Letter to Max Hastings

Dear Mr Hastings

It was with genuine horror that I read your comments in the press via Twitter.  One piece was entitled 'Germany and Austria started WW1 because they wanted European domination' and the other was called 'Sucking up to the Germans is no way to remember our Great War heroes, Mr Cameron'.  It is so embarrassing in 2013 that such old fashioned and biased opinions are being given such media coverage albeit in the right wing press.
Whilst I acknowledge that you have read and written books on the Great War (and indeed were a researcher on the groundbreaking 1964 BBC documentary 'The Great War', this anti-German stance is so old hat.  Have your views not changed since fifty years ago when Europe was still recovering from the wreckage of the Nazis' conquest?  Yet this is my point there is such a fundamental difference between 1914-1918 and 1939-1945.  Hitler is rightly blamed for starting WW2 and I cannot see a time when that view is controversial.  However to tar 1914 Germany with the same brush is a gross disservice to history and Germany, then and now.
Austria wanted war with Serbia to crush the largest Balkan power, whose government and army were partly complicit in the assassination of its heir to the throne.  Germany went to war to protect her Austrian ally against attack from Russia, should Serbia 's ally decide to protect her Balkan little brother, which she did.  Indeed having given Austria his assurance that Germany would stand by her Dual Alliance partner, the Kaiser left for his annual summer cruise to Norway.  This is hardly the actions of a country's leader who is embarking on a war to take over Europe!
It is true that once the war had started, some people in Bethmann-Hollweg's administration drafted the September Programme which had expansionist intentions after a German victory.  However this was never formally adopted by the German government and although it was discovered by Fritz Fischer at about the time you were researching 'The Great War', this was not Germany's stated war aims, but some ideas dreamt up by some in the civil service and the Prussian military.
Has British historiography regressed so much that as we approach the centenary commemorations, we feel a knee jerk reaction to try and tell the world that it was Germany's fault, just like the second one?  I despair that as a teacher, such old-fashioned Anglo-centric and anti-German views might be read by today's school children when if we all take a step back, we might just see that ALL countries involved in the war's fighting were involved in the war's starting!  France, Russia and Britain all had their own reasons to go to war.  Some of these reasons were to do with Germany and others had nothing to do with Germany.  The Central Powers were not blameless for the catastrophe which began in August 1914, but instead they must take their share of the blame alongside all belligerents from BOTH sides. So we must remember this war's victims ON BOTH SIDES and we need to remember how the war ended.  But we must also remember that it was the sloppy peace treaty that followed that went a long way to starting an even bigger, even worse catastrophe twenty years later.
Kind regards
From someone who wants to see an open minded, objective and European commemoration of a war that created no winners, only losers.