Or the French and Russians who had plans to double team Germany?
AH had just provocation. However, Russia attacked AH before Germany attacked France.
More or less because… they didn’t. AH attacked Serbia, then Russia attacked AH, and that was the start of the Great War. By no means was Imperial Germany blameless, they egged the AH on, and they wanted a war. But so did Russia, France and even GB.
The Sleepwalkers makes it clear- no one nation bears the blame for the Great War- just mass foolishness, militarism, and imperial colonialism on all sides.
Is Dr Deth connected to the revisionist dot com website or is he just part of its fan club?
It’s one thing to argue that the Central Powers weren’t 100% responsible for WWI. Claiming that all combatants equally wanted war flies in the face of history.
In DD’s case one gets the idea that he glommed on to one revisionist work, found it appealing, and refuses to consider informed consensus on the matter - much as he decided that present-day Kentucky is thoroughly racist, based on a single opinion piece that reflected the author’s views of Kentuckians circa 1900.
There are many good histories of WWI that will broaden one’s horizons beyond simplistic revisionist nonsense, such as The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman and the more recent Catastrophe 1914 by Max Hastings.
It’s not as though the propaganda war was a one-way street, either during WWI or WWII. For example, the Nazis spent huge amounts of money promoting the German view and Nazi philosophy in the U.S., mostly by co-opting existing German-American organizations. The primary differences were that the British were better at it, and propaganda wasn’t really necessary when there was plenty of evidence of Nazi atrocities by 1938 or so.
It could also be read as two examples expanding on the phrase “simplistic revisionist nonsense”. I know it took me a second to parse the first time I read it.
Nope, had no problem parsing that one, maybe if they’d phrased it as “when he was in office” it might be less clear but I don’t think so.
My advice is to just accept that your phrasing was (at least momentarily) ambiguous and let it go, other people’s perception of your writing isn’t something you can travel back in time to litigate.
The Sleepwalkers is simplistic nonsense? July 1914 is simplistic nonsense ?
The distinctive achievement of “The Sleepwalkers” is Clark’s single-volume survey of European history leading up to the war. That may sound dull. Quite the contrary. It is as if a light had been turned on a half-darkened stage of shadowy characters cursing among themselves without reason…Both authors put a stake through the heart of a common narrative that has Germany mobilizing first so as to spring the preventive war its generals had long advocated. It didn’t. Clark documents how Berlin’s political and military leaders stuck to their blithe belief that any conflict could be localized. Russia’s mobilization, he says, was “one of the most momentous decisions of the July crisis. This was the first of the general mobilizations.” McMeekin says that Russia’s crime was first in escalating a local quarrel by encouraging Serbia to stand up to Austria-Hungary and then accelerating the rush to war. He faults Barbara Tuchman in her classic “Guns of August” for misdating Russia’s mobilization two days later than it was ordered. He is no apologist for Germany…Clark lends authority by citing Russian-French falsifications of documents. The Russians backdated and reworded papers in the records. The French were even more inventive, fabricating a telegram reporting six days of war preparations by Germany that weren’t happening. In Clark’s phrase, both Russia and France were at pains, then and later, to make Berlin appear “the moral fulcrum of the crisis.”…. Clark declines to join McMeekin in what he calls “the blame game,” because there were so many participants. He argues that trying to fix guilt on one leader or nation assumes that there must be a guilty party and this, he maintains, distorts the history into a prosecutorial narrative that misses the essentially multilateral nature of the exchanges, while underplaying the ethnic and nationalistic ferment of a region.
Guns of August was considered great- 50 years ago. Now- not so much (although is is a good read). https://muse.jhu.edu/article/497154 In contrast to the popular acclaim received by the book, professional historians have from the start been equally critical of it. Some, such as the reviewer in the Journal of Modern History (March 1963), praised its prose style but found the account based “only partially” on the best available sources and castigated its flagrantly “one-sided treatment of imperial Germany.” Another reviewer, in Military Affairs (autumn 1962), pronounced that the “serious military scholar, however, will find nothing here that is new either in facts or interpretations and will be struck by the author’s significant omissions.”
