by Philipp Blom
In the manner of a Boy’s Own story, the two heroes eventually come to realize that the inexplicable movements they have observed on the German coast point to an enormous danger: ‘I understood at last. I was assisting at an experimental rehearsal of the great scene, to be enacted, perhaps in the near future - a scene when multitudes of sea-going lighters, carrying full loads of soldiers, not half-loads of coal, should issue simultaneously, in seven ordered fleets, from seven shallow outlets, and, under escort of the Imperial Navy, traverse the North Sea and throw themselves bodily upon the English shores.’ The problem, or so one of the novel’s protagonists claimed, was that the English had grown soft: ‘We’ve been so safe so long, and grown so rich, that we’ve forgotten what we owe it. But there’s no excuse for those blockheads of statesmen as they call themselves, who are paid to see things as they are ... By Jove, we want a man like this Kaiser, who doesn’t wait to be kicked, but works like a nigger for his country and sees ahead ... We aren’t ready for her [Germany].’
Other authors agreed, both with the sentiment and its overt racism, and Lord Northcliffe found the matter important enough to have his Daily Mail serialize a novel by William Le Queux, The Invasion of 1910, in which Britain is overrun by a German horde close to the one Kaiser Wilhelm must have had in mind during his infamous ‘Huns’ speech. Looting, burning, raping and killing, they make their way towards the capital, which they at first succeed in taking, but must inevitably lose again, submerged by a tidal wave of British outrage and stubborn courage. To launch the novel, sandwich men wearing blue Prussian uniforms and spiked helmets marched up and down Oxford Street. The novel sold over a million copies, even if Le Queux found to his disgust that in the German translation it was the Kaiser who triumphed over the empire he had so long been jealous of.
It is one of Britain’s greatest charms that its citizens refuse to take anything very seriously, even and especially their own great symbols; it is one of her greatest weaknesses that they pay as much attention to the subtleties of class as a German would have to epaulettes. This lesson was learned somewhat painfully by the admiral commanding HMS Dreadnought in 1910, when he received the Emperor of Abyssinia on board, or thought he did. The visit had been announced by telegram and the navy had pulled out all the stops: red carpet, honour guard, flags waving, bands playing, the entire crew standing to attention in their best uniforms. Given the short notice, no Abyssinian flag could be found, and the flag of nearby Zanzibar was flown instead. Undisturbed by such details, the imperial delegation was shown around the ship, a translator whispering into His Majesty’s ear. They were astonished at the ship they saw. An electric light switch first startled and then delighted them. During the visit, they also requested prayer mats and bestowed military honours of their country on some of the officers.
It took a few weeks for the visitors to be properly identified in a sensational article in the Daily Mirror, to which members of the delegation had sent a group photo taken at the occasion. They were, in fact, a group of English friends, made up with grease paint and false beards. Among the delegation were Duncan Grant and the young Virginia Stephen (adorned with a fetching black beard), who was to marry Leonard Woolf. During the visit they had conversed with one another by using a few words of Swahili learned on the train and adroitly mixed with fragments from Virgil’s Aeneid, half remembered from school. The ‘interpreter’ and the fake Foreign Office representative of the visit had appeared undisguised. He was Horace de Vere Cole, the mastermind and financier of the operation, and a man who devoted a good part of his life to conceiving and executing elaborate practical jokes. He was an old hand at disguises: at his Cambridge college he had appeared dressed as the Sultan of Zanzibar, and in middle age he had capitalized on his resemblance to Ramsay MacDonald by arranging for the Labour leader to be temporarily ‘lost’ in a taxi in the London traffic while Cole went to a meeting of the Labour Party in his stead and gave a speech, telling the workers to work more for less.
Madmen and Muscle Jews
The worship of manly strength could bring forth strange blossoms, perhaps none stranger and more symptomatic of the period’s preoccupations than Max Nordau’s glowing invocation of the Muscle Jew as the physical and spiritual goal of Zionism. Nordau’s woolly but influential bestselling tome Degeneration, had made him one of the main voices critical of everything he saw as the enfeebling and debilitating influences of modern life and art. The threat to civilization was grave, Nordau claimed, and it came from:
... a contempt for traditional views of custom and morality ... a practical emancipation from traditional discipline…unbridled lewdness, the unchaining of the beast in man ... disdain of all consideration for his fellow-men, the trampling under foot of all barriers which enclose brutal greed of lucre and lust of pleasure ... to all, it means the end of an established order, which for thousands of years has satisfied logic, fettered depravity, and in every art matured something of beauty.
