Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 Read online

  Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

  This book explores the impact of the First World War on Imperial Germany and examines military aspects of the conflict, as well as the diplomacy, politics, and industrial mobilization of wartime Germany. Including maps, tables, and illustrations, it also offers a rich portrait of life on the home front – the war’s pervasive effects on rich and poor, men and women, young and old, farmers and city-dwellers, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. It analyzes the growing burdens of war and the translation of hardship into political opposition. The new edition incorporates the latest scholarship and expands the coverage to include military action outside Europe, military occupation, prisoners of war, and the memory of war. This survey represents the most comprehensive history of Germany during the First World War. It will be of interest to all students of German and European history, as well as the history of war and society.

  ROGER CHICKERING is Professor Emeritus of History in the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University, where he taught from 1993 to 2010. His recent publications include The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (2007) and, with Dennis Showalter and Hans van de Ven, The Cambridge History of War: War in the Modern World (2012).

  New Approaches To European History

  Series editors

  William Beik

  Emory University

  T. C. W. Blanning

  Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

  Brendan Simms

  Peterhouse, Cambridge

  New Approaches to European History is an important textbook series, which provides concise but authoritative surveys of major themes and problems in European history since the Renaissance. Written at a level and length accessible to advanced school students and undergraduates, each book in the series addresses topics or themes that students of European history encounter daily: the series embraces both some of the more “traditional” subjects of study and those cultural and social issues to which increasing numbers of school and college courses are devoted. A particular effort is made to consider the wider international implications of the subject under scrutiny.

  To aid the student reader, scholarly apparatus and annotation is light, but each work has full supplementary bibliographies and notes for further reading: where appropriate, chronologies, maps, diagrams, and other illustrative material are also provided.

  For a complete list of titles published in the series, please see:

  www.cambridge.org/newapproaches

  Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

  Third Edition

  Roger Chickering

  University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom

  Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

  Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

  It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

  www.cambridge.org

  Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107691520

  © Roger Chickering 2014

  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

  First published 1998

  Second edition 2004

  Third edition 2014

  Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc

  A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

  Chickering, Roger, 1942–

  Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 / Roger Chickering. – Third edition.

  pages cm. – (New approaches to European history)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-107-03768-7 (hardback)

  1. World War, 1914–1918 – Germany. 2. World War, 1914–1918 – Social aspects – Germany. 3. War and society – Germany. I. Title.

  DD228.8.C48 2014

  940.3′43 – dc23 2014010190

  ISBN 978-1-107-03768-7 Hardback

  ISBN 978-1-107-69152-0 Paperback

  Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

  For Kyle

  When I view the radiant valleys of our fatherland which spread out here at our feet, I can only wish: may the day never come when the hordes of war rage through them. And may the day also never come when we are forced to carry war to the valleys of a foreign people.

  Gustav Wyneken October 1913

  Contents

  List of plates

  List of figures

  List of maps

  List of tables

  Preface to the First Edition

  List of abbreviations

  Prologue: Imperial Germany

  1 The war begins

  The “spirit of 1914”

  The plan

  Tannenberg and the Marne

  2 The war continues

  Bureaucratic foundations

  Mobilizing industrial resources

  Feeding soldiers and civilians

  The mobilization of morale

  The campaigns of 1915

  Falkenhayn and Bethmann Hollweg

  3 The war grows total

  The land campaigns of 1916

  Hindenburg and Ludendorff

  The Hindenburg Program

  Occupied Europe

  Global war

  The war at sea

  4 The war embraces all

  Warriors

  Home front and battle front

  Paying for war

  War and social class

  Gender

  Generations

  Confession

  5 The war breeds discord

  Culture

  Cold and hungry

  Criminality and war

  Early opposition

  Industrial unrest: the labor movement splits

  War aims and constitutional change

  6 The war ends

  “Peace feelers”

