Book Look: Europe's Last Summer by David Fromkin: I have always had an odd fascination for WW1, specifically the events surrounding its outset. The romantic view of WW1 is that, apart from being a horrific from a military standpoint, it was a clean demarcation of modernity. Although the old order had been crumbling from within for decades, the Great War was the nail in the coffin. It ushered in the world we know and love by kicking off the bloodiest century in human history.
That's cynical comment, but not inaccurate. Modernity has brought us in the West very good lives for the most part, but there is also much we have lost, as Fromkin reminds us early on when he notes that in the summer before the war it was possible to travel anywhere without a passport, take up residence anywhere with no documentation, and generally live wherever and however you wanted with little or no interaction with any governmental authority whatsoever. Although there has been undeniable scientific and industrial progress, and there has arguably been a good deal of social progress in some quarters, those simple freedoms are gone from us now and likely never to return. How did this happen? Or put another way, who or what really started WW1?
Fromkin does a bang up job of incorporating relatively recent scholarship into his analysis. This is the sort of stuff that wasn't really known when I was memorizing WW1 facts in junior high school. (And now that it is known, the topic is likely no longer in public school curricula.) As revisionism goes, this is very mild. It's more of a clarification -- a well-reasoned expansion of context. In the end Fromkin concludes that the culpability rests primarily with the German General Staff. However, he also notes a striking bit of irony. As events tumbled toward finality, the only ones who could have and would have likely stopped them were two paragons of the old order, living parodies of obnoxious monarchs, Archduke Franz Ferdinand (by then assassinated) and Kaiser Wilhelm II (effectively neutered by the German political establishment). Modernity was born of blood not from the death throes of the old order, but from self-inflicted wounds.
