Fracture E-Book

Philipp Blom

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 905

Beschreibung

When the Great War ended in 1918, the West was broken. Religious faith, patriotism and the belief in human progress had all been called into question by the mass carnage experienced by both sides. Shell shocked and traumatized, the West faced a world it no longer recognized: the old order had collapsed, replaced by an age of machines. The world hurtled forward on gears and crankshafts, and terrifying new ideologies arose from the wreckage of past belief. In Fracture, critically acclaimed historian Philipp Blom argues that in the aftermath of the First World War, citizens of the West directed their energies inwards, launching into hedonistic, aesthetic and intellectual adventures of self-discovery. It was a period of both bitter disillusionment and visionary progress. From Surrealism to Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West; from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to theoretical physics, and from Art Deco to Jazz and the Charleston dance, artists, scientists and philosophers grappled with the question of how to live and what to believe in a broken age. Morbid symptoms emerged simultaneously from the decay of the First World War: progress and innovation were everywhere met with increasing racism and xenophobia. America closed its borders to European refugees and turned away from the desperate poverty caused by the Great Depression. On both sides of the Atlantic, disenchanted voters flocked to Communism and fascism, forming political parties based on violence and revenge that presaged the horror of a new World War. Vividly recreating this era of unparalleled ambition, artistry and innovation, Blom captures the seismic shifts that defined the interwar period and continue to shape our world today.

Leseprobe

FRACTURE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Enlightening the World: Encyclopédie, The Book That Changed the Course of History

The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900–1914

A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment

To Have and To Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting

First published in hardback in the United States in 2015 byBasic Books, a Member of the Perseus Books Group.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2015 byAtlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Philipp Blom 2015

The moral right of Philipp Blom to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-0-85789-219-5

E-book ISBN: 978-0-85789-278-2

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-85789-221-8

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-0-85789-220-1

Printed in Great Britain

Design and composition by Eclipse Publishing Services

Photo and excerpt credits appear on page 415

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Manfred, Peter, and Tanjaand in memory of Jon, poet, teacher, and friend

God is dead. A world has collapsed. I am dynamite. World history has broken into two halves. There is a time before me. And a time after me. Religion, science, morality—phenomena originating in the fear of primitive peoples. An era collapses. A thousand-year culture collapses. . . . The world reveals itself to be a blind battle of forces unbound.

Man lost his celestial face, became matter, conglomerate, animal, an insane product of thoughts twitching abruptly and insufficiently. . . . And another element collided destructively and menacingly with the desperate search for a new order in the ruins of the past world: mass culture in the modern metropolis. Complex the thoughts and sensations assailing the brain, symphonic the feelings. Machines were created, and took the place of individuals. . . . A world of abstract demons swallowed individual expression, swallowed individual faces into towering masks, engulfed private expression, robbed individual things of their names, destroyed the ego and agitated oceans of collapsed feelings.

Hugo Ball, “Kandinksy,” 1917

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: 1,567 Days

PART I:  Postwar

1918: Shell Shock

1919: A Poet’s Coup

1920: Moonshine Nation

1921: The End of Hope

1922: Renaissance in Harlem

1923: Beyond the Milky Way

1924: Men Behaving Badly

1925: Monkey Business

1926: Metropolis

1927: A Palace in Flames

1928: Boop-Boop-a-Doop!

PART II: Prewar

1929: The Magnetic City

1930: Lili and the Blue Angel

1931: The Anatomy of Love in Italy

1932: Holodomor

1933: Pogrom of the Intellect

1934: Thank You, Jeeves

1935: Route 66

1936: Beautiful Bodies

1937: War Within a War

1938 Epilogue: Abide by Me

Acknowledgments

Credits

Bibliography

Notes

Index

List of Illustrations

Nameless horror

Gabriele d’Annunzio

Harlem Hellfighters

Ku Klux Klan

Berlin

German war veteran

Anna Akhmatova

Street scene in Harlem

W. E. B. Du Bois

Josephine Baker

Franz Kafka

Experimental film Ballet Mécanique, 1924

Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan

The “average American male”

Still from Metropolis

Fritz Kahn’s workings of the human body

Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times

Tsiga Vertov’s vision of Homo sovieticus

Le Corbusier’s vision of Paris

The burning Palace of Justice in Vienna

Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna

Betty Boop

Steel ovens in Magnitogorsk

Marlene Dietrich in Der blaue Engel

August Sander’s portrait of a secretary in Cologne

Michele Schirru

Hitler and Mussolini

Joseph Stalin with his daughter, Svetlana

A victim of Stalin’s artificial famine

Action Against the Un-German Spirit

Osip Mandelstam photographed by the NKVD

Strikebreakers in Rhondda, Wales

A dust storm approaches a settlement

After a dust storm in South Dakota, 1936

Portrait of a Dust Bowl refugee with her children

Wolfgang Fürstner

Statues of athletes at a sports complex in Dresden, 1936

Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhos Woman

The Victor by the German sculptor Arnold Breker

Street battles in Barcelona, 1936

Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, 1937

Introduction: 1,567 Days

ON AUGUST 10, 1920, AT NINE-THIRTY IN THE MORNING, THIRTY-SEVEN-year-old singer Mamie Smith and her musicians arrived at a recording studio close to New York’s Times Square. Crowded around the large horn of the recording machine, they began improvising their way into “Crazy Blues,” a song written for the occasion. Again and again they played, riffing and refining as they went. Perry Bradford, the pianist, remembered: “As we hit the introduction and Mamie started singing it gave me a lifetime thrill to hear Johnny Dunn’s cornet moaning those dreaming blues and Dope Andrews making some down-home slides on his trombone, while Ernest Elliott was echoing some clarinet jive along with Leroy Parker sawing his fiddle in the groove. Man, it was too much for me.”1

The blues dealt with disappointed love—how could it be otherwise? Smith sang with raw grief in her powerful alto voice as clarinet, violin, and trombone sighed and groaned alongside her, the musicians fortified by a steady supply of bootleg gin and blackberry juice. After thirteen takes and eight hours of work the musicians declared themselves satisfied with the result. They were tired and happy, in something of a collective trance. They saw out the day over plates of black-eyed peas and rice at Mamie’s apartment.

