The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  The loss of integrity of the self, of a personality with clearly defined borders and a solid core which people felt in their social experience was further amplified by science. Instead of building the solid basis predicted by the positivist nineteenth century, advanced research and theory dissolved all certainty. They smashed the very matter into empty atoms and swirling electrons, twisted and distended time and space, showed dark powers and invoked a lurking, invisible reality: living people could be made to look like skeletons by X-ray machines; the mysterious rays from uranium could fly through solid objects; telegraph signals were whizzing through the air unseen; electricity could be sent over great distances and could be made to tickle, turn on a light bulb, power a locomotive, even to kill. None of this accorded in any way with the limited range of direct experience that people could rely upon from their senses. According to experience, physics was and still is Newtonian, time and space were the same for everyone, objects were solid. But experience was wrong, a mere projection of the mind, which in itself was part social construct, part illusion. As science expanded human possibilities and vastly increased human knowledge about nature, it also sapped any sense of direction, of purpose. More knowledge went hand-in-hand with less reliance on perception, with a weaker sense of which direction to head in. More knowledge made the world a darker, less familiar place.

  If scientific analysis made the world fall apart, philosophical reason poured acid over the remaining truths. William James trenchantly proclaimed that truth was simply what was useful. Bertrand Russell explained that the very term ‘truth’ was a misunderstanding, and others like Mauthner and Wittgenstein questioned whether language could be meaningful at all. Ernst Mach was adamant that there was no such thing as a self, while Freud believed that not only the self, but even its morality, were individual, narcissistic constructions. Against all this, only Henri Bergson’s vitalism appeared to offer some sort of salvation for instinct and experience, but it, too, rested on a critique of ‘spatial’ values, the very quantifying mind that had proven such a powerful tool for constructing new things and administrating existing ones. The comforting certainties of German idealism, Kant’s critical reason and Hegel’s obsessively methodical world spirit, were broken on the wheel of uncertainty. Nietzsche remained, but his poetic language meant that he could be claimed by anyone, that his intentions were endlessly disputed, that there was no authoritative legacy to hang on to.

  Avant-garde artists mirrored this dissolution of personal integrity and authoritative myth. Figures were splintered, heads were smashed into fragments and multiple perspectives existing simultaneously, none of them more authoritative than the other. The shrapnel of the exploding outside world pierced the figures shown; borders between self and environment had broken down. Musicians such as Gustav Mahler mirrored this feeling as they let melodies interrupt one another, vulgar military marches riding roughshod over exquisitely turned phrases, sentiment distorted by sentimentality or undermined by irony. Stravinsky’s Sacre blurred musical structures into a series of atmospheric moments and vicious assaults, while Arnold Schönberg went even further by using the breakdown of form and tradition as a tool with which to split music into its smallest constituent parts.

  The very basics of life - time and space, physical integrity and personal identity - had been robbed of their solidity by the tide of change sweeping across the West, and as tribes of consumers replaced the estates of old, the loss of authenticity, of uniqueness and of unquestioned selfhood was keenly felt.

  The Cult of Unreason

  The new world taking shape in the 1900s was a creature of reason, of experts and scientists, statisticians and engineers. Until this era, reason had demystified the world, tearing away the veils of superstition in the tradition of Descartes, Hume and Kant. Evidence and deduction had taken over from revelation, from faith.

  Now reason no longer fulfilled this function. Philosophical reason had attacked its own constituent parts (language and perception) and echoed Nietzsche’s description of truth as a ‘mobile army of metaphors’, constantly changing formation to meet its enemy. As the society of reason was hurtling into an uncertain future, rationality aroused suspicion and the feeling of vertigo described by so many witnesses elicited a strongly irrational response. if reason was not providing certainty but breaking it down, salvation must lie in instinct, in primeval forces, many intellectuals proclaimed. The result was a search for ancient certainties, for mystical truth, a fascination with the unconscious, a celebration of violence and spontaneous action and of war, an anxious manifestation of manliness and virile strength. As reason undermined the world, unreason - the timeless realm of instinct and inspiration, of impulse and irrationality - promised to remedy the widespread feeling of emotional and intellectual alienation.

