The seeds for the Great War were sown in the 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt that ended the Franco-Prussian War. Aside from the War Guilt clause I don't see the treaty particularly harsh for the war that had occured.
I have to disagree:
Versailles: 226 billion Goldmark at ca. 0.358 g, later reduced to 132 billion
Frankfurt: 5 billion Golfgranc at ca. 0,290 g
The main difference was that France was treated as an - admittedly defeated - great nation, with the last German soldier leaving in 1873. France was already reforming its military in the late 1870´s ...
Germany was not treated as a defeated nation, but as a pariah state. Not allowed to have a real army, not given full control of its remaining territory, the war guilt clause, the Leipzig trials ...
There were also a lot of pointless, deliberate humiliations: Forcing Germany to disarm its civilian population and police, having to buy new short barreled police pistols (long ones being outlawed) abroad because it was no longer allowed to build its own weapons, forced to adopt US-style narcotics policies and reform its patent laws (maybe not in Versailles itself, but happening at the same time IIRC) etc.
These petty humiliations continued after Versailles. A few years later there was an international conference to regulate the radio spectrum ... guess which nation got very (!) few frequencies.
Another often overlooked fact is that the victorious nations blatantly violated the Treaty of Versailles (e.g. the Little Belgian Farce); this somehow undercut its legitimacy ...
Keynes may have been exaggerating when calling Versailles a Carthaginian peace, but not by much IMHO. It was quite unique, not only in its harshness, but also in being so full of hatred and stupidity ... all IMHO, of course.