Back in January I was asked to continue my Year in Reading series here at LH, and how can I say no? At first I was thinking “I didn’t really read much this year,” but then I looked through my appointment book (if that’s what you call those little week-at-a-glance thingies, which I mainly use to keep track of reading and movies) and discovered that actually I read quite a bit. I’ll list most of them (in more or less chronological order) with cursory evaluations, linking to posts if I’ve written about them, and at the end I’ll be more expansive about a couple I’m reading now with great pleasure.
I enjoyed Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard, though it’s not my favorite Sorokin (LH). My wife and I spent many happy hours listening to Zadie Smith read her recent novel The Fraud (LH). I reread Gaito Gazdanov’s Вечер у Клэр [An Evening with Claire], which I last read shortly after moving to NYC in 1981 (I checked it out of the much-missed Donnell, with its superb foreign-language collection); I don’t know why I didn’t post about it, but I enjoyed it even more than I had before, since I had more background, both historical (it’s about the Russian Civil War) and literary, and I’m sure Bryan Karetnyk’s translation is well worth reading if you want to investigate it. I read Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March (LH), Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier: A Novel (my wife and I thought it was very funny, if frequently discomfiting, as he intends), Veniamin Kaverin’s Художник неизвестен [Artist unknown, tr. as The Unknown Artist] (LH), Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake (LH), Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep (see JC’s 2019 comment; again, I don’t know why I didn’t write about it here, but it was a fun read), Nabokov’s Подвиг [The feat] (LH) and Приглашение на казнь [Invitation to a Beheading] (LH), and Juan Filloy’s Caterva (LH).
One book I really wanted to post about and somehow didn’t manage to was Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. It got rave reviews (you can see some quotes at Mandel’s site), and I’d been wanting to read it for quite a while before it came into my hands as a birthday present this year; I found it gripping and well written, but I somehow couldn’t find anything worth saying about it. If you have any interest in post-apocalyptic fiction that isn’t about zombies or civil war but about ordinary people trying to get by, get along, and deal with their memories, you will almost certainly like it.
I was disappointed by Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental (LH) and by Marietta Shaginyan’s Кик [Kik] (LH) and entertained but not impressed by Irina Polyanskaya’s Читающая вода [(The) reading water; Water that reads] (LH); my wife and I found Lore Segal’s autobiographical novel Other People’s Houses involving but often depressing (Segal has a very disenchanted view of humanity), and we are now rereading Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing, the first novel in his sequence A Dance to the Music of Time (LH) — I’m enjoying Powell’s leisurely, Latinate prose as much as I did a decade ago.
And now to my current reading. For some reason I decided to treat myself to Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, which I’d been wanting to read since it came out over a decade ago (I’ve always been fascinated by WWI), and I’m very glad I did — his emphasis on the importance of both historical and personal factors feels right to me, as does his insistence on contingency (the older I get and the more awareness of the world I acquire, the more ridiculous I find ideas of historical inevitability). Here’s a section on Edward Grey (of “The lamps are going out all over Europe” fame):
Unlike Stolypin and Kokovtsov or their German colleagues Bülow and Bethmann Hollweg, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had no reason to fear unwanted interventions by the sovereign. George V was perfectly happy to be led by his foreign secretary in international matters. And Grey also enjoyed the unstinting support of his prime minister, Herbert Asquith. Nor did he have to contend, as his French colleagues did, with over-mighty functionaries in his own Foreign Office. Grey’s continuity in office alone assured him a more consistent influence over policy than most of his French colleagues ever enjoyed. While Edward Grey remained in control of the Foreign Office for the years between December 1905 and December 1916, the same period in France saw fifteen ministers of foreign affairs come and go. Moreover, Grey’s arrival at the Foreign Office consolidated the influence of a network of senior officials who broadly shared his view of British foreign policy. Grey was without doubt the most powerful foreign minister of pre-war Europe.
