The Fischer Controversy,Documents and the ‘Truth’ About the Origins of the First World War

I

The debate has been ‘marked by a distressing literal-mindedness, every “scrap of paper”, every public document, has become sacrosanct and receives its often exaggerated exegesis.’

Fritz Stern, 1967 ⁷

For some historians, his book amounted to a ‘national catastrophe’. ⁸ It is possible that without the heavy-handed reactions of his colleagues, who alerted the German Foreign Office to the perceived threat to national interest posed by Fischer’s thesis, his ‘unwieldy study might possibly have remained an academic matter’. ⁹ Instead, it turned into a controversy of unprecedented ferocity. To his critics, Fischer’s views amounted to ‘a renewal of the guilt accusation of Versailles’. ¹⁰ His work undid years of laborious attempts to arrive at a comfortable consensus of shared responsibility for the outbreak of war, turning Germany once more into the culprit.

At the heart of Fischer’s publications, and of the objections raised by his many critics, was documentary evidence. Despite the fact that for nearly 50 years the topic had been subject to deliberate lies and obfuscations, Fischer was confident that it was now possible to establish the truth about events in 1914 and to prove beyond doubt the intentions and aims of decision-makers in Germany, based on newly discovered primary sources. Fischer presented a mountain of evidence with which, seemingly, it would be impossible to argue.

Some of the contributors to the Fischer controversy were able to introduce their views to an English-speaking audience in 1966 with the publication of a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History. In his contribution, Fischer’s assistant Imanuel Geiss characterized the question of the origins of the war as ‘a historical problem which may well rank as one of the most complicated and bewildering in modern history.’ ¹¹ Fritz Fischer did not contribute to the special issue, and his controversial book Griff nach der Weltmacht would not be available in English translation until 1967, but his side was well represented by Geiss who supplied both a brief summary of the debate and a forceful explanation of how he and Fischer interpreted the events of 1914–18 based on primary source evidence. Documents had been at the heart of the argument between Fischer and his opponents since the publication of Griff nach der Weltmacht in 1961 and Geiss made a point of stressing that much of the evidence Fischer and he had used to substantiate their claims had been available for some time, for example in official document collections, or those contained in Luigi Albertini’s three-volume study on the origins of the war. ¹² Geiss and Fischer had already broken rank by taking seriously the publication of the Italian scholar whose work most German historians had dismissed as ‘unscientific’. ¹³ Other documents were newly discovered by Fischer or Geiss (and Fischer’s other assistants) ¹⁴ and formed the basis of their contentious interpretations. In particular, they were able to draw on previously inaccessible archives in the GDR and on recently returned German government files which had been confiscated by the Allies in 1945. ¹⁵

In the same journal, Wolfgang Mommsen noted the momentous challenge that Fischer’s publications posed for the German historical establishment. Fischer had undermined the comfortable interwar view of shared responsibility for the outbreak of the war, ‘a kind of international consensus [which] seemed to be achieved to the effect that historical sources had not confirmed that Germany alone […] bore the guilt for starting the war.’ ¹⁶ This view, which had been ‘accepted in their turn by German historians after 1945’, was challenged by Fischer’s propositions which ‘are put forward in the form of an inexorable deployment of evidence’. ¹⁷ With his ‘rigid black-and-white thesis’ and new evidence Fischer undermined the old consensus. ¹⁸ It was his contention that his sources confirmed that Germany’s had been the most significant share of responsibility.

Mommsen bemoaned Fischer’s ‘obvious tendency to exploit to the limit the documents relating to war aims and to ignore the fact that in politics no less than in daily life deeds seldom match up to words.’ The charge was that Fischer took the documents at face value. ‘He confines himself to the literal wording of the documents, whatever the situation in which they were composed and whatever the specific object they served’, while presenting ‘a continual stream of new evidence for the sole purpose of proving his main theme.’ ¹⁹

As far as their critics were concerned, Fischer and Geiss had been over-stating their case. They had used the wrong kind of evidence and they had relied too much on documents, reading them subjectively, or simply out of historical context. Walther Peter Fuchs charged that Fischer used ‘all means of modern publishing’, referring to the very public nature of the debate which was conducted in the media as well as in historical journals, constantly ‘to make known new scraps of memoranda and documents’. According to Fuchs, Fischer then interpreted these ‘as if there existed only the one historical truth […]. Where in the world is there – particularly in modern history – anything comparable?’ ²⁰ This is an interesting critique, given that it was precisely because Fischer queried the perceived historical orthodox truth about shared responsibility for the outbreak of the war that such wrath could result in the first place. The fact that his evidence offered such a powerful counter-argument to the established orthodoxy, that it suggested that shared responsibility was not ‘the truth’, is at the heart of the debate. While Fuchs is astonished that Fischer might claim to be the arbiter of the only correct interpretation, the same actually holds true for Fischer’s critics.