Smith had left the grim Cincinnati neighborhood where she grew up and made a reputation for herself in vaudeville theater in Harlem before beginning to appear in bars and speakeasies. It was a life at the edge, but it had its rewards. Her expressively dark and flexible voice soon brought her a local following, and eventually even the great Victor label became interested in making a record with her. They eventually dropped the idea, however, ostensibly on artistic grounds, but more probably out of fear. Smith was black, and southern customers in particular had warned record firms that they would boycott their products if they began to record and credit black artists on their discs. Finally a smaller firm, the OKeh Phonograph Company, had decided to defy the threats and give Mamie a chance. She had recorded her first blues song, “That Thing Called Love,” on Valentine’s Day 1920 with an all-white band of musicians, a compromise solution. No other African American had ever recorded a blues song before.

“That Thing Called Love” had done well for the company, and for the second record Smith was allowed to play with her regular band. When she had heard of the decision, she broke into a spontaneous dance of joy. Now, after a long day’s recording, the second record, “Crazy Blues,” was ready for pressing and distribution. It would sell seventy-five thousand copies in Harlem alone in just one month. Throughout the United States, sales soon topped one million—a historic achievement, and not just for a black artist. Only star tenor Enrico Caruso and Al Jolson’s hit song “Swanee” sold more that year.

What made Mamie Smith’s recording success so phenomenal was that both white and black households were buying “Crazy Blues.” Something new had happened. Classical singers such as Caruso and professional crooners such as Jolson had begun to carry a more popular repertoire into people’s lives, but always in a form as shiny and carefully arranged as Jolson’s brilliantined hair. By contrast, Smith’s singing conveyed unvarnished emotion. A whole culture found its voice in hers. She combined the bellow of a street hawker and the vocal punch of an angry washerwoman with the sorrow of centuries of humiliation and a young woman’s sheer lust for life. It was not the first time popular singers had sung with such raw sassiness, of course, but it was the first time such a performance had been recorded. The voice of the down-and-dirty people came into the polite living rooms of the middle and upper classes, and young listeners in particular decided that it spoke for them, too.

As Mamie Smith was riding a wave of success as “Queen of the Blues,” other black artists broadened the appeal of jazz in the United States and beyond. Jazz was much, much more than danceable tunes. It was the child of slavery and speakeasies, the inspiration for indecency and irresponsibility, acoustic subversion, the musical infiltration of lives lived at the margins into the center of society. In America, young black musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington were often restricted to segregated or illegal clubs and bars. In Europe, which was still reeling from the nightmare of the First World War, they toured the great cities and were welcomed as heralds of a new age. Jazz somehow embodied everything that had changed, and more: it embodied the fact that nothing was the same now as it had been in 1914.

Jazz became the soundtrack of an age, the incendiary charge flung into society, igniting tensions, stoking sensuality, and sapping the old order. Even the Nazis would pay tribute to the power of its message by fighting a culture war against “degenerate nigger jazz,” wary of its immense pull and eloquence yet unable to replace it with anything but cheerily sterilized swing music, military marches, and Viennese waltzes corrupted into vehicles of National Socialist feeling. But they never felt safe. Syncopation, it seemed, was lurking in every corner.

A paradox lies at the heart of this image of an all-new world suddenly risen from the war. As I have argued in The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West 1900–14, the great shift into the modern age did not spring full-blown out of the trenches of the Western Front; rather, many of its elements were already in place well before 1914. Mass societies, consumerism, mass media, urbanization, big industry and big finance, feminism, psychoanalysis, the theory of relativity, abstract art, and atonal music all predate the beginning of the war. So why did the world suddenly seem so much more modern? Why is it that far more than a single decade seems to separate the fashions, social mores, and moral outlook of, say, 1913 and 1923?

Perhaps this apparent paradox can be resolved by another one. The First World War is generally accepted to represent a radical break for the societies concerned, followed by a new beginning. This assumption of a sudden rupture may appear to explain why the world looked different after 1918, but when studying the period one is struck time and again by the great forces of continuity originating around 1900, traversing the war years, and reaching far into the future.

In the epigraph at the beginning of this book the German poet Hugo Ball draws the apocalyptic scenario of a world ending, a “blind battle of forces unbound.” Ball was writing in 1917, and while his poetic analysis appears to fit the interwar period after the supposed rupture of 1918, he is actually describing life before 1914. Even at the turn of the twentieth century, metropolitan areas had already become battlegrounds of modernity, about which he could remark: “The world became monstrous, uncanny, the relationship with reason and convention, the yardstick vanished. . . . The science of electrons caused a strange vibration in all surfaces, lines and forms.”2

The warlike scenario of city life evoked here is strikingly similar to reports by soldiers from the front in the Great War—a hellish place of machines and technology, of constant threat and individuality annihilated, a place ruled by abstract demons. Ball himself had volunteered for military service but had been classed as unfit for service. His only direct confrontation with life at the front came when he went to visit a wounded friend near Lunéville in late 1914. What he saw behind the front lines was deeply shocking to him, and as his lecture three years later made clear, he identified the existential rift and the historical rupture with the “electric tingling” of modernity and its supreme expression: the fascination and danger of life in the big city.3

Even before 1914 new machines, scientific inventions, and industrial processes had been transforming the lives of city dwellers—and, to a lesser degree, those of people in the countryside. The denizens of the growing urban agglomerations had already come to rely on mass transportation, mass-produced goods, food imported from across the globe, work in factories and offices, newspapers and cinema, and everyday technologies such as condoms, which were made from vulcanized rubber and which facilitated easier and less risky access to sex. These technological possibilities changed not only daily lives but also the sense of self of those living in this way.

