I have to write a paper on this topic, and I am finding a hard time coming up with talking points. The spirit of the question is not asking why war broke out (what caused it), but why some people (intellectuals and artists) thought it would be a good thing. Here is the full question:
It has been said that Europeans both dreaded and hoped for war leading up to 1914. Why did some intellectuals and artists receive news of the war enthusiastically when it broke out?
This is for a second-year university paper (2500 words) in a European history course. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
^ These answers I've given previously should be pertinent
I'll also recommend a number of books:
Suffice to say that modern scholarship has largely dropped the idea of 'war enthusiasm' at the outbreak of WWI. A wide range of emotions were experienced by people on the ground, and for the most part anxiety and fear, as well as a stoic determination to defend their country, were more widespread than 'enthusiasm'.
That said, there were those that saw it with passivity, even enthusiasm. Movements like Futurism saw violence and war as expressions of untamed masculinity, as a progressive force that moved history forward and prevented stagnation. The Fin-de-Siecle or End of the Century milieu was also had somewhat similar ideas, encompassing a belief in individual will over the collective (see Schopenhauer, Le Bon and Nietzsche), and that modern society had become to decadent and nervous, that it required some kind of 'shock' to jumpstart it. Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention feeling of Patriotism and especially Nationalism. Stig Forster and Geoff Ely have written about the radicalization of the German Right in the years leading up to the war, especially after 1912 (see especially Forster's writings on 'Double Militarism'.) There was also something of a nationalist revival in France after 1912, though left wing parties held power in 1914. For many intellectuals, it could be said that war represented an opportunity for the enhancement of personal prestige and honour by serving their country, the defence and furthering of National Interests, and quite simply, a break from the apparent 'complacency' of the Belle Epoque (how the Balkan Wars, the 1905 Russian Revolution, and the Crises in Bosnia and Morocco make the Belle Epoque a 'golden age' is beyond me).
Modris Ecksteins' Rites of Spring, George Moses's The Roots of Fascism and Fallen Soldiers (as well as the article Two World Wars and the Myth of War Experience that the latter book derived from), and Geoff Eley's Reshaping the German Right are all good places to start.