Dennis Showalter and the study of the First World War

I. Clash of cultures

‘The relationship between Imperial Germany and Tsarist Russia before 1914 was a complex mixture of attraction and repulsion’. That first sentence of Dennis Showalter’s revolutionary, path-breaking, and deeply influential Tannenberg: Clash of Empires says almost everything a reader needs to know about Dennis’s approach to the problem of war in 1914. It reveals Dennis’s ability to see war in the same philosophical sense that Carl von Clausewitz saw it, as an interaction of opposites, a violent contest not only between political systems and military forces, but between cultural systems and ways of viewing the world. We see from the first few words that Tannenberg, in Dennis’s mind, was about much more than the fateful decisions of commanders on the spot. It was also about a collision between titanic empires that might not have happened if the attraction had been able to overcome the revulsion in the heated months of July and August 1914.

In other words, Dennis saw the essential truth that wars are fought between societies and cultures as much as they are between armies. Armies are reflections of the social and cultural assumptions a given nation-state makes. Its strategy becomes, in effect, its theory about how it can best secure its safety and pursue what it has constructed as its interests. To a polymath and holistic thinker like Dennis, even attitudes towards the ballet and prostitution can become important lenses through which we can see the whole. ¹

In this article, I will rely mostly on Dennis’s two great works on the German Army in the years prior to the First World War and in the war’s opening phases. Railroads and Rifles, published in 1975, appeared at a time when Dennis recognized a ‘lack of modern studies of the Prussian army as a military instrument’. ² Of course, since then, the scholarship has corrected that lacuna, filling in the gap with a wide range of books and articles of varying quality. Tannenberg: Clash of Empires anticipated and, in some ways, foreshadowed the so-called trans-national turn in history, looking at the battle not only for its military dimensions but what it might say about shared cultural assumptions, political systems, and the interaction of forces that easily transcended national boundaries. ³ Neither Germanophile nor Germanophobe, Dennis was able in these works to analyse the history of this complex state and nation with as much objectivity and distance as is possible for a member of the historical profession. ⁴

Perhaps the most important lesson from Dennis’s work for the present is that battlefield victories, even ones as lopsided as Tannenberg, do not produce strategic victory unless they are tied to a political, strategic, and cultural system well adapted to profit from them. As I argue at the end, Tannenberg in this way differs from the victories Dennis analysed in Railroads and Rifles. The latter produced the unification of Germany that the Prussians desired; Tannenberg instead set the Germans on a 30-year period of total war from which they would emerge defeated, occupied, and divided.

II. The challenge

It is not easy to write about the German Army in the First World War. For one, we all know what comes next, and to write about the years 1914-18 is to wrestle with the question of whether or not the German Army’s behaviour, especially in the east, previews the horrors of 1939-45. Serious and talented scholars can and do disagree on that question. ⁵ With that question comes the corollary question of explaining why Germany, more than any other state, began not one but two world wars and prosecuted them in ways that strike us (and struck many contemporaries) as completely separated from any serious attempt to pursue a reasonable political objective. Scholars have presented various explanations for this phenomenon. At their best, these studies are intellectual and thoughtful. ⁶ Sometimes they focus on the military expressions of the Sonderweg, the special German way (neither western nor eastern) that led Germans to organize their state and society in ways that made them distinct from the countries they fought. ⁷ In other cases, this type of analysis is much more negative, depicting the Germany of 1914 to 1918 as more devilish, more willing to take risks, or simply trapped in a kind of national sociopathy, seeing enemies everywhere where none really existed. ⁸

At their worst, however, studies of the German Army are simplistic, arguing that some pathology existed only in Germany. Sometimes, this pathology expresses itself in a kind of oddly grudging admiration of the supposedly unique German ‘genius for war’. ⁹ At their very worst, they become a study in what Dennis himself liked to call, in his own inimitable style, ‘Wehrmacht penis envy’. ¹⁰ This syndrome describes a desire among amateurs and some professionals alike for the dominance of military officers over meddling and misinformed civilian politicians, the attendant permission given to the army by German society to ignore the rules and norms of war, and the hyperexpression of masculinity as part of the warrior ethos. It also meant in some cases studying the tactical and operational prowess of the army apart from the values and interests of the state that sent it into combat. We can dismiss some of this as the wild-eyed fantasies of militarists and racists, but it creeps into legitimate scholarship from time to time as well. We can also understand it as a product of the Vietnam War period in which Dennis was writing.

