Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.
For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.
The Age of Catastrophe: A History of the West 1914-1945
1016Overview
One of Germany’s leading historians presents an ambitious and masterful account of the years encompassing the two world wars Characterized by global war, political revolution and national crises, the period between 1914 and 1945 was one of the most horrifying eras in the history of the West. A noted scholar of modern German history, Heinrich August Winkler examines how and why Germany so radically broke with the normative project of the West and unleashed devastation across the world. In this total history of the thirty years between the start of World War One and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Winkler blends historical narrative with political analysis and encompasses military strategy, national identity, class conflict, economic development and cultural change. The book includes astutely observed chapters on the United States, Japan, Russia, Britain, and the other European powers, and Winkler’s distinctly European perspective offers insights beyond the accounts written by his British and American counterparts. As Germany takes its place at the helm of a unified Europe, Winkler’s fascinating account will be widely read and debated for years to come.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300204896 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/03/2015 |
| Pages: | 1016 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 2.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Age of Catastrophe
A History of the West, 1914â"1945
By Heinrich August Winkler, Stewart Spencer
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Heinrich August WinklerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21309-6
CHAPTER 1
The Twentieth Century's Seminal Catastrophe: The First World War
Battles and War Crimes: Military Action: 1914–16
The war would be short and would end with their country's victory. On this point, at least, everyone was agreed as they cheered their departing front-line troops in August 1914. And this was true whether the cheering crowds were in Berlin, Vienna, Paris, London or St Petersburg. But within weeks a mood of sobriety had descended on them all, and by the end of 1914 it was clear that the enemy would not be quickly defeated. From the outset, this war assumed different, greater, proportions from any that had previously been waged in Europe, wars in which many older contemporaries had themselves played an active part.
During the first four weeks of the war the forces drawn up against each other were, on the one hand, the two Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary and, on the other, the Triple Entente of Russia, France and Great Britain, together with Serbia, Montenegro and Japan. Neutral Belgium became Germany's enemy when it refused to bow to an ultimatum from Berlin and opposed Germany's violation of international law. Turkey entered the war in October 1914, Bulgaria in October 1915, in both cases siding with the Central Powers. The Triple Entente was strengthened in May 1915, when Italy entered the war, and in 1916, when Portugal, Romania and Greece followed suit.
During the early weeks of the war, nothing inspired public revulsion as much as the German atrocities committed in neutral Belgium. The Belgian army put up unexpectedly stiff resistance, and it is possible that non-uniformed members of the Civil Guard were also involved in the fighting. Whatever the facts of the matter, the German military quickly developed a fear of 'franctireurs' that led to the same degree of panic that had been felt during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. They responded by destroying private and public buildings, taking hostages and indiscriminately executing civilians falsely accused of shooting German soldiers. At the end of August large parts of the medieval town of Louvain, including the Catholic University's priceless library, were burnt to the ground. A total of 5,521 Belgian civilians were killed in the course of the massacres that took place between August and October 1914. Countless Belgian women were raped by German soldiers. It has also been claimed, but never proved, that children's hands were cut off and that other forms of mutilation were perpetrated, but these reports are almost certainly invented, their psychological origins lying in the colonial practices known to have taken place in the Belgian Congo during the reign of King Leopold II, who died in 1909.
John Horne and Alan Kramer, the authors of what is still the most thorough investigation of the atrocities perpetrated by the Germans in 1914, describe the Germans' mistaken belief that the Belgians were conducting a 'popular war' as an exceptional case of autosuggestion unique in any modern army. The actual atrocities committed by German soldiers were so terrible that in Belgium, France and England events that sprang, rather, from an overexcited imagination were taken to be true: as Horne and Kramer suggest, the severed hands became 'an allegory of the invasion, the enemy, and the war'. The brutality of the German troops in Belgium and shortly afterwards in northern France was seen as a typical expression of Prussian militarism, impossible to reconcile with the Hague Convention signed by Germany in 1907 or with German claims to be one of the world's leading centres of civilization. From then on it was easy for the Allies' wartime propaganda machine to portray the barbaric enemy as twentieth-century Huns and Kaiser Wilhelm II as a latter-day Attila.
