War guilt question
The war guilt question (German: Kriegsschuldfrage) is the public debate that took place in Germany for the most part during the Weimar Republic, to establish Germany's share of responsibility in the causes of the First World War. Structured in several phases, and largely determined by the impact of the Treaty of Versailles and the attitude of the victorious Allies, this debate also took place in other countries involved in the conflict, such as in the French Third Republic and the United Kingdom.
This article is about the debate over responsibility for World War I. For the notion of collective guilt for the Holocaust, see German collective guilt.
The war guilt debate motivated historians such as Hans Delbrück, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Gerhard Hirschfeld, and Fritz Fischer, but also a much wider circle including intellectuals such as Kurt Tucholsky and Siegfried Jacobsohn, as well as the general public. The war guilt question pervaded the history of the Weimar Republic. Founded shortly before the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, Weimar embodied this debate until its demise, after which it was subsequently taken up as a campaign argument by the Nazi Party.
While the war guilt question made it possible to investigate the deep-rooted causes of the First World War, although not without provoking a great deal of controversy, it also made it possible to identify other aspects of the conflict, such as the role of the masses and the question of Germany's special path to democracy, the Sonderweg. This debate, which obstructed German political progress for many years, also showed that politicians such as Gustav Stresemann were able to confront the war guilt question by advancing the general discussion without compromising German interests.
A century later, debate continues into the 21st century. The main outlines of the debate include: how much diplomatic and political room to maneuver was available; the inevitable consequences of pre-war armament policies; the role of domestic policy and social and economic tensions in the foreign relations of the states involved; the role of public opinion and their experience of war in the face of organized propaganda;[1] the role of economic interests and top military commanders in torpedoing deescalation and peace negotiations; the Sonderweg theory; and the long-term trends which tend to contextualise the First World War as a condition or preparation for the Second, such as Raymond Aron who views the two world wars as the new Thirty Years' War, a theory reprised by Enzo Traverso in his work.[2]
Since German reunification in 1990, archives from the former GDR and the Soviet Union have also been evaluated. Prompted by Fischer's theses, researchers increasingly devoted themselves to German policy in the states occupied by the Kaiserreich. Wolfgang J. Mommsen presented concrete plans for the forced expulsion and resettlement of Poles and Jews[131] and, in 1981, blamed government action on the nationalism of important interest groups.[132] Wolfgang Steglich, on the other hand, used foreign archival material to emphasize German-Austrian efforts to achieve an amicable or separate peace since 1915,[133] and lack of crisis management by Germany's opponents.[134]
Thomas Nipperdey contradicted sociohistorical explanations in 1991 with his view that the "war, the German readiness for war and the crisis policy" were not a consequence of the German social system. He modified Lloyd George's "slide into war" thesis and referred to disastrous military plans and war decisions of the executive even in parliamentary states.[135]
Since the Fischer controversy died down, according to Jürgen Kocka (2003)[136] and Gerhard Hirschfeld (2004),[71] Germany's decisive contribution to the outbreak of war in 1914 has been widely acknowledged, but explained in a more differentiated way than by Fischer also from the pan-European power constellations and crisis situations before 1914. Gerd Krumeich wrote in 2003 that Germany had largely sabotaged efforts at diplomatic deescalation and therefore bore a large share of the blame.[137]
2013 saw the publication of Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, and Herfried Münkler, The Great War. The World 1914 to 1918, two works that disputed whether Germany contributed any more to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 through its actions or inactions than the other great powers did. Since their appearance, the debate has once again been considered open, according to some scholars.[138]
More recent publications by and large stick to the earlier view, namely that Germany contributed significantly to the fact "that as the crisis widened, alternative strategies for de-escalation did not bear fruit ... Given Germany's policy until 23 July to exert pressure on the Viennese government to take advantage of the situation and to deal with the Serbs, Germany undoubtedly did have a special responsibility".[139]
In contrast to Christopher Clark's view, Gerd Krumeich, John C. G. Röhl, and Annika Mombauer summed up the situation as the Central Powers bearing primary responsibility for the outbreak of the war, even if it could not be blamed on them alone.[140][141][118]
The public debate on longer-term causes of the war continues. Today, it relates primarily to the following topics:
Anne Lipp's Meinungslenkung im Krieg [143] (Shaping Opinion in War) analyzed how soldiers, military leaders, and wartime propaganda reacted to the front-line experience of mass destruction. Attempts had been made to refute doubts about the defensive character of the war by placing it in an aggressive-nationalist context. "Fatherland Instruction"[al] offered front-line soldiers heroic images for identification, in order to redirect their horror, and their fears of death and defeat into the opposite of what they had experienced. To the "homeland," the "front-line fighters" were held up as role models to prevent insubordination, desertion, public agitation against a war of conquest, and maintaining solidarity of soldiers and civilians against it. This had created a persistent, mass mentality that set the course for the postwar success of war-glorifying myths such as the stab-in-the-back myth.[144]
In 2002, the historians Friedrich Kiessling and Holger Afflerbach emphasized the opportunities for détente between the major European powers that had existed until the assassination in Sarajevo which had not been exploited. Other historians disagreed: in 2003, Volker Berghahn argued that the structural causes of the war, which went beyond individual government decisions, could be found in the alliance system of the European great powers and their gradual formation of blocs. Like Fischer and others, he too saw the naval arms race and competition in the conquest of colonies as major factors by which all of Europe's great powers contributed to the outbreak of war, albeit with differences in degree. He also considered domestic minority conflicts in multinational Austria. Nevertheless, he named the small leadership circles, especially in Berlin and Vienna, as the main culprits for the fact that the July crisis of 1914 led to war. The decision makers had shown a high willingness to take risks and at the same time had aggravated the crisis with mismanagement and miscalculations, until the only solution seemed to them to be the "flight forward"[am] into war with the other great powers.[145]