Erik Ringmar is a political scientist at Lund University in Sweden. His
“The Spirit of 1914”: A Redefinition and a Defense was published in
War in History 24, no. 1 (2017). Its an interesting read. Here is the link
http://portal.research.lu.se/portal/fil ... 832036.pdf and the abstract:
The received wisdom has long been that people in Europe reacted with great enthusiasm as war was approaching in August, 1914. However, scholars who have investigated the matter have found little evidence of enthusiasm. There was no unique “spirit of 1914,”
and people in general were not happy about the prospect of war. This revisionist thesis is now the new orthodoxy and should as such be subject to scrutiny. In this article I focus on the notion of an “experience.” Experiences are felt and gone through, the argument will be, not rationalized after the fact. As such they will always leave only faint traces in the historical sources. It is very difficult to say what people in August 1914 actually felt. As a way around this problem I suggest we should focus on a study of public moods. It is in a public mood that felt experiences arise and public moods are in principle open to historical investigation
A further summary of the author's premise can be found on pages 4-5:
Our general concern is the question of how to make sense of the emotional reactions of people of the past; that is, in our case, how, and to what extent, we can draw conclusions regarding what people felt as war was breaking out in the summer of 1914.7 Or, to be more precise, what will concern us is the very notion of an “experience.”8 After all, it is the Augusterlebnis, the “August experience,” which revisionist historians want to document.9 Yet what we might mean by an “experience” is far from clear. There are, in this respect, three questions that are particularly pressing. Consider, first, the question of documentation. If an experience is something that someone goes through, we may wonder what traces it leaves in the historical sources. The experience needs to be identified and documented somehow, and it is not obvious how this can be done. A second question concerns the problem of reconstruction. Since the experience as once gone through is unavailable to us it must be reconstructed. The question is how this can be done and how we can judge the accuracy of any such reconstruction. A third question concerns how experiences can be combined into a comprehensive account. We rarely experience things by ourselves after all but always together with others, and the task of the historian is to provide an account of the experiences of society as a whole.
The revisionists, we will argue below, provide only partial and unconvincing answers to these three questions. What they document, first of all, is not what it felt like to go through the events of the summer of 1914 but rather how these experiences were recounted in retrospect. Secondly, and rather suspiciously, the people who appear in these reconstructions are far too similar to ourselves. They are the mirror-images of who we take ourselves to be — rational, peace-loving, but also ready to do our duty. And finally, since the revisionists tend to explain any expression of enthusiasm as an example of something else, the accounts they provide are far too coherent. We need an account of society which allows for explicit contradictions, tensions and conflict.
Yet the aim of this article is not critical as much as constructive. The aim is to improve on, rather than to reject, the revisionist account. As we will go on to suggest, the problems we have identified can be addressed, if ultimately not solved, by redefining the notion of a spirit as a question of a “public mood.” Although there indeed was no Geist von 1914, there was nevertheless a distinct public mood which pervaded much of society at the time and in which people's felt experiences subsequently arose. After discussing how moods can be defined and studied, we will provide a brief characterization of the mood of the summer of 1914. With this description in hand we will return to the revisionist account and address the three questions we identified earlier. An investigation of the public mood, we will conclude, can help us better document the way people experienced the war, better reconstruct their experiences, and combine both enthusiasm and foot-dragging into the same comprehensive account.
Its an interesting article covering the fields of history, political science and psychology. Worth the read.
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