IN THE ABSENCE OF HITLER

37 Days BBC 2 6th -8th March 2014

The BBC has promised to “explain why the First World War happened”. Consequently over three nights last week it gave us this docudrama, a reconstruction of the diplomacy leading up to the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. And if you wanted a presentation of the classic British historical position, that it was all the fault of, well in this presentation some, beastly Germans, this was that case.

Scriptwriters of this sort of serious docudrama seem to find it impossible to resist the temptation to introduce an element of the comic, and ‘37 Days’ proved no exception. In the first episode this took the form of the Austrian ambassador to Germany who came on like a cross between Larry Grayson[1] and Salvador Dali. He being just the most preposterous of a host of excitable foreigners, including a scattering of pantomime villains. In comparison the British, particularly the foreign secretary Edward Grey, came across as calm and measured.
Ian McDiarmid as Edward Grey

The origins of World War one are immensely complex and this is one thing that any such drama was going to struggle. More importantly the elements that came together to create conflict in July 1914 had been developing over the course of many years beforehand and no short drama, even over the course of three nights, could ever really do justice to this complexity. Though to be fair to the programme the closest it came to ‘home’ i.e. the British cabinet, the better it became at highlighting the tensions in the led up to war.
37 Days: From left to right
Moltke, Jagow(Foriegn Minister)
Bethman Hollweg (Chancellor)
However when it came to exploring the motivations and actions of those in Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia it was woeful. It seemed that someone at the BBC had stressed that, in the absence of a Hitler, someone was required to play the role of mad German warmonger. Helmuth Moltke the German army Chief of Staff was elected to serve this purpose. Now, though not an expert, I know something about the German governing elite in 1914, and you do not have to be a fan of the extremely unpleasant Moltke to see that this characterisation was seriously over the top.
The programme presents Moltke as deliberately seeking to ensure that the crisis is drawn out, with the aim of unsettling the Russians and provoking them into becoming the aggressors and declaring war. I do not know where the evidence of a conversation taking place in a Bavarian sauna, along just these lines, came from and would be interested to know. Moltke was certainly not undaunted by the prospect of war and believed that the clock was ticking against Germany military supremacy but this is not the same as evidence that he deliberately sought to create a war.
Moltke in 1914
In the interests of balance the programme provided the good German in the shape of Count Max Lichnowsky, the ambassador to the court of St James and a serious Anglophile, possibly more English than the English and consequently mistrusted in Berlin. Lichnowsky and Grey are portrayed speaking honestly, man to man, in the peace of an English Garden, or watching a game of cricket.

As for warmongers had the programme so chose there were plenty of other candidates in 1914, Conrad the Austrian Chief of Staff, Sukhomlimov the Russian War minister, Poincare the French President and his Russian ambassador Paleologue, to name a few. Though again in fairness Churchill does not emerge well, a little to anxious to re-live the cavalry charge at Omdurman. The French however, with the exception of Gambon the ambassador to London, are wholly absent from the programme.

The Drama, as indeed has history, was kind to Grey, magnificently portrayed by Ian McDiarmid. Though importantly it does portray the moment when the way in which he has been carrying out foreign policy without reference to the cabinet, let alone the House of Commons, is exposed, albeit too late for the peace lobby to prevent the coming catastrophe.

The programme also afforded suitable, possibly even exaggerated, weight to the decision of the German Social Democrats to vote for war credits,[2] a decision that made war inevitable and let Moltke of his already weakened leash. The Kaiser by this stage already a marginalised figure; it was Moltke who was now calling the shots.

The reasons why Germany chose to launch war against Russia and France in August 1914 were to be found as much in Paris and St Petersburg as Berlin. This the programme does not make clear.
Cabinet Members portrayed in 37 Days
Top Row from Left to Right
Top: Burns, Churchill, Lloyd George
Seated:Morley, Asquith,Grey
It does however provide an insightful portrait into the struggles within the British cabinet, split between the Liberal Imperialists, Grey Asquith and Churchill, and the anti militarists headed by Burns and Morley, in the run up to the declaration of war on August 4th.

To argue that the programme does not present a full and rounded picture of events is perhaps unfair, since its first and foremost duty was to entertain. In this it succeeded. Though it was also sold as history and some I suspect swallow the narrative it presented as representing ‘the truth.’ Though for anyone with knowledge of the greater complexities of these events it left a great to deal to desire.





[1] Camp British comedian of the 1970’s.
[2] I do not believe a revolt of the German Social Democrats could have stopped war, though they would have thrown a serious spanner in the works and slowed down the march to war. They would also have augured in the military dictatorship that arrived AT A much later stage I the war. The damage that they would have done though could have proved fatal to the German war effort and might just have inspired their comrades in France and Britain. The real problem of course was Russia and it is this, as indeed the programme makes clear, that made them decide to vote for war. 
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