Am I the only one who can get years behind on relevant readings? Silly me let teaching and editing get in the way of basic readings. But maybe I’m not the only one who gets behind. As much as I appreciate discussions about how digital scholarship could speed up the dissemination of research results, sometimes I’m quite glad these results come out slowly through journals, and that these journals are available online through the library for me to look at as time permits. I’m trying to get caught back up in a more systematic way, so that I can’t use earning money as an excuse for missing new scholarship on certain topics. Still, we are talking about dead people who aren’t going anywhere, right? And the pace of historical research is slow anyway. Besides, how often are the results of historical research advanced in real time? It’s not like cable news channels and NPR are standing in line to review our output. Even blogging, tweeting, facebooking scholars have their own research projects to do, so that they can’t pay attention to every new development of their colleagues at the moment it occurs.
The Schlieffen Plan debate has been dragging on for over a decade, so maybe I shouldn’t feel too bad that I have only now read Gerhard Gross’s excellent intervention (available in both German and English), in which he explains the whereabouts and wherefores of Schlieffen sources better than anyone I have seen (at least for those deeply immersed in the problem), not to mention addresses Zuber on his own chosen operational turf—albeit with politics as well as incredibly thorough archival work and careful, nuanced analysis. Now I need to make time to explore the differences between his Schlieffen and the one I see Zuber’s other historiographical opponents offering, especially regarding the question of “preventive war” in 1905. But that will have to wait. Right now, I’m more interested in Schlieffen’s image of war, what he imparted to the General Staff, and how. And I’m interested in matching Groener’s timeline against this, because what I’m really trying to get at is the evolution of Wilhelm Groener’s Schlieffen Plan, that is, how he understood and wrote about Schlieffen over the years.
By the way, how does “Wilhelm Groener’s Schlieffen Plan” sound for an article title? That’s what I’ve decided I’ll write first.