Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  Falkenhayn’s immediate political antagonist was not a soldier, however, but the chancellor.31 The two leaders represented an interesting contrast. Bethmann Hollweg had advanced through the ranks of a classic bureaucratic career.32 By temperament he was a ponderous, occasionally melancholy man, who found it easier to soften conflicting views through equivocation or compromise than by choosing among them. In part for this reason, he conveyed different impressions to different people. Temperamental differences played a role in the growing conflict between him and Falkenhayn. The general was not prepared to suffer the interference of civilian politicians in strategic planning; and he withheld information from them. The absence of any institutional forum to coordinate strategy and policy was consistent with German political traditions, but it exacerbated this problem. The chancellor in turn had doubts about Falkenhayn’s competence to lead the German armies; and he questioned the general’s strategic priorities. He also feared that Falkenhayn had designs on the chancellorship. By early 1915 he was scheming to have Falkenhayn replaced.

  Bethmann’s concerns reflected political difficulties that made Falkenhayn’s strategic dilemmas look almost easy. Every phase of the war burdened the chancellor. The military conduct of the war had to concern him, as did the views (and moods) of the Kaiser, Germany’s relations to other countries – whether allies or enemies – and the growing pressures on the home front, which had by 1915 begun to find political expression. In the first instance, however, the chancellor had to preserve the domestic truce that had been forged in the summer of 1914.

  Despite the impressions of popular unity in the early days, the consensus in favor of the war was fragile from the start, vulnerable to pressures from both the left and right. The most sensitive problem was the Socialist labor movement.33 The Socialist party’s vote in favor of the war in August 1914 masked deep reservations among industrial workers, whose support was critical for the war effort. The Socialists were persuaded that Russian aggression against Germany had caused the war. To their supporters, leading Socialists argued that the defeat of this reactionary, autocratic power would promote democratic reform of the constitution in Germany after the war. Socialists advocated a negotiated peace as soon as the war’s basic defensive purpose was achieved. The continuation of the war into a second year made the tensions within this party increasingly difficult to contain; and in December 1914 Karl Liebknecht, the leader of its left wing, broke party discipline and voted in the Reichstag against authorizing further public loans to finance the war. As the advance of German armies deep into Belgium, France, and Russian Poland made it harder to portray the war as a defensive struggle, the Socialists began to call for specific domestic reforms in order to reward the continued loyalty of workers to the war effort. One such reform was securing the legal validity of collective bargaining agreements. Another was the democratization of the suffrage and the establishment of ministerial responsibility in parliaments in Prussia and the other German states.

  To Bethmann fell the task of persuading the Socialists of the German government’s desire for a moderate peace, as well as its sympathy for some kind of domestic reform. The chancellor also had to appease other groups, however. Right-wing forces insisted that a decisive victory, attended by appropriate territorial annexations, could alone justify the frightful sacrifices that Germans had already borne in their own defense. In a series of memoranda, which arrived on the chancellor’s desk in the first months of the war, the advocates of these war aims laid out a program of demands so ambitious that they anticipated, in notable respects, the German goals in the next European war. Buttressed by vast annexations in eastern and western Europe, Germany would, in all events, have emerged as the hegemonic power on the continent. Bethmann sympathized with the idea of large-scale annexations as a reward for Germans’ exertions during the war, but public statements to this effect were impossible.34 Along with any prospect for a negotiated peace, they would destroy the tenuous domestic consensus as surely as would public commitment to democratic reforms at home.

  Managing this dilemma required all the chancellor’s arts of evasion, as he parried entreaties from proponents of the conflicting positions. Support for a moderate peace and constitutional reform was concentrated in the Reichstag – principally in the Socialist party, but also among the middle-class Progressives, and the left wing of the Catholic party, the Center, which enjoyed substantial support among the Catholic working class. Bethmann sought in vague terms to assure these political leaders of his support, for they could make life uncomfortable for him: these three parties potentially represented a majority coalition in the federal parliament. The periodic convening of the Reichstag to authorize additional war loans provided a public forum for criticizing official policy; and, as the costs of the war mounted, so did the criticism.

