I think it’s definitely possible that it increases defection rates and/or decreases morale among the officers, or that it completely bounces off most of the troops or increases defection rates there. Especially because you can’t test it on officers and measure effectiveness in the environment of long trench wars, where nihilism ran rampant, because that environment wouldn’t exist until it was far too late to use it as a testing environment.
But propaganda and war recruitment was generally pretty inferior to what exists today, e.g. the world’s best psychologist was Sigmund Freud and behavioral economics was ~a century away. They were far worse than most people today at writing really good books that are easy to read and that anyone could enjoy, and the contemporary advances in propaganda that they did have resulted in massive and unprecedented scaling in nationalism and war capabilities, even though what they had at the time was vastly less effective than what we’re used to today.
I think it’s definitely possible that it increases defection rates and/or decreases morale among the officers, or that it completely bounces off most of the troops or increases defection rates there. Especially because you can’t test it on officers and measure effectiveness in the environment of long trench wars, where nihilism ran rampant, because that environment wouldn’t exist until it was far too late to use it as a testing environment.
But propaganda and war recruitment was generally pretty inferior to what exists today, e.g. the world’s best psychologist was Sigmund Freud and behavioral economics was ~a century away. They were far worse than most people today at writing really good books that are easy to read and that anyone could enjoy, and the contemporary advances in propaganda that they did have resulted in massive and unprecedented scaling in nationalism and war capabilities, even though what they had at the time was vastly less effective than what we’re used to today.
I’m struggling to see why fun books would make any difference. Germany didn’t lose because it ran out of light reading material.
As for troop morale and so on, I don’t think that was a decisive element as by the time it started to matter, defeat was already overdetermined.
In other words, I think Germany would have lost WWI even with infinite morale.