Clark's account starts with the lurid description of “an orgy of violence,” namely the regicide of the unpopular Serbian King Alexandar Obrenović and Queen Draga in June 1903. Recounted in great and gory detail in a chapter fittingly titled “Serbian Ghosts,” this violent act marked the end of the Obrenović dynasty and the instatement of a new King, Peter Karadjordjević, from a rival dynasty. Footnote 33 Among the chief conspirators in the 1903 murder was Dragutin Dimitrijević, better known as Apis, who would later play a significant role in the planning of another regicide—that of Franz Ferdinand in June 1914. He “only narrowly escaped bleeding to death” in 1903 after having been wounded during the coup—which surely begs the first of many counterfactual speculations about the origins of the war. A response to the question of whether the assassination of 1914 would have occurred had Apis died in 1903 depends largely on what role one assigns to him in the 1914 plot. During the—often heated—public controversy sparked by a number of these publications, fascinating national differences in interpreting the outbreak of the war emerged, a result of differing experiences of World War I, which shaped both a country's subsequent history and its national memory of the war. Historians and the public argued about questions of “war guilt,” and even about whether one should think about the origins of the war in such terms at all: today, responsibility is a term with which most historians would feel more comfortable. In addition, there was a notable effort to internationalize our reading of the origins of the war, with a move away from explanations that foreground the actions of a single government in favor of ones that seek instead to explain the diplomatic crisis of 1914 as an international event. As part of this, Serbia and the Entente powers found themselves under scrutiny to an extent not seen since the immediate postwar years, whereas Germany in particular benefited from a propensity among some historians to deemphasize its role in the escalation of the July Crisis. Today, all the most recent contributions to the debate attempt to explain the July Crisis by considering the actions of the governments of all the great (and some of the smaller) powers; explanations that focus on the actions of one government above that of all others have consequently fallen out of favor. Now looking at the evidence we have on decision-making, particularly in Berlin and Vienna now, it seems to me that Berlin put a lot of pressure on Vienna at various points during the July Crisis, particularly if you look at the blank cheque – it’s not just a blank cheque saying yes we’ll support you, but it is the case of saying, but you need to do it now – it’s now or never – and there is a fear in Vienna that the ally might abandon them if they don’t appear strong enough. Does that in your opinion constitute to some extent German responsibility for the outbreak of war?

