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The Great War of Words: Episode 2

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Episode 2

BBC Radio 4 - The Great War of Words, Episode 2

Responsibility for the Great War has been a fierce battle for meaning ever since 1914.

Michael Portillo examines how the history of the origins of the Great War and the issue of war guilt has, since 1914, frequently been a fierce battle for meaning with high stakes.

The arguments over who began the Great War have raged since the first shots were fired. Michael Portillo examines a fierce battle for meaning with high stakes. 

All governments needed to convince their public that they had not begun this war of the world. Historians were immediately pressed into the national cause. Documents of state became weapons of propaganda but it was the coming of peace that transformed the issue of responsibility into the burning question of war guilt. 

Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles assigned responsibility for the war to Germany and its allies essentially as way of making the case for reparations but the defeated people of the new German Weimar Republic saw the clause as a terrible judgement and bitterly resented it and the issue of reparations . 

Defeat and horrific loss fostered powerful myths that would later become central to Hitler's appeal. Even before the war ended the myth of the 'stab in the back' was born in Germany. The idea that the war had not been lost on the battlefield but by betrayal at home. This & the inability to consider the role their nation had played in the outbreak and prosecution of the war would become corrosive narratives.

In the interwar years the German government and its historians devoted themselves to finding a way to revise history and undermine the Treaty of Versailles. A race to release documents and control the truth began. Across Europe and America others began to question these issues of responsibility. A new understanding of the causes of the war grew- no one had been to blame.

Then, in the 1960's, the work of German historian Fritz Fischer blew any consensus apart. And now, a century on, can historians agree and should the issue of responsibility for the war have any residual power?

Producer: Mark Burman.

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Michael Portillo explores the intellectual battleground of World War One.

Michael Portillo explores the last battleground of World War One - the charred intellectual landscape left by generations of historians, politicians and cultural commentators.

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