The Peace to End All Peace
(OSHER-RIT Spring 2014)
This year is the 100th anniversary of the start of WWI. This was a war that no one wanted and yet it was eagerly entered into by everyone. It was the war to end all war followed by the peace to end all peace. It was preceded by a period of unprecedented peace among the great powers of Europe. There had only been one significant war in the preceding 100 years (Franco-Prussian). Once WWI began, we have experienced ceaseless war.
To Americans, this war seems remote. It all happened overseas. Europeans to this day all recognize November 11 as Armistice Day, the anniversary of the cease fire; Americans have drained all original meaning from this date, reinventing it as a generic jingoistic celebration of the American military.
The nominal subject of this course is WWI. I want to understand why no one thought WWI would happen. And yet, despite this conviction that European wars were a thing of the past and could never happen again, when the opportunity presented itself, they seemed only too eager to jump into combat.
Let me emphasize that to Germany, France, and England, the countries that would be the combatants in 1914, war among them seemed approximately remote as WWI does to us today. It seemed impossibly remote, a thing of the past, that would never recur.
When the war finally started, why did everyone seem to think it would be very short? Despite this, the war was very long. By the time a ceasefire was signed the Western Front had devolved into complete stasis; with neither side able to gain ground on the other.
One theme that will run throughout all of these classes is my contention that WWI never ended. There was no surrender. There was an armistice – a ceasefire. You may find this assertion audacious. But, I will remind you that there are a fair number of professional historians who contend that WWI ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet Union.
I believe the obituaries to have been premature. WWI is simply being fought in different venues.
Another theme of the course is the contention that after 1914 the world changed in a permanent and irreversible way. Beyond the obvious changes every war brings about; WWI changed literature, it changed music, it changed art. Amplifying these changes were the near-simultaneous developments in physics, astronomy, and psychology that revolutionized our understanding of the universe and our place in it.