Mark Hewitson, Germany and the Next War: Militarism and the Imagination of Violence, 1887–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2026. £150.
Reviewed by Jeremy Black
Following Absolute War: Violence and Mass Warfare in the German Lands, 1792–1820 (2017) and The People’s Wars: Histories of Violence in the German Lands, 1820–1888 (2017), this is the third of Hewitson’s studies of the violence of war in the German lands. Hewitson, Professor of German History and Politics at University College London, emerges from these works and from his earlier studies, notably on German assessments of France, as a major scholar of considerable consequence for those working on war and international relations, not least in the cultural and social aspects of the former and their significance for the latter. This then is a world away from the ahistorical theorisation seen in volumes such as Hudson and Day’s Foreign Policy Analysis (4th ed, 2026), and it is much the better for it. Drawing on an astonishing range of newspapers, magazines, diaries, memoirs, printed correspondence, treatises, novels, contemporary histories, and official documents, this work seeks to capture German opinion. Hewitson carries forward his argument that the Napoleonic Wars romanticised military conflicts and turned them into pivotal political events, but the wars of unification saw the disclosure of the horrors and human costs of war. He argues that, in 1914, the assessment of the acceptability of the risk of war rested on the imagination of conflict. Hewitson claims that the idea of a successful European war was integrated to German foreign policy, and sees this as encouraging risk-taking. There is a focus on the fading memory of the wars of unification and the domestic isolation of ruling élites. Militarism and the military emerge as key elements, although, as Hewitson points out, the gap between risking war and going to war was considerable.
The book covers a remarkable range of topics from the perspectives of veterans to the views of conscripts, the perception of contemporary colonial conflicts, the political tensions within Germany, including the SPD view of the arms race, and the histories of past German wars. The whole book is ably illustrated.
At once atomistic in the best sense, in his search for links, Hewitson is capable of perceptive and interesting understandings of broader cultural issues, as in the discussion of the national mythology of national German wars. The latter does open up a problem, as there is inadequate consideration of the survival of anti-Prussian and non-Prussian perspectives on military history, and, indeed, changes in Prussian accounts, for example of Waterloo, which was downgraded in significance and resonance in Prussia, but also in Hanover.
Nevertheless, it would be inappropriate to end on a critical note. This is a first-rate and significant study by a major scholar, one that sets a high standard in military history.
