The eleventh hour of the eleventh day

In Cologne, Germany, the 12th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of 11th month of the year marks the beginning of Carnival season, that will end on Ash Wednesday 2010. But the 11th minute is still devoted to remembering the end of the First World War of 1914 to 1918.

Nowhere more so than in Paris. For the first time a German Chancellor, Ms. Angela Merkel did attend a ceremony under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris together with President Sarkozy. For it was the First World War, and what many consider its consequence, the Second from 1939 to 1945, that forged the European Union of today.

France was defeated by an upsurging German Empire in 1870, and lost two provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. Since the end of the 17th century the Rhine had been France’s eastern frontier, but the 1870 war was fought to the tunes of “Die Wacht am Rhein” (the watch on the Rhine), the unofficial anthem of the German Empire proclaimed on France’s own soil at Versailles on that same year. Remember the sequence in Michael Curtiz’ Casablanca, when the Germans start singing in Rick’s café, and start a riot?

Still everybody claimed to have been surprised by the start of the next war in 1914. War by inadvertence? Some historians claimed that during the doldrums in July and August, the rigid plans of the General Staff’s on both sides let a minor conflict in the Balkans between the Austrian Empire and Serbia roll into a full fledged conflagration.

“Christmas in Berlin” was the cry on Paris’ streets in 1914, while German regiments in grey (Feldgrau) rolled through Belgium in punctual execution of a long-standing battle plan by Schlieffen, exerting Schreckligkeit (frightfulness) to ease their advance. The French went to battle in red pantaloons and blue jackets. Not for long, though.



The best laid plans ground to a standstill. The Schlieffen plan did not work out. The High Command on both sides had misinterpreted the consequences of the high technology that they were using. For the first time industrial warfare devoured resources at an unimaginable rate. The machine gun favored the defense, gun preparation of the battlefield could use a million shells in a few hours, units got lost as telephone wires from the front were cut by artillery fire. General staffs laid out plans and executed doctrines for a different age.

For instance the all-powerful British navy went into battle formation at Jutland (May 31st 1916) under Jellicoe, in steel ships throwing car sized projectiles to five miles away, with a Nelsonian mindset of wooden ships and close-up broadsides. Distrusting the information received by wireless, the Navy reverted to communication by signal flag in the dusk, along a twenty mile long line of battle.

In France the battles sank into the mud and the trenches. The high point of this warfare came at the defense of Verdun where the French and the German sacrificed millions of men in a six month confrontation without outcome.

The end came in exhaustion in November 1918. The world as it was then known had also ended. Germany and Austria sank into revolution, inflation and famine. The influenza, brought to Europe by the American soldiers, ravaged the weakened populations. The “victors” looked for righteous compensation.

Ads for fashion in 1920s France featured wedding dresses “for second marriages” and “widow’s clothing”. Because of a new awareness of human fallibility and the fragility of life and happiness the roaring twenties broke all the rules.

Disconcerted populations looking for stability and certainties turned to saving formulas and dogmas, and their strongmen. In response and emulation of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Dollfuss, Horty, and Pétain offered renewal, return to the old stability, by fire and discipline.

An enraged Germany thirsted for revenge. Pointedly, after France’s renewed defeat of 1940, Hitler insisted on signing the armistice in the same railcar in the forest of Compiegne where the German plenipotentiaries had signed the 1918 Armistice.

In 1945 Europe had reached its nadir. Again it had squandered its wealth and its young in six years (nine if you count the Spanish Civil War of 1936, where all the belligerents of 1939 were already involved) of immensely destructive warfare. 1945 was year 0 of European history.

The reconciliation of France and Germany was the precondition for the avoidance of continued conflict. Precursors like Jean Monnet, Robert Schumann, Konrad Adenauer, Kurt Schumacher worked, under US tutelage, to bring about an economic system that would make future wars impossible. From the initial Coal and Steel Community the framework evolved towards the Treaties of Rome in 1957, the Single European Act of 1987, and the European Union Treaty of 1992.

And on this 11th November 2009, one minute before the start of the Cologne Carnival, Germany and France came together under the Arc de Triomphe.

I would strongly recommend to watch the Michael Haneke film “The white Ribbon” (Palme d’Or in Cannes 2009) as a primer on German attitudes before 1914.