[account42]

"Germany" as we know it today did not exist before or during or even directly after WW1. You could just as easily say e.g. Poland was responsible for WW1 because most of that region was also part of the German Empire.

What's next, making Italy pay reparations for the roman empire? Making Turkey or other arab countries pay reparations for their empires?

[int_19h]

I'm not sure what your point is because nobody is suggesting that modern Germany pay reparation for WW1. The discussion was about reparations that Germany has already paid after WW1, imposed on it by the victorious Entente. There's a long-standing historical myth that those reparations were 1) unjustified because Germany was not actually solely or primarily responsible for the war, and 2) excessive. It further goes to claim that this is a big part of why Germany went Nazi and started WW2 eventually. This was, indeed, the prevailing wisdom in the inter-war era, but Fritz Fischer poked a lot of holes in it after WW2.

At this point, while there's still no consensus as to the degree of German responsibility, most historians would weight it significantly higher than that of the Entente. The notion that reparations (and the Treaty of Versailles in general) was particularly onerous and punitive has also been largely debunked. However, the popular understanding still mostly reflects the inter-war consensus and not the later developments.