In early October 1914, ninety-three well-known German academics, artists and intellectuals signed an officially inspired 'Appeal to the World of Culture' protesting at such attacks. The signatories included the zoologist and social Darwinian Ernst Haeckel, the philosopher and Nobel laureate for literature Rudolf Eucken, the chemist Fritz Haber, the immunologist and Nobel laureate for medicine Paul Ehrlich, the historians Eduard Meyer and Karl Lamprecht, the painter Max Liebermann and the poet Gerhart Hauptmann. In putting their names to this document, they not only denied that the Germans were guilty of war crimes but even ignored the fact that Belgium's neutrality had been criminally violated, claiming that the lives and property of Belgian citizens had not been affected, except in cases of extreme necessity; they denied the destruction caused by German troops in Leuven; and they even found it in themselves to state that 'without German militarism, German culture would long since have been wiped from the face of the earth'. The impact of this appeal in countries that were hostile to Germany and even in those that main- tained their neutrality was devastating: Germany's cultural elite seemed to have parted company with the 'cultural world' at which its patriotic manifesto was primarily directed.
By September 1914 German advances in northern France had stalled, and for no compelling reason a profoundly pessimistic chief of the general staff, Count Helmuth von Moltke ('the Younger'), abandoned the Battle of the Marne as lost, ordering a precipitate retreat and finding himself replaced on 14 September by Prussia's minister of war, Erich von Falkenhayn. This marked the end of the 'Schlieffen plan', according to which the German army would break through enemy lines in Belgium and Lorraine and defeat the French forces, after which the bulk of the German troops would be sent to Russia. The Germans failed to win control of the most important Channel ports, including Dunkirk and Boulogne, where reinforcements of the British Expeditionary Force were in consequence able to land. The battles fought in the autumn of 1914 brought successes to both sides in turn, but both suffered appalling losses in the process. In the end the western front between Flanders and Upper Alsace could best be described as a standoff.
To the east, by contrast, Germany reported a military triumph during the early months of the war that it was never able to repeat in the west. At the end of August 1914 the Eighth Army under the nominal command of the infantry general Paul von Hindenburg – brought out of retirement for the occasion – but under the actual command of the chief of the general staff, General Erich Ludendorff, who had recently taken the city of Liège, succeeded in defeating the Russian army at Ortelsburg following the latter's incursion into East Prussia. For reasons of historic symbolism the battle was named after the nearby town of Tannenberg, where Poles and Lithuanians had defeated the army of the Teutonic Order in 1410.
At the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes in September 1914, German forces drove back the occupying Russian troops, but it was in February 1915 at the Winter Battle of Masuria that the Russians suffered their worst and definitive defeat in East Prussia. On the Polish front, too, the German and Austrian units that were deployed there were able to make substantial territorial gains in the autumn of 1914. But in the spring of 1915 an attempt by Austro-Hungarian forces to drive the Russians back into Carpathia proved ineffectual, and the Danube Monarchy, which had already lost 1.2 million soldiers in 1914 alone, suffered further losses of 800,000 men, a blow from which Germany's leading ally had still not recovered by the end of the war.
In spite of this, the Central Powers were able to place immense pressure on tsarist Russia, capturing Lithuania, Courland and Russian Poland between May and October 1915, and driving the Russians from Galicia. In the course of their retreat, the Russian troops deported more than 1.6 million Lithuanians, Latvians, Jews and Poles, claiming that in doing so they were acting in the interests of their own safety and security but in fact anticipating the even crueller fate that was to be meted out to Turkmen and Kirghiz nomads in 1916 after both of these groups had refused to accept the decision to call up all the Muslims living in tsarist Russia. Some half million Turkmen and Kirghiz nomads were robbed of their herds and property and driven into the mountains or deserts, where they died a pitiful death. By the autumn of 1915 a tenacious standoff had developed along the eastern front, too, albeit one that was broken in the summer of 1916 by the Russians' Brusilov offensive. The Austro-Hungarian army suffered a devastating defeat at Bukovina, and between then and the Russian February Revolution of 1917, the front remained largely unchanged.
