by Philipp Blom
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 un
derstood 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 inte
rlinked 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.