Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  10 Quoted in Roger Chickering, “Die Alldeutschen erwarten den Krieg,” in Jost Dülffer and Karl Holl (eds.), Bereit zum Krieg: Kriegsmentalität im wilhelminischen Deutschland 1890–1914 (Göttingen, 1986), 20–32, 25.

  1 The war begins

  It began, to use the formula familiar in today’s newspapers, with an “act of state-sponsored terrorism.” The archduke Francis Ferdinand was the heir apparent to the Habsburg throne of Austria–Hungary; when, on June 28, 1914, a Serbian student shot him and his wife to death in Sarajevo, the capital of the Austrian province of Bosnia, the act provoked astonishment and outrage throughout Europe. Public excitement quickly receded, however, despite lingering rumors in the newspapers – subsequently substantiated – that officials of the Serbian government had been complicit in the assassination. In Germany and elsewhere the summer season had begun. The onset of warm weather signaled travel for those who could afford it; and, for those who could not, it brought less idle adjustments in the annual rhythms of life in town and countryside.

  In Berlin, as elsewhere, the events in Sarajevo provoked a series of fateful deliberations during the first weeks of July.1 The German leadership concluded that the assassination carried far-reaching implications for German security. Austria–Hungary was Germany’s principal ally. The Serbian affront promised to encourage discontent not only among the South Slav inhabitants of Austria–Hungary but also among the other ethnic groups that made up the Habsburg monarchy. In the eyes of the German leaders, the logic of this process boded the dissolution of the monarchy and, ultimately, Germany’s full diplomatic and military isolation in Europe.

  This alarming prospect loomed over the consultations in the German capital. The decisions that emerged out of these deliberations have themselves given rise to a bitter dispute among professional historians.2 At the center of the dispute stands the German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg (see Plate 1), the civilian head of the German federal government. Some historians, with Fritz Fischer in the lead, have argued that Bethmann seized upon the assassination as the pretext to launch a long-planned war of aggression, whose goal was German hegemony on the European continent. The preponderance of evidence now suggests instead, however, that the chancellor pursued a somewhat more cautious policy, which grew out of his anxiety over the future of the Austrian monarchy, whose survival, he believed, did justify the risk of a European war. Bethmann was strengthened in this belief by the country’s leading soldier, the chief of the army’s General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke. Moltke’s calculations were technical. They originated in his fear that military reforms already under way in France and Russia, Germany’s principal continental antagonists, would reach completion in 1917 and render the alliance of these two powers invincible thereafter. With this date in mind, Moltke recommended risking a general war, which he believed should be fought “the sooner the better.”

  Plate 1 Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg (reproduced courtesy of the Hulton Getty Picture Collection Limited)

  The thinking of both Bethmann and Moltke betrayed as well the malaise that was rife among Germany’s political and social elites over the country’s domestic future – particularly over the dramatic growth of the world’s most formidable socialist party. Domestic concerns figured in the German calculations. A diplomatic triumph promised to rally public opinion – at least non-socialist opinion – in favor of the established order; on the other hand, Germany’s numerous patriotic organizations would as surely mobilize public anger if the government failed to act vigorously in response to the new challenge.

  Debates in Vienna had meanwhile also produced a decision to “settle accounts” with Serbia, and when an Austrian emissary arrived in Berlin in early July 1914 to seek German help he received the famous “blank check” – the assurance of full German support – along with German pleas to move swiftly, lest public sympathy for the Austrian position dissipate along with international outrage over the assassination.3 During the next weeks the German leaders thus prodded their allies into an option – war with Serbia – that the Austrians themselves had originally defined. The Germans did so in full view of the possible consequences, chief among them the intrusion of Russia into the dispute; and their decision was tempered only in the hope that the military conflict could be localized between the two immediate antagonists, Austria–Hungary and Serbia. The ultimatum that the Austrians thereupon delivered to the Serbs on July 23 was the product of this policy; the demands it made on the Serbian government were calculated to be unacceptable. In all events, the document provoked a diplomatic crisis that, within little more than a week, activated Europe’s alliance network and brought about Russia’s military intervention on Serbia’s behalf, Germany’s on Austria’s behalf, France’s on Russia’s behalf, and Great Britain’s on France’s behalf.

