A leading historian of the outbreak of the first world war has urged admirers of his work among Germany’s political elite to stop drawing comparisons to the conflict in Ukraine, warning any parallels between 1914 and 2022 are flawed.
Cambridge academic Christopher Clark’s account of the complex logic behind each of the main actors’ entry into the global conflict, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, was an international bestseller after its publication in 2013. The book struck a particular chord in Germany, where it provided a counterview to a prevailing narrative of national war guilt and has sold more than 350,000 copies.
