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The debate on the origins of the First World War

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How could the death of one man, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was assassinated on 28 June 1914, lead to the deaths of millions in a war of unprecedented scale and ferocity? This is the question at the heart of the debate on the origins of the First World War. Finding the answer to this question has exercised historians for 100 years.

In July 1914, everyone in Europe was convinced they were fighting a defensive war. Governments had worked hard to ensure that they did not appear to be the aggressor in July and August 1914. This was crucial because the vast armies of soldiers that would be needed could not be summoned for a war of aggression.

Socialists, of whom there were many millions by 1914, would not have supported a belligerent foreign policy and could only be relied upon to fight in a defensive war. French and Belgians, Russians, Serbs and Britons were convinced they were indeed involved in a defensive struggle for just aims. Austrians and Hungarians were fighting to avenge the death of Franz Ferdinand.

Germans were convinced that Germany’s neighbours had ‘forced the sword’ into its hands, and they were certain that they had not started the war. But if not they (who had after all invaded Belgium and France in the first few weeks of fighting), then who had caused this war?

The war guilt ruling

For the victors, this was an easy question to answer, and they agreed at the peace conference at Versailles in 1919 that Germany and its allies had been responsible for causing the Great War.

Based on this decision, vast reparation demands were made. This so-called ‘war guilt ruling’ set the tone for the long debate on the causes of the war that followed.

From 1919 onwards, governments and historians engaged with this question as revisionists (who wanted to revise the verdict of Versailles) clashed with anti-revisionists who agreed with the victors’ assessment.

Sponsored by post-war governments and with access to vast amounts of documents, revisionist historians set about proving that the victors at Versailles had been wrong.

Countless publications and documents were made available to prove Germany’s innocence and the responsibility of others.

Arguments were advanced which highlighted Russia’s and France’s responsibility for the outbreak of the war, for example, or which stressed that Britain could have played a more active role in preventing the escalation of the July Crisis.

In the interwar years, such views influenced a new interpretation that no longer highlighted German war guilt, but instead identified a failure in the alliance system before 1914. The war had not been deliberately unleashed, but Europe had somehow ‘slithered into the boiling cauldron of war’, as David Lloyd George famously put it. With such a conciliatory accident theory, Germany was off the hook. A comfortable consensus emerged and lasted all through the Second World War and beyond, by which time the First World War had been overshadowed by an even deadlier conflict.

The Fischer Thesis

The first major challenge to this interpretation was advanced in Germany in the 1960s, where the historian Fritz Fischer published a startling new thesis which threatened to overthrow the existing consensus. Germany, he argued, did have the main share of responsibility for the outbreak of the war. Moreover, its leaders had deliberately unleashed the war in pursuit of aggressive foreign policy aims which were startlingly similar to those pursued by Hitler in 1939.

Backed up by previously unknown primary evidence, this new interpretation exploded the comfortable post-war view of shared responsibility. It made Germany responsible for unleashing not only the Second World War (of this there was no doubt), but also the First - turning Germany’s recent history into one of aggression and conquest.

Many leading German historians and politicians reacted with outrage to Fischer’s claims. They attempted to discredit him and his followers in a public debate of unprecedented ferocity. Some of those arguing about the causes of the war had fought in it, in the conviction they were fighting a defensive war. Little wonder they objected to the suggestion that Germany had deliberately started that conflict.

In time, however, many of Fischer’s ideas became accepted as a new consensus was achieved. Most historians remained unconvinced that war had been decided upon in Germany as early as 1912 (this was one of Fischer’s controversial claims) and then deliberately provoked in 1914.

Many did concede, however, that Germany seemed to have made use of the July Crisis to unleash a war. In the wake of the Fischer controversy, historians also focused more closely on the role of Austria-Hungary in the events that led to war, and concluded that in Vienna, at least as much as in Berlin, the crisis precipitated by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was seen as a golden opportunity to try and defeat a ring of enemies that seemed to threaten the central powers.

Recent revisions

In recent years this post-Fischer consensus has in turn been revised. Historians have returned to the arguments of the interwar years, focusing for example on Russia’s and France’s role in the outbreak of war, or asking if Britain’s government really did all it could to try and avert the war in 1914. Germany’s and Austria-Hungary’s roles are again deemphasised.

