Clark, C. Die Schlafwandler

How Europe went into the First World War. For a long time it was considered a foregone conclusion that the German Empire bore the main responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War because of its dreams of great power. In his groundbreaking new work, renowned historian and best-selling author Christopher Clark (Prussia) comes to a different assessment. Clark meticulously describes the interests and motivations of the most important political actors in the European metropolises and paints a picture of a complex world in which mutual mistrust, misjudgements, arrogance, expansionist plans and nationalist aspirations led to a situation in which a spark was enough to trigger the war, the devastating consequences of which hardly anyone was able to estimate. It is already clear that "The Sleepwalkers" will be one of the most important new publications on the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War.

Christopher Clark, born in 1960, is Professor of Modern European History at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. His research focuses on the history of Prussia. He is the author of a biography of Wilhelm II, the last German emperor. For his book "Prussia" he received the prestigious Wolfson Prize in 2007 and in 2010 he was the first non-German-speaking historian to receive the Prize of the Historical College. His previous books published by Pantheon are "Prussia" (2008) and "Wilhelm II" (2009).