Imperial Challenge: Ambassador Count Bernstorff and German-American Relations, 1908-1917 (Supplementary Volumes to the Papers of Woodrow Wilson)

This book is a detailed study of the troubled diplomatic relations between the United States and Germany prior to their break in 1917. Reinhard Doerries focuses on the actions of Johann Heinrich Count von Bernstorff, the Imperial Ambassador in Washington. Bernstorff, a seasoned diplomat, came to Washington in December 1908, during a placid and superficially cordial period in German-American relations. However, the outbreak of the First World War, and particularly the German government's decision in early 1915 to launch an unrestricted submarine campaign against merchant shipping, thrust Bernstorff into the center of a diplomatic firestorm that culminated in an American declaration of war against the German Empire in April 1917.

A liberal at heart, and fully at home in Anglo-American politics and society, Bernstorff was a strange representative of the hard-line military leadership and conservative landed gentry steering Germany into the ultimate abyss. In an effort to enable Woodrow Wilson to remain neutral and eventually offer his services as a mediator between the warring European nations, the desperate envoy did everything in his power -- and indeed overstepped his instructions -- to pacify America in the face of such blunders as the torpedoing of the Lusitania.

But the Ambassador's conciliatory recommendations fell on deaf ears in Berlin, where ignorance of the realities of international relations and an overestimation of German power reigned supreme. Berlin reacted to Count Bernstorff's advice not by asking Wilson to mediate the conflict but by inviting Mexico to join Germany in declaring war on the United States.

Imperial Challenge was first published in German under the title Washington-Berlin, 1908/1917, in 1975, throwing new light on the still-controversial topic of German-American relations prior to 1917 by utilizing new documentary evidence that had become available after World War II. For this American edition, Doerries has undertaken new research, especially in American sources, and he has greatly expanded sections on German espionage, sabotage, and propaganda in the United States from 1914 to 1917. The resulting English-language version of the book is thus the most definitive treatment of German-American diplomatic relations during the critical period prior to U.S. entry into World War I.