Old Knowledge and New Research: A Summary of the Conference on the Fischer Controversy 50 Years On

The conference to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht took place in October 2011, at the German Historical Institute (GHI) in London. It drew participants from three distinct generations of historians: those in their late sixties and seventies who had lived through the Fischer controversy as a defining moment in their careers. The next generation, often their students, in their forties and fifties, established scholars, many holders of chairs, who made a different contribution: robust, active, skeptical of the prevailing certainties, engaged in work to revise what the older generation regard as established and unquestionable – the ‘main’ responsibility of the German Empire for the outbreak of the First World War. Finally a third generation of young historians from Germany, Britain and the USA watched intently the spectacle of the academic version of the passage of the generations. Their contribution both in formal papers and discussion shows that the issues Fischer first raised still attract very able young scholars. The Fischer controversy not only drew an active crowd for the opening session; it kept it to the end. The majority of participants stayed for the entire programme, a tribute to the success of the conference.

I had agreed with Annika Mombauer, John Röhl and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, the organizers of the conference, that I could not give a paper, since I left the field – the origins of the First World War – a very long time ago. I agreed instead to provide a summary of the main themes from the point of view of somebody who lectures on the period and knows the issues but has no recent experience of archival work in the field. What I had not foreseen was that the conference would devote a day to Fritz Fischer and the ‘Fischer controversy’ and then two days to new research and new points of view on the decisions to go to war of all the Great Powers. By the first evening I had 18 pages of handwritten notes and ended with more than 30 by the final session on the Saturday. The following account of the conference can only sketch the outlines of an event of extraordinary richness and variety, but it may help those who missed the occasion to know some of the many places where the conference broke new ground. Since many of the most remarkable contributions have been selected for this volume, I shall not attempt to cover all the panels and papers, but concentrate on the issues that made Fischer famous in 1961 and which continue to keep his book alive: the issue of German guilt for the outbreak of the Fist World War.

The day devoted to Fritz Fischer himself and the impact of the book produced a remarkable and unexpected outcome: a collective portrait of Fischer and his work habits. It began with Richard Evans’ confession that Fischer’s lecture at Oxford in 1967 had made him into a historian of Germany. The sight of all the grandest figures in Oxford crammed into an overfull hall, some of them forced to sit on the floor, to hear Fischer, convinced the young Evans that German history must have powerful attractions. Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann shared his memories of the early 1960s in Hamburg where he served as an Assistent to Fischer during the publication of the book and its aftermath, which included shouting matches with Fischer’s senior colleague, Egmont Zechlin. Hartmut Pogge gave us the details of the very odd reception the book had. The storm of rage from the German historical profession almost without exception met an almost equally enthusiastic wave of approval from the journalists, especially Rudolf Augstein and Der Spiegel, who came to believe in Germany’s Alleinschuld [exclusive guilt]. Events of 1961 played their part: the Eichmann Trial began in April 1961, the controversy about Hans Globke who served as Adenauer’s Staatssekretär in the Bundeskanzleramt even though he had helped to write the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and in August 1961 the Berlin Wall began to be built. Against this background Fischer’s book caused a sensation. Yet, as Hartmut Pogge pointed out, by Christmas 1961, only half the original edition of 3000 copies had been sold.

The book itself has had a strange history. As the late Nicholas Richardson observed, ‘a classic is a book you can quote without having read’. The Fischer conference revealed how truly that observation applied to Griff nach der Weltmacht. The controversy concentrated on the first three chapters which Fischer intended as an introduction to the remaining 800 pages. The main object of the book, Fischer’s assertion of the absolutely unwavering intention of influential Germans in the government, military and business communities to secure German hegemony on the continent of Europe, provoked less debate in the 1960s. The burning issue was: did the Kaiser’s Germany cause the war in 1914? In the discussion which followed Hartmut Pogge’s and Geoff Eley’s papers on the wider ‘discursive landscape’ of 1914, the conference participants agreed that Fischer made three made major contributions:

his provocative view of the German part in the July Crisis of 1914;

his account of German war aims from 1914 to 1918;

his assertion of the continuity of those German war aims from the First to the Second World War.