On 5 November 1916 the military situation made it possible for the two Central Powers in the persons of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Kaiser Franz Joseph to proclaim the establishment of a Polish state – the 'Kingdom of Poland' – on the territory formerly occupied by Russian Poland, although the real executive power lay not in the newly formed Polish National Council in Warsaw but in the hands of the German governor general in Warsaw and the Austrian governor general in Lublin. In consequence there could be no talk of an 'independent' Poland, still less of a secure frontier: Germany retained the right to annex a 'border strip' that was also to include Polish parts of the Upper Silesian industrial region. The future of two other areas occupied by German troops also remained open: Lithuania and Courland. Among the voices raised in favour of the annexation of the Baltic States were not only the Pan-Germans but also, and above all, the upper strata of German Balt society and many of the German Balts who were living and working in Germany.
Meanwhile on the western front there were repeated attempts in 1915 and 1916 to end the military stalemate. At the end of April 1915 German troops used poison gas for the first time at Ypres, and at the end of February 1916 Erich von Falkenhayn launched an offensive aimed at capturing Verdun. By June the German and French armies had each lost more than 200,000 men in sustained and bitter fighting. Falkenhayn broke off the battle in mid-July in order to repel the British offensive on the Somme. By November the British, German and French armies had between them lost more than one million men here, the end result being only the most insignificant gains for the Allies. Falkenhayn paid for his failure by being replaced as chief of the general staff, and in August 1916 the Third Army High Command was appointed, with Hindenburg as chief of the general staff and Ludendorff as quartermaster-general.
From now on, Ludendorff was the 'strong man' in the German military, Hindenburg its popular figurehead. In the face of all the historical facts, Ludendorff was even hailed as the 'victor of Tannenberg' by the army's propaganda machine and soon assumed the role of substitute Kaiser, Wilhelm II being wholly unsuited to such a role – from August 1914 he rarely appeared in public at all. True, neither of the two army commanders was able to bring about an improvement in the situation on the western front, and between October and December 1916 the French regained control of the fortifications at Verdun that the Germans had previously wrested from them.
At sea, too, the stalemate between Germany and the two western powers remained largely unchanged during the first two years of the war. At the instigation of Winston Churchill, then the first lord of the Admiralty, Britain imposed a blockade in the North Sea from the Shetland Islands to southern Norway, cutting off Germany from supplies of raw materials and food and also preventing the country from exporting its own produce overseas. Germany responded by deploying submarines and mine ships, whereas its surface fleet was kept on standby at the insistence of its commander in chief, Germany's secretary of state for the navy, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.
In March 1915 the German High Command gave orders for an unrestricted submarine war, enabling its vessels to attack even neutral ships without warning. The first fatal outcome of this new strategy was the sinking of the British liner the Lusitania in May 1915, with the loss of 1,200 passengers and crew, including 120 American citizens. The government in Washington responded by issuing a series of ultimatums, leading in September 1915 to a reduction in the scope of German submarine attacks. Not until late May 1916, at the Battle of Jutland, was the surface fleet used to any greater extent. Although the British fleet suffered more serious losses than its German equivalent, it was none the less able to prevent the Germans from breaking through the naval blockade. And while Germany's naval leaders demanded a return to full-scale submarine warfare, they were unable to persuade either Wilhelm II or his chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, to accept their proposal. Tirpitz responded to his defeat by resigning as secretary of state for the navy.
