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ChristopherClarksSleepwalkers andthe Germans. Amisunderstanding?

Media, books & the arts

An Australian historiansreappraisal of the origins of thefirst world war has provokedenormous interest in Germany,writes Andreas Wirsching. Butthe debate tells us more aboutGermany than about the book

05 August 2014

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Tags: Andreas Wirsching, Daniel Nethery, Europe,

Germany, history, warfare

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Special path to war?

An undated photo of

German officers,

NCOs and enlisted

men during the first

world war.

drakegoodman/

Flickr

he Cambridge-based Australian

historian Christopher Clark was not

unknown in Germany when he

published his latest book, The Sleepwalkers.

In 2010, his history of Prussia, Iron

Kingdom, attracted considerable praise and

saw him awarded the prestigious prize of the

Historisches Kolleg, an important centre for

advanced study in history. His biography of

Wilhelm II, which followed shortly after, was

also generously received. The success of The Sleepwalkers, however,

is on another level. Rarely does an almost 900-page history book by

a university professor, densely written and replete with source

material, meet with such an overwhelming response from the

German public.

This phenomenon is, at first glance at least, surprising and worthy

of explanation. One reason for its success lies in the quality of the

work itself. The Sleepwalkers is a probing, well-written book that

provides significant, and in part new, insights where Clark draws on

archival material. Moreover, Clark, like no other before him, treats

the July 1914 crisis as a European crisis. He examines the

international system, its players and the underlying structure of

interests equally in Belgrade and Vienna, Paris and London, Berlin

and St Petersburg. He delves deep into his source material to

reconstruct the parameters in which those who decided between

war and peace acted, and demonstrates the lack of clarity with

which they were confronted. The image that emerges is one of a

diplomatic labyrinth in which European monarchs, statesmen and

diplomats lost all sense of direction and from which the only way

out lay in war. This lends the title of the book a certain plausibility,

one which indeed suggests that those actors lacked awareness and

understanding. One may, with good reason, question the adequacy

of this portrayal and of the title itself. But until now, it has not been

possible to read, in such colourful detail, the complexity and the

contingency that imprinted the perceptions of the decision-makers

of 1914 and determined their actions.

So far we are talking about an important and exciting book. This

cannot explain its success in Germany, however. For this success

says more about German attitudes than about the book itself.

Clearly The Sleepwalkers has touched a nerve of the German

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Christopher Clarks Sleepwalkers and the Germans. A misunderstanding?... http://inside.org.au/christopher-clarks-sleepwalkers-and-the-germans-a...

1 of 6 13/08/2014 8:23 AM

consciousness of history. But the reflex does not correspond to what

one hears in mainstream public debates; rather, its meaning relates

to a subcutaneous feeling in Germany of being unjustly held to

blame by history in general and by Europeans in particular. Such

feelings weave like a red thread through blogs and comments on the

book on the internet the same type of comment made by

frustrated listeners of public lectures and panel discussions on

twentieth-century history: when will we move on from this eternal

German guilt?

So Clarks book has been sucked into the whirlpool of the debate

over German responsibility for the first world war, a debate that

leaves well-informed people astonished. It almost seems like we are

back in 1964, at the height of the Fischer controversy, when German

war aims, German guilt and whether Germany was primarily

responsibility for the war were passionately debated. That over the

last fifty years all these questions have been intensively studied,

analysed and discriminatingly portrayed in international research

appears to have been forgotten. Whether calculated risk, theories of

preventative war, mindless acceptance, the autonomy of military

war planning, nationalistic sparring and high-stake systems of

alliance, or plain chance was to blame: all of this has been

exhaustively discussed, over and over again, and no historian who

wishes to be taken seriously would formulate a simple theory

attributing all responsibility for the war to the German Reich. Nor,

by the way, did Fritz Fischer.

