The Origins of the First World War: Controversies and Consensus (Making History)

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Mombauer was a contributor to Max Hastings' documentary about the causes of World War I, The Necessary War, broadcast by BBC 2 in February 2014. [5] Selected works [ edit ] Here Annika explains her research and why it’s essential to understand the origins of the war and the controversy the topic has sparked. The hundred-year debate Ever since the First World War started, historians have debated why it began; we’re now looking at a hundred year debate; we’re looking at mountains of documents; thousands of books written on the topic; and yet even now historians don’t agree on why war started in 1914. John has worked at the University of Sussex for all his academic life – and why are you so interested in the topic? This is not the only area in which the book makes some interesting contributions to existing debates. Despite the fact that the title suggests that the scope of the work is confined to the origins of the war, the study actually continues into the early war years. Thus, in addition to assessing Moltke's contribution to the military outcome to the July Crisis, Dr Mombauer also evaluates his part in the failure of the so-called Schlieffen plan. This is, of course, an old controversy, but Dr Mombauer is, nevertheless, able to bring a genuinely fresh eye to it. Starting from the premise that there was a Schlieffen plan, Terrance Zuber's recent claims notwithstanding (4) that it was Moltke's job to update this plan on a regular basis, that his revisions made sense in the light of the changing circumstances of the European military scene, and that Moltke's actions reflected the fact that he was not a victim of the 'short war illusion', she is able to provide a more balanced perspective to the German reverse at the Marne. This result, which played a major part in ensuring that the First World War would be a prolonged 'total war', was in many respects the culmination of all of Moltke's fears. Once again, however, this fact merely serves to place his actions in pushing so strenuously for war into the sharpest relief. This book is a unique collection of diplomatic and military documents for the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. It brings together newly-discovered documents as well as many not previously available in English, drawn from a broad range of sources and countries. It is an essential collection for anyone studying the origins of the First World War.

Now we’ve talked a lot about guilt, responsibility, culpability, and that’s essentially what this long debate has always been about – trying to attribute guilt, starting of course in the war itself and then at Versailles, it was very much about war guilt for the obvious reasons of needing someone to shoulder the reparations and being responsible. But how useful do you think it is to talk about war guilt now that we’re a hundred years or more removed from these events – should historians attribute responsibility and guilt?Interviews with prominent newspapers and TV and radio broadcasters in Germany and as far afield as the United States, Brazil, Serbia and Turkey have allowed me to share my knowledge on this crucial episode in our history with international audiences. My contributions have also entered the political discourse. In 2017, members of the ‘Die Linke Partei’ quoted my interview with the national daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in the German Bundestag when advocating that the government should reject the new revisionist views in favour of my interpretation. John Keiger: Yes, I'm afraid that, rather pessimistically, I do think that, particularly over Ukraine, but also perhaps over what is going on in the Far East, [where] there is a potential for things to go horribly wrong. One incident in which the pride of a nation becomes implicated -- like, for instance, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 -- that kind of incident, if it came today, say, the assassination of a major person in Ukraine that immediately brought into play the various external powers, then that could provoke a very serious incident. That does concern me. I don't think the United Nations would be able to do very much. It is very hard to know, but, for instance, if the Russian ambassador in Ukraine was assassinated, what would happen? The Kaiser. New Research on Wilhelm II’s role in Imperial Germany, Cambridge University Press, 2003 (edited with Wilhelm Deist) Find out more about this book The same is true, to some extent, of France's role. The decision-makers in Paris, Stefan Schmidt argued in 2009 in an in-depth study of French foreign policy before the war, were intent on strengthening the Franco-Russian Alliance and thus prepared to support Russia's policy in 1914, regardless of the consequences. He concludes that French President Raymond Poincaré did not, in his dealings with Russia, actively intend a military escalation of the July Crisis, but that his aim was to achieve a political victory for the Entente. Footnote 23 That said, Poincaré was prepared, in this pursuit, to risk war if Germany insisted on taking things further. On the eve of the centenary, it had thus become widely accepted that war had not been ruled out in principle by the governments in St. Petersburg and Paris, and that they were willing to seize a perceived golden opportunity to achieve, if possible, a diplomatic victory—while not ruling out going to war if the need arose. My work forms part of secondary teacher professional development in the UK and contributes to secondary school curriculums and textbooks in Germany and the UK. It provides one of many interpretations of the origins of the war (which I happen to think is the right one, but with which not everyone agrees!), enabling pupils and students to evaluate different viewpoints and come to their own conclusions.

So when we look at evidence of German culpability, the documents that stand out in particular which were first found by Fritz Fischer are those relating to the war council of December 1912 and then those relating to war aims – the famous September programme of 1914 – and I just wonder what your take is on these events and on these documents? Where is the debate headed? All too often historians have attempted to predict the future of this century-long controversy—and they have nearly always got it wrong, thus making it presumptuous to make confident predictions. Footnote 126 In a summary of the debate as it had developed up to the end of 2012, Gerhard Groß was confident that the topic would continue to exercise public opinion in the run-up to the centenary and provide for “an exciting discussion,” but he did not expect “a new Fischer-controversy with a great deal of public attention like the one in the 1960s.” As we have seen, that turned out to be far from the mark. Footnote 127

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Annika Mombauer (born 1967) is a historian best known for her work on General Helmuth von Moltke the Younger. She is a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History in the History Department at the Open University in Great Britain, and Associate Dean (Research) for the Arts Faculty. In the immediate aftermath of the Versailles verdict, revisionist historians (many, but not all, sponsored by post-war German governments in the 1920s and 30s) have tried to prove it wrong. Among countless arguments, they highlighted Russia and France’s responsibility and stressed that Britain could have played a more active role in preventing the escalation of the so-called July Crisis, which led to the outbreak of war. Throughout the twentieth century, this debate ebbed and flowed. It was particularly ferocious in the 1960s when a German historian, Fritz Fischer, claimed he had evidence to show that Germany had been more responsible than other nations, thus undoing decades of revisionism which had resulted in a comfortable compromise. the long controversy around the question, why did the war break out in the first place? Over the next four weeks, some renowned historians will share their research and analysis with you. And you’ll discover the devastating impact of the war on individuals and on whole societies. While this might seem like a sobering learning experience, it’s also a moving story that’s lost none of its fascination more than a century after it began.