Moreover, scholars of this period of German history have to walk the fine line of humanizing the German Army without excusing its behaviour. Here, of course, I do not mean dividing a supposedly ‘good’ German Army of the First World War from the genocidal one of the Second. Worse still, I do not mean dividing a ‘good’ or honourable Wehrmacht from the evil German paramilitaries of the Second World War like the SS or the Gestapo. ¹¹ Nor do I mean depicting the German Army as a force of Paul Bäumers, the tragic anti-hero of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, suffering as all soldiers of that war did.

By humanizing, I mean seeing the Germans of this period as men and women affected and influenced by their world just as we all are. ¹² The temptation, which Dennis quite rightly resists, is to reduce them to either murderous madmen driven by a fevered ideology and led by a psychotic group of self-styled Übermenschen or as victims of a kind, ravaged by hunger and moulded by propaganda in their youth. But to reduce them to stereotype dehumanizes them and, in a way, ends up excusing their behaviour. It also tends to put artificial brackets around the Nazi experience, comforting us that such a combination of historical factors could not repeat. By seeing the Germans of this period as Dennis does, as people only minimally in control of the forces shaping their behaviour, he reminds us that we, as humans no more or less flawed than our ancestors, are subject to the same influences and capable of making the same mistakes. In other words, our cultures influence us as much as our politics. Or, perhaps put more accurately, our culture is our politics. To separate them makes little sense. ¹³

One could trace the ‘German problem’ or ‘German question’ back to 1864 or 1808 or even as far back as Charlemagne. For our purposes, we will begin in 1914 with the battle of Tannenberg. The battle was as much myth as anything else, so named because it sat close enough to the site of the 1410 defeat of the Teutonic Knights at the hands of Poles and Lithuanians to justify treating it as an erasing of that humiliation at the hands of Slavs. The numbers seemed to back up that conclusion, with one German field army having inflicted on the defeated Russians as many as 78,000 men killed in action and 92,000 prisoners of war.

Even before we leave the first paragraph of the body of Tannenberg, we already have the answer to the question Dennis posed in his introduction, ‘Why a book about Tannenberg?’ The seemingly simple answer to that seemingly simple question is that the forces that drove the Germans and Russians to fight such a massive battle can, and well might, lead two other large states that have ambivalent feelings towards one another into war again. The more complex answer is that wars do not always happen between states and societies that despise one another or are so culturally different from one another that they cannot understand one another. Sometimes, they happen when relationships are ambiguous, as happened in 1914 between the Germans and the Russians. As John Dower also argued in a different military context, moreover, stereotyping and cultural mirroring are sufficiently malleable processes to produce both positive and negative outcomes depending on the needs of the moment. ¹⁴

No historical event is inevitable. They are the result of long-term patterns, some of them invisible to the people living through them, combined with the decisions made by imperfect human beings dealing, as Dennis reminds us, with all too real human problems like fatigue, fear, and uncertainty. ¹⁵ A Russian–German war in 1914 might never have happened if the two sides had been able to overcome both their negative and positive stereotypes about one another. Tannenberg begins with an exploration of those views and the ways that they influenced state behaviour on both sides.

Tannenberg is thus, among its other strengths, a useful and important corrective to the views of international relations theorists that the problem of the period 1914-45 was the too rapid growth of Germany in the centre of Europe. This growth certainly worried the states around Germany and caused them to ally with one another, even when their political and social systems seemed antithetical to one another. In the most famous example, Republican France and autocratic Russia came together in an Entente beginning in 1891. They consummated their unusual marriage with the opening of the beautiful Alexander III bridge over the Seine near Les Invalides in 1900. France, with customary diplomatic elegance, had named the bridge for Czar Nicholas’s father, the man who had begun the alliance from the Russian side, thus turning the bridge into a kind of symbolic dowry. Nicholas himself had laid the first stone 4 years earlier. At the opening, part of the Universal Exposition of 1900, the Czar patiently (if a bit uncomfortably) stood at attention while a French military band played La Marseillaise, an anthem dedicated to the joys of killing aristocrats.

