World War I

Around 1900, Germans and German society were deeply integrated into the global world through migrationmigration, travel, trade, and commerce. Germany’s universities served not only a German student population but increasingly a transnational student population with students coming from as far away as Japan and the United States. The stream of foreign students to German universities seemed to confirm notions of German superiority that were deeply ingrained into the minds of Germans. And it was this thinking about German superiority that contributed to the enthusiasm of Germans of all walks of life when war broke out in August of 1914. This conflict quickly turned, at least on the Western Front, into a stalemate that lasted for more than three years. The experience of trench warfare impacted the thinking of those young Germans who suffered in the trenches and molded them either into Nationalists or into Pacifists. The brutality of the war as well as the war’s end with draconian treaties from the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to the Treaty of Versailles and the post-war upheaval and revolution robbed Germans and Europeans of all certainties.