German Society and Culture without the World Wars?

A few months back, there was a similar thread focusing on German ECONOMY without the world wars.
There, I said I was sure that social democracy would take over at some point, and I stand by that. Now social democracy can mean a lot of different things with regard to culture... but with regard to society, it likely means expansion of education earlier than IOTL, women's liberation progressing without the rollback of the Nazis and Adenauer era, sexual freedom progressing from Weimar's achievements onwards, loss of relevance of religions pretty much on schedule or even slightly earlier.
I don't see anything like the Nazis emerge, at least not in Germany. On the other hand, not having lost WW1 probably means even a social-democratic Germany is going to be rather full of itself, which is never a really good idea and can cause lots of traps for its social, cultural, political or economic development down the line.
And without the Nazis and WW2, of course, (also without the division into FRG and GDR), Germany is really quite unrecognisable when compared to OTL by now. Right down to how its towns and even countryside look.
 
With all of Wilhelmine Germany's territory in tact they would be an economic power house and the dominent economic power on the continent (more so than the original time line)

The monarchy as a institution was popular in the Wilhelmine period even amongst SDP; however Wilhelm himself was a take it or leave it prospect. The monarchy such as it was, would not have continued past his next major gaffe or his passing the crown on to one of his sons; neither of whom saw themselves as a man chosen by god to lead nor where they burdened with a severe inferiority complex the way their father was

The SDP would have continued their ability to work with the monarchy and the military until they came to another budget impasse... the question becomes do the military and the kaiser get the message, or do they try the pattern of dissolving the Reichstag and supporting their right wing pet parties (which never worked any of the times it was tried) during an economic downturn; and the SDP decides they have had enough and brings the monarchy and the army to heal via crippling general strikes
 
Germany would retain a very traditional atmosphere with respect to art and architecture, not feeling the destruction of war. It would also have more non-German speaking territory.

Take Poland, for instance. The people retained coherent identity even though the country was partitioned three ways in the eighteenth century. Austria-Hungary would probably last much longer, perhaps to this day, with German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak and Polish spoken in various regions.

I think no wars (or a very minor one) would hasten the concept of a European Union.
 
I will even state that the question should be reversed : what would need a change in Germany’s culture to avoid WW1 ?

You need a different unification, a peaceful one, and one that does not lead to a Germany under Prussia’s hegemony.

Prussia was the curse of Germany. It was a militaristic and colonialist State (but a State that would not colonize distant overseas lands but instead wanted to colonize european neighboring lands), or as others put a State owned by a warmongering army.

Without changing this, you will have some kind of WW1.

I don't think anything you say about what was in Germany, and in Prussian dominant culture in particular, is dead wrong; the tendencies you describe are all there and it is somewhat deplorable unification was achieved under a Prussian banner. But I do think you sell other potentials in German culture a bit short in asserting that Prussian victory on the terms of OTL completely predestined the war. Other aspects of German culture and spirit might have prevailed.

The other injustice you do to the situation counteracts these good potentials unfortunately, or rather what you implicitly downgrade--the general responsibility of all of capitalist-dominated Europe, all the other nations surrounding Germany, on both sides of the eventual wartime Entente-CP split, collectively for the collision that was the Great War. That I think had a deterministic inevitability to it--perhaps not utterly so but the burden is on the AH author to explain just how the situation could be defused and lubricated enough to avoid the mad rush to the "obvious" resolution by violence all parties were mindlessly drawn into.

And when I say mindless, I am abstracting from the ugly fact that it was not entirely so. Seeing the configuration of conflict in many dimensions, from a humanistic and pacifistic point of view what was lacking was not intelligence but wisdom, and it was in scant supply on all sides! There were plenty of people who could foresee conflict and figure it would be pretty brutal, but typically people desiring peace would shy away from visualizing it in detail and just as well, because the details would shift with technical advances, and shift with the chaotic luck of the battlefield, and trying to mentally game out the war in advance would tend rather to draw people into a martial spirit of patriotism souring into bellicose chauvinism. One reason we write fiction is I believe a deep expression of human intelligence's utility--'what if' is how we approach pragmatic problem solving, in an important aspect anyway. But wishful thinking puts a thumb on the scale. I am no good for trying to work out how to give the Axis a victory nor the Confederacy, because I don't want an ATL win for those sides. It is too easy for me to insist on the objective doom of these "bad guys" and focus on proving they were bad guys.