The symbolism and the pageantry seemingly prove that a common foe, especially one growing in power like Germany, can bring two disparate states together. The point has become axiomatic to International Relations Realists, who argue that the international system naturally tends towards balances of power. The distribution of power is, to Realists, far more important than cultural beliefs or societal norms. Thus can they explain alliances like the American one with the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945 or the French one with the Russians from 1914 to 1917. The need to contain and, if necessary, fight a rising challenger is the common precondition for determining alliances.

Tannenberg does not explicitly challenge this core belief of the Realists, but it does force us to think more deeply about the importance of culture. Germany in Dennis’s eyes is far more than the sum of its power as measured by rising steel production, new battleships, or soldiers under arms. ¹⁶ It is instead a state built on contrasts, a Protestant core aiming for centralization ruling over diverse and heavily Catholic populations jealous to guard some measure of autonomy. The new Germany was also a state unsure where to look for trade partners, cultural models, and allies. The west had advanced technology and a certain appeal as states that had successfully navigated similar transitions; the south had another largely German-led state (Austria-Hungary) that nonetheless struck Prussians as too far behind the times. Then there was the east, a place where Germans ‘might dream of population shifts on a scale unseen since Genghis Khan’. ¹⁷ In the way stood Russia, a stumbling giant perhaps, but a giant nevertheless.

Thus was born the fundamental east–west dilemma of Germany, a dilemma that remains even today as German leaders debate the value of the trans-Atlantic alliance with the United States in a post–Cold War world. An energy-rich Russia remains a constant in German strategic thinking, underpinned by the abiding ambivalence inherent in German attitudes to the superpower to its east. ¹⁸ In the period 1914-18, the east–west dilemma caused a kind of split personality in German strategy, leading the Germans to concentrate in the west in 1914, the east in 1915, the west in 1916, the east in 1917, and the west again in 1918. The pattern would repeat in the Second World War with an eastern strategy in 1939, a western one in 1940, and an eastern one in 1941. Part of the dilemma, of course, is rooted in Germany’s geography, but much of it, too, is rooted (at least for the 20th century) in the kinds of mindsets the Germans inherited from the period after unification. ¹⁹

Great writers have the ability to convey complex patterns to their readers in innovative and memorable ways. Tannenberg used the wonderfully illustrative but (for many readers) challenging metaphor of the circus rider, a trickster with one foot on two horses trying to keep them moving in tandem. For Dennis, the rider was Germany and the two horses the rival states of Austria-Hungary and Russia. The key, for the rider, was to maintain a policy that allowed Germany to keep its two enormous eastern neighbours more or less on side. As long as its eastern frontier was reasonably secure, Germany could with greater confidence look west to deter both France and Britain from trying to upset the balance of power developed to Germany’s great favour in the 1860s and 1870s.

In this case Germany’s best circus rider, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, found a way to maintain the right rhythm. The Reinsurance Treaty of 1887 guaranteed the neutrality of the three great empires of Central Europe under most circumstances. There were weaknesses in the arrangement and plenty of critics, to be sure, but with Germany riding and the two ‘horses’ of Austria-Hungary and Russia moving in the same direction, German security was ensured without the need to fight any more wars. Bismarck’s dismissal in 1890 by the young and brash Kaiser Wilhelm II put a new rider in the saddle, the untested and inexperienced Leo von Caprivi. In the ensuing years, he proved far less adept at riding the horses, who were, in any case, growing tired of following the same path at the same pace.