In May 2019, she organised (with colleagues in the History Department) a Royal Historical Society Symposium entitled Contested Commemorations: Reflections on the centenary of the First World War, 2013-2019 , jointly funded by the Royal Historical Society and the Open University. https://royalhistsoc.org/rhs-symposium-ou-2019/ Clark's forceful intervention has made others question the validity of the century-long quest to find “the culprit” and pin blame primarily on one country—Germany. His resolutely international approach confirms the idea that the origins of the war can only be effectively studied by adopting a comparative international approach. The same is true of the war itself, of course. Jay Winter's ambitious Cambridge History of the First World War, as well as Oliver Janz's online project, “1914–1918 online,” are both exemplary specimens of this: both of these multi-authored publications approach the history of the war from an international viewpoint, focusing on both great and small powers, in Europe and around the world. They take care to give a voice to the histories (and the historians) of countries that may seem peripheral from a European perspective. The war thus emerges as a truly global phenomenon. Footnote 81 After the war, people dealt with what had happened in different ways. We’ll study how writers and artists attempted to come to terms with the experience. And finally, we’ll explore So when we now look at the July Crisis, my opinion is that it’s sort of a crisis of two halves, if you like; the first half, up until the Serbian ultimatum is really very much a crisis that’s shaped by decisions made in Berlin and primarily in Vienna; but that after the ultimatum, everyone obviously is involved in decision-making and they make decisions which will affect the outcome of the crisis. Would you agree with that or do you see that differently?The volume includes a detailed scholarly introduction which analyses the most controversial issues in the debate on the origins of the War and provides a comprehensive overview of the history of document collections on the war's origins. The documents cover the period 1911-14, with particular emphasis on the July Crisis and immediate outbreak of war. Thoroughly cross-referenced and annotated, these fascinating sources are presented with authoritative commentary, enabling readers to make connections between the documents to illuminate how the decisions for war were taken, and why. Annika Mombauer (born 1967) is a historian best known for her work on General Helmuth von Moltke the Younger. She is a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History in the History Department at the Open University in Great Britain, and Associate Dean (Research) for the Arts Faculty. This reinterpretation of Serbia's role was not welcome in contemporary Serbia, where the national story told about the country's entry into the war has traditionally been one of victimhood. The Belgrade government, in this interpretation, had been unfairly targeted by the imperial power Austria-Hungary, which wrongly sought to punish it for having allegedly instigated the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. In present-day Serbia, i.e., in the aftermath of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the fighting of the 1990s, the history of the country's twentieth-century wars remains politically relevant and contested, and the suggestion that Serbia had played a decisive role in causing the outbreak of World War I was greeted with national outrage. Footnote 35 It should come as no surprise that Serbian nationalists considered unacceptable both Clark's comparison of the events of June 28, 1914 with September 11, 2001, as well as his discussion of Serbia's more recent Balkan Wars in the same breath as Serbia's alleged aggressive prewar foreign policy at the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, Clark's account paints a lurid picture of Serbia's violent past, and he argues that our “moral compass” has changed in recent years: “Since Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo, it has become harder to think of Serbia as the mere object or victim of great power politics and easier to conceive of Serbian nationalism as an historical force in its own right.” Footnote 36 Interviews with prominent newspapers and TV and radio broadcasters in Germany and as far afield as the United States, Brazil, Serbia and Turkey have allowed me to share my knowledge on this crucial episode in our history with international audiences. My contributions have also entered the political discourse. In 2017, members of the ‘Die Linke Partei’ quoted my interview with the national daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in the German Bundestag when advocating that the government should reject the new revisionist views in favour of my interpretation. From the German perspective, it hardly mattered if Russia was preparing merely a partial or an actual mobilization, because “every day that Russia concentrated her troops was indeed a lost day for the German deployment plan…” Footnote 109 Yet, as Krumeich rightly notes as well, one should “not overlook the fact that it was precisely the strict timetable of the Schlieffen Plan that allowed the political leadership so little leeway for negotiations or even for “militarily secured diplomacy.” Footnote 110 In that sense Britain's hand had not been forced by the fact that Russia had mobilized early, but rather because Germany could not have allowed Russia to have this head start. In emotionally charged scenes, and in the knowledge that Russia was gaining ground, military leaders pleaded with civilian authorities to be allowed to declare Germany's “period preparatory to war.” But it was only when full mobilization was confirmed on July 31 that the German military was allowed to proceed with its own military measures. Footnote 111 The fact that Russia decided on July 24 to prepare to mobilize had nothing to do with this German decision.

Even a hundred years ago the Versailles verdict was not without its critics, of course, particularly in Weimar Germany, whose leaders and citizens saw themselves unfairly punished for a war they thought had been defensive in nature. There were also critical voices outside of Germany that assigned responsibility not to Berlin, but rather to Paris and St. Petersburg. But in the main, such revisionists were drowned out by those who blamed Germany until a more conciliatory consensus, reached by the 1930s, blamed impersonal forces, rather than German decision-makers, for the outbreak of the war. Footnote 10 This was an acceptable position for most. Soon an even more terrible war shifted the focus away from 1914, and in the aftermath of World War II, explaining the inhuman horrors of an even more deadly conflict overshadowed the once so bitterly debated question of the origins of World War I. Footnote 11 In: Ehlert, Hans; Epkenhans, Michael and Gross, Gerhard P. eds. Der Schlieffenplan: Analyse und Dokumente (pp. 79-99) RFE/RL: There has been a lot of speculation that the situation around the world now -- say, in Ukraine or the dispute between China and Japan over islands and resources in the South China Sea -- and the situation in the summer of 1914. Do you see parallels and lessons that can be applied to the world today? The Origins of the First World War: diplomatic and military documents, Manchester University Press, 2013 Find out more about this book The “war-guilt” debate is, without a doubt, one of the most protracted historical controversies of modern history. Why did Franz Ferdinand's violent death unleash a war of previously unprecedented horror and scale? This murderous act resulted in the July Crisis, “the most complex [event] of modern times, perhaps of any time so far,” and ended in “the most complicated of all wars,” leading to a hundred-year controversy and a heated quest to identify “guilt” among some of the participants. Footnote 9 That question seemed easy to settle when the war had just broken out: everyone was certain, of course, that their war was a defensive one. In the wake of the Allies’ victory, it was also easy to attribute “war guilt” to the losers. But over the next hundred years, the term guilt would fall out of fashion; at the same time, the question of deciding who had been responsible would remain a topic of fraught debate. It would be an exaggeration to claim that the long debate about the war's origins had been entirely settled before the centenary, but there were nonetheless broad agreements that had been hard fought for during decades of debate.In conclusion, this study makes a very significant contribution to the scholarship on both Wilhelmine Germany and the military pre-history of the Great War. In the current state of research, it is clearly the definitive statement on the role and career of the younger Moltke as Chief of the Great General Staff. I suspect that it will remain as such for a long time to come. Notes Introduction: The Fischer Controversy 50 years on’, The Journal of Contemporary History April 2013 48 (2), pp.231-240 Also published in Serbian - ISBN 978-86-7102-452-5 and Croatian translation - ISBN 978-953-303-726-4 - with a new foreword, 2014) is reviewed between 08.30 to 16.30 Monday to Friday. We're experiencing a high volume of enquiries so it may take us Helmuth von Moltke: A General in crisis?’, in Matthew S. Seligmann and Matthew Hughes (eds), Leadership in Conflict, 1914-1918, Leo Cooper, London 2000, pp. 95-116, 0-85052-751-1.