  Unreason has always had a role to play in Western history. It is the driving force behind the Greek tragedies, the spiritual goal of medieval mysticism, the sublime or the thing-in-itself of the Enlightenment. To the Romantics of the turn of the nineteenth century, it blossomed into the Blue Flower, the elusive ideal of all artistic and spiritual life. It was there in Coleridge’s opium dreams, in Shelley’s ecstatic verse, in Hölderlin’s poetic search and madness, in Pushkin and in the Marquis de Sade. Now it became both a political force and a phenomenon of mass culture. Dreyfushaters in France chose unreason in the face of irrefutable evidence to manifest their disgust with what they perceived as the degeneracy of modernity, while avant-garde artists were fascinated with the archaic instincts and aesthetics of pre-industrial and pre-Christian societies. Mystics like Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner attracted a substantial following by choosing spiritual vision over reasonable doubt; Kaiser Wilhelm had a famously short attention span and constantly wanted to do something. Unreason could be worshipped in many ways.

  The prophet of this turn-of-the-century counter-culture had been Friedrich Nietzsche, whose celebration of Dionysian will and ultimate self-overcoming was read (wrongly perhaps) as gospel by a whole generation of young Europeans. Nietzsche famously denounced the morality of his day as a slave morality, and his indictment gained a new and powerful resonance. The sexual morality of the day condemned many young women to ignorance and nervous fear, while encouraging young men to find release in the arms of prostitutes, strictly separating lust from ‘higher’ feelings and dividing women into virgins and whores.

  As the speed of change gathered momentum, reason and instinct seemed increasingly estranged. All instinct is ultimately sexual, and the battle lines were drawn along sexual frontiers: the relationship between men and women was being questioned socially as well as erotically, leaving men, in particular, anxious and bewildered and looking for solutions. The question of unreason was a sexual question.

  It was Sigmund Freud’s genius to recognize this at this time and to make the irrational and sexuality central to understanding psychology. Freud described the revolt of unreason at the individual level and his concept of the subconscious made reason little more than a metaphoricizing gloss over ungovernable lust, a buoy bobbing haplessly on a sea of unrecognized desires. This analysis and its artistic expression centred particularly on Vienna, the capital of pathological sensitivity to questions of identity, to language and its pitfalls, to the limits of rationality. The canvases of Egon Schiele showed subjects falling prey to their impulses, exposing themselves and burying themselves in the loneliness of convulsive embraces. His works were often sexually explicit but never joyful - logbooks of inescapable erotic slavery. In nearby Prague, the young Franz Kafka began to narrate and investigate the dimension of the mythical in the personal, of deep structures at work under a seemingly everyday surface. Kafka’s central myth was biblical, while Freud drew his inspiration from ancient Greece, but their projects resemble each other and have the same resonances at their cores.

  To antisemites and prophets of race such as Guido von List, Houston Stewart Chamberlain or Edouard Drumont, a pseudo-scientific notion of descent and mystical deep stru
ctures simply denied the force of reason altogether. The highest race (representing, without exception, the writer’s own ethnic group) was automatically right in all its actions and instincts. Its impulses were healthy and sanctioned by nature, its actions necessarily good. No argument could question this. These utopias constituted a true revolt against reason, which they identified with the ‘soulless rush’ of modernity, with degeneracy and an ominous, corrosive Jewish influence on culture. Rationality condemned itself; any argument against this utopia was further evidence of conspiracy. ‘Jewish reason’ had corrupted the world; ‘inferior races’ and ‘degenerates’ had undermined the alleged purity of the race. The goal was to return, by way of a violent cataclysm, to a primeval harmony with Destiny, to a primeval community based on a spiritual essence, the very antithesis of the modern tribes.

  The revolt of unreason was a revolt against modernity itself. It held the idea of an ancient and immutable essence of man against the unstable identities of city folk, it articulated itself in the male backlash against early feminism, in violence and the cult of manliness, in reactionary politics. But it was not backward-looking in all its aspects: it also played an important role in Futurism, avant-garde art and ‘scientific’ racial theories, in mysticism, and in the careers of men as different as W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Adolf Hitler and Mark Rothko. The cult of unreason was important to movements as seemingly incompatible as abstract modernism and fascism.

