expelled from Alsace-Lorraine.19 Some 426,000 Hungarians had also fled from territories taken by Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania and Austria by 1924. The large numbers who departed underline that territorial loss brought by defeat and Wilson’s new order were not merely smears on national honour; they destroyed many ordinary people’s lives.20

  In addition to the loss of territory imposed or confirmed by Versailles and Trianon, the treaties demanded reparations. Article 231 of Versailles, which set out the legal basis for this claim, asserted ‘the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies’. Historians have pointed out that the figure of 132 billion gold marks that the Allies settled on for Germany in 1921 was largely notional and intended to satisfy vengeful domestic opinion. The sum that they really aimed at, 50 billion gold marks paid over thirty-six years, was entirely manageable.21 However, the German public was shocked by the larger claim. Hyperinflation, which was caused by their government’s economic mismanagement but blamed on reparations, wiped out the value of their savings and their war bonds and increased their anger. Reparations became a particular source of acrimony for two other reasons. First, the German delegation in Paris in 1919 tried to discredit the legal basis on which claims for payment rested by casting Article 231 as ‘the war-guilt clause’. Although the Allies were not in fact demanding any admission of culpability, the term stuck and turned a financial transaction into an emotive moral issue. Second, in January 1923, after the German state had continually defaulted on payment, the French and Belgians, who together with the British were already in occupation of the left bank of the Rhine, invaded the industrial Ruhr region. The propaganda of fear spread by the imperial authorities in 1917 now appeared uncannily prescient. Enemy invasion, German workers coerced to labour for a hated oppressor, even the deliberately humiliating use of black French troops to oversee the loading of coal into wagons for dispatch to France, had all come about in the wake of defeat. There was violence. Some 132 German civilians were killed, 4,124 imprisoned and 172,000 expelled by French and Belgian forces. The Reich’s army, reduced by Versailles to just 100,000 men, was impotent to react.22

  All this broke on a people that, like all east-central European societies, was already deeply traumatized. Central European peoples had invested heavily in the war and its psychological impact was correspondingly enormous. Some have blamed the long years of mass killing for the brutalization of interwar society and politics.23 Yet the paramilitary violence that wracked the region after the war was
perpetrated by only a small minority of men. As the speed with which the German army demobilized at the end of 1918 testifies, most soldiers just wished to go home.24 Instead, suffering was key to shaping the conflict’s emotional legacy. Suffering was everywhere across east-central Europe. It was most visible in the human wreckage left by war – the millions of disabled veterans and the bereaved. In Germany, 533,000 war widows and 1,192,000 orphans survived their fallen soldiers.25 Czechoslovakia, whose population was one-fifth of that of the Reich and whose soldiers were alleged not to have fought well, paid pensions for 121,215 war widows and 238,000 orphans.26 However, war had brought a surfeit of suffering with many causes. Besides battle and bereavement, hunger and cold on the home fronts caused intense suffering. Invaded East Prussians and deported Galician Jews had suffered. So too did people who lost their homes after the war as borders moved.

  This suffering, and the jealousies, prejudices and violence that it spawned or exacerbated, was highly and lastingly destructive. One specific and suggestive link between German suffering in the First World War and the crimes against humanity committed a quarter of a century later can be made. Germans who lived in ethnically mixed border areas, where war deprivation inflamed racial animosities, were disproportionately likely to take part in the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Those who in addition lost their homes as frontiers moved at the conflict’s end were six times over-represented among Holocaust perpetrators.27 More generally, wartime suffering at home fractured societies along class and racial fault lines. These would be torn open further by inter-ethnic paramilitary fighting, left-wing revolutions and bloody far-right reprisals in the aftermath of the conflict. Wartime suffering was at the root of what one left-wing intellectual described ominously in 1929 as ‘the wild and brutal atmosphere of hatred and revenge which is still the dominating current of Eastern Europe’.28

  The other important legacy of wartime suffering was a desperate search for meaning. At the apex of the value system of central European war culture had been the concept of sacrifice: a voluntary surrender to loss, suffering or pain for a higher cause. German and Austro-Hungarian societies sacrificed men in staggering numbers in 1914–18: 2,036,897 German soldiers were killed.29 Austro-Hungarian casualties were never properly calculated, but totalled between 1,100,000 and 1,200,000. Austrian Germans and Hungarians suffered most, followed closely by Slovenes and Moravian Czechs.30 Habsburg defeat did not, at least officially, devalue the sacrifices of Czech, Polish or Yugoslav soldiers. The new states simply reinterpreted the men’s deaths as in the cause of independence. There was no public space for alternative views.31 For Germans, by contrast, defeat brought great cognitive dissonance. Ruth Höfner blurted out the dilemma immediately on learning of the armistice. ‘For what have German mothers sacrificed their sons?’ she asked.32 For Anna Kohnstern, the Hamburg woman who for four years had devotedly sent letters and gifts of love to her soldier son Albert at the front, this question must have been accompanied by extraordinary pain. He was killed on 26 October 1918, barely two weeks before the fighting at last stopped.33 With spite, the French government refused until 1925 to permit ordinary Germans to visit war graves on its soil, making the mourning of parents even more difficult, their lives even more empty.34

  People across and beyond east-central Europe struggled to come to terms with the mass death of 1914–18. The dilemma of how to vindicate the sacrifices of beloved sons, brothers and fathers after a lost war gave the German interwar cult of the fallen soldier a unique character and intensity. The municipal, Church and local networks that had supported soldiers when they had lived, mobilized again to honour them in death. Many individuals took comfort from thinking of the fallen as Christ-like martyrs or as reposing in deep sleep. The idea too that the dead looked on, and that like Christ or a sleeper they must rise again, permeated national consciousness. The questions of what they had died for and what they desired divided Germans across the political spectrum, but even republicans imagined the dead admonishing the living to resurrect the Fatherland. The far right, which strove to establish itself as the voice of veterans and the guardians of the memory of fallen soldiers, would embrace a literal and militant understanding of this wish. For its adherents, the defeat of 1918 was in fact a betrayal to be avenged and overturned.35

