The Ideas of 1914 – German Intellectuals and the Legitimation of the German Reich's Policy at the Beginning of the First World War

Abstract

After the outbreak of the World War in august 1914, German intellectuals – university professors, writers, artists and publicists – gave an important contribution to the legitimation of the German Reich’s war aims. As a kind of ‘spiritual mobilization’ for the sake of the defense of the fatherland from the allied enemies, they engaged in intense publicity and propaganda activities whose goal was to show the responsibility of the opponent countries for the outbreak of the war as well as to prove that Germany was fighting a just war for its national survival. The ideological justification of the German war aims formulated in the so called ‘ideas of 1914’ rested on several motives. First, the French revolution and its entire political, social and conceptual inheritance were discarded. The revolutionary transformation of society, the theory of natural law, the liberal and democratic ideology and the parliamentary system consider to be inappropriate to ‘German national spirit’, German intellectuals argued for the superiority of gradual social reforms, conservative social and political order and authoritarian political system embodied in the Hohenzollern monarchy. At the same time, they rejected the modern class society marked by the predominance of the egoistic individual interests in favour of an allegedly harmonious ‘organic community’. Finally, they attributed some higher metaphysical meaning to the current war since it was conceived of as a battle for the preservation of the German culture understood as sublimation of highest spiritual achievements of the entire humanity, from the decadent materialistic civilization of Western Europe as well as ‘barbarian’ Russia. In that way, in the ‘ideas of 1914, German intellectuals expressed all elements about the peculiarities of German history (der deutsche Sonderweg) thus giving ideological legitimacy to the German Reich’s war endeavours and to its ‘grab for world power’.