Admirals versus Generals: The War Aims of the Imperial German Navy, 1914–1918

1972 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 208-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger H. Herwig
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
German Empire ◽  
German States ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
War Aims ◽  
German Navy ◽  
State Secretary

The recent controversy over Germany's war aims during World War I has centered primarily around the positions taken by the Kaiser, the Foreign Office, and the army high command. The views of the navy have been largely neglected. This is unfortunate because the navy was, in a way, the status symbol of the German Empire. It was not, like the various armies, a divisive, particularist force, but rather a national Reich institution—the “melting pot” of Germany. It flew the Imperial black-white-red banner, was funded by the Reichstag, had a state secretary in the Imperial cabinet under the chancellor, recruited its officer cadets from all the German states and cities, trained them in the national naval school at Mürwik, and swore an oath of allegiance to the German Kaiser. Yet as the junior service, the navy struggled to escape from the shadow of the Prussian army and to establish its own identity. The issue of war aims provided it with just such an opportunity.

scholarly journals Flexible Fatherlands: “Patriotism” among Polish-speaking German Citizens during World War I

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-93
Author(s):  
James Bjork
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
German Empire ◽  
Passive Compliance ◽  
War Effort ◽  
War Aims

AbstractThis article examines the experiences of Polish-speaking subjects of the German Empire during World War I. Fighting for wartime empires tended to be retrospectively defined as involuntary service to a “foreign” cause. But the author of this article argues that it was very difficult to distinguish ostensibly passive “compliance” from ostensibly active “patriotism.” The apparent tensions between a German imperial agenda and Polish nationalism also proved to be highly navigable in practice, with German war aims often seen as not only reconcilable with but even conducive to the Polish national cause. Drawing on a recent wave of relevant historiography in English, German, and Polish, and incorporating further analysis of individual testimonies, the article explores the various ways in which “non-German” contributors to the German war effort tried to make sense of their awkward wartime biographies.

Imperial Berlin and Washington: New Light on Germany's Foreign Policy and America's Entry into World War I

1978 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reinhard R. Doerries
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War I ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The World ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
The Government ◽  
War Aims ◽  
First World

Since the early 1960s we have witnessed in West German historical writing noteworthy changes in the interpretation of the causes of the First World War and, therefore, of the meaning of that war for Germany. One is particularly struck by the refreshing debate which ensued among German scholars on Germany's war aims specifically and on Imperial Germany's foreign policy prior to the World War in general. The so-called captured German documents of the Foreign Office and other branches of the government were returned to Germany, and a younger generation of historians eagerly examined the newly available material. Remarkable, if at times controversial, studies were the result of the scholarly reexamination of the German imperial era. Yet, in all the commotion and controversy, there was one area of German foreign policy which conspicuously remained ignored or treated with astonishing marginality

Designing Empire for the Civilized East: Colonialism, Polish Nationhood, and German War Aims in the First World War

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (6) ◽  
pp. 936-952
Author(s):  
Mark T. Kettler
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Polish Space ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Union ◽  
German Empire ◽  
The First World War ◽  
War Aims ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First World

AbstractThis article critically reexamines how Germans understood Polish national identity during World War I, and how their perceptions affected German proposals for ruling Polish territory. Recent historiography has emphasized the impact of colonial ideologies and experiences on Germans’ imperial ambitions in Poland. It has portrayed Germans as viewing Poland through a colonial lens, or favoring colonial methods to rule over Polish space. Using the wartime publications of prominent left liberal, Catholic, and conservative thinkers, this article demonstrates that many influential Germans, even those who supported colonialism in Africa, considered Poland to be a civilized nation for which colonial strategies of rule would be wholly inappropriate. These thinkers instead proposed multinational strategies of imperialism in Poland, which relied on collaboration with Polish nationalists. Specifically, they argued that Berlin should establish an autonomous Polish state, and bind it in permanent military and political union with the German Empire. The perception of Poland as a civilized nation ultimately structured Germany’s occupation policy and objectives in Poland throughout the war, much more than stereotypes of Polish primitivity.

scholarly journals ’Det er easy at tale engelsk også’. Amerikadansk i 1960’erne og 1970’erne