There was a heated discussion of the book’s intentions and especially on the issue of the extent to which Fischer made moral judgments.

The second panel of the first day examined the impact of the Fischer controversy in France, the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic. John Keiger described the complex political background of de Gaulle’s new bonapartist Fifth Republic and the rapprochement between de Gaulle and Adenauer. De Gaulle hoped to offset his increasingly strained relations with US President Kennedy and British Prime Minister Macmillan by an understanding with Adenauer. De Gaulle had no interest in historical works that might upset the German Chancellor. In the French historical profession there was no reaction to Fischer’s work. The French archives on the period only opened in 1964; hence no these d’État was possible on the issues of the causes of the First World War until the 1970s, nor was there much urge to write one. The ‘cultural turn’ in French historical studies made traditional diplomatic history – ‘what chap A said to chap B’, as Michael Howard described it – seem dry and irrelevant. The prestige of the great Pierre Renouvin and his huge output spread over the field like a giant tree under whose shadow nothing grew. His Histoire des relations internationales in four volumes appeared in 1954 and for younger French scholars there seemed to be nothing further to say. Renouvin in effect absolved the French decision-makers from any responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War and hence made further research irrelevant.

Joshua Sanborn argued that Fischer’s book appeared in the Khrushchev ‘thaw’ and made a favorable impression not least because it supported Lenin’s view in Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism by emphasizing, as Fischer does throughout the book, that commercial motives lay behind the Mitteleuropa schemes from Bethman Hollweg’s ‘September Memorandum’ to the annexations planned in the Treaty of Brest Litovsk. Post-1989 Russian historiography is hardly known yet in the West. Much of it emphasizes the importance of the Balkans in Imperial planning, a theme that also recurred throughout the conference.

Matthew Stibbe fitted the reaction to Griff nach der Weltmacht into a chronology of the political evolution of the GDR in the 1960s. March 1964 to October 1964 turn out to have been the key months, during which Rudolf Augstein defended Fischer in Der Spiegel by showing that his findings of German guilt in 1914 for the war and the continuity of war aims between the Kaiser and Hitler explain the origins of the Cold War. At the Tagung der deutschen Historiker in the GDR in 1964 Jürgen Kuczynski defended Fischer’s factual and disinterested approach to German history. Fritz Klein had written to Fischer in 1962 and Fischer in turn invited Klein and other East German historians like Joachim Petzold and Willibald Gutsche to visit Hamburg.

Professor Dominic Lieven, in the discussion after the panel, drew parallels with the complex centenary of 1917 to be expected in Putin’s Russia. There would be the same interaction of Soviet and post-Soviet historiography, especially in relation to the role of German imperialism in 1917–18 and its part in the Russian revolution.

The first day also included a round table of Zeitzeugen, colleagues who were there when the book was written. The late Imanuel Geiss, who died on 20 February 2012, could not attend but added his recollections in a written communication. Together Hartmut Pogge, Helmut Bley who had been Zechlin’s Assistant, Bernd Sösemann and Gerd Krumeich exchanged memories. As they did so, an extraordinary, collective portrait of Fritz Fischer began to emerge. After the conference, Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann sent me a description of how Geiss worked with Fischer:

The documents which Fischer had selected and researched were ordered and organised by another research student and then fed to Geiss at his small typewriter. The emerging text of the first chapters was the result of Fischer cooperating with his two research students. ¹

Thus the great work emerged as a collective labor. As Hartmut Pogge noted in his obituary of Fischer in the Independent of 13 December 1999: ‘He drew great strength from his willing collaborators, including his wife, and should perhaps have been a bit more generous with his acknowledgements.’

Gerd Krumreich recalled a visit by Fischer to Göttingen when he was a student in 1967. The students gathered afterwards and began to discuss Auschwitz and how such a thing could have happened. Bernd Sösemann recalled similar experiences. Helmut Bley observed that Egmont Zechlin, one of Fischer’s critics, had been in the SS which made him vulnerable, as indeed Fischer himself was as a former SS member.

