Volume 10, Number 5 · March 14, 1968
Place in the Sun
By Geoffrey Barraclough
Germany's Aims in the First World War
by Fritz Fischer
Norton, 652 pp., $15.00
Germany without Bismarck
by J.C.G. Röhl
California, 304 pp., $9.00
It is still possible to find people who will tell you that both World Wars were a tragic, avoidable mistake. They are the revisionists, or their heirs, the people who attacked the pro-Allied attitudes of Wilson, House, and Lansing in World War I, and accused Roosevelt of deceiving the American people in World War II by talking peace while preparing to fight. They have not had much success among professional historians; but among a broad segment of the American public their attacks went home. There was not, they suggest, much to choose, after all, between the Germans and their opponents, certainly not enough to justify the destruction of the heart-land of western civilization; with greater statesmanship it would have been possible to satisfy legitimate German demands, or at least to have achieved a compromise peace without handing over eastern Europe to Soviet communism and necessitating immense sacrifices by the United States to put western Europe on its feet again after 1945.
Review, 2068 words
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