Kurt Riezler seemed like the decisive witness to the great diplomatic crisis of July 1914. Although he was officially in the employ of the German Foreign Office, he had become assistant, speechwriter, and confidant to the chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. He was thus, at the age of thirty-two, a first-hand observer as the dramatic events of that month unfolded toward war. When Riezler's diaries were published in 1972, they promised clarification, if not resolution, of the bitter historiographical controversy that Fritz Fischer had provoked a decade earlier over the chancellor's role in the origins of the war. In the event, Riezler's diaries produced no such result. For one thing, they portrayed Bethmann in a way that seemed to offer support to both sides in the controversy; they showed the chancellor to be a ponderous, melancholy, fatalistic man who well recognized the frightful potential consequences of his actions but shied neither from ruthlessness nor from colossal risk. For another thing, it soon became clear that the entries in the Riezler diaries that recorded the July crisis did not represent the eyewitness source that their German editor claimed them to be. The author himself had, in fact, subsequently recomposed these passages, leaving their authenticity and reliability in doubt.

New autobiographical documents have now come to light. In 2008, Guenther Roth, the eminent Max Weber scholar, discovered them in the home of a son of Kurt Riezler's niece in Baltimore, Maryland. The documents include about a hundred letters that Riezler wrote during the first year of the war to his fiancée, Käthe Liebermann. Roth arranged for the deposit of the letters in the Leo Baeck Institute, along with their digitization and online publication, lest questions arise about the authenticity of these documents as well.Footnote * Roth has now joined with John Röhl, the biographer of Wilhelm II, to publish the letters in a print volume, along with an editorial apparatus, a series of introductory essays, and several additional letters that Riezler wrote to Käthe Liebermann in March 1914 and in the spring of 1918, when he was again in the service of the Foreign Office and stationed in the German legation in Moscow.

These new documents do not resolve the controversy over Germany's war guilt in 1914, nor do they introduce significant new evidence about the July crisis. They are nonetheless of considerable interest. Riezler wrote more regularly to his fiancée than he added entries to his diaries, so the letters offer an important supplement to the diaries during the early months of the war, which the author spent in the company of Bethmann at General Headquarters, first in Luxembourg and then in Charleville. Because the diaries contain no mention of his relationship with Käthe Liebermann, the letters offer interesting new kinds of information as well. Riezler's fiancée was the only child of the painter Max Liebermann. Although her letters to Riezler have evidently not survived, his letters responded to her reports about life on the home front in Berlin, in a largely Jewish milieu that comprised businessmen, high officials, writers, artists, and their patrons, and whose central figure was her father. Among those who circulated within this milieu and surfaced in the letters were, in addition to the painter himself (whom Riezler found intimidating), Walther Rathenau (who was the painter's cousin), Eduard Arnhold, Paul Cassirer, Ferdinand Hodler, and Theodor Lewald.

Riezler's letters also offer more information than the diaries do about his private feelings. Although he had courted Käthe Liebermann for years, she agreed to his proposal of marriage only upon the outbreak of the war; and, to judge from his letters to her, the war complicated an already complex relationship. The letters testified to his recurrent mood swings, ongoing anxieties about the durability of her affections for him, uncertainties about the impact of the war on their relationship and on his professional future, and self-reproach over his absence from his regiment in the field. “I think that my letters vacillate so in their mood,” he confessed in October 1914, “because I write them so directly [geradeaus], they always seem somewhat darker [mulmiger] or more cheerful than they are meant to” (186). The letters also suggest that Riezler's relationship to Bethmann rested on temperamental affinities. Riezler, too, was given to spells of melancholy and fatalism (though not without reason). “The worst thing would be if the matter were not to end with a tolerable result for us,” he remarked of the war at the beginning of October. We would then “enter, as we did 120 years ago, a period of recurrent world wars with changing constellations” (170). Several days later, however, he appeared to endorse the breathtaking kind of ruthlessness that was familiar in the Pan-German League: “We must damage France so much economically and financially that the country's desire to produce children disappears for economic reasons—rough, but the only way” (188).

Riezler's emotional vacillations were largely a result of his shifting perceptions of the war. He confronted a situation that, as he wrote in November, always hung in the balance and “gravitates at one moment toward the greatest hopes, at another toward the opposite” (217). In any case, these perceptions provide this volume's greatest source of general interest. The war letters began on August 17, 1914, as Riezler headed west to headquarters, and they continued until he returned to Berlin in May 1915 to marry Käthe Liebermann. In the interim he witnessed the general elation at headquarters as the German army advanced toward the Marne, the uncertainty that descended after the failure of the German offensive in the west, and then the sobering realization that the war would not end soon in either the east or the west. In this atmosphere, which was further unsettled by “Geheimniskrämerei” (150)—the stifling military secrecy that limited what even the top civilian leadership was told—Riezler reported on August 24 that “everything is good beyond expectation in the west” (124); a week later that “the prospects for a quick peace are bad” (133); on September 9 that “the situation in the west offers few prospects and is downright dangerous”(142); and on September 25 that “everything will be all right, but it is going to take a frightfully long time” (162). Once the prospects dimmed for a quick German victory, the atmosphere in German headquarters became fraught with rumor, suspicion, and machinations as questions of blame emerged, threatening Riezler's position along with Bethmann's. Riezler's own suspicions focused on the head of the Imperial Naval Office, Alfred von Tirpitz, whom he characterized in the letters (and the diaries) as “the father of the lie” (199), and on the foreign secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow, “my intimate enemy” (142).

