Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  The war thus ended amid extraordinary popular confusion in Germany, while a host of unanswered questions hovered over what the liberal theologian Ernst Troeltsch described as the “dreamland of the armistice period.”32 While the circumstances of the war’s termination were anything but clear, little thought was given to the final peace terms that might eventuate. The end of hostilities was itself greeted with near-universal relief among soldiers and civilians alike. Almost no one had envisaged the defeat of the German army, and the return of front-line regiments to their garrisons in Germany at the end of the year occasioned grateful celebrations, in which the soldiers were hailed as unvanquished heroes. A “Welcome greeting to our brave soldiers,” which was read from Catholic pulpits in early December, captured the sentiments. “You have returned home. Undefeated! […] Your heroes’ shield shines, your honor is unscathed.”33 The most fateful moment occurred days later in Berlin, where Friedrich Ebert, who now led a tenuous republican government, greeted the returning troops in the same spirit: “We welcome you with all our hearts, comrades and citizens. No enemy has conquered you.”34

  Most of the republicans who embraced the motif of “undefeated in the field,” which Wolfgang Schivelbusch has called the “universal loser trope,” were careful to qualify their remarks with allusions to what Ebert characterized as the “enemy’s great superiority in men and material,” which had finally “overwhelmed” German forces.35 Ludendorff and his allies on the right, who were hostile to the new republic, exploited the same motif for their own agenda, however. The chief element in their brief was that the German armies had not lost the war at all. Instead, the soldiers had remained in the field, valiant and in good order, as the home front collapsed in the fall of 1918 amid a bitter harvest of subversion and agitation by pacifists, socialists, slackers, and Jews – the “November criminals,” who, by no coincidence, now led the new republican government. As a description of this sequence of events, the term “stab in the back” (Dolchsstoss) had already made its way, in numerous accents and variations, into the political discourse by the end of 1918; and in late 1919 Hindenburg himself, whose reputation had escaped military defeat unscathed, lent his powerful imprimatur to the same reading of the war’s end when he told a parliamentary committee of investigation that die deutsche Armee ist von hinten erdolcht worden (“the German army was stabbed in the back”).36

  By the time Hindenburg offered this guide to the war’s conclusion, prominent officers and right-wing political leaders had begun a campaign to cultivate the legend that the victorious army had been stabbed in the back by treacherous forces on the home front.37 Hindenburg probably believed what he said, while others embraced his views with more cynicism. All the proponents of the Dolchstoss could capitalize on general ignorance and fleeting impressions, which seemed at first glance to lend some credibility to the legend. “It was all very surprising,” recalled Klaus Mann of the war’s conclusion, “and not altogether easy to understand.”38 The war did indeed end with German forces deep in enemy territory on both fronts – a scenario that was historically unique.39 The retreat of the German army did take place in reasonably good order, at least until it reached the German frontier. The Socialists, some of whose leaders were Jews, did come to power at the war’s end. The civilian government, with Erzberger in the lead, did sign the armistice agreement, whose provisions turned out to be much harsher than Ludendorff had hoped.

  The “stab in the back” played as well on central features of the relationship between the home front and the fighting front: the tensions between the two theaters of war; the home front’s exhaustion, which no one denied; and the inextricable link between productivity at home and the performance of the troops in the field. The myth also spoke to themes that had informed the “spirit of 1914,” insofar as the collapse of the great community of national resolve could be traced now to the machinations of elements that had never really belonged to it.40

  The Dolchstoss was nonetheless a shameless exercise in evasion and denial. It was calculated to deflect blame for defeat away from the parties who were responsible for it. At the forefront of this group stood the army’s leadership, whose decisions had been based on fantastic beliefs about the endurance of civilians and soldiers alike. The arrogant miscalculation of the soldiers – what one is tempted to call the Frontstoss, or “stab from the front” – was a decisive factor in 1918, when the Ludendorff Offensive failed. Their miscalculation had also been decisive in 1917, when the submarine offensive failed, and in 1916, when the Verdun offensive and Hindenburg Program intensified the ordeal of the army and the home front – and, most fatefully, in 1914, when the failure of the Schlieffen Plan dashed hopes for the only kind of war that the Germans could hope to win against the coalition that they had chosen to fight.

