Mobilization involves moving people and things to attain a particular objective. It has a clearly defined meaning with regard to the military: putting the armed forces into a position and a state of readiness to fight a war effectively. This entails calling up recruits and reserves, moving armaments and other supplies, and organizing transport as required to carry out military action. Such mobilization, and its success or failure, is relatively straightforward to measure: in the numbers of men prepared by the military for combat and in the amounts of munitions and so forth moved so that they may be used in war.

There is no comparably unambiguous measure for the mobilization of a society for war, and, consequently, the success or failure of such a mobilization is more difficult to determine. Of course, in one sense the success or failure of mobilization, whether of the military or of society, appears obvious: Insofar as Germany lost World War I, the mobilization of German society between 1914 and 1918 can be judged a failure. However, to leave it at that is not particularly helpful. In order adequately to assess German attempts to mobilize society during World War I, some fundamental and necessarily difficult questions need to be posed: What was the extent of the mobilization of German society? Given the constraints, could that mobilization have been more successful in helping Germany to fight the war? Finally, what were the consequences of wartime mobilization for the subsequent catastrophic course of German politics? These form the underlying themes to be addressed, in a fairly schematic and necessarily incomplete manner, in this chapter.