David Fromkin - Europe's Last Summer: Who Started The Great War In 1914?

Just who started World War I? That’s a question that historians have debated since, well, World War I. In fact, if you manage to collect a room full of scholars on that tragic conflict, also known as the Great War, you’re likely to get as many opinions as you have bodies. And you may end up with a ruckus that resembles a third world war to boot.

Generally, however, there is a consensus that the First World War was not really started by any one European power, but grew out of the rivalries, power grabs, and alliance structures that had been a fact of Old World realpolitik for centuries. While it’s true that German troops were the first to march against another major power, they did not do so in the same purely aggressive fashion in which the Nazis did two decades later. Instead, they were reacting to a chain of events that spiraled out of control when the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were assassinated by Gavrilo Princips in Late June of 1914.

Or were they? Historian David Fromkin, author of several tomes on the era including a fascinating account of the formation of the modern Middle East entitled A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, seems to think otherwise. And in Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?, Fromkin attempts to pin the blame on Germany more so than most historians do. He accuses the Germans of seizing hold of the tragic events in Sarajevo and using them as an opportunity to launch a war against Russia and France.

A country being a rather ambiguous entity, Fromkin nails his accusations down even closer to the mark, laying responsibility on just one man: Helmuth Johann Ludwig von Moltke, aka Von Moltke the Younger. Fromkin claims he used his position as head of the General Staff to force the Austrians into war against Serbia and, by extension, Russia, thereby involving Germany in a European struggle for supremacy that he felt was inevitable and that Germany had a better chance of winning in 1914 than she might in, say, 1920. Interestingly, though most have accused Kaiser Wilhelm II of masterminding the war, Fromkin paints him as a monarch who, up until the final moments just before war broke out, tried to avoid a conflict.

But the evidence for this is not completely convincing, and the author tries to make the book into an almost murder mystery –like suspense thriller, saving his revelation of the guilty party until the very end of the work. Even then, the final bit of evidence he lays out is unconvincing, a statement by Von Moltke after the war had begun (and he was, ironically, relieved of command by the Kaiser): where he refers to This war which I prepared and initiated. Likely here he was referring to the fact he was involved in war plans before and during the initial stages of the war, not some sinister scheme for global conquest.

To be sure, Fromkin’s claims are often ambitious, and his supporting evidence is wide open to interpretation throughout the book. He has a knack for molding it to his purpose, as most historians, inevitably yielding to the influence of their own personal bias, are wont to do. He claims, for example, that Germany was well aware that Russia’s mobilization of her army was not an aggressive move, since the Germans must have been well aware that Czar Nicholas could easily mobilize and at the same time keep his army roaming through his country’s massive expanses. This is a bit disingenuous, since Germany may have known he could do this, yet considering Russia’s alliance with France there was no guarantee she would do this.

The format here was a bit annoying too, and I thought the book could have had more neat to it. Set out in multiple chapters each consisting of short segments, this 320 page hardcover must have had a good 20 to 30 pages of blank space inserted. The author does, however, cram a lot of fascinating information into the space he has, and his chronological progression works very well indeed.

Overall, I found Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? an enjoyable read with food for thought to those interested in this period in history. In the final analysis, the author’s argument did not persuade me, but I learned much through reading and enjoyed the book at the same time.