8 - The “spirit of 1914,” 1919–1945

Summary

In the Weimar Republic there was little interest in the history of the “August experiences.” Very few of the 1914 plays were performed. Very little of the 1914 poetry was republished. The majority of First World War novels written in the 1920s did not include an account of the “August experiences,” although they did refer to them in a vocabulary full of pathos. There was a great deal of interest in the history of the beginning of the war, but it concentrated on the responsibility for the outbreak of the war. In this huge literature the “spirit of 1914” seldom appeared, and when it did appear it was only as the argument that as all Germans had willingly and enthusiastically come to the defence of their country, and as they would have done this only if they had believed that this was a just, a defensive war, then it must have been a defensive war.

The heyday of the “spirit of 1914” as a metaphor, a political slogan, had also passed. Some of the liberal clubs founded to sustain and uphold the “spirit of 1914” survived the revolution, but dropped the “1914” from their name. In 1919, in the elections for the Constitutional Assembly, the Deutsch Nationale Volks-Partei (DNVP), the reincarnation of the Conservative Party, proclaimed: “Vote DNVP. We are the Spirit of 1914.” To my knowledge they never used this slogan again.