by Philipp Blom
Running through the raped countryside of bomb craters, rotting limbs, and half-mummified corpses, the narrator finds himself with a bayonet and is confronted by a German soldier. At this moment, moral considerations count for nothing:
I’ve risked grenades, cannons, mines, fire, poison gas, machine guns, the whole anonymous, demoniac, precise, blind machinery. I’m going to kill a man. Mon semblable. A monkey. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Just the two of us now. Just fists, just knives. No feeling. I jump at the enemy. I slash him, slash him, slash deep in the neck. Bloody butter. The head’s almost ripped out of place. Windpipe’s tough as nails. I’ve killed the Kraut. I was livelier and quicker than he. More skilled. I struck first. I’ve a greater sense of reality, being a poet. I’ve acted. I’ve killed. Just a shit that wants to live.
A war that made murderers out of poets, rendering them not fighting heroes but simply shits who want to live, without higher goal, without any greater justification than naked survival, could and did turn honest men into monstrous alter egos of themselves. When they returned, they found it almost impossible to talk about their experiences, about the change that had taken place within themselves, and they continued to live in fear that their brain might be the brain of a criminal, their hands the hands of a murderer, that they would wake up one day and find that Mr. Hyde had won, that Jekyll could no longer turn back into his former self.
While Hollywood horror struck the fear of God into its viewers with visions of a creation that was not divinely sanctioned and the terrible consequences that followed, serious scientists were also interested in the metaphor of the body as machine. In 1919, the Scottish anthropologist and anatomist Arthur Keith had published The Engines of the Human Body, in which he described the human machine as a system of levers (bones), internal combustion engines, and a “telephone exchange” (the central nervous system). But the idea of mechanizing humans was popularized most energetically by Fritz Kahn, a German doctor who lived a peripatetic life between the United States, Germany, and Palestine. Having grown up partly in Hoboken, New Jersey, and in New York, Kahn went to school in Hamburg, Bonn, and Berlin, where he also studied medicine. During the war, the young doctor served on the Western Front and in the Alps, the scene of entrenched battles and particularly vicious shelling. In early 1918 he suffered a breakdown and was sent to recuperate with a farming family in the Tyrol.
Returning from a prolonged trip to Algeria, Kahn became engaged in social projects. An ardent Zionist since his student days, he was active on behalf of Jewish charities and traveled to Palestine in 1921. In the following year, he opened a gynecological practice in Berlin and also began writing popular medical books in which he consistently described the human body as “the most highly performing machine in the world.” His works owed their considerable success in part to their lavish illustrations, striking plates showing the inner workings of the human machine, complete with a command center in the brain, where little men in white coats ran operations; the arteries as a system of pipes; the liver transforming sugar and cleansing the plant on a conveyor belt system with attentive workers; and so on. As a metaphor, not only was man the machine easily understood, but its determinism also lent itself to being applied to social and political questions.
Man as machine: Fritz Kahn’s explanation of the workings of the human body, 1922.
By now a popular figure, Kahn was invited in 1926 to become scientific advisor to a large exhibition in Düsseldorf devoted to health, social questions, and physical fitness, where he was responsible for questions surrounding “the hygiene of the Jews”—a testimony to the organizers’ inherently racist way of thinking. Kahn himself, incidentally, was not immune to biological determinism. In his book Unser Geschlechtsleben (1937; English trans., Our Sex Life, 1942), he introduced the sexual characteristics of a “normal man” and “normal woman,” noting that men had high foreheads indicating intelligence and decisiveness, whereas women’s low foreheads were testimony to their sentimental nature and readiness for self-sacrifice.
Cogs in the Machine
HUMANS AS MACHINES, either metaphorically or literally as mechanically enhanced cyborgs, haunted the imagination of the interwar years. It was a very modern nightmare, born not only out of the experience of the war but also of city life and the Taylorized work in the factories. In 1936 Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times would go one step further and tell the story of a worker whose humanity rebels against the mechanization of his existence and who is eventually swallowed whole by the huge machine of which he has become a tiny, organic part.