  But we are getting ahead of ourselves. At the beginning of the book, I invited you to try a thought experiment, to imagine a plague of document-devouring bookworms depriving us of all information about the twentieth century after July 1914. Only this somewhat unlikely perspective can, I think, allow an understanding of this period which is so massively overshadowed by the events that followed and is too often treated as a hostage to historical inevitability, can give back to this period its open future. We all know what happened in August 1914 and how the War (and perhaps the second Thirty Years War, 1914-1945) marked and marred the face of the century, but in this book I have found it essential to keep this perspective out, to unravel the period from within, interpreting it not retrospectively but as it was viewed by those living through it. Nobody would interpret the 1990s exclusively from the vantage point of 9/11, blaming the world for not anticipating what was to come. Similarly, nobody should look at the years before 1914 expecting to find a prophetic awareness of the horrors and preoccupations of the future.

  Before 1914, the process of being rushed into the age of industrial mass production dominated many people’s lives, feelings and thoughts. In spite of Virginia Woolf’s claim, nobody was already fully ‘modern’ around 1910 - nobody is today. Different periods and different ways of seeing the world coexist, not only in societies, but even in individuals. The modernist heroes of cultural history had their personal blind spots which showed them rooted in conventional culture: Schnitzler despised experimental painting (he gave a devastating account of a show including paintings by Viennese modernists and called Egon Schiele an ‘affected charlatan’) and thought little of avant-garde music; Picasso was indifferent to music and had never heard of Schnitzler; Stravinsky never visited a theatre without a professional reason, and his taste in paintings was decidedly conservative. Mentalities and identities have a way of interweaving across the generations, creating composite and fractured selves, and this in itself is an integral part of modernism, notably dramatized by the fragmentary character of modernist art and philosophy.

  The identities of the ‘new’ men and women of this time (an important rhetorical trope in contemporary literature) were always torn between old loyalties and new aspirations, between nostalgia and social reality. They were transitory and haunted by fragility, by decline, by impotence, and they were always struggling to catch up with the social realities changing around them. Change occurred too fast; rationality had outstripped experience, people felt locked inside a runaway automobile like Henry Adams, or, with Max Weber, on a train whose points had not been set. The acceleration without direction made them dizzy. Vertigo was everywhere, cutting across cultural and ideological divides. Writers of the day spoke of themselves and others not only as New Men and New Women, but also, in German-speaking countries, as Übergangsmenschen, people in transition. Nothing was the same any more, and nothing had yet settled into a new, fixed shape. Our own world and our intellectual and emotional horizons were shaped by these transitional people. Fear and exhilaration formed an extraordinary creative tension, the origin of almost every idea and social phenomenon that would come to dominate the twentieth century - socialism and fascism, nuclear physics and the theory of relativity, conceptual art and consumer society, mass media and democratization, feminism and psychoanalysis. In many ways the twentieth century merely played out the dreams and the nightmares arising in the creative ferment of 1900-1914.

  In Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities the protagonist Ulrich muses about the era he is living in:

  Stuffed shirts: consumer identities.

  Was there really a war in the Balkans or not? Some intervention was bound to be taking place; but he was not certain whether it was a war. So many things were moving humankind. The record height for aeroplanes had been raised once again; a proud affair. If he was not wrong it was now at 3,700 metres, and the man was called Jouhoux. A negro boxer had beaten a white champion and conquered the world title; Johnson was his name. The president of France was going to Russia; people were speaking of a danger for world peace. A newly-discovered tenor earned sums in South America which were unheard of even in North America. A terrible earthquake had hit Japan; the poor Japanese. In a word, a lot was going on, the times around the end of 1913 and the beginning of 1914 were momentous indeed.

  Notes

  1. 1900: The Dynamo and the Virgin

  page7Sauvage, a schoolteacher: Jean Sauvage, Eine Reise nach Paris von Jean Sauvage, Oberlehrer, Berlin, 1900, 2.

  7 ‘by tourist guides’: ibid., 3.

  7 ‘advertisements with me’: ibid., 16.

