by Philipp Blom
Wherever Talmeyr looked in the colonial exhibition, he found nothing but ‘nullity, buffoonery, gross alteration, or absolute falsity’, impressions made to titillate and to fulfil stereotypes, but never to present something genuinely new. Instead, everything had become stagework, nothing was as it seemed:
We are here, it seems, in the most legendary Spain, and this time there is indeed a well-done reproduction of great fidelity and delicacy. I feel, in these old walls, in this broken well, in these small columns which are crumbling, in a coat of arms that is obliterated, five centuries of mystery and sunshine ... Then I look, I observe more closely, and I notice, above the door, in the patina of the stone, the tracing of Gothic letters ... I approach, and what is it I make out?
Simply: Menier Chocolate ...
To Talmeyr, the world of mass consumption was necessarily a world of economically motivated lies, and it would be absurd to ask anything else of it. Entering the grounds of the World Fair meant agreeing to its rules, just as entering a department store entailed, or rather allowed, a delicious suspension of disbelief that made all shoppers rich and free of troubles for a little while:
An exposition must, above all, be an exposition, which is to say a certain type of didactic banking whose first goal is to attract, to hold, and to attract and to hold by the exclusive means of the bank ... Truth, history, common sense, will be arranged afterward as best they can. So ... why, in English India, do the panther, wild boar, partridge, elephant, monkey, ibis and serpent present themselves all in a family and form this touching commune? Because this fable gathers them together, and what matters, above all, is to gather them together. And why is starving India incarnated in well-coiffed, well-nourished, well-clothed Indians? Because famine is not and never can be an attraction ... And why does Andalusia - in the time of the Moors - recommend Menier Chocolate to us? Because the authentic Moors and the Authentic Andalusia do not, according to all appearances, sufficiently allow for advertisements, and an exposition is not going, never has gone, and never will go without advertisements.
If the World Fair brought the world to the capital, new means of transport brought the inhabitants of the big cities into the wider world. Vienna’s Sommerfrische, Trouville, Biarritz and other seaside towns in France; cheap hotels and workers’ holiday homes throughout the rural regions in Germany and the Baltic Sea resorts - they all allowed Europeans to leave the haste and intensity of the city behind for a few days or weeks.
Earlier industrialized, and more open to developments from across the Atlantic such as Coney Island (the legendary place of relaxation in which New Yorkers exchanged the heat of the city with the heat of the amusement park), Britain was the unquestioned champion of seaside holidays. The railways brought the sea within everybody’s reach, and the piers in Blackpool and Brighton with their spectacular architecture, music halls, theatres and other popular entertainments were only the largest in a quasi-interminable list of more or less famous seaside resorts from Bognor Regis to Westward Ho. Blackpool alone was host to some 3 million visitors around 1900, 4 million by 1914 - roughly one in ten Britons visited the seaside town that year. Many more went to alternative destinations. Agreeable as it was to many, the invasion of the masses was perceived by some as an affront to good manners, but it was a necessary part of the whole, as Georges d’Avenel pointed out:
[It] would doubtless be more pleasant for each Parisian to own the Bois de Boulogne all by himself, or with a small number of friends, rather than share its enjoyment on holidays with 500,000 other proprietors. But it is precisely the glory of Progress to have created this congestion in making accessible to all an outing which used to be very remote.
The world itself, it seemed, was coming closer, and it became increasingly difficult to flee the crowd, the speed and strain of city life, the din of traffic, and the persistent visual assault of advertising.
The cultures of consumption and of industrially produced convenience and entertainment, of ‘bread and cinemas’, were one of the key aspects of the age of the masses. Where slowly evolving traditional structures - regional origin, religious faith, guilds and the estates - had been the main factors delineating identities since the dawn of civilization, other constructions were now taking over, powerfully aided by urbanization and the mass media. A man who thought of himself as a Protestant from a village in Provence, a wine-grower like his father, might see no future in the rural life, and so might decide to pack up and become a factory hand in Paris. In his new life he might become a loyal reader of Le Matin who particularly enjoyed the sports section and serialized novels, a fan of the novel series of Fantomas crime movies, a socialist, a member of an allotment gardening association, and a supporter of the Paris Football Club - an identity composed of individual choices. He might also be married to a woman from the overwhelmingly Catholic Brittany and proclaim the family’s social ambitions by giving their children traditional French names, or turning for inspiration to the French Revolution, Greek mythology, sports heroes, or popular stars.
The engine of these choices, industry and its mass-produced goods, had asserted itself in people’s daily lives with discrete but formidable force, often transforming not so much the appearance of things as their very fabric; literally so in the case of the ready-to-wear clothes and shoes people wore. The taste of Mr and Mrs Average might have changed little since the 1870s - indeed it might have been driven further into historicizing neo-Renaissance or neo-medieval fantasies by the insecurities engendered by social change - but the availability and price of their objects of desire had. Many could now afford modest luxuries and make personal choices in catalogues or department stores, they could buy newspapers and cinema tickets, and could take the family for a week’s holiday at the seaside. By going about their day-to-day lives, they made themselves part of a fully globalized economy, the last link in the chain: they read the same papers as millions of their peers, ate meat imported from New Zealand and Argentina, wheat from Russia and Canada, and had milk delivered by industrial dairies and tea and coffee from the colonies.