The social consequences and the possibilities created by these technological changes began to transform all aspects of life. Within less than a generation, many aspects of life such as entertainment, education, and travel had become more democratic; women had demanded equal rights and were fighting for them; and workers were increasingly organized and ready to defend their interests through trade unions and strikes. To those at the bottom, life in the metropolis was miserable, but those who were already one rung up—those who had enough to eat and a roof over their heads—profited from access to cheaper goods, cheaper food, and more possibilities for learning about and encountering different people, places, cultures, and perspectives, even if only through cinema shorts, badly reproduced photographs in a newspaper, and a weekend third-class railway outing for the family.

The world had grown, and it had accelerated. Clocks, conveyor belts, timetables, telegrams, and telephones sped up daily life; racing cars, bicycles, planes, and even trains and ships dominated the news as new records were set and then broken every day in a contest between human mechanical ingenuity and nature. Machines extended human abilities beyond most people’s dreams.

The headlong rush of history had also caused deep anxieties. On a philosophical level, writers of various political stripes ranging from the fanatical and self-hating anti-Semite Otto Weininger to the left-leaning humanist Émile Zola all emphasized the point that modernity was devouring its children, that virtue and dignity were being swallowed by the rootless, internationalized, capitalist, mass-produced life of the big city. On a societal level, the newly awakened self-confidence of disenfranchised groups such as women, workers, and people subjected to racial discrimination rebelled against their exclusion. From the colonies of all major powers came a growing wave of civil rights agitation, national pride, violent protests, and civil disobedience; from women came the campaigns of the suffragettes and the strident analysis of writers such as Rosa Mayreder, who declared traditional masculinity obsolete; and from workers came an increasing ideological and individual commitment to revolution.

This social and intellectual upheaval caused a multitude of reactions, most important those among men who saw their masculinity threatened by the changing patterns of power and by a personal and professional life marked by increasing speed and insecurity. Those who could not cope with the new demands were declared “neurasthenics” and sent to mental hospitals to recuperate away from the constant haste of city life. Others sought refuge in rituals of masculinity such as bodybuilding and a cult of health and fitness. Uniforms were in fashion, and more duels were being fought than ever before, while small advertisements in newspapers from Chicago to Berlin asked their readers to consider whether they might be suffering from a secret “manly weakness” or from “nervous exhaustion,” and proposed tinctures and electric baths to stimulate virility.

For many men, the outbreak of the war was therefore a welcome opportunity to turn their backs on the “effeminate” and virilitysapping ways of city life and conquer not only enemy territory but manliness itself. As the first enthusiastic soldiers volunteered in Munich and Manchester, Linz and Lyon, their ears were ringing with sermons, lessons, and public exhortations to follow the noble call of the fatherland and find death or glory on the battlefield of honor, where they would engage in a holy fight, blessed by the Lord, that pitted man against man, saber against saber, courage against courage. For many, the war seemed the ideal remedy for life in a soulless modern world.

The enthusiasm at the outbreak of the war in the summer of 1914, what is in German simply called the “August experience,” is one of the factors often used to portray the years before 1914 as naive and all too willing to rush to war. To some extent that was certainly the case. But this is only half the story, a half told and retold countless times until very recently, partly because it fitted the narrative of a war-crazed German emperor and an out-of-control military caste plunging all of Europe into misery.

Recent research paints a more nuanced picture. There was indeed enthusiasm, and there is abundant evidence for this, mainly because the most enthusiastic—often young men from middle-class backgrounds—were precisely the kind of people who were likely to leave evidence in the form of letters, diaries, poems, and memoirs. This image, however, ignores the opposition to the war coming from workers and farmers on all sides (the former because their families would go hungry and they saw the war as a capitalist plot, the latter because their fields would be left untended), and it disregards the large, usually socialist peace demonstrations in Paris, Berlin, and London, as well as the many voices declaring their shock and predicting a catastrophic end to the war even as early as August 1914.

The enthusiasm of the summer of 1914 has become a received historical truth, but that truth chooses to forget the extent to which the myth of the “August experience” was a conscious creation. More than two hundred thousand copies of the Kriegsbriefe deutscher Studenten (War Letters by German Students), a highly selective and propagandistic work of retrospective hero worship published in 1916 by Philipp Wittkop in Germany, were in circulation by the time Hitler came to power, and its popularity still informs the common assumption that soldiers as well as entire societies went into the war with feverish enthusiasm.

While many soldiers headed into battle torn between worry for themselves and their families, resentment at being forced to fight for a cause that was not theirs, and genuine enthusiasm for the gloriously dangerous life of a soldier and the “bath of steel” that would make them real men, their actual experience was worse than anything they might have feared. The highest hopes of heroism were dashed by the reality of mechanized warfare, in which soldiers sat in waterlogged trenches, watching their feet rot away, amid the stench of bodies decaying in no-man’s-land, waiting, waiting, waiting, until at some random moment a shell would come out of the sky, hurled by a gun miles away, and obliterate all life with cruel indifference to courage and patriotism.

Modernity at War

THE FIRST WORLD WAR had many fronts, from Gallipoli in Turkey to the Isonzo River in the Alps, the terrible slaughter in eastern Europe, and satellite conflicts in the colonies. But the front experience that most clearly seared itself into the popular imagination of western European and American soldiers and societies was the Western Front, stretching between France and Belgium. This was where most of their troops were committed, and this was the scene of the most technologized, mechanized warfare humanity had seen to date. A moonlike wasteland cratered by hundreds of thousands of shells and scarred by trenches running for thousands of miles, this was modernity unhinged. Everything here was mass-produced and standardized; every human being carried a number and wore a uniform. There was no more mechanized, more industrialized, more rationalized, and at the same time more obviously insane environment than the Western Front, and the armies on all sides were gigantic machines. Men, horses, provisions, ammunition, news, secrets, ideas, and experiences were transported over thousands of miles along sophisticated road, rail, and communications networks to be consumed at their destination. Fighting had become an industrial process rather than an act of personal bravery or even heroism.

During the war countless men, especially those from rural areas, traveled to a foreign country for the first time in their lives. Yet, as soldiers in uniform, they were little more than anonymous ciphers and meticulously kept statistics in a monstrous game played between generals and politicians far away. The war had made these men modern, even if many of them resented and even hated this intrusion.