Nordau did not pull any punches when he went against the perceived excesses of the new, menacing, speeding machines, or the degeneracy of contemporary art. Of the legendary nineteenth-century poet Paul Verlaine, he wrote: ‘We see a repulsive degenerate with an asymmetric skull and a Mongolian face, an impulsive vagabond and dipsomaniac, who, because of crimes against morality, was placed in a penitentiary; ... a dotard, who displays the absence of any definite thought in his mind by incoherent speech, meaningless expressions, and frizzy images.’ The creature of this life of mechanical enfeeblement and immoral over-excitation was an aberration: ‘physically, sick and feeble; morally, an arrant scoundrel; intellectually, an unspeakable idiot who passes his days choosing the colours of things to drape his room artistically, observing the movements of mechanical fish, sniffing perfumes, and sipping liqueurs ... A parasite of the lowest level.’
A doctor himself, Nordau knew that parasites had to be exterminated, and he had no hesitation in applying this scientific principle to society:
The weak, the degenerate will perish; the strong will adapt themselves to the achievements of civilization or will subordinate them to their own organic capacity.... The art of the twentieth century will connect itself at every point to that of the past, but it will have a new task to fulfil: to bring a stimulating variety to the uniformity of cultured life, an influence that probably only science, many centuries later, will be in a position to exert over the great majority of humankind ... Whoever believes with me that society is the natural organic form of humanity, ... whoever considers civilisation to be a good that has value and deserves to be defended, must mercilessly crush the anti-social vermin [Ungeziefer] under his thumbs.
For its author, this violent rhetoric was little more than a pose. Born in Pest (later a part of Budapest) in Hungary in 1849, Nordau was the son of an orthodox rabbi by the name of Südfeld. Estranged from religion, the young Maximilian Südfeld changed direction, not only in life but also in his surname, in which he swapped south for north and field (Feld) for meadow (Aue), and Doctor Max Nordau was born, a self-made publicist who finally opened a practice in Paris and published a succession of books on cultural topics. Like the Viennese foreign correspondent Theodor Herzl, Nordau was deeply disgusted by the wave of antisemitism rising in France during the Dreyfus affair, and soon the two men began to discuss their ideas about the future of the Jewish people. Nordau became one of Herzl’s most ardent supporters, but his vision of a Jewish renaissance carried connotations different from Herzl’s. While the latter’s vision was largely pragmatic, the author of Degeneration fused his two preoccupations, the decline and decadence of Western societies and the future of his own people, into a curious but influential amalgam: heroic Jewishness, a race of new Jews with ‘clear heads, solid stomachs, and hard muscles’.
Nordau’s message fitted perfectly into the anxieties of Jewish emancipation, eager to distance itself from the antisemitic stereotypes of the pale and feeble inhabitant of the ghetto with eyes reddened from study, his emaciated body pallid, the very blo
od in his body dull and lifeless, part of a dirt-poor flood of strangers transformed into capitalist exploiters of honest muscle work. Jew-hating authors like Richard Wagner’s British son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) had peddled this message far and wide, and Nordau accepted this diagnosis:
Microbiology teaches us that microorganisms that are harmless as long as they are living in the open air turn into terrible, disease-causing pathogens if one deprives them of oxygen and, to use the technical language, transforms them into anaerobes. Governments and people had better beware of making the Jews into anaerobic beings. They could have a high price to pay, regardless of what they do, to get rid of these Jews whom they turned into pests [Schädling] by their own guilt.
