> Maybe a bit off-topic, I wholeheartedly agree with your teacher [...] it's very common for there to be a single trigger that starts the whole thing. Everybod

> Maybe a bit off-topic, I wholeheartedly agree with your teacher [...] it's very common for there to be a single trigger that starts the whole thing. Everybody "knows" that the first world war started with the assasination of the archduke Ferdinand, but the causes were many Yes! That is exactly what he tried to make us understand! I loved that teacher. To him, learning history was not about memorizing dates and places[1], but understanding causal relationships. Also that us Germans had kind of lost our historical memory after World War II. Also, he taught me the important lesson that two people can have diametrically opposing opinions (I was very left-wing at the time, he was "conservative"[2]) and still respect each other as human beings and acknowledge that the fact I disagreed with him on some important issues did not make either one of us an idiot or a bad person. When I look at the people often "debate" on the Internet, I think lesson might be more important than anything else he taught me. [1] Those are important, too, obviously. But knowing the exact date World War I broke out was not nearly as important to him as understanding why it broke out, and why it would have broken out sooner or later, even if Archduke Ferdinand hat not been killed. [2] Note that "conservative" in Germany does not mean the same thing as in the USA. My teacher was, for example, vehemently anti-Marxist, but he also pointed out to us that Marx's analysis of capitalism and its inherent contradictions was spot-on in many ways and still very relevant today.