by Philipp Blom
It was not over. Instead, it would turn into what historians have called Europe’s “second Thirty Years’ War,” from 1914 to 1945. The so-called interwar years, then, were not so much years of peace as, to paraphrase Clausewitz, a continuation of war by other means. The new fronts ran between classes, between town and country, between ideologies, between rich and poor, and between ethnic groups. Perhaps these conflicts came closer to a manner of resolution during the late 1920s as economies stabilized and attitudes softened, but the global economic slump following the Wall Street crash hardened minds and conflicts once again as poverty and the fear of destitution exposed the fault lines anew.
IN JUNE 1940 Adolf Hitler tried to vanquish not only Europe but history itself. On a survey of his troops in Belgium, he visited the military cemetery at Langenmarck, near Ypres. The name Langenmarck had a mythical ring to Germans. It was here, on November 10, 1914, that young German soldiers had shown real patriotic spirit as they charged the enemy with the national anthem, “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,” on their lips as they gallantly faced the enemy, as the official reports from the front had noted and as newspapers had embellished the event in subsequent weeks. Most of these brave young soldiers had been students of Germany’s top universities, and most of them had given their lives that day on the field of honor. Adolf Hitler himself, then stationed twelve kilometers away, later wrote about the event in Mein Kampf, claiming to have heard the soldiers singing as they went to their deaths and remembering how the anthem had spread to all German trenches until the enemy was faced with a singing front line, breathing and fighting in unison.
It was a myth, of course, a mixture of wartime propaganda and fervent wishful thinking. The attack had taken place “to the west of Langenmarck,” as the official reports shrewdly put it. The accurate place name, Bikschote, was not fit for a German myth. The name of the next village had a more heroic ring to it; it brought to mind Bismarck. In the course of a fight that would become known as the Battle of Ypres, there was a German attack made by a regiment consisting of mainly young, almost untrained troops. Some of them were students, though probably not even one in twenty. One or two of these might have been studying at one of the old universities.
There was also singing on this day and one of the songs appears to have been the national anthem, as several reports suggest, but that was behind the front. In any case, experienced soldiers said, run full out through the mud of a Belgian turnip field after an exhausting march, clods of thick soil sticking to your boots, and then try to sing anything at all, never mind a melody as ponderous as “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,” the theme of the slow movement of a Haydn string quartet. Singing or not, two thousand young men from one regiment were killed in a single day as they stumbled toward the enemy trenches and were mown down by machine guns, most before they could even make it to the trench.
But the Langenmarck myth had grown. Germany needed tales of heroism in this increasingly squalid and hopeless war. Langenmarck associations had been formed, a memorial was commissioned, poems were written, and speeches were made extolling noble sacrifice and true heroism. The notion that these young people knew how to die for their country was a paradoxical refrain recurring in solemn lead articles and sermons. Hitler set foot on sacred ground when he visited the cemetery in which the soldiers who had senselessly perished that day had been buried. It was Germany’s very emblem of the war, an already sublimated memory of the death of its sons and of its empire. The “Greatest Führer of All Times,” as he liked to be styled, always had an eye for symbolic gestures. At Langenmarck in 1940 he declared Germany’s First World War finally to be over. Providence had spoken. His historic act came five years early.
IT IS THE TRAGEDY of the interwar period that it did not have an open future. The vertigo years, 1900 to 1914, are often wrongly thought of mainly as a prewar time necessarily culminating in war. But even in the early summer of 1914 nobody knew that there would be war, and certainly nobody could envisage the kind of war and the intensity of devastation it would wreak on human lives, economies, and fundamental certainties. It was a time coming to grips with its own modernity, and endowed with an open future. The Great War was anything but inevitable, and it is only the terror of this cataclysm and its seeming senselessness that have left later generations looking at the years before and endlessly trying to piece together clues, often neglecting the fact that great events frequently do not have strong and logical causes, that disaster can stem from even diffuse networks of attitudes and oversights, incompetence and misunderstandings.
The feeling of mystification and helplessness is a legacy of the interwar years, of course, and it was dealt with in two ways. On the one hand, there were the strong explainers, usually those who were ideologically committed. Depending on their ideological family, they blamed the war on the capitalists, the Jews, the military, decadence and modernity tout court, or a mixture of these.