Five panels presented new research on British, French, Russian, Italian and Serbian pre-war planning, policy changes and the events of the July Crisis itself. Much revision and revisionism marked these panels and a very different assessment of ‘war guilt’ began to emerge. The Germans look less guilty; the others conspicuously more, but one thing strikes me in reflecting on how and why Fischer’s view remained so unquestioned. A peculiar asymmetry in the study of the causes of the First World War has its origins in the way the Second World War ended. No modern state has ceased to exist so utterly and in such calamitous circumstances as Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich. In the years after 1945 the Allies and the Soviets grabbed from the ruins what records and files they could find and randomly shipped them back to their respective capitals. Thus the entire archive of the Reichsmarineamt of Imperial Germany ended in the basement of the Admiralty in London under the steam pipes where small groups of scholars and naval officers tried to make sense of what they had. The assets of the Reichsbank, including so-called ‘Melmer deliveries’, after SS Hautpsturmführer Bruno Melmer, the SS officer who brought the loot from the concentration camps to Berlin, turned up in a cave in Thuringia and the ledgers of the Reichsbank ended in the US Treasury. The Russian Kommandatura carted the papers of whatever ministries and agencies ended in their zone of occupation onto flat cars that carried them to Moscow. The study of Nazi Germany began at once and by the end of 1945 had begun to create the basis for war crimes trials. The First World War and its causes had no such priority. Scholars like F.H. Hinsley and Howard Ehrmann without much support managed to make micro-film copies of small parts of Imperial naval archives in the 1950s and when the Federal Republic became a NATO ally the Admiralty returned the whole archive – minus the submarine sections – to the new Military Historical Archive in Freiburg im Breisgau. Thus, Fritz Fischer and his team of Assistenten in the late 1950s had a unique chance to see for the first time documents on 1914 which nobody knew existed. Thus Griff nach der Weltmacht caused a double sensation by its arguments but even more by the new documents on which those arguments rested. Austria-Hungary had ceased to exist in 1918 and the poor shriveled remnant of that Empire, the Austrian Republic, divided like Germany into four Allied occupation zones, was too busy telling lies about its enthusiastic Nazi past to worry about what the Habsburg Monarchy did in 1914.

A long and very lively tradition of German revisionist writing – some of which was of excellent quality – made way for an extraordinary wave of research into Germany's own responsibility for the conflict – a phenomenon that has no parallel, not even in the Soviet Union, which did seek to discredit the imperialist designs of Tsarism, but never produced a body of scholarship on this scale or at this level of sophistication. The second asymmetry is between the Fischer-thesis style in Germany, which sought out every document that seemed to impugn German statesmen, and France and Britain which assumed (with a few notable exceptions) the complete innocence of their own politicians in the disaster of 1914. Britain and France differed in that British scholars, fascinated by the grand narrative of Britain's departure from isolation and entry into the great family of states that would fight both world wars, produced a huge historiography on the subject, whereas the French historical profession after 1945 showed very little interest in 1914 as a problem in French political/diplomatic history. Such few studies as there were mostly adopted an ‘innocentiste' approach – dissenters like Jules Isaac were ignored and given the cold shoulder treatment. The French studies of the 1960s–90s focused mainly on opinion, social resonance and the emergence of the union sacrée. Political studies were rare and had little impact on broader debates. In post-Fischer Germany, on the other hand, the claim of moral superiority associated with the exposure of German culpability meant that any dissenting viewpoint risked being branded revisionist, conservative or reactionary. A further important point is that German Fischerite scholarship was for the most part entirely ignorant of (and uninterested in) the policies or politics of the other great powers and thus had no way of verifying the extent of German responsibility for the outbreak of war.

Just as France had no interest in 1914 in particular and diplomatic history in general, the Soviet Union under Stalin and Khrushchev had little patience with ‘bourgeois historians seeking objectivity’. Thus the German role in 1914 became much more prominent and much more thoroughly studied and debated, offered much more promising subjects for PhD students than anywhere else on the continent. Two German modern histories came to be written at the same time: the history of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, and the history of Imperial Germany; two terrible wars on the same European continent seemed to merge into one.

