Europeans, unlike Americans, did not have the option of pretending that the end of World War I could bring a restoration of the status quo ante. When the war began in August of , the map of Europe was dominated by five empires. When the Armistice ended the war in November of , only one of those five empires — the British — still existed.
The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires had shattered, and the German state that replaced its empire had shrunk in Europe and ceased to exist almost anywhere else. In Russia, the war had brought about not only the collapse of the Tsarist regime but its subsequent replacement by a totalitarian Communism that would cast a shadow over the world for most of the twentieth century.
The collapse of those four multi-national empires radically changed the map of Europe, but this by itself was not unprecedented. Similar revisions had resulted from the Congress of Vienna in , which ended the Napoleonic wars, and before that from the Peace of Westphalia in , which ended the Thirty Years war. What was novel about the process that ended World War I was the articulation of the right to national self-determination as at least in theory a fundamental principle of statecraft.
The resultant treaties were inconsistent in their application of this principle, but once articulated it proved to be an irresistible force, not only altering radically the map of Europe but also sounding the death knell of colonialism. The most significant result of World War I, however, arose out of the unavoidable realization of the destructive power of modern weaponry. In our era of vast nuclear arsenals capable of incinerating the entire planet, the destructive power of World War I weaponry hardly seems significant.
The extent of that change and its effect on the course of the war seemed to take all the combatants by surprise. None of the leaders of the major European powers that stumbled into war in imagined that the war would last more than four years and cost millions of lives. Too much had been sacrificed to achieve the allied victory for the resulting peace treaty to be equivocal about who was at fault.
Because the battles took place far from the American heartland, its civilians were not part of the transformation into what we now call collateral damage. America had experienced a preview of the horrors of modern warfare, however, during its Civil War half a century earlier — and the result was eerily similar. The weapons used in the Civil War were not as sophisticated or as destructive as those which would be deployed in World War I a half century later, but it was still a technological leap from the weaponry that had preceded it. No one on either side had expected the Civil War to last as long as it did.
The level of destruction, and the enormous numbers of dead and wounded, were well beyond what anyone could have imagined at the outset. The course of events that followed the end of the Civil War foreshadowed that which would later follow World War I. The unexpected enormity of the carnage in both cases demanded accountability, which led to the harshness of Reconstruction after the Civil War and the harshness of Versailles fifty years later.
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That harshness in both cases led to resentment by the defeated side, and ultimately to a backlash. The misery resulting from the backlash against Reconstruction was borne primarily by the newly freed slaves and their descendants. The victim that suffered most, however, was one that had nothing to do with the excesses of Versailles — the Jewish people. As twenty-first century Americans — and especially as twenty-first century Jews — we cannot view the First World War except through the lens of the Second.
We know now that the punitive provisions contained in the Treaty of Versailles created among the German people a sense of grievance that Hitler skillfully exploited. It is difficult to imagine the Holocaust without the allied overreach embodied by that treaty. It is, alas, even more difficult to imagine what subsequent Jewish history would look like without the catastrophe that we call the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was the greatest catastrophe to befall the Jewish people since the Romans crushed the Bar Kochba rebellion eighteen centuries earlier. As a result, it is tempting, to view the significance of World War I within Jewish history solely for its indisputable role as a primary cause of World War II. One of these results is well known, though its connection to World War I is often ignored.
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The British government, on November 2, , issued what is now commonly known as the Balfour Declaration. The other Jewishly significant result of World War I, though traumatic at the time, has been largely forgotten. That war marked the first armed conflict in which substantial numbers of Jewish soldiers were fighting on both sides of a non-Jewish war.
The American Civil War had actually broken this ground earlier, but although there certainly were Jewish soldiers on both sides during that conflict, the numbers were too small to receive significant attention. Of course, the phenomenon of Jews fighting against other Jews as soldiers on behalf of the predominantly non-Jewish countries of which they were citizens should not have surprised anyone. In late August of Mauthner had himself already begun to turn his attention to the Habsburg Empire. Particularly during , Mauthner and Landauer developed contrary positions on immigration.
It was Mauthner who called for a cessation of Eastern European Jewish immigration to Germany because the situation of German Jews would be endangered. During this time a variety of discriminatory actions against Eastern European Jews came into being. Landauer was convinced that both Western and Eastern European Jews would need a spiritual renewal after the war. However, it would be much harder for the Western Jew to accomplish such a renewal.
