The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark – review
Should
Germany really be blamed for the first world war, or did European nations
simply sleepwalk into it?
Ian Pindar
Fri 19 Jul
2013 18.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/19/sleepwalkers-christopher-clark-review
This superb
account of the causes of the first world war begins in 1903 with the murder of
Alexander I of Serbia by a secretive terrorist network called the Black Hand.
They went on to organise the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in
Sarajevo in 1914, which resulted in the bloodbaths of the Somme, Verdun and
Gallipoli. Germany has usually been blamed for escalating the conflict, but
Clark refuses to play the blame game, arguing that the Germans were not alone
in their paranoid imperialism. The more convincing and terrifying reality is
that no nation really meant to wage war, but each sleepwalked into it. Clark
brilliantly puts this illogical conflict into context, showing how pre-1914
Europe was inherently unstable, riven by ethnic and nationalistic factions. He
also suggests that the European elites who vied to prove their virility in
battle were suffering from a "crisis of masculinity". Could it really
be that the war began because upper-class statesmen and generals felt
threatened by the rise of previously marginalised "proletarian and
non-white" men?
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