Germany and the Next War

by Friedrich von Bernhardi, Allen H. Powles (Translator)

Germany's General von Bernhardi explains (in 1911), from the German viewpoint, the inevitability of war between Germany and England. He discusses "the goals to be aimed at, the difficulties to be surmounted, and the sacrifices to be made" resulting in the political crises in Germany. To counter Bernhardi's "facts", Arthur Conan Doyle undertook England's answer in his Great Britain and the Next War.

Genres: History, World War I, War, Germany, Nonfiction, 20th Century

292 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1912

About the author

Prussian general and military historian. He was a best-selling author prior to World War I.

A militarist, he is perhaps best known for his bellicose book Deutschland und der Nächste Krieg (Germany and the Next War), printed in 1911.

He advocated a policy of ruthless aggression and of complete disregard of treaties and regarded war as a "divine business".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedri...

Reviews

[Alex]

We are accustomed to regard war as a curse and refuse to recognize it as the greatest factor in the furtherance of culture and power... 

There are two sections to this book. One of them is about political philosophy and the other is a manual of contemporary military strategy and preparation. He lost my focus on the latter chapters, dated as they were, but the former I found fascinating and abhorrent at the same time.

Let's keep in mind the cliché about the paving the paths leading to Hell. Bernadhi's collectivist and paternalistic views of the state are heterodox at worst. He speaks of the state as not existing for the sake of protecting abstract rights but to take a positive effort in improving its citizens. He emphasizes the importance of education and refers to intellectual hygiene. Yet he also takes the Hegelian view that the state is itself the highest conception in the wider community of man, but its a nationalist view.

He views a world state as absurd though I was never able to figure out whether he means this from a practical or a theoretical point of view. International bodies such as the Hague are mocked as idealistic and toothless, which needless to say are legitimate criticisms. the state is so far exalted to the point of being revolting. He accepts the Machiavellian dictum that the state is allowed to carry out actions that would be considered immoral for the individual, including wars of conquest. If the state is man's highest conception, then to what should it sacrifice its interests to. Everything must be done in reference to its aggrandizement and self preservation. The candid admission that wars of conquest are allowed is very bold and very rare as Bernardhi notes that even Bismarck disguised his wars of conquest as reluctant necessities.

Frederick the Great's acquisition of Silesia, which let's remember had a legal pretext of course, is brought up as an example of a situation where war brought about more benefits than legal maneuvers: international prestige, strengthened sovereignty, projection of power, and the example of a heroic and successful leader to imitate, but it is not mentioned that the Silesian Wars were not endless successes, and that they brought Frederick to the brink of suicide, saved by the timely death of Russian Empress Elizabeth, perhaps such gambles could inspire a future leader with a little less luck to bring the nation to destruction in a failed war of conquest, but one never knows.

Bernardhi plans for the next war, and while this was the most tedious part of the book there were some interesting moments. An invasion of Belgium is alluded to, with its neutrality discarded, but not as a scrap of paper, but as perhaps entirely illegitimate. How can Belgium be neutral with it's enormous colonial holdings in Africa. Doesn't neutrality imply renouncing involvement in world affairs? He actually says this.

This book is so thoroughly German. I can't remember a single non German thinker cited here.

Two great movements were born from the German intellectual life, on which, henceforth, all the intellectual and moral progress of man must rest: the Reformation and the critical [Idealist] philosophy. The Reformation, which broke the intellectual yoke, imposed by the Church, which checked all free progress; and the Critique of Pure Reason, which put a stop to the caprice of philosophic speculation by defining for the human mind the limitations of its capacity for knowledge.

I'm going to disagree with both of these, both were a triumph for subjectivism however, and the former for nationalism. It is war that Berardhi regards as the fountain of German and thus human progress, but how many of Germany's achievements in science, industry, art, philosophy, or literature, were really due to the conquests of Frederick the Great and Bismarck? How many brilliant minds have also been lost in the battlefields?