The second reaction sought not so much an explanation as a refuge. In the decade after 1918, artists and writers had already begun to cast a new, nostalgic light on the period before 1914, which they had all lived through. In operettas, novels, poems, memoirs, and historical accounts, the prewar era was being bathed in the kind, golden rays of nostalgia, producing the notion of a time of stability and order. This was quite different from how the period had actually been experienced at the time, and it added to the impossibility of explaining the industrial slaughter that erupted out of it. As the early postwar years lurched from crisis to civil war, blame and nostalgia were equally out of place but equally powerful. One aggressive and the other sentimental, they were two sides of the same coin.
The forces unleashed into the societies of the West during the period between 1918 and 1938 exacted a terrible toll. Most of the millions who were killed perished in the Soviet Union, but every Western country had victims of political violence to mourn. The peace was fragile at best; the next war, a continuation of the first, was waiting in the wings. Societies that would have had to learn to deal with the memory and the legacies of the war had no time to heal. Plunged into a war again after Hitler’s rise to power, they suffered a second catastrophe.
The long-range consequences of this dynamic can still be felt today, even after the fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany. It is present in the composition of our populations: African Americans in urban centers in the United States, Jews and other emigrants across the world. It is present in Germany’s continuing aversion to inflation, in the specter of the Holocaust in Western memory, in the existence of the United Nations and the state of Israel and the situation in the Middle East, in America’s cultural hegemony over the Western world, in the change from German to English as the main language of science and the global spread of English, in the speedy decline of the colonial empires and its aftermath, in Islamic fundamentalism as an answer to godless Western politics, and in the sound of our popular music and its goddesses, whose lives are a far cry from that of early jazz diva Mamie Smith, but who are still fulfilling the same promise: to bring the street into their music.
The street has stayed in our music. When jazz exploded into a torn and confused world, it changed the way we hear. The culture associated with it did not only permeate our lives in the shape of dirty notes and driving rhythms; its proud vindication of rebellion and marginal identities would also give us rock, hip-hop, and rap. The street has stayed in fashion, too, and in the notion of black cool. It is a culture of revolt that has become our culture, and it had its first stirrings as a mass phenomenon in the interwar period, before being hit hard by the war that followed and the conservative climate in the years afterward. It would rise again as a revolt of the children in the 1960s, and its anthems carried the echoes of the clubs, the concert halls, and the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance.
The entry of the street into the cultural mainstream and into high culture is exemplary of wider changes. Many of them had already begun before 1914, but the immensely democrat
izing disillusionment of the postwar years meant that some people simply refused to take any notice of the values and borders that had existed before the war, while others went on the attack against anything they perceived as bourgeois, middle-class, safe, restrictive, and constructed out of lies. The millions of Americans who frequented speakeasies every day during Prohibition had simply voted with their feet. Their morality was different from that of the lawmakers—many of whom were sitting at the bar themselves.
The experience of the war acted as a catalyst for modernity. By subjecting millions to the absolute authority of planning, training, mass production, standardization, and logistics, it hastened the arrival of the new. Its effect was later intensified and distorted by political mistakes with devastating economic and cultural consequences. On a global scale, the Wall Street crash hardened the economic and political climate and led to new eruptions of violence and hostility. In Germany, the hyperinflation of 1923 caused a further erosion of optimism and socially cohesive attitudes. Together these two developments and their aftereffects broke the recovery of the 1920s and facilitated the rise of fascism.
To Europeans, and in a more mediated form also to Americans, the war framed the experience of the decade following it and informed the events of the 1930s. From our more distant perspective it is possible to see it in a different light. Neither of the world wars was the defining event of the twentieth century; both are almost side effects of the same vast revolution, the revolution of modernity, of technology, and of the Enlightenment.
Historians of mentality such as Michel Foucault have drawn a straight line from Immanuel Kant’s cult of absolute reason in the eighteenth century to the concentration camps and the gulags of the twentieth, and they were right to do so—at least in part (in A Wicked Company I have written about this idea of the Enlightenment and its marginalized alternatives). The Kantian and Enlightenment conception of reason released a cascade of developments, innovations, and revolutions. It could, however, also be twisted into a cold rationality that did not hesitate to crush human lives in the quest for progress or even utopia.
Around 1900, as modernity