New Tribes
People’s world-views, their hopes and aspirations and their loyalties, were no longer what they had been a generation earlier. Political ideologies transmitted themselves via large party networks and newspapers. Hundreds of thousands organized themselves in trade unions and in political parties corresponding to the social realities of industrialized societies. Women’s organizations defended women’s interests, socialist and communist parties made themselves champions of the working poor, conservative parties defended the interests of the haves against those of the have-nots, and the liberal movements in Europe expanded from enlightened Whiggism to an emphasis on economic freedom and reform in the French radical mould.
Young people organized themselves in sports clubs and associations like the German Wandervogel movement and conquered the world in bands of teenagers cut loose from society at large - a first recognition of youth as a world in itself and not just a kind of deficient adulthood, a group demanding recognition, entertainment, identity.
Their demands were heard only dimly: youth culture as such, a world of ‘cool’ with its own clothes, customs, music and consumer goods, would not exist for another sixty years. For the time being, youth was accorded little or no value, as the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig recalled:
Someone wanting to advance [his professional career] had to use every masquerade imaginable to appear older than he was. Newspapers recommended patent medicines to make beards grow faster, young doctors of twenty-four or twenty-five, just after their exams, wore mighty beards and golden glasses even if they had no need of them, just to give their patients the impression of being ‘experienced’. One wore long, black frock coats and walked slowly, if possible with a slight embonpoint, to incarnate that desirable settledness; and the most ambitious tried to disown their real, suspiciously unsolid age …
Young people as consumers were a resource largely untapped by industry; they had not yet become a
commercial, urban tribe. There were no special clothes for the young once the boys had outgrown their short trousers. There were no cultural events for them alone; no places where they could meet away from school. Children’s magazines catered for the tastes and excitement of young teenagers and there were popular novels for juvenile audiences, but none of these constituted anything like a youth culture. The foundations for the later changes, however, were laid already: the changing status of women and the first stirrings of a sexual revolution, a longer youth for middle-class children because of time spent in secondary and tertiary education, the formation of clubs and associations and, of course, the explosive energy of young artists from the German expressionists to the young people around the Stephen sisters in London’s Bloomsbury.
New tribes needed new rituals, new ways of common living, demonstrations of cohesion and power such as the communist Mayday marches which regularly attracted hundreds of thousands of participants in Europe’s large cities, and moments of collective communion such as soccer matches, in which the life-and-death struggle for existence was played out vicariously on the central turf. In Britain alone, 12,000 football clubs with 300,000 players were registered with the Football Association in 1910, and an event like the FA Cup Final could attract more than 100,000 spectators. Other sports events, such as the tennis championships at Wimbledon or important cricket matches, also drew large crowds, and at the turn of the century twenty-five London newspapers were entirely devoted to sport.
These new tribes were a central fact of the emerging social order. A realignment of identities was taking place everywhere, leaving most people suspended between their traditional communities (religious faith, regional origin and customs) and new communities - half chosen, half imposed - of life in the modern city. As villages close to industrial sites or mining operations boomed into urban prosperity, they created whole cities with their own civic culture, often centred on popular pursuits rather than the preoccupations of the elite. There was more likely to be a first-rate football ground, with stands for tens of thousands of visitors, than a first-rate public library or opera house. In addition to this, political rallies, workers’ education clubs, sports clubs, trade unions and co-operatives provided additional focal points for social life. Democratic choices about culture were powerfully asserting themselves.
The choices offered by mass society were particularly marked for women. Decent, cheap dresses in fashionable fits and colours were now available on every high street. Wearing reform clothes instead of corsets meant that they could breathe freely and no longer be subject to picturesque fainting fits, that they could function as social equals to men, and that they could enjoy and demonstrate their independence by playing sports. Bicycling women in baggy trousers, a scandalous sight to many, were one of the iconic motifs of the popular press.
The availability of things, the lure of the possible satisfaction of all dreams, increased both the range of possible experiences and the psychological pressure. Looking at the advertising sections of newspapers in France, Austria and Germany (less so under the more restrictive obscenity laws of Britain and Russia) that were mainly directed at male audiences - satirical journals, sports papers - one is struck by the predominance of sex. Pages are filled with ads for condoms, for ‘interesting photographs’, erotic literature, remedies for impotence and ‘sexual neurasthenia’, hair and beard tonics, tinctures, pills and electric belts to improve virility and make men more impressive, more masculine. Sex and the cult of masculine force were more publicly present than they had ever been a decade earlier, as recorded in a Berlin reportage by the pioneering journalist Hans Ostwald:
In front of a shop window. Inside, rows and rows of books. Many show a lascivious female head. Several carry a wrapper:
‘Interesting! Formerly forbidden!! Really fascinating! Revelations about the fast set!!’
An early example of female independence.
