Pandora’s Box: A History of the First World War

By Jörn Leonhard

Winner of the Norman B. Tomlinson, Jr. Prize

“The best large-scale synthesis in any language of what we currently know and understand about this multidimensional, cataclysmic conflict.”
—Richard J. Evans, Times Literary Supplement

In this monumental history of the First World War, Germany’s leading historian of the period offers a dramatic account of its origins, course, and consequences. Jörn Leonhard treats the clash of arms with a sure feel for grand strategy. He captures the slow attrition, the race for ever more destructive technologies, and the grim experiences of frontline soldiers. But the war was more than a military conflict and he also gives us the perspectives of leaders, intellectuals, artists, and ordinary men and women around the world as they grappled with the urgency of the moment and the rise of unprecedented political and social pressures. With an unrivaled combination of depth and global reach, Pandora’s Box reveals how profoundly the war shaped the world to come.

“[An] epic and magnificent work—unquestionably, for me, the best single-volume history of the war I have ever read…It is the most formidable attempt to make the war to end all wars comprehensible as a whole.”
—Simon Heffer, The Spectator

“[A] great book on the Great War…Leonhard succeeds in being comprehensive without falling prey to the temptation of being encyclopedic. He writes fluently and judiciously.”
—Adam Tooze, Die Zeit

“Extremely readable, lucidly structured, focused, and dynamic…Leonhard’s analysis is enlivened by a sharp eye for concrete situations and an ear for the voices that best convey the meaning of change for the people and societies undergoing it.”
—Christopher Clark, author of The Sleepwalkers

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Release date: Apr 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9780674985407

Book preview

PANDORA’S BOX

A History of the First World War

JÖRN LEONHARD

Translated by Patrick Camiller

THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts | London, England | 2018

Copyright © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

This book was first published as Die Büchse der Pandora: Geschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs © Verlag C. H. Beck oHG, München 2014

Maps © Peter Palm, Berlin / Germany

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International—Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT, and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers and Booksellers Association).

Jacket photo: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images (August 2, 1917)

Jacket design: Jill Breitbarth

978-0-674-54511-3 (alk. paper)

978-0-674-98540-7 (epub)

978-0-674-98541-4 (mobi)

978-0-674-98542-1 (web-ready pdfs)

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PRINTED EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Names: Leonhard, Jörn, author. | Camiller, Patrick, translator.

Title: Pandora’s Box : a history of the First World War / Jörn Leonhard ; translated by Patrick Camiller.

Other titles: Büchse der Pandora. English

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018. | This book was first published as Die Büchse der Pandora: Geschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs © Verlag C. H. Beck oHG, München 2014. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017040904

Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1914–1918—History.

Classification: LCC D521 .L36513 2018 | DDC 940.3—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040904

To the brothers

Ludwig Leonhard (1893–1917)

and

August Leonhard (1898–1976)

CONTENTS

List of Maps

1.

Legacies: The First World War and Europe’s Long Nineteenth Century

2.

Antecedents: Crises and Containment before 1914

3.

Drift and Escalation: Summer and Fall 1914

4.

Stasis and Movement: 1915

5.

Wearing Down and Holding Out: 1916

6.

Expansion and Erosion: 1917

7.

Onrush and Collapse: 1918

8.

Outcomes: Wars in Peace and Rival Models of Order, 1919–1923

9.

Memories: Fragmented Experiences and Polarized Expectations

10.

Burdens: The First World War and the Century of Global Conflicts

Appendix

British and Empire Losses on the Western Front

French Losses on the Western Front

German Losses on the Western Front

German Losses on the Eastern Front

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

Index

MAPS

1.

Western Front, 1914

2.

Eastern Front, 1914–1918

3.

The War in Africa, 1914–1918

4.

The War in the Near and Middle East, 1914–1918

5.

Balkan Front, 1914–1915

6.

Alpine Front, 1915–1918

7.

Western Front, 1915–1917

8.

The Battle of Verdun, 1916

9.

Eastern Front, 1917–1918

10.

German Offensives on the Western Front, 1918

11.

Allied Counteroffensives on the Western Front, 1918

12.

The Near and Middle East after the First World War

13.

Europe after 1918

14.

Political Map of the World after 1918

1

LEGACIES

The First World War and Europe’s Long Nineteenth Century

IT WAS REMEMBERED as a glorious summer. During the coming weekend, the children and some friends of theirs in the neighborhood were planning to perform a play based on the Greek myth of Pandora’s box. Recounted in one of Gustav Schwab’s well-known collections of tales from classical antiquity, it tells in parable form the story of Zeus’s rage against Prometheus after he steals fire from the gods. The father of the gods orders Hephaistos, the god of blacksmithing, to produce a life-size figure of a maiden, who is then endowed by the other gods with many ways of inflicting calamity on human beings. Zeus himself leads this woman, Pandora (literally, the All-gifted), to Prometheus’s brother Epimetheus. And though warned by his brother never to accept a gift from the gods, Epimetheus, to save humans from harm, invites Pandora into his home: In her hands she was carrying her gift, a finely crafted golden box with a lid. She carefully lifted the lid from the receptacle—and at that very moment a swarm of evils rushed from it and spread in a flash over the whole earth. A single good lay hidden at the bottom of the box: hope. But before it could escape, Pandora—acting on divine inspiration—quickly snapped the lid shut. And now all forms of misery filled land, sea and air; all manner of fevers laid siege to the earth, and death, which used to creep up slowly on mortals, quickened its step.¹

The children eagerly awaited the day of the performance. Wearing specially designed costumes, they were in the midst of the final full dress rehearsal in the garden of their vacation home on Saturday, August 1, 1914, when it was interrupted by their nanny: Just you take them off again; you can’t play at theater today. War has broken out. The puzzled children found their parents on the terrace. Mother had her head buried in a newspaper, while Father, gazing into the distance and not without a touch of theatricality of his own, remarked, Before long a fiery sword will probably appear in the sky. That, anyway, is how the children remembered it.