She has published widely on German military planning in the years before the First World War, and has contributed to the historiographical debate on the nature of the Schlieffen Plan. She has edited primary sources on the origins of the First World War, and published a German language book on the July Crisis of 1914. She is currently working on a comparative history of the Battle of the Marne of 1914 to be published by Cambridge University Press. The Kaiser. New Research on Wilhelm II’s role in Imperial Germany, Cambridge University Press, 2003 (edited with Wilhelm Deist) Find out more about this book

In: Epkenhans, Michael; Foerster, Stig and Hagemann, Karen eds. Militaerische Erinnerungskultur. Soldaten im Spiegel von Biographien, Memoiren und Selbstzeugnissen (pp. 132-151)

Clearly, then, some important areas of consensus do exist. But disagreements on nuance and detail continue unabated, and here the devil is in the detail. Historians reading the same evidence come to opposing conclusions or evaluate the importance of specific events in an entirely different way. For example, they continue to argue over the significance of Austria-Hungary's declaration of war on Serbia, the importance of the Russian mobilization, as well as about the nature of, and intention behind, the British mediation proposals. In fact, the most recent publications spend a great deal of time considering these controversial aspects in particular.It seems to me that the problem with the blame-centred approach is not so much that you might end up blaming the wrong party because frankly now a hundred years later, as you say, it doesn’t matter who we blame, politically it doesn’t make any difference. The real danger is that you end up deciding who you think is the culprit – you know bringing in the suspect and then constructing a charge sheet against that suspect in prosecutorial manner which is exactly what Fritz Fischer did. The problem is that that’s such a narrow approach. What we really need to understand is how did this war come about? Once we understand how the war came about, then we can ask questions about why it came about and because of whom; and we need to ask how first and allow the why and who questions to arise out of the how answers, rather than the other way around. If there was a consensus of sorts, then Christopher Clark's groundbreaking study The Sleepwalkers both reacted to and shattered it. Impressive in its scope and in its scholarly grasp of a vast quantity of sources in many languages, Clark's book offered an alternative interpretation that has had an extensive and unexpected impact within and beyond the academy. He divided historians with his revision of the established consensus and inspired a large public audience with his provocative thesis, which offered a new way to think of Germany's role during the prewar years in particular. The debate over war origins ushered in the golden age of diplomatic history. Never before—or since—was there such widespread interest among the general public in what historians of diplomacy had to say. Not only did these massive studies sell in unprecedented numbers for serious works of scholarship, but they made their authors famous. Footnote 124 Joern Leonhard: We should be careful not to talk about direct analogies. If we look to the summer of 1914, we see factors that help us to better understand the situation at the moment. And the first thing I would mention is the politics of history. There is some sort of imperialism and fear of imperialism after the end of empires. If you look at the situation in Russia, this is a post-imperial state. If you look at the conflict zone from the Baltic states to southeast Europe to the Middle and Far East, it is in a way the shadow zones of the three former empires -- the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. And the breaking up of these empires is a legacy of World War I. And in a way you could argue that following World War I, there has been in many ways never been a stable state structure filling the gap that came up after the end of these empires.