World War I: the “Great War” Part I

World War I: The “Great War” Part I Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius THE TEACHING COMPANY ® Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, Ph.D. Associate Professor of History, University of Tennessee Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius was born in Chicago, Illinois. He grew up on Chicago’s Southside in a Lithuanian- American neighborhood and also spent some years attending school in Aarhus, Denmark, and Bonn, Germany. He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago. In 1989, he spent the summer in Moscow and Leningrad (today St. Petersburg) in intensive language study in Russian. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in European history in 1994, specializing in modern German history. After receiving his doctorate, Professor Liulevicius spent a year as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Peace, and Revolution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Since 1995, he has been a history professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and holds the Hendrickson Professorship in the College of Arts and Sciences for 2005–2007. He teaches courses on modern German history, Western civilization, Nazi Germany, World War I, war and culture, 20th-century Europe, nationalism, and utopian thought. In 2003, he received the University of Tennessee’s Excellence in Teaching Award. In 2005, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for his research. Professor Liulevicius’s research focuses on German relations with Eastern Europe in the modern period. His other interests include the utopian tradition and its impact on modern politics, images of the United States abroad, and the history of the Baltic region. He has published numerous articles, and his first book, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in the First World War (2000, Cambridge University Press), also appeared in German translation in 2002. His next book project is a larger study of German stereotypes of Eastern Europeans and ideas of a special German cultural mission in the East over the last two centuries, entitled The German Myth of the East. Professor Liulevicius also has recorded another course with The Teaching Company, Utopia and Terror in the 20th Century. He lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, with his wife, Kathleen, and their son, Paul. ©2006 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership i Table of Contents World War I: The “Great War” Part I Professor Biography............................................................................................i Course Scope.......................................................................................................1 Lecture One The Century’s Initial Catastrophe..............................3 Lecture Two Europe in 1914 ..........................................................6 Lecture Three Towards Crisis in Politics and Culture ....................10 Lecture Four Causes of the War and the July Crisis, 1914 ...........14 Lecture Five The August Madness ...............................................18 Lecture Six The Failed Gambles—War Plans Break Down .......21 Lecture Seven The Western Front Experience ................................24 Lecture Eight Life and Death in the Trenches................................27 Lecture Nine The Great Battles of Attrition ..................................30 Lecture Ten The Eastern Front Experience .................................33 Lecture Eleven The Southern Fronts ................................................37 Lecture Twelve War Aims and Occupations.....................................40 Timeline.............................................................................................................43 Map: National Borders (1914).........................................................................46 Map: National Borders (1919).........................................................................47 Legend: Key Sites of World War I..................................................................48 Map: Key Sites of World War I ......................................................................49 Glossary.............................................................................................................50 Biographical Notes......................................................................................Part II Bibliography.............................................................................................. Part III ii ©2006 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership World War I: The “Great War” Scope: The First World War came as a dreadful surprise to those who experienced it, due to its magnitude, global expanse, unprecedented violence, and shattering impact on Western civilization. This course of 36 lectures explores the continuous series of brutal surprises and shocks that the first example of a “total war” brought, a conflict not limited to armies, but pitting entire societies against each other in mortal struggle. An estimated 70 million men were mobilized and approximately 9 million died. The civilizational impact of an industrial slaughter on this scale was so significant that World War I set the 20th century on its violent course, culminating in a later, perfected total war, World War II. We combine chronological and thematic approaches for an in-depth look at this conflict’s many dimensions, integrating military history with social, political, intellectual, and cultural history. Unlike narratives of World War I that emphasize the Western Front with scant attention to other theaters, this course provides comprehensive coverage of all fronts. Likewise, we consider not only political elites and generals but also the lives of ordinary soldiers and civilians. Major themes include the surprising eagerness to plunge into mutual slaughter; the unexpected endurance of societies undergoing this ordeal; the radically different hopes and hatreds that war evoked, with remarkable contrasts in Western and Eastern Europe; and the way in which the Great War functioned as a hinge of violence, opening the door to the normalization of previously unsuspected levels of violence, including against civilians, a dynamic that hurried Europe toward renewed conflict. Our first six lectures depict the state of Europe and the world as the 1914 cataclysm approached and then struck. We examine internal politics of the Great Powers and growing tensions among them, reacting to the expansion of German power, as well as important currents of thought (both optimistic and pessimistic) in intellectual life. We examine the slide into the abyss: origins of the July crisis, beginning with an act of terrorism in Sarajevo; historians’ debates on the war’s true causes and where the main responsibility lies; the striking “August Madness” celebrations; and the breakdown of longstanding military plans for short, decisive war. The next three lectures—Seven through Nine—cover the Western Front and the surreal trench landscape that emerged there. We examine technological reasons for the stalemate that the trenches represented, desperate and costly attempts to break it, strange patterns of death and life (including tacit truces) developed by ordinary soldiers, and vain and horrific battles at Verdun, the Somme, and Ypres. Lectures Ten and Eleven cover lesser known theaters: the vast, open Eastern Front where Germans battered Russia, even as final victory eluded them, and the Southern Front, including the Alps, the Balkans, and the doomed Allied Gallipoli expedition against Ottoman Turkey. Lectures Twelve through Fifteen take a closer look at particularly important themes. We survey combatant countries’ war aims and the experience of foreign occupation. The suffering of ordinary soldiers is confronted, as we discuss military medicine, psychological traumas, and the experience of 8 million prisoners of war. Although many men broke down under the strain of combat, others exulted in it: elite storm troopers were among them, as well as two men, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, who later became dictators as they sought to recreate wartime experience. This section concludes by investigating rapidly changing technology, as machine guns, poison gas, and tanks were deployed to mass-produce death ever more efficiently. The next three lectures—Sixteen through Eighteen—return our attention to other theaters: war in the air and at sea and surprises and confounded expectations in each. The war’s global reach, its colonial dimension, and the attempt to win sympathy in world opinion are examined in detail. Our next set of lectures concerns internal home-front politics. In comparative fashion, we note similarities as well as striking differences in how nations reacted. Lectures Nineteen to Twenty-Three reveal centralized state control of economies, societies, and propaganda to create martial enthusiasm. We cover the privations and extraordinary endurance of many societies, as well as growing signs of stress and breakdown, to understand civilian experience. New social divisions arose, threatening cohesion. Dissent could be explosive, and we explore protest and its growth or suppression. By the later years of the war, 1916–1917, a fresh remobilization of energies was needed to continue fighting. ©2006 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 1 The next five lectures cover dramatic new departures in world history created by total war. The 1915 slaughter of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire launched a series of 20th-century genocides. War’s strains encouraged revolts, socialist and nationalist, radically reenvisaging

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