Hew Strachan on Germany and Britain's View of Their Great War Experience

A Young, Reflective German Officer, 1916

Presented in a 2014 interview with Max Easterman of the Goethe Institut of London

Max Easterman  Sir Hew Strachan is currently Professor of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. He was born in Edinburgh and went to Cambridge University, where he’s still a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. He’s been a merchant seaman and a lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. He’s the author of the Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War and has written about Clausewitz and German strategy in the First World War, so he knows both sides of that coin. 

Max Easterman The Germans confront their past, they call it Vergangenheitsbewältigung…why is it the Germans have done this and we have not? 

Hew Strachan There is a very straightforward answer to that and it is the Third Reich, it is a question of whether there is collective German responsibility for the Nazis and for the Holocaust. There is a continuous narrative that really begins with Frederick the Great’s Prussia that sees the army as essential and the use of military power essential to the assertion of Prussia as a Central European state. And, after all, it is essentially surrounded by land frontiers and by possible enemies. The army has to be essential to the formation of the state and it is through war that Germany is both unified in 1871 and through war that Germany expands in the 20th century. And the First World War is part of that narrative that ends in Berlin in 1945. In confronting that Germany is asking real question about how it got where it is today. 

Max Easterman How did the First World War then change Germany’s view of war as an essential military tool for, if you like, maintaining the nation? 

Hew Strachan Not as much as it should have done, is the short answer. Partly, of course, because the army engineers the revolution from above, so called. In other words it itself gets rid of the Kaiser. The Keiser doesn’t topple through a democratic process, which is what Woodrow Wilson, the American president, had hoped would happen. It therefore is able, it – the army, is able to argue after 1919 that it hadn’t lost the war on the Western Front, because it was still standing on French territory when the war ended. And it was able to argue that the reputation Germany had for military prowess was therefore unbroken. It’s extraordinary in many ways if you look at the 1920s and 1930s that Germany—reduced to an army of 100 thousand men by the Treaty of Versailles - that Germany is still seeing war as one of the ways it might defend itself. It really hasn’t fully come to terms with the notion that this may be the war to end all wars. 

Hew Strachan and Max Easterman

Max Easterman You wrote recently that we in Britain have “parochial preoccupations with the mud of the Western Front.” What do you mean by that? 

Hew Strachan I’m concerned that our approach to this war is still very nationally determined, that we find it very hard to raise our eyes above the British experience and that means in most people’s understanding the experience of the Western Front, although British servicemen and women served in many other parts of the world and, of course, did many other things than to serve in the army. We tend to forget that there were people in Royal Navy, people in Gallipoli, people in Mesopotamia, people fighting in East Africa. So there isn’t one experience of this war, but we’ve allowed one experience to colour it. And the Western Front that we are concerned with runs only as far as the Somme. Champagne, Verdun, Vosges—they don’t figure, they are not part of our understanding. And there is almost a genuine surprise when you say something staggeringly obvious about the French or German or Austro-Hungarian experience, because it’s different, or it might be different, or it might be similar, but there isn’t an awareness of that. 

What I would hope is the four year centenary is an opportunity for us to widen our approach. So far there is no sign of that happening. Putting it another way round, 88 per cent of those who put on a uniform in the British Armed Forces between 1914 and 1918 came back from this war. In other words the majority, the vast majority survived this war. Of course it depended on which part of the army, which front you served on, if you were in Infantry on the Western Front your chances of survival were much less, if you were Royal Flying Corps pilot—even less than that. The point is, when somebody is says, I hear it said very often: “my great-grandfather was one of the lucky ones, he came home”, actually that’s true of most of us who are alive today: our great-grandfathers came home, because otherwise we wouldn’t be here 

Max Easterman British historians have arguments about the 1st World War…German historians have arguments about the First World War But do you have arguments with German historians about the First World War? 

Hew Strachan Yes actually I’ve had a few arguments. One of the things about German historians and study of war is because it has been inherently very difficult, it’s been much easier for British historians to study war and to study the First World War than it has been for Germans, because Germans come with more baggage to their own experience of war and we come at it from outside. It’s also been in a way liberating for me, because one of my concerns as an academic military historian in Britain is that as we Brits become more monoglot and particularly my students become more monoglot, they are far less able to engage with what I would call comparative military history. 

War, you know, is a reciprocal business; it’s not just fought by one country. You can’t write military history from the perspective, in my understanding, of one country. We talk about an army and its relation to parent society, but you can’t talk about battle, campaigns, wars without engaging with interaction with the enemy. For me, working above all on the First World War, it’s incredibly liberating and enlightening and exciting to engage with the literature of not only Germany, but also of France. It’s a truism that I am sure you are aware of that it doesn’t require much reading in another language to suddenly realise that you are in a very different place. And that’s vital.