At the end of the war it was Landauer who, in a letter to Mauthner dated November 28, , held the German people responsible for the war because they did nothing early on to stop the preparations for war. A man who lived a miserable, pure, and honorable life as a starving writer, Kurt Eisner, stands there, a man of the spirit, this brave Jew, as the moral head of Germany [ Let that go down, which must perish, and let that take shape, which has the ability to do so.
Help or stand aside, but have we not learnt Spinoza for life and not for school? For Mauthner, however, the passing of the old order did not symbolize a new optimistic and morally renewed beginning. Mauthner obviously did not share the vision espoused by Landauer, according to which the new German state and its revolutionary upheavals would bring about the unity of the German people with all humankind.
Jewish Question Since World War II
Only when the old order was destroyed could this happen, in the view of Landauer, 61 who perceived this change to a new kind of government — embodied in chaos — as a true and authentic movement. Mauthner had, however, called for the emperor to abdicate. After having questioned him, Landauer suggested, ironically, that they would agree to pay him a pension and let him go on his way.
While Mauthner continued to live in Meersburg on Lake Constance, where he finished writing the History of Atheism , Landauer played an active role in the Bavarian Soviet Republic and was later murdered for it in Stadelheim in April of Landauer tried to combine his writings with his political agenda and hoped to bring about a kind of universal salvation. Consequently, in his remaining years, Mauthner resolved this apprehension, by choosing not to associate with either Weimar Germany or Jewish nationalism, but to remain a skeptic who continued to believe himself to be a German. Role Model and Countermodel.
Lexington Books , Vorbild und Gegenbild. Schapkow is the co-editor of Darkhei Noam. The Jews of Arab Lands: A Festschrift for Norman Noam A. How to quote this article: Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Focus The Great War. German Jews and the Great War: Holocaust Research and Archives in the Digital Age. Insights on an Unusual Scenario. Holocaust Intersections in 21st-Century Europe. Portrait of Italian Jewish Life ss. Travels to the "Holy Land": Perceptions, Representations and Narratives. Contested Narratives of a Shared Past.
The “Great War” and the Jewish Question: Reflection on a Centennial
The Making of Antisemitism as a Political Movement. Political History as Cultural History Modernity and the Cities of the Jews. Jews in Europe after the Shoah. Studies and Research Perspectives. On a more intimate level it also challenged personal relationships. This can be studied in the case of the friendship between the anarchist Gustav Landauer and the critic of language Fritz Mauthner. Their friendship changed during the war because both men developed different interpretations of the war and its immediate aftermath. This change serves as an example of how the correspondence between friends in wartime prompted debate about the war, on the one hand, and German and Jewish identity, on the other.
Most significantly, Germany, in the perception of these two intellectuals as a place of culture and as native country, was transformed. On July 21, he wrote to his friend, author and translator Ludwig Berndl, in Karlsruhe: I would like to thank the two anonymous readers of an earlier version of the article for their comments.
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Sincere thanks go also to Tryce Hyman for his insightful comments and edits. John Horne Malden, Ma: Wiley-Blackwell, , ; Liverpool University Press, , 3. See also Peter Pulzer: CH Beck, vol. Penslar, Jews and the Military. Princeton University Press, All translations of primary sources from the original German into English are mine. The Political History of a Minority, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, Ute Daniel, http: Unter Mitwirkung von Ina Britschgi-Schimmer. Band 2 , ed. Martin Buber Frankfurt am Main: Anarchist and Jew , ed.
Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europa: Sprache, Schweigen, Musik Berlin-Boston: Editori Riunti, ; Gustav Landauer. Philosophie und Judentum , ed. Verlag Edition AV, Sprache und Psychologie Stuttgart und Berlin: See also Lunn, Prophet of Community , Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers. University of Wisconsin Press, , Metropolis Verlag, , Hanna Delf, Julius H.
Beck, , Delf and Schoeps, Landauer, Ketzergedanken, Krojanker, Parution, , Fritz Mauthner als Schriftsteller, Kritiker und Kulturtheoretiker , eds. Arco Verlag, , ; Band 1 Stuttgart und Berlin, , Band I , Akademie Verlag, , Delf and Schoeps, ; originally printed in the Berliner Tageblatt , September 13 th , See Hermann Cohen, Deutschtum und Judentum.
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Delf fand Schoeps, Mendes-Flohr, 81, Michael Meyer et al. CH Beck, , vol.
Die politische Biographie eines Alldeutschen Paderborn: Delf and Schoeps, ;