»Der Sinn des Krieges. Politische Ziele und militärische Instrumente der kriegführenden Parteien von 1914 bis 1918«. Tagung im Historischen Kolleg München, mitveranstaltet von Holger Afflerbach (Leeds) und Elisabeth Hüls (München), ,21. bis 23. März 2013

摘要

This conference brought together a selection of internationally renowned scholars to discuss the war aims and strategies of many of the belligerent nations during the First World War. Through a series of chaired discussions and keynote addresses the conference sought to draw together the separate, national approaches to the consideration of war aims, and create a forum in which a more comparative, international, collaborative discussion of the topic could take place. As noted by Holger Afflerbach in his introduction, the questions surrounding war aims and strategies are myriad and complex, whilst the aims and strategies themselves were subject to change as the war developed. Internal and external pressures, combined with the magnitude of events, produced a conflagration of previously unimagined scale and duration. The conference sought to examine the responses offered by politicians and military personnel alike to some of these key questions: How were coherent strategies developed by the belligerents? What actions did the political and military elites take in order to establish a consensus of national opinion? What were the political leaders actually able to do as events continued to unfold, both before and during the war? What alternative strategies were available to them? And finally, why did the war continue for as long as it did? Why didn't it stop?