The result was a huge imbalance in what could be known: much too much on Germany, hardly anything on Austria, little on France, little on Imperial Russia and too much on Britain. Well ordered British archives in an accessible language attracted graduates of American and English-speaking universities in the Commonwealth and a cohort of young German speakers. Both groups began to get jobs in the British system during its decade of growth (1960 to 1970 saw the foundation of new ‘plate-glass’ campuses at York, Lancaster, Warwick etc) and produced a very large literature on Germany from 1870 to 1945. Anglo–German studies flourished and made many careers.

The GHI Conference of 2011 represented an extraordinary attempt to right this imbalance. As I listened to the rich and stimulating new work, I realized that the existing model that I have had in my head and in my lecture notes for a generation needs serious adjustment. Here are some preliminary thoughts on what has changed and what has not:

Fischer’s book and its central theme of continuity between the First and Second Wars and continuity of war aims between 1914 and 1918 remains intact in a broad sense. 1914 to 1945 marks a kind of Thirty Years War about German political, ideological and economic hegemony in Europe. But was Imperial Germany more responsible for the outbreak of the First War than other Great Powers?

Austrian policy has – oddly enough – become more understandable as new research on Serbia by Christopher Clark shows how involved the Serbian government was in supporting terrorism. The chain of errors and miscalculations that led to the murder of the Archduke, and the peculiar combination of belligerence and pessimism that went into the Habsburg Monarchy’s war expectations, has its equivalents elsewhere.

The Russian turn to Serbia and away from its traditional alliance with Bulgaria, the role of the Russian General Staff, the death of Stolypin and the rise of a party of hawks made Russia much more willing to gamble on a war in the Balkans under what it saw as favorable circumstances.

The French assessment of Russian power corresponded closely with the German. Both states overestimated how well Russia had recovered from the defeat in 1904–5 in the Russo–Japanese War and that overestimation led Germany and France to conclude that now or never was the right policy. Overestimation led the French general staff to conclude that their best chance to defeat Germany was in a war that started in the Balkans where German forces would have to support their Austrian allies. German overestimation of Russian power and the danger of an ever bigger Russian army, an ever more developed rail network and a steadily declining Habsburg ally, produced the same conclusion with identical consequences: now or never. The German reaction, the Schlieffen Plan, turned a local war into a European and then World War. The equally dangerous French reaction, the readiness to see Russian mobilization against Austria as a casus foederis, has received much less attention than it deserves.

All the Great Powers looked at the European balance of power in the first decade of the twentieth century with a mixture of optimism on a substratum of anxiety. The French feared that the Russians would weaken as they had in 1908–9. The Russians feared that the Serbs would weaken and accept an Austrian ultimatum as in 1912. The Germans feared that the Austrians would weaken and the British feared that the French would weaken if Germany threatened to attack them. The French understandably could not be sure that the British would come to their aid in the event of a German attack on them.

Research by various participants began to come together at this point: (a) Stefan Schmidt spoke on how the French fought a ‘preventive war' – a point on which, in discussion, Gerd Krumeich agreed with him; (b) Bruce Menning and Guenther Kronenbitter spoke on the importance of the crisis of winter 1912–13 in creating a new and potentially explosive situation in the Balkans; (c) John Röhl argued that the winter of 1912 and the war council was the moment when Germany decided to ‘postpone' the world war it was planning to unleash; (d) There was also a very interesting session on Fischer's account of German war aims, in which the papers took a broadly revisionist line, suggesting that German war aims in the east were actually rather traditional aims based on relationships with a network of national principalities and in no way resembled Nazi plans.

By this stage in the GHI conference, the German ‘guilt’ in the causes of the First World War had been well and truly revised, but there was a ‘German problem’ which all the papers, good as they were, seemed to me to ignore. One can equate the role of the Schlieffen Plan with the plans of the other Powers, though the violation of Belgian neutrality seems to me to have been unusually risky but, perhaps, no less nefarious than the Russian encouragement of Serbian aggression against Austria-Hungary.

Beyond the decisions taken by the Powers, a deeper issue needs to be recognized. There was a German problem which would have existed even if German policy had been less aggressive. Germany had become a super-power and threatened to dominate Europe for the same reason it dominates the European Union today: the size of its population and the superiority of its economy and technology. By 1914 the German Empire produced more of everything that modern states need than all the rest of its continental rivals put together. Its high quality products, its excellent engineers and scientists created a colossus at the center of the continent that would have made its neighbors nervous whatever sort of government it had. By 1914 it had surpassed the British Empire not in capital but in technology and the instruments of power. The British knew it and were alarmed.

