Unlike Clark's Sleepwalkers: In Defiance of a Ubiquitous Wake-up Call
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According to the 2020 founding manifesto and 2023 mission statement, Aufa100 focuses on the history and memory of the final stages of World War One as well as the (first) post-war order. The warlike events of our own time, however, caused us to return to the conflict's fore-end.
How come that the bulk of Christopher Clark's 'The Sleepwalkers' extended readership appears to have slipped in the title's role? At the same time, following the lead cannot be denied. This highly questionable role of sleepwalking into a state of global warfare was modelled by the West's military (NATO) and political elites.
Sleepwalkers Then
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Sisters and Brothers in Sleepwalking
On 27 September 2023, Clark was interviewed by one of Germany's well-known television moderators. With reference to the First World War, the question for the Cambridge-based professor was if 'das, was wir gerade um uns herum sehen, aus Versehen hineinschlittern könnte in einen großen Weltkrieg?'(8) In contrast to the many thousands of demonstrators for peace in February 2023 at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, the historian answered negatively. Shortly after, having arrived in the 2014 proxy war's second decade, he should be given another interview by an alternative moderator, preferably one from the Berliner Zeitung. Would he really stay true to his analysis? Whatever affirmation suggests that the audiences at home and on the set can go to bed in peace and quiet. After all, it seems as if the sleepwalker of the 1910s, the revered writer's tragic figure, is alive and kicking.(9)
She or he is not alone. All around the western world, rows of sleepwalkers are accompanying you. They sleepwalk from one year into another. Perhaps it is not to late: Wach auf. Réveillez-vous. During holidays or at home, you may well sleepwalk all night through. In the aftermath, though, turn away from mainstream media, start thinking and put your finger on entrenched thinking. Without judging our sleepwalking our and your great-grandfathers, read or reread 'the centenary's international bestseller'.(10) Because of these one-of-a-kind lessons at our disposal, their enlightened offspring should be able to reflect as well as correct. If not, the curse is likely to give birth to great evil. In historical terms, that is from a comparative perspective, the current generations' sleepwalking may derive from a commensurately higher level of ignorance, a failure of introspective memory as well as Geschichtsvergessenheit. To their predecessors, any precedents were lacking.
Peter de Bourgraaf
Footnotes
1. Hermann Wentker, review of Andreas Rödder, Der verlorene Frieden. Vom Fall der Mauer zum neuen Ost-West-Konflikt, Munich 2024, in: Sehepunkte 25 (2025).
2. Glenn Diesen, Time for NATO to Retire?, G. Diesen's substack, 24 September 2024.
3. Jost Dülffer, Rezension zu: Die Schlafwandler. Wie Europa in den Ersten Weltkrieg zog, C. Clark. H-Soz-Kult.
4. Michael Fleischhacker's broadcast interview with colonel Markus Reisner and former NATO general Harald Kujat, Servus TV, 26 November 2024.
5. Zara Steiner, The Treaty of Versailles Revisited, in: M. Dockrill and J. Fisher (eds.), The Paris Peace Conference, 1919. Peace without Victory?New York 2001, pp. 13–34, p. 17.
6. Jost Dülffer, Rezension zu: Die Schlafwandler. Wie Europa in den Ersten Weltkrieg zog, C. Clark. H-Soz-Kult.
7. Michael von der Schulenburg, 'Europe's civilisation is on the ground', lecture at Eurasien Gesellschaft, 14 January 2025.
8. Germany's broadcasting network ARD Maischberger, 27 September 2023. One by one, the other guests represented media or political parties that invariably adhere to the Scholz/Habeck government of shedding Ostpolik as well as a no-negotiations policy of NATO support for Ukraine. Also available on Youtube.
9. Benjamin Abelow, How the West Brought War to Ukraine, Massachusetts 2022, p. 51.
10. Christoph Cornelissen and Arndt Weinrich, German Historiography on World War I, 1914–2019, in: idem (eds.), Writing the Great War. The Historiography of World War I from 1918 to the Present, New York-Oxford: 2021, pp. 147–191, here 170.