Mechanization was frightening, but not for everyone. The heartland of these dreams of a perfect plan for a flawless society of the future was revolutionary Russia, known as the Soviet Union after uniting with some of the smaller former tsarist states in 1922. After the terrible bloodletting of the civil war, after the executions and the famines and the epidemics, after the constant hunger and the disastrous early government initiatives, the new empire appeared to some to be settling down to hope, and to thinking about how to realize a dream of justice and equality that was as old as humanity itself.
Not everyone took so optimistic a view of the developments in the new state. The crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion had appalled many sympathizers in the West, and even in Russia itself many idealistic socialists had become disillusioned. But while Comrade Stalin secured his hold on power with an ever-widening net of secret police spies, jails, torture cellars, gulags, and executions, many committed younger intellectuals and artists still thought that they could realize utopia—and often continued to think so until the Cheka knocked at their own doors in the small hours of the morning.
Among those keeping faith with the revolutionary idea and the possibility of utopian renewal was an engineer and poet, Alexei Gastev, who had been a communist activist since his student days. His engagement had led him to be excluded from the Moscow Pedagogical Academy and had caused him to be banished to Siberia three times, until he finally emigrated to France in 1907. In Paris, he had worked at the Renault car factory and had observed first hand the introduction of Taylorism, the gospel of efficiency and labor optimization preached by the American pioneer Frederick Winslow Taylor, who had analyzed product streams down to individual sequences of movements executed by the workers on the factory floor and had propagated a series of changes designed to save effort and time and thus increase productivity. Taylor viewed the individual workers in a factory as little more than parts of a machine, and improved on their efficiency not by making their work pleasanter or safer but simply by making them more efficient.
Swallowed by the big machine: Charlie Chaplin as a deranged worker in Modern Times, which was seen by many as too critical of modern capitalism.
On his return to Russia on the eve of the Revolution, Gastev became a trade unionist and made himself the prophet of Taylorism, and he found an interested listener in Lenin, with whom he corresponded. After the establishment of the Soviet state, Lenin made the rapid industrialization of the huge but hugely backward empire his greatest priority, and he turned to the engineer to introduce the miracle of labor saving to the factories. “The war taught us much,” Lenin wrote, “not only that people suffered, but especially the fact that those who have the best technology, organization, discipline and the best machines emerge on top; it is this the war has taught us. It is essential to learn that without machines, without discipline, it is impossible to live in modern society. It is necessary to master the highest technology or be crushed.”4
In 1920, as a step toward the realization of the dream of a fully industrialized Soviet Union, Lenin had helped Gastev to set up the Central Institute of Work, which was devoted to analyzing work practices and training workers in how to work more efficiently. Gastev threw himself into his task like a man possessed, his goal the realization of the total, machine-like efficiency of factory work and ultimately of every aspect of life in the new society.
Gastev’s veneration of the “iron messiah” knew
no bounds. He thought of machines as his “iron friends” and saw the crashing, whistling, grating, and screaming of the factory as the music of the future. Eventually, he believed, even the cumbersome process of democratic decision making would be taken over by competent automata, able to evaluate facts far more objectively than humans. His shining example of transformation at the workplace and its social implications was arch-capitalist Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company and the man who introduced the moving assembly line in his factories. Ford not only had written My Life, an autobiography that went through multiple editions in its Russian translation, but also had expounded on the hidden morality of work in other books.
In his Machinery, the New Messiah, Gastev sang the praises of his new gospel of Fordism, which not only was a way of increasing productivity but also introduced clean, moral living to the workers. “A clean factory, clean tools, accurate gauges, and precise methods of manufacture produce a smooth working, efficient machine,” Ford had written, while “clean thinking, clean living, and square dealing” would produce a good home life.5 At the time, however, Ford’s factories were no Sunday schools, but arenas of ruthless competition in which the workers were but cogs in a machine honed to perfection. “A great business is really too big to be human,” Ford opined. Gastev admired this pitiless determination and its hugely successful outcome. The Soviet Union was importing Ford cars and tractors by the tens of thousands, and he was convinced that the communists must learn from their ideological adversary. Amerikanizatsii, “Americanization,” became the watchword of the day.