  7 ‘Bois de Vincennes’: ibid., 22.

  8 ‘Tendeur pour pantalons’: ibid., 25.

  8 ‘in advanced civilization’: quoted in: Frederic Mayer, The Parisian Dream City, St Louis, 1900, n.p.

  10 ‘has claimed victory’: ibid., 40.

  10 ‘to individual atoms’: ibid.

  11 ‘the most expressive’: Adams, 380.

  13 ‘have explained it’: J. de Maistre, Trois Fragments sur la France, in Œuvres inédites du comte J. de Maistre, Paris, 1870, 9. Translation by Theodore Zeldin.

  13 ‘and twentieth centuries’: Jacques Bertillon, La dépopulation en France, Paris, 1911, 7.

  14 ‘itself in plaster’: Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, ‘Sur la défunte exposition’, Revue des deux mondes, November 1900, 396.

  14 La France juive: Edouard Drumont, I, 6.

  15 ‘literal sense of the term’: René Gonnard, La dépopulation, Paris, 1898, 85.

  15 ‘life of tomorrow’: quoted in Winock, 35.

  18 ‘terrible ... terrible disaster’: Maksim Gorky, The Philistines, 42.

  19 ‘an ocean liner’: Vogüé, ‘Sur la défunte exposition’, 394.

  20 ‘as far as possible sexless’: Adams, 11.

  2. 1901: The Changing of the Guard

  25 ‘Lamb of God’: quoted in Wilson, 472.

  25 ‘their own might’: Tuchman, 54-5.

  27 ‘waters are upon us now’: Edel, Leon ed., Henry James’s Letters, vol. IV, 1895-1916, Cambridge, Mass., 1984, 184.

  27 ‘pleasure and comfort’: quoted after Cannadine, The Decline, 349.

  31 ‘keeping it up’: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act I, Scene 1.

  32 ‘had become accustomed’: Lvov, quoted in Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 49.

  35 ‘ostentation, indeed presumption’: Musil, 66-7.

  36 ‘the cheapest hospice’: quoted after MacDonough, Prussia, 124.

  37 ‘with astonishing rapidity’: in conv
ersation with the author.

  39 ‘boating with the Kaiser’: quoted after Blackbourn, History of Germany, 366.

  40 ‘ring of racing people’: quoted after Cannadine, The Decline, 349.

  41 ‘more reality than appearance’: quoted after Giles MacDonough, Prussia: the Perversion of an Idea, London, 1995, 137.

  41 ‘no sense of proportion’: Spitzemberg, 528, 29 April and 20 May 1911.

  3. 1902: Oedipus Rex

  46 ‘Dr Emil Fronz’: Weiner Zeitung, 18 March 1902, 1.

  49 remembered of his youth: Stefan Zweig, 92.

  50 ‘warm, comfortable existence’: ibid., 15-20.

  50 ‘that of operetta’: Bruno Bettelheim, ‘La Vienne de Freud’, in Vienne, 1880-1938, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1986, 33.

  51 The Daisy Chain: more commonly translated, after the film by Max Ophuls, La Ronde.

  54 ‘into [self-]reproach’: quoted in Gay, Freud, 92.

  54 prevent facts from existing: Gay, Freud, 52.

  54 ‘during the night’: Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, New York, 1911, 189.

  55 ‘in normal functioning’: ibid.

  55 ‘to this day’: ibid., 308.

  57 ‘interested in that’: Schnitzler, Fräulein Else, 113.

  58 ‘life passes you by’: Schnitzler, Ruf des Lebens, Act I, Scene 1.

  58 ‘a coherent way’: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Ein Brief’, in: Der Brief des Lord Chandos, Stuttgart, 2000, 50.

  58 alone, and silent: ibid., 50-1.

  59 ‘of psychological anaylsis’: Ernst Mach, The Anaylsis of Sensations (1897). Translation by C. M. Williams and Sydney Waterlow.

  61 ‘every cliché killed’: Karl Kraus, Die Fackel, 319-320, 31 March 1911, 19.

  61 ‘funeral orations for it’: Hermann Bahr, ‘Die Moderne’, in Die Wiener Moderne, Stuttgart, 1981, 189.