Like all circus riding, Dennis reminds us, Bismarck’s was ultimately a trick that moved at great speed but could not sustain itself for very long. As the horses began to move apart, the new riders had to choose their horse or risk falling. The Germans ultimately chose Austria-Hungary, which gave them a central geographic position and an alliance with a leadership team that shared their basic culture, language, and outlook on the world. But the decision also increased the likelihood of conflict with Russia over ‘some damn fool thing in the Balkans’, as Bismarck himself had warned.

The point here is less the collapse of the reinsurance treaty as a long-term cause of the First World War and the necessity of fighting the Battle of Tannenberg than in Dennis’s ability to give us a mental picture to help these complex historical processes come into sharper focus. We can see both the change of jockeys from the champion rider Bismarck to the rookie von Caprivi. We can also see the inevitable collapse of the balance of power in the east as the horses drifted apart.

Dennis’s discussion of the road to Tannenberg also reminds us that historical events are not inevitable. Once again, the war of 1941-45 on the eastern front makes it alluringly easy to distort our view of the entire period as an almost preordained contest for the resources of the east. ²⁰ Tannenberg forces us to question that kind of teleology. At any one of a number of points in history – political, diplomatic, and cultural – history could have taken a different course. If it might have been too much to expect the circus rider to keep two horses in rhythm indefinitely, it is not too hard to imagine a very different future if another man had been Kaiser or if Gavrilo Princip’s pistol had jammed on that late June afternoon in Sarajevo.

III. The nature of war

The remainder of this essay honours Dennis’s long associations with military students, especially in the United States. Dennis taught at Colorado College which, by a stroke of good fortune for a generation of future Air Force officers, is located in the same city as the United States Air Force Academy. He was also a visiting professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point and the Marine Corps University at Quantico, Virginia. At all three schools, and as a guest lecturer at many others, Dennis used his talents to help cadets and officers think through the meanings of the past to help them understand the present and the future.

It was also through his teaching at the Air Force Academy that I first got to know Dennis. He was such a terrific teacher that not only would over-worked Air Force cadets audit his classes, but the faculty would as well. When Dennis taught the interdisciplinary class on the Holocaust, five faculty members, including myself, sat in the back, took pages of notes, and sometimes translated Dennis’s cultural references for the young cadets. More than two decades later, I still have that notebook and still refer to it regularly. It is important that those who have never seen Dennis teach understand just how good he was in the classroom. In his World War II class at USAFA I watched Dennis look in frustration in his bag for his ‘lesson plan’, which turned out to be a Post-It note with just three words written on it in Dennis’s indecipherable scrawl.

Before we examine the key themes in Dennis’s books as they relate to the present, we can borrow from the Clausewitzian distinction between the nature of war and the character of war. The character of war changes as ideas, technology, and politics change. The nature of war does not because certain elements within it are timeless. To fully understand war, we must understand both. Thus, for Dennis, the Prussian army’s success in the Wars of German Unification featured elements of the changing character of war that the Prussians proved ideally suited to master. They include, to borrow from his title, the development of railroads and rifles. These advances depended in turn on changes in the European economic and political structures.

But Prussian success also depended on some elements of the nature of war. Had he lived long enough to see them, Clausewitz would have recognized them in the wars of 1864-71. They include the nature of war as a duel of wills in which the Prussians were clearly superior not just to the overmatched Danes and Austrians, but also to the French. He would also have seen the main lesson that most political historians take from the wars, namely that the Prussians, under Bismarck’s guiding hand, were able to match military power to an achievable and sustainable political end state, in this case the unification of most of the German states (except Austria) under Prussian control.

Clausewitz helped to instil (and continues to instil) in the professional mind the central verity that war is the extension of policy by other means. This oft-cited bumper sticker phrase is a reminder that there is no such thing as tactical or operational victory. That side wins which can best translate its resources into military power used for an appropriate political purpose. Thus, merely having the railroads and rifles meant little, just as having B-52s and helicopters could not alone assure victory to American forces in Vietnam except where victory was measured by the quite non-political metric of men killed.