  The “spirit of 1914”

  The announcement of the Austrian ultimatum on July 24 (a Friday) electrified public discourse in Germany. The principal media of local communication in 1914 were the newspaper and the public placard; the points where they were displayed became the nodes of public excitement in the final week of July, as the crisis unfolded. In towns throughout the land, crowds gathered at newsstands, the windows of buildings where newspapers were published, public houses, and at kiosks, in order to learn of the most recent announcements – and to embellish the bulletins with all manner of rumor. As the crisis intensified, the crowds grew; and in many places the mood became euphoric to the accompaniment of military and civilian bands, the singing of patriotic songs, the waving of flags, and spontaneous processions through the centers of cities, particularly in university towns, where students provided the lead.

  The spectacle had already taken on the air of a public festival when, on July 31 (another Friday), the big news broke. The kiosks and newspapers now announced that the Russian armies were in general mobilization. The German proclamation of a state of imminent war (Kriegszustand) with Russia followed immediately. The headlines of the first four days in August then registered the inexorable march of events towards general war: the imposition of martial law in Germany and the mobilization of the German armies, the German declaration of war on Russia, the mobilization of the French army, the German declaration of war on that country, and the British intervention against Germany. The public festivals in Germany kept pace with the escalating drama, but their focus shifted to the barracks that housed the local regiments. Armed young men in uniform now took over the processions through town, as they marched toward the railway stations, their first way station to the front and an adventure that they, like most Germans, thought would be over by Christmas.

  The exhilaration of early August was captured in innumerable scenes – many of them photographed – of flag-bedecked public squares, such as the Marktplatz in Darmstadt and the Wilhelmsplatz in Frankfurt an der Oder, where crowds gathered in increasing numbers as the crisis reached its climax. The most famous scenes took place in Berlin. Here, at the royal palace, the Kaiser proclaimed on August 4 that the war had suspended domestic strife and that henceforth he “recognized no parties, only Germans.” Several blocks away, the Reichstag gave formal expression to the same sentiments when – to the enormous relief of the government – the Socialists joined the other parties in a unanimous vote in favor of the credits necessary to finance the war.

  These were heady days. Testimony abounds from those who participated in these festive scenes and were captured in the conviction that a new era in German history had begun. A historian in Leipzig testified to “a single great feeling of moral elevation, a soaring of religious sentiment, in short, the ascent of a whole people to the heights.”4 “I have experienced such a physical and moral condition of luminosity and euphoria two or three times since,” recalled the writer Carl Zuckmayer, who witnessed the events in Berlin, “but never with that sharpness and intensity.”5 And a restless young man in Munich, who appeared in one of the photographs amid the multitudes at the Odeonsplatz, recalled that he found the experience “like a r
elease from the painful feelings of my youth.” “Overpowered by stormy enthusiasm,” he wrote later, “I fell down on my knees and thanked heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.”6

  These statements reflected what might be called an initial “reading” of the war, a rendering of events that quickly became known variously as the “ideas of 1914” or the “spirit of 1914.”7 Countless documents of the summer of 1914 – speeches, newspaper articles, letters, and diary entries, as well as photographs – spoke to a spontaneous and overpowering sense of national unity, a unanimity of views about the origins and meaning of the conflict that was beginning. This consensus was, to be sure, inchoate and vaguely formulated; it nonetheless framed public understandings of the war, and in some circles it proved remarkably durable.

  Its foundation was the proposition that Germany had been attacked. Whatever the truth of this proposition, the German government had managed by its skillful manipulation of the news during the crisis, and then by the selective release of diplomatic documents, to convey the impression that Germany’s mobilization was only a response to the aggression of Russia and its western allies. The motto Feinde ringsum now became the moral foundation of the war effort, which, in the eyes of most Germans who experienced it, remained for the duration a defensive struggle.