We will explore the hell that was life in the trenches and its psychological cost a little more in Chapter 1. In the present context, that of the dynamism of the vertigo years and the cultural history of technology, it is important that the soldiers’ appalling experience be seen not as a negation of the urban, technological world they had known or had just encountered by enlisting but as an intensification of it. At the front they encountered an overwhelming dystopia of technology run amok, leaving in its wake a trail of mangled corpses.

Before the war, the West had been energized by an unprecedented push of economic growth, industrialization, urbanization, and culture. This combination of velocity and instability had been bearable only because the cultural foundations on which the Western project was built still seemed valid: the idea of progress, a hierarchical concept of society, and ideals such as patriotism, faith, heroic sacrifice, and honor. These pillars of a bourgeois understanding of the world were questioned only by a minority of critics. If, as Max Weber has written, the train of history was hurtling forward and the passengers didn’t know where they were headed, at least the rails appeared relatively solid.

When these rails were blasted apart by the war, the immense energy driving the engine of this prewar dynamic plowed into society itself, and the war turned inward. During the armed conflict the tremendous energies of industrialization and its social and cultural consequences had been concentrated and channeled by patriotism and the need to survive, but in many ways the hostilities had been brought to no resolution. This was true even on a symbolic level. The war had not been won by a final, decisive victory that breached the opponent’s lines and paved the way to the enemy capital, after which the vanquished laid down their swords in front of the victors. Instead, it had been halted by mutual exhaustion, with one side economically weaker than the opposing one, allowing German politicians to claim that the country’s army was “unbeaten in the field” and “never vanquished.” In fact, on all sides there was a pervasive feeling of betrayal among a majority of people whose lives had been touched by the war. The bitter and inconclusive end of the hostilities simply did not seem commensurable with the sacrifices they had made. At the same time, the values of those who had exhorted them to take up arms had been totally discredited. The postwar years were painfully experienced as a moral vacuum.

If there was any one turning point in how Europeans learned to look not only at war and sacrifice but also at Enlightenment rationality, it was the Battle of the Somme, which began on July 1, 1916, and lasted until November 18, killing more than a million men. On the first day alone, having fired 1.5 million shells at the enemy lines during the preceding week, the British Army lost sixty thousand soldiers. This was a battle of unknown and unimaginable proportions, a man-made inferno. Progress had become murderous; the Enlightenment had betrayed those who had put their trust in it. But as the full scale of the industrialized slaughter became obvious, so did the lack of ready alternatives. Patriotism and religion had been enlisted to motivate soldiers, but their rhetoric sounded hollow after untold numbers of men had been mauled and murdered by mere machines. What values were there left to live for? This would become a crucial question during the ensuing years.

There was no time to sit and ponder, however. In the war’s aftermath, the immense energies of modernity continued to transform the countries of the West along the same axes as before, while political and economic crises greatly added to the prevailing sense of insecurity and anxiety. But now the optimism about technology had been crushed, the idea of a glorious and uninterrupted march of progress lay in ruins, and faith in the values underpinning society had been profoundly shaken. The great technological transformation continued unabated, but its conflicts changed in character. As the guns fell silent, battles raged on as many societies found that they were at war with themselves.

While much of the surface evidence of life after the war suggests radical change, this is actually due to the catalytic effect of accelerating a modernity that was already well established. The great social and industrial forces that had made life in the first years of the 1900s feel so vertiginous continued to exert their influence on societies and individuals. New Deal America, Weimar Germany, fascist Italy, and the early Soviet Union were all expressions of, or reactions against, the industrially driven and increasingly technologized mass societies that had already reigned in cities during the early 1900s. And the era’s intellectual preoccupations—the superman, the irrational, the masses, race, health, and purity—all continued debates that had been raging long before the young Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip raised his gun against Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the summer of 1914.

To those with eyes to see, the war revealed the powers and structures that had been constituted by 1914. Even the conservative German writer Ernst Jünger penned a surprisingly Marxist analysis of his experiences at the front: “The war battle is a frightful competition of industries, and victory is the success of the competitor that managed to work faster and more ruthlessly. Here the era from which we come shows its cards. The domination of the machine over man, of the servant over the master, becomes apparent, and a deep discord, which in peacetime had already begun to shake the economic and social order, emerges in a deadly fashion. Here the style of a materialistic generation is uncovered, and technology celebrates a bloody triumph.”4

This bloody triumph not only was the face of mass death in the trenches but also signaled another, deeper defeat: that of man by machine. Already a reality before the war but perceived as such only by a minority of farsighted observers, the machine age had asserted itself with its full, brutal force. The young men fighting in the trenches aged by years in a matter of weeks precisely because they understood that everything they had come to fight for, everything they had believed in, was a myth; it remained truth only for schoolmasters hopelessly out of touch with the brutal reality of their lives. The soldiers would not forget this lesson.

From now on, it seemed, most men and women would be the slaves of machines constructed to create the wealth of others, a theme recurring throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the best-known examples being films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). “Ideas belong to human beings who have bodies,” wrote the American philosopher John Dewey in 1927, “and there is no separation between the structures and processes of the part of the body that entertains ideas and the part that performs actions.”5 The war had been won not by human courage, strength, and principled endurance but by impersonal artillery, steely harbingers of industrial death miles behind the front lines. Killing was efficient and impersonal. The victims of shell shock, soldiers reduced to quivering psychological ruins by the incessant shelling at the front, became the troubling emblems of humanity.

This awakening in the disenchanted machine age, amid social unrest and political strife, created a strong sense of nostalgia and a fierce desire to reenchant the world, to find a new great vision that could replace the old and discredited ones, overcome the suffering and humiliation of the war, and point the way into a future in which human beings would subdue the machines and master new challenges with clean minds and healthy bodies. This ideology would also be the answer to the question of how to live in a broken age, how to carry on when all values remembered from home and school and rehearsed in speeches and essays seemed to have been unmasked as cynical mass manipulation.