In the non-Clausewitzian world of 1914, German armies marched east without anyone really knowing why. Again, the problem was conceptual, not technological. They had written a war plan designed to build on what they knew how to do: use railroads to concentrate their forces at decisive points, then win rapid and decisive campaigns against superior forces by employing better technology on the battlefield. Exactly what those battles would achieve on the political level, they did not much consider. German war planning was, in essence, campaign planning unaligned to wider state goals. In a famous anecdote, Kaiser Wilhelm asked Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke to alter the plan at the last minute in August 1914 in order to better match the reality of the crisis. When Moltke said he could not, the Kaiser allegedly said that Moltke’s famous uncle would have given him a better answer.

Whether or not the anecdote is true, it does reveal a fundamental reality of all of the great powers in that fateful summer. None of them knew what political goals they were trying to achieve through military action. As Dennis’s friend and West Point colleague Robert Doughty clearly demonstrated, French war planning did not aim for the liberation of the ‘lost provinces’ of Alsace-Lorraine or to avenge a humiliation now more than two generations in the past. Instead, the French wrote a concentration plan to allow the commander-in-chief as much operational flexibility as possible. ²¹ Oddly, it was the British, often criticized for their lack of planning, who may have had it closest to right. They knew that they had to try to deny Germany use of the ports on the southern coast of the English Channel, temporarily subordinate their own strategy to that of the French, and buy time to build up military power from the empire.

German strategists had not thought through the political aspect of the problem of 1914 that deeply. Notably during the diplomatic crisis of July, the Germans issued the Austro-Hungarians the now famous ‘blank check’. Whatever they thought they were promising to their allies in Vienna, it is impossible to believe that German leaders were offering to fight a 4-year total war on behalf of the Habsburg Monarchy. Military planning had become so detached from political reality that not even the Kaiser and chancellor recognized the problem, as the anecdote above reveals. ²²

The now infamous war plans drawn up by Alfred von Schlieffen and modified by his successor, Helmuth von Moltke, have themselves been the subject of intense debate, including here in the pages of this journal. ²³ Now that the debate seems to have arrived at its natural conclusion, we can revisit the fundamental problem that Schlieffen and his peers had to address. If the circus rider could no longer assure a safe ride with the Austrians and the Russians, and if the Russians were allied with the French and the British, how could the German Army guarantee security? The technological advantages that Dennis analysed in Railroads and Rifles had narrowed to almost nothing between 1870 and 1914. The Germans could not count on the needle gun or even on a decisively superior rail network to guarantee them victory in the next war. Nor could Germany safely assume that size alone would produce victory as it had against Denmark or that its enemies would be as careless and error-prone as Napoleon III had been. German unification had scared the rest of Europe enough that they tried to learn the lessons and spend the money to maintain relevancy through generations of technological and conceptual change.

One of the most important problems that war planning had to solve clearly involved the difficult alliance map that appeared to leave Germany surrounded. A powerful, industrial France sat to the west and a massive, if clumsy, Russia sat to the east. The nation the German elite hated more than any other, Great Britain, sat loosely connected to those two foes. As for allies, Germany had just one, the polyglot and chaotic Austro-Hungarian Empire, which seemed to prove every year Napoleon’s maxim about the Habsburgs always being one year, one army, and one idea short. Most recently, Germany had cut off staff talks with its ally after discovering that the head of Austro-Hungarian counterintelligence, Colonel Alfred Redl, had been passing critical information to the Russians for years. ²⁴ Germany thus went to war in 1914 with the wrong war plan, written for the wrong enemy, in support of a weak ally.

A German philosopher might have helped them think their way out of the problem, but few had read him. Ironically, few generals, including those in Germany in 1914, thought much about the now axiomatic theories of Clausewitz. To borrow a phrase from modern American business theory, their capabilities became their disabilities. ²⁵ In other words, they spent far more time refining their railroad time tables and making their mobilization plans more precise than they did thinking about the ways that the military arm related to the social and political one.

