Versailles #73: The German Counterproposals
When Diplomacy Fails Podcast
Zack Twamley
4.8 • 773 Ratings
🗓️ 31 May 2019
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
My agora friends and others are going to be in New York for a special conference on 29th June - meet Mike Duncan, Kevin Stroud, David Crowther and more! Search Intelligent Speech Conference now! Use the code WDF to get 5% off your ticket!
After weeks of waiting, Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau finally broke radio silence on 29th May 1919, when he communicated the full extent of Germany's answer to the draft peace treaty from 7th May. And oh boy, was this communique full in its extent. Consisting of more than 100 pages, what came to be known as the German 'counterproposals' was half a document half as large as the peace treaty itself, and it packed quite a punch. Initially, it was necessary to translate the document to discover its ramifications, so it wasn't until 31st May that true consideration of it was possible for the non-German speakers. This delayed matters, and facilitated speculation among the big three over what the Germans could be after. Before long, the document would be unwrapped - the Germans, in a very roundabout way, were saying Nein.
In this episode, we examine a forgotten answer to that forgotten question - that being, what did the Germans have to say about the allied draft peace treaty? So often we are presented with the simple narrative of A-B, where the treaty is presented on 7th May, and approved on 28th June. Here, we are reminded that matters were rarely if ever so simple. The Germans had been waiting on the sidelines, following the peace conference as best as they could. Now utterly depressed and disillusioned by what they had been given, the Germans started writing immediately after 7th May, and came to discover that they had an awful lot to get off their chests. The allies, technically, did not have to listen to their proposals, yet in the atmosphere of emotional post-war morality politics, the big three discovered that not only would they have to listen to these proposals, they would also have to absorb them, consider them, and mount a rely. This was a process which, it was feared, the vaunted unity of the big three up to this point might not survive...
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, history friends. Sack Twomley here, reminding you that on the 29th of June, something very special is happening. |
| 0:07.3 | We are going to petition to make New York New Amsterdam again. |
| 0:11.8 | No, we're not. We're not going to do that. What we're doing instead is something far more interesting and important. |
| 0:15.8 | We're going to have an intelligent speech conference involving all the podcasters you love, including |
| 0:22.5 | Mike Duncan, Kevin Stroud, David Crowther, but not myself because I can't go to America |
| 0:27.3 | at this moment in time. |
| 0:30.0 | The Intelligence Speech Conference is a really exciting venture that the Agora Podcast Network |
| 0:35.3 | is launching, and hopefully if it goes well enough, it could become an annual thing. |
| 0:39.9 | Or maybe throughout the year we could organize more of these conferences, and not just in America, |
| 0:44.6 | but also maybe in Europe, maybe in the UK, all that kind of thing. |
| 0:48.5 | Personally, I'm going to petition for a Dublin meetup just because it suits me the best, |
| 0:52.1 | and maybe some of you guys out there would |
| 0:54.2 | like to visit Dublin and that'll be the perfect opportunity. If that sounds interesting, if you |
| 0:58.9 | would like to petition for a Dublin meeting, why don't you pressure Royfield Brown because he's |
| 1:02.6 | the guy who makes these decisions? But maybe you don't care either way. Maybe you're not |
| 1:06.3 | that interested in going to an intelligent speech conference and maybe personally for you you'd rather interact |
| 1:12.2 | with people online if that's the case the app flick has got you covered we use flick an awful lot these |
| 1:19.1 | days and it can be really handy for those of us that don't like Twitter or Facebook and want to |
| 1:23.7 | stay away from all that nonsense are you sick and tired of the news feed bothering you with all this irrelevant garbage? |
| 1:28.8 | Would you rather just talk to people who are as like-minded as you are about the subject of history? |
| 1:33.6 | Would you like to discuss the latest episode of when diplomacy fails? |
| 1:37.8 | Whatever the heck that one is, because there's so many of them these days. |
... |
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