8 - Sore Loser: Ludendorff’s Total War

Summary

The scenes in Sweden betrayed his turmoil. Here, during his walks in early 1919, his wife reported that he “was lost in strained concentration. His lips were constantly moving, as he incessantly murmured words and sentence fragments quietly to himself.” Forced to flee from revolutionary Germany to Sweden in fear of his life, Erich Ludendorff was beginning a long emotional and intellectual odyssey, whose goal was to make sense of the disaster, both collective and personal, that the armistice of November 1918 had signaled. The quest for discovery and self-justification occupied him for the rest of his life. In the course of this quest, he became one of the most public figures in Germany - as memoirist, journalist, polemicist, political activist, rebel, and folk-hero - until he withdrew, now the embittered visionary, into the company of his most devoted admirers. In this last capacity, he composed a small volume in 1935 on a topic of general interest. Like everything else he wrote after 1918, this was an intensely personal statement, a variation on the private obsessions that had governed his public agenda since the Great War. This treatise, however, also lent broad currency and meaning to the term total war.