Of course, historians have always attempted to solve the riddle of 1914 with the help of documentary evidence, and there had already been several decades of disputes, but Fischer’s approach elevated documents to a new status, not least by the sheer volume of evidence he was able to muster to support his argument that Germany’s was the largest share of responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War. This was a contention that most national-conservative historians (as well as the government) in Germany could not share. Francis Carstens summed up the position of many of his critics: ‘We had really fixed it all so well, and then this stupid ass must come along and spoil it.’ ²¹

And yet, the initial response to Fischer’s 1959 article which preceded his contentious Griff nach der Weltmacht of 1961 had not been universally hostile. His use of primary sources was then considered rather favourably by Hans Herzfeld (a veteran of the First World War), who praised Fischer’s use of detailed sources which had not previously been examined by historians. He offered a measured assessment of ‘Fischer’s important article’ (‘bedeutsamer Aufsatz’) ²² . Elsewhere Fischer pointed forward to his forthcoming book which would offer ‘a plethora [Fülle] of primary sources […] which would force themselves [onto the reader] with overwhelming evidence’. ²³ The implication was that the documents really spoke for themselves, so persuasive was the evidence they provided of Germany’s aggressive war-aims between 1914 and 1918.

Only three years later, and now in response to Fischer’s more provocative and controversial book publication Griff nach der Weltmacht, Herzfeld bemoaned Fischer’s ‘never-ending reciting of files’ which, he felt, ‘neglected the historical atmosphere of the events and personalities’. ²⁴ From his revisionist, anti-Versailles position he argued that Fischer read the documents out of context, or was not sufficiently sympathetic to contemporary restraints on decision-makers. In an earlier review of Geiss’s dissertation he had made similar observations with reference to the work of both historians: ‘Already Fischer’s theses raised the concern that they based themselves all too optimistically onto the thread provided by the governmental files which are available today and in that do not pay enough attention to the multi-layered nature of the tasks of historical interpretations.’ ²⁵ In other words, Fischer’s reading of documents was too literal and one-dimensional and his interpretation was skewed by his agenda.

Such ‘black-and-white interpretations’ meant that in the eyes of their critics Geiss and Fischer failed to succeed in the historian’s task of ‘not only criticizing’ an epoch, ‘but also understanding it’. ²⁶ According to such apologist critiques, historians should not concern themselves with attributing ‘guilt’, but should be empathetic and take into account a broader understanding of the contemporary context of the views of the decision-makers whose actions they were studying. The question of guilt was always implicit in the argument, not because Fischer explicitly raised it, but because of the unprecedented allocation of war-guilt at Versailles. Essentially, the debate rekindled arguments from the interwar years, when revisionists (largely, but not exclusively German) and anti-revisionists battled over whether the Versailles war-guilt decision had been justified. ²⁷

If, in the 1960s, it seemed impossible to counter the sheer weight of uncomfortable evidence Fischer presented, it was certainly possible to question the methodology with which it was employed. The charge, in essence, was that Fischer’s work was ‘unwissenschaftlich’ ²⁸ , not scholarly or ‘scientific’ in the way that it deployed and interpreted evidence. As Erwin Hölzle commented in his review of Fischer’s book: ‘Facing a huge mass of material stands a thesis which is wrong and a marshalling of evidence which is misconceived.’ ²⁹

Another historian who had experienced the First World War first-hand was Gerhard Ritter. He became one of Fischer’s most vociferous critics. ³⁰ He shared Herzfeld’s and Hölzle’s concerns about the amount of evidence used by Fischer. ³¹ In 1949 he had confidently declared that the ‘fight over the so-called “war-guilt question” had […] finally resulted in a world-wide success of the German main theses’ on Germany’s innocence. ³² In 1951 he had been involved in drafting the Franco–German Commission’s report on how the subject should be taught in schools. It concluded that German policy in 1914 had not aimed at provoking a European war. Ritter had confidently concluded at the time: ‘The documents do not permit attributing a premeditated desire for a European war on the part of any government or people in 1914.’ ³³ Within the next decade, Fischer would make a mockery of Ritter’s revisionist statement, armed with documents which in his view permitted exactly such an attribution of responsibility. In 1961, his response to Fischer ‘emotionalized the subject’. He wrote to the Foreign Minister, Gerhard Schröder, concerned that Fischer’s thesis ‘by far surpassed in its radical nature the accusation of the war guilt thesis of Versailles’. This started the involvement of the Auswärtiges Amt in trying to counter Fischer’s thesis, famously culminating in the cancellation of funds already promised for Fischer’s lecture tour of the USA. ³⁴

