The Long Way Back to Ourselves

7.4

The First World War: The End of a World Order

This episode reconstructs the thirty-one days between the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the outbreak of a war that six great powers had avoided five times before. You learn why the usual suspects, alliance systems, arms races, and mobilization timetables, fail a strict test: all existed during earlier crises that did not escalate, explaining why war was dangerous but not why this one did. The episode weighs Christopher Clark's "sleepwalkers" thesis against Fritz Fischer's argument for deliberate German responsibility, and includes a scene of Kaiser Wilhelm trying to redirect the army east on August 1, only to be told it was impossible. It also traces how the war created the vocabulary for shell shock.