Lusitania: The Cultural History of a Catastrophe by Willi Jasper (review)

The story of the sinking of the British liner, Lusitania, off the Irish coast on 7 May, 1915, by Lieutenant-Commander Walther Schwieger's U-20 is well known and has been told countless times. The Library of Congress Catalog lists no fewer than 64 book titles on the Lusitania and a Google search for "Lusitania WWI" results in 2.93 million hits. The last several decades have seen such vivid titles as Seven Days to Disaster by Des Hickey and Gus Smith (1981), The Day the World Was Shocked by John Protasio (2011), and Dead Wake by Erik Larson (2015). The book under review is a translation of the German Kulturgeschichte einer Katastrophe, published by the Bebra-Verlag, Berlin, in 2015.

What is new? With regard to the sinking of the Lusitania, the answer is "very little." The author uses mainly well-known secondary works and despite citing a "Department of Military Archives, Federal Archives" [sic] in the bibliography, eschews any references to primary materials, such as the records of the German Admiralty Staff, or of its chief, Vice-Admiral Gustav Bachmann, or even of U-20. There is nothing new on what war materials the Lusitania carried on board or of its secret presence on the Navy List as a British reserve auxiliary cruiser.

Jasper, retired professor of German literature at the University of Potsdam, offers two theses. The first is that the war of 1914 was one between the French "ideas of 1789" (fraternity and equality) and the German "ideas of 1914" (authoritarianism and bureaucracy); as one between "shopkeepers" and "heroes;" and as one between "German culture" and "western civilization" (8). The author's villains are economist Werner Sombart, novelist Thomas Mann, and theologian Ernst Troeltsch; his ideals are the popular writers Heinrich Mann, Henri Barbusse, and Romain Rolland. Such intellectual bifurcation has existed in the historical literature for a century. Unsurprisingly, given his early career as a functionary of the Berlin Communist Party, Jasper singles out Erich Mühsam, one of the leaders of the bloody Munich Soviet Republic of 1919, as the keenest analyst of the cultural side of the war of 1914.

The second thesis concerns what Jasper calls the onset of "totalitarian violence" with the sinking of the Lusitania. Schwieger and his crew were "modern Viking pirates." The "terror" of their fore-bearers in plundering villages and monasteries, enslaving local populations, and putting everything in their path to the torch "was to return with the sinking of the Lusitania" (50). Thus, all U-boat commanders are typified as being "ruthless," "brutal," "notorious," "unscrupulous," and "murderous" criminals. To date, Jasper argues incorrectly, historians have failed to explain this "process of brutalization" (118), begun with the torpedoing of the Lusitania.Infact, some historians have dated this "process" as far back as the Siege of Baghdad in 1258, in which, according to Arab sources, a Mongol Army put to the sword about 2 million citizens.

Jasper makes short shrift of two prevailing conspiracy theories concerning the sinking of the Lusitania: that First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill deliberately steered the ship into the path of U-20 in the hope that the likely loss of American lives would bring the Republic into the war; and that the Cunard Line had been infiltrated by German agents who had apprised Berlin of the Lusitania's route across the Atlantic. It would have been helpful had the author offered evidence to disprove either theory.

The Epilogue has little to do with the Lusitania or with the "cultural history" of its tragic sinking. Rather, it is a rambling collection of Jasper's views on the state of German historiography. It ranges from Erich Ludendorff putatively lecturing Adolf Hitler on "total war," to the alleged failure of German historians to deal with "the question of war guilt" (185). Jasper's comment that no one in Berlin "sleepwalked" their way into World War I is...