In the Great War, it is far less obvious to me the CP was the wrong side to win--but in considering a CP win I want to wank aspects and potentials of Germany and Austria-Hungary that probably will not stand the scrutiny of withering skepticism. Every good potential of German culture and society I would wish to see strengthened and triumphant is there and in some abundance too...but cynically speaking, is victory in a continental total war the way to expect them to grow and dominate? Almost certainly not! The worst rather than the best is likely to be cultivated and the saving grace of the utter horror of the OTL Great War is won at a bitter price--and indeed the intense negative negation of the notions of narrow minded chauvinism and selfishness and cynicism that should have been the hard won lesson failed to work, and the world was subjected to another round.

So part of the horror of the Great War, and its later second verse, is that people were not mindless. They gave much thought to the narrower questions of "OK, how do we do it again and this time get it right so that we win?" And while lots of lip service and even decisions of actual material consequence were made in the service of the vaguely imagined cause of peace, when push came to shove a lot more energy and ingenuity went into "how shall our side win?" And of course given the nature of the German answer to this narrow question, there was little choice for moral wisdom but to join in on the other side with patriotism and petty greed and put everyone's shoulder to the same wheel. This time there would be serious attention to the question "how shall we avoid doing it again a third time" at least. But sadly, avoidance of a third war was probably mainly a matter of Balance of Terror.

It would be admirably clever to think up a way for Europe to avoid the abattoir of the Great War, and that plainly means not just the next decade or two but indefinitely to the present day, that does not lean exclusively on ASB Utopian altruism, but gives that some traction with crasser interests balanced against each other. But any such scenario surely must also involve the triumph of some better wisdom than OTL, even if only in apparent hindsight.

We need to specify the scenario to answer the OP question because whatever it takes to divert the otherwise inevitable train wreck is going to have great bearing on every society successfully diverted.

And it is simply inadequate, and analytically wrong, to focus just on Germany as a sole factor needing reform. All the Great Powers and many lesser ones contributed to the mess and all of them need diverting. Part of the reason Germany remained Prussian-Junker ruled in mentality and personnel is that the Germans were objectively threatened by a deeply revanchist France and ambitious Russia, and that danger would not go away just because the Germans all woke up one morning suddenly enlightened.

Indeed if a different spirit had laid the groundwork for unified Germany--if say Germany were united by the great liberal-radical revolutionary spirit of 1848, for instance, with the Prussian revolt breaking the power of their overbearing monarchal-militarist rulers and more populist aspects of Germany in ascendency, then perhaps there would also be no French Revanchism. Perhaps Russia would totter between an undermined but still in power autocracy and a pacifist (to outsiders anyway) sophisticated and grassroots populist Narodnik spirit neutralizing the huge empire as a factor to be feared. Perhaps a more bourgeois Germany would refrain from vainglory in the form of a High Seas Fleet and focus on business; perhaps parallelism between France and Germany would point more toward mutual cooperation than a fatal confrontation and perhaps Britain would not, as some assert Britain must, choose a side to oppose the continental hegemony but let be and the dominant powers would all be objectively committed to peace.

Maybe! But realism in AH will demand a bunch of hard questions be answered before anyone can accept such a benign picture as solid in foundation.

Anyway, this puts the POD the better part of a century earlier than the period in question.

I might attempt to finally answer the OP directly by virtue of some kind of ASB heuristic involving meddling aliens who show up in orbit but stay hidden and seek to check all moves to actual war with manipulations as subtle as they can manage, and suspect in the mid-1910s that some of these will have to be pretty ham-handed. Stuff like turning all the cordite in France into sawdust or something, or most of it, so the French ministers know they must back down until they can fix the miraculous problem...then having to throw other monkey wrenches into the CP lest they get too overconfident. Hopefully I could game out something less bluntly unsubtle! But so deep did the currents pulling to war run in the early 20th century it will take something like that, or perhaps someone more clever than me or even the admirable effort of @carlton_bach to divert and ground the lightning a bit to figure out how to more plausibly, without deus ex machina intervention, set it up to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis somehow--where Scylla is a metaphor for the apparently inevitable Great War, and I suppose to people who don't want to embrace Red Revolution wholesale, the latter is the "solution" many a contemporary visionary would embrace--for good or as conventional wisdom has it, terrible lll as bad as the Great War or perhaps worse. I am very sympathetic to the idea of radical revolution as a cure not a disease, but all the harpies of naysaying who would descend on me for saying that come armed with some solid historic and pragmatic evidence. I still believe we could do better, but the project of drawing the map of the Red Exodus from the Egyptian captivity of global capitalism probably requires a mind at least as worthy as a Moses, and probably the inscrutable wisdom of the God of Exodus.