The relationship of man and machine is one of the recurring themes of this book. Culturally, there is an arc from the trauma of the shell-shocked soldiers coming home from the Western Front with limbs shaking and twitching uncontrollably, the ultimate image of human impotence in the face of the machine age’s threats, to the superhuman and steeled bodies of Fascism and Bolshevism, answers of a sort to the pervasive fears that mere flesh had become a distant second to gleaming metal. It was not for nothing that Hitler would call for Germany’s youth to be “hard as Krupp steel.”

Awakenings

ONLY 1,567 DAYS, from the beginning of the war on August 20, 1914, to the armistice on November 11, 1918, separated two seemingly very different worlds from each other. After the last shells had been rained down on unseen enemies, people emerged, blinking, into a harsh sun illuminating the debris around them. Four mighty empires—those of Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, and the Ottomans—had vanished from the map, robust economies had been ground into the dust, and political stability had been turned into civil war.

Particularly in Europe, this bleak beginning was accompanied by a deep sense of disorientation and anger toward a treacherous past and a contested future. The old order, the old values, and the old elites had all failed and no valid new ones had yet been established. In the wake of humanity’s biggest slaughter, the value of rationality was being questioned. The experience of technology and modernity in people’s lives had been intensified by the war, but the traumatic memories of the catastrophic events of 1914–1918 became so dominant that they solidified into national war myths—stories of heroism, sacrifice, and betrayal serving the needs of the living and turning the victims into insurmountable psychological obstacles between the present and the past.

Amid the bitterness and the urgency of the postwar years, jazz burst onto the scene like a liberating blast. In a time when anarchy and the loss of conventions had become often threatening realities, the freedom of this music and its offhand disdain for the conventional beauty of highly polished music were the ideal reply, the affirmation that expression and fulfillment were still possible.

Jazz offered new idioms for ancient questions. The infectious rhythms and electrifying improvisations of dance forms such as swing liberated listeners’ feelings and bodies, while repetitive, trancelike blues laments bewailed the disillusionment and disappointment of love and of life itself. Hard on the heels of such pain came something fast, fun, and furious, a celebration of life, movement, sex, and freedom, moving the souls and feet of those who felt too young to succumb to disillusionment and asserting their right to live. The Jazz Age with its flappers in the United States, the Bright Young Things in Britain, and the androgynous, fun-loving girls and boys in the bars of Berlin and the cellar joints of Paris was a spontaneous protest against an era that was growing too serious, a time that seemed either devoid of hope or inflated with utopian dreams by the partisans of left and right.

No dictatorship has ever approved of jazz. People who drink and dance together and feel their partner’s moving body on the dance floor simply find it more difficult to hate one another. Close dancing may be the best inoculation against ideology. The dictators of the age—and there were significant movements supporting dictatorship in all Western countries during the interwar years—sought to channel the hopes and energies of those courageous enough to live another day. Their promises were new versions of old religious visions. The former seminarian Stalin and the lapsed Catholic Hitler (who was never excommunicated) promised their followers a new Jerusalem, while Mussolini spoke of a new Rome. All of them preached versions of the gospel of the new man, a pseudo-Nietzschean creature so glorious and strong that he could vanquish all enemies and even technology itself to live in a future world of health and purity.

This shining city on the hill stood in stark contrast to the political realities of Europe after the war, an era designated as peacetime by the signatories of the Treaty of Versailles but in reality a state more akin to civil war and political uncertainty. In Germany alone between 1918 and 1923, more than five thousand people were killed as a result of political violence. And while other countries were not as deeply unsettled, there were also large-scale and sometimes murderous political unrest, violent strikes, rioting, and coups d’état in Italy, Austria, England, Ireland, Hungary, France, and Portugal, to say nothing of the proxy war fought after 1936 between fascists and socialists in Spain. From this perspective it is both more helpful and more accurate, as some historians have suggested, to speak of the period between 1914 and 1945 as Europe’s second Thirty Years’ War.

The United States seemed to be isolated from these direct consequences of the war; however, here the effects were comparable in their profound power but more mediated. There had been no battles on US soil; the country had lost fewer soldiers, both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the population, than other major powers; and the country’s economy was buoyed up by wartime production, sales of raw materials and other goods to Allied powers, and a weakening of its former competitors on the international market.

But in the United States as elsewhere, the modernity of the war transformed societies in subtle but powerful ways, working on the social and cultural fault lines within the country and turning combative energies into social ones. Mamie Smith and artists like her showed that a new culture was growing, one that would not have asserted itself, or would only have asserted itself much more slowly, without the war and the changes it brought for African Americans. Black troops had distinguished themselves in France and experienced a new respect, and they carried this attitude back home. At the same time, African American workers had taken the factory jobs of white workers who had been called up by the army. Hundreds of thousands of southern blacks had migrated to the northern industrial cities, and they were there to stay. On the back of this grew the Harlem Renaissance and a thriving jazz culture, but what also emerged was a period of increased racial hatred, with lynchings in the South and race riots in the cities of the North.

Currents and Causalities

APPROACHING THIS PERIOD of wars turned inward and its parallel and overlapping currents of fear and hope, alienation, escape, and engagement, I have chosen to investigate it through exemplary episodes designed to build up a picture out of individual components that are interlinked in many ways, often by the sense of conflict, of a war continuing not on the battlefield but in people’s heads. Protagonists appear in various contexts; cultural movements and social realities, great art and great atrocities create a picture of the evolving mind-set of a rudderless time caught between hope and despair, between reconstruction and revolution.

At the heart of this history of attitudes and strategies deployed throughout the interwar years are not politicians and armies but perceptions, fears, and wishes, ways of dealing with the trauma of the war, with the energies released by industrialization, with the confusing and exhilarating identities that became possible in an industrial mass society, especially once the old values had been shattered.

