1 George F. Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875–1890 (Princeton, NJ, 1979), 3.
2 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York, 1994), ix.
3 See Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison (eds.), The Economics of World War I (Cambridge, 2005); Frank P. Chambers, The War Behind the War, 1914–1918: A History of the Political and Civilian Fronts (New York, 1939); John Williams, The Other Battleground: The Home Fronts – Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1918 (Chicago, 1972). Although it treats London, Paris, and Berlin, the conclusions in the great collaborative project directed by Jay M. Winter and Jean-Louis Robert bear directly on the broader problems of mobilization: Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919 (2 vols., Cambridge, 1997–2007).
4 John Horne, “Remobilizing for ‘total war’: France and Britain, 1917–1918,” in Horne, State, Society and Mobilization, 195–211, 195. See also Pierre Purseigle, “Home fronts: the mobilisation of resources for total war,” in Chickering, Showalter, and van de Ven, The Cambridge History of War, IV, 257–84.
5 Scott Desks (ed.), The Value of a Dollar: Prices and Incomes in the United States, 1860–1989 (Detroit, 1994), 143.
6 Dietrich Beyrau and Pavel P. Shcherbinin, “Alles für die Front: Russland im Krieg 1914–1922,” in Bauernkämper and Julien, Durchhalten!, 151–77; Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis (Cambridge, MA, 2002); Hubertus Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, NY, 1995); W. Bruce Lincoln, Passage through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914–1918 (Oxford, 1994); Michael T. Florinsky, The End of the Russian Empire (New York, 1961).
7 Mark Cornwall, The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: The Battle for Hearts and Minds (Basingstoke, 2000); Robert J. Wegs, Die österreichische Kriegswirtschaft 1914–1918 (Vienna, 1979); Josef Redlich, Österreichs Regierung und Verwaltung im Weltkriege (Vienna, 1925). See also Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge, 2004).
8 Horne, “Remobilizing for ‘total war.’”
9 Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker, France and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2003); Patrick Fridenson (ed.), The French Home Front, 1914–1918 (Oxford, 1992); Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People, trans. Arnold Pomerans (London, 1985); John F. Godfrey, Capitalism at War: Industrial Policy and Bureaucracy in France, 1914–1918 (London, 1987).
10 Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge, 2008); Alan G. V. Simmonds, Britain and World War One (London, 2012); John M. Bourne, Britain and the Great War, 1914–1918 (London, 1989); Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (London, 1965); Llewellyn Woodward, Great Britain and the War of 1914–1918 (London, 1967); De Groot, Blighty.
11 Roger Chickering, “World War I and the theory of total war: reflections on the British and German cases, 1914–1915,” in Chickering and Förster, Great War, Total War, 35–53.
12 Richard Bessel, “Mobilization and demobilization in Germany, 1916–1919,” in Horne, State, Society and Mobilization, 212–22.
13 Frederick S. Northedge, The Troubled Giant: Britain among the Great Powers (London, 1966), 623; cf. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York, 1987), 268–9.
14 Paul Kennedy, “Military effectiveness in the First World War,” in Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray (eds.), Military Effectiveness (4 vols., Boston, 1988–9), I, 329–50.
15 Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 273.
16 For good introductions, see Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford, 1993); Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York, 1989); Hans Mommsen, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996).
17 Christian Saehrendt, Der Stellungskrieg der Denkmäler: Kriegerdenkmäler im Berlin der Zwischenkriegszeit (1919–1939) (Bonn, 2004).
18 George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York, 1990), 87–90.
19 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995), 78–116.
20 Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat, 208–12.
21 Quoted in Sammet, “Dolchstoss,” 59.
22 See now Benjamin Ziemann, Contested Commemorations: Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture (Cambridge, 2013).
23 Pierre Jardin, “La legend du ‘coup de poignard’ dans les manuels scolaires allemands des années 1920,” in Jean-Jacques Becker, Jay M. Winter, Gerd Krumeich, Annette Becker, and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau (eds.), Guerre et cultures, 1914–1918 (Paris, 1994), 266–77.