An introductory essay by the editors offers background information on the “realities of war,” the questions of war and politics that dominated Riezler's letters. A separate essay by Röhl seeks to gear the letters to the broader historiographical questions raised in the Fischer controversy. That essay, which comprises more than a quarter of the entire volume, represents an extended response to Christopher Clark, whose recent book on the origins of the war (The Sleepwalkers [2012]) rejects Germany's principal responsibility for the outcome of the July crisis, hence a position that Röhl himself has manned for much of his professional life. Röhl's essay is an impassioned restatement of his own position. It presents a formidable body of evidence to suggest that the entire phalanx of German military and civilian leaders, from the kaiser on down, had actively planned a European war at least since 1912. The July crisis accordingly offered them the occasion to put into action a military project that was intended to eventuate in German world power and hegemony on the European continent. In Röhl's view the singular authenticity of the Riezler letters makes them key pieces of evidence in this argument. Unlike the disputed diaries and other critical autobiographical documents, most of which, Röhl notes, have somehow disappeared from the papers of Bethmann, Helmuth von Moltke, and other leading German participants in the crisis, Riezler's letters to his fiancée are “fascinating precisely because of their spontaneity”; they offer “an unembellished impression” of the “motives and expectations that led to the attack on [Germany's] neighbors in east and west” (37). They thus confirm Fritz Fischer's views and, as Röhl writes, “make clear the continuity in Germany's quest for world power” (68).

Röhl's claims demand more of these letters than they can deliver. Few passages bear on the July crisis at all, but Röhl's argument dwells on two that do. The first resides in a letter of August 22, in which Riezler noted of the war that the “staging [Inszenierung] was very good. Otherwise the war was certainly not deliberate, but it was a calculated possibility, and it broke out at the most favorable moment” (124). Röhl puts much weight on this disclosure, but it is hardly new. Bethmann's calculated risk in supporting Austria against Serbia, like his efforts to manage the German response to the partial Russian mobilization, is now such orthodoxy that even Clark's account accepts it. Röhl's broader, less generally accepted claim—that the German actions during the July crisis were part of a long-term design for conquest—rests on another passage in the letters: on September 7 Riezler wrote that he “must prepare an extended memorandum on the Siegespreise,” adding that it “has to be ready for the Kaiser tomorrow” (140). The document in question was the “September Memorandum,” the outline of the far-flung annexations that the Germans expected to result from their military victory. About this document, which provided a foundation for Fischer's assertions about the continuity between Germany's war aims and its prewar policy, the letters tell us nothing else specific, except to reveal that Riezler had visited the Saar on September 6 to learn about the desirability of annexing iron fields in Lorraine.

The letters do, however, speak more dramatically than the diaries to the context in which the September Memorandum was composed. On August 24 Riezler wrote of “the battle of opinions about a desirable rearrangement of Europe”: the soldiers, he reported, “are naturally all rabid and want to annex half the world” (126). The next day he noted that “our victories are unexpectedly large” and that “we are already in the middle of discussions about the Siegespreis” (129). Two days later he complained of “the dumb Soldateska, which can only grab things, and the pan-German megalomania” that reigned at headquarters (131). “The people are wild and dumb” (132), he charged the next day. And on September 8 came another complaint about the soldiers’ “mania for annexations and their ranting at the diplomats” (141). The euphoria at headquarters quickly reached a point where Riezler himself began to fear the worst from it: “I think that it will be frightful after the war,” he confided to his fiancée on August 25, “given the belief in power that governs all the people around us” (129). Then, in the wake of the Battle of the Marne in mid-September, Riezler offered the remarkable observation that “it's a real blessing that things are not moving forward in the west any more—in fact that they are going backward; otherwise this war would have no educational impact on nerves in Berlin” (151).

It is difficult to characterize the September Memorandum as a moderate statement of war aims, but Riezler's remarks suggest that even more radical possibilities were in play in early September. The letters also support the argument that the September Memorandum, far from representing the product of long-term German designs, documented the exhilaration of the German leadership during the dizzying early days of the war. In any event, Gerhard Ritter, who reached just these conclusions about the September Memorandum in his response to Fischer, could have found in Riezler's letters as much support for his own views as Röhl has for Fischer's.

Although publication of these letters will not much alter the terms of the debate, the letters themselves nevertheless represent a significant addition to the sources and a valuable supplement to the Riezler diaries. They provide more insight than the latter do into the atmosphere in which the German leadership operated early in the war. They also shed significant light on the thinking and emotions of Kurt Riezler himself. We owe the editors a debt of gratitude.