patriotic because of Fischer. Variety of outcomes According to Richard J. Evans, the outcome of the Fischer Controversy and of Ritter's role in it "only succeeded in giving Fischer's massive, scholarly and extremely detailed book a national prominence it would probably not otherwise have achieved". Evans notes that after his death, Ritter was usually cast as the "villain of this affair, as Fischer's views, at least in their more moderate forms, gained widespread acceptance among a younger generation of historians". A history book on Imperial Germany by Hans-Ulrich Wehler was published in 1973 and held that as a result of Fischer's theories, "two opposing schools of thought" formed. The first agreed with Fischer. The second admitted that Fischer showed that much political talk in high circles that sounds quite warlike, but it held that Fischer failed to find the actual political decisions and military actions that he claimed. Professor Wolfgang Mommsen (1930-2004) was a German historian of Britain and Germany on the 19th and the 20th centuries. His 1990 work credited Fischer's work in part for opening up the discussion. However, Mommsen characterised Fischer's "central notion of Germany's will to power" from 1911 to 1915 as being seriously flawed, as Fischer "has allowed himself to be carried away". The nature of his methodology worked to obscure his perspective, and Fischer's conclusions displayed a neglect of the historical context. According to Mommsen, Fischer blamed Germany alone for a Social Darwinism that was then European. Niall Ferguson is a British historian who served as a professor at Oxford University and then at Harvard University. In his 1998 work on World War II, The Pity of War, Ferguson reviewed Fischer's claims about German objectives in a European war: "Yet there is a fundamental flaw in Fischer's reasoning which too many historians have let pass. It is the assumption that Germany's aims as stated after the war had begun were the same as German aims beforehand." Ferguson then recited how a September 1914 program of German aims "is sometimes portrayed as if it were the first open statement of aims which had existed before the outbreak of war.... But the inescapable fact is that no evidence has ever been found by Fischer and his pupils that these objectives existed before Britain's entry into the war.... All that Fischer can produce are the pre-war pipedreams of a few Pan-Germans and businessmen, none of which had