The goal of this process was nothing less than a total transformation of society. In the new order, Gastev wrote enthusiastically, machines would set the course and people would follow, performing standardized gestures and living standardized lives. All aspects of life would be optimized for efficiency and uniformity, including not just housing and education but also language, food, thoughts, and sex. The ideal person was to be regarded as a production unit, evaluated only according to its efficiency and named with a combination of neutral letters and numbers, “soulless and devoid of personality, emotion, and lyricism—no longer expressing himself through screams of pain or joyful laughter, but rather through a manometer or taximeter. Mass engineering will make man a social automation.”6
At the Central Institute of Labor, workers had to learn to perform their tasks strapped to machines that ensured maximum efficiency of their movements. Every task was photographed and described in diagrams and “cyclograms,” and the resulting improvements were transmitted to factories around the Soviet Union. Battling shortages of tools and scientific instruments as well as food and heating fuel for his institutes, Gastev tirelessly pushed forward the gospel of an eventual total mechanization of society, regardless of opposition from the workers and of other Bolsheviks. When the German writer Ernst Toller visited the institute, he described rows upon rows of trainees in identical work clothes standing at identical work benches and being taught to obey the electric signals of a machine, repetitively, day after day, for up to six months per course.
To the enthusiasts of revolutionary planning, such daily monotony was nothing less than a social ideal. The Society of Contemporary Architects was founded in 1928, and its members saw their mission as something much larger than just putting up houses for the proletariat. Their aim was to “alter radically the structure of human life—productive, social, and personal,” by imagining and constructing structures that were “social condensers” in a great surge of Soviet urbanism. The workers’ houses were to be arranged in communes, each of which was to have its own dining hall, club, wash house, kindergartens, cultural spaces, and parks. In contrast to the petty bourgeois habits of the past, property and the tasks of daily living were to be shared freely, and life was to be organized according to scientific principles. One architect helpfully drew up a “graph of life” intended to regulate the daily routine of workers, as well as the planning priorities of urbanists:
1.Lights out. 10:00 P.M.
2.Eight hours of sleep. Reveille. 6:00 A.M.
3.Calisthenics—5 min. 6:05 A.M.
4.Toilet—10 min. 6:15 A.M.
5.Shower (optional 5 min.) 6:20 A.M.
6.Dress—5 min 6:25 A.M.
7.To the dining room—3 min. 6:28 A.M.
8.Breakfast—15 min. 6:43 A.M.
9.To the cloakrooms—2 min. 6:45 A.M.
10.Put on outdoor clothing—5 min. 6:50 A.M.
11.To the mine—10 min. 7:00 A.M.
12.Work in the mine—8 hours. 3:00 P.M.
13.To the commune—10 min. 3:10 P.M.
14.Take off outdoor clothing—7 min. 3:17 P.M.
15.Wash—8 min. 3:25 P.M.
16.Dinner—30 min. 3:55 P.M.
17.To the rest room for free hour—3 min. 3:58 P.M.
18.Free time. Those who wish may nap. In this case they retire to the bedrooms. 4:58 P.M.
19.Toilet and change—10 min. 5:08 P.M.
20.To the dining room—2 min. 5:10 P.M.
21.Tea—15 min. 5:25 P.M.
22.To the club. Recreation. Cultural development. Gymnastics. Perhaps a bath or swim. Here it is life itself that will determine how time is spent, that will draw up the plan. Allotted time: four hours. 9:25 P.M.
23.To dining room, supper, eat, and to bedrooms—25 min. 9:50 P.M.