Others [books] offer information about marital issues. Flagellation books with revolting illustrations on the cover. And at the very front of the window are photographs with banderoles:
‘Formerly confiscated!’
And in front of it: young and old gentlemen, and very young boys and girls, looking at this strange world with eyes wide open.
‘Yea - man - I’m gonna buy that,’ says a twelve-year-old boy to his neighbour.
Communities of Consumption
The new communities of consumption, the new tribes, were communities of fears as well as dreams. At the centre of these fears was the trade-off between certainty and opportunity at the heart of the new tribal society (others call it ‘the modern project’) itself. If ideologies could be chosen like dress styles and furniture, this freedom came at the price of an established identity, of protection from tradition, Church, and established principle. Looking in the mirror, people found a face of almost Cubist facets staring back at them. Given more opportunities than ever before, and exposed to the growing rush and clamour of a myriad different voices, people found they were no longer made of one piece, that there was no single perspective that described them adequately. They had become many things, unfamiliar things. Not everyone who saw this fragmentation in his inner looking glass could live with the resulting image.
One of the most perceptive contemporary observers of the interchange of destruction, transformation and construction around him was Georg Simmel (1858-1918), a German-Jewish scholar whose financial independence allowed him an intellectual freedom that a university career would not have afforded him - a fact he discovered to his cost when a lecture he gave at the university of Berlin in order to become eligible for a professorship (the Habilitation in the German system) was boycotted because the young philosopher had dared to contradict a senior professor in public.
A Jewish boy born in the very centre of bustling Berlin and who had lost his father as a young child, Simmel was in many ways predestined for close observation, an outsider looking in. He spent his working life at the margins of the academic establishment and published a series of books and articles that brought him international renown. The titles of many of his essays read like seismographic records of his time: Two Forms of Individualism (1901); Spiritual Life in the Metropolis (1903); The Philosophy of Fashion (1905); The Philosophy of the Sexes (1906); The Fragmentary Character of Life (1916): ‘The characterization of life as a fragment can claim reasons,’ Simmel wrote in this last work, ‘... often individual life is experienced thus [as fragmentary], as if in a hidden layer or in God’s eye there were a perfect whole ... from which innumerable parts break off as soon as it comes into our empirical reality.’ Being alive in the modern world entailed damage, fragmentation.
A central paradox governed the relationship between the individual and his or her new power to choose in a consumer society: while mass production furthered not only membership of a tribe, but also personal, individual choice as an assertion of personal preference and taste, industry itself depended on looking at people not as individuals, but as types, as averages. For managers and product planners no individuals existed, but only budgets, sizing charts, bell curves, fashions, markets. Marketing and advertising worked to close this gap. They associated perfectly anonymous products with faces, gave them a personal appearance, a little homely warmth.
Amid the growth of the new, old things suddenly seemed more precious, motivating people to document vanishing worlds and ephemeral moments. The photographer Eugène Atget haunted the streets of Paris to preserve what he saw and what could not last; August Sander made his first great portraits of Germans at work; the Russian Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) took an astounding series of vivid colour photographs (using a camera produced according to his own designs) of monuments and peoples of the Tsar’s empire; and the Briton Benjamin Stone founded the National Photographic Record Association in 1897. Preservation was the order of the day. Founded in 1895 and devoted to preserving country houses and other sites of historic interest, the National Trust in Britain was r
ecognized by law in 1907. The Dürerbund in Germany, 1902, aspired to fulfil a similar role, while in France sites identified as patrimoine national were protected by a law passed in 1905, and Austria gained a highly official ‘Imperial and Royal Monuments Commission’ in 1911.
We have moved away from the cinema, but its luminous revelation was a key sign of the times. It provided not only entertainment but a race of demigods appearing to their devotees in a blaze of light, the apotheosis of the individual. More than ever, technology had now taken control of people’s dreams, and authors and engineers competed to innovate and expand the technical and aesthetic possibilities of film.
There was another cinema-related event in 1911, though it went all but unnoticed. The great French firms had quickly found that it was best to install their studios in the bright and sunny south of the country, where natural light could be used instead of expensive and accident-prone high-voltage lighting. In October 1911 the American David Horsley, thinking along the same lines, went to California to open the first cinema studio there, the Nestor Studios. As a convenient location he chose a hilly suburb of Los Angeles, a village by the name of Hollywood, where he set up shop on the dusty but grandly named Sunset Boulevard.
13
1912: Questions of Breeding
The man who is thoroughly healthy in every respect simply cannot act badly or wickedly; his actions are necessarily good, that is to say, properly adapted to the evolution of the human race.
- Hugo Ribbert
Seven hundred men and women from across the civilized world crowded together in the corridors and lecture halls of London’s University College to hear speeches and to participate in seminars and discussions led by some of the most distinguished experts in the world. They were doctors and university professors, politicians and biologists, theologians and feminists, social reformers, philosophers, statisticians, anthropologists and eminent natural scientists, and they had all come to debate the one idea that most of them considered the chief foundation of a better future: the genetic improvement of the human race.