BOOK REVIEW: ‘Lusitania: The Cultural History of a Catastrophe’

OPINION:

LUSITANIA: THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF A CATASTROPHE

By Willi Jasper

Translated by Stewart Spencer

Yale University Press, $30, 233 pages, illustrated

There have been so many books about the sinking by a German submarine of the British liner Lusitania off the Irish coast in May 1915 that you may well ask if we need another. Only the Titanic, felled by an iceberg three years earlier, spawned more books. But that resounding call to “Remember the Lusitania,” the rallying cry for American involvement in World War I, still reminds us a century later of this particular maritime disaster’s political dimensions.

But as Willi Jasper, emeritus professor of modern German literature, cultural history, and Jewish studies at Germany’s University of Potsdam, the author of this unusually thought-provoking book, informs us, “it is only Anglo-Saxon writers who have dealt with the subject until now.” He goes on:

“There is still the need for a comprehensive assessment of the cultural history of the disaster — especially from a German perspective . What was involved here was more than merely the military increase in the number of combatants and areas of conflict, but, above all, a new ideological, moral, and religious dimension to the battle between ’German culture’ and ’western civilization.’ The fatal belief that the Germans had a cultural mission in life grew increasingly radicalized.”

It is Mr. Jasper’s most significant achievement to make us look at the incident not only through the German eyes back then but to trace its effects in sowing the seeds of the future corrosive Nazi ideology and praxis.

Be reassured, though, that there is not the slightest hint here of that poisonous brand of historical revisionism which seeks to justify barbarism. His account of the incident resounds with sorrow for the victims. “To understand all is to forgive all” is definitely not Mr. Jasper’s motto as he indeed promotes, deepens and intensifies our understanding in all manner of spheres. In any case, there has already, he points out, been too much debate among Anglo-American historians going “round in circles” about everything from conspiracy theories about the Lusitania carrying contraband munitions to the Allied blockade aimed at depriving Germany not merely of materiel but food for its people as moral justification for unrestricted submarine warfare.

Even from our perspective, readers have been familiar with the triumphalist attitude adopted by Germany at what it saw as a great achievement — banquets held, medals struck — so it is not too surprising to read in these pages of Crown Prince Wilhelm cabling his father and namesake (known to history as The Kaiser): “Tremendous delight here at the torpedoing of the Lusitania . The more ruthlessly the U-boat war is waged, the quicker the war will end.”

What will astound readers is the reaction of the writer Thomas Mann, that symbol of German civilization and such an enemy of Nazism and its effects that he not only exiled himself to the United States during World War II but refused to return even afterward to live in his native land:

“Mann sought to defend the frenzy of nationalist celebrations as compared to their enemies’ ’moral pussyfooting’: ’The German people, AS a people have not whined about what the radically merciless enemies have done to them in turn, but in an emergency have not doubted their right to revolutionary measures, either; they have approved of such measures, and more than approved the destruction of that impudent symbol of British mastery of the sea and of a still comfortable civilization, the sinking of the gigantic pleasure-ship, the Lusitania, and they defied the world-resounding hullabaloo that humanitarian hypocrisy raised.”

Mann went on vigorously to defend the demands of his people for “unlimited submarine warfare.” That this apostle of humanism should so write shows just how profound an earthquake was shaking German culture.

After reading Mr. Jasper’s book, you will never think about the loss of the Lusitania quite the same way again. The pity for all those aboard lost in the shockingly quick time between the torpedo strike and its plunge into the ocean will still be with you, as will its role in bringing the United States into World War I on the Allied side. But this is one of those rare works that immensely broadens our perspective and really alters the way we evaluate a historical event, for as its author writes,

“If we share the view of the American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan that the First World War was the ’seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century, we may well conclude that that the sinking of the Lusitania was the ’seminal catastrophe’ of both world wars, marking, as it did, the beginning of a process whereby totalitarian violence lost all of its inhibitions and raged completely out of control.”

Who would have thought that the road to Auschwitz — and so many other horrors — began in those calm May Atlantic waters, off Ireland’s Old Head of Kinsale?

• Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, Calif.