The essays my students wrote fulfilled or exceeded my expectations in some cases, but there were others that did not go as well as they could have. In part, this was due to the compressed nature of the summer term, but more than anything else, I think building a deliberate approach to teaching the process of synthesis into the course syllabus would have helped. Yes, these students were in an M.A. program and had taken many history courses in their lives, but few had ever had to do such an assignment.

Of course, we spoke about process both in class and in individual meetings, but the current senior research seminar I am teaching, which includes explicit work on process, suggests to me that I should formalize such efforts in graduate courses too, if I am going to require an unfamiliar writing task. That’s not how I learned as a graduate student, but so what?

The differences are stark, but there’s that pesky word “socialism” and the collectivist rhetoric that is so easily conflated or confused with “collectivization,” never mind the existence of economic plans, mass murder, and a host of apparently shared phenomena commonly subsumed under the heading of “totalitarianism.” So why does this question sometimes cause me to push back instead of letting students gradually begin to understand, taking as many intermediary steps as they need to get there?

I would like to blame the heat and my tiredness after a forty-eight-hour power loss at home, and there’s something to that. But this is also one of those topics that can get my goat under better conditions, unless I am prepared for it. I am ready these days when teaching History 100 (“Western Civilization”), but the question took me by surprise in the context of a graduate survey of modern Europe. I am beginning to think it should not have.

Something about this question can elude or confound even well-informed graduate students like those in my current class. Something is getting lost in translation from a past that grows more distant, more remote. The words “nazi” and “socialist” and “communist” are on many lips in these United States, but they’re employed in our own contemporary struggles over ideology, identity, and politics. They help us to create meaning in our own world, but this circumstance complicates the already difficult task of understanding the Germany and Soviet Union that existed in the 1930s and 1940s.

Perhaps it’s time to choose some primary sources for the students to analyze in at least a portion of our next class.

But why does it matter if they use Chicago or whatever else? The historian in me says that they should learn the trade as I learned it. On the other hand, I am dealing with MA students, few of whom plan to go the PhD route, so I should not necessarily treat such classes as mini-apprenticeships for future historians. If most are studying for other reasons, why does enforcing a specific style matter?

First, all educated people need to know how to use the scholarly apparatus (footnotes or endnotes, bibliography) of any text they read, because information crucial to the author’s argument is there: evidence, intellectual debts to other scholars, and so on. I learned some of this by reading a great deal of history, but writing it helped me even more. And to do this work, I needed to follow a specific system that my professors understood, just like I had to write in English and follow a bunch of rules and customs associated with that. With that experience in mind, it seems to me that students can grow intellectually by acquiring more practice in such citation habits, even if they are not in my class as apprentice historians.

Second, my work as an editor has shown how far too many professionals ignore style sheets when they submit their written work for publication. For me, that merely creates a hassle and consumes time, but I can imagine much worse consequences in other writing contexts. Submit a job or grant application without following the directions? Forget it. Get an article through peer review that ignores the basic conventions of the discipline? Never. And so many other writing tasks—whether internal to a profession or organization or for publication the wider public—require one to follow specific guidelines and conventions. Indeed, it seems to me that we educated professionals should be able to learn and adapt to the specific style and formatting requirements of whatever writing task comes our way, even if that requires decoding seemingly arcane directions. From this point of view, too, mandating specific citation styles for graduate students can make sense.

I’m sure there are other good reasons, but it’s past midnight. Maybe readers have some ideas, whether for or against?

Less interesting were the panels, which are actually the main event of conferences. The problem was not the quality of scholarship but rather the fact that I have a low tolerance for being read to. I try to be patient and grown-up and stuff, but my mind starts to wander in this format. I wish that presenters would let go of the notion that they need to fill their 15 or 20 minutes with as much text as possible and instead just focus on pitching their main points and the central evidence that they are using to make them.

When I complained about this on Twitter and Facebook, I heard other scholars feeling the same way. We should not be reading our papers, but most of us do. One colleague on Facebook also shared a link to an interesting paper on “How to Give an Academic Talk” (by Paul N. Edwards). The trick, I think, is to adopt as much of the advice in this paper as one can without feeling so intimidated that one resorts to the crutch of reading to an audience. The result won’t be perfect, but it will be far better for listeners than the standard alternative.

As boring as the reading format is, though, the panels in this conference were particularly well-filled—standing room only in the couple I visited (one with senior historians and one with graduate students, both with papers read to the audience), which I have not seen at any AHA or BHC conferences (where papers, unfortunately, are also read).

A few other impressions: the conference seemed to include both people who call themselves military historians and those who just happen to be doing a related topic. It also included members of the military itself, as well as professors who teach the military at the War College and related institutions. The mix reinforced my opinion that military history and business history share analogous positions within the field of academic history and relative to the occupational fields that they study.

On the other hand, whereas we had the teachers of our future generals at the conference in Crystal City and the teachers of future CEOs at the conference in Philly, I saw practitioners (officers) in Crystal City but no practitioners (business leaders) in Philly. This might have been due to the proximity of the conference to the Pentagon and other military installations in the area, but I wonder if this one difference says anything about different attitudes towards history in the military and business. Few doubt the importance of history for cultivating critical thinking in our military officers, especially not the officers themselves, but I wonder how passionate about history business executives are. It would be interesting to find out.

This was both an enjoyable and a frustrating read, but the frustrating part had more to do with my own preferences. Muth (who I know and value) takes West Point in this period to task for some pretty lousy education (Fort Leavenworth, too) and awful hazing. I have no problem with such well-sourced assertions, but I can’t help but think there might have been a deeper cultural logic to these things that Muth does not seek to uncover, because it apparently did not relate to military effectiveness, which is his topic, not, for example, the deeper character of leadership, education, and masculinity in the United States more generally.