  But the Reichstag was itself deeply divided. The Conservatives and National Liberals, the right-wing parties that represented in turn the landowning nobility and the upper bourgeoisie, called for a Siegfrieden, a victorious, uncompromising peace with lavish territorial rewards for the victor. Beyond the parliament, the advocates of this position were entrenched in the structures of power in Imperial Germany, so they enjoyed an influence altogether out of proportion to their numbers. They included the business leaders who controlled the country’s economic mobilization. They dominated the public bureaucracies; and they were well organized in the patriotic societies. These nationalist organizations, which had called for an aggressive German foreign policy before the war, easily embraced a vast program of annexations as soon as the war broke out.35 Finally, advocates of annexations could be confident of the support of the military leadership, particularly in the eastern command. Most of Imperial Germany’s prewar political and social elites thus congregated in this camp. They anticipated that military triumph would vindicate their own leadership of the country and hence forestall demands for domestic political and social reform.

  Controversy thus quickly erupted over Germany’s aims in the war. The early German advances suggested that the war was about more than national defense; they also raised specific political questions that were difficult to evade – such as the future of Belgium and Poland. Besieged in the first weeks of the war by a “flood of memoranda and petitions” with specific recommendations, Bethmann moved to suppress the debate before it could jeopardize the domestic political truce.36 He decreed a moratorium on all public discussion of war aims. The guidelines that he then laid down to the censors provided vaguely that Germany would emerge from the war secure against Russian despotism (a concession to the Socialists) and British plots to achieve world hegemony (a concession to the right).

  Although several of the loudest and most aggressive nationalists were muzzled, enforcement of the moratorium was anything but balanced. Bethmann had no power over the deputy commanding generals, who controlled the censorship in their districts and sympathized with the right-wing nationalists. Left-wing pamphlets and circulars were hence more vulnerable to confiscation than were those that circulated with extravagant demands for annexations. To the chancellor’s consternation, the annexationists also enjoyed access to officials in the highest circles of government. The army’s eastern command sympathized with their views and communicated its sympathies to the press. Early in 1915 the annexationists found another ally in Tirpitz, who was anxious to encourage popular support for an all-out submarine offensive against Allied commerce, which could alone, he argued, break the strategic stalemate. The chancellor saw only the diplomatic perils of a military course that would antagonize the neutrals, above all the United States – as the furious outcry that followed the sinking of the Lusitania in May made clear. Not for the last time, he struggled to discourage the idea. To deprive Tirpitz of his popular forum, he persuaded the emperor to limit the admiral’s autonomous powers of censorship over naval affairs. It was but a temporary success, and it earned the chancellor an important enemy in uniform.37

  Falkenhayn remained another one. Tensions between him
and Bethmann grew during the campaign of 1915, in part because of the general’s support for Tirpitz’s position. The chancellor also believed that the general’s preoccupation with the western front was ill founded, that a decisive victory in the east was not only possible but the only realistic prelude to any kind of peace with the western powers. Bethmann thus gravitated towards the camp of the so-called “easterners” and a dangerous alliance with the two heroes in uniform who held sway there. The alliance was consummated in 1916, and it had profound consequences for the remainder of the war.

  1 Wilhelm Deist (ed.), Militär und Innenpolitik im Weltkrieg 1914–1918 (2 vols., Düsseldorf, 1970), covers all aspects of the institutional problem. The introductory essay to this collection of documents, “Voraussetzungen innenpolitischen Handelns des Militärs im Ersten Weltkrieg,” is republished in Wilhelm Deist, Militär, Staat und Gesellschaft: Studien zur preussischdeutschen Militärgeschichte (Munich, 1991), 103–52.

  2 William II is the subject of an exhaustive biography by John C. G. Röhl, Wilhelm II (3 vols., Munich, 1993–2008), the third of which covers the era of the First World War. These volumes are now available in English translation. See also Lamar Cecil, Wilhelm II: Emperor and Exile (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996); Christopher Clark, Kaiser Wilhelm II (Harlow, 2000), 225–45.