24 Sammet, “Dolchstoss,” 224.
25 Dieter Riesenberger, Geschichte der Friedensbewegung in Deutschland: Von den Anfängen bis 1933 (Göttingen, 1985), 124–42; Hans Harald Müller, Der Krieg und die Schriftsteller: Der Kriegsroman in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart, 1986).
26 Thomas F. Schneider, Erich Maria Remarques Roman “Im Westen nichts Neues”: Text, Edition, Entstehung, Distribution und Rezeption (1928–1930) (Tübingen, 2004); cf. Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918–1945 (New Haven, CT, 2010), 9–12.
27 Ziemann, Contested Commemorations, 238–9.
28 Arndt Weinrich, Der Weltkrieg als Erzieher: Jugend zwischen Weimarer Republik und Nationalsozialismus (Essen, 2013), 65–124.
29 Gerd Krumeich (ed.), Nationalsozialismus und Erster Weltkrieg (Essen, 2010).
Suggestions for further reading
The First World War has inspired an almost boundless literature. The survey that follows can make no claim to comprehensive coverage. It attends in all events to newer titles that deal principally if not exclusively with Germany in this era of conflict. References to German local and regional studies, which are also abundant, should be sought in the footnotes, where they are confined. The following categories provide orientation.
1 General works
2 Military affairs
3 Mobilization of the economy
4 The social history of the war
5 Cultural themes
6 War aims and international relations
7 Domestic politics
8 War memory
General works
Several ambitious encyclopedias of the First World War have recently appeared. The most immediately relevant is the German volume by Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, Irina Renz, and Markus Pöhlmann (eds.), Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg (2nd edn, Paderborn, 2009). This volume is now available in English translation as Hirschfeld et al. (eds.), Brill’s Encyclopedia of the First World War (2 vols., Leiden, 2012). It partners with John Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I (Chichester, 2010). The French volume was the first to appear and represents something of a model for the rest: Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Jean-Jacques Becker (eds.), Encyclopédie de la Grande Guerre 1914–1918 (Paris, 2004). This year a large collaborative encyclopedia of the First World War will go online: 1914–1918 online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War (www.1914–1918-online.net).
Overviews of the historiography of the German Great War are available in Gerd Krumeich and Gerhard Hirschfeld, “Die Geschichtsschreibung zum Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Hirschfeld et al., Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg, 304–15; Bruno Thoss, “Weltkrieg und Systemkrise: Der Erste Weltkrieg in der westdeutschen Forschung 1945–1984,” in Jürgen Rohwer (ed.), Neue Forschungen zum Ersten Weltkrieg: Literaturberichte und Bibligraphien von 30 Mitgliedstaaten der “Commission internationale d’histoire militaire comparée” (Koblenz, 1985), 31–80; Bruno Thoss, “Der Erste Weltkrieg als Ereignis und Erlebnis: Paradigmenwechsel in der westdeutschen Weltkriegsforschung seit der Fischer-Kontroverse,” in Wolfgang Michalka (ed.), Der Erste Weltkrieg: Wirkung, Wahrnehmung, Analyse (Munich, 1994), 1,012�
��43; Holger H. Herwig, “Industry, empire and the First World War,” in Gordon Martel (ed.), Modern Germany Reconsidered 1870–1945 (Abingdon, 1992), 54–73; Michael Epkenhans, “Neuere Forschungen zur Geschichte des Ersten Weltkrieges,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 38 (1998), 458–87; Christoph Nonn, “Oh what a lovely war? German common people and the First World War,” German History 18 (2000), 97–111; and my own “Imperial Germany at war,” in Roger Chickering (ed.), Imperial Germany: A Historiographical Companion (Westport, CT, 1996), 489–512. For a survey of East German scholarship, see Fritz Klein, “Die Weltkriegsforschung der DDR,” in Hirschfeld et al., Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg, 316–19; and Willibald Gutsche and Helmut Otto, “Der Erste Weltkrieg in der DDR-Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Rohwer, Neue Forschungen zum Ersten Weltkrieg, 91–7.