  The First World War was a catastrophe for central and eastern Europe. The new republics that replaced the old, discredited empires were themselves undermined by the war’s bitter legacy. Impoverished, insecure and frequently with large, resentful minorities, most proved unstable. War had rent the fabric of their multi-ethnic societies and disastrously exacerbated racial divisions, bequeathing lasting antagonisms above all against older Jewish and new German minorities. Within a decade, there was little left of Wilson’s new democratic order, for most of the east had fallen under the rule of autocratic strongmen. Germany too was ruined. The national unity of 1914 had through war collapsed in acrimony, and the divisions between the left and an anti-Semitic right widened and became more vicious in its aftermath. The struggle had been a people’s war. The suffering and sacrifice had been immense. Those who survived the ordeal were left with the question of what it had all been for.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1.Marshal Joffre, the Ex-Crown Prince of Germany, Marshal Foch and Marshal [sic] Ludendorff, The Two Battles of the Marne (London, 1927), p. 213.

  2.G. F. Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875–1890 (Princeton, NY, 1979), p. 3.

  3.R. Overmans, ‘Kriegsverluste’, in G. Hirschfeld, G. Krumeich, I. Renz and M. Pöhlmann (eds.), Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg, 2nd edn (Paderborn, 2004), pp. 664–5.

  4.Bethmann Hollweg, quoted in K. H. Jarausch, The Enigmatic Chancellor: Bethmann Hollweg and the Hubris of Imperial Germany (New Haven, CT, and London, 1973), p. 280.

  5.See A. Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2008), p. 156, and G. Gratz and R. Schüller, Der wirtschaftliche Zusammenbruch Österreich-Ungarns. Die Tragödie der Erschöpfung (Vienna and New Haven, CT, 1930), pp. 150–51.

  6.S. Broadberry and M. Harrison, ‘The Economics of World War I: An Overview’, in S. Broadberry and M. Harrison (eds.), The Economics of World War I (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore and São Paulo, 2005), p. 8.

  7.M. Dydyński (Cracow), diary/memoir, p. 125, 15 March 1915. AN Cracow: 645–70.

  8.C. Führ, Das k.u.k. Armeeoberkommando und die Innenpolitik in Österreich, 1914–1917 (Graz, Vienna and Cologne, 1968), and W. Deist (ed.), Militär und Innenpolitik im Weltkrieg, 1914–1918 (2 vols., Dusseldorf, 1970).

  9.T. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918. Machtstaat vor der Demokratie (2 vols., Munich, 1998), ii, pp. 47, 51, 182–3 and 188–91, and R. A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, and London, 1974), pp. 326–42.

  10.For an introduction, see H. Lasswell’s pioneering Propaganda Technique in the World War (London and New York, 1927).

  1. DECISIONS FOR WAR

  1.J. Redlich, Schicksalsjahre Österreichs, 1908–1919. Das politische Tagebuch Josef Redlichs, ed. F. Fellner (2 vols., Graz and Cologne, 1953), ii, p. 153 (entry for 3 November 1916).

  2.J. Leslie, ‘Österreich-Ungarn vor dem Kriegsausbruch. Der Ballhausplatz in Wien im Juli 1914 aus der Sicht eines österreichisch-ungarischen Diplomaten’, in R. Melville, C. Scharf, M. Vogt and U. Wengenroth (eds.), Deutschland und Europa in der Neuzeit. Festschrift für Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin zum 65. Geburtstag. 2. Halbband (Stuttgart, 1988), pp. 675 and 678–80.

  3.C. Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York, 2013), pp. 396–7.

  4.V. Dedijer, The Road to Sarajevo (London, Fakenham and Reading, 1967), pp. 175–80, 290–301 and 366–81. Also Clark, Sleepwalkers, pp. 48–9.

  5.F. Fellner, ‘Die “Mission Hoyos” ’, in W. Alff (ed.), Deutschlands Sonderung von Europa, 1862–1945 (Fran
kfurt am Main, Bern and New York, 1984), pp. 294–5 and 309–11; Clark, Sleepwalkers, pp. 114–15 and 400–402.

  6.Wilhelm II on a report from the German ambassador to Vienna, Baron Heinrich von Tschirschky und Bögendorff, to Bethmann Hollweg, 30 June 1914, in I. Geiss (ed.), July 1914: The Outbreak of the First World War: Selected Documents (London, 1967), p. 65.

  7.Szögyényi to Berchtold, 5 July 1914, in Geiss (ed.), July 1914, pp. 76–7.

  8.Szögyényi to Berchtold, 6 July 1914, in ibid., p. 79.

  9.Fellner, ‘Die “Mission Hoyos” ’, p. 311.

  10.Falkenhayn to Moltke, 5 July 1914, in Geiss (ed.), July 1914, pp. 77–8, and Plessen, diary, 5 July 1914, in H. Afflerbach (ed.), Kaiser Wilhelm II. als Oberster Kriegsherr im Ersten Weltkrieg. Quellen aus der militärischen Umgebung des Kaisers, 1914–1918 (Munich, 2005), p. 641.

  11.Fellner, ‘Die “Mission Hoyos” ’, pp. 312–13, and Jarausch, The Enigmatic Chancellor, pp. 155–6. For the contrary but unsustainable view that the Germans pushed Vienna to war during July, see F. Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London, 1967), esp. pp. 57–61.