  3 Holger Afflerbach (ed.), Kaiser Wilhelm II als Oberster Kriegsherr im Ersten Weltkrieg: Quellen aus der militärischen Umgebung des Kaisers 1914–1918 (Munich, 2005).

  4 Lothar Burchardt, “Walther Rathenau und die Anfänge der deutschen Rohstoffbewirtschaftung im ersten Weltkrieg,” Tradition: Zeitschrift für Firmengeschichte und Unternehmerbiographie 15 (1970), 169–96; Gerhard Hecker, Walther Rathenau und sein Verhältnis zu Militär und Krieg (Boppard, 1983). See also Shulamit Volkov, Walter Rathenau: Weimar’s Fallen Statesman (New Haven, CT, 2012), 132–37; Lothar Gall, Walther Rathenau: Portrait einer Epoche (Munich, 2009).

  5 Hans Ehlert, Die wirtschaftliche Zentralbehörde des Deutschen Reiches 1914 bis 1919: Das Problem der “Gemeinwirtschaft” in Krieg und Frieden (Wiesbaden, 1982).

  6 Margit Szöllösi-Janze, Fritz Haber (1868–1934): Eine Biographie (Munich, 1998); Dietrich Stolzenberg, Fritz Haber: Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew (Philadelphia, 2005).

  7 Otto Goebel, Deutsche Rohstoffwirtschaft im Weltkrieg einschliesslich des Hindenburg-Programms (Stuttgart, 1930), 175.

  8 Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford, 1989), 21–78; Friedrich Aereboe, Der Einfluss des Krieges auf die landwirtschaftliche Produktion in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1927); Arnulf Huegel, Kriegsernährungswirtschaft während des Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieges im Vergleich (Constance, 2003), 100–254, 374–88. For a local study, see Roger Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2007), esp. 159–88.

  9 Martin Schumacher, Land und Politik: Eine Untersuchung über politische Parteien und agrarische Interessen 1914–1923 (Düsseldorf, 1978), 60–2.

  10 Anne Roerkohl, Hungerblockade und Heimatfront: Die kommunale Lebensmittelversorgung in Westfalen während des Ersten Weltkrieges (Stuttgart, 1991); George L. Yaney, The World of the Manager: Food Administration in Berlin during World War I (New York, 1994); August Skalweit, Die deutsche Kriegsernährungswirtschaft (Stuttgart, 1927). Local studies include: Bernd Schlüter, Lebensmittelversorgung und Krieg: Die kommunale Kriegsernährungswirtschaft in Bremen 1914–1918 (Oldenbourg, 2008); Carsten Schmidt, Zwischen Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf: Sozialpolitik und Kriegsgesellschaft in Dresden 1914–1918 (Marburg, 2007), 238–76.

  11 Gerd Krumeich, “Le blocus maritime et la guerre sous-marine,” in John Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale: Le tournant de 1914–1915 (Paris, 2010), 175–90; C. Paul Vincent, The Politics of Hunger: The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1915–1919 (Athens, OH, 1985); Marion C. Siney, The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1914–1916 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1957).

  12 Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life, 266.

  13 Matthew Stibbe, German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2001).

  14 Quoted by Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Bürgerstolz und Weltmachtstreben: Deutschland unter Wilhelm II, 1890 bis 1918 (Berlin, 1995), 563.

  15 Kurt Koszyk, Deutsche Pressepolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Düsseldorf, 1968).

  16 Karl Lange, Marneschlacht und deutsche Öffentlichkeit 1914–1939: Eine verdrängte Niederlage und ihre Folgen (Düsseldorf, 1974).

  17 Wilhelm Deist, “Zensur und Propaganda in Deutschland während des Ersten Weltkrieges,” in Deist, Militär, Staat und Gesellschaft, 153–64; Heinz-Dietrich Fischer (ed.), Pressekonzentration und Zensurpraxis im Ersten Weltkrieg: Texte und Quellen (Berlin, 1973).

  18 Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Die Regierung Bethmann Hollweg und die öffentliche Meinung 1914–1917,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 17 (1969), 117–55.