Ritter questioned whether Fischer really drew the right conclusions about Germany’s war aims policy based on the wealth of documents that he presented. Where an interpretation was not correct, he asserted, ‘a mass of source material [‘gehäuftes Quellenmaterial ’] can also appear confusing’. ³⁵ It was the piling-up of evidence that stuck most in the throats of Fischer’s many critics. In Ritter’s opinion, and based on Rankean tradition, each piece of evidence should be carefully weighed up and judged according to the values of the time. Implicit in this critique is the assumption that historians cannot ever step outside those contemporary values and – more controversially – that only participants (i.e. Ritter and his generation) are able properly to understand those values. Fischer, by contrast, piled document upon document in support of his argument, with the intention of proving a particular point, rather than offering any differentiation, empathy or understanding of the circumstances in which decisions were made in the past.

Ritter went on to examine in detail (like a professor might with the work of their students) how accurately Fischer analysed his documents. He chose the first two chapters of Griff nach der Weltmacht for this test; as they were based on published sources, he argued, ‘everyone has [the chapters’] source material to hand and can check it. Thus it is instructive to study the methods of the author with these chapters.’ ³⁶ Unsurprisingly, Ritter concluded that Fischer’s methodology did not convince. Fischer did not interpret documents within their proper historical context, ‘as it befits an historian’. ³⁷ Some of Fischer’s arguments reminded him ‘in their thread-bareness almost of the anti-German war propaganda of 1914’. Fischer’s approach was not refined enough and did not amount to the kind of history writing that the subject required (and that, by implication, Ritter was able to provide in his own work): ³⁸

[…] such a delicate topic, so endlessly talked about and loaded with such masses of source material as the ‘war guilt question’ requires infinite patience and scrupulous care in the analysis of every single source statement. Nowhere is ‘thesis history’ less called for than here. ³⁹

Having thus shown why he considered Fischer to be ‘not very discerning in selecting his evidence’ ⁴³ , Ritter attempted to offer a different reading of the same documents used by Fischer to prove German decision-makers plotted to bring about the war in 1914. By offering a different interpretation of the same evidence, Ritter unwittingly acknowledged the inherent difficulty in using primary sources in the first place, a position which proponents of postmodern theories would later come to recognize, given their insistence that a historical document does not allow for just one reading of the truth about the past. However, for those engaged in this acrimonious debate, there were only two readings – their own, and the wrong one.

Ritter chose several documents to illustrate his point. On 27 July 1914, for example, the German Ambassador in London, Prince Lichnowsky, sent a despatch to the Auswärtiges Amt in Berlin which indicated for the first time Sir Edward Grey’s unhappiness with Germany’s apparent reluctance to influence Austria-Hungary towards mediation. ⁴⁴ He hinted that Britain might join the Entente in a forthcoming war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. This was just one day before Austria-Hungary would declare war on Serbia, making an escalation of this Balkan crisis into a European war almost certain. According to Fischer this news was only passed on to Vienna with delay (the implication being that they did not want to restrain their ally), while for Ritter, the news was passed on ‘still on the same day […] i.e. only after seven hours.’ ⁴⁵

Evidently the same document could have different meanings, depending on what emphasis the historian puts on the reasons for and the nature of the delay. In Ritter’s view, the delay was caused because the despatch from London first had to be discussed in Berlin, while Fischer sees here ‘suppression’ of this news, even ‘falsification’ because a sentence from the despatch which had been intended for Berlin only was omitted when the document was finally communicated to Vienna. Based on the same piece of evidence, two diametrically opposed readings lead to different conclusions about the events and the likely intentions behind the actions of leading decision-makers – either a cunning attempt to delay passing on this news so as not to hold back the ally and thus potentially avoid the outbreak of war (Fischer), or a reasonable reaction which involved a thorough discussion of the news before it was passed on to Vienna in the correct manner (Ritter). However, Ritter fails to mention that Fischer’s analysis of this event was based on more than this one document. For example, at the same time as the British mediation request was passed on to Vienna, Foreign Secretary Jagow met in confidence with the Austrian Ambassador Szögyény to advise him that Germany was only pretending to support the mediation proposal, but actually wanted Vienna to reject it. ⁴⁶ In this sense it was the amount of evidence, the many different documents marshalled to support an argument that made it difficult to question Fischer’s conclusions.