  1 David Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics (Oxford, 1988).

  2 Lancelot L. Farrar, Jr., Divide and Conquer: German Efforts to Conclude a Separate Peace, 1914–1918 (New York, 1978); Wolfgang Steglich (ed.), Die Friedensversuche der kriegführenden Mächte im Sommer und Herbst 1917 (Stuttgart, 1984).

  3 Wolfgang Steglich (ed.), Der Friedensappell Papst Benedikts XV. vom 1 August 1917 und die Mittelmächte (Stuttgart, 1970).

  4 Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War.

  5 Ritter, Sword and Scepter, III.

  6 Wilhelm Ernst Winterhager, Mission für den Frieden: Europäische Mächtepolitik und dänische Friedensvermittlung im Ersten Weltkrieg, vom August 1914 bis zum italienischen Kriegseintritt Mai 1915 (Stuttgart, 1984).

  7 Thomas Boghardt, The Zimmermann Telegram: Intelligence, Diplomacy and America’s Entry into World War I (Annapolis, MD, 2012).

  8 Stevenson, The First World War, 199; cf. Wolfgang Steglich, Die Friedenspolitik der Mittelmächte 1917/18 (Stuttgart, 1964).

  9 Gerhard Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk: Das Problem des “Militarismus” in Deutschland (4 vols., Munich, 1954–68), IV, 345.

  10 Rod Paschall, The Defeat of Imperial Germany, 1917–1918 (New York, 1989).

  11 Michael Geyer, “Rückzug und Zerstörung 1917,” in Hirschfeld, Krumeich, and Renz, Die Deutschen an der Somme, 163–78.

  12 Bruce Gudmundsson, Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914–1918 (New York, 1989).

  13 David Zabecki, Steel Wind: Colonel Georg Bruchmüller and the Birth of Modern Artillery (Westport, CT, 1994).

  14 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIV, 68.

  15 Correlli Barnett, The Swordbearers: Supreme Command in the First World War (Bloomington, IN, 1975), 282.

  16 Cited in Klein et al., Deutschland im Ersten Weltkrieg, III, 236.

  17 David Zabecki, The German 1918 Offensives: A Case Study of the Operational Level of War (New York, 2006). See also Joseph Gies, Crisis 1918: The Leading Actors, Strategies, and Events in the German Gamble for Total Victory on the Western Front (New York, 1974).

  18 Klein et al., Deutschland im Ersten Weltkrieg, III, 260.

  19 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIV, 300–464.

  20 Wilhelm Deist, “Die Unruhen in der Marine 1917/18,” in Deist, Militär, Staat und Gesellschaft, 165–84.

  21 Wolfgang Kruse, “Krieg und Klassenheer: Zur Revolutionierung der deutschen Armee im Ersten Weltkrieg,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996), 530–61.

  22 Wilhelm Deist, “Der militärische Zusammenbruch des Kaiserreichs: Zur Realität der ‘Dolchstosslegende,’” in Deist, Militär, Staat und Gesellschaft, 219.

  23 Kruse, “Krieg und Klassenheer,” 556–7.

  24 Michael S. Neiberg, The Second Battle of the Marne (Indianapolis, 2008).

  25 Deist, “Verdeckter Militärstreik im Kriegsjahr 1918?” in Wolfram Wette (ed.), Der Krieg des kleinen Mannes: Eine Militärgeschichte von unten (Munich, 1992), 146–67; Deist, “Der militärische Zusammenbruch.”

  26 Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2008).

  27 Benjamin Ziemann,
“Enttäuschte Erwartungen und kollektive Erschöpfung: Die deutschen Soldaten an der Westfront auf dem Weg zur Revolution,” in Jörg Duppler and Gerhard P. Groß (eds.), Kriegsende 1918: Ereignis, Wirkung, Nachwirkung (Munich, 1999), 181.