This was the family of Thomas Mann, which had been spending the summer in their chalet at the idyllic Bavarian resort of Bad Tölz. On that August afternoon, the German Reich had declared war on Russia. It struck the children as odd that their father should be thinking just then of Leo Tolstoy, the writer and apostle of radical nonviolence, who had died in 1910. It’s strange, he mused, "but if the old man were still alive—he wouldn’t need to do anything, just be there at Yasnaya Polyana—this would not be happening; it wouldn’t dare to be happening."²

Four years and three months later, in November 1918, Thomas Mann commented in his journal on the collapse of the order in which he had grown up and by which he had been so deeply marked: the order of the nineteenth-century bourgeois world, with its distinctive values and symbols. Through his novel Buddenbrooks, he himself had become its chronicler. But now it seemed to have foundered beneath a twin wave of revolution and military defeat. This was no mere change in the political form of the state. The novelist’s entry for November 9, 1918, in which he points to the hollowing out of that order by the long years of war, has a laconic feel. He is no longer surprised by the turn of events: All in all, I am rather calm and no longer feel horror. Revolutions happen only when they encounter no resistance (it was so with this one too), and this very lack proves that they are natural and justified. At heart the old rulers are happy to be rid of their power—which was no longer real power—and it has to be conceded that their authority is not adequate to the situation as it is and as it will be in the near future.³

What was the First World War? With the hindsight that we have today, it appears as the formative prelude, elemental crisis, or early turnaround of the still young twentieth century.⁴ Soon after its outbreak, people experiencing the war had already begun searching for the right words to describe what was so vast, novel, even monstrous about it: in Britain they spoke of the Great War, in France of the Grande Guerre, in Germany of the Weltkrieg. Or else, like Ernst Jünger a few years later, they emphasized its universal, indeed revolutionary, character: The war [was] not the discharge of revolution but its opening fact. No one can escape this fact; every being is directed and shaped by it, however he may regard it ideologically.⁵ Today’s labels, by contrast—seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century, crisis of modernity, collapse of civilization, second Thirty Years’ War (from 1914 to 1945), beginning of a period in which Europe became a dark continent of violence—were formulated only with the knowledge of consequences that no one living in August 1914 could have guessed.⁶ The unprecedented violence of the world war did not end with the formal peace agreement after 1918, but persisted and intensified in Europe and elsewhere in the name of new radical ideologies. This is what made the war an epochal turning point, which people living after 1918 were just beginning to understand. For Thomas Mann, the extraordinary pastness of the narrative in his novel The Magic Mountain resulted from the rift that has cut deeply through our life and consciousness since the old days of the world before the Great War, with whose beginning so many things began, whose beginnings, it seems, have not yet ceased.⁷ This deep rift became the defining feature—whether in stylized memories of childhood or as a reference point for the post-1918 generation that experienced the results of the war.⁸ In December 1937, the Social Democrat politician Wilhelm Dittmann wrote in the party paper Neuer Vorwärts, "Prewar Germany is almost a terra incognita for today’s generation, so much did the war shatter the link between what went before and what came after."⁹

The conflict reached completely new quantitative and qualitative levels of violence, killing ten million soldiers and nearly six million civilians; bringing about an unprecedented mobilization of societies and mass media, economies, and finances; and eliciting a plethora of explanations and justifications. It also marked a profound change in the relative weight of the world’s regions and especially in Europe’s place in the world.¹⁰

What was the First World War? Anyone who wishes to understand it must grasp the experiences and expectations of the world it affected. William Gladstone, who, as Britain’s Liberal prime minister, left his stamp on the Victorian age, was born in 1809 and died in 1898. In his childhood he heard the sound of cannons firing from Edinburgh Castle to mark the abdication of Napoleon, and toward the end of his life he listened to his own recorded voice and became familiar with the newly invented telephone as the twentieth-century means of communication.¹¹ The great tensions and dynamics of change in the nineteenth century, bridging the period before 1800 and the prehistory of the contemporary world, were concentrated in a single man’s lifespan; the century was, so to speak, illustrated in his biography. How should this legacy of the long nineteenth century be characterized, and what did the First World War mean for it?

(1) Emancipation was a leitmotif running through the nineteenth century. In Europe as a whole, despite regional differences, demographic growth resulted in the mobilization of ever larger segments of the population, as the industrial mode of production imposed itself and transformed a feudal society of estates resting on legal privileges into a complex class society. Social and economic criteria increasingly came to define the locus of the individual within society. The legacy of the nineteenth century thus included the experience of economic growth and the ideal of not only political but also social equality—evident, for example, in the recurrent struggles for a republican form of state with socially defined rights, which erupted in France in 1848–1849 and among the forces of the democratic Left in Germany. By the end of the century, the specific momentum of economic and social differentiation became evident, contrasting with the political-ideological image of an elemental class conflict between capitalist bourgeoisie and proletarian working class that could only be solved by revolutionary means. Indeed, such simple rhetoric had masked the many nuances characterizing European societies in practice, which were discernible, for example, not only in the appearance of new groups such as skilled workers and white-collar employees but also in the question of whether the concept of revolution was still applicable at all in highly complex industrial societies. Disputes in the workers’ parties between supporters of proletarian revolution and evolutionary reform reflected this dynamic.

At the same time, social classifications and demarcations were changing at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1934 the Hungarian writer Sándor Márai recalled how new social and religious dividing lines had developed. Describing a new-style apartment building in his native Košice (then part of the Slovak region of Hungary), he wrote, I think it was an ugly, inhospitable house. No one knew how they had ended up there; no ties of friendship, and scarcely even of neighborliness, bound its occupants together. It already had different castes, classes, and confessions living in it. In the old ground-story houses, families had lived side by side as friends or enemies, but in any case as people inextricably linked to one another.¹² During the First World War, traditional social roles and functions were called into question, as shifts in society brought new stratifications and created new definitions of winners and losers. Above all, the war became a test for societies: it demonstrated whether they were capable of integrating different social, ethnic, and political groups under the conditions of a protracted conflict in which the home front played an ever more important role in the mobilization of resources.