  This conviction could not alone engender the feelings that emerged in the summer of 1914. The public celebrations testified as well to the belief that the transition from peace to war had produced a dramatic break, a fundamental transformation in German society and politics, and that the forces that would galvanize the new Germany were nothing like those that had plagued the old one. The contrasts that informed this thinking reflected many of the issues that had long polarized German politics. They were captured in the dichotomy, made famous at the end of the previous century by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, between “society” (Gesellschaft) and “community” (Gemeinschaft). The one suggested a social system ridden by materialism, artificiality, and the selfish and calculated pursuit of individual interest; the other implied a community bound organically by patriotic idealism and selfless determination to achieve common goals. “One perceived in all camps that it was not a matter merely of the unity of a gain-seeking partnership, but that an inner renovation of our whole state was needed.” These were the terms in which the historian Friedrich Meinecke, who was about to move from Freiburg to the university in Berlin as the war broke out, recorded the German transition from peace to war. “We generally believed,” he continued, “that this [renovation] had already commenced and that it would progress further in the common experiences of war.”8 Meinecke’s expectation was widely shared. The common experience of war promised the transformation of basic relationships among Germans – the suspension, if not the transcendence, of narrow loyalties of class, confession, and party. When the Kaiser announced that he recognized only Germans, he gave expression to the same belief, as did the theologian who wrote that “my first impression was that war changed men, and it also changed the relationship between men.”9

  The drama and extravagant expectations of war lent almost mystical status to the “spirit of 1914,” and not a little of this mysticism has colored subsequent historical writings on the subject. It soon became an article of faith that Germans had entered the war in euphoric unanimity. In their search for the roots of these emotions, commentators have written of a general flight from (or into) modernity, the longing to escape from the boredom of civilian life, or the venting of primitive drives.10 Much of the commentary is speculation; and even basic generalizations about the unanimity of enthusiasm require significant qualification. The evidence on which these generalizations rest is drawn largely from urban Germany. The attitudes of women and men in the countryside and small towns await the attention they deserve. Nor did the euphoria over war extend by any means to all of urban Germany. “There was no unified ‘August experience,’” writes a historian who has examined this phenomenon in Darmstadt, “rather there were many different August experiences.”11 In Darmstadt and elsewhere, anxiety was as widespread as jubilation. The leaders of the SPD and trade unions endorsed the war, but this step marked a rupture with the pacifism and internationalism that had long animated the German labor movement. When Socialists spoke about the transformation of basic relationships, they had in mind the democratic reform of the German constitution; in any case, many in the Socialist movement – and elsewhere – accepted the war with reluctance and fatalism, but with little enthusiasm.12 Finally, generalizations about the German “spirit of 1914” must accommodate the evidence that the public reception of war was similar in other countries, and that the scenes in Berlin and Munich were indistinguishable from those in London, Paris, and St. Petersburg.

  Nonetheless, in its German context the “spirit of 1914” was of vital importance to the history of the war that followed.13 It massively informed the reaction of the most powerful, influential, and articulate people in the country – the elites of property, education, and high birth, whose military, economic, political, and cultural power put them in positions to represent publicly the experience of war to Germans of all stations. The incantations of community spoke foremost to anxieties that had long been resident in these elite circles; in fact, the Gemeinschaft that they invoked in the summer of 1914 represented a mirror image of the society over which they actually presided. On the eve of war, Imperial Germany was not united. Its society, culture, and political system were characterized by all manner of discord. Virtually no issue debated in the German houses of parliament – whether it had to do with taxes, tariffs, canal building, schools, welfare, or defense policy – failed to stir these tensions. Well might political life in Germany have conveyed the impression of narrowness and the pursuit of self-interest, for the parties were wedded to parochial constituencies and divided by basic differences and suspicions, and they found it difficult to act durably in concert.