I don’t have the expertise to critique Muth’s interpretation of officer education in this period, and I’m convinced he knows what he is talking about. But my guard goes up when I read works that are not only critical, but also assume an air of being smarter than their human subjects. It seems to me that we historians need to be more modest than that. Still, this is a question of personal style, and Muth is by no means alone in following such an approach, especially in military history, which straddles a line between historiographical traditions, sometimes trying to understand the past on its own terms (as I was trained to do in a program and profession in which, unfortunately, “military history” can even be a dirty word), but also trying to judge what worked and didn’t work, a worthy question that interests Muth and many other military historians, to say nothing of policy makers, military professionals, and the lay public.²

Let me provide an example from the Imperial German period. In his conclusion Muth writes,

The German Great General Staff saw a steady steep decline in performance after its founder and mentor, Moltke the Elder, retired. His successors tried in vain to emulate the habits and outward appearance of the great old man but failed miserably in their basic tasks—to provide leadership, strategic planning skills and sound advice for the head of state—until the whole organization collapsed in the apocalyptic defeat of a two-front war, which every sane staff officer would have thought to prevent with all its might (181-82).

I interpret the General Staff’s professionalism and competence differently,³ but Muth’s take is certainly consistent with a great deal of historiography. Indeed, his comment points to the need for me to participate in this debate with more scholarship of my own. The part that bothers me, though, is the last dependent clause in the above quote. Yes, the project that Germany’s leadership embarked on in 1914 seems insane from our own vantage point. It even seems insane based on our interpretation of what was known back then. But denying the rationality of German war planning and the professionalism of its planners amounts to a refusal to take them seriously and enter their thought world in order to truly understand what it was they thought they were doing in 1914.

But this is not the focus of the book. Instead, the Imperial period offers but a foil against which Muth measures German military professionalism in the interwar period, and he uses the latter as a foil for criticizing U.S. military education at the time. Furthermore, Muth is not so much interested in war planning, grand strategy, and so on, as he is in how officers led—or didn’t lead—on the battlefield. This is a crucial question, and his observations on the differences between American and German approaches to military leadership at the beginning of World War II offer plenty of food for thought, which I hope specialists of this period will soon discuss.

One last note: Muth provides the place of education and year of graduation with the first mention of each U.S. officer he names, for example, “General George Smith Patton, USMA 1909″ (29). He offers this highly suggestive information to provide readers with a sense of the personal networks that officers developed in their formative years. This makes me wish for further, even prosopographical studies of the U.S. officer corps that employ such data, just as we need more of it in the German case, if with other reference points, such as the first regiment of a German officer, although I have also noticed some tantalizing overlap in the years that Wilhelm Groener and other officers attended the War Academy in Wilhelmine Germany.

Notes

¹ Jörg Muth, Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901–1940, and the Consequences for World War II (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2011).

²For a useful discussion of the tensions inherent in writing military history because of the multiple constituencies it serves, see Stephen Morillo with Michael Pavokovic, What is Military History? (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006).

³Mark R. Stoneman, “Bürgerliche und adlige Krieger: Zum Verhältnis zwischen sozialer Herkunft und Berufskultur im wilhelminischen Offizierkorps,” in Adel und Bürgertum in Deutschland II: Entwicklungslinien und Wendepunkte im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Heinz Reif (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 25–63; Stoneman, “Wilhelm Groener, Officering, and the Schlieffen Plan” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2006).

If I look at the Schlieffen Plan debate carried out mainly in the pages of War in History, it is clear that Groener’s perspective has something to offer that audience, because the man who initiated the debate, Zuber, accuses him of having “invented” the Schlieffen Plan. That is reason enough to bring up the issue, at least for those interested in the military planning that helped cause and shape what George F. Kennan once called “the great seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century.

When I shift my perspective to understanding the German military’s role in the outbreak of World War One, I find the more nuanced perspective of German military thinking worthwhile for its own sake, but the basic story line of an inflexible plan that offered no diplomatic wiggle room and helped to ensure that Germany played the role of aggressor remains the same. So why should anyone but a specialist in military history care? Why should it matter to a general historian of modern German or European history?

The answer to this question seems to relate to our image of German history and World War I more generally. Do we blame that war on elites wedded to outdated notions about war? Do we turn them into alien “Others” who are impossible to understand in anything but stereotyped terms along the lines that we see for Britain in the wonderful comedy series, Black Adder Goes Forth (but not as well-meaning, if callous fools, but instead with nefarious intentions)?

Or do we open our eyes to a less comfortable thought? What if World War I was not an aberration, but rather part and parcel of European (and Western) modernity? And what if the officers who developed and later justified Germany’s war plans were not defenders of a premodern monarchical system nor simply protecting their own reputations after Germany’s defeat, but instead were modern military professionals whose attitudes and efforts might have relevance for our understanding of modern militaries far beyond 1914?

The latter point of view could make the question of Groener’s Schlieffen Plan relevant for modern militaries and, therefore, interesting for a readership like the Journal of Strategic Studies has. But does this story only have something to tell scholars of military history and strategic studies? What about historians of Imperial Germany? I think an answer could relate to the modernity of the officer corps, the Great General Staff, and the war itself. It might also help us to understand a story whose chronological boundaries transcend political regimes, insofar as this one reaches from Wilhelmine Germany until close to the end of the Weimar Republic, if not further.

As I think along these lines, however, I see a journal article grow into something too big for the format. I would like to keep thinking about why Groener’s Schlieffen Plan might matter to general historians of Germany, but maybe I first need to concentrate on a narrower, more specialized audience. I have to write a lot more before I can know.