Like most of his nineteenth-century predecessors, Sir Edward Grey was born into the top tier of British society. He was the descendant of a distinguished line of Whig grandees – his great grand-uncle was the Earl Grey of the 1832 Reform Bill and eponym of the popular scented tea. Of all the politicians who walked the European political stage before 1914, Grey is one of the most baffling. His aloof and lofty style did not go down well with the rank and file of the Liberal Party. He had long been a Liberal MP, yet he believed that foreign policy was too important to be subjected to the agitations of parliamentary debate. He was a foreign secretary who knew little of the world outside Britain, had never shown much interest in travelling, spoke no foreign languages and felt ill at ease in the company of foreigners. He was a Liberal politician whose vision of policy was opposed by most Liberals and supported by most Conservatives. He became the most powerful member of the faction known as ‘the liberal imperialists’, yet he appears to have cared little for the British Empire – his views on foreign policy and national security were tightly focused on the European continent.
There was a curious dissonance between Grey’s persona – private and public – and his modus operandi in politics. As a young man, he had shown little sign of intellectual curiosity, political ambition or drive. He idled away his years at Balliol College, Oxford, where he spent most of his time becoming Varsity champion in real tennis, before graduating with a third in Jurisprudence, a subject he had chosen because it was reputed to be easy. His first (unpaid) political post was fixed up through Whig family connections. As an adult, Grey always cultivated the image of a man for whom politics was a wearisome duty, rather than a vocation. When parliament was dissolved in 1895 following a Liberal defeat in a key vote, Grey, who was then serving as an MP and parliamentary under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, professed to feel no regrets. ‘I shall never be in office again and the days of my stay in the House of Commons are probably numbered. We [he and his wife Dorothy] are both very relieved.’ Grey was a passionate naturalist, birdwatcher and fisherman. By the turn of the century, he was already well known as the author of a justly celebrated essay on fly-fishing. Even as foreign secretary, he was apt to leave his desk at the earliest opportunity for country jaunts and disliked being recalled to London any sooner than was absolutely necessary. Some of those who worked with Grey, such as the diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, felt that the country excursions were getting out of hand and that the foreign secretary would be well advised to ‘spare some time from his ducks to learn French’.74 Colleagues found it difficult to discern political motivation in Grey; he struck them as ‘devoid of personal ambition, aloof and unapproachable’.
And yet Grey did develop a deep appetite for power and a readiness to deploy conspiratorial methods in order to obtain and hold on to it. His accession to the post of foreign secretary was the fruit of careful planning with his trusted friends and fellow liberal imperialists, Herbert Asquith and R. B. Haldane. In the ‘Relugas Compact’, a plot hatched at Grey’s fishing lodge in the Scottish hamlet of that name, the three men agreed to push aside the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and establish themselves in key cabinet posts. Secretiveness and a preference for discreet, behind-the-scenes dealing remained a hallmark of his style as foreign secretary. The posture of gentlemanly diffidence belied an intuitive feel for the methods and tactics of adversarial politics.
That gives me a better sense of Grey than I’ve gotten from my previous reading, and a passage about Conrad von Hötzendorf’s long liaison with Gina von Reininghaus, the wife of a Viennese industrialist, is equally enlightening:
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this relationship; it was at the centre of Conrad’s life throughout the years from 1907 to the outbreak of war, eclipsing all other concerns, including the military and political questions that came to his desk. Its obsessive quality may help to explain some features of Conrad’s professional demeanour – his willingness, for example, to risk his professional standing by associating himself with extreme positions, and his relative immunity from the fear of being exposed or discredited. He even came to see war as a means of gaining possession of Gina. Only as a victorious war-hero, Conrad believed, would he be able to sweep aside the social obstacles and the scandal attaching to a marriage with a prominent divorcée. He fantasized in a letter to Gina about returning from a ‘Balkan war’ draped in the laurels of triumph, throwing caution to the winds and making her his wife.
If you prudishly ignore that kind of thing, you miss something vital. I strongly recommend the book to anyone interested in the period.
I’ll finish with one of the best gifts I received this year. Trevor Joyce, the poet laureate of LH (see Fastness and Trem Neul), sent me his latest book, Conspiracy; there’s a description at the site of the publisher, Veer2:
Conspiracy is a set of 144 twelve-line poems, written one or more per day in Shandon, Cork, between May 18 and July 10, 2020.
