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JACKET BLURB:
War, Mutiny and Revolution in the German Navy
The World War I Diary of Seaman Richard Stumpf
Edited, Translated and with an Introduction by DANIEL HORN
In 1928, when the Reichstag Investigating Committee concluded its nine-year-long hearing to determine the causes of Germany's defeat and collapse during World War I, its official proceedings included only one personal memoir — the complete wartime diary of Richard Stumpf.
That document, here published in English for the first time, created a sensation when it was introduced as testimony at the height of the controversy over the naval mutinies of 1917 and 1918. For although Stumpf had kept the diary only to preserve his memories of the war and to while away long hours of inactivity aboard the battleship Helgoland, the diary effectively refuted the current charge that the sailors had rebelled because of the propaganda and subversive activities of the radical Socialists. It provided almost incontrovertible evidence that the real causes of the mutinies were hunger and starvation among the enlisted men, their mistreatment by the officers, and their intense desire for peace.
The diary was also important because of its viewpoint. Its author was not, like most of the witnesses who had testified before the Reichstag deputies, a former officer or a politician defending military decisions or his own personal interests. Richard Stumpf was a tinsmith who had spent six years in the navy as an ordinary seaman. He thus provided the first opportunity to view the war from the position of the common people, the class that had been alienated and driven to revolt.
But what makes the diary of enduring value is the fact that — in addition to presenting an engrossing narrative of daily events on board the Helgoland and Stumpf's reaction to developments throughout the navy, on the home front, and abroad during the entire course of the war — it is written with such psychological insight that it transcends the personal. It reveals not only how and why Stumpf was transformed from an ardent nationalist and supporter of the Kaiser to a reluctant participant in the 1918 revolution but also how a large part of the German population experienced a similar conversion in response to the social, economic, and political upheaval caused by the war. It is both personal and universal, at the same time a military and political and social history of a period that continues to merit the attention of both scholar and layman.
Daniel Horn, assistant professor of history at Douglass College of Rutgers, The State University, in addition to translating the diary, has supplied an introduction and extensive footnotes that provide the fascinating background of this historical document.
— Dr. Horn is currently at work on a history of the German naval mutinies of World War I. |