  The “spirit of 1914” thus implied a definitive end to all these divisions in the face of the external threat. Germans of all stations were to be bound in a great common experience, which would recast fundamentally the dynamics of national life. The difficulty was that this rhapsody on national unity offered no realistic formula for solving the problems that beset Germany in 1914, to say nothing of problems in the offing. Geared to the expectation of a short war, the “spirit of 1914” was bound instead to raise expectations that the pressures of industrial warfare were calculated to frustrate. Compelling practical questions remained unaddressed. The language of nationalism hid them only momentarily; then it translated them into a new idiom. How was the country to be governed, particularly once the consensus of the early days receded? Who was to make the painful decisions about allocating the burdens of war? How in fact were these growing burdens to be allocated? The initial elation suggested that they would be equitably distributed, but was this expectation consistent with the mechanisms of market capitalism, which preserved fundamental inequalities of wealth and access to goods and services? How far was the transformation of human relationships to extend? Were German women, who constituted roughly half the adult population but were everywhere excluded from politics, to be accorded full membership in the new national community? On all these issues, opposing forces could invoke the idea of national unity to make their case.14

  The “spirit of 1914” offered little practical guidance for negotiating the unimagined strains of war in the twentieth century. It also brought to the fore basic issues of social and political equity, which had long plagued the country. Its premise was the involvement of all Germans in a great national exertion. It implied as well, however, an equitable sharing of both the burdens and rewards of this endeavor. Once these expectations were shown to be empty, the “spirit of 1914” took on the aura of an elusive fantasy, a painful reminder of the idealism that had reigned in the first hour. While some circles henceforth attempted to manipulate it for their own ends, the exp
ectations that it raised became themselves the object of growing popular discontent. The “spirit of 1914” framed the war in terms that could nourish only disillusionment, which commenced almost the moment the German armies encountered the dreadful new realities of combat.

  The plan

  The armies of the European powers had not clashed in almost a half-century. Nonetheless, memories of the last of these conflicts, which resulted in the crushing defeat of France by the armies of Prussia and its German allies in 1870–1, dominated the thinking of every professional soldier who, during the ensuing era, was called upon to forecast the next European war. Among military planners from Paris to St. Petersburg, agreement reigned in retrospect that the German victory over France had been due, above all, to the superiority of the military institutions that the Prussians had introduced in the 1860s. A series of reforms had turned the Prussian army into a body of short-term conscripts and reserves, who were initially mobilized in the localities where they were recruited; from here they were then deployed, combat-ready, to the front. As a consequence, Prussian troops arrived in greater numbers and better prepared to fight the decisive early battles that settled the outcome of the whole campaign. The other German states had already begun to reorganize their armies on this pattern in the 1860s. Then, in 1870–1, the numerical superiority, mobility, and coordination of these formations brought the humiliation of first the professional army of Imperial France and then the militias raised by the new government of republican France.

  In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War the armies of every continental power underwent restructuring on the Prussian model. The specifics varied, but all armies instituted a combination of conscription and reserve levies, into which conscripts passed after several years of active service. The continental armies also emulated the Prussians in establishing the corps as the central administrative and operational unit and in anchoring each of these bodies in a home district in peacetime, where it recruited and barracked its own constituent combat units, drew its supplies, and underwent its initial mobilization. Finally, in order to coordinate the movements of these units onto and about the field of battle, European armies established – again on the Prussian model – centralized general staff organizations, which linked planning agencies in the capital through a network of staff officers to the headquarters of the combat units. Conscription guaranteed that the size of European armies increased in pace with the growth of population, so the armies that clashed in a future war would dwarf those that had met in 1870.15 Nonetheless, military planning everywhere remained wedded to the idea that the dynamics of combat had not changed since 1870, that the first encounters between armies would prove decisive in any future campaign, and that victory therefore awaited the side that best organized its forces for rapid mobilization and initial deployment. These calculations put a premium on the management and planning of military forces, for they suggested that the issue in any future struggle would be all but settled before the first shots were exchanged.