(2) Emancipation and mobilization also had a political dimension. One of the key consequences of the European revolutions between 1789 and 1848–1849—however much they varied in their details—was the transition from a monarchic-absolutist form of rule to one based on the regulated political participation of parts of the population. Governance could no longer function as a series of arbitrary acts; it was now bound up with suprapersonal legitimacy, with written constitutions, the rule of law, and parliamentary activity. In practice, this entailed a wide spectrum of forms of government ranging from constitutional parliamentary monarchies to constitutional republics. In this context, new ideological movements and political parties took shape in Europe, which, in the form of liberalism, conservatism, and socialism, developed blueprints for the political and social order. Among the legacies of Europe from the long nineteenth century were therefore not only the experience of ideological competition and political conflict but also the triad of crisis, revolution, and reform. European societies changed through revolutionary upheavals, but even more so through the kind of reforms introduced in Prussia after its defeat at the hands of Napoleon in 1806, which were meant to obviate a violent French-style revolution.

When war broke out in 1914, it seemed to many to reflect a clash between two rival conceptions: on the one hand, the ideas of 1789 associated with France’s revolutionary tradition or, more generally, a western European tradition that also included English parliamentarism and the republican liberty espoused by the American Revolution of 1776; on the other hand, the ideas of 1914 that supported calls for Germany to distance itself from that tradition and to uphold such values of its own as culture and community, Kultur and Gemeinschaft. The nineteenth-century liberal inheritance was thus in crisis, because its political forms of electoral and parliamentary participation and of basic human rights, as well as its other constitutional achievements, came up against the new reality of the Kriegsstaat (the war state). Between 1914 and 1918, this state geared to war represented a challenge to the civil authorities, the role of the constitution, the policy-shaping powers of parliament, political parties, and basic political rights not only in Germany but elsewhere in Europe. The disputes over the franchise and the limits of political participation that dominated the scene in many societies around the year 1900 became deeper and sharper in the context of the war.

(3) The nineteenth century was also the century of the state, which confronted its citizens not only in elections and parliaments but also in law courts and government departments, schools, and universities. Based on constitutional legality, but operating through bureaucratic administration, social intervention, and early welfare-state measures, the state encroached on more and more areas of life that had been private spheres or the province of churches or corporate institutions. Its dealings with subjects were different from those of the monarchic tax-raising and military state of the eighteenth century. It not only claimed the right to register and classify but took on new responsibilities, as in the embryonic social insurance systems established after the 1870s. These processes of statification, as we may call them, were considerably expanded throughout the First World War and its military, political, social, and economic mobilization. Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.¹³ Then a fundamental change occurred: the state became not only a decisive military actor in the war overseas, but a social state at home, the organizer of the war economy, the grand administrator. As the war dragged on, the limits of these trends and their political and social costs became ever clearer.¹⁴

(4) Revolutions were a feature of both the beginning and the end of the long nineteenth century. But it was not only an age of connected chains of political revolution, with highpoints in 1789, 1830, and 1848–1849. It was also an era of multiple revolutions in communications, linked to the political upheavals in many ways, but often surpassing them in their long-term impact. A number of developments lent enormous importance to communications and the media: not only higher literacy rates, the dissemination of printed texts and images with the help of new technologies (from lithography through the daily press to illustrated magazines, from photography and telegraphy to the telephone), and greater access to knowledge among wide sections of the population, but also the increased significance of the public sphere, the publication of parliamentary debates, and the rise of a popular press. The First World War continued trends that had been present since the wars of the French Revolution, only now these had acquired a new dimension thanks to technological innovations and their spread among the broad masses. The world war was also a media war. Communication and information became military factors, whether through the new, institutionalized relationship between army and press, the posters appealing for war loans, or developments in photography and cinema that gave visual form to war experiences and images of the self and others. In this way, the world war fueled hopes and expectations that, given the independent dynamic of the conflict, could often not be realized or fully satisfied. All of this went far beyond the usual understanding of propaganda as a massaging of information in the service of the military establishment and the war state. The war itself would reveal how the impact of the media, and the uses to which this was put, often escaped the intentions of soldiers and politicians.

(5) In the long nineteenth century, the nation, the nation-state, and nationalism became central markers orienting the state’s self-assertion in the world, as well as in the political order and the shaping of society at home. Based on the French revolutionary ideal of a self-determining sovereign power, the nation and the state, as well as the people and the territory, were supposed to be harmonized with one another. Yet the actual formation of nations was often associated with wars; for example, in the establishment of the new nation-states of Italy and Germany between 1859 and 1871. At the same time, it involved the internal nationalization of societies: the loading of institutions, symbols, and traditions with a national significance in virtually all European societies. This could entail the marginalization or exclusion of groups whose loyalty seemed questionable and who were included in the core nation only with certain reservations: whether religious groups such as Jews or Catholics in the post-1871 German Reich, ethnic groups such as Danes or Poles in Germany, Irish in the United Kingdom, South Tyrol Italians or Czechs in Austria-Hungary, or political movements such as the socialist workers parties before 1914. Religious and ethnic markers frequently overlapped, as in the case of Catholic Irish in the UK or Catholic Poles in the German nation-state. The world war brought with it new aggressive manifestations of nationalism that continued and exacerbated the prewar forms. The wartime mass mobilization increasingly refined the criteria by which the national loyalty of various sections of society was measured, and in many countries social tensions and distribution crises combined with ethnic or religious factors to exclude certain groups from the nation. Such processes became radicalized as the war went on, often being accompanied with violence. Toward the end, they could even threaten the cohesion of societies and the stability of political regimes.