Consequently, the Germans wrote not a war plan but, as Dennis describes it, ‘a staff college tour de force . . . a military myth requiring everything to go impossibly right to have a real chance of succeeding’. As a modern American staff officer might say in condescension, the Schlieffen Plan briefed well. Knowing that they could not fundamentally alter their state’s geopolitics or correct for the failings of their diplomats, the Great German General Staff fine-tuned what they could control. ‘In this context, a withdrawal into procedures, a concentration on mobilization schedules and corps-level tactics, was natural if not exactly inevitable’. Anticipating the Zuber debate over the Schlieffen Plan’s origins by decades, Dennis concluded that ‘Had [the Schlieffen Plan] not existed its equivalent would almost certainly have been designed’. ²⁶

German planners before 1914 may have been confident to the point of hubris, but they knew that success from 1864 to 1871 had come in no small part because of the speed with which Germany had been able to fight its wars. They also knew that they had been able to concentrate on one enemy at a time. A long war, with German armies widely separated across multiple fronts, did not play to German strengths, no matter how good the railroad network was or how competently German engineers could manage it. One enemy would have to be defeated before the other.

Here we come back to the core argument of the early chapters of Tannenberg. It was not geography alone that would slow the Russians down, the Germans assumed. Rather, the Germans could convince themselves that some innate inferiority in the Russian character would cause them to move too slowly or make the critical mistake at the right time. These mistakes would buy the Germans the 6 weeks they would need to move through Belgium and defeat the modern, professional French Army before shifting to the east to support Austro-Hungarian operations against the Russians. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the Germans told themselves the only story that could possibly convince them that their war plans had any chance of success. ²⁷

That story had seven-eighths of the finely honed German Army moving at a moment’s notice through small, poor Belgium and into France where it would rapidly repeat the success of Sedan in 1870, forcing the French into surrender. The remainder of the German Army, plus whatever the Austro-Hungarians could bring to play, would suffice to hold the Russians at bay while Germany shifted forces from west to east.

As a result of the assumptions built into German war planning, the German Army had become, in Dennis’s words, a ‘doomsday machine’. ²⁸ Whatever the diplomatic crisis or cause of war, Germany’s war plans would start a war against Russia, France, Great Britain, and their empires. Unable or unwilling to serve as a deterrent to maintain the status quo, it began increasingly to think of itself as Germany’s saviour, the one institution that could overcome problems at home and abroad. Supremely confident and anxious to justify the resources given to it, it began to think in grandiose terms about a single war or campaign on the 1866 or 1870 model that could, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, solve all of Germany’s problems.

Of course, as we know now, circumstances did not go ‘impossibly right’ for the Germans in August 1914. The Belgians fought harder than expected, the Austrians moved south towards Serbia rather than east towards Russia, the plan asked too much of German reservists, and, maybe most critically, the Russians did not play the role of the fool that the Germans needed. ²⁹ Instead, they mobilized with reasonable speed and efficiency, putting enough soldiers into East Prussia to win the battle at Gumbinnen in mid-August and cause a panicked German general to order his troops to flee west towards the Vistula. When news of that retreat reached Berlin, Moltke fired the commander and made the fateful decision to vest power in the east in two commanders, the able and experienced Paul von Hindenburg and the man Dennis describes as a ‘hard driving kicker of hind quarters’, the arrogant and humourless Erich Ludendorff. ³⁰ Their assumptions about the east would influence the rest of the First World War and drive many of the assumptions of the Second.

There are, of course, multiple warnings here for war planners in our own day. The need to check one’s own hubris and cultural assumptions remains the most critical. ³¹ Strategists and soldiers must be sure not only that their views of their adversary are correct, but that their assessments of their own society are also correct. Above all, no state should ever go to war for an aim that is either too ill-defined or beyond the reasonable capacity of a society to support. In 1914, the German and Russian empires went to war or, to cite Dennis one last time, war found a way, without those goals or sacrifices being well understood. No one could then have imagined what the world would look like in 1918. If they could have, they never would have chosen war in the first place. More imagination and self-awareness might have led them into making better choices.