I'm not a pacifist, and a triumphant war waged for a just cause may very well catapult a nation on to greater things, but it is certainly a situation that is forced upon a nation. Viewing conquest as a duty, world domination as a goal, and constantly seeking out wars will thoroughly destroy a nation as much as any period of decadence. The best repudiation of this book is history itself. Less than a lifetime after this book was published, where is Prussia? Where is Hohenzollern Germany?

wer das Schwert nimmt, der soll durchs Schwert umkommen

[noblethumos]

Published in 1912, Germany and the Next War remains one of the most controversial texts of pre–First World War political and military thought. Written by the German cavalry general and strategist Friedrich von Bernhardi, the work sought to justify Germany’s geopolitical ambitions through a synthesis of militarism, nationalism, Social Darwinism, and strategic realism. Appearing during a period of mounting European tensions, the book was widely interpreted—especially in Britain and France—as evidence of German expansionist intentions and a harbinger of the coming conflict. More than a military treatise, Germany and the Next War serves as an ideological manifesto for power politics in the age of high imperialism. While its predictive value and strategic insight are uneven, the text remains historically significant for illuminating the intellectual climate of Wilhelmine Germany and the assumptions underpinning European great-power rivalry.


Bernhardi’s central thesis is that war is not merely inevitable but desirable. Rejecting liberal and pacifist notions of perpetual peace, he argues that armed conflict is an essential instrument of national vitality and historical progress. Influenced by evolutionary concepts then circulating widely in European political thought, Bernhardi portrays international politics as an arena of competition in which nations survive through struggle. According to his reasoning, a strong state has not only the right but the duty to expand its influence if it seeks to preserve its vitality. Germany, he contends, faces strategic encirclement and demographic pressures that necessitate assertive foreign policy and military preparedness.


The book’s ideological foundation rests heavily on a militarized conception of statecraft. Bernhardi presents war as morally regenerative, capable of strengthening national cohesion and preserving civic virtue against the perceived decadence of commercial modernity. In this respect, the work echoes broader intellectual currents of the late nineteenth century, including nationalist romanticism and critiques of liberal cosmopolitanism. Peace, in Bernhardi’s formulation, threatens stagnation and moral decline; war restores energy and hierarchy. Such arguments reflected anxieties among conservative elites in imperial Germany, who feared domestic fragmentation, socialism, and geopolitical marginalization.


Strategically, Bernhardi advocates for Germany to secure continental dominance before rival powers could consolidate against it. He emphasizes military readiness, offensive planning, and the necessity of pre-emptive action under certain conditions. His geopolitical vision reflects concerns over Germany’s position between France and Russia, as well as competition with Britain for global influence. Bernhardi regards colonial acquisition and naval strength as components of Germany’s rightful status as a world power, though he places greater emphasis on continental military supremacy than maritime competition.


One of the most debated aspects of Germany and the Next War concerns its relationship to actual German foreign policy before 1914. Historians remain divided on whether the work should be understood as representative of mainstream German strategic thinking or as an extreme expression of nationalist militarism. Some scholars argue that the text exaggerated tendencies already present in German political culture, while others caution against treating it as an official statement of state intentions. Bernhardi himself was neither a policymaker nor an architect of imperial strategy, yet the popularity of his ideas among segments of the German military and educated public reveals the resonance of militaristic nationalism in the years preceding the Great War.


The book’s strengths lie primarily in its capacity to reveal the intellectual assumptions of its era. Bernhardi writes with confidence and systematic argumentation, combining military expertise with sweeping reflections on history and politics. His critique of sentimental pacifism anticipated certain realist arguments about the persistence of power competition in international relations. Indeed, aspects of his geopolitical realism foreshadow later strategic thinkers who emphasized national interest over moral universalism.


Nevertheless, the text suffers from significant analytical and ethical shortcomings. Bernhardi’s embrace of Social Darwinist reasoning leads him to naturalize violence and subordinate moral considerations to national power. His treatment of war as inherently ennobling ignores the destructive realities of industrial conflict that would soon become evident during the First World War. In hindsight, his confidence in the civilizational benefits of military struggle appears tragically naïve. The catastrophic losses of 1914–1918 undermined many of the assumptions about glory, vitality, and national regeneration that structured his worldview.


Furthermore, Bernhardi frequently overstates Germany’s strategic predicament and underestimates the destabilizing consequences of aggressive diplomacy. His deterministic language often leaves little room for political contingency or diplomatic compromise, creating a framework in which conflict appears unavoidable. Such reasoning exemplifies the security dilemmas that contributed to escalating tensions among European powers prior to the outbreak of war.