Between 1500 and 1914, the number of state players in Europe shrank from some five hundred political-territorial entities to approximately thirty states at the time of the First World War. In central Europe, a special connection between war and internal or external state-formation manifested itself above all in the period from 1792 to 1815.¹⁵ Another legacy of the nineteenth century was the recasting of the principle of popular sovereignty: what had been argued out in France in 1830 and 1848 mainly in terms of class conflicts became overlaid with the criterion of nationality in Italy, Germany, and the multinational empires. Here, social confrontations expressed themselves not so much in street fighting and revolutionary barricades as in ethnic differentiation and territorial borders. In the course of the nineteenth century, these divides deepened. From western to eastern and southeastern Europe, the panorama shifted from barricades into borders.¹⁶

On pre-1914 maps, the world of states was marked by clear borders and colors. But the imperial red of the British Empire, the green of the Russian Empire, or the blue of the German Reich suggested a uniformity that corresponded to the model of the homogeneous nation-state, not to the complexities of the real world. In stark contrast to the demand for cohesion and loyalty stood the reality of the multinational Habsburg, Tsarist, and Ottoman Empires. Around the year 1900, the borders between nation-states and empires became more porous: Germany, France, and Italy pursued an imperial policy involving the creation of overseas colonies to justify their self-assertiveness and power ambitions both internally and externally, whereas in Britain attempts were made to derive the national concept of Britishness from the existence of a maritime empire. Even such small western European countries as Portugal, the Netherlands, and Belgium (whose colonial possessions were 80 times larger than the motherland) acted in an imperial spirit; the ratio was 140 to 1 in the British case.¹⁷ The national state was the engine of empire building, a visible display of the strength and self-assertiveness of each nation in the midst of international rivalry. Ernst Troeltsch, in his essay Das Neunzehnte Jahrhundert (1913), argued that both democratization at home and the capitalist way of life—which he could imagine only as the internationality of capital and business—were part of the essence of the national state.¹⁸

But nation-states were not the only political entities in flux; the Russian, Habsburg, and Ottoman Empires were also in transition, engaging in a series of competitive thrusts of nationalization that underlined the model of the homogenizing nation-state. But insofar as attempts at Russification, Germanization, or Turkification gave rise to countermovements, the situation within these empires grew more complex—although their dissolution into breakaway nation-states did not yet seem as inevitable as it would to many living after 1918.¹⁹ Nevertheless, the First World War did mark a decisive change: while none of the three multinational continental empires survived the war, and a host of new nation-states took shape out of their legacy in east-central and southeastern Europe, relations among European states and their colonial empires entered a new age, as the examples of Britain and France demonstrate. At the same time, the weight of new players such as Japan and the United States was keenly felt.

(6) The nineteenth century already brought new, multifaceted forms of interdependence to the relationship between Europe and non-Europe, as well as among the various other regions of the world. This was not only a question of European expansion and the formation of dependent colonies, which, in a climate of increased international competition, led to conflict over the distribution of what many at the time still saw as free territories in Africa and Asia. These ties were also evident in migratory flows and the interchange of goods and knowledge. Only because Europe was still a decisive reference for other societies can the nineteenth century be talked about in terms of a European global history, as characterized by Hans Freyer. At the same time, the impetus to globalization, with its multiplicity of transfers and interdependences among economic, financial, and knowledge markets beyond national borders, in no way put the European nation-states into question. In fact, those processes restabilized them again and again.²⁰

The mainly British-shaped, though not fully British-controlled, economic and legal order operated far beyond Europe in the nineteenth century. This influence no longer rested only upon territorial possession, but on the prevalence of economic and legal models.²¹ The Royal Navy itself had a special significance, symbolizing not only military superiority in the narrow sense but also the imposition of norms in a politics of maritime order.²² This constellation changed in the course of the nineteenth century, as the criterion of ethnic belonging associated with occupation of a territory became more and more important. The nation-state became the model—as form of rule over a particular territory, as basis for legal and political decisions, and as space of experience grounding images of the self and others, as well as nationally defined loyalties. From the 1860s, territoriality was decisive in measuring the capability and legitimacy of states and empires. The tradition of informal empire structures weakened in favor of formal colonial rule.²³

The First World War marked a watershed in the relationship between Europe and non-Europe, as well as among various regions of the world. This change did not manifest itself only in the dissolution of the European pentarchy (Britain, France, Russia, the Habsburg monarchy, and Prussia / Germany) that had shaped international relations since the eighteenth century. In addition, the reallocation or reversion of Germany’s colonies after 1918, as well as the breakup of the Ottoman and other multinational empires, created new scope for action and influence, while the European powers, especially Britain, became much more dependent on the military contribution of their colonial empires. But the First World War did more than usher in a new phase of colonization and decolonization for Europe. Equally important were the worldwide mobilization of manpower and raw materials, the various migration flows, and the wartime experiences of colonial societies outside Europe. And as the British dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand showed, these experiences did not begin and end with the provision of troops and war materials. Above all, the war changed the weight of these societies within the Empire and helped form them as nations.

(7) The conception of international order that applied in Europe until 1914 originated during the period between 1792 and 1814–1815, the era of the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars. Its primary aim had been to stabilize the European interstate order through a system of balances, which was supposed to block hegemonic projects such as those of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire. This conception of security was designed to de-ideologize conflicts and to prevent war between states from becoming an international civil war. Accordingly, conference diplomacy was based on the idea that relations among European states should not be the subject of public discussion; instead, secret talks among government representatives should deal with disputes early on, in accordance with the principles of state sovereignty. This war prevention policy was thoroughly successful between 1815 and 1871; even the national unification wars in Italy (1859–1870) and Germany (1864–1871) never involved more than bilateral conflicts, and until the end of the century there were no comprehensive and exclusive alliances involving a number of states.²⁴ However, while a major conflict was averted in the European core areas that had repeatedly been theaters of war since the seventeenth century, new zones of tension arose in the colonies, particularly in southeastern Europe on the Balkan Peninsula. There the conceptions of order developed in 1815 did not apply, but the fact that power conflicts could be channeled away into those regions served indirectly to stabilize the international order. Even the flashpoints that led to war in Summer 1914 were located in the southeastern zones of tension, where the withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire and the clash of interests between Russia and the Habsburg monarchy had caused a dangerous power vacuum to turn into a highly volatile source of crises.

Major wars in the age of extremes. Bars show war deaths of soldiers and civilians during the twentieth century, in millions.