In terms of sheer narrative power, The Guns of August is an admirable work. As a scholarly contribution to the history of World War I it is less satisfactory. Though Mrs. Tuchman has gathered (and effectively quotes from) a sizable stock of sources, her story is only partially based on the best available evidence. Numerous inaccuracies and over-simplifications, notably in the discussion of prewar developments and Mediterranean affairs, must be ascribed to insufficient familiarity with the relevant monograph literature. Moreover, for the events after August 1, 1914, a wider utilization of primary evidence would have been desirable. For example, neither the Russian and Italian document collections published since 1918 nor the captured German government viles, a valuable new source, seem to have been consulted.
> The book’s usefulness is further impaired by a blatantly one-sided treatment of Imperial Germany. Authentic information about its faults and misdeeds is mixed in- discriminately with half-truths, innuendoes, and absurd generalizations, transforming the Germans of 1914 into a nation of barbarians. In Mrs. Tuchman’s pages, the German people are invariably unpleasant, hysterical, or outright brutish (the garbling of evidence is particularly noticeable here), and the armies, marching like “predatory ants” across Belgium (p. 213), soon reveal the “beast beneath the German skin” (p. 314).
So, while a great read, the Guns of Augustis bad, outdated and horribly biased “history”. But yeah, if that is your primary source- you would assume the Germans were the villains…although in reality all the major combatants were the villains.
Color me unsurprised that you were able to dig up a German historian (Ulrich Trumpener) who believed (in 1963, anyway) that Tuchman was unfair to poor imperial Germany. Some of his countrymen had a more clearheaded view, including Fritz Fischer, the historian who uncovered archival evidence that Germany was determined to go to war before the Russian military could modernize and manipulated events to start the conflagration.
Fischer’s work was instrumental in quelling a revisionist narrative of communal guilt that arose in the 1920s but still crops up from time to time among tu quoque historians, like “The Sleepwalkers” author, Christopher Clark. A good antidote to such nonsense (and which you failed to mention) is British historian Max Hastings’ “Catastrophe 1914”:
“Most wide awake of all the 1914 malefactors was Germany, in Mr. Hastings’s view: Even if it did not conspire to start the war, he says, it bears principal responsibility for it—for not checking Austria and for believing that it could dominate Europe with a show of overwhelming force. Its leaders “attempted a stroke of Bismarckian ruthlessness and magnificence, such as Bismarck himself never would have made.” While less harsh than Fritz Fischer, the historian who in the 1950s delivered a famously censorious indictment of German policy, Mr. Hastings nonetheless rejects Mr. Clark’s unwillingness to apportion war guilt.”
“Catastrophe 1914” is fairly unique among WWI histories for its documentation of the toll the war took on ordinary citizens and animals. It’s a painful but necessary read.
For the record, Gerrmany occupied 4% of French territory during WWI (by comparison, 3% of US territory would be New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Delaware).
And in this 4% were major iron and coals mines, and heavy steel industries (Lille region). And Alsace- Lorraine, who is now part of France, was German since 1870 and the last war.
By the way, French military and politic forces were very eager to go to war against Germany, to retake Alsace. That war was seen as a blessing… in the first days…
Not only that, but the German-occupied zone took a large portion of that capacity. As a Wikipedia article notes, "…the occupied zone included some of the most industrialized parts of France:[1] 64 percent of France’s pig-iron production, 24 percent of its steel manufacturing and 40 percent of the total coal mining capacity was located in the zone, dealing a major setback to French industry…Partly because of its proximity to the front, occupied north-east France was ruled by the military, rather than by a civilian occupation administration. Economic exploitation of the occupied zone increased throughout the war. Forced labor became increasingly common as the war dragged on.
Much useful infrastructure was sabotaged/destroyed by the retreating German army, something else to take into account when hearing about how unfair the Versailles-mandated reparations were.
German pronouncements and military buildup in the days before the war made it quite obvious that a conflict was approaching, and the French military planned for, and in some cases were eager for a chance to avenge the defeat of 1870. But there’s an enormous difference between readiness and actually starting a war, as the Central Powers did by invading Belgium and Serbia.