The more the question of blame arises in public discussion over the

first world war, the more reflective one becomes. Beneath the

surface, the old trauma of the German people appears to live on: not

only standing alone in Europe, but being encircled by resentful

neighbours. If true, it would point to a troubling parallel between

1914 and 2014. It might be asked whether Germany is responsible

for its own isolation lets leave that aside for the moment. But the

feeling of isolation and of being surrounded produced in Germany a

posture of stubborn insistence on its own morality, and over

generations reinforced the impression that Germany was

fundamentally ill-treated by its enemies. In this way the Germans

deprived themselves of the opportunity to come to terms with the

defeat of 1918 in a constructive way. Instead, the Treaty of Versailles

and the victorious powers of the first world war appeared, in the

end, to share at least part of the blame for Hitlers rise and the

devastation caused by the Nazi regime a view that serious

research rejected long ago.

But surely generational change and the positive experience of

German reunification have overcome such feelings? The reception of

Clarks book has shown this not to be the case. And this in the end

is its most surprising aspect: the desire for a historically uncharged,

so to speak innocent, perhaps even normal, but still nationally

impregnated historical role for the German people remains, in fact,

as widespread as ever. If Fritz Fischer once destroyed the

exonerating myth that we all slithered over the brink, thereby

bringing upon himself the hatred of the nationalistic public and not

a few of his university colleagues, Christopher Clark, through his

portrayal of the July crisis, offers the German people the return to

that comfortable consensus.

Not that Clark goes easy on the Germans or denies their partial

responsibility for the outbreak of the first world war. But he does

not discuss the question of blame or the prime responsibility of the

Germans. He does not want to discuss these topics because he sees

them as badly posed questions. This must be criticised, for the

question of blame had arisen and become an inevitable historical

category of the war as early as the German invasion of Belgium.

Clark also chooses not to delve into the depths of German structural

burdens. The precarious constitution of the Prussian-dominated

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Bismarckian Reich, which opened all doors to the autonomous deals

and plans of the military, and took control away from the

parliament; the equally precarious simultaneity of dynamic

industrialisation and backward social structure; a problematic

bourgeois worldview, which saw its national history and the

contemporary conflicts in Social-Darwinist and in part even racist

categories; entirely overblown war aims Clark mentions all of this

and much more, but does not view it as specific to German history.

So Clarks diagnosis goes as follows: all of this the same, similar

or at the very least comparable could have occurred in the history

of every other European great power. The German reader can

therefore lean back, knowing with academically attested certainty

that in no case did a Sonderweg or special path lead Germany to

world war. Rather, the German trajectory looks very much like that

of the others.

But why has such an academic diagnosis proved so attractive for the

German public today? One would not be mistaken in looking for an

answer in the thorough precariousness of the present political and

economic context. Status fear and anxiety the typical ingredients

of (petty) bourgeois mentality in the Kaiser Reich have made an

irritable return in Germany. The eurozone crisis has made it

possible. Are not its European neighbours by all appearances

coming together in order to harass Germany and, if possible, break

its economic and financial strength? Does not the situation recall

what happened one hundred years ago, when the Kaiser Reich

found itself encircled by its European neighbours? So it feels good to

hear an Australian historian, who teaches in Cambridge, explain to

the Germans that at that time, at least, they were not in the wrong,

and that they bear no special responsibility for the devastation of

the Great War.

All the cheaper then is the shot taken in the midst of the debate at a

Europe depicted and rejected as a threat. The argument goes as

follows. At the outbreak of the first world war, the Germans bore no

particular responsibility and were not principally to blame for what

happened as has now, finally, been proved. This gives Germans

today the moral right to oppose European integration, which

apparently goes against German interests. Cora Stephan, an author

of popular books on historical and political subjects, appears to take

some pleasure in seeing that the thesis of prime responsibility of

the German Reich is buried deep by Clarks book. Together with

three well-known younger historians, she rejects the idea that the

Reich, because of its lust for power, needed to be violently stopped.

Moreover, this view of Germany before the first world war which

Clark apparently refutes would lie at the core of the present

conception of Europe, according to which Germany needs to be

shackled within a supranational structure to keep it under control.

The Germans, with Clark in their briefcases, should vanquish once

and for all their negative exceptionalism and recognise that a

Europe based on a historical fiction will fail. Here, at last, it

becomes clear with which subtext and which interests the Clark

debate has been promoted.