Ritter employed other such examples to query Fischer’s use of primary source evidence. On 1 August, an exasperated Helmuth von Moltke exclaimed in response to news that Britain and France might stay out of the war: ‘The final straw would be if Russia now also fell away’ ⁴⁷ . Where Fischer discerned evidence of bellicose intentions at the highest levels of decision-making in Berlin based on such evidence, Ritter considers this document (a diary entry by the Chief of the Kaiser’s Naval Cabinet, Müller) ‘a very severely abbreviated note’ and alleges that ‘nobody who can read sources innocently (‘unbefangen’) [could] understand this other than as bitter irony.’ ⁴⁸

This statement not only assumes that it is possible to approach any topic in an innocent or objective way, it also introduces the concept of irony to historical interpretation. It is not clear here if Ritter sees irony in the situation that Müller’s diary describes (and which certainly seems absurd, if perhaps not ironic), or whether he considers Moltke’s remark to have been ironic. Either way, irony adds another level of complexity to how historians might read evidence from the past, although Ritter does not reflect on the limitations this puts on his own use of primary sources. If ironic statements imply a meaning in opposition to the literal meaning of what is said, then how can historians ever be on firm ground when using documents?

If irony is a possible reading of a document that purports to report events in a factual way, then how can we know whether Müller’s note captured either an exasperated statement or an ironic one? And, crucially, if this statement was ironic, why not every other one? Was the Kaiser being ironic when he demanded that ‘the Serbs must be sorted, and that right soon’ ⁴⁹ , or when he later suggested a ‘Halt-in-Belgrade’ ⁵⁰ ? When Müller recorded in his diary that he had witnessed in the General Staff building ‘everyone congratulating themselves on appearing attacked’, were they being ironic? ⁵¹ Some of the documentary evidence we have seems so outrageous that irony would offer a much more comforting way of reading it. Arguably this is the only reading which allows Ritter to acknowledge, in the case of Müller’s diary, its existence and yet enables him to claim that Germany’s main decision-makers did not actively want to bring about war in 1914. However, the sheer amount of documents which suggest the same motivation among Germany’s leaders made Fischer’s thesis compelling. Even if it was possible to dispute the meaning of some of them, or to reject them as ironic, it was difficult to dismiss their cumulative demonstration of a desire for war at the highest decision-making levels.

In the wake of Fischer’s publications, historians thus started to argue over the same piece of evidence and its actual or alleged meaning. Arguments about the authenticity and interpretation of primary evidence reached new heights as Fischer’s critics, finding themselves faced with overwhelming amounts of primary source evidence, contended that Fischer was either using the wrong type of evidence, or reading it in the wrong way. Both sides looked for evidence of foul play in edited sources. ⁵² They disagreed in particular on the interpretation of the so-called war council meeting of December 1912 and of the Riezler diaries. ⁵³ With much of the debate hinging on the reading of Bethmann Hollweg’s policy in the years 1914–17, the importance of the diaries of his private secretary Kurt Riezler was immense, as Fischer explained in 1965: ‘Every interpretation is possible, as well as none at all, as long as Riezler’s diary is being withheld from researchers.’ ⁵⁴ Unsurprisingly, Riezler’s diary did not live up to expectation. When the long-awaited edition appeared in 1972, there was consternation about the fact that they did not contain the explosive evidence that scholars had been led to expect. ⁵⁵ Later, doubts were raised about the authenticity of parts of the documents, the authorship of certain passages and the provenance of some of the loose pages which appeared to have been written at a later date. ⁵⁶ This called into question to what extent this long-anticipated source could be used at all. ⁵⁷

It was not just how to read documents that was up for debate, but which documents to rely on in the first place. In 1963, Hans Herzfeld complained that ‘Fischer believed himself to be able to rely methodologically almost exclusively on the “primary” source statements which are contained within the files compiled by the Germany government offices’. ⁵⁸ He pointed to some inherent difficulties with using documentary sources, highlighting

the problem that even the document in the most secret archive of a government is the outpouring of politically acting and fighting people, so that this gives rise to the most difficult question to what extent even a signed document is a valid expression of the intentions and even of the thinking of the man to whom it owes its creation, either alone or in the circle of his colleagues. ⁵⁹