These eight weeks saw the initial onslaught of the pandemic and the first panicked responses: mass hospitalizations and lockdowns, shortages of oxygen and protective equipment, lip-service to emergency workers, and political manoeuvring. It was also marked by the murder in the USA of George Floyd, street demonstrations, the leap to prominence of Black Lives Matter, and the spread of rumour and paranoia as lockstep faltered. Everywhere, this was played out on screens, as the language of voiceover often peeled away from the observed realities.
The title, Conspiracy, puts front and centre the human activity of breathing together, a shared need felt urgently at that time when much else ceased. The phrases stagger onward, interrupting and speaking over one another, as obsessive doomscrolling gives way to other reading and concerns — a book on cave art, a Victorian manual of stage magic, a coroner’s inquiry into the collapse of Dublin tenements in 1913 — yet returns again to supplant them.
The poems are interset with photographs of stencilled sidewalk art from Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, Feb. 2020, images which echo or anticipate the apprehensions of the days they separate.
It’s a lovely little volume, and I’ve been reading it slowly, letting it infuse my awareness of the passing days; I like Peter Manson’s description: “It’s not really enjambment, more as if a dozen voices were speaking in turn, so well-rehearsed as to flow perfectly and still retain their distinctness.” You can download a pdf sample at that publisher’s page; here’s poem 106, to give you an idea:
more precious than
certain rare metals
the flat spalted timbers
of the lid display
in startling turquoise
a compacted history
telling how the felled woods
rot yet they reveal
nothing of what is closer
to hand that is what is
within the box if
anything at all
I am always refreshed and stimulated by his sense of how words interact and how language can be used to engage with the complexity of its own and the world’s history; especially in these difficult times, I need poetry like that. If you like the sample, why not try the book?
Addendum. Since the question of blame for WWI came up in the comments, I thought I’d quote a substantial chunk of Clark’s conclusion, so interested parties can draw conclusions based on actual evidence.
We need to distinguish between the objective factors acting on the decision-makers and the stories they told themselves and each other about what they thought they were doing and why they were doing it. All the key actors in our story filtered the world through narratives that were built from pieces of experience glued together with fears, projections and interests masquerading as maxims. In Austria, the story of a nation of youthful bandits and regicides endlessly provoking and goading a patient elderly neighbour got in the way of a cool-headed assessment of how to manage relations with Belgrade. In Serbia, fantasies of victimhood and oppression by a rapacious, all-powerful Habsburg Empire did the same in reverse. In Germany, a dark vision of future invasions and partitions bedevilled decision-making in the summer of 1914. And the Russian saga of repeated humiliations at the hands of the central powers had a similar impact, at once distorting the past and clarifying the present. Most important of all was the widely trafficked narrative of Austria-Hungary’s historically necessary decline, which, having gradually replaced an older set of assumptions about Austria’s role as a fulcrum of stability in Central and Eastern Europe, disinhibited Vienna’s enemies, undermining the notion that Austria-Hungary, like every other great power, possessed interests that it had the right robustly to defend.
That the Balkan setting was central to the outbreak of war may seem self-evident, given the location of the assassinations that started the crisis. But two points in particular deserve emphasis. The first is that the Balkan Wars recalibrated the relationships among the greater and lesser powers in dangerous ways. In the eyes of both the Austrian and the Russian leaderships, the struggle to control events on the Balkan peninsula took on a new and more threatening aspect, especially during the winter crisis of 1912–13. One consequence was the Balkanization of the Franco-Russian Alliance. France and Russia, at different paces and for different reasons, constructed a geopolitical trigger along the Austro-Serbian frontier. The Balkan inception scenario was not a policy or a plan or plot that steadily matured over time, nor was there any necessary or linear relationship between the positions adopted in 1912 and 1913 and the outbreak of war in the following year. It was not that the Balkan inception scenario – which was in effect a Serbian inception scenario – drove Europe forwards towards the war that actually happened in 1914, but rather the other way round, that it supplied the conceptual framework within which the crisis was interpreted, once it had broken out. Russia and France thereby tied the fortunes of two of the world’s greatest powers in highly asymmetrical fashion to the uncertain destiny of a turbulent and intermittently violent state.
