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Reading beloved5/11/2023 ![]() This does not mean that Clark absolves the main actors of responsibility – each carried a ‘smoking pistol’, but the meticulous reader may be surprised to find that Russia probably bore a far greater responsibility through its political actions than the other European powers. He consequently refuses to mark out one culprit: there were many of them. While Sleepwalkers sets the bar for future scholarly works trying to weigh the seemingly countless reasons for the outbreak of the First World War, the author calls it a ‘tragedy, not a crime’. ![]() Yet neither Christopher Clark's Sleepwalkers nor Sean McMeekin's July 1914: Countdown to War adhere to this consensus. There has also been a similarly extensive view of Germany as the main – if not the only – culprit since Fritz Fischer established this in his 1961 Griff nach der Weltmacht, even the majority of German historians – especially from the left – have supported the thesis. ![]() ![]() For nearly a century there has been consensus among historians that the First World War was ‘the great seminal catastrophe of this century’, as George Kennan characterised it. ![]()
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