Author explores effect of Versailles Treaty
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/01/2018 (3154 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
In conventional historical writing, 1919’s Versailles Peace Treaty, which formally concluded the First World War, is depicted as a disaster.
The victorious Allies, it is argued, imposed vindictive terms on Germany — a “Carthaginian peace.” In particular, the demand for reparation payments hamstrung the economy of Germany’s newly established Weimar Republic, creating the social conditions that facilitated the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party.
The Versailles Treaty, then, led directly to the Second World War.
This conventional interpretation is utterly rejected by Jürgen Tampke, a retired German historian who lives in Australia. Tampke articulates his revisionist view of Versailles and its legacy in a provocative narrative.
Germany may have lost the First World War, Tampke says, but it won the peace. Indeed, it was arguably in a stronger position economically and in geopolitical terms in 1919 than it was in 1914, when the war began.
On its western border, Germany faced a debilitated France which had been devastated by the war. To the east, Russia was weakened by revolution. The German economy survived the war largely intact — it was Europe’s “industrial powerhouse.”
And the reparation terms mandated by the Versailles Treaty, Tampke contends, were modest: they were “within Germany’s capacity to pay, and did not effectively cripple the immediate post-war economy.”
Hitler’s rise to power, then, cannot be explained by the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Tampke attributes the Nazis’ success to the influence of the Great Depression, which began in 1929, and a general disillusionment with the Weimar Republic.
While Tampke makes at least a strong prima facie case that historians have distorted the significance of the Versailles Treaty, his concept of the causes of the First World War is less convincing. He states flatly that “The First World War was not brought about by the alliance system.”
But the alliance system was crucial to the events that precipitated the war. It was precisely because of the alliance system that a local conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia escalated into a global apocalypse, drawing in Russia, Germany, France and Britain.
Tampke writes that Britain declared war on Germany because the latter violated the neutrality of Belgium. But British historian Christopher Clark, in his 2012 book The Sleepwalkers, maintains that Belgium was not central to British deliberations in the summer of 1914. Rather, Britain entered the war to contain German expansion.
One of the most insightful parts of this book is the author’s critique of “postmodernism,” an academic fashion of the 1980s and 1990s which denied the reality of objective historical truth. This doctrinaire relativism, Tampke points out, provides intellectual cover for those who seek to misrepresent the past, e.g. Holocaust deniers.
Tampke challenges so much conventional wisdom that the effect is breathtaking, urging a complete re-evaluation of the Versailles Treaty. Some of his assertions are dubious, particularly about the origins of the First World War. And other historians will doubtless find much to criticize in his account.
But it is precisely through this process of debate that historical truth is crystallized — and Tampke, to his credit, clearly believes in an objective historical reality, which is why he is so determined to set the record straight.
Graeme Voyer is a Winnipeg writer.
