This was a short book, so this will be a short entry (it is one I found in the bowels of the Pentagon Library). Henig's is a brief summary of scholarly positions on the origins of the war framing a brief survey of events from the rise of Bismarck through 1914. It is intended as a preparation for "advanced exams" though I'm not sure exactly what that means (sounds Harry Potterish to me).
Her focus initially is on the longer term factors already discussed: industrialization, urbanization, German economic growth, social Darwinism, and the like. In Germany, she focuses heavily on the clash between liberalism/socialism/democracy and the Junker aristocracy. Indeed, she spends most of her time looking at Germany, concluding that Bismarck's diplomatic efforts achieved shorter-term stability but at the cost of longer term problems.
She does a decent job of covering the essential events of 1912-1914 in a short amount of space, concluding that the war was not that which the powers had prepared themselves for, mentally or materially. As for war guilt, she does a good job of providing a scholarly survey (a sort of literature review) of the main schools of thought, from 1919 to the present. She definitely agrees with Fritz Fischer, the "father" of German war guilt as the explanation for the war, providing a summary of how he went from academic pariah to widely accepted.
It's a quick little book, and not much new ground, but I rather liked the academic approach to covering the main scholars on the topic.
Next up will probably be a brief WW1 hiatus as I prep for some new grad school classes I am teaching this summer.