When charged by his critics with ‘a fetishism of files’ (‘Aktenfetischismus’) ⁶¹ because he had given preference to such official sources over memoirs, diaries and other primary evidence, Fischer was moved to explain his position. He had made a conscious decision to give preference to primary sources from official government files, sources which, he complained, had been denigrated by his critics to ‘so-called primary sources, now suddenly apparently so dubious in their value’. He contended that ‘only in them alone is there a testimony (‘Zeugnis’) of the situation as it was then, the ideas as they were then, and of the acting will as it was then, unbroken by later experiences and reflections.’ ⁶² A defiant Fischer countered that ‘the truth lies in the files’ (‘in actis veritas’). ⁶³ He considered the value of governmental official sources ‘more highly’ than other documents, such as diaries and memoirs, whose insight was ‘necessarily limited’, not least because in wartime, all high-level discussions would have been strictly secret and might not have found their way into private documents. ⁶⁴ His own work, he argued in 1967, amounted to a fundamental new interpretation of historical reality [‘Wirklichkeit’]’. ⁶⁵ He characterized his second major publication, Krieg der Illusionen, as ‘based on the sources’ (‘aus den Quellen erarbeitet’). Again, the implication was that therefore its conclusions, more radical now than in 1961, had to be the truth. ⁶⁶

Fischer’s critics also charged that it was possible to amass too much evidence. This critique implies that correlating evidence in the way the Fischer school did was unusual. Certainly, we are much more used to it today than Ritter’s generation, for example, had been. It was made possible by postwar technology (such as the photocopier) and the relative ease of travelling to previously inaccessible archives. According to Ritter, in the main body of Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht, documents are ‘heaped together in masses’ and ‘always interpreted in the same way’. ⁶⁷ Hölzle’s critique was cutting: ‘The extravagant nature of the German war aims, evidenced a hundred times in one-sided fashion appear almost like the monologue of a maniac’ (‘Monolog eines Irrsinnigen’). ⁶⁸ And yet, Fischer’s critics also marshalled their own evidence and their replies were at times similarly constructed from or even ‘permeated’ by primary sources. ⁶⁹

Fischer’s work was accused of being ‘a bad piece of history’, or a mere ‘piece of hard graft which lacked instinct’ (‘instinktlose Fleißleistung’ ⁷⁰ ), an interesting criticism, for it implies the acceptance of a certain degree of subjectivity in historical methodology, suggesting that some historians perhaps just have a better instinct for unearthing causality than others. While the right instinct will lead to the right interpretation, without that quality, Fischer’s history writing can only ever impress in terms of the effort he put into assembling his evidence, not in the flawed conclusions he draws from it. Thus, in Hölzle’s words, Fischer ‘dragged so much laboriously assembled baggage along the wrong path’. ⁷¹

Of course, such focus on primary sources was not new in the context of this particular debate. The controversy around war guilt had always centred on documents, ever since the governments of the Great Powers decided to publish some of their secret documents to demonstrate to the rest of the world that they had not caused the war. This unprecedented outpouring of documents began as soon as the war had started in the form of so-called coloured books and was particularly pronounced in the interwar years when governments felt compelled to expose their secret documents to public scrutiny, either in order to prove the victors wrong in their war-guilt ruling, or to counter apologist claims of shared responsibility for the war. ⁷² Carefully edited and with the national interest in mind, such apologist publications largely succeeded after 1919 in deceiving the German public and eventually in convincing other governments into revising the Versailles ruling on German war-guilt. Fischer claimed not to be deceived by this published evidence, but to read it in conjunction with newly discovered archival material and to come to a different interpretation, thus undoing the efforts of countless authors who had set about revising the Versailles war-guilt ruling.

Examining the ways in which historians argued over war-guilt during the Fischer controversy highlights the extent to which Fischer prompted a debate in which Germany had to be shown to be either guilty or innocent (or, to be more precise, certain German decision-makers, in particular the Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg). The debate harked back to previously entrenched positions, following the Versailles war-guilt allegation which set the parameters in which revisionists and anti-revisionists contested their opposing interpretations. Here, too, German governments had become involved in shaping the controversy, another interesting parallel between the debate of the 1960s and the 1920s. The attribution of guilt, and the corresponding desire to deny any such allegations, made it almost impossible to adopt the middle ground. Rather, the debate was always conducted against a perceived urgency to establish the truth about why the war began. Following Fischer, this trend continued. A truth had to be found; there was no question in the minds of most of those involved in the debate that it was possible to do so. In this quest, even post-Fischer debates remained entirely unaffected by concurrently emerging doubts about our ability to discover any kind of truth in history, as the following section will show.

II

We cannot, of course, tell the whole truth.

Harold Temperly, 1920 ⁷³

[…] my book was nothing short of treason. I had demonstrated beyond any doubt that Germany had similar aims in both world wars, and since this similarity could not be denied, my critics resorted to a variety of methods to obscure the unpleasant truth. ⁷⁴

Fritz Fischer, 1965

The postmodern challenge has resulted in doubts about confident assertions of ‘truth’, ‘guilt’, even of definite causes of events in history. However, this does not generally apply to the debate on the origins of the First World War, where notions of culpability, war-guilt and blame have led to entrenched positions about the real causes of the war. The following section will argue that the controversy is unusual in this unreflexive approach to notions about truth in history and in seeking to find a definitive, true account of the past.