For Austria-Hungary, whose regional security arrangements were ruined by the Balkan Wars, the Sarajevo murders were not a pretext for a pre-existing policy of invasion and warfare. They were a transformative event, charged with real and symbolic menace. It is easy from the perspective of the twenty-first century to say that Vienna should have resolved the issues arising from the assassinations through calm bilateral negotiations with Belgrade, but in the setting of 1914 this was not a credible option. Nor, for that matter, was Sir Edward Grey’s half-hearted proposal of ‘four-power mediation’, which was founded upon a partisan indifference to the power-political realities of Austria-Hungary’s situation. It was not just that the Serbian authorities were partly unwilling and partly unable to suppress the irredentist activity that had given rise to the assassinations in the first place; it was also that Serbia’s friends did not concede to Vienna the right to incorporate in its demands on Belgrade a means of monitoring and enforcing compliance. They rejected such demands on the ground that they were irreconcilable with Serbian sovereignty. […]
Where does this leave the question of culpability? By asserting that Germany and her allies were morally responsible for the outbreak of war, Article 231 of the Versailles Peace Treaty ensured that questions of culpability would remain at or near the centre of the debate over the war’s origins. The blame game has never lost its appeal. The most influential articulation of this tradition is the ‘Fischer thesis’ – shorthand for a bundle of arguments elaborated in the 1960s by Fritz Fischer, Imanuel Geiss and a score of younger German colleagues, who identified Germany as the power chiefly culpable in the outbreak of war. According to this view (leaving aside the many variations within the Fischer school), the Germans did not stumble or slither into war. They chose it – worse, they planned it in advance, in the hope of breaking out of their European isolation and launching a bid for world power. Recent studies of the resulting Fischer controversy have highlighted the links between this debate and the fraught process by which German intellectuals came to terms with the contaminating moral legacy of the Nazi era, and Fischer’s arguments have been subjected to criticism on many points.3 Nonetheless, a diluted version of the Fischer thesis still dominates in studies of Germany’s road to war.
Do we really need to make the case against a single guilty state, or to rank the states according to their respective share in responsibility for the outbreak of war? In one classical study from the origins literature, Paul Kennedy remarked that it is ‘flaccid’ to dodge the search for a culprit by blaming all or none of the belligerent states. A stiffer approach, Kennedy implies, ought not to shrink from pointing the finger. The problem with a blame-centred account is not that one may end up blaming the wrong party. It is rather that accounts structured around blame come with built-in assumptions. They tend, firstly, to presume that in conflictual interactions one protagonist must ultimately be right and the other wrong. Were the Serbs wrong to seek to unify Serbdom? Were the Austrians wrong to insist on the independence of Albania? Was one of these enterprises more wrong than the other? The question is meaningless. A further 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. Then there is the problem that the quest for blame predisposes the investigator to construe the actions of decision-makers as planned and driven by a coherent intention. You have to show that someone willed war as well as caused it. In its extreme form, this mode of procedure produces conspiratorial narratives in which a coterie of powerful individuals, like velvet-jacketed Bond villains, controls events from behind the scene in accordance with a malevolent plan. There is no denying the moral satisfaction delivered by such narratives, and it is not, of course, logically impossible that war came about in this manner in the summer of 1914, but the view expounded in this book is that such arguments are not supported by the evidence.
The outbreak of war in 1914 is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol. There is no smoking gun in this story; or, rather, there is one in the hands of every major character. Viewed in this light, the outbreak of war was a tragedy, not a crime. Acknowledging this does not mean that we should minimize the belligerence and imperialist paranoia of the Austrian and German policy-makers that rightly absorbed the attention of Fritz Fischer and his historiographical allies. But the Germans were not the only imperialists and not the only ones to succumb to paranoia. The crisis that brought war in 1914 was the fruit of a shared political culture. But it was also multipolar and genuinely interactive – that is what makes it the most complex event of modern times and that is why the debate over the origins of the First World War continues, one century after Gavrilo Princip fired those two fatal shots on Franz Joseph Street.