Because the Germans did not have a political end state in mind, their appetites only grew with the eating. Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and the other ‘easterners’ became convinced that they could repeat the miracle of Tannenberg, regularly defeating larger, slower Russian armies with smaller, but more agile German ones. Even if the British and French helped to keep the Russians alive and fighting, the calculus, they were certain, would eventually work to Germany’s favour. The massive tactical success at Gorlice-Tarnow in 1915 reinforced what the Germans wanted to believe, that operational victories in the east would somehow lead to the permanent annexation of large tracts of Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian land. Only a few of them, most notably Moltke himself and his successor, Erich von Falkenhayn, saw clearly that the lack of strategic victory in the east invalidated the operational and tactical victories by keeping the two-front dilemma alive. Success in the east therefore did not produce victory on one front, but an illusory belief in the ability to win on two fronts. Call it self-delusion, victory disease, hubris, or the sunk cost fallacy as you prefer; Tannenberg was a tactical and operational victory that, paradoxically, led to wider strategic problems.

The victory at Tannenberg had other unintended consequences that ought to remind us of the dangers of overconfidence. In the first place, it reinforced in the German mind all of the negative stereotypes of slow, dim-witted Russians and clever, adept Germans. The Germans also thought they saw a fragile Russian political order that had cracked under the pressures of war in 1905 and then again in 1917. The legacies of these worldviews in two world wars need hardly be emphasized here.

Finally, although we think of wars as having clear winners and losers, the Tannenberg case provides a fascinating counterpoint. ³² The Germans ‘won’ Tannenberg in a tactical sense, inflicting far more casualties on their enemy than they themselves suffered. They also won on the operational level, forcing the Russians into retreat and securing East Prussia for the remainder of the war. But in a strategic sense, it provided no clear victory, not even after the twin triumph at the Masurian Lakes just days later. In part, the Germans could not achieve strategic victory because they had not properly set the political conditions for victory. Thus, Tannenberg did not give the Germans an end but a beginning. Had they been fighting for a clear political objective, like control of the Polish Salient or strategic space in Ukraine, they might have used Tannenberg in the way that Moltke the Elder had used Sadowa or Sedan, as single campaign victories that produced a political victory.

But of course, they did not. Instead, to follow Isabel Hull’s formulation, they fought towards absolute destruction, pursuing the Russians further and further to the east. In doing so, they seemingly proved the fragility of the Russian system, inserting Lenin into Russia and thereby helping to cause the revolution of 1917. ³³ But the bacillus spread, infecting not only the Russian political system but the German as well and causing a revolution in Germany that some scholars see as more traumatic for Germans than defeat in the war. ³⁴ Thus did Tannenberg lay the seeds for the destruction of not just one empire, but two. Consistent with Hull’s later findings, the Germans pursued the absolute destruction of their enemy only to find that they had ensured their own as well.

The postwar fates of Hindenburg and Ludendorff show the competing legacies of Tannenberg the battle and Tannenberg the myth. Hindenburg used his success to become one of the most popular figures in Weimar Germany, his seeming triumphs in the east a marked contrast to the bloody stalemate and eventual defeat Germany suffered in the west. His popularity made him the logical choice to become the closest thing Germany had to a non-partisan leader. ³⁵ He died in 1934 and was buried in a massive crypt at the enormous memorial the Germans built to commemorate the great victory at Tannenberg. Ten years later, with Russian armies advancing, the Germans had to move his and his wife’s bodies to prevent them from being desecrated by the advancing Red Army at the tail end of a genocidal war the likes of which Hindenburg (one hopes) never could have imagined. The memorial itself was razed to the ground; today the site sits inside a recreated Poland.

Ludendorff took the other road, standing in opposition to the Weimar Republic. He helped coin the phrase and the ideas behind the stab in the back myth, helped launch the right-wing paramilitaries known as the Freikorps, and met with Hitler in 1923. After a flirtation, the two grew to dislike one another and see each other as rivals despite (or maybe because of) the similarities in their views. Ludendorff also grew estranged from Hindenburg. He drifted further and further from sanity, delving into multiple conspiracy theories and dying of liver cancer in 1937. By then both of the heroes of Tannenberg had done enough damage that another war in the east had become a real possibility, once again revealing the failures of German strategy.