You are forgiven :)
As to Venner lumping WW1 and WW2, I find it arbitrary and strained. The Great War was decisively ended — with the world in a shambles — when Germany surrendered, else there would have been no excessively punitive reparations imposed by the clear victors.
One could as well — in fact, better — call them Bismarck’s Wars, though he died before either of them, and the Kaiser was certainly hostile to him. Bismarck was the single most responsible individual for the 20th century German nation. For all his differences with Wilhelm II, German militarism was born in Bismarck’s head; for all his denunciation of socialism, he built the first modern welfare state.
Nevertheless, history needs to keep some things simple — like when a war begins and ends. I don’t begrudge any foggy and pretentious academic, such as Venner, his perspective on the causes and the historic currents; life’s complicated, we get that; but he should not presume to rearrange the furniture.
Incidentally, I would highly recommend a book titled “The Mind of Germany,” by Hans Kohn. It explores the philosophical underpinnings of modern Germany, and how they came to the disaster of World War II.
I agree with Venner on the two wars.
The capitulation of 1918 ended the Western front conflict only, and only for the Western powers. Germany continued operations in the East on the vast territories it received as a gift from Lenin and Trotsky. It is these territories that Hitler and Stalin re-partitioned in 1939.
For Russia, the Great War transformed itself into the Civil War, which metastasized many times. For the White Movement, Germany attacking Russia was clearly a continuation of the Civil war for them; roughly two million Russians volunteered for the Wermacht, not out of particular love for Germany but because it was giving them a chance to re-fight the Civil War.
For Germany, the Second World War was a chance to defeat the Versailles system that they viewed, for a good reason, as grossly unjust. So Germany, far from being “decisively” beaten, conceived WWII as a continuation of the Great War also.
The endless wars of aggression the Soviet Union fought with all its neighbors was, too, a consequence of the breakup of the Russian Empire, that occurred in the course of the Great War.
Hitler wouldn’t have succeeded so spectacularly in continental Europe in the 30’s were it not for the breakup of the Austrian-Hungarian empire and the emerging past 1918 political vacuum in south-central Europe.
The promise of world-wide Communist government sounded by the Communist International was not empty sloganeering in France, Britain and the US at the time. It is the legitimate and rational fear of worldwide communism — not head-in-the-sand appeasement — that drove the policies of France and Britain vis-a-vis Germany till 1939. Had there been no Russian Revolutions in 1917, — a part and parcel of the Great War, — there would be no meteoric rise of the Third Reich and no WWII.
The two wars are inseparable. The outcomes of the first created the second.