John C. G. Röhl

Goodbye to all that (again)? The Fischer thesis, the new revisionism and the meaning of the First World War

What is the truth about the nature of the First World War and why have historians been unable to agree on its origins? The interpretation that no one country was to blame prevailed until the 1960s when a bitter international controversy, sparked by the work of the Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer, arrived at the consensus that the Great War had been a �bid for world power� by imperial Germany and therefore a conflict in which Britain had necessarily and justly engaged. But in this centennial year Fischers conclusions have in turn been challenged by historians claiming that Europes leaders all �sleepwalked� into the catastrophe. This article, the text of the Martin Wight Memorial Lecture held at the University of Sussex in November 2014, explores the archival discoveries which underpinned the Fischer thesis of the 1960s and subsequent research, and asks with what justification such evidence is now being set aside by the new revisionism.

The conflict between the Prince of Prussia and his parents

While still at the gymnasium in Kassel the pubescent prince reached out one last time to his mother before breaking with her in haughty disdain and mutual recrimination. In the winter of 1874–5 Wilhelm began a series of letters to his mother – in English, naturally – recounting a recurring ‘dream’ he was having; letters that are remarkable not only for their evidently incestuous character but also for their fetishistic emphasis on her gloved left hand – a poignant cry for unconditional acceptance and love if ever there was one. ‘I have got a little secret which is for you alone viz. a peculiar dream,’ he wrote to Vicky in March 1875, shortly after her visit to Kassel for his sixteenth birthday. I dreamt last night that I was walking with you & another lady; in walking you were discussing who had the finest hands, whereupon the lady produced a most ungraceful hand, declaring that it was the prettiest, and turned us her back. I in my rage broke her parasole [sic]; but you put your dear arm round my waist, led me aside, pulled your glove off your dear left hand – which I so often kissed at Cassel – & showed me your dear beautiful hand which I instantly covered with kisses. Wilhelm hoped that his ‘dream’ would soon become reality. ‘I wish you would do the same when I am at Berlin, alone with you in the evening.’ And he continued, craving reassurance: ‘Pray write to me what you think about the dream; it is quite true as I have written it. You see I always think of you, my dear Mama, I sometimes dream of you; I am so glad that soon we shall sit together in you[r] dear library and cose [sic] together. But this dream is alone for you to know,’ he insisted. Several days later the ‘dream’ recurred.

Divine right without end

For contemporaries, the transition from the ninety-year-old Kaiser Wilhelm I to his twenty-nine-year-old grandson Wilhelm II seemed like jumping a generation. Ideologically, however, the Year of the Three Kaisers was more a matter of leaping a chasm of centuries. It is true that the Empress Frederick, as Victoria now asked to be known, with her almost republican convictions, was in many respects far in advance of her time; she could never have gained acceptance for her ideas in the system of ‘personal monarchy’, which, thanks to Bismarck, was once again firmly entrenched in Germany (and Prussia in particular). Yet the conception of the divine monarchical principle that the young Wilhelm had absorbed, not least as a counterweight to his parents’ liberal ideals, belonged to the eighteenth century, to the era before the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and Napoleon. Although Bismarck had prided himself on preserving the Hohenzollern monarchy from the clutches of parliamentarianism and preventing it from degenerating – as in Britain, Italy, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Belgium – into an ‘automatic signing machine’, he was compelled to realise, soon after the double change of sovereign in 1888, that by keeping alive the ‘monarchical principle’ he had put an axe to the roots not only of his own position of power but also of the entire Reich structure he had built up. By ignoring the constitutional aspirations and the centuries-old experience of Europe, he had opened the door to arbitrary rule, sycophantic favouritism and strutting militarism at the court of the Hohenzollerns. If ‘personal monarchy’ was no more than a legal fiction in Bismarck’s eyes, Wilhelm II took it literally and regarded the monarchical principle of divine right as legitimising his autocracy.