So the trick is to somehow sail between the extremities more or less unscathed. And Odysseus had to see lots of his crew snatched up by hungry Scylla in the myth--given the powder-keg readiness of Europe to explode we probably would have to avoid such sparks and the metaphoric ship of European civilization will probably have to take a rough turn or three whirled around revolutionary Charybdis instead.

Note that the nuclear balance of terror changes our thinking in modern times--today risking revolution rather than war might seem the wiser course, but in Classical mentality and in the wisdom prevailing in the pre-atomic age, most people not committed to a really radical Utopian goal would agree better a bit of wartime bloodshed than the specter of Communism taking flesh. That is, most people who were not actual Communists, or anyway socialists willing to risk that "threat."

It would require some doing to prevent 1910s ruling minds from saying "bring it on!"
 
Germany bears very little responsibility for the starting of the war. The blame in near entirety belongs to Nicholas II's Russia.

Serbia committed an act of state sponsored terrorism against Austria by having their intelligence agency bankroll the assassination of the Austrian deputy head of state; Austria was morally justified to declare war on Serbia over this

Had Russia not engaged in their pan-slavism and adventurism, it would have been contained to an Austria v Serbia war. Instead they mobilized against Austria to defend the Serbs; which in turn triggered the balance of the alliance system.

This is to say nothing of the revengeism, bellicose political discourse and extremely aggressive military build up that France was engaging in... and their refusal to do anything to reign in Russia's continued foreign policy blunders (Russia for the entirety of that alliance was materially dependent on French financial support and was crushed in both conflicts she engaged in under the treaty, (Japan and Germany).

The greatest opportunity to prevent the war would be the collapse of the Franco-Russian alliance sometime before 1914.... for a republican democracy to be allied to such a repressively reactionary regime as Nicholas II should have been more politically unsustainable than it was; and after their debacle in 1905 without any substantive political or military reforms ever occurring, France should have seen the writing on the wall that they were in fact the ones shackled to a corpse
 
More traditional with regards to architecture, yes, just because all the old buildings would still stand. Art in general, though, is a different matter, when we look at early 20th c. Trends
 
In the 1890's, you had the attitude that "everything was already invented," not as naïve as it sounds, given the amount of technology begging to be made public. You also had the notion that the world had outgrown war. Now if the balances of power had continued, the world wars could be avoided or reduced to much smaller conflicts. The result is a mindset and culture difference in all of Europe and the developed world, not just Germany. European countries would start looking at colonies to expand their growth, putting some of the more serious wars into the third world. This forum is full of timelines over these issues.
 
This forum is full of timelines over these issues.
Sure, but how plausible are they? The notion that everything important had been discovered was soon exploded in science, even as they spoke nagging peripheral issues already known turned out to be fulcra totally overturning basic concepts. Similarly, people may have smugly believed they had the big issues of society pretty well in hand, but such pride always goeth before a fall in our experience. Newt Gingrich believed the Internet had abolished market cycles and what are we now, two, three cycles and counting since then? Galbraith had a classic essay, "Financial Genius is Before the Crash," about similar fatuousness in the 1920s. Meanwhile we don't need to resort to generalities to see in retrospect the nigh inexorable drive toward general war underscoring the first half generation of the 20th century.

If you think it is easily done to sidestep the Great War, please give some links to the particular TLs you thought did it well, or sketch out precisely how it happens resting on something beyond the self-satisfaction of the world's elites.

Each of them is postulating in their heads, I believe, that the other guys will yield before the majesty of their rightness. None, except the cynical realists about war or the hopeful revolutionary idealists who hope to pull the rug out from under the whole corrupt order, are thinking about how the Other Guy has resolution and self satisfaction similar to their own.

Who do you think does the best job of deconstructing conventional wisdom about the deep seated conflict, that we be mindful of them?

Note, as an aside to others, that pointing to any one side as the sole culprit is I suppose an approach to a view where the war could be sidestepped--but such frames are not very realistic. Indeed I think the Tsar bears the most personal and proximate blame for the particular spark that set off the whole magazine, but consider how it would have been if he had totally ignored the Serbian crisis and let AH have its unchallenged way.