Station Eleven — I read one of her other books and liked it. So I put myself on the hold queues at our public library. I’m surprised, it was published in 2014 but it’s still very popular. I’m number 16 on the paper book queue and number 82 on the e-book queue. (I’ll take whichever version is available first.) And you can also get it as a Book Club Set and in DAISY format, which are something I’ve never seen in my long history of using our library.
Although now that I’ve checked Wikipedia, it might have that level of popularity because it was featured on Canada Reads in 2023.
“graduating with a third in Jurisprudence,”-this is known as “a gentleman’s third”
“Conrad von Hötzendorf”-he must have been an excellent marksman, a prominent industrialist could probably have hired the best professional duellist.
While what is quoted about Hötzendorf may be relevant to the outbreak of the war, the lines on Grey are fascinating but their relevance to this theme is far to seek.
Clark’s overall thesis that “we’re all to blame” went down well in Germany: his wife is German and he speaks the language excellently. He sometimes appears in programmes for German TV.
As I remember it, almost the first third of the book is dedicated to showing that people in high places in Serbia must have been complicit to some extent in the assassination. The point could have been made more succinctly.
What puzzled me at the end was that, if I recall correctly, of the actual declarations of war between the principal belligerents, that of war between Germany and Russia is only mentioned in passing (hint: Russia didn’t declare war on Germany). Between France and Germany it wasn’t mentioned at all: in fact Germany declared war on France with an ultimatum demanding that they surrender all their fortifications and accusing them of bombing Nuremberg from the air (there were of course no planes capable of doing that in 1914).
The book was widely praised but his thesis didn’t garner much support amongst British historians.
Clark’s overall thesis that “we’re all to blame” went down well in Germany
That’s not his overall thesis (he explicitly says that he’s not interested in writing about the tired theme of who’s to blame), and who cares whether it went down well in Germany? And what do you mean by “their relevance to this theme”? The “theme” is whatever he’s writing about, and this is one of the things he chooses to write about; I found it illuminating, but if you don’t care about the people involved, just abstractions like who’s to blame, then I can see why you’d be impatient, but he wasn’t writing for you (or, apparently, some group of “British historians”). I confess I have little patience for reviews that basically say “I wish the author had written a different book.” (E.g.)
The discussion of Grey that’s blockquoted is … puzzling. He supposedly was a) woefully ignorant of and incurious about the outside world; yet (b) also had very decided views on foreign policy that were out of sync with that of the majority of Parliament; yet (c) both the king and the prime minister (the former of whom was supposed to defer to the latter and the latter of whom was supposedly a creature of that parliamentary majority) just stayed out of his way and let him pursue the agenda he wanted to. It’s not impossible, but it raises more questions than it answers and suggests that some crucial explanatory piece of the story has been omitted.
In the atmosphere is 2013 it was inevitable that the book would be perceived as dealing with the blame question, and hence British historians being approached for their opinion on this in relation to Clark’s book. Clark’s statement that he’s not interested in blame strikes me as disingenuous.
What is real tennis? Or, rather, what is unreal tennis?
(“Royal”, I suppose?)
As in peer review: “you shouldn’t be doing your project; you should be doing my project (which I’m already doing myself)”.
I can’t find that; the closest I can find is that it says he was a member of “the liberal imperialists” but seems not to have cared about liberal imperialism – he treated the faction as a means to gain personal power in the party and in parliament.
He was a Liberal politician whose vision of policy was opposed by most Liberals and supported by most Conservatives
If the Liberals were in power, presumably ‘most Liberals’ is a larger number than ‘most Conservatives’, although they and the other Conservatives and assorted hangers on don’t necessarily add up to an absolute majority.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_tennis, as distinct from vulgar modern so-called tennis, is a sufficiently rare thing these days that German wikipedia apparently doesn’t have an article on it, although the Afrikaans and Welsh editions of wikipedia do.
Clark’s statement that he’s not interested in blame strikes me as disingenuous.
Wow, you’re really committed to the it’s-all-about-blame theory. I’ve read over half the book and haven’t yet seen a single sentence that implies blame for the war, but maybe he’ll spring it on me at the end. Or maybe, just maybe, he’s not actually disingenuous.
