Lunch with the Kaiser

Why Europe went to war in 1914

By: Michael Bennett

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

'Lunch with the Kaiser' provides remarkable clarity on the last days of July 1914 when war, at least between Germany and Russia, could still have been averted. What emerges is a narrative of events driven by the beliefs of a handful of decision makers in Berlin and St Petersburg, rather than any objective strategic assessment, as their respective allies in Vienna and Paris, pushed and pulled them ever closer to war.

In London, a government nominally free of alliances and removed from the pressure for immediate mobilsation by the power of the Royal Navy, nevertheless rushed to war with what the British historian AJP Taylor termed 'indecent haste'. The political justification presented to the House of Commons, the strategic imperative of preventing a German hegemony in Europe, concealed the need to intervene to continue the appeasement of Russia due to Foreign Office policy miscalculations over Britain's imperial interests in Asia.

A series of fictional interviews, conducted with Kaiser Wilhelm II in October 1938 as he lived out his old age in exile, sets out the chronology of events revealing how Austrian recklessness, German miscalculation, Russian precipitation and French ambition, combined with British policy errors, led Europe to war. The book does not absolved Wilhelm from his share of responsibilty for the events of 1914 but places it in the context of decisions made by others who history has allowed to escape into undeserved obscurity.