European alliances before the First World War -- The comfortable consensus of the 1930s -- Assessing the role of the other belligerent powers in 1914 -- Nuances in the debate in the wake of the Fischer controversy -- Post-Fischer Consensus and Continuing Debates -- The end of the Fischer decade -- The search for new evidence -- New consensus and new debate: Fischer's War of Illusions -- Support for Fischer's conclusions -- Fritz Fischer and his critics -- Fritz Fischer's new challenges to an old consensus -- The debate after the Second World War: towards a comfortable consensus -- The Origins of the War and the Question of Continuity in German History -- Anti-revisionists -- German territorial losses following the Treaty of Versailles -- European revisionists -- American revisionists -- The German quest for a revision of Versailles -- Revisionists and Anti-Revisionists -- Official document collections -- The German 'innocence campaign' -- The Versailles war guilt allegation -- The beginning of the debate on the war's origins -- The Question of War Guilt during the War and at the Versailles Peace Negotiations -- The July Crisis and the outbreak of war -- Long- and short-term causes of the First World War -- The debate at the end of the twentieth century