Greetings! What an interesting question this is, and one which definitely speaks volumes about just how much of a deal the First World War remains in its historiographical treatment. This response shall focus more on the historiography regarding the origins of the war, so if any other AH travelers would like to weigh in on other aspects of the war, then please do so! A note before we begin however: for the purpose of this response, "living memory" shall be defined as the contemporary memory of the war as told by those who experienced it, lived through it, and even those who were educated on it in the immediate postwar years. Whilst the memorialisation and commemoration of the Great War continue to occupy a significant place in historical remembrance events, we shall be focusing moreso on how the historiography of the war's origins have evolved and changed in tandem with the societies which produced them. Let's begin.

Wartime Justification, Postwar Ponderance

"The understanding of the First World War is connected more than that of any other modern conflict with the war's historiography. Even before the armies marched, the respective combatants were compiling document collections justifying their innocence in the run-up to war and the initiation of hostilities."

- Historian Dennis Showalter, writing in a 2006 general survey of First World War historiography

The claim made by Showalter's quote above is (if a little bold), entirely in-step with the development of First World War historiography even while the war was ongoing. As the armies began their march to the front lines, governments called on their academia (historians in particular) to present their "cases" for going to war to the larger populace as a moral and just one, in which the popular (and somewhat propagandistic) sentiment was a "war of self-defense" against the aggression of external threats.

For an example of just how sudden these historical justifications were, consider the example of British historiography on Germany at the war's outbreak. As early as September 1914, the Oxford modern history faculty published Why We Are at War: Great Britain's Case, in which the harmonious Anglo-Saxonism that had marked prewar writings disappeared entirely, and the Germans were portrayed as the barbaric and uncivilised Hun. Herbert Fisher wrote his own article titled The War, condemning Prussian militarism and the Germans' expansionist desires. Here is an extract from that work, and below that a postwar quote from Fisher on the prewar admiration by British historians of Germany:

"Prussia has been made by the sword...That is one of the unalterable facts of history graven upon the mind of every German schoolboy, and shaping his whole outlook on the world."

"To sit at the feet of some great German Professor... was regarded as a valuable, perhaps as a necessary passport to the highest kind of academic career...The names of the German giants, of Ranke and Mommsen, of Wilamowitz and Lotze**, were sounded again and again by their admiring disciples in British lecture-rooms."**

Historians, much like the soldiers and working classes, were mobilised in their government's wish to occupy the moral high ground and present the war as a just one for the cause (or defense) of the country's interest. Yet in the immediate postwar years, these justifications were shattered, as the Treaty of Versailles gave way to new debates (intercontinental ones at that) about who and what had actually caused Europe's four years of bloodshed, brutality, and battles.

Here we ought to return to those collections of archive documents and government correspondence which were still being amassed even as the ink was drying on the peace settlement. Chief among those collections were the ones being published in the Weimar Republic, owing to the fact that the German Empire which had come before had been the target of majority of the blame for the war. In the Weimar Government following the war, the Foreign Office contained a "War Guilt section" (or Kriegschuldreferat), whose publications of evidence from before the war influenced academic discussions in Britain and America. The monumental forty-volume Die Grosse Politik (1922-1927) contained extensive materials from the German Foreign Office from 1871 all the way to 1914.

These new primary source documents, previously inaccessible during the war itself, gave rise to new strains of historiography, which began to re-assess the "justifications" produced by each nation at the beginning of the war. In Britain, these collections of sources generated debates on the extent to which the German nation could be blamed for the First World War. This crusade's most prominent leader was George Peabody Gooch, a former Liberal M.P and author of distinguished historical works (despite never holding academic office himself). One of the first revisionists on the First World War, he argued alongside William Harbutt Dawson (another prominent historian on German), Raymond Beazely, and a few other British historians that the Germans were not the sole arbiters of war, and as such the peace treaty of Versailles was a flawed one. Unsurprisingly, liberal parties in the Weimar Republic (and followers of a rising Nazi party) cheered the rise of these revisionist "Collective War Guilt" theses. German historians for their part, were re-mobilised to support and propagate these theses (with noticeably more nationalistic overtones). As Showalter describes:

"Strongly nationalistic and patriotic in orientation, matchless researchers and unrivaled polemics - controversy has long been an art form among German intellectuals - the pundits and professors rallied behind a cause lost by the soldiers. Given a previously unheard of access to government documents and frequently supported by government money, a generation of revisionists challenged and denied Germany's sole responsibility [for the war]."

So to sum up this section of the response, we might observe that during the war itself and in the immediate aftermath, historiography was heavily attached to the national agendas of each country. Whilst the historians were quick to rally to their respective flags and defend their country's status as a belligerent, they were equally quick after the war to about-face and reassess their previously nationalistic narratives. The following quote from Catherine Ann Catherine Ann Cline (writing in 1988) which sums up this first part of the response with regards to British historiography:

"During the war, they [British historians] saw Britain as fighting in defense of international law and Germany as guilty of having wantonly provoked the conflict. In the post-war years, Germany's guilt for having caused the war was transferred to the allies for having dictated an 'unfair' peace.

In the next part, we shall investigate how the Second World War and the following Cold War gave rise to whole new historiographical debates, even as the public began to reshape its memories of the horrors of the War To End All Wars.

Part 1 of 3