24.Prepare to retire (a shower may be taken)—10 min. 10:00 P.M.7
By 1938, the institute and its seventeen hundred branches had trained more than half a million workers according to the new system. Gastev was awarded the Order of the Red Flag for his work, one of the highest decorations of the Soviet Union. He was even allocated an apartment in a Moscow building housing many of the most famous writers and intellectuals of the Soviet Union. There, on September 8, 1938, agents of the secret police arrested him and took him away. Accused of being a counterrevolutionary conspirator and condemned to death during a half-hour hearing on April 14, 1939, he was shot the following day.
Gastev’s fate was shared by tens of thousands of enthusiastic revolutionaries who suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of internal Kremlin power struggles or policy changes, or simply were chosen to fill execution quotas imposed from above. His faith in a technological future in which the entire Soviet Union would be one enormous, gleaming machine animated by anonymous production units of flesh and blood, a vast landscape of steel, concrete, and asphalt glorifying the world revolution, would live on, if not in the way he himself had hoped. His writings and beliefs animated a swath of science fiction novels. The most famous of these, Yevgenii Zamyatin’s We, was written in 1921 but not published until 1927, after the author had managed to have the manuscript smuggled out of the country. The novel is set in One State, a police dictatorship in the future, in which individuals are known only by a combination of letters and numbers. The narrator and the chief engineer of One State is D-503, who initially lives a comfortable life enhanced by occasional visits from his lover, O-90, assigned to him for impersonal sex visits. In One State, people live out their utterly uniform lives in glass houses to facilitate supervision by the secret police and do exactly as they are told.
Spinning out of control: Tsiga Vertov’s utopian vision of Homo sovieticus as a perfect machine part.
When D-503 is confronted with a woman who breaks the strict rules and shows signs of personal traits and desires, he is appalled but strangely fascinated. Shortly afterward he begins to dream in his sleep—a sure sign of mental trouble, according to the state authorities. He becomes involved in an illicit love affair that results not only in a pregnancy that was not sanctioned by the all-knowing administration but also in his lover’s being smuggled out to another life, where she will be able to keep her child rather than be forced to give it up for adoption. D-503 has to pay a high price for this act of foolish individualism, as his last diary entry reveals. He is overpowered, tied to a table, and subjected to a “great operation” on his brain, after which he will function “like
a tractor in human form,” like thousands of his fellow citizens who have also been operated on.
Another fictional treatment of Gastev’s soulless utopia was Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 film Aelita, Queen of Mars, in which the queen malfunctions and diverges from her strictly laid-out aristocratic existence after watching a dashing young Russian engineer on Earth through her telescope. In the futurist world on Mars evoked in the film through striking constructivist sets, love is not supposed to be part of the system, and Aelita falls afoul of other members of the elite, only to be rescued by her interplanetary sweetheart, who has built a spaceship and flown over. In Protazanov’s rendering, the distant planet looks remarkably like Gastev’s imagined future Russia, only on Mars the shiny world of the elite is supported by an army of slave workers much like those who would appear in Metropolis two years later.
Concrete Utopias
IN GERMANY, THE IDIOM OF A NEW WAY of living very consciously opposed to the heavy drapes and knickknacks of the Wilhelminian time and its war-mongering ethos had one name: Bauhaus. Like the torn, contradictory country full of new beginnings that housed it, the Bauhaus art school was in many ways pursuing ideals that were mutually exclusive. Remembered today mainly for its functional design and architecture, the ancestor of the huge wave of often blandly functional buildings of the 1960s and 1970s that used Bauhaus methods without its spirit, the school’s ambitions were much more comprehensive and aimed at nothing less than a revolution of all areas of life.
The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar by Walter Gropius, a visionary architect whose elegant Fagus shoe-last factory in the German town of Alfeld was erected in 1911 and is one of the earliest examples of the new style of architecture, which almost ostentatiously eschewed all ornament. With its emphasis on straight lines and materials such as glass, concrete, and steel, its functionality and industrial efficiency were as indebted to Taylor and Ford as Gastev’s dreams of a mechanized society in the USSR were.