The Book that Caused the War?

Deutschland und der nächste Krieg (1912), by the retired cavalry general Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849–1930), has been aptly called “a best seller and a political disaster.” It ran through five impressions in 1912 alone, and nine by 1914, by which time an English “popular edition,” Germany and the Next War, had reached a sixth reprint. Deutschland was itself extracted from an even larger treatise, Vom heutigen Kriege, part of which had already appeared in English as Cavalry in Future Wars (1906); a second volume of Vom heutigen Kriege (1912) duly became, rather more pointedly, How Germany Makes War (1914). Much of Germany and the Next War likewise focuses on military technicalities, to the extent that one wonders who but specialists will have read through to the end. But the early chapters, notably those vividly evoking not only Germany's “right to wage war” but her “obligation to wage war” to achieve her “historic mission,” namely “world-power or downfall,” are, in the words of a contemporary critic, “very curious… messroom metaphysics, and worth explaining.… It is a blessing to the world that the men who wanted war, and got a war much bigger than they wanted, had a spokesman so simple and frank in proclaiming all their plans as General von Bernhardi.”

Yet a third version of Bernhardi's ideas reached English readers shortly after the outbreak of war as a two-shilling paperback, Britain as Germany's Vassal, its cover declaring it to be “The Book That Caused the War.”