(8) A key requisite for the conception of international order, and hence also for the relatively long period without major military conflicts in Europe, was the capacity and preparedness of individual states to wage war. Not least because of its deterrent value, this potential was essential for the international balance of power and for the stabilization of internal relations within each country—particularly in the second half of the century, when every large European power save Britain engaged in accelerating arms drives and the development of conscription-based mass armies. At the same time, however, the preparedness in principle to wage war outside Europe was demonstrated, especially in the opportunity space of the colonies. Only in Summer 1914 did the general parameters of the situation change, introducing an unprecedented cascade of violence in the twentieth century.²⁵

War readiness in the nineteenth century was also an expression of the economic and technological achievements of industrial societies and of their ability to integrate new social groups, assert themselves politically, and demonstrate their staying power in an age of growing international competition. Not by chance did war fleets acquire enormous symbolic and political value in the wake of colonial expansion;²⁶ they conveyed the economic strength and technological advances of the country in question, its mobility on the world stage, and its preparedness for military intervention. The existence of these war fleets shaped the strategies of naval combat in an industrializing world and produced a new way of looking at the relationship between war on land and at sea, as well as between continental states and global empires.²⁷ These developments in turn gave rise to new pressures and dynamics, so that constellations began to emerge in which military elites and their insistence on strategic necessities changed the latitude for policy decisions.

In the end, this orientation to war and the military had a far-reaching social dimension, as it asserted itself in public debate, the educational system, literature, and the press. In all European societies in the second half of the nineteenth century, this war readiness tended to have great importance for the conception of the nation and its massive public dissemination—in material ranging from the culture of flags and uniforms through war memorials and commemorations, to soldiers and veterans associations, and the widespread impact of naval construction in Germany and Britain. On the other hand, it should not be inferred that these trends within society, which point to a close association between martial themes and definitions of the nation, actually led to increased violence in the wars of the nineteenth century. It was not a totalization of war-related violence, but the successful containment of conflicts that constituted the special legacy of the nineteenth century. Its experiences of war, after the period between 1792 and 1815, were restricted to brief conflicts: in 1853–1856 in the Crimean War; in 1859–1861 in the process of Italian unification; and in 1864, 1866, and 1870–1871 in the wars to establish a German nation-state. Although the mass media and retrospective accounts promoted these as national and popular wars, they were in practice limited to conflicts between states in which the primacy of politics was never called into question. The totalization of violence in the name of the nation in arms was not yet part of the actual course of conflicts, but it did become an important leitmotif in popular histories and instrumental politics, and especially in images of what future wars would look like.²⁸

However, this relative limitation of martial violence remained confined to the core of the European continent. On its southeastern periphery in the Balkans, a distinctive mix of factors—a multinational population, a political vacuum left by the gradual withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire, rivalry between two great powers (Russia and the Habsburg monarchy), and increasingly radical national movements competing with one another in a context of weak state authority—had already resulted in a series of wars before Summer 1914, with a rising tide of violence against various ethnic and religious groups. The limits of containment were all the more apparent in the colonial wars of European powers against indigenous peoples in Sudan (1898) and South Africa (1899 and 1902), and in the German crushing of revolts by the Herero and Nama peoples in and after 1904. In these conflicts, the war aim was not to inflict military defeat on an adversary, but to achieve total subjugation by destroying the economic, social, and political foundations of the enemy’s existence.²⁹ Punitive practices were driven by such purposes as revenge and mass deportations, which after 1914 would also become operative in the war in Europe.³⁰ Although the unfettering of violence in the colonies did not lead directly, by a kind of causal link, to the totalization of European war after 1914, it was clearly part of the wider historical context. If the long nineteenth century offered partial instances of the violence that the future might present, then they were to be found in the Crimean War of 1853–1856 and, most of all, in the American Civil War. Between 1861 and 1865, 2.1 million troops were mobilized in the Northern states and 880,000 in the Confederate South; the war toll amounted to 750,000 deaths, including more than 620,000 soldiers, or just under 2.5 percent of the North American population—roughly the same as the total number of Americans killed in the revolutionary wars of the eighteenth century, the war of 1812, the Mexican-American war, the Spanish-American war, the two world wars of the twentieth century, and the Korean War combined. These nineteenth-century wars demonstrated the new links between mass mobilization and official justifications of unprecedented casualty figures, between increased violence (also against enemy civilians) and doubts about the loyalty of certain groups in the home population.³¹

(9) Another feature of the nineteenth century was the initially widespread vision of all-around progress: the future would become ever better and open to human design, as a result of wider political participation, economic growth and social equality, improved education and scientific advances, higher mobility and hygiene levels, and the worldwide spread of an idea of civilization conceived in Europe. However, from the last third of the nineteenth century on, more and more doubts beset this faith in progress as the core of what the bourgeois future offered. Cultural criticism, the reception of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the manifold reform movements and artistic currents active around the year 1900 revealed that the promise of progress had become increasingly shaky. We cannot infer from these tendencies that there were widespread hopes in liberation through war or even an actual longing for a great war, but neither can we fail to see the extent to which the themes of progress, growth, and expansion had already come under pressure before 1914. Part of the reason for these doubts was a major change in the understanding of reality. In physics, Max Planck’s quantum hypothesis and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity had shattered the previous image of the world. The same was happening with the discovery of the unconscious in the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud. The First World War began under the aegis of these two developments: disillusionment with the promise of progress and turmoil in the perception of reality. Moreover, after 1914 a specific connection between war and science became apparent, as numerous researchers were prepared without further ado to place their knowledge at the service of their country, whether in a flood of justificatory tracts penned by historians, theologians, economists, and sociologists or in the exploitation of new scientific breakthroughs and new technologies for the development of the means of war and substitute materials in everyday life.

(10) All these developments were connected to a final aspect: the changing self-image of individuals and their position in the historical process. A preoccupation with history at a variety of levels—in monuments, museums, and historical associations; in an endless stream of historical novels; and in the rise of history (especially in Germany) as an academic discipline giving a sense of direction to the bourgeoisie—became a central theme of the nineteenth century. Motivating this preoccupation was the quest for individual and collective certainty in an epoch that, especially since the 1860s and 1870s, seemed gripped by the mode of acceleration. This sense of ever-greater speed was different from the distinctions between before and after that might have been used in relation to events such as wars or revolutions. In contrast to the early nineteenth century, the experience of time had developed a novel quality, side by side with a subjective perception that space itself was shrinking. A number of technological achievements around the turn of the twentieth century contributed to these changes. Steamboats, railroads, and automobiles provided faster and denser transportation, increasingly replacing the natural propulsion of sailing ships and coaches; and the global cable-and-wire news network entered a new age in 1899, when the first successful wireless transmissions took place between Britain and France, followed in 1901 by a similar transatlantic breakthrough. These accelerations shrank perceived space and hence the distance between events and their reporting as news.³² But at the time they also produced new crisis symptoms in many people, as historically experienced time and the individual-biographical experience of time grew further and further apart. Indications of this trend in the early twentieth century were the counting compulsion and rush disorder observable in the heroes of Robert Musil’s novels and short stories and especially shock, trauma, and nervousness as symptoms of a sick age. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) was in two senses a Zeitroman, since it focused not only on the historical time before the First World War but also, consciously, on the subjective splitting of time into competing conceptions.