To Nordau, Zionism was not just a political necessity, it was a call for spiritual rebirth, and many of his readers found themselves agreeing that Jews could be really free only if they were masters not only of their own countries, but of their own healthy bodies. Jewish sports clubs sprang up, often with names reminiscent of biblical warriors: the Bar Kochba (1898) and the Maccabi Union of Jewish Sports Clubs (1902) in Berlin, the Hakoah (‘the force’) in Vienna (1909), and dozens more across Europe. The movement had its own magazines, its own championships and its own idols. How important it was deemed to be may also be seen from the fact that the universal strongman Eugene Sandow chose to publish an article about Jewish body culture in the first issue of his Sandow Journal.
For the leopard-skinned Sandow, as for the proud new Jews, manliness was of prime importance, as Nordau stated with a flourish:
Our new muscle Jews have not yet regained the heroism of their forefathers ... to take part in battles and compete with the trained Hellenic athletes and strong northern barbarians. But morally speaking, we are better off today than yesterday, for the old Jewish circus performers of yore were ashamed of their Judaism and sought, by way of a surgical pinch, to hide the sign of their religious affiliation ... while today, the members of Bar Kochba proudly and freely proclaim their Jewishness.
Nordau was only too happy to accept the role of prophet of the new kind of Jewishness that was so enthusiastically supported by Zionist youth across Europe. Nothing, however, was more hateful to him than to have prophets next to himself. His special venom was reserved for a man who had been, he wrote, ‘obviously insane from birth’ and whose influence on Western civilization had been entirely negative. ‘From the first to the last page ... the careful reader seems to hear a madman, with flashing eyes, wild gestures, and foaming mouth, spouting forth deafening bombast…So far as any meaning at all can be extracted from the endless stream of phrases, it shows, as its fundamental elements, a series of constantly reiterated delirious ideas, having their source in illusions of sense and diseased organic processes.’ This madman was, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Anxious Virility
The struggle against the enfeebling slavery of convention and the desire to become a ‘superman’ were Nietzsche’s dreams, and an entire generation had dreamt them after him. Every single educated person at this time would have been conversant with his work. Some of his books, such as Thus Spake Zarathustra, were read over and over, passed from hand to hand, and discussed as great prophetic utterings, particularly among the younger generation. Of great intellectual subtlety and depth in their ensemble, some of his more declamatory sentences were fatally liable to being quoted out of context. This and the devastating editing work of his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (later a passionate admirer of Hitler), after his descent into madness, made his legacy ambivalent and the thinker himself into a prophet claimed by movements as different as the nihilists of the late nineteenth century and the National Socialists.
What Nordau so despised about Nietzsche was his determination to overthrow all bourgeois values in order to return humanity (or those few who had the strength in them) to a pre-modern paradise of instinct mastered by spiritual force. Nordau, an assimilated Jew, did not want to do away with the blessings of civilization, with discipline and order; he merely thought they were threatened by decadence and wanted to cleanse them by methods carrying unmistakably Darwinist overtones. There is an irony here, of course, which Nordau, with a profound blindness given only to those who will not see, does not appear to have appreciated: dreams of power were much like those dreamed earlier by Nietzsche, and his ideal Muscle Jews were effectively misunderstood Nietzschean supermen with a ‘surgical pinch’, as Nordau himself put it. Nordau’s physical Zionism as well as his wider cultural critique were effectively a weaker second serving of the older man’s revolutionary ideas. The Zionist writer was not alone in suffering this indignity. The cult of strength and manliness that was such a dominant feature of pre-1914 culture was celebrated everywhere in Nietzsche’s shadow.
Eugene Sandow and Kaiser Wilhelm, Dreadnought battleships and duelling, body-building, sailor suits and grand military parades all played their part in the cult of virile strength that was, in part at least, a reaction to the spreading uncertainty about masculine virtues and manliness itself. A new time seemed to demand new models, new identities, and it was true that men appeared to be overwhelmed by the demands placed on them. That, at least, was one of the conclusions French writers drew from the decline in birth rates, and it was certainly one of the reasons for the wave of male neurasthenics washing into the sanatoriums from Switzerland to Scotland.