Maybe he’s ingeniously disingenuous. That reliably leads to interpretive squabbles – everyone can find something to fit their agenda. After all, squabblers too can be disingenuous. As to ingenuity, that’s a prerequisite for any kind of non-boring discussion.
I myself dislike in-your-face ingenuity as being rather common and boastful. Interesting ideas don’t need to wear their smarts on their sleeve.
Real tennis killed two French kings.
vulgar modern so-called tennis
Officially “lawn tennis”.
Maybe “blame” is too loaded a word, but it would seem quite an accomplishment if Clark has written an entire book about the beginning of WW1 without touching on questions of … what’s a politer word/phrase? Causation? Causal responsibility? That everything may have been highly contingent and could equally well ex ante have gone in a different direction had events only fallen out a little bit differently (what if Princip’s gun had jammed, etc etc) can be part of such a discussion, of course. It’s always possible to steer away from such questions for a sentence at a time, as in Lincoln’s famously, perhaps ostentatiously, vague-about-agency sentence “And the war came.” But that was a deliberate rhetorical strategy with a specific political motivation, and would in any event be harder to do at length, I should think.
IN A.D. 2101
WAR WAS BEGINNING.
No link because lurkmore.to no longer exists and “has been excluded from the Wayback Machine”.
JWB, it was probably more a web of interests, expectations, and contradictions (maybe personalities too) and not a chain of events that led to WWI. Removing one event would not have changed much. In fact, Europe escaped a general conflagration in 1908.
@D.O.: Aha, so it’s the Turks’ fault, for being so feckless as to let themselves get pushed around by otherwise-incompetent-at-war second-rate powers like Austria, with that fecklessness thus destabilizing the prior status quo. But a “web” metaphor rather than a “chain” metaphor means “multiple causes” rather than “single cause”; it doesn’t mean “no cause” or “mysterious act of God.” “Plenty of blame to go around” is one way of talking about “blame.”
The French get blême at blâme.
That is unwise, as one of their old guys commented: Peu de gens sont assez sages pour préférer le blâme qui leur est utile à la louange qui les trahit.
Disintegrating empires are a threat to everyone nearby, especially if those nearby are empires themselves, no doubt. I am sure Clark provides plenty of background to assign blame either in quotation marks or without, but maybe he is not nudging the reader sufficiently strongly into a particular direction, at least not as strongly as some may like (did historians decide yet who was to blame for the Punic wars?) I am sure British patriots of a certain kind want to blame someone because WWI began the end of the Empire, but do French (of the analogous kind) consider it as a bad thing? After all, they did get their Alsace-Lorraine.
Maybe “blame” is too loaded a word, but it would seem quite an accomplishment if Clark has written an entire book about the beginning of WW1 without touching on questions of … what’s a politer word/phrase? Causation? Causal responsibility?
Good lord, I didn’t say he didn’t “touch on” such questions — where did you get that from? I said blame wasn’t his “overall thesis” and it’s not the business of the book to assign blame; of course he discusses the various views on the subject. He’s simply not interested in pointing fingers (in contrast to most of those who write on the subject). In other words, if one’s primary interest in a book on WWI is to determine who should be arrested and charged with the crime, this is not the book one is looking for.
I blame Woodrow Wilson, although I acknowledge there are some matters of fine detail in the timeline that remain to be sorted out.
That’s not how I remember it. I remember reviewers castigating Clark for daring to contradict what had been the dogma among German historians since the 1960s: Germany and Austria are to blame for WWI, and nobody else. They did not actually deal with his arguments, and I remember reviews suggesting he should not be taken serious as a historian (there are historians in Germany who think that writing readable books for a wide audience is simply unprofessional).
As for the French, they didn’t need to settle for merely Elsaß–Lothringen. Why, they also got the lion’s share of both Kamerun and Togoland. Not to mention Syria (et le Liban), which must have seemed lucrative at the time rather than the sort of thankless dysfunctional headache of a place one should not wish to have any responsibility for. Pretty sweet imperial gains for a mere 1.4 million (give or take) soldiers KIA.
Sometimes these kind of arguments read as whether the match or the powder keg is guiltier; and here, there were several of both.
Well put.