Another leitmotif in the quest for self-certainty was discernible in cultural critiques and debates around the turn of the twentieth century. The relationship of the individual to the expanding mass society, particularly the self-assertion of the individual in the crowd, had become for many a deeply ambivalent result of demographic growth, economic development, and social mobility—all legacies of the nineteenth century. Many of the contemporary debates on the popular press and mass consumption, moral improvement, sexuality and the body, and the opposition between anonymous society and identity-building community revolved around the individual’s role among the masses.³³

The world war fundamentally changed people’s time-consciousness. Expectations and experiences differed more and more widely between the military front and the home front, and they could no longer be straightforwardly synchronized with each other. Although Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West was written before 1914 in anticipation of the coming war, his diagnosis of an age of gigantic conflicts and a cycle of civilizations as organisms only came into its own after the reality of world war had exceeded any metaphors of decline.³⁴ The relationship to the future would also change, as would the identification of ideas of progress and theories of order. For after 1917, the promise of new models of political and social order no longer appeared to come from western or central Europe, but rather from Russia and eastern Europe and the other side of the Atlantic: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Woodrow Wilson symbolized these imagined futures.

Around the year 1900, Europe was an unsettling tangle of diverse and ambiguous currents. Robert Musil, in his novel The Man without Qualities, sketched a panorama of this unrest and contradictoriness: Suddenly, out of the becalmed mentality of the nineteenth century’s last two decades, an invigorating fever arose all over Europe.… Talents of a kind that had previously been stifled or had never taken part in public life suddenly came to the fore. They were as different from each other as could be, and could not have been more contradictory in their aims. There were those who loved the overman and those who loved the underman; there were health cults and sun cults and the cults of consumptive maidens; there was enthusiasm for the hero worshipers and for the believers in the Common Man; people were devout and skeptical, naturalistic and mannered, robust and morbid; they dreamed of old tree-lined avenues in palace parks, autumnal gardens, glassy ponds, gems, hashish, disease, and demonism, but also of prairies, immense horizons, forges and rolling mills, naked wrestlers, slave uprisings, early man, and the smashing of society.³⁵ Also part of this tense configuration was the juxtaposition of rationality and subjectivism. In view of the strong tendencies toward rationalization in economics, politics, and public administration, political and social theorists diagnosed a lack of instinct, intuition, or subjectivity—and hence also of irrational elements—as a source of feelings of loss and isolation. In particular, Max Weber’s focus on ecstasy and charisma underlined the perceived limits of regulating social and political activity through rational, bureaucratic, and legal processes alone. Attitudes to violence were another area of tension. Its interpretation as a purely irrational force, to which those like Georges Sorel or the Futurists signed up programmatically, was one thing. But at the same time, Max Weber emphasized that systematic violence was also inherent in legitimate, well-run, peaceful states: every form of social and political order rested on the state’s monopoly of violence. Lenin wove precise political analysis, strategic calculation, and rational organization by the revolutionary vanguard together with a high preparedness to use force. Around the year 1900, the nineteenth-century idea that rationality always goes together with progress toward peace, and reason with liberal constitutions and the containment of violence, was being questioned, at least at the level of political and social theory.³⁶

It would be wrong to try to elucidate the First World War solely in terms of the nineteenth century. Such an approach would make that century a mere prehistory, guiding one’s attention only to processes and contexts that fit one’s putative explanation of the war, and not those that speak against it. No history can be merely a prehistory of what came later—that is the misguided perspective of those who expect the structures of the pre-past to explain the past. The future past of the nineteenth century had many possible developments, and their multiplicity should not be dismissed too lightly because only one prevailed in the end. Neither should we forego explaining such historical connections—if we did, it would be impossible to understand the zones of tension and constellations of conflict, and ultimately the causes of the war and the escalation of Summer 1914. Underlying these connections is a question that has a deep historical dimension. Why did the tradition of containing crises and channeling violence—a tradition that, after the seventeenth century and against the background of bloody religious and civil wars, had become such an important feature of European history—break down in 1914? Why did the principle of trusting in an internal and external peace order fail so spectacularly?³⁷

The dual historical dimension of the First World War, its function as a pivot between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has to do with the fact that the destruction and violence, and the inability to construct a lasting peace, persisted well beyond 1918. It may be possible to say quite precisely when the war began, but on closer examination the question of exactly when it ended proves to be incomparably more difficult. In this respect, the First World War resembles other events such as the French Revolution, which for nineteenth-century historians like Alexis de Tocqueville or Jacob Burckhardt had at most a beginning but not a chronologically definable end; the postrevolutionary era involved a continuation of the revolution through other means, so that what became known as the Age of Revolution ground to a halt neither in 1799 nor in 1815. In the case of the First World War, to see the difficulty of defining its end means to grasp the longue durée of its consequences. It was the inability to remain at peace with others and oneself that kept the war going in peacetime and characterized the twentieth century until well beyond 1945. In 1955 Hannah Arendt wrote, No history of the causes leading to the First World War, and no analysis of explicit and ulterior motives, can elucidate what happened in Europe on August 1, 1914.… We cannot ‘explain’ the First World War from the history of the nineteenth century; but we can do nothing other than understand in the light of that catastrophe the century that came to an end in it. Perhaps the event would have been less dramatic if that one catastrophe had been the end of the matter. But the sorrowful calm that descends on the scene of a great disaster has still not materialized. The first explosion was like the start of a chain reaction, which to date it has not been possible to end.³⁸

The First World War, therefore, cannot be explained solely with reference to the nineteenth century, with the latter reduced to a mere prehistory; nor can the war be reduced to its twentieth-century consequences, unfolding as a result of the global upheaval of 1914–1918. Rather, the two centuries are intertwined in the history of the conflict, although ultimately the war went beyond even this complex entanglement. The war had its own particular history of dynamics and logics, of elements beyond what went before and what came after, beyond the apparent causal chains and lines of continuity. It is necessary to take account of this particular history and to engage with it.