In addition, between 1870 and 1914 industrialization in Europe, Japan and the USA created an imbalance between developed and undeveloped regions that made it possible for small European states (Belgium, Holland, Portugal) to govern huge empires in Africa and Asia. The white world had the guns, the rest had spears. This imbalance made colonialism possible and the fixed borders of European states made it desirable. Bismarck wanted all other states to have colonies to take their minds off European conflict. The two imbalances made it hard for the old balance of power politics to operate. German power could not be contained. How Europe would cope with the new German super-power was the European question. It still is, but under Angela Merkel it is in safer hands.

The declining empires created areas of unrest on the periphery of Europe, of which the Ottoman decline was the worst. The old diplomatic history rightly talked of the ‘Eastern Question’ – a place where underdeveloped and unstable states and statelets emerged, fought each other and sucked their larger neighbors into their quarrels – and of ‘the power vacuum’. The absurd and frivolous decision of the government of Giovani Giolitti and its otherwise very cautious Foreign Secretary, the Sicilian grandee, the Marchese di San Giuliano, to invade Libya in 1911 embodies both imbalances. Italy too wanted its ‘place in the sun’. The Italian War destabilized the Balkans, led to the first and second Balkan wars and thus to July 1914.

Finally two other long-term trends need to be built into our explanatory structures: First, the crisis of the European aristocracy: from 1869 to 1914 world agricultural production expanded enormously. The steamship and railroad made it possible to ship vast quantities of grain, meat etc from the USA, Canada, Argentina, or Russia into the heartland of old Europe. Since the European aristocracy owned land, the combination of cheaper and better imports and the great agrarian depression of 1873 to 1897 threatened the status of the aristocracy and gentry from Hertfordshire to the Bukovina. Even after the recovery in the late 1890s the debts of the magnates and the precarious economic foundation of the schlachta/gentry reduced their self-confidence and tied them to the banks (in central and eastern Europe frequently Jewish ones at that). The old aristocracies thought that a short victorious war would solidify their position in the great struggle against the forces of change.

Secondly, mass society: urbanization, the new press, the telegraph, the telephone, the railroad, the streetcar, bicycle and typewriter etc. Out of all this came new parties and pressure groups that further undermined the hold of the old nobility on the levers of power. Nationalism is a product of the new print culture and mass society. The growth of modern politics, new parties, the extension of the suffrage, the explosion of the mass press and for the first time ‘public opinion’ unsettled decision makers in Whitehall as on the banks of the Neva. New scholarship on Russia shows how jittery the decision-makers in Moscow were when the Russian chauvinist press demanded military action and the sooner the better.

The consequences of these two trends came out in the underlying fear of the rulers in every country of their own people, of the other states, of the future. Germany embodied more than any other state all these trends. Its leadership feared the loss of control and an end to aristocratic dominance. All the other states feared German power, its militarism and efficiency and thus whatever its ally did, Germany got the blame. Its leadership believed the state to be weaker than it was – hence disastrous plans like the Schlieffen Plan – and this ghastly chain of events in July 1914, in which the continental war became a world war, ended in the trenches.

Fischer saw this phenomenon though, perhaps, in too narrow a context. All the Great Powers suffered from these insecurities and changes. The real German problem arose from bad government. No other Great Power had such inadequate decision-making machinery and so unstable an executive power. Backward Russia had a cabinet and it met to talk about war. Backward Austria-Hungary with its absurd dualist structure had a Crown Council. Only Germany had no such machinery. There was no place to discuss whether the Schlieffen Plan was the right strategy. Had the Schlieffen Plan worked, a German victory like that of 1870 might well have occurred on the Western Front and Bethman Hollweg’s September Memorandum would have been realized. Can the German Empire be blamed for the long war of attrition which actually occurred? Before the conference at the German Historical Institute, I would have said ‘yes’. Now I am not sure.