  The enduring face of warfare

  The Ludendorff Offensive

  The end

  First impressions of peace

  7 The war endures

  The war elsewhere

  The material costs

  The cultural costs: memory wars

  Suggestions for further reading

  Index

  Plates

  1 Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg

  2 Erich von Falkenhayn

  3 The Kaiser studying maps under the guidance of Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff

  Figures

  1 German agricultural production, 1912–18

  2 War-related expenditures of the German government

  3 Banknotes in circulation

  4 The rise of prices and the cost of living

  5 Distribution of women’s industrial employment

  6 Marriages and births

  7 Mortality, ages one to five

  8 Youth criminality

  9 Mortality rates of women in Germany and England and Wales

  10 Caloric value of daily rations

  11 Wartime criminality

  12 Crimes against public order

  13 Industrial strikes, 1916–18r />
  Maps

  1 Schlieffen’s plan

  2 The German advance, August–September 1914

  3 The Battle of Tannenberg, August 1914

  4 The western front, December 1914

  5 The eastern front, 1915

  6 The western front, 1915

  7 The Battle of Verdun, 1916

  8 The Brusilov Offensive, 1916

  9 The western front, 1917

  10 The Kerensky Offensive, 1917

  11 The Ludendorff Offensive, 1918

  12 The Allied counteroffensive, July–November 1918

  Tables

  1 Food prices in Karlsruhe, 1914–15

  2 Raw material production, 1918

  3 Industrial wage indices (male workers), 1914–18

  4 White-collar wage indices, 1914–18

  5 Material and human resources, 1917

  6 Material resources, early 1918

  7 Some costs of the war

  8 Material resources, 1913

  Preface to the First Edition

  This book originated in another project, which is at once broader in scope and much narrower in focus. In deference to the principle that total war requires total history, I have been studying the comprehensive impact of the First World War in a single mid-sized German city. In conjunction with this project, I decided several years ago to explore the history of the war and German society with a class of undergraduate students at the University of Oregon. I discovered that there was no suitable text for such a course. The present volume grew directly out of discussions with students in that class. It is conceived in the first instance for readers like them, but it is also intended for others who are interested in the modern history of Germany and Europe, as well as the history of war and society. The scholarly apparatus is designed for those whom the text entices into further reading.

  It is now a pleasure to repay my many intellectual debts with public gratitude. My thanks go first to my students in Oregon, my former home, for contributions that pervade the volume. In addition, I owe great thanks to a number of scholars who have offered comments on the manuscript as it progressed. They include Gerald Feldman, Wilhelm Deist, Belinda Davis, Stig Förster, and Richard Stites, who is now my colleague at Georgetown. My friend Bruce Wonder, who counts himself in the category of “informed general reader,” has also offered invaluable suggestions for the manuscript’s improvement. My research assistant, David Freudenwald, provided much-needed help in my dealings with a number of libraries. Several institutions have also supported the manuscript in various stages of its gestation. My gratitude goes to the Gerda Henkel Foundation, which supported a year’s research in Europe in 1991–2, the Graduate School at Georgetown University, which made possible several subsequent trips to Europe, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, which provided me with the opportunity to complete the work in a stimulating atmosphere of intellectual exchange.

  Preface to the Third Edition

  When I began to work on the First World War in the late 1980s, I had no idea that I would still be writing about it on the occasion of its centenary. A lot has happened in the meantime. This volume has now gone through two English-language editions, as well as a German translation. The “other project” that provided the stimulus for the first edition was published several years ago as a kind of pendant in microcosm to this volume.1

  Beyond commemorating the outbreak of the war a century ago, this new edition of the volume is designed to account for the scholarship that has enriched the literature during the decade since the publication of the second edition. I have attempted to integrate this new work into the account, recognizing that the explosion of titles in 2014 will defeat any hope of staying abreast of the scholarship for long. The new or expanded portions of this edition mark the principal areas into which scholarly interest in Germany’s war has migrated in recent years. These parts include the discussions of military operations outside Europe, events in eastern Europe, occupation regimes, prisoners of war, the circumstances of the war’s end, and collective memory of the war.

  Thanking all those to whom I have become intellectually indebted would occupy more space than I can claim. I would, however, like to offer special thanks to the Institute for Civic Space and Public Policy at the Lazarsky University in Warsaw, which in the spring of 2011 hosted a seminar in which I had an opportunity to discuss my interests in the First World War with a number of Polish scholars. I thank Daria Nałęcz in particular. I benefited as well from participating in the seminar “Not so quiet on the eastern front: new directions in World War I studies,” which convened in October 2013 at a meeting of the German Studies Association in Denver. Margaret Anderson’s name also belongs on the list of those who have come to my aid. Finally, I must note with sadness the deaths of Wilhelm Deist, Gerry Feldman, and Richard Stites, close friends who provided essential help in the early stages of my work on the war.