Trying to capture the different resonances of past and present, this account explores the period away from its familiar great historical milestones. The chapter focusing on 1919 is not devoted the peace negotiations leading to the Treaty of Versailles, the 1923 chapter not to German hyperinflation, the one on 1929 not to the Great Crash, 1933’s chapter not to Hitler’s ascent to power. Instead, I have chosen less obvious and more varied themes that form a mosaic of perspectives and identities growing and evolving over time, from the initial shock of the postwar era to the growing tension after 1929, which rapidly turned into a prewar time. The chapters explore the plight of veterans and the rise of fascism, the world of speakeasies during Prohibition and a rebellion of Russian sailors, the rise of African American culture in Harlem and the discovery of galaxies beyond the Milky Way, the surrealists in Paris and evolution on trial in rural Tennessee, the doomed International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and a historic concert in Vienna.

Dealing with the charged and changing time between 1900 and 1914, The Vertigo Years was based on a thought experiment: namely, to imagine that we could look at this period without the shadow of the impending First World War, without a narrow teleology. The portrait that emerged was of a time full of contradictions, optimism, friction, and vertiginous speed, looking into an open future. For the interwar period this experiment would not yield any similarly interesting results, because there was always the threat of another war, or rather of the same large conflict erupting again.

The war in 1939 did not come as a great surprise to many people. It had been predicted ever since the Treaty of Versailles had locked Germany into a state of permanent crisis. In Paris in 1919, the young Spanish portraitist José Simont was commissioned to draw the president of the Chambre des Députés, Paul Deschanel, who had been involved in the negotiation of the treaty that had officially ended the war. Deschanel would be elected president of France the following year, but for the time being he chatted with the artist who was engaged in drawing him. When Simont asked him what he thought of the Treaty of Versailles, Deschanel’s analysis was succinct: “Nous venons de signer la deuxième guerre mondiale—we have just signed on to the Second World War.”

Deschanel’s pessimistic analysis of Versailles was echoed by the influential British economist John Maynard Keynes as well as others. The demands of the victorious Allies had cast Europe off balance. In particular, French president Georges Clemenceau had insisted on imposing high reparations on an already ruined Germany; while this may have appeared morally just, a country that was the central power and economic engine of the continent should not have been allowed to become unstable and teeter on the brink of revolution. The inbuilt fragility of Germany’s young republic bore terrible dangers for the future.

In his great novel The Man Without Qualities, written mostly during the early 1920s, Robert Musil describes Vienna before the war. The ostensible plot for this comedy of morals is an attempt by a group of Habsburg officials and intellectuals to sum up the age and find a fitting tribute for the seventy-year anniversary of the emperor’s reign, coming up in 1918. This grand effort, called the “Parallel Campaign,” is an utter failure, however, because nobody is sure what, if anything, unifies the age, or which of the many ideologies, worldviews, and scientific achievements deserves precedence over all others. After a thousand pages and scores of grand projects and profound plans, all that remains is a modest procession in favor of world peace, with participants in traditional dress.

Musil’s novel is set during the year before the war, but the confusion at its heart also describes the atmosphere of hostility during the postwar years. Amid the continuing seismic realignment of social and intellectual positions, there was no firm ground to be had, no grand unifying cause behind which everyone could rally. The surge of the new, the experience of modernity, was too replete with confusing possibilities to allow any one of them to impose itself. Consequently, the protagonist of the novel, a man called Ulrich, cannot decide what to do with his life.

As the Parallel Campaign gradually breaks apart and becomes a parody of its original ambitions, the cautious rationalist Ulrich becomes aware that all great promises are almost always false. Writing about the year 1914, Musil was commenting on the world a decade later, a world that had suffered a collective experience that appeared to have changed everything but was still pulsating with the currents and energies released during the first decade of the twentieth century—energies that continue to shape our lives today.

PART I

POSTWAR

A generation that still drove to school in horse-drawn carriages suddenly stood under the open sky in a landscape in which nothing but the clouds had remained unchanged, and in the center, in a force field of destructive currents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.

—Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 1936

· 1918 ·

Shell Shock

Rumour had it that the constant twitching and jerking and snorting was caused by something called shell-shock, but we were not quite sure what that was. We took this to mean that an explosive object had gone off very close to him with such an enormous bang that it had made him jump high in the air and he hadn’t stopped jumping since.

—Roald Dahl, Boy, 1984

CAMPBELL WILLIE MARTIN WAS ONE OF THE LUCKY ONES. HE WAS alive. He had escaped from hell after little more than a year and, despite having been wounded twice, had lost no limb. He had been a good soldier. Born in London in 1895 to a policeman and his wife, in October 1914, at age twenty-nine, he had enlisted as a volunteer private in the Royal Fusiliers, and had made lance corporal in early 1916. By then he was already serving on the Western Front, in the midst of slaughter on an industrial scale.

Then, on July 16 of that year, having been pinned down in a trench for hours during severe shelling, Martin lost consciousness. The next day, when his trench was hit by a shell, he saw eight of his comrades die in the explosion, and he lay buried under debris for an entire night before he was rescued. As a result of this, according to his personnel file, the “following day [he] felt very queer muscular tremor set in[,] a fit of crying[,] follow[ed] by loss of consciousness for some hours.”

Nameless horror: The German artist Otto Dix transformed his wartime experiences into powerful evocations of life and death in the trenches.

Lance Corporal Martin was found to be suffering from “shell shock,” as the doctors had come to name this trauma from exposure to artillery fire and the sight of violent death, and he was graded at 25 percent disability—enough to be sent back to England for treatment at a specialized hospital. Again he was lucky: initially, the men exhibiting such symptoms had been treated as malingerers. Some had been simply sent back to the trenches, while others had been on the receiving end of an old-fashioned kind of treatment that the older officers in particular had hoped would stem the tide of the new phenomenon:

They were apt to be rather stern. I remember one man came in, big chap, six footer, and he was shaking with a shell-shock and I was amazed, the colonel lifted his heavy stick and hit him across the head on his—he had his tin hat on—hit him across the head to give him another shock and he used the words “you’re a bloody fool, pull yourself together.” But that couldn’t put the man right and he could see he really had gone beyond, so of course he was taken care of and he went down. But they tried sometimes to give them a type of reverse shock, you see, to try and reverse the process but it rarely worked.1