The richest, most comprehensive account of Germany in the First World War is still the three-volume survey edited under the direction of Fritz Klein et al., Deutschland im Ersten Weltkrieg (3 vols., East Berlin, 1968–9). The work displays both the strengths and weaknesses of German Marxist–Leninist scholarship. While it follows the military history of the war in detail, it emphasizes the economic and social dimensions of the conflict. Its principal theme, however, is the pre-history of the GDR: the emergence of the German Communist Party out of radical opposition to a war undertaken in the interests of monopoly capitalism. The other general surveys tend to be more riveted to military affairs and high politics. This proposition applies alike to Peter Graf Kielmansegg, Deutschland und der Erste Weltkrieg (Frankfurt am Main, 1968); Hans Herzfeld, Der Erste Weltkrieg (Munich, 1968); Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Der Erste Weltkrieg (Munich, 1980); Günther Mai, Das Ende des Kaiserreichs: Politik und Kriegführung im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 1987); and Holger Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1918 (3rd edn., London, 2014), which has the virtue of including the Habsburg monarchy in the account. Laurence V. Moyer, Victory Must Be Ours: Germany in the Great War, 1914–1918 (New York, 1995), treats the home front more centrally, but it lacks a conceptual framework robust enough to control the rich material that it collects. The essays in Michalka’s Der Erste Weltkrieg contain a wealth of information on diverse phases of the conflict. The collected essays of Imanuel Geiss, Das Deutsche Reich und der Erste Weltkrieg (Munich, 1985), provide a provocative and readable introduction to a number of the issues that dominated the historiography of the war in the 1960s and 1970s.
The essays in Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (New York, 1999) have assaulted much of the conventional thinking about the war, including the wisdom of British intervention. Many of the author’s contentions have provoked a furious response, however, and the book should be read with care. The essays in the volume edited by Bruno Thoss and Hans-Erich Volkmann, Erster Weltkrieg / Zweiter Weltkrieg (Paderborn, 2002), perform a great service in seeking to compare the two world wars of the last century. Wolfgang Mommsen has provided a concise and readable account in his contribution to the new Gebhardt series, Die Urkatastrophe Deutschlands: Der Erste Weltkrieg 1914–1918 (Stuttgart, 2002). A collection of the same historian’s essays offers the fruits of his scholarship on war aims, constitutional issues, and cultural activity: Mommsen, Der Erste Weltkrieg: Anfang vom Ende des bürgerlichen Zeitalters (Frankfurt am Main, 2004). The German case also figures prominently in the essays assembled in Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds.), Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2000). Introductions to new trends in the cultural history of the First World War can be found in several other valuable collections of essays. They include Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, and Irina Renz (eds.), “Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch…”: Erlebnis und Wirkung des Ersten Weltkrieges (Frankfurt am Main, 1996); and Wolfgang Kruse (ed.), Eine Welt von Feinden: Der Grosse Krieg 1914–1918 (Frankfurt am Main, 1997). Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, Dieter Langerwiesche, and Hans-Peter Ullmann (eds.), Kriegserfahrungen: Studien zur Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs (Essen, 1997) belongs in the same genre, and it contains a number of good local studies. My own The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2007) also belongs in the category of “general works,” insofar as it aspires to capture every phase of the war in a single locality.
Since its founding in 2001 the International Society for First World War Studies has encouraged scholarship on all aspects of the conflict. Its journal, First World War Studies, has become an essential resource. The fruits of several of its conferences, in which German topics have been central, have been published: Jennifer D. Keene and Pierre Purseigle (eds.), Uncovered Fields: Perspectives in First World War Studies (Leiden, 2003); Pierre Purseigle (ed.), Warfare and Belligerence: Perspectives in First World War Studies (Leiden, 2005); Heather Jones, Jennifer O’Brien, and Christoph Schmidt-Supprian (eds.), Untold War: New Perspectives in First World War Studies (Leiden, 2008); Jennifer D. Keene and Michael S. Neiberg (eds.), Finding Common Ground: New Directions in First World War Studies (Leiden, 2011); James E. Kitchen, Alisa Miller, and Laura Rowe (eds.), Other Combatants, Other Fronts: Competing Histories of the First World War (Newcastle, 2011).