After 100 years of debate, every conceivable interpretation seems to have been advanced, dismissed and then revisited. In some of the most recent publications, even seeking to attribute responsibility, as had so confidently been done at Versailles, is now eschewed.

Is it really the historian’s role to blame the actors of the past, or merely to understand how the war could have occurred? Such doubts did not trouble those who sought to attribute war guilt in 1919 and during much of this long debate, but this question will need to be asked as the controversy continues past the centenary.

After 100 years of arguing about the war’s causes, this long debate is set to continue.

Next: listen to the viewpoints of two leading historians on the causes of the war with our podcast  Expert opinion: A debate on the causes of the First World War

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

This is a revised text of the 39th Martin Wight Lecture, given at the University of Sussex on 6 November 2014.

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JOHN C. G. RÖHL, Goodbye to all that (again)? The Fischer thesis, the new revisionism and the meaning of the First World War, International Affairs , Volume 91, Issue 1, January 2015, Pages 153–166, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12191

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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 Fischer's conclusions have in turn been challenged by historians claiming that Europe's 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.

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

In Memoriam

Fritz Fischer (1908-99)

Volker R. Berghahn | Mar 1, 2000

Fritz Fischer, professor emeritus at Hamburg University and one of the most influential historians of modern Germany since 1945, died on December 1, 1999 at the age of 91. He was named an Honorary Foreign Member of the AHA in 1984.

Born on March 5, 1908 in Upper Franconia in southern Germany, he embarked upon the long road of a German university career, finally obtaining a full professorship at Hamburg University in 1948. Originally a specialist in 19th-century German Protestantism, he had been briefly associated with Hans Frank's "Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany" under Hitler, but belonged to those German academics and intellectuals who came out of World War II determined to build a different Germany and to wrench the German historical profession away from its nationalist-conservative past.

This opportunity came when Fischer was given access, in the 1950s, to the East German archives at Potsdam, where he came across an explosive set of files relating to war aims and annexationist plans that the Reich government had drawn up in World War I. It was not merely the extent of Germany's territorial ambitions that moved him to develop his provocative hypotheses, but also the suspicion that the German government might have started the war in the first place in order to realize its expansionist program on the European continent. His book on this theme, titled Griff nach der Weltmacht (1961; trans. 1967, rather less grippingly, Germany's War Aims in the First World War ), caused a huge public uproar. His German colleagues had just about accepted that Germany had been squarely responsible for unleashing World War II, but they fiercely resisted Fischer's notion of German responsibility for World War I. Gerhard Ritter, the doyen of West Germany's historians, spoke of the "self-obscuration of German historical consciousness." He continued to hold that all powers were more or less equally guilty of pushing Europe over the brink.

Fischer held his ground against these attacks, repeatedly pulling from his pocket, during televised debates with fellow historians and journalists, yet another official memorandum or telegram proving his point. Meanwhile students from all faculties at Hamburg University flocked to his lectures, easily filling the large Auditorium Maximum, and some of them stayed on to write a doctoral dissertation under his supervision. Several of them made important contributions to the history of the German Empire in their own right and some historians of German historiography have spoken of a "Fischer School," whose members went to bat for their mentor's cause.

The politicization of the Fischer Controversy went so far that at one point some of his colleagues persuaded the Bonn government to withdraw promised financial support for a lecture tour by Fischer in the United States. Angry American historians thereupon found the money themselves to pay for the trip.

As criticism continued, Fischer decided to present his subsequent archival findings concerning Germany's aggressive foreign policy and the origins of World War I in a second 800-page tome, titled Krieg der Illusionen (1969, trans. 1973, this time literally, War of Illusions ). In this volume he also advanced the theory that in December 1912, at an infamous "War Council," Wilhelm II and his military advisors had made a decision to trigger a major war by the summer of 1914 and to use the intervening months to prepare the country for this settling of accounts. In the 1970s Fischer published further, shorter studies and essays elaborating on the myopia and political failures of Germany's elites. He became one of the most explicit advocates of the Sonderweg thesis, i.e., the argument that Germany had taken a special path into the 20th century, and also threw himself into the controversy over the authenticity of diaries that Kurt Riezler, the private secretary of Reich Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, had kept during the July Crisis of 1914.