2

ANTECEDENTS

Crises and Containment before 1914

HELMUTH VON MOLTKE knew all about war. Born in 1800 into an old noble family in Mecklenburg and educated in a Danish cadet school, he entered the Prussian army at the age of 22 and was soon afterward promoted to the general staff, where he was mentored by Carl von Clausewitz, the foremost theorist of war in the early nineteenth century. His rapidly advancing career reached its peak in 1857, when he was promoted to major general and appointed head of the general staff. In the campaigns of 1864 against Denmark, 1866 against Austria, and 1870–1871 against France, he acted as the top military leader. The trio of victories soon cast him as a strategic genius in the eyes of the public, and he contributed more than a little to the myth of the Großer Generalstab, a Greater General Staff that not only ruled on narrowly military matters but also made decisions with considerable political import.¹

In contrast to his public image at the time, which fused the legendary grand strategist with the omniscient man of few words, Moltke was a cautious observer of war. He knew from his own experience how much the reality of an actual war diverged from any theories or plans. He conceived of strategy as a system of makeshift plans or moves, and in his view a campaign could at most be planned only in its initial phase. Once it had broken out, a war should be decided as soon as possible, with the help of all the technical and logistic means available; the introduction of the Prussian needle rifle and, most important, the use of railroads for troop transport had played a decisive role in the Prussian victories of the 1860s.² But Moltke always remained aware that wars have a dynamic and logic of their own that cannot be controlled.³

After the Franco-Prussian War ended in 1871, Moltke became active as a Conservative Party deputy in the Reichstag and, as its oldest member, served as its interim president in 1881. As he had learned from Clausewitz, he maintained that the traditional Kabinettskrieg (cabinet war) between princes, conflicts that involved fairly small armies and were limited in both time and materiel, should be carefully distinguished from the people’s war initiated by the French Revolution, with its large national armies and theoretically unrestricted effects. The Austrian war of 1866, for example, had been of the desirable Kabinett type, with no excesses of violence, especially against civilians, no humiliation of the enemy, and no ideological gloss on the war aims. Only in this way, Moltke believed, had it been possible to assert the primacy of Prussian politics. The war had not arisen out of self-defense against a threat to our existence nor as a result of public opinion and the nation’s voice. Rather, it had been a struggle deemed necessary in the Cabinet, long envisaged and calmly prepared. The war of 1866 had been waged not for the incorporation of states, territorial expansion, or material profit, but for the strengthening of Prussia’s power. The Battle of Königgrätz accordingly settled the rivalry for supremacy between Prussia and Austria.⁴

The short war, Moltke wrote in 1880 with the Franco-Prussian War in mind, is the result of a historical learning process. In contrast to the savagery of the Thirty Years’ War, it brings a new humanity to warfare, avoiding unnecessary excesses of violence, even though the enemy in 1870–1871 suffered more than just symbolic humiliation; for example, the loss of Alsace-Lorraine and the imposition of high reparation payments. Yet unlike in the eighteenth century, it was not only enemy troops who were targeted in these short wars: The greatest blessing in war is the swift ending of the war, and for this all means that are not actually reprehensible must be freely available. Use should be made of all possible resources of the enemy government: its finances, railroads, and food supplies, even its prestige. This was not yet a total people’s war or guerrilla warfare, but still war against an enemy state and all its military, political, economic, and ideological instruments of power. In principle, this precise combination seemed to have proven successful in 1870 within a matter of weeks. Only after the defeat of Napoleon III at Sedan, when the French side declared a people’s war and deployed irregular franc-tireurs and guerrilla tactics, did the violence escalate: The last war against France was waged with this energy, yet with greater restraint than ever before. After two months the campaign was decided, and only when a revolutionary government prolonged it for four more months, bringing ruin on its own country, did the fighting take on a more bitter quality.⁵

A glimpse of total war: Richmond, Virginia, at the end of the American Civil War, 1865

The moment in Fall 1870 when the military defeat of the Second Empire became apparent, but the war was not yet over, marked the beginning of a crisis. Philip Sheridan, the former Union general in the American Civil War, was observing the conflict at Prussian headquarters on behalf of the U.S. government, and he saw Prussia after its victory at Sedan in the same position that the Northern states had faced six years earlier in relation to the Confederacy, at the beginning of a spiral of violence and unpredictable guerrilla warfare. The response of the Northern states had been to make a conscious military turn against the civilian population of the South, culminating in General William Sherman’s March to the Sea. Looking at photos taken at the time of Southern cities after their occupation by Northern troops, it is not easy to spot the differences from the images of bombed-out cities at the end of the Second World War. In Fall 1870, Sheridan advised the German generals to employ this scorched-earth tactic to force France to sue for peace. Count Waldersee later recalled Sheridan’s words: You know how to strike an enemy, as no other army does, but you haven’t got the hang of annihilating him. There should be more smoke from burning villages, or else you won’t finish the French off. Such ideas found no echo in Moltke.⁶

In May 1890, just a few weeks after Bismarck left office, Moltke gave his last speech in the Reichstag. At first sight, it was a warning about a new war in Europe, but there was more to it than that. He looked skeptically into the future and saw that, as politics and the conduct of war came increasingly under the spell of new developments, governments would lose their influence in wars. Looming on the horizon stood the horrifying specter of an uncontrolled people’s war: But … princes and governments in general are really not the ones who wage war in our times. The age of cabinet wars lies behind us—all we have now is people’s war, with all its unpredictable consequences, and any level-headed government will decide on that only with great difficulty. No, … the elements that threaten peace are to be found among the people. Internally, they are the greed of less fortunate classes and their occasional attempts to achieve an improvement of their lot through violent measures.… Externally, they are the strivings of certain nationalities and races, and the discontent everywhere with things as they are. This may bring about a war at any time, without or even against the will of governments. Given the arms drives underway in all European powers, Moltke feared that a war of incalculable length would exclude a peace agreement of the kind negotiated in 1864, 1866, and 1871: Should such a war break out, no one can foresee how long it will last or when it will end. The great powers of Europe, armed as never before, will enter the fray against one another; none of them can be defeated so thoroughly in one or two campaigns that it declares itself vanquished, accepts harsh peace conditions, and never picks itself up to renew the struggle even after a year’s delay.⁷