When compared with France and Russia, south-east Europe and the Mediterranean were sideshows of the First World War. By the end of 1914 the Central Powers had overrun the whole of Serbia. Montenegro capitulated in January 1915. And in the autumn of 1916 large tracts of Romania fell into the hands of the Germans and Austrians. But these successes were overshadowed by Italy's decision in May 1915 to enter the war on the side of the Entente. Prior to taking this step, Italy had been in negotiations with Austria-Hungary and had demanded that in compensation for its claims to the Balkans, Austria-Hungary would cede Trentino, Görz, Gradisca, Istria (including Trieste) and several Dalmatian islands, demands to which Austria, under pressure from Berlin, largely agreed, but they stopped short of the concessions that Britain, France and Russia had made in secret negotiations that were conducted in parallel. The result was the secret Treaty of London of April 1915, under the terms of which the Entente agreed that at the end of the war, Italy would receive reparations in the form of the South Tyrol, Trieste and Istria (but without the Hungarian port of Rijeka, or Fiume), north and central Dalmatia and the islands off its coast and, finally, complete sovereignty over the Dodecanese Islands. Italy was also to acquire an area of influence on the Turkish Mediterranean coast and would be given a protectorate over a reduced Albania.
The Italian prime minister, Antonio Salandra, and his foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino, supported intervention on the side of the Allies, but they had the majority of members of parliament against them, and so Salandra resigned on 21 May 1915. His predecessor, Giovanni Giolitti, had championed Italian neutrality and could count on a parliamentary majority but he had no desire to govern himself. Ultimately, the decisive factor proved to be pressure from the overwhelmingly middle-class demonstrators on the streets of Rome and other large cities, many of whom were students. Among them were several leaders emphatically on the side of intervention, including the nationalist poet Gabriele D'Annunzio and the former radical Marxist and syndicalist Benito Mussolini, who since his break with the decidedly anti-interventionist Socialist Party in November 1914 had edited his own Popolo d'Italia, a newspaper financed by industry and by the French government. King Victor Emanuel III aligned himself with the vociferous nationalist minority, refused to accept Salandra's resignation and persuaded him to continue to run the country. In turn, this meant that the liberal majority in parliament took the interventionist line and granted the government the extraordinary powers that it demanded. Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary on 23 May 1915, but waited until August 1916 to declare war on Turkey and Germany. The first of a total of eleven Battles of Isonzo began in June, leading to serious casualties and only minimal territorial gains.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Age of Catastrophe by Heinrich August Winkler, Stewart Spencer. Copyright © 2011 Heinrich August Winkler. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction xi
1 The Twentieth Century's Seminal Catastrophe: The First World War
Battles and War Crimes: Military Action 1914-16 1
War Aims, Ideological Warfare, Opposition to the War 7
A Year to Remember: The Russian Revolution; the United States Enters the War 19
Freedom for Civilized Nations: Woodrow Wilsons New World Order 52
Two Countries Lie in Ruins; One is Reborn: Germany, Austria-Hungary and Poland at the End of the First World War 60
Trust Gambled Away and Violence Unleashed: The Legacy of the First World War 86
2 From the Armistice to the World Economic Crisis: 1918-33
The Pace of Revolution Slows: Germany on the Way to the Weimar Republic 92
A Blighted New Beginning: Austria and Hungary in 1918/19 105
The Struggle for Independence: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland 110
The East Remains Red: The Russian Civil War and the Foundation of the Third International 112