Some of Fischer's more radical hypotheses have been challenged and modified by subsequent research published after the heated arguments of the 1960s had subsided. This time American and British historians had a major share in effecting this shift that has resulted in a more complex picture of Wilhelmine society and politics. But if his more specific findings on who was responsible for the outbreak of World War I have been revised, very few people doubt today that, as Fischer had argued, the Kaiser and his advisors played a crucial role in the escalation of the international crisis of July 1914, although they were in the best position to de-escalate. Nor does anyone deny that the exorbitant annexationist plans of the German monarchy in World War I were ominous harbingers of Hitler's ruthless imperialism 25 years later.

The repercussions of Fischer's work upon the political development of postwar Germany have been his first lasting achievement. His books helped to pave the way for West Germany's abandoning the territorial revisionism of the Adenauer era and to facilitate the emergence of Brandt's Ostpolitik . For the first time since the Wilhelmine period, Germany became willing to recognize the existing frontiers in Europe and to pursue a policy of reconciliation toward those countries of eastern Europe that had suffered from German expansionism in two world wars. The lesson had at last been learned from the disastrous course that German foreign policy had taken in the first half of the 20th century.

There is yet another mark that Fischer's work left, this time on the historical profession of the Federal Republic. Methodologically speaking, his books may have been rather traditional, focusing as they did on high politics and decision-making elites. But his challenge to interpretations of German history that had entrenched themselves in early postwar Germany encouraged a younger generation of historians who were not members of the "Fischer School" to move beyond Fischer's kind of political history and toward the analysis of the country's social and economic structures and political-cultural traditions since 1871. The history of the German Empire became a major field of research, attracting also many non-German scholars, and the work they undertook has yielded very fruitful results as well as fresh arguments.

If the imperial period offers rich material also to the teacher of modern European history on both sides of the Atlantic today, it is in no small degree thanks to the breach that Fischer made, and the courageous stand that he took, in rejecting the historiographical orthodoxies of the early postwar period. His achievements as a scholar and as a man of firm convictions and great integrity were recognized by the many honorary doctorates that he received from universities around the world. The president of the Federal Republic awarded him the Bundesverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse.

Fritz Fischer is survived by his wife Margarete, his two children, and five grandchildren.

—Volker Berghahn teaches at Columbia University.

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In This Section

New Journal of Chemistry

Determining the hydrocarbon chain growth pathway in fischer–tropsch synthesis through dft calculations: impact of cobalt cluster size †.

* Corresponding authors

a Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran E-mail: [email protected] , [email protected]

b Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran E-mail: [email protected] , [email protected] , [email protected] Tel: +985138805539

In the present work, the barrier energies ( E b ) of CH 4 formation and C–C coupling and the mechanism of Fischer–Tropsch synthesis (FTS) on different cluster sizes of cobalt were investigated. Three cobalt clusters with 10, 18, and 30 atoms (Co-10, Co-18, and Co-30) were used for comparison of the results. The E b , transition state, and reaction energy (Δ E r ) were analyzed by using density functional theory (DFT) calculations. The results showed that CH 4 was produced more easily on the small cluster (Co-10) than on the other two clusters. The E b values for the Co-10, Co-18, and Co-30 clusters were 1.62, 2.53, and 2.44 eV, respectively. The E b values for dissociation of CO on the three clusters Co-10, Co-18, and Co-30 were 1.64, 0.93, and 1.81 eV, respectively, and the minimum E b was related to the Co-18 cluster. Also, the tendency towards chain growth increased with increasing cobalt cluster size. The results showed that the mechanism of the FTS reaction was dependent on the particle size of the cobalt clusters. It can be concluded that the Co-10 cluster followed the CO insertion mechanism and the Co-18 cluster followed the carbide mechanism in the FTS reaction. Also, the Co-30 cluster followed both mechanisms (CO insertion and carbide mechanisms) in the FTS reaction. DFT results showed that as the cobalt cluster size increased, the olefin/paraffin ratio in the FTS reaction products enhanced.

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Determining the hydrocarbon chain growth pathway in Fischer–Tropsch synthesis through DFT calculations: impact of cobalt cluster size

S. Veiskarami, A. Nakheai Pour, E. Saljoughi and A. Mohammadi, New J. Chem. , 2024, Advance Article , DOI: 10.1039/D4NJ01435A

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