Even before the onset of postmodern critiques of historical methodologies, some historians had already begun to question the notion of authenticity, objectivity, or reliance on primary sources as a way of understanding events in the past. In 1961 E.H. Carr’s influential What is History? not only questioned whether there are historical facts which ‘speak for themselves’, but also – crucially – highlighted the importance of the historian as author, as somebody who brings his or her own preconception and values to their subject of enquiry. Carr urged readers to ‘study the historian before you study the facts’; advice which is certainly useful for understanding this long debate.

Others went much further in casting doubt on history as a scientific discipline and queried whether historians could ever hope to uncover the past and tell ‘the truth’ about it. Texts were considered to have no unambiguous meaning and could be read in many different ways. In 1966, the same year in which the Fischer controversy featured in the Journal of Contemporary History, the American scholar Hayden White argued against the Rankean notion that historians can uncover the past ‘as it really was’ and questioned the way in which history defined itself as a science when it suited and as art when it did not. ⁷⁵

Many historians continue to treat their ‘facts’ as though they were ‘given’ and refuse to recognize, unlike most scientists, that they are not so much ‘found’ as ‘constructed’ by the kinds of questions which the investigator asks of the phenomena before him. ⁷⁶

In the views of some postmodernists, ‘the historian is always the prisoner of the world within which he thinks, and his thoughts and perceptions are conditioned by the categories of the language in which he operates’. ⁷⁸ Those involved in the debate would surely have recognized some validity in this assertion – at least where the views of their opponents were concerned. Gerhard Ritter’s background, war experience and the desire to educate the German population politically resulted in Ritter being a historian with a political mission whose world view had been shaped by his approval of the Kaiserreich’s authoritarian political system. ⁷⁹ This meant that as a convinced Protestant and German-nationalist historian he rejected ‘confessional’ (that is, Catholic) and foreign interpretations of German history which ‘naturally’ lacked any inherent understanding of German questions. He was thus a prime example of a historian whom one could consider ‘non-objective’, that is, someone bound up by his ideology who considered his own work to be essentially objective and that of others of different persuasions to lack this alleged objectivity. ⁸⁰ And similarly, it is through a greater understanding of Fischer’s personal background that we can fully appreciate the motivation behind his position. ⁸¹

Extreme postmodern views have not generally been adopted by historians and they would certainly not have resonated with Fischer or Ritter, had they known about them. ⁸² Historians have not rejected empiricism in droves but continue to employ it in their research and in their teaching. Robert Berkhofer commented in 1995 that ‘few books or articles by Anglophone historians have exemplified in practice the possibilities of the linguistic and other turns for writing history’ ⁸³ and the same can be said for German historians. ⁸⁴ Indeed, as Georg Iggers observes, ‘meaningful historical writing would be impossible’ if postmodern views were applied to history. Writing in 1997, he concluded:

The postmodernist challenge has had a significant impact on historical thought and writing without, however, destroying the continuities with older conceptions and practices. […] The subject matter of history has shifted from social structures and processes to culture in the broad sense of everyday life. ⁸⁵

In trying to explain the fact that the ‘men of 1914’ failed to preserve the peace, those involved in the Fischer controversy could not have accepted White’s demand ‘to recognize that there is no such thing as a single correct view of any object under study but there are many correct views, each requiring its own style of representation.’ ⁸⁸ This difficulty stems from the fact that the differing interpretations are often not varying shades of grey, but are diametrically opposed, black or white, which means that several views cannot be simultaneously correct. For this reason, those researching the topic today would find it just as difficult as the earlier generations to accept postmodern ideas.

Fischer and his critics shared an underlying assumption that it was possible for historians to be able to find truth in history. ‘I had demonstrated beyond any doubt that Germany had similar aims in both world wars’, concluded Fischer in retrospect. ⁸⁹

The burden of their history-writing was to uncover and explain what caused the war, based on primary sources, using their evidence to substantiate their conclusions, in an effort to convince others of their opposing views. There was ‘guilt’ at stake, which made the topic all the more passionately fought over. It was not possible with this mindset to agree to disagree, and indeed, historians engaged in the debate 50 years on still attempt to convince others of their interpretation of events and many still engage in polemics. ⁹⁰ And yet, White’s approach might have enabled them to resolve this heated debate, for agreeing that there could be several correct views would have allowed them ‘to entertain seriously those creative distortions offered by minds capable of looking at the past with the same seriousness as ourselves but with different affective and intellectual orientations.’ ⁹¹

