Berlin

As if to show its resolve, the kaiser’s government staged its largest military display to date on Berlin’s Tempelhof Field in September 1912. Some 60,000 troops paraded, while two zeppelins and ten airplanes circled overhead. A visiting British official found the event “the most impressive and menacing event I had ever witnessed. . . . The civilian audience seemed almost intoxicated with excitement and the reality of the German menace, with its ever increasing momentum, made the prospects of European peace look more precarious than ever.”

The frustrations attending German foreign relations did not prevent the imperial government from indulging in some major celebrations in 1913. On June 15 Kaiser Wile II celebrated the silver anniversary of his ascension as king of Prussia and German emperor. The occasion brought to the capital throngs of loyal subjects, who gaped in wonder at the monuments. The cafés and restaurants were filled with people dancing the tango, the latest imported craze, though officers in uniform were banned from joining in because the kaiser considered the dance immoral. A little later that year, Wile laid the cornerstone of a new sports stadium for the Olympic Games of 1916, which had recently been awarded to Berlin. (Of course, there would be no Olympic Games in 1916, and Berlin would not host this festival until 1936.) In October came the celebrations marking the one hundredth anniversary of the “Battle of Nations” near Leipzig, where Prussian troops had helped to overpower Napoleon, setting him up for his final defeat at Waterloo a year and a half later.

Yet all the celebrations, impressive as they were, could not disguise the fact that Berlin was a city on edge, seething with political and social dissension, full of frustration over diplomatic and military isolation. The most widely discussed book in 1912–13 was General Bernhardi’s Germany and the Next War

, which argued that war was a biological necessity for a healthy young nation surrounded by senile but tenacious adversaries. There was considerable talk among the kaiser’s generals about the need for a “preventative war”—a quick strike that could liberate the Reich from its encirclement before its enemies became too powerful to defeat.

It was not only Berlin that was restless. All the European capitals had their “war parties,” their eager believers in the notion that if war was inevitable it should come sooner rather than later. Observing all the signs of restless saber rattling during a visit to Europe in summer 1913, Colonel Edward M. House, President Wilson’s confidant and emissary, reported worriedly: “The whole of Europe is charged with electricity. Everyone’s nerves are tense. It needs only a spark to set the whole thing off.”

The Spirit of 1914

Of course, the spark that ignited what came to be known as World War I was the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, at Sarajevo. The killer was a Serbian terrorist named Gavrilo Princip, who wanted to strike a blow against Austria for annexing Bosnia in 1908. (Princip was later portrayed as a hero by the Yugoslav Communists, who placed a plaque at the spot where he carried out his deed and named a street in his honor. After Bosnia seceded from Serbian-led Yugoslavia in 1992, Muslim officials tore down the plaque and renamed the street.) Franz Ferdinand’s death would not have had such far-reaching consequences had the Austrians not known that they had German backing to punish the Serbs. Wile and his advisers believed that a limited war—one confined to the Balkans—could be highly salutary if it rallied folks around the flag while weakening pan-Slavic influences abroad. “Just tread hard on the heels of that rabble,” was Wile’s advice to Vienna. Thus Bismarck’s well-known prediction that the next major war would start in the Balkans was proven correct, though the real source of the explosion was not the Balkans, but Berlin.

On July 23 Austria presented an ultimatum to Serbia, insisting that if its demands were not met in two days, Vienna would declare war. The demands were so far-reaching that Austria was confident that the Serbs would reject them out of hand, giving Vienna the excuse it was looking for to put Belgrade in its place. As it happened, Serbia accepted nearly all the demands, and thus almost denied Vienna its pretext for war.