Germany and the Origins of the First World War

Abstract

Twenty-two years ago Fritz Fischer's Griff nach der Weltmacht (Diusseldorf, 1961) reopened the question of Germany's responsibility for the First World War. Germany, Fischer argued, had purposely brought about a European conflict in 1914 in an effort to become a world power. Equally significantly, he suggested that the sources of Germany's conduct must be sought in her domestic political, economic, and social structure. Fischer later elaborated his thesis in another work, Krieg der Illusionen (Diisseldorf, 1969). No postwar historian has been more influential; a steady stream of monographs has elaborated Fischer's thesis during the last two decades. In the long run Fischer's methodological emphasis on the need to focus on the interaction of imperial domestic and foreign policy-a near-heresy in Germany in 1961 despite the earlier pioneering work of Eckhart Kehr-has been at least as influential as his substantive conclusion that the German government was primarily responsible for the First World War. Most subsequent literature has focused upon the influence of domestic factors on German foreign policy, paying particular attention to the inauguration of Weltpolitik in 1897 and the outbreak of the war in 1914. It is perhaps the emphasis of Fischer and his successors upon the connections between internal and external policies that has made German responsibility for the war one of the very few European diplomatic questions to excite such widespread interest over the last twenty years. Yet the results of their attempt to broaden the focus of diplomatic history have been disappointing; the fascinating and critical problem of relating German society and politics to the conduct of the Imperial government has not been solved. Fischer himself has been frequently and rightly criticized for merely concatenating discussions of the political and ideological climate of pre-1914 Germany-liberally spliced with quotations from extreme polemicists -with more traditional analyses of the German government's major decisions, while failing to explain exactly how the former influenced the latter. Other historians have developed much more