From a contemporary scholarly perspective, Germany and the Next War is best approached as a historical document rather than a reliable guide to strategy or political ethics. It offers valuable insight into the mentality of European militarism and the ideological currents that shaped elite discourse before 1914. Political historians, military scholars, and students of international relations will find the book useful for understanding how nationalism, strategic anxiety, and imperial competition interacted during the final years of the European balance-of-power system.


Friedrich von Bernhardi’s Germany and the Next War occupies an important place in the historiography of pre-war Europe. Though flawed by determinism, militaristic idealization, and questionable ethical premises, the work remains a revealing artifact of the intellectual atmosphere preceding the First World War. Its historical significance lies less in the accuracy of its predictions than in its exposure of the ideological assumptions that made continental catastrophe conceivable. As such, the book endures as an unsettling reminder of how theories of national necessity and civilizational struggle can transform political ambition into a justification for war.

GPT

[Bill Spurlin]

This work is most famous for its apotheosis of war: "War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow, which excludes every advancement of the race, and therefore all real civilization.", but polemic aside I found it most useful as an indication of how the German General Staff viewed the modernization of the armed forces in the run-up to the first World War, and how wrong Bernhardi was in, e. g., his detailed recommendations for the expansion and improvement of the cavalry arm. But who can predict the future? Certainly not I, even when that future is as close as WW1 was to Bernhardi. But as the post WW2 world order dissolves around us I have a dreadful feeling that we have not learned from the past, and are thus doomed to repeat it.

[ian witham]

Essential reading.

General Friedrich von Bernhardi was a Prussian cavalry officer in the Franco-Prussian War who wrote about the next war between France and Germany. His book is little read these days but it is impossible to understand the Great War without reading it. After the Franco-Prussian War, Germany demanded reparations from France and he was upset that the French paid them too quickly. He wanted another war, and when France was defeated it would be forced to pay the cost of the war. The war lasted longer than anyone predicted, the costs were higher, and Germany lost.

Modern historians have not read Germany And The Next War. They write how the excessive reparations demanded by France led to the next war, and they are right, but many of those politicians had read this book. They knew that General von Bernhardi had not merely advocated making France pay for the war but paying more than what the War had cost Germany to prevent them from fighting another. Gemany invaded France and Belgium. The War was fought on the soil of France and Belgium. From 1914-1918, no French or Belgian soldiers entered Germany except as a prisoner. French and Belgian cities, churches, universities, and farms were destroyed. French and Belgian men were deported to work in Germany.

I do not know how the Second World War could have been prevented but thanks to von Bernhardi, I understand why steep reparations were demanded. If I had been at Verseilles, I would have demanded those operations. If I had been in the German or Austrian delegations, I would not have been able to do anything except say, "Let's not do that again." But they did it again.

[Haavard Fonneland Pettersen]

von Bernhardi's views are unbelievably, fascinatingly politically incorrect today. He basically argues that war is good and peace is unhealthy, because war is a "biological necessity" - the law of struggle for existence applies to humans as much as other organisms, and to countries as well as individuals. Like a lot of people in this period, he had overdosed on Darwin. He further argues that it is Germany's right, nay, duty, to wage war to further her interests, and that since Germany is trapped in these "unnatural" borders, it must get colonies to have somewhere to put her excess population. What is not willingly given, must be taken by force. He also believes that Germany's is the highest civilization on earth.

While I completely disagree with 99 pc of what he writes, it is quite refreshing to read something so nakedly, shamelessly cynical and, I suppose, honest. It was published in 1912, and what followed - the First World War and the rise of Nazism - makes total sense when you have read it. If this was a widespread attitude in his day, the theory that the Germans somehow wanted the first world war to happen and were bent on world conquest even then, actually seems plausible.

On the other hand, there was something about this timeperiod, too. It had much more enthusiasm for war than anyone since 1914. It was, after all, a world which hadn't witnessed the horrors of WWI and WWII (and various later conflicts), but associated war thing the quick, limited campaigns of Bismarck's Germany or the Crimean war, or, at worst, the US Civil War.

[Thomas Rausch]

Writing just before the First World War, the author argues that a war with the Triple Entente is inevitable. He also imagines Germany triumphant and ascending from a regional power to a great world power. Alas, the war came, and the outcome was far different from what he imagined.