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (47) ◽  
pp. 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karoline Kühl
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Rapid Decline ◽  
Language Loss ◽  
World War ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Post War ◽  
American Society

The conditions for the Danish language among Danish emigrants and their descendants in the United States in the first half of the 20th century were tough: The group of Danish speakers was relatively small, the Danes did not settle together as other immigrant groups did, and demographic circumstances led many young, unmarried Danish men to marry non-Danish speaking partners. These were all factors that prevented the formation of tight-knit Danish-speaking communities. Furthermore, US nationalistic propaganda in the wake of World War I and the melting-pot effect of post-war American society in the 1950s contributed to a rapid decline in the use of Danish among the emigrants. Analyses of recordings of 58 Danish-American speakers from the 1970s show, however, that the language did not decline in an unsystematic process of language loss, only to be replaced quickly and effectively by English. On the contrary, the recordings show contactinduced linguistic innovations in the Danish of the interviewees, which involve the creation of specific lexical and syntactical American Danish features that systematically differ from Continental Danish. The article describes and discusses these features, and gives a thorough account of the socioeconomic and linguistic conditions for this speaker group.

Working for Peace

2020 ◽  
pp. 160-174
Author(s):  
Melanie Beals Goan
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
War Aims

World War I represented a troubling predicament for suffragists. This chapter explores the ways Kentucky suffragists managed to “sneak in a little suffrage” even as they committed themselves fully to supporting American war aims.

World War I. Causes, Origin and War Aims

1970 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-104
Author(s):  
Hanns Hubert Hofmann ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
War Aims

Rulers of the Ruhr: Leadership and Authority in German Big Business Before 1914

1979 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Glovka Spencer
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Steel Industry ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Constraints ◽  
Iron And Steel Industry ◽  
World War ◽  
German Empire ◽  
Iron And Steel ◽  
Professional Management ◽  
The Social

The rise of heavy industry and its managerial elite in the German Empire and in the United States provides stimuhting parallels and contrasts. Professor Spencer discusses the social constraints under which a professional management class developed in the German coal, iron, and steel industry during the generation before World War I. Ranking distinctly below the landed aristocracy and the governmental bureaucracy (both of which they would gladly have emulated), and preoccupied with the maintenance of order in the midst of rapid economic and social change, German managers used their power and influence to sustain and manipulate existing systems of authority, and came to play no broader role in the development of their commonwealth than did their American counterparts.

The Career of Sir Eyre Crowe: A Reassessment

1972 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 193-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Cosgrove
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
First World War ◽  
Evil Spirit ◽  
Prime Mover ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
British Policy ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
British Foreign Office ◽  
First World

Among the myths of the origins of World War I is that of the ability of obscure bureaucrats to influence the foreign policy of their country through intrigue and deceit. The foremost example in the volumious literature involved the unlimited capacity for evil attributed to Friedrich von Holstein of the German Foreign Office. One of his contemporaries left the. following portrait: “His life was devoted to poisoning human and international relationships. Holstein's diplomacy by intrigue, his vicious disloyalties, and the way he placed his own revengeful purposes before his country's good contributed largely towards the outbreak of the First World War.” Labeled the Grey Eminence of the Wilhelmstrasse in the aftermath of defeat, Holstein became the scapegoat for the disasters of German diplomacy in 1914.Other bureaucrats of the pre-war era whose careers followed a similar pattern have received like treatment. On the British side, it was asserted, there operated a civil servant whose anti-German animus steered Britain into conflict with Germany. Allegedly possessing a fatal fascination for Sir Edward Grey, Sir Eyre Crowe was credited by historians with enormous surreptitious influence. The hostility toward Germany manifested by Great Britain in the decade prior to 1914, the argument runs, reflected Crowe's personal hatred and suspicion of German power. “The vast influence exercised by Sir Eyre Crowe upon British policy between 1908 and 1914,” wrote the distinguished Austrian historian A. F. Pribram in 1951, “only became generally known outside the Foreign Office, and especially abroad, in recent years.” Apologists for Germany cited Crowe as the prime mover of British policy, and one German historian termed him the ‘böse Geist’ [evil spirit] of the British Foreign Office.

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