In the normal non-metaphorical world we would IMHO fairly uncontroversially say that the fellow who struck a match dangerously close to a powderkeg with knowledge that the powderkeg was there is (absent additional extenuating circumstances) more culpable than the fellow who previously left a powderkeg in a perhaps insufficiently-secure or otherwise inappropriate location.* Whereas if the fellow who struck the match did so for a normal match-striking reason (to light a cigarette, or a gas burner on a stove where the pilot light was on the fritz) without reason to know that someone had previously left a powderkeg somewhere nearby where you wouldn’t have expected one, it would be the other way around.
*This is more or less what is called in Anglo-American tort law the “last clear chance” doctrine.
@ulr
What you say also indicates that Clark’s book was perceived as dealing with the “blame game” whatever he claimed.
Clark as a serious historian? He once stated that Britain did not enter WW1 because Germany invaded Belgium. For a historian to give a categorical answer to a hypothetical question for me is not serious, or at least shows he has a line to follow.
Great that the Year in Reading is back on LH! I got Sleepwalkers for my birthday a couple of years ago but I haven’t read it yet. It sounds like the type of book I want to read.
Let us know what you think if and when you do!
@J.W. Brewer: It seems like a relevant metaphor for the outbreak of the First World War concerns who should have known how much powder was in the keg. However blithely other powers may have been moving along toward the outbreak of the fighting, it is a fact that Germany and Austria-Hungary wanted to have a war. The latter wanted to assert itself in the Balkans, and the former wanted to have another go at France and supported the Austrians because they correctly figured that France would be drawn in through their alliance with Russia, who was in turn allied with Serbia. What the sleepwalkers on both sides failed to realize was how much of a disaster the war would turn out to be (although the Serbians, at least, seemed to have a clear idea of how difficult the war might be for their own country).
There had been localized Balkan Wars in the preceding decade that had not led to widespread destruction, and many planners of 1914 had no idea what to expect from a war that would bring in more great powers than any conflict since the War of the Sixth Coalition had ended a hundred years earlier. No decision-makers in Europe fully grasped what a fully modernized industrial war between great powers could really mean—although there were precedents that might have warned them, had they cared to look. The Crimean War had turned out to be much longer and bloodier than any of the participants had expected, but it had been still been a relatively small, distant war of empire for most of the participants. The potential lessons of the American Civil War could have been even more salutary. It was an extended war, fought in the heartland of a country with one of the world’s largest economies, with artillery engagements, trench warfare, and economic warfare—which all presaged the tenor of the Great War half a century later. However, the Europeans did not grasp its significance at the time, for reasons that were at least partially about not appreciating how advanced America had become.
A lot of planners, especially in Germany, looked instead to the last great powers war that had taken place on the European continent—the Franco-Prussian War. However, they took the wrong lessons from that conflict. They saw a war of maneuver that had been won quickly with a single crushing victory at the Battle of Sedan. That was an accurate evaluation of what had determined the war, but it missed a number of key points. The Franco-Prussian War (as its name indicates) had been a war between just two great powers, which necessarily limited its scope. Moreover, while the French defeat at Sedan had guaranteed Prussian victory, it had not ended the war. Unlike the Austro-Prussian War a few years earlier, which had ended within a few weeks of the decisive Battle of Königgrätz, the French continued to fight for almost five months, and it remained a grueling, bloody conflict for both sides, even while Bismarck’s already had an army encamped around Paris. The German elation at their victory and the proclamation of the German Empire allowed a lot of people to forget how much effort it had taken to truly subdue the French forces. These factors combined to help the Germans underestimate what a colossal conflagration would erupt when they intentionally put their match to the waiting powder.
See the Addendum for Clark’s take on the blame issue.
Here is a link to Clark’s recent LRB review of a Perry Anderson book covering six influential takes on the origins of WW1 (Sleepwalkers being one of them):
Christopher Clark
Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War by Perry Anderson. Verso, 373 pp., £30, November
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n23/christopher-clark/the-murmur-of-engines
Thanks, an excellent essay — here’s an archived link. I like his take on Perry Anderson (who is always interesting and usually irritating in equal measure), and his gift for writing is on full display. A couple of sample paragraphs: