The subtitle tells you this book is a serious work of history. The title helped to shoot it into popular prominence as soon as it was published in 2012.
Christopher Clark is Regius Professor of History at Cambridge (UK). He was born and raised in Australia, studied history at Sydney University and later at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He received his doctorate while at Pembroke College, Cambridge, before moving to St. Catherine’s College as a professor of modern history. He is fluent in German and his earlier work is on nineteenth century German history.
So he has all the expert credentials that you might desire for a new look at the First World War.
He is also a great storyteller.
After the introduction to The Sleepwalkers (more of that later) Clark plunges you straight into a murder.
‘Shortly after two o’clock on the morning of 11 June 1903, twenty-eight officers of the Serbian army approached the main entrance of the royal palace in Belgrade.…the king, flabby, bespectacled and incongruously dressed in his red silk shirt, emerged with his arms around the queen. The couple were cut down in a hail of shots at point blank range….By the time the assassins had gathered in the gardens to have a smoke and inspect the results of their handiwork, it had begun to rain.’
I’ve left out the really gory bits.
Two pages at the start of the book. If Clark had continued like this he would have written a fascinating historical novel with horror elements. But this is serious scholarly work and the next section is analysis. This is where you will need to gird your loins and take on the names and events of the mysterious Balkans.
‘The root of the problem lay partly in the coexistence of rival dynastic families. Two great clans, the Obrenović and the Karadjordjević, had distinguished themselves in the struggle to liberate Serbia from Ottoman control.’
Are you reeling? How on earth do you pronounce those names? Where exactly is Serbia, anyway? What and why are Ottomans?
Give yourself a break. No-one is going to test you. Clark has given you what matters: two rival families. He succinctly explains the rest in the following paragraph. It’s like he’s talking to you. And if all the names and dates wash over you? Like I said, it doesn’t matter. There is no history teacher devising convoluted multiple choice questions to catch you out. There are no condescending reading-group discussion questions at the end either.
In his introduction Clark asks why this book, when the First World War has ‘ …spawned an historical literature of unparalleled size, sophistication and moral intensity’?
His answer: ‘But if the debate is old, the subject is still fresh…a kind of period charm accumulated in popular awareness around the events of 1914. It was easy to imagine the disaster of Europe’s ‘last summer' as an Edwardian costume drama…The presumption steadily asserted itself that if the actors’ hats had gaudy green ostrich feathers on them, then their thoughts and motivations probably did too….This book strives to understand the July Crisis of 1914 as a modern event….It is concerned less with why the war happened than with how it came about.’
Delving deeply into ‘how’ Clark gives you memorable characters and stories. But he doesn’t avoid ‘why’. What he does is steadily build the how from the perspectives of the participants (Serbia, Austria, Russia, France, Germany, Britain, Italy, the Ottoman Empire) and allow you to ask why. Your conclusion may be different from mine. This is a complex book on a complex subject. What I brought away from it was that no one power started that war. And no consensus in any country wanted a war (a real one where millions of people were killed) but, as they went down the slippery slope, almost any one of the players could have stopped war being the outcome – if they had only had the courage to back down and find another way.
In other words this book completely changed my understanding of that period of history, and the myth on which my British cultural identity is founded. That’s a big thing for a book to achieve.
I can’t go without commenting on Clark’s humour. I think he is at heart a lecturer and a good lecture needs humour. Some have objected to any lightheartedness on this terrible topic but, as the green ostrich feather comment shows, his humour has point. And the fact that he’s Australian lets him stand aside a little. Here’s a line on the German attempt to become a naval power in the first decade of the 1900s.
"Ships, they built ships, that upset the British, you should never build ships. Because it upsets the British".
If you are open to changing your view of European history, or expanding it, this is the most important book on the catastrophic opening to the twentieth century you are ever going to find. At 562 pages, before notes, it is no quick read, but, remember, no-one is testing you.
Comments