Goodbye to all that (again)? The Fischer thesis, the new revisionism and the meaning of the First World War
Speaker: Professor John Rohl
When German troops invaded Belgium on 3 August 1914 on their way to France, and before turning on Russia, very few Britons doubted that this attempt to conquer and dominate the Continent needed to be repelled, however high the cost might be.
It was not until the mid-1920’s that the appalling carnage on the Western Front came to be seen in Britain as a meaningless sacrifice of an entire generation; a view also underpinned by a massive surreptitious government-run propaganda campaign in inter-war Germany designed to disprove the “war guilt” lie in order to reverse the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
The interpretation that no one country was to blame prevailed until the 1960’s when a bitter international controversy, sparked by the work of the Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer, arrived at the consensus that the Great War had indeed been a “bid for world power” by Imperial Germany and therefore a conflict in which Britain had necessarily and justly engaged.
For the past 50 years, the Fischer paradigm has informed hundreds of scholarly monographs and articles seeking to build on and refine his interpretation, however, just two years ago, revisionist works such as Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers threw this consensus into doubt. Clark argued, as David Lloyd George had claimed in his memoirs, that in 1914 all the powers had “slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron” of war and that the Kaiser’s Germany bore no more responsibility for the catastrophe than any other government. This therefore meant that Germany had been unjustly punished by the Treaty of Versailles.
So what is the truth about the nature of the First World War and why have historians after nearly 100 years of research, been unable to arrive at a consensus on its origins? This lecture will explore the arguments surrounding the Fischer thesis and New Revisionism within the context of historical scholarship.
This is an open public lecture and everyone is welcome to attend, but we do ask that you book your place as numbers are limited.