In 1911 Alfred von Schlieffen—architect of the German offensive plan that Moltke’s grandson, Helmuth von Moltke Jr., would apply against France in 1914—published an influential essay on the new mass army: Über die Millionenheere. He argued that the wars of the future, their length, and their quantitative or qualitative increase in violence were altogether beyond human calculation.⁸ They might last seven or even thirty years, and their consequences were so unpredictable that the foundations of the German nation-state, itself a result of war, might suddenly be called into question. Future war therefore contained the potential for revolution. Moltke had already feared the arming of industrial workers in new-style conscription armies. His gloomy, skeptical survey had offered food for thought especially because he considered the implications of the fact that future wars could no longer be restricted. Unlike the traditional cabinet wars, they might no longer lead only to limited territorial losses; the stakes would be the survival of the Reich, perhaps the continuation of the social order and civilized existence, and at any event hundreds of thousands of human lives.⁹

Things had not yet gone that far, and despite all the crises over prospective wars, the expected struggle for the survival of European nations did not materialize after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. Why was this so? Why was war contained despite all the epicenters of crises and zones of tension in Europe? Why, after the end of the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France between 1792 and 1815, was there no other major war until 1914—no war involving not only Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and the Habsburg monarchy, but all the other European powers that had established a long, stable, and successful peace in 1814–1815? But, also, how unavoidable was a great war in 1914, against the background of the nineteenth century and especially its final third? When, therefore, did the prehistory of the First World War begin?

1. BALANCES OF POWER AND DYNAMICS OF CHANGE

To understand why the containment of war in Europe broke down in July and August 1914, we need to look back to the origins of this concept.¹⁰ Efforts to limit wars to interstate conflicts and to contain violence especially against civilians began in reaction to the religious civil wars of the early modern period. After the Reformation there had been an unprecedented ideologization of the grounds for war. It rested on the identification of each individual combatant with grounds for war that were considered just, genuine, or morally superior; the soldier was not a paid mercenary, but a convinced fighter for a cause, and especially for his faith. This justified an increase in wartime violence, making the boundaries between combatants and noncombatants relatively porous; it brought bloody civil war right to the midst of society, as in the 1560s in France or the 1640s in England. Out of this traumatic experience of civil war, with its unleashing and mobilization of unprecedented violence, came the idea of the sovereign princely state—a state that, as it were, cut itself off from the outside through a new concept of sovereignty, made diplomacy a domaine réservé, and thereby supposedly prevented interference in the internal affairs of other states. Internally, the princely monopoly of violence checked the rival systems of force of various social and religious groups; the separation between external and internal politics became clearly distinguishable. The modern law of nations and war, which came out of the great European peace agreements signed in Münster, Osnabrück, and Utrecht between 1648 and 1713, was one consequence of these experiences. Its purpose was to prevent civil wars by creating a European legal order, a ius publicum Europaeum, that was supposed to permit only limited interstate wars in accordance with clearly defined rules, to rid war of ideological overload, and to decriminalize the enemy-image by means of the iustus hostis formula.¹¹ In the language of the mechanics of the time, states resembled closed spheres that could be positioned in such a way that the resulting equilibrium prevented any one state from securing hegemony over the others.¹²

The French Revolution and the wars fought after 1792 in the name of the sovereign nation were a fundamental challenge to this regulatory framework. Although the revolutionary wars soon exposed the idea of an international civil war of the oppressed against their oppressors as a naïve myth—nowhere, Robespierre pointed out, do people like armed emissaries—contemporaries were aware of the dangers within society of a war unleashed in the name of ideological principles.¹³ For a long time the most powerful interpretation of this change between 1792 and 1815 was the one provided by Clausewitz. For the period before the French Revolution, he noted that the limited, constricted form of war was due to the restricted finances and personnel available to the absolute monarchies. Clearly this meant it was essential to contain conflicts, to restrict war to armies, and to spare the civilian population: if the army was pulverized, he [the commander] could not raise another, and behind the army there was nothing. That enjoined the greatest prudence in all operations. The army soon came to constitute a state within the state. But with the French Revolution and its ensuing wars, a new link developed between violence in the name of the nation and the participation of citizens as defenders of the fatherland: Suddenly war again became the business of the people—a people of thirty millions, all of whom considered themselves to be citizens.… The people became a participant in war; instead of governments and armies as heretofore, the full weight of the nation was thrown into the balance. The resources and efforts now available for use surpassed all conventional limits; nothing now impeded the vigor with which war could be waged, and consequently the opponents of France faced the utmost peril.¹⁴

After 1815, the generation of politicians around the Austrian chancellor Metternich and the French minister Talleyrand, who had lived through the almost uninterrupted period of wars between 1792 and 1815, tried to draw out the implications of this

Reviews for Pandora’s Box

[santhony_35 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a tough book for me to rate. Honestly, it was not a pleasant and enjoyable reading experience for me. Nevertheless, it is a meticulously researched and exhaustively detailed book on a seminal historical event. If you are the scholarly sort, with a deep and abiding interest in World War I, or even history in general, this is likely the “go-to” book on the subject. On the other hand, if you are reading simply for enjoyment, look elsewhere.This book is a real doorstop, incredibly dense (not just in the depth of its subject, but physically) and difficult to even hold when reading in bed. It is heavy and cumbersome with over 900 pages of text and another hundred or two in endnotes, bibliographies and indexes. I read a lot of very long books, but this one took me seemingly forever to read, such was the complexity of the subject matter and the author’s treatment of it. If you read it at night, it will often times put you to sleep after 15-20 minutes.I rate it at 5 stars, because I believe it accomplishes what the author set out to do; that is to produce a comprehensive analysis of the factors leading to, involved in and following the First World War. That being said, I believe the target audience for this work is relatively small.