  1 Roger Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2007).

  Abbreviations

  SPD Social Democratic Party of Germany

  KRA War Raw Materials Section

  OHL Supreme Command of the Army

  USPD Independent Social Democratic Party

  MSPD Majority Social Democratic Party

  Prologue: Imperial Germany

  “What a paradise this land is! What clean clothes, what good faces, what tranquil contentment, what prosperity, what genuine freedom, what superb government!”1 Mark Twain’s exclamations in 1878 to his friend and editor, William Dean Howells, sounded a theme that echoed in the judgments of countless visitors who followed the American writer to Germany in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, the German Empire’s renown as a dynamic and prosperous land, whose accomplishments were the envy of the modern world, only grew during the next decades, as evidence accumulated of breathtaking change.

  By the turn of the twentieth century Germany had become Europe’s foremost industrial power. In the production of steel and chemicals and in electrical engineering, the sectors that drove the so-called “second industrial revolution,” Germany’s accomplishments were rivaled only in the United States. German engineers were pioneers of the new industrial technologies. Mammoth firms such as Krupp, Siemens, and Bayer spearheaded the growth of the German economy. Coal production in Germany increased more than seven times between 1870 and 1913, steel production fifteen times.2 Gross national product multiplied six times in the same era. In a manner that belied Mark Twain’s picture of “tranquil contentment,” German society was transformed within a generation. The population exploded by nearly 60 percent between 1871 and 1910. Half of it farmed in 1875; less than one-third did in 1913. During the same interval the number of Germans doubled whose primary occupations were in industry, and in 1913 they outnumbered Germans who worked in agriculture. In the wake of torrid industrial growth, Germany became one of the world’s most urban societies. The capital city, Berlin, grew by nearly five times between 1871 and 1910, to more than 2 million inhabitants; six other German cities counted over 500,000 inhabitants in 1910.

  Other features of the German Empire impressed contemporary observers no less. Germany’s claim to “superb government” reflected the reputation of its bureaucracies for efficiency and incorruptibility. German trains ran on time; and the streets were clean. Defenders of Germany’s constitution could likewise appeal to standards of efficiency in order to justify vesting the monarch with substantial authority and, conversely, significantly limiting the powers of parliament. In an era when – in Germany and elsewhere – democratic government carried the taint of corruption and fecklessness, Germany’s more authoritarian system could plausibly claim to embody “true freedom.” In all events, it spawned the most progressive system of social insurance in the world, which offered public entitlements that workers do not to this day enjoy in the United States. In the eyes of most observers, however, the greatest emblem of bureaucratic authoritarianism was Germany’s
cultural achievement. The German public school system was reputed to be the finest and most comprehensive in the world. It banished illiteracy. Germany’s public universities served as models throughout the world. Whether in medicine, the natural sciences, the social sciences, or the humanistic disciplines, German scholarship was preeminent. Between 1900 and 1925 over one-third of the Nobel Prizes in chemistry and physics went to Germans. German was the international language of scientific discourse.

  There was a darker side to this spectacle. The German Empire was born on the battlefield; and the legacy of its birth had a profound and enduring impact on society and politics in the new state. The German army was the mightiest in the world, the model for military reformers everywhere. Soldiers enjoyed enormous influence and respect in Germany. The authoritarian features of the German constitution were designed in the first instance to isolate the army from civilian control. The views of the generals figured significantly in councils of state, while deference to martial virtues permeated institutions of civil society, from student fraternities to corporate boardrooms. German nationalism, the civic religion of the new state, radiated military values, as well as an aggressive confidence in Germany’s growing industrial power and the conviction that German influence in the world ought to correspond to the country’s burgeoning economic might. Germany’s participation in overseas colonialism began late, in the middle of the 1880s, but it became as loud and provocative as its most public champion, the emperor William II. It also accompanied the relentless construction of a battle fleet, which made Germany a European naval power second only to Great Britain. In the early years of the twentieth century, as a series of diplomatic crises in north Africa and the Balkans raised the prospect of European war, the accents in contemporary fascination with Imperial Germany changed, and admiration for its industrial and cultural accomplishments ceded to apprehension over the combination of German military power and an erratic foreign policy. “The ultimate aims of Germany surely are, without doubt, to obtain the preponderance on the continent of Europe,” read a bleak British analysis in 1909, which concluded that Germany would then “enter on a contest with us for maritime supremacy.”3