The deep irony is that Clark does not tell the story these people

want to hear. Rather, his book, which does not provide deep

structural analysis, and thus in the end a historical-analytical

explanation, of the first world war, has been simplified and

misunderstood in the German debate. Clark wishes to understand

what drove the actors of 1914 to war. What he really shows is the

complexity of the system of states and its crisis. He renders palpable

the contingent nature of how events developed. Whether the

broader public is really interested in this seems, however,

questionable. Rather, the German reception of Clarks book bears all

the signs of instrumentalisation: it has been used for something

other than what Clark intended. He himself wonders how some in


3 of 6 13/08/2014 8:23 AM

this country have come to see him as especially sympathetic to the

German cause. Is it perhaps all just a big misunderstanding? Such

a misunderstanding would bring into the spotlight, however,

problematic rifts in German political culture. For it yields deep

insight into the state of mind of every German who rejects the

mainstream view, because that view remains uncomfortable. Once

again, the German illness of self-pity, as Alfred Grosser wrote,

expresses itself. And so the difficulties of German history in the first

half of the twentieth century a history marked by violence,

annihilation and also guilt must continue to be discussed.

Andreas Wirsching is Professor at Ludwig-Maximilians University

in Munich and Director of the Institut fr Zeitgeschichte. This

article, which first appeared in the Sddeutsche Zeitung on 16 July

2014, was translated for Inside Story by Daniel Nethery.

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4 Comments

David T Roth added this comment on 8 August 2014 |

Permalink

Andreas, I agree that no historian who wishes to be taken seriously would

formulate a simple theory attributing all responsibility for the war to the German

Reich. Unfortunately, popular Anglosphere histories and history magazines,

and many of the recently published, emphasise German responsibility and in

particular, principally due to the alleged mental instability of the Kaiser (the

subject of another book by Clark), as caricatured in the BBC documentary 37

Days. There are also attempts to portray the Serbian government as some

sort of innocent party.

That Imperial Germany bore no responsibility is not true either. But the

popularity of Clarks book (beyond Germany) shows that more nuanced views

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4 of 6 13/08/2014 8:23 AM

of the origins of WW1 are filtering through.

John smith added this comment on 8 August 2014 |

Permalink

Interesting book and perhaps I might try and get hold of a copy when I return to

Australia. Ive been following the argument(s) over the culpability for the start

of the Great War. If you invited ten academics from different establishments,

youd probably get eleven different opinions and then some more who would

change theirs for something else. Germany cannot shoulder all the blame,

there were others but Germany cannot hide what is an historical fact.

Frank Formby added this comment on 8 August 2014 |

Permalink

While I cannot gainsay the authors statements about the popularity of the

book in Germany, I dont believe he is correct in his explanation of the

motivations of Germans in embracing what he sees as a mistaken positive

message in the book. I dont see Germans as traumatised by their

mistreatment by their fellow Europeans. Though patchy, the German response

to its Nazi past was positive and healing and the issues of WW1 are so long

ago as to be irrelevant to current politics and society. Currently Germany is the

kingpin of Europe with other countries envious and suspicious of increasing

German power. Germany remains the third biggest exporter in the world, has

low unemployment and miniscule far right, racist parties, unlike almost every

other European nation. Because Germans were forced to come to terms with

the legacy of Nazism they have developed a habit of humble, apologetic and

critical introspection (of which this article is an example). However, with

obvious success post war there is a growing atmosphere of confidence and

relief that Germany has put its Nazi past behind it, having learnt valuable

lessons and evolved.

Meanwhile in Australia, memorialising of WW1 will doubtless consist of facile,

ahistorical propaganda and an ignorant, boasting and utterly unjustified sense

of self-importance. The idiotic catastrophe of our involvement will be portrayed

as some sort of victory.

Brian Edwards added this comment on 8 August 2014 |

Permalink

Another theory is that Germany planned well when it built railways pre-war to

the French border etc etc. The facts speak for themselves (Im elaborating

on Johns comment) is a worry when facts become maybes. Maybe his

generals thought it would be like 1870-71 again? Home by Xmas.

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5 of 6 13/08/2014 8:23 AM

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Christopher Clark.pdf