In response to postmodern theories historians studying the origins of the First World War might do well to argue in favour of the relativism of judgments of such a large moral question. We do want to know why war broke out in 1914. We see important links between the origins of this war and subsequent conflicts and we continue to be moved by the suffering the war inflicted upon countless victims. We cannot divorce this emotional and moral involvement from our study of the war’s causes. We seek facts and explanations, not theories, which tell us why the war began. Arguably there are documents which really do provide some facts about history. As Richard Evans points out, since the 1960s, we have seen the emergence of ‘genres of history which carry a strong moral charge’. Among them he includes feminist history and Holocaust history. The latter in particular acknowledges ‘the notion of historical fact independent of the historian’s recognition of it.’ ⁹² It might be argued that, since 1919, the origins of the First World War have also carried such a strong moral charge and should be added to this list of genres. While denying that there ever was a Schlieffen Plan, for example, (a debate which is an important recent footnote to the controversy over the origins of the war) is clearly not the same as denying the Holocaust, nonetheless such claims provoked some heated responses from those who argued strongly against this challenging notion. They did so not least because it was rooted in an apologist view that Germany had not started the war. This is essentially a black-and-white question on which one could not agree to disagree. Being right mattered.

In 1965, Fischer’s conviction of the link between documents and the truth was made most emphatically in an article in the journal Die Zeit, published to coincide with the international historians’ congress in Vienna:

There does not exist a single document in the world that could weaken the central truth that in July 1914 a will for war existed solely on the German side and that all arrangements on the side of the Entente only served for the defensive securing of their alliance. ⁹³

III

One pertinent historiographical fashion is the loss of confidence in causal explanations, in our ability to give clear answers to ‘why’ questions, which has taken place over the last thirty years. ⁹⁷

Ludmilla Jordanova, 2000

This is bad news for historians. It is the ‘unspoken assumption’ of the Fischer controversy that there is a truth to be found and that we can find it in contemporary sources. While Fischer and his critics were mindful of the falsifications and deliberate deceptions inherent in many document collections and post-war publications, they were confident that unpublished sources provided an unadulterated view into the past. Hence Fischer’s exegesis of archival sources and his critics’ unease about how to counter his claims backed up by the sheer volume of documentary evidence. Postmodern theory could actually have been usefully employed in trying to destroy Fischer’s argument, for it argues that ‘the problem with truth is narrative’.

Historical documents, fragments of a past, have meaning only when they are put to use. Their meaning resides with the reader, and is derived from the imaginations of the historian […]. ⁹⁹

A number of conclusions can be drawn from this investigation of the debate on the origins of the war. Firstly, it proves wrong the confident assertions of some postmodernists that ‘most of us, archivists and historians alike, have long since been disabused of [the] possibility’ that the products of our labours amount to ‘empiricist peons to Truth’. ¹⁰² The controversy could only be so heated because all sides believed that they had uncovered the truth and because that truth was tied up with blame and war-guilt, turning historians into judges of the past. Arguably, this tendency to seek guilty parties among the actors in 1914 still features in many accounts of the causes of the war. As Christopher Clark points out, the ‘drawback of prosecutorial narratives is that they narrow the field of vision by focusing on the political temperament and initiatives of one particular state rather than on multilateral processes of interaction.’ ¹⁰³ In contrast, a comparative, international approach will result in a less judgmental view of the past. It can highlight, for example, the extent to which military decision-makers in all European capitals wanted to press for military solutions to the July Crisis much earlier – ‘managing and restraining these military demands until a peaceful solution had been ruled out was a common problem among Entente and Alliance powers alike.’ ¹⁰⁴

Secondly, the very nature of the topic eschews attempts to relativize it because of its perceived inherent importance and because of our moral engagement with it. Since 1914, the question of culpability for an event of such terrible consequences has dominated all historical enquiries. This has rendered the topic inherently unsuited to the relativizing theories of postmodernists. As A.J.P. Taylor commented in 1961: ‘Even the most aloof historian feels the tug of patriotism when his country has been defeated in war and humiliated after it.’ ¹⁰⁵ Fischer appeared not to have felt that patriotic tug (or rather, he denigrated it behind his desire to tell the truth, as he saw it) and this was one reason why his critics took him to task. It really was important to war and postwar generations to explain and understand the origins of the war. They believed in the war-guilt of others (or, alternatively, in the culpability of none) and were subsumed by a desire to prove it. West Germany’s standing in Cold-War Europe depended on it as much as the personal histories of those engaged in the debate, many of whom were attempting to explain the actions of their own or of their fathers’ generation. Even today, the horror of the war, and the countless lives lost, still instil in most historians working on the topic a desire to explain the ‘why’ and not to stop short at ‘patch[ing] together a pastiche of playful suggestions.’ ¹⁰⁶ We seek an explanation, not an interpretation, because of the enormity of what resulted from decisions taken in July 1914 and for the sake of the millions who died. To this day, we look for it essentially in the same way that Fischer and his critics conducted their enquiries in the 1960s – based squarely on primary sources, continually looking for more evidence and with the implicit and explicit assumption that we can uncover the true story of how the war started.

