100 Years After the Great War, the Bad Guy Is Still Elusive
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Version 0 of 1. BERLIN — A century after the start of World War I — the “just war” that was supposed to end all wars — the debate about its origins has become more textured and contentious, as much in once-imperial Berlin as in once-imperial Britain, which were adversaries in 1914 and are now confronting some of the same riddles of history. At the core of the discussion in both countries is the question: Should Germany alone bear the blame? And much as there are those who cleave to the long-held view of many that German expansionism propelled the conflict, more recent scholarship suggests that its roots were far more tangled. “Historians no longer look simply to Berlin to explain the causes of the Great War, but increasingly to Berlin and Vienna, to St. Petersburg and London,” a group of German experts wrote recently in the newspaper Die Welt. As one of the authors, Sönke Neitzel, said in an interview, “You can’t break it down into the bad guy is this one or that one.” In a world as multipolar today as Europe in the early 20th century, the implications go far beyond academic debate. The presentation of the past determines the assumptions of the present. By casting Germany’s militarism as the sole cause of the conflict, history laid the foundations of the view, strengthened mightily by the Hitler era, that Germany must forever be locked into a supranational web of alliances and partnerships — now represented by the European Union and NATO — if its primal urges were to be restrained. Without that logic, Europe would look very different. Yet, by positing a broader set of causes, historians risk stirring the jingoism that defines the relationship between some Britons and their history, coloring their view of Germans to this day and offering a source of pride as a wartime bulwark against what London’s Conservative mayor, Boris Johnson, called Germany’s “deranged ambitions.” The British, he said, “were, in essence, fighting on the right side, and it should not be forbidden to state that fact.” So fierce has the debate in London become that some Conservatives have taken strong exception to satirical depictions of Britain’s World War I officer class — such as in the television series “Blackadder” — as upper-crust bunglers. Nowhere in Western Europe, of course, is the past so present as here in Germany, a dark bequest of Nazism that has never been allowed to loosen its grip on the nation’s psyche — by Germans or by outsiders. The Great War, by contrast, has fallen into a different category, as if, as the recent article in Die Welt put it, “the catastrophe of the Second World War left everything else in its shadow.” That is not the only distinction. German leaders, said Moritz Schuller, a columnist for the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, like to see 1914 as “the hour of the birth of the European Union” because it set the Continent on the long and tortured path of war that finally convinced its leaders that their common future lay in harmony and integration. But “in most other European countries,” Mr. Schuller wrote, “the First World War remains what it has always been: a catastrophe that cost 20 million people their lives — and was started by the Germans.” Such musings prompt a parallel debate: What point are history’s lessons if they are ignored and historical truth remains elusive? The question is particularly acute at a time when sectarian strife is straining the political geography of the modern Middle East — laid down by the victors of World War I, Britain and France in particular, which set frontiers, carved spheres of influence and drew the parameters of what was to come. A hundred years on, the region’s protagonists will doubtless remind European powers frequently enough that, no matter who started it, the war’s legacy lies in a conflicted arc from Jerusalem to Damascus and Baghdad as much as on the onetime battlefields of the Somme. |