H-Diplo Article Review
long-reigning orthodoxy about the 1919 peace settlement. It would take too long to do
justice to all of the points that she makes in this review article, so I will confine myself to
the most salient ones: The first is that the patient archival work of historians in the 1970s
and 1980s, after the British and French records for the period under review had been
opened, has produced a scholarly consensus regarding the status of the 1919 peace
settlement. That consensus rejects the orthodox interpretation in favor of a much more
nuanced assessment of the peace settlement after the Great War. It demonstrates that the
peace treaty with Germany was much less harsh and vindictive than critics since Keynes
and Nicolson have alleged, that the Weimar Republic could have coped relatively easily
with the financial obligations and territorial losses imposed upon it by the peace treaty,
and that the Versailles system collapsed not because of its oppressive features but because
the German public was led by its leaders to believe that it was unjust and therefore should
be resisted at every turn and dismantled at the earliest opportunity.
5
As Marks observes,
“While the Four [Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando] imposed losses and
constraints upon Germany, many of them temporary, they allowed it to remain Europe’s
greatest state politically, economically, and potentially militarily...” (658). The Weimar
Republic—long before Hitler came to power—refused to accept the fact that Germany had
lost the war because the war had been fought outside German territory and the defeated
German army was permitted to march home in formation instead of scuttling home in
abject defeat. The vanquished power was deluded into believing that it had signed an
armistice rather than a capitulation. In short, the German people were led to believe that
their military forces had fought the French, British, and American armies to a draw in the
west and then signed a truce in the expectation of being treated leniently at the peace
conference on the basis of the liberal principles of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. As Marks
reminds us, the failure of the allies to drive home to the German people the reality of their
army’s total defeat on the battlefield gave rise to the Dolchstoss (“stab in the back”) myth
and the widespread belief—again long before Hitler took power—that since Germany had
not lost the war, the severe restrictions placed upon it by the peace treaty were unfair. This
in turn became the source of bitter resentment and the demand for revenge.
Marks is at pains to emphasize a number of salient points about the peace settlement that
have been overlooked or deemphasized by the proponents of the “Carthaginian Peace”
school of historiography.
She points out that the territorial settlement, which deprived Germany of 13% of its
territory, 10% of its population, and 13.5% of its economic potential, in fact involved the
transfer of much German land that “was French, Walloon, Danish, or Polish in population
5
That consensus was first unveiled in Boemeke, Feldman, and Glaser, op. cit. This book brought
together the proceedings of an international conference commemorating the 75
th
anniversary of the Treaty of
Versailles in May 1994 at the University of California at Berkeley that was attended by twenty-seven
historians from Germany, France, Great Britain, Switzerland, and the United States (including Marks and
myself). The essence of this scholarly consensus was presented to the general public in Margaret Macmillan’s
best seller, Paris, 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York, 2002).
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