The Suicidal “Spirit of 1914”: Self-Destruction, National Sacrifice, and the Spontaneous Mobilization in Germany

Abstract

This article examines the spectrum of suicidal behaviors in Germany at the outbreak of World War I. It argues that the recorded suicides of August 1914 highlight core vectors that eventually led to Imperial Germany's collapse in 1918: the mass shattering of socioemotional ties and moral certainties, engendered by political and military authorities’ decisions to prosecute the war, as well as those they undertook during the conflict. But the spectrum extended beyond these recorded suicides and ironically included the quintessential “war-enthusiastic” figure: the warvolunteer (Kreigsfreiwilliger), who willingly joined the military despite widespread public knowledge of the new war's massive lethality. The self-destructiveness of this volunteerism was then largely concealed by its emotionally resonant moral coding by both state and nonstate actors as “national sacrifice,” in line with the “spirit of 1914.” Right from the beginning, suicide was not the “flipside” of sacrifice, but its largely unspoken, implicit shadow: what sacrifice risked becoming in the absence of an adequate victory.