Newspapers were full of exuberant reports about the events of August 1, the day of the general mobilisation, when some 50,000 war supporters gathered in Berlin and the Kaiser declared in a speech that he no longer knew of any political parties, only the German people.
Had any onlookers ventured into the side streets, where the impoverished working class families lived, they would have encountered a very different spectacle-scenes of fear, despair and anger at the preparations for war. The well-known photos of jubilation were taken in the last days before the war, when student unions and supporters of national civic associations gathered on central squares, especially in university towns, sang patriotic songs, roamed the cafés and held impromptu propaganda speeches welcoming the war.
Secondly, without the consent and active participation of the political adjuncts of the Second International, particularly German social democracy and the trade unions, the imperialist governments would have been unable to mount their mobilisations as rapidly as they did. However, their number in August was not approaching the two million mark, as previously claimed, but only about 185,000, according to recent estimates.
The war volunteers, who are repeatedly cited as evidence of the rampant war fever, consisted predominantly of grammar school and university students from the middle class, who welcomed the war as an adventure and liberation from social constraints. In all the belligerent countries, it was mainly the bourgeois and petty bourgeois layers and intellectuals who were responsible for the blind patriotism and war fervour of the day. The situation was similar in France, Britain, Austria-Hungary, Italy and Russia. The rural population was generally against the mobilisation, mainly because farmers feared losing their harvest, which had just begun. Oliver Janz, whose book was released to accompany BBC Two’s current eight-part “Great War Diaries” television series, presents two fundamental discoveries based on recent studies (e.g., by Wolfgang Kruse, A World of Enemies, 1997 Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany, 2000 Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War, Paris 2004 Lawrence Sondhaus, World War One: The Global Revolution, 2011).įirst, there was massive opposition to the war in Germany, especially among workers, until just before the outbreak of hostilities and even in the days that followed. This was especially true of Germany, where right-wing circles-including Hitler’s National Socialists-have repeatedly drawn attention to the “August experience.” However, the assertion of the general enthusiasm for the war was a “result of selective perception on the part of opinion makers in the press, journalism and politics” in order to justify Germany’s entry into the war. Berlin historian Oliver Janz writes in his book, 14-The Great War, published late last year: “The thesis of the general enthusiasm for war in August 1914 is one of the major historical myths of the 20th century.” In the same way, the press deliberately exploited the still relatively new technology of photography in the early 20th century to provide alleged proof of the general population’s support of the German emperor’s and imperial government’s war policy. Today’s media attempts to use televised images to create a widespread mood in favour of military operations in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Ukraine. This was a propaganda myth as recent scholarly publications and studies have exposed. Everyone is familiar with photos of the flag-waving crowds and jubilant soldiers that are supposed to have captured the people’s universal enthusiasm for war in the first days of August 1914.