And there is a third, more tentative conclusion, which suggests that we have already experienced another turn which affects the way historians evaluate the origins of the war in the twenty-first century, now that the topic is no longer of contemporary relevance. In 1961, in another important and controversial book published that year, A.J.P. Taylor focused on the origins of the Second World War, a topic that had thus far been entirely uncontroversial. Taylor felt that his topic could now be studied, as it had become history, rather than being about ‘today’.

[…] there comes a time when the historian can stand back and review events that were once contemporary with the detachment that he would show if he were writing of the Investiture conflict or the English civil war. At least, he can try. ¹⁰⁷

Today, we are as far removed from the First World War as the Edwardians were from the Battle of Waterloo. This temporal distance must surely affect how we relate to the topic, arguably more so than any postmodern doubts about the nature of history ever did. But if the centenary presents a turning point at which the First World War truly becomes history, then what is an empiricist historian such as the present author to make of this long debate and of the challenges posed to it by postmodernism? How are we to understand the causes of the war and to try and explain why Europe was plunged into a devastating conflict that would shape the rest of the twentieth century? Analysing broader social forces or attempting theoretical analysis does not provide answers in a study of a breakdown of diplomatic relations which had previously successfully averted major wars in Europe. Postmodern theories cannot help us to explain an event that we still feel the need to understand, and reminding us of the uncertainty and plurality of interpretations inherent in any historical document will not help us solve these enduring questions. Why did ‘conflict avoidance’ not work in 1914 as it had in previous crises? ¹¹¹ What was the role played by certain key decision makers? Is David Lloyd George’s celebrated interpretation that Europe had ‘slithered’ into war – that ‘great equalizer or relativizer’ in that it attributes war-guilt to nobody ¹¹² – really as valid as one which considers all the available evidence and concludes that some individuals actually wanted the war more than others? In 2003, Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig contended: ‘Lloyd George’s notion of the innocent or unintended “slide” stands sharply opposed to the evidence now available’. ¹¹³ In the most recent major investigation of the July Crisis, ‘the most complex event of modern times’, an impressive amount of international evidence is mustered without a case being made against a single state. Rather, the war was caused by ‘sleepwalkers’. ‘There is no smoking gun in this story; or, rather, there is one in the hands of every major character’, argues Christopher Clark. ¹¹⁴ This is a different kind of relativism, but, unlike the critiques posed by postmodernism, one that is much more helpful in seeking to explain the past. But it is also unusual, as most accounts of the origins of the war still seek to advance arguments which foreground the culpability of one or other state. ¹¹⁵

What, then, is the status of this debate after near enough 100 years and what role has the Fischer controversy played in it? Arguably the sheer weight of evidence on the decision-making in the governments of Europe’s Great Powers, in no small measure a result of the scholarship of the Fischer controversy, is today so overwhelming that, even allowing for the fact that the documents do not tell just one version of the ‘truth’, the sum of their parts nonetheless allows us to draw convincing conclusions. Much of what postmodernism raises as potential pitfalls of empiricist history makes for helpful food for thought and has forced historians, on the whole, to reflect critically on their discipline, even if the effect on this particular debate has been negligible. We have moved far beyond Fischer’s focus on the decisions of one government and an international focus is helpful in illuminating the shared assumptions and constraints inherent in all the decisions made in July 1914. And yet, my own reading of the sources leaves me with an overwhelming amount of evidence of different types which show the desire in Berlin and Vienna to unleash a war in July 1914 much earlier than in other capitals. ¹¹⁶ Others might look with similar certainty to St Petersburg, Belgrade and Paris, in particular, for evidence of war-mongering and war-guilt. Postmodernism might help us finally to accept why we cannot agree in our interpretations and this should not surprise us; understanding the limits of historical enquiry might make it easier for us to accept opposing conclusions and has certainly made the controversy today much less discordant than it has been for most of its duration. Perhaps we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that historians

[…] can never attain perfect or total knowledge of the whole truth. All they can do is establish probabilities – sometimes overwhelming, sometimes less so, sometimes hardly at all – about parts of the past: those parts that can be accessed by means of the remains it has handed down in one form or another to posterity. ¹¹⁷