The Victors Move to the Right: The Western Powers on the Eve of the Paris Peace Talks 118
A Fragile Peace: From Versailles to the League of Nations 122
Protest, Prohibition, Prosperity: The United States in the 1920s 151
The International Revolution is Delayed: The Rise of the Soviet Union and the Divisions within Left-wing Parties in Europe 160
Three Elections and a Secession: Post-war Britain 180
Confrontations and Compromises: France 1919-22 188
A Democracy Self-destructs: Italy's Road to Fascism 193
A Republic Put to the Test: Germany 1919-22 201
A Year of Decisions: 1923. From the Occupation of the Ruhr to the Dawes Plan 223
Right Against Left: Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic 237
Authoritarian Transformation (I): The New States of Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic Region 245
Authoritarian Transformation (II): From the Balkans to the Iberian Peninsula 277
Democracy Evolves: From Sweden to Switzerland 301
Fascism in Power: Italy under Mussolini 320
From Poincare to Poincare: France between 1923 and 1929 338
From Empire to Commonwealth: Britain under Baldwin 351
From Dawes to Young: Germany under Stresemann 360
Socialism in One Country: The Soviet Union under Stalin 1924-33 383
Boom, Crisis and Depression: The United States 1928-33 400
The Logic of the Lesser Evil: Germany under Bruning 412
Stagnation and Criticism of the System: Frances Third Republic 1929-33 433
The Power of Continuity: Britain in the Early 1930s 442
Weimar's Downfall: Hitler's Road to Power 452
Storm Clouds in the Far East: Japan Invades Manchuria 477
3 Democracies and Dictatorships: 1933-9
A New Deal for America: Roosevelt's Presidency 1933-6 484
The Process of Seizing Power: The Establishment of the National Socialist Dictatorship 1933-4 502
Rome's Second Empire: Fascist Italy and the War in Abyssinia 531
The Great Terror: Stalin Builds Up his Dominion over the Soviet Union 540
Setting the Course for War: National Socialist Germany 1934-8 553
Early Signs of Appeasement: Britain 1933-8 571
Mobilization of the Right, Popular Front on the Left: France 1933-8 581
Battlefield of Extremes: The Spanish Civil War 1936-9 602
A Model for Germany: The Anti-Semitic Policies of Fascist Italy 621
Neighbours at Risk: Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Third Reich 1935-8 624
Roosevelt's Realpolitik: The United States from 1936 to 1938 632
Reaching Out Across Borders: From the Austrian Anschluss to the Munich Agreement 639
The ninth of November 1938: The History and Consequences of the Jewish Pogroms in Germany 651
An Alliance of Opposites: The Second World War is Unleashed 655
4 Fault Lines in Western Civilization: The Second World War and the Holocaust
War as Annihilation: The Fifth Partition of Poland 673
From 'Drôle de guerre' to the Battle for Norway 679
France's Collapse: The Campaign in the West 685
Tokyo, Washington, Berlin: A Change in International Politics 1940-41 696
From 'Barbarossa to Pearl Harbor: The Globalization of the War 711
Genesis of Genocide: The 'Final Solution' (I) 723
A Change of Direction: The Axis Powers go on the Defensive 736
Home Fronts: Nations at War 742
Occupation, Collaboration, Resistance (I): Eastern Central Europe, South-east and North-west Europe 755
Occupation, Collaboration, Resistance (II): France 772
'To cause this nation to vanish from the face of the earth': The Final Solution (II) 783
Collapse of a Dictatorship: Italy 1943-4 797
The Allies Advance: Eastern Asia and Europe 1943-4 806
The twentieth of July 1944: German Resistance to Hitler 815
The Partition of Europe (I): The Allies' Post-war Plans 822
Completion of a Mission: The 'Final Solution (III) 832
The End of the War (I): The Fall of the Third Reich 837
The Partition of Europe (II): Radical Changes and Deportations 847
New Beginnings and Traditions: Germany after Capitulation 856
Potsdam: The Decision of the Three Great Powers 861
The End of the War (II): The Atom Bomb and Japan's Capitulation 870
Guilt and Atonement: The Caesura of 1945 (I) 878
West, East, Third World: The Caesura of 1945 (II) 894
From World War to World War: Retrospective of an Exceptional Period 903
List of abbreviations 917
Notes 922
Index 938
Customer Reviews
