R.J.W. Evans: ‘The Greatest Catastrophe the World Has Seen’ - The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 by Margaret MacMillan Random House, 739 pp. - 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War by Charles Emmerson PublicAffairs, 526 pp. - The Russian Origins of the First World War by Sean McMeekin Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 324 pp. - July 1914: Countdown to War by Sean McMeekin Basic Books, 461 pp. - The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark Harper, 697 pp. - Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War by Max Hastings Knopf, 628 pp.

How simple it had all seemed to Gavrilo Princip on that sunny summer day in 1914! “I am not a criminal,” he told his prosecutors, “because I destroyed that which was evil.”9 How much more evil had he unleashed. Still to come, after some strange and unreal local truces had been briefly implemented at Christmas 1914, were tanks and gas; air bombardments (anticipated already by German strafing of the east coast of England); an Alpine “white war” on the most merciless of all the fronts once Italy entered the fray; massacres of Armenians by Turks and Arab uprisings; the battles of the Somme and Verdun; German U-boats taking hostilities to the US—where Wilson’s inaugural address in 1913 had not even mentioned international affairs; the African and Asian fronts; the revolution and prostration of many of the belligerents; 16 million killed and 20 million wounded.


Mein Blog befasst sich in einem umfassenden Sinn mit dem Verhältnis von Wissen, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Ein besonderes Augenmerk richte ich dabei auf die Aktivitäten des Medien- und Dienstleistungskonzern Bertelsmann und der Bertelsmann Stiftung.