Historians’ dispute in Germany over a bestseller that claims Europe shares the blame for WW 1

Unlike Britain, there is no established tradition here of remembering the conflict, nor is it ever referred to as the “Great War”. However the centenary has seen the country make up for lost time with a flood of books, exhibitions and documentaries that challenge long-held assumptions about the conflict.

The greatest phenomenon so far has been the runaway success of Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers. It remains a bestseller after weeks atop Germany’s non-fiction charts last autumn. His thesis, that all of Europe’s powers – not just Germany – carry blame for the war has triggered a heated historians’ dispute.

It is a reversal of the original first World War dispute of the 1960s when historian Fritz Fisher argued that there was an obvious continuity between the war goals in 1914 and 1939: German world dominance. He framed the first World War as a warm-up act for the second and put blame for both squarely at the door of Berlin. By doing so he shattered West Germany’s post-war complacency towards the Nazi era as a regrettable, unprecedented historical mishap. 

Fischer’s arguments have been challenged by other German historians in the subsequent decades but The Sleepwalkers has lobbed a grenade into the debate and younger German historians have applauded Clark’s portrayal of a pan-European crisis with shared guilt.