This is what I mean by one-sided thinking that credits one actor or group of them with full humanity and agency and turns everyone else into bit players. It works in each egotistical head, until that head runs into the stone wall of someone else's bull head. I agree the Germans were somewhat unfairly demonized, all right--but not because they were angels; rather everyone had a whiff of sulfur about them.
 
It matters because an implausible way of fixing the wars implies an unlikely and hard to fathom social configuration in the European dominated world; people being in power politically who couldn't reasonably be expected to be, opinions being popular that have little basis, etc. How can we generalize from a situation where a major driver of war OTL is magicked away?
 
Germany bears very little responsibility for the starting of the war. The blame in near entirety belongs to Nicholas II's Russia.

Serbia committed an act of state sponsored terrorism against Austria by having their intelligence agency bankroll the assassination of the Austrian deputy head of state; Austria was morally justified to declare war on Serbia over this

Had Russia not engaged in their pan-slavism and adventurism, it would have been contained to an Austria v Serbia war. Instead they mobilized against Austria to defend the Serbs; which in turn triggered the balance of the alliance system.

This is to say nothing of the revengeism, bellicose political discourse and extremely aggressive military build up that France was engaging in... and their refusal to do anything to reign in Russia's continued foreign policy blunders (Russia for the entirety of that alliance was materially dependent on French financial support and was crushed in both conflicts she engaged in under the treaty, (Japan and Germany).

The greatest opportunity to prevent the war would be the collapse of the Franco-Russian alliance sometime before 1914.... for a republican democracy to be allied to such a repressively reactionary regime as Nicholas II should have been more politically unsustainable than it was; and after their debacle in 1905 without any substantive political or military reforms ever occurring, France should have seen the writing on the wall that they were in fact the ones shackled to a corpse

In this case, Russia was morally justified to declare war on Austria for the murders of over 300 (!) Russian officials by Austrian-backed terrorists throughout the early 1900s. So it's all good.

Oh, and it's a total myth that Russia was engaged in "pan-slavism" (world's most ill-defined buzzword) and "adventurism" in 1914. Throughout 1913 and 1914, Russia was given multiple opportunities to destabilize A-H, and it turned away from these opportunities in blind panic, because it did not want war at the time. Not to mention how Russia failed to make any strong reaction to Austria's own state-sponsored terrorism. Or how, at one point, Russia advised Serbia to not even defend itself against A-H's coming attack.

Russia's policy, and the policy of the entire Entente, was peaceful and conciliatory beyond all reasonable expectations. The war happened because Austria wanted it and Germany was willing to indulge it.
 
In this case, Russia was morally justified to declare war on Austria for the murders of over 300 (!) Russian officials by Austrian-backed terrorists throughout the early 1900s. So it's all good.

Oh, and it's a total myth that Russia was engaged in "pan-slavism" (world's most ill-defined buzzword) and "adventurism" in 1914. Throughout 1913 and 1914, Russia was given multiple opportunities to destabilize A-H, and it turned away from these opportunities in blind panic, because it did not want war at the time. Not to mention how Russia failed to make any strong reaction to Austria's own state-sponsored terrorism. Or how, at one point, Russia advised Serbia to not even defend itself against A-H's coming attack.

Russia's policy, and the policy of the entire Entente, was peaceful and conciliatory beyond all reasonable expectations. The war happened because Austria wanted it and Germany was willing to indulge it.

This is news to me? Was't the entire Austrian intel service in the pocket of Russian intel for the 7-8 years before the war?

France's policy was NOT peaceful.... their conscription law of 1912 was extremely destabilizing to the balance of power and forced Germany into a reciprical increase in size of the active army (when they hadn't done so in years) which made everyone even more paranoid about their security and desiring for war, even if just to eliminate threats for the express purpose of being able to slow down future spending
 
This is news to me? Was't the entire Austrian intel service in the pocket of Russian intel for the 7-8 years before the war?