Writing in 1904, the feminist writer Rosa Mayreder analysed this phenomenon. ‘The “strong fist”, which under other conditions was crucial and formed the legal foundation of his dominion, has become entirely superfluous.’ Those men who, in the face of unforeseeable change, could think of nothing better than clinging on to outdated moral codes were woefully ill equipped for the rush of life in the modern cities:
Modern man suffers from his intellectualism as from an illness ... is it not significant that men, educated to be critical in all questions, remain uncritical for longest when it comes to analysing masculinity? To be masculine…as masculine as possible…that is the true distinction in their eyes; they are insensitive to the brutality of defeat or the sheer wrongness of an act if only it coincides with the traditional canon of masculinity.
This canon was on its way out. Women like Rosa Mayreder were not demanding only the vote and better working conditions; as we shall see in chapter 9, some of them were openly challenging the very cultural values the West had been built upon: the relation between men and women, notions of honour, property and physical courage, patriarchy itself. Even the suffragettes who refused to go that far pushed into male domains and showed themselves determined and effective and in no ways angels in the house. In the early media age, these arguments and their often outrageous protagonists were a daily presence in newspapers and conversations. Cases like the various suffragette trials, the hunger strikes and speeches given by Emmeline Pankhurst and the activism of women like Anita Augspurg caused international media interest, as did strong female figures such as Sarah Bernhardt, Jenny Churchill and Lady Astor.
Male culture reacted to this threat to its supremacy by glorifying manliness in its most traditional form, from the Kaiser’s love of uniforms and the Tsar’s fetishism for detail of military dress to the avant-gardist Guillaume Apollinaire and his sexually charged fast machines, the exuberant, flashy energy of the Futurist Filippo Marinetti, and the place of the military in public life. Never before had so many uniforms and moustaches been worn on the streets of Berlin, Paris and St Petersburg; never before had so many devoured at home openly misogynist expositions of male greatness such as the bestselling works by Otto Weininger and Julius Möbius. All the strutting, parading, twirling of moustaches and polishing of large guns, however, could not disguise the fact that the game was up. Something new would have to replace it - a new form of living perhaps, a new vision of the world.
8
1907: Dreams and Visions
Extinguish all your days and nights!
Eliminate all foreign pictures from your house!
Let rainy darkness fall upon your soil!
Listen: the music of your blood will rise inside you!
- Ernst Stadler, c. 1910
The 256 delegates from forty-two countries, most of them elderly men, who assembled for the opening ceremony of the International Peace Conference in The Hague on 15 June 1907, had only one thing in common: they were not interested in peace treaties which, most of them privately thought, were nothing more than a nuisance and a hindrance to the healthy development of nations. They had simply had to come and sweat it out in their stiff collars, morning suits and uniforms, shut away from the world in the Ridderzaal (normally the gathering place of the Dutch parliament) because popular opinion was excited about woolly ideas, and no state could very well be seen to be against peace on principle. So here they were, the most hard-bitten veterans of international diplomacy, in their pockets a mandate from their rulers not to give anything away and above all, never to agree to any binding initiative that might involve limits on their governments’ actions. Invited to talk peace, they were prepared for battle.
The top brass of the major powers had not been troubled for the occasion, and negotiations on behalf of Russia were left in the hands of the obscure and aged Mikhail Nelidov, whose frequent bouts of ill health confined him to his rooms for the greater part of the negotiations. The United Stated were represented by 75-year-old Joseph Hodges Choate, Britain by Sir Edward Fry, eighty-two, and Sir Ernest Satow, who was merely in his sixties, as was Baron Marschall von Bieberstein (a perfect Prussian complete with twirled moustache and duelling scars), Germany’s former ambassador to Constantinople and now the emissary of Wilhelm II. Constrained by protocol and public opinion to put peace on the agenda, the delegates grudgingly discussed the topic during a plenary session - for a full twenty-five minutes. The remainder of the four-month period of consultations was taken up with a formalization of the rules of war, including regulations governing the use of mines on land and on sea, the treatment of enemy merchant ships during times of war, the rights of neutral countries, and so on. When the final declaration was signed by all participating powers on 17 September, the cause of world peace had not been advanced an inch. On the contrary, behind the scenes secret agreements had been reached between some of the great powers. While the attending governments declared themselves satisfied with the results of the conference, other, non-governmental participants were seething with anger and frustration. For one of them especially, the indefatigable Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Baroness Bertha von Suttner, this was an historic chance missed, a tragedy for humankind.