Prague Papers on the History of International Relations (Dec 2018)
Weltmächte und Weltrevolution: Das Jahr 1917 als globale Zäsur in der Historiographie der Zwischenkriegszeit || World Powers and World Revolution: The Year 1917 as a Global Caesura in the Historiography of the Inter-War Period
Abstract
The year 1917 ist still widely accepted as a caesura of global history, according to the emerging of the USA as a world power and to the „world revolution“, arising from Russia as a threat to almost all societies in europe and the western world. Normally, the german historian Hans Rothfels ist named to be the first having defined this caesura at the beginning of the 1950s. But has he really been the first to do so, and was the ending of the Second World War a condition sine qua non for those thoughts? The article shows, that several inter-war historians dealt with the question of the meaning of „1917“ for global history, that some of them already drew conclusions very near to Rothfels’s considerations and that actually one of them — Paul Schmitthenner — forestalled his deliberations about 20 years before him.
