ABSTRACT
Whatever the significance of earlier intellectual antecedents, it is widely recognized that the contingent occurrence of the First World War created the conditions of possibility for the later totalitarian regimes, with all their troubling outcomes.1 The novel political departures in Russia, Italy, and Germany grew directly from the war, to some degree playing off each other as they did so. And the perceptions and priorities that fueled them stemmed in important measure from the new experiences that the war proved to entail as a result of its unforeseen length and difficulty. Thus, for example, Victor Chernin’s comment that “the moral nature of the Bolshevik Revolution was inherited from the war in which it was born.”2 In the same vein, Ian Kershaw insisted that “the First World War made Hitler possible”; what happened under Hitler was not presaged by imperial Germany but by the experience of the war and its aftermath.3