Some soldiers who had not responded to this old-fashioned method and who had run away, refused to “go over the top,” or simply broken down and hidden in the muddy trenches had been court-martialed for cowardice. More than three hundred “deserters,” from Britain and elsewhere in that country’s empire, were executed in a miserable dawn ritual, many of them unable to stand upright, shaking and quivering even as they were bound to a wooden post to be shot by their own comrades.2

But by late 1916, with the war intensifying and the terrible weapons of the new century—machine guns, poison gas, and huge artillery capable of firing over distances of twenty miles in bombardments that could last for days—the British military and medical establishments had been forced to reconsider. That year’s appalling four-month Battle of the Somme had resulted in more than a million casualties, and of those who emerged alive from the waterlogged trenches, many had suffered major psychological damage. Among the British forces alone, thirty thousand men were showing symptoms of the strange new condition that rendered them useless as soldiers and an ongoing burden to their units. Reluctantly the authorities began to accept that a man might be severely impaired even when he seemed to be physically unharmed, and soon these mental casualties were arriving at military hospitals by the tens of thousands.

Campbell Willie Martin was among them, and he was to remain hospitalized until after the end of the war. He is described as having been excitable and suffering from insomnia, severe headaches, recurrent panic, memory loss, and a persistent tremor in his hands. Though the doctors noted his “good physique . . . tongue clean, teeth fair,” as late as 1920 his level of disability was still being graded at 20 percent; it had improved only a little since his first admission.

Unspeakable, Godless, Hopeless

MARTIN’S PATIENT FILE is one of thousands pulled from Britain’s National Archives, where they are still preserved; as shell shock went, his case was not particularly severe. Contemporary film footage reveals soldier after soldier reduced to a quivering wreck by the inhumanity of what he has experienced. Faces are grotesquely distorted, etched with a permanent anguish; limbs shake or jerk violently, uncontrollably; a soldier recoils, panic-stricken, at the sight of another man in uniform. In the imaginations of these lost men, the bombardment has clearly never stopped.

These were the living debris of the Great War. In Britain alone, fully 10 percent of the officers and 7 percent of the ranks were eventually diagnosed with shell shock, with some thirty-seven thousand awarded war pensions on account of it. The military doctors had learned early how to deal with the physically wounded, with legs and arms blown off or stretched out for amputation, eyes blinded by gas and eardrums burst by explosions, and faces ruined by ghastly disfigurements—but with the shell shock cases, there were no evident outward wounds.

Some of the worst cases were treated at Netley Hospital in London, among them Private Meek, confined to a wheelchair, shuddering convulsively, oblivious to the orderlies trying to relax his rigid joints; Private Preston, nineteen years of age, who had returned from the trenches mute and unable to understand any word but “bomb,” at the mention of which he would dive under his hospital bed in a fit of terror; Private Smith, buried alive by shellfire in August 1917, walking stiffly, as if on wooden legs, wiping his face compulsively, as if to wash away the mud and the slime of the decomposing bodies that had surrounded him; Sergeant Peters, his spine distorted, his legs shuddering, making a dangerous farce of his every attempt to walk. Broken men, all of them.

Embarking as heroes and saviors of a nation’s freedom, they had returned as pitiful survivors of an inhuman reality. In a 1917 letter to his wife, Margaret, the English painter Paul Nash, then stationed on the Western Front near Ypres, had described the awful scene:

No pen or drawing can convey this country. . . . Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous, they are mockeries to man, only the black rain out of the bruised and swollen clouds all through the bitter black of night is fit atmosphere for such a land. The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell holes fill up with green-white water, the roads and tracks are covered with inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease. . . . It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless.3

Soldiers home on leave from this monstrous reality often found themselves more frustrated than relieved. Having lived in an ongoing butchery that had come to seem senseless, having slept alongside unburied corpses and witnessed friends and comrades ripped apart by the random, anonymous destruction of a shell fired from miles away, having lost trust in old faiths and respect for their superiors, and having come to doubt the justice of their national cause, they returned home to a world dominated by patriotic rhetoric and the wisdom of armchair warriors who continued to regard the war as just and as an opportunity for heroism and manly combat—in effect, as a kind of operetta war, a view that took no account of the savage reality and merely added insult to terrible injury. As early as 1915, a journalist for the leftist Labour Leader, a newspaper with pacifist leanings, had described one soldier back from the front: “[He] began laughing, a queer laugh. He went on laughing and I knew it was because the horrors he had been through were so incongruous with his experience of life till then that it seemed a joke.”4

Wilfred Owen’s “shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells” remained with the returning soldiers when they were on leave and even after their final return home. The celebrated war poet, who until 1915 had served as a vicar’s assistant while studying at University College, Reading, became a victim of shell shock himself after his trench position was hit by a mortar. Flung into the air, Second Lieutenant Owen had landed among the dismembered corpses of his comrades killed by the blast. Following this horrific incident, he was trapped for days between the two enemy lines, an experience he relayed to his mother in a letter of January 1917:

I have suffered seventh hell.

I have not been at the front.

I have been in front of it.

I held an advanced post, that is, a dug-out in the middle of No Man’s Land. . . .

My dug-out held 25 men tightly packed. Water filled it to a depth of 1 or 2 feet, leaving say 4 feet of air.

The Germans knew we were staying there and decided we shouldn’t.

Those fifty hours were the agony of my happy life.5

Rescued from his advance post, one of very few survivors, he broke down.

Recuperating at Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland, haunted by the terrors he had endured, Owen began to cast his experience of the hell that was trench warfare in stark lines of verse. He was inspired by his encounter with another patient, the poet and officer Siegfried Sassoon.

Aristocratic, exotic, handsome, and self-possessed, Sassoon was everything that the modestly born Owen had always longed to be. Wealthy and artistic, Anglo-Catholic on his mother’s side and Baghdadi Jewish on his father’s, educated at Marlborough and Cambridge, Sassoon was imbued with the indestructible self-confidence of the British upper class. He had volunteered on the day war was declared and had distinguished himself at the front, being awarded the Military Cross for exceptional bravery. But the blue-blooded hero had been sent to Craiglockhart Hospital not because he had been wounded but because he had spoken his mind.

