ABSTRACT
A little more than a month passed between the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the frantic exchange of war declarations which followed one another between July 31 and the first days of August 1914.1 Only on a few issues does historiography agree as much as it does in assessing the outbreak of World War I. The first global war marks the central break in the periodization of the twentieth century,2 as the event that signaled the bursting of modernity’s “dark side”3 onto the stage of European history.4 In pages of great evocative power, Stefan Zweig described the atmosphere that spread in Vienna, as happened in most large urban centers in Europe, during the period of general mobilization in the unforgettable summer of 1914:
As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peacetime, that they belonged together. A city of two million, a country of nearly fifty million, in that hour felt that they were participating in world history, in a moment which would never recur, and that each one was called upon to cast its infinitesimal self into the glowing, there to be purified of all selfishness. All differences of class, rank, and language were flooded over at that moment by the rushing feeling of fraternity. Strangers spoke to one another in the streets, people who had avoided each other for years shook hands, everywhere you could see excited spirits. Every individual experienced an exaltation of his ego, he was no longer the isolated person of former times, he was part of the people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person, had been given meaning. . . . [They all acknowledged] the unknown power which had lifted them out of their everyday existence . . . But it is possible that a deeper, more secret power was at work in this frenzy. So deeply, so quickly did the tide break over humanity that, foaming over the surface, it churned up the depths, the subconscious primitive instincts of the human animal-that which Freud so meaningfully calls “the revulsion from culture,” the desire to break out of the conventional bourgeois world of codes and statutes, and to permit the primitive instincts of the blood to rage at will. It is also possible that these
powers of darkness had their share in the wild frenzy into which everything was thrown-self-sacrifice and alcohol, the spirit of adventure and the spirit of pure faith, the old magic of flags and patriotic slogans, that mysterious frenzy of the millions which can hardly be described in words, but which, for the moment, gave a wild and almost rapturous impetus to the greatest crime of our time.5