  19 Holger Afflerbach, Falkenhayn: Politisches Denken und Handeln im Kaiserreich (Munich, 1994).

  20 Ibid., 198.

  21 Heinz Kraft, Staatsräson und Kriegführung im kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1916: Der Gegensatz zwischen dem Generalstabschef von Falkenhayn und dem Oberbefehlshaber Ost im Rahmen des Bündniskrieges der Mittelmächte (Göttingen, 1980).

  22 On these calculations and the developments on which they were based, see the essays in Gerhard P. Groß (ed.), Die vergessene Front: Der Osten 1914/15. Ereignis, Wirkung, Nachwirkung (Paderborn, 2006).

  23 Gordon A. Craig, “The World War I alliance of the Central Powers in retrospect: the military cohesion of the alliance,” Journal of Modern History 37 (1965), 336–44; Gary W. Shanafelt, The Secret Enemy: Austria–Hungary and the German Alliance, 1914–1918 (New York, 1985).

  24 On developments on this front, see Jonathan E. Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2009).

  25 Robert DiNardo, Breakthrough: The Gorlice-Tarnow Campaign (Santa Barbara, CA, 2010).

  26 Fritz Klein et al., Deutschland im Ersten Weltkrieg (3 vols., Berlin, 1968–9), II, 76.

  27 Hew Strachan, “From Cabinet war to total war: the perspective of military doctrine, 1861–1918,” in Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds.), Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2000), 19–33.

  28 Klein et al., Deutschland im Ersten Weltkrieg, VI, 84.

  29 Tait Keller, “The mountains roar: the Alps during the Great War,” Environmental History 14 (2009), 253–74.

  30 The classic studies of this problem are Gerhard Ritter’s Sword and Scepter: The Problem of Militarism in Germany (3 vols., Coral Gables, FL, 1969–73), and Gordon A. Craig’s The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 (Oxford, 1955). See also Roger Chickering, “War, society, and culture, 1850–1914: the rise of militarism,” in Roger Chickering, Dennis Showalter, and Hans van de Ven (eds.), The Cambridge History of War, vol. IV, War and the Modern World (Cambridge, 2012), 119–41.

  31 See, in addition to Afflerbach’s biography of Falkenhayn, Karl-Heinz Janssen, Der Kanzler und der General: Die Führungskrise um Bethmann Hollweg und Falkenhayn (1914–1916) (Göttingen, 1967).

  32 Konrad H. Jarausch, The Enigmatic Chancellor: Bethmann Hollweg and the Hubris of Imperial Germany (New Haven, CT, 1973); Günter Wollstein, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg: Letzter Erbe Bismarcks, Erstes Opfer der Dolchstosslegende (Göttingen, 1990).

  33 Susanne Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie im Ersten Weltkrieg (Düsseldorf, 1974).

  34 One such memorandum, which advocated breathtaking annexations, originated in his own office. This document, the “September memorandum,” is the principal piece of evidence that Bethmann planned the war to achieve German hegemony in Europe. See Fischer, Germany’s Aims, 98–106.

  35 Recent studies of nationalist leaders make this point clear: Johannes Leicht, Heinrich Claß 1868–1953: Die politische Biographie eines Alldeutschen (Paderborn, 2012); Stefan Frech, Wegbereiter Hitlers? Theodor Reismann-Grone. Ein völkischer Nationalist (1863–1949) (Paderborn, 200
9).

  36 Mommsen, Bürgerstolz und Weltmachtstreben, 574.

  37 Raffael Scheck, Alfred von Tirpitz and German Right-Wing Politics, 1914–1930 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1997).

  3 The war grows total

  Historians have used the term “total war” to describe the dramatic growth in the scope and intensity of warfare since the end of the eighteenth century.1 The term is geared to historical processes that, since the French Revolution, rendered wars larger, longer, and more costly. The growing difficulties of reaching a decision by arms and the expanding needs of modern armies placed growing demands on home fronts – to the point that, in the world wars of the twentieth century, civilians were scarcely less central than soldiers to the prosecution of war; and their pivotal roles in these wars made them just as vulnerable to systematic and calculated acts of enemy aggression, whether by means of commercial warfare or strategic bombardment from the air.