  28 Scott Stephenson, The Final Battle: Soldiers of the Western Front and the German Revolution of 1918 (Cambridge, 2009), 1–66.

  29 Leo Haupts, Deutsche Friedenspolitik 1918–1919: Eine Alternative zur Machtpolitik des Ersten Weltkrieges (Düsseldorf, 1976); Klaus Schwabe, Deutsche Revolution und Wilson-Friede: Die amerikanische und deutsche Friedensstrategie zwischen Ideologie und Machtpolitik (Düsseldorf, 1971).

  30 Quoted by Nebelin, Ludendorff, 466.

  31 “Ein ernster Aufruf aus dem Felde,” Die Volkswacht (Freiburg im Breisgau), July 21, 1916.

  32 Rainer Sammet, “Dolchstoss”: Deutschland und die Auseinandersetzung mit der Niederlage im Ersten Weltkrieg (1918–1933) (Berlin, 2003), 202.

  33 Boris Barth, Dolchstoßlegenden und politische Desintegration: Das Trauma der deutschen Niederlage im Ersten Weltkrieg 1914–1933 (Düsseldorf, 2003), 218.

  34 Barth, Dolchstoßlegenden, 214.

  35 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (New York, 2004), 203.

  36 Bernd W. Seiler, “‘Dolchstoß’ und ‘Dolchstoßlegende,’” Zeitschrift für deutsche Sprache 22 (1966), 1–20.

  37 In addition to Barth, Dolchstoßlegenden, and Sammet, “Dolchstoss,” see Ulrich Heinemann, Die verdrängte Niederlage: Politische Öffentlichkeit und Kriegsschuldfrage in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen, 1983); Joachim Petzold, Die Dolchstoßlegende: Eine Geschichtsfälschung im Dienst des deutchen Imperialismus und Militarismus (Berlin, 1963).

  38 Klaus Mann, Der Wendepunkt: Ein Lebensbericht (Berlin, 1960), 63.

  39 Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat, 191.

  40 Martin Schöning, Versprengte Gemeinschaft: Kriegsroman und intellektuelle Mobilisation in Deutschland 1914–1933 (Göttingen, 2009).

  7 The war endures

  George Kennan fashioned an indelible label for the First World War when he called it “the great seminal catastrophe of this century.”1 It is a fitting characterization. This great conflict destroyed the old European order and let loose political storms that required another world war to calm them. It inaugurated the “short twentieth century,” spawning the ideological divisions that defined the political geography of Europe until the close of the era in 1989.2 In the many European lands that were locked in combat, the Great War demolished millions of lives, squandered untold riches, and left few phases of human existence untouched for the worse.

  However broadly the effort is cast, describing the repercussions of this terrible war in a single European land is an exercise in disproportion, which can only plead for pardon on the grounds that a more comprehensive history would require a much different – and much longer – book. In deference to the war’s more comprehensive impact, the question nonetheless insists on at least a summary hearing: was the German experience of this war different or special in any significant way? The question itself is complex. It invokes issues of comparative costs, privation, and suffering, as well as military performance; and its implications reach well beyond the four years in which the battles raged. By way of an epilogue, the following brief remarks confront the general terms in which the German experience of the Great War might be set into two analytical contexts. The one pertains to the experience of war in other belligerent countries, the other to a broader chronological span of German history, during which the war’s bitter legacy played out.

