Fritz Fischer and the Historiography of World War One

CONTROVERSY is hardly new in German historiography. The essence of the Reformation, the personality of Frederick the Great, the factors contributing to the rise of National Socialism-these and countless other topics have stimulated spirited debates among German historians for decades. In the Federal Republic of Germany no historical subject, except perhaps the reappraisal of Adolf Hitler, has occasioned a greater furor in the profession than the appearance in 1961 of Fritz Fischer's Griff nach der Weltmacht. Die Kriegsziele des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914-1918. (The American edition bears the innocuous title Germany's Aims in the First World War.) In this weighty volume Fischer argues that Germany's incredibly expansionist war goals grew directly out of imperialist aspirations, especially the desire to create a massive, German-dominated Mitteleuropa, or central Europe, which had been widespread in Wilhelmine Germany. To support his case, Fischer reproduced several hundred pages of govern-