Christopher Clark is no amateur historian. He is a professor of modern history at Cambridge University and author of Iron Kingdom: The rise and downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947, among other works. His current bestseller, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914, was acclaimed one of the best books of 2013 by the New York Times. But I can’t imagine why he wrote it, other than that (possibly) this year’s calendar reads 2014.
There are many happy hunting grounds for the autodidact, but surely few are richer than the causes of World War I, the catastrophe from which all other modern catastrophes sprung. I have on my shelves twenty books on the start of World War I and I have read perhaps twenty more. None have struck me so themeless as The Sleepwalkers.
“Modern” thinking about the causes of World War I was defined by Fritz Fischer’s 1961 bombshell, Griff nach der Weltmacht, translated into English as Germany’s War Aims in World War I, whose basic theses, stated in a less conspiratorial manner, were excellently summarized by David Fromkin’s Europe’s Last Summer (2004). Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War (1998) attempted to refute many of Fischer’s arguments, even though what the book is “really” about is Ferguson’s forlorn nostalgia for the British Empire, a “thesis” not terribly popular in either Dublin or Delhi, or even Washington, DC.
Fischer pictured Germany and Austria as led by a tiny band of doomed aristocrats, astride their fine chargers and waving their fine swords, determined to conquer or die rather than be swept aside by the sans-culotte masses. Ferguson resurrected Bertrand Russell’s notion that if Germany had been allowed to settle things quickly with France, there would have been peace rather than conquest.
I think Fischer is a historian and Ferguson a self-publicist, but Clark is nowhere. He vaguely weakens the Fischer/Fromkin case against Germany without explicitly trying to deny it, and suggests that Britain, France, and Russia didn’t always do the right thing, but won’t point the finger irrevocably at any of them either. He covers ground poorly in brief that has been covered excellently in detail by others. After reading a book of more than 550 pages one is left with little more than the argument that statesmen are often second-rate and that things don’t always happen as planned. It’s certainly believable, but less than the full story.