I assume you're referring to the Redl affair? Redl was a well-placed and useful agent, but ultimately he was just a man. The Austrian intelligence as a whole was not in anyone's pocket, and it was surprisingly good at its job in spite of leaks.
France's policy was NOT peaceful.... their conscription law of 1912 was extremely destabilizing to the balance of power and forced Germany into a reciprical increase in size of the active army (when they hadn't done so in years) which made everyone even more paranoid about their security and desiring for war, even if just to eliminate threats for the express purpose of being able to slow down future spending

France's conscription law could be seen as an offensive or defensive measure. IMO, abstract disturbances of the "balance of power" can't be considered aggression. It's only direct threats or attempts at undermining a neighboring state.
 
State owned by a warmongering army.

Yet for the first 26 years of Wilhelm II's reign, its war record consisted of a couple of native risings in Germany's African colonies, and providing a contingent for an international expedition to Pekin. These aside, the German army fired at nothing except training targets.
 
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I assume you're referring to the Redl affair? Redl was a well-placed and useful agent, but ultimately he was just a man. The Austrian intelligence as a whole was not in anyone's pocket, and it was surprisingly good at its job in spite of leaks.


France's conscription law could be seen as an offensive or defensive measure. IMO, abstract disturbances of the "balance of power" can't be considered aggression. It's only direct threats or attempts at undermining a neighboring state.

Id love to read any materials on Austria's intel ops of the period if you have any suggestions

France's move was aggressive; modernizing their forts to have long recoil artillery, machine guns and mortars would have been defensive. Doubling, the size of their active field army when Germany hadn't increased the field in 9 years feels very aggressive
 
Id love to read any materials on Austria's intel ops of the period if you have any suggestions

France's move was aggressive; modernizing their forts to have long recoil artillery, machine guns and mortars would have been defensive. Doubling, the size of their active field army when Germany hadn't increased the field in 9 years feels very aggressive
I still think Serbia deserves most of the blame. They committed an act of state sponsored terrorism. If Syria or a other nation encouraged or funded assassination of a US president many in the US and abroad would say the United States is justified in declaring a war against them. I am actually a bit surprised any nation would support Serbia in this situation especially Russia who has experienced assassination of their leaders by radicals.
 
But to launch an all out war seems wrong. Austria should simply have replied proportionally, i.e. kill off Serbian officials in various positions (Prime Minister, officers on the army staff etc. ).
I'm not so sure that reciprocal always equals proportional. That's more street gang reasoning than the act of a powerful nation state committed to going beyond warfare to better ways. It might have been innovative and enlightened in the time of Hammurabi perhaps. (Indeed the Old Testament "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" code was I believe meant to be an upper limit on retaliation, not a demand for reciprocity as a minimum. Relative to "offend me in the least and I will level your city and salt the earth and scatter your survivors to the far corners of my empire!" eye for an eye was progressive and enlightened).

If we say, "well, sure, nations are nothing more than overgrown street gangs and the notion of some sort of post-warfare concert of nations to secure general peace is utopian and unrealistic," then I think that would just validate my thesis that the blame for the Great War goes around pretty much to everyone--when I say France was guilty, I certainly am not saying therefore Germany or Austria--or certainly not Serbia--was therefore not guilty. They all were guilty of failing to look beyond warfare. If we assume that in the end the relations of nations must always involve warfare then we pretty much have to concede the Great War was a thing that would inevitably happen, sooner or later and by the mid-1910s, probably sooner.
 
I'm not so sure that reciprocal always equals proportional. That's more street gang reasoning than the act of a powerful nation state committed to going beyond warfare to better ways. It might have been innovative and enlightened in the time of Hammurabi perhaps. (Indeed the Old Testament "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" code was I believe meant to be an upper limit on retaliation, not a demand for reciprocity as a minimum. Relative to "offend me in the least and I will level your city and salt the earth and scatter your survivors to the far corners of my empire!" eye for an eye was progressive and enlightened).

If we say, "well, sure, nations are nothing more than overgrown street gangs and the notion of some sort of post-warfare concert of nations to secure general peace is utopian and unrealistic," then I think that would just validate my thesis that the blame for the Great War goes around pretty much to everyone--when I say France was guilty, I certainly am not saying therefore Germany or Austria--or certainly not Serbia--was therefore not guilty. They all were guilty of failing to look beyond warfare. If we assume that in the end the relations of nations must always involve warfare then we pretty much have to concede the Great War was a thing that would inevitably happen, sooner or later and by the mid-1910s, probably sooner.
I don't believe it was inevitable. You could say the the same about many conflicts. People thought conflict between the USSR and the USA was inevitable but it wasn't.
 
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