Yes and no.
WWI was one of the most miserable, horrifyingly unnecessary wars ever. How did Germany even end up the big boogie Man? What had it done prior that suggested it should be the big bad guy? Except being even more unstable than much of Europe.
WWII was more an outgrowth of evil forces bristling from the insults dealt by English and French in their terms. But really, the question isn’t so much “Germany reacted” to WWI, but that WWI happened at all, and Germany took it upon itself to bear the brunt of the offense and defense rather than those who actually started it. All stupidly picked up the yoke of “well, you hurt my friend...” and before they knew it, friends of friends were the main participants in a massive street brawl over “honor”.
Very well put!
Few people realize in Imperial Germany the right vote was more widespread then Imperial UK. The common man had far more rights in Austro-Hungary then in our ally Russia.
I honestly do see the point of WWI. It really was fought to make the world safe for democracy. Since it didn't begin with an overt aggression, like Pearl Harbor, or the shelling of Danzig followed by the invasion of Poland, it's hard for us to pin down what started it all, and therefore easy to say that it was an absurd pointless diplomatic mistake, made worse by inflexible railroad schedules, which nonsensically somehow swallowed nations, monarchies, and tens of millions of combatants and civilians. It seems inexplicable to us because we no longer grasp what the world was like before 1914. We see people in old films and pictures that look quaint, but not unrecognizable as like ourselves, and we naturally assume that they are like us, sharing our values and beliefs. They didn't; they were born into a much different world than we were.
WWI was the end of a series of increasingly bloody wars which started in the late 18th century with our revolution, and were fought to overthrow the notion that a birthright, a King or a Queen, or a ruling class, had title to the world. Even Napoleon, albeit an emperor, claimed to be the protector of the revolution, and he claimed to be freeing Europe with history's first mass armies. The world before 1914 was a world of colonial rule, monarchies, Tsars, Kaisers, and the British Commonwealth. As the industrial mass production of goods created an historically unprecedented middle class, the contradictions of piled centuries were bent and compressed like springs, ready for any incident, like the shooting of a bumbling archduke, to release them with unbelievable, inhuman, slaughter on a modern industrial scale. That was WWI.
It may be, as one poster pointed out, that Germans had more voting rights that others, but they were ruled by a Kaiser, and oppressed by a military which under his authority could overrule civilian authority whenever it pleased them. All that, and how many other royal houses, were swept away, and while Britain and France kept their colonies, the future was clear.
We can write endlessly about how WWI lead to the even more disastrous WWII, and probably it did, but that does not mean that the First World War was pointless.
Germany was the boogeyman because its leading state (Prussia) had beaten France in a war in 1871 (making the new Germany the most powerful country on the continent), and because it was developing a navy to rival Britain’s (which always tried to maintain a navy as large as the second- and third-largest combined). France and Britain were going to have a war against Germany - it was just a question of when/how.