Military affairs
Most of the surveys cited above offer reliable introductions to the military dimensions of the war. The most complete examination of operations, logistics, and military planning for all theaters in which German land forces participated is the Reichsarchiv’s exhaustive official history, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918 (14 vols., Berlin, 1925–44). This work has an interesting history itself: see Markus Pöhlmann, Kriegsgeschichte und Geschichtspolitik: Der Erste Weltkrieg: Die amtliche deutsche Militärgeschichtsschreibung 1914–1956 (Paderborn, 2002). Analyses of tactics and the effort to find effective tactical reform can be found in Bruce Gudmundsson, Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914–1918 (New York, 1989); Hans Linnenkohl, Vom Einzelschuss zur Feuerwalze: Der Wettlauf zwischen Technik und Taktik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Koblenz, 1990); Timothy Lupfer, The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine during the First World War (Fort Leavenworth, KS, 1981); Graeme C. Wynne, If Germany Attacks: The Battle in Depth in the West (Westport, CT, 1976); and David Zabecki, Steel Wind: Colonel Georg Bruchmüller and the Birth of Modern Artillery (Westport, CT, 1994). For the action of German armies on the eastern front, see Gerhard P. Groß (ed.), Die vergessene Front: Der Osten 1914/15: Ereignis, Wirkung, Nachwirkung (Paderborn, 2006); Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (London, 1975); and Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Army of Francis Joseph (West Lafayette, IN, 1976). Lance Farrar provides a provocative multidimensional interpretation of the first phase of the war in The Short-War Illusion: German Policy, Strategy, and Domestic Affairs, August–December 1914 (Santa Barbara, CA, 1973). For a military analysis of the war’s last phase in the west, see David Zabecki, The German 1918 Offensives: A Case Study of the Operational Level of War (New York, 2006); Rod Paschall, The Defeat of Imperial Germany, 1917–1918 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989); and Barrie Pitt, 1918: The Last Act (New York, 1963).
The Schlieffen Plan has recently been the object of controversy. It began when the American military historian Terrence Zuber argued that “there never was a Schlieffen Plan,” that “the plan” was no more than a myth concocted after the war by Schlieffen’s disciples, who hoped to defend themselves in the debates over the German operational failure of 1914. Zuber contended further that the memorandum that allegedly contained the plan represented only Schlieffen’s musings: Zuber, Inventing the Schlieffen Plan: German War Planning 1871–1914 (Oxford, 2003). A heated exchange ensued, primarily in the pages of the journal War in History, until the German historian Gerhard Groß located documents that showed the extent to which Schlieffen’s thinking did in fact inform the operational plans of the German army: Groß, “There was a Schlieffen Plan: Neue Quellen,” in Hans Ehlert, Michael Epkenhans, and Gerhard Groß (eds.), Der Schlieffenplan: Analysen und Dokumente (Paderborn, 2006), 117–60.
> There is a rich literature on individual battles, much of it in English. The best accounts are both readable and sensitive to historical context. Alistair Horne’s The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 (New York, 1962) and Dennis Showalter’s Tannenberg: Clash of Empires (Hamden, CT, 1991) are models. Good recent accounts of critical battles on the western front include Holger Herwig, The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle that Changed the World (New York, 2009); Michael S. Neiberg, The Second Battle of the Marne (Bloomington, IN, 2008); and Robert T. Foley, German Strategy and the Path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the Development of Attrition, 1870–1916 (Cambridge, 2005). The essays in Irina Renz, Gerd Krumeich, and Gerhard Hirschfeld (eds.), Scorched Earth: The Germans on the Somme 1914–1918 (Barnsley, 2009) represent the best overall account of the German army in the campaign here in 1916. Older histories of German action in major battles on the western front include Sebastian Haffner and Wolfgang Venohr, Das Wunder an der Marne: Rekonstruktion der Entscheidungsschlacht des Ersten Weltkrieges (Bergisch Gladbach, 1982); Wolfgang Paul, Entscheidung im September: Das Wunder an der Marne (Esslingen, 1974); Robert B. Asprey, The First Battle of the Marne (New York, 1962); Karl Unruh, Langemarck: Legende und Wirklichkeit (Koblenz, 1986); German Werth, Verdun: Die Schlacht und der Mythos (Bergisch Gladbach, 1979); Bryan Cooper, The Battle of Cambrai (New York, 1968); and Gregory Blaxland, Amiens: 1918 (London, 1968).
Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 Page 33