Disgusted with what he had seen during the fighting on the Western Front, in 1917 he had published a protest against the war, using his social contacts to procure a reading for it in Parliament. The previous year, under the wartime Defense of the Realm Act, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, himself an earl and the grandson of a British prime minister, had been dismissed from his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, for publishing a statement of conscientious objection to the war. Russell had hoped to garner public support by being sent to prison, though as it turned out he had only to pay a fine.

For Sassoon, however, a serving officer, the stakes were much higher. Risking a court-martial and even execution, he had written an impassioned attack against those in authority. “I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops,” he declared, “and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. . . . On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.”6

There is some evidence of harsher sentencing for men of lower military and social rank, and it does seem that Sassoon’s standing as a war hero and also as a gentleman saved him from a court-martial for treason. Instead of going before the judges—and possibly before a firing squad—he was declared to be suffering from neurasthenia (nervous exhaustion or neurosis) and sent to Craiglockhart Hospital, where he met the younger officer-poet Owen.

Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori

OWEN FELL IMMEDIATELY under Sassoon’s spell. Inspired by his uncompromising courage, Owen himself began to write about his feelings and experiences in a more straightforward way. In what is perhaps his most famous poem, he combines the terror of a poisonous gas attack with the bitter reflections of his comrades-in-arms, convinced now that they have been led into a slaughterhouse by the mendacious ideals of those who taught them. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, “sweet and fitting it is to die for the fatherland”—this line from Horace was inscribed on a chapel wall at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and the sentiment had informed the education of generations of young officers in training. To Owen and his fellow veterans, it was no more than a cynical lie, and the line was to be quoted countless times as its own indictment. Owen himself was not to enjoy the literary glory he had wrested from the gas and blood of the Western Front. Volunteering to return to France after his discharge from the hospital, he was killed on November 4, 1918, a week before the armistice.

Owen’s death at the age of twenty-five became symbolic of the fate of his whole generation—the “lost generation,” as it was quickly called, though more in romantic legend than historical truth. The old men who were thought to have cheated the young generation of their hard-won victory and the ideals they had been fighting for were the generals, the politicians, the bosses, portrayed in angry articles and novels as the cynical and incompetent survivors of the Victorian age. They had sent schoolboys to their deaths, making this breed of superior young men reared on the playing fields of Eton believe that this would be a “jolly war”and that they were there to “play the game.” “Lions led by donkeys,” as the German general Erich von Ludendorff had called them, Britain’s young men had been sacrificed on the fields of Flanders for no gain but the old men’s own.

After the war, it was widely felt, the deaths of these young men meant that there was virtually no one left to carry on the work of empire, of industry, of art and science. The great bloodletting resulted in “the embarrassing spectacle of men of minor powers wrestling with major responsibilities” during the interwar years. “There is impoverishment on all levels,” wrote Reginald Pound, himself a volunteer of 1914. Half a century later he would wonder whether the “strong and cultivated intelligences” of the lost generation could have “seen to it that their second-rate would not become our first-rate, or have arrested the decline of moral indignation into unheroic tolerance.”7

Perhaps the best-known literary chronicle of this perceived collapse was Vera Brittain’s 1933 autobiographical novel Testament of Youth, in which the author dramatized the impact of the war on her own life and on those of the people closest to her. From 1915 until the end of the war Brittain had served as a field nurse with the Voluntary Aid Detachment; in 1919, with her fiancé, her only brother, and many university friends now dead, she returned to Oxford, bitterly disillusioned.

Brittain’s purpose in writing the book that was to make her famous was partly to counteract the impression that only men had lived and suffered through the war. “Didn’t women have their war as well?” she asked herself, and then set out to answer the question. How had women experienced the war, and how had they experienced the peace that followed it? “I detached myself from the others,” she wrote, describing the armistice celebrations, “and walked slowly up Whitehall, with my heart sinking in sudden cold dismay. Already this was a different world from the one I had known during four lifelong years, a world in which people would be lighthearted and forgetful. . . . And in that brightly lit, alien world I should have no part.”8

Killing Fields

BRITTAIN’S SENSE OF ALIENATION was shared by many of the returning soldiers, particularly those who had served on the Western Front. Even if thousands of letters, diaries, and memoirs prove that the beginning of the war was not accompanied by the wave of collective enthusiasm bordering on hysteria that has often been written about, but instead drew more anxious and ambivalent responses, many young men had gone into the war with a sense of elation. In Europe and America boys in particular were educated to be patriotic and to value manly virtues such as courage, strength, and sacrifice. For many, there were paramilitary institutions such as the Officers’ Training Corps and the Boy Scouts in Britain and the Commonwealth, or the collective drill in Prussian and French schoolyards. There was also testosterone and the hope of battlefield glory.

It was not easy to be a man in 1914. Traditional forms of manliness and social hierarchies had been undermined by industrialization and urbanization. Most factory work could be done by women, too, and life in the big city required working couples to bring home two wages and to have fewer children. New jobs and occupations were hard to reconcile with the ideas previous generations had had of manly virtue. Encased in anonymous buildings and wedged in front of a typewriter, pale from the lack of sunlight and nervous from the constant din of machines in the vicinity, the modern office worker looked nothing like the image of martial virility that had ruled his up-bringing. The feminist writer Rosa Mayreder had even dubbed offices “coffins of masculinity.”9

Feminism was another prewar phenomenon that did much to shake the image of what it meant to be a man. Women demanded the vote, entry into the professions, and places at schools and universities, and they were beginning to play an ever-increasing role in occupations traditionally reserved for men. A tide of male assertion had answered these demands. Scientists had vainly attempted to prove the physical and intellectual inferiority of women, and masculine rituals such as dueling had shown a sharp rise in popularity. But even before the war hundreds of thousands of men had succumbed to this new psychological pressure and fallen victim to “neurasthenia,” a nervous affliction similar to today’s burnout, and had been sent to recuperate in sanatoriums.