  The war elsewhere

  The general patterns of mobilizing for war were similar everywhere.3 From Great Britain to Russia, economies and societies improvised to accommodate the voracious appetites of industrial warfare. No belligerent country was exempt from the sorts of upheavals that defined the German experience of war. Armies initially claimed millions of men from field and factory, until the prolongation of combat revealed that some kinds of factories were no less essential to the war than were the armies themselves. This truth then dictated the rapid reorganization of economies and societies under the state’s bureaucratic auspices, the ruthless redirection of human and material resources into manufacturing and operating the tools of war. While the attendant dislocations offered opportunities to some categories of workers, such as women, the disruptions were general. They bore with special force on the food supply, which became an early object of commercial warfare, even as agriculture relinquished its manpower and animals to the armies and its fertilizers to the makers of munitions. Anxiety about food became a staple feature of war on the home front, like fear for the physical safety of loved ones. So did inflation, the issue of unbridled military demand, irrepressible public expenditures, and the reluctance of public authorities to tax already beleaguered populaces. At home these tribulations were calculated to breed exhaustion, discontent, and protest, which accumulated foremost in groups, such as the labor movement, whose grievances and disaffections antedated the war. The battle front offered its own tribulations, which bred their own characteristic modes of discontent and protest. But armies in the field were intimately bound to the societies that succored them from home. The battlefield was the ultimate measure of the home front’s ordeal, for the combat strength of field armies registered faithfully the strains of mobilization at home. The war eventuated in the collapse of armies at the front and the collapse of governments at home. The empires of the Romanovs, Habsburgs, and Osmanlis thus joined the empire of the Hohenzollerns as crown witnesses to another axiom of this war: that revolution at home was the price of a great power’s military defeat on the field of battle.

  The strains of industrial war challenged everywhere the moral and material bonds that held states and societies together. Some belligerents were better organized than others to withstand the ordeal, however. The war placed a premium on the capacity of belligerent states to generate and channel resources to military ends. This capacity in turn correlated with a variety of circumstances that social scientists and historians have analyzed broadly in metaphors of “development” or “modernization.” Whatever it is called, the process suggests several propositions. Waging protracted industrial war required – one is tempted to say by definition – an established and well-articulated industrial base to supply huge quantities of essential military materials, chiefly metals and chemicals. Mobilizing production rapidly for war far exceeded the capacities of the market alone; it required an administrative apparatus with the competence and power to redirect human and material resources for military use – as well as to manage agricultural shortages. This vast administrative undertaking overtaxed the limits of bureaucratic compulsion; it demanded, as John Horne has argued, a “balance of coercion and persuasion.”4 The effectiveness of mobilization depended to a large degree on the assent and cooperation of the populaces with whose aid – and in whose name – the war was being prosecuted. Durable popular support for the war in turn correlated with some significant degree of civic integration, a general acceptance of the state’s legitimacy, and a sense of common moral obligation among a society’s constituent groups, whether or not civic obligation corresponded to institutionalized participation in government.

  Martial virtues belonged somewhere in this catalogue. In its principal theaters, however, the First World War offered little reward for the virtues that had distinguished soldiers of earlier eras. Strategic virtuosity, operational flair, cavalry charges, and other battlefield heroics did not decide this war. The potentially heroic moment passed early, and unfulfilled, in the fall of 1914. The skills that the war thereafter demanded of soldiers were organizational; and they pertained as much to questions of industrial management as they did to the movement of troops and supplies. Whether military officers oversaw railroad schedules, manpower allocations, labor relations, or the supply of fertilizer, they became central figures in the management of civilian economic affairs. Civil–military relations often revolved t
herefore, in Germany and elsewhere, as much around disputes over war contracts as strategic priorities.

  Some statistics speak to the common strains of war, as well as to the differing capacities of the belligerent states to manage the ordeal (see Table 7). These figures require caution. They cannot be precise. Some of them reflect the work of scholars in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, and, given the formidable difficulties of collecting the statistics of war, most of the numbers were (and remain) educated guesses. Given the nature of combat, it was impossible to determine precise number of military casualties, while the contribution of the war to civilian deaths was also difficult to estimate. The figures for Russia are particularly misleading, for most of them exclude losses and costs incurred in the war’s immediate aftermath of revolution and civil war. If these broader costs are figured in, Russian civilian and military losses probably exceeded those of all the rest of Europe combined. The money costs are figured in 1914 US dollars – when $440 purchased a Ford Runabout (when a gallon of gas cost a dime) and $4 purchased a pair of shoes, $5 a pair of young men’s trousers, and $12 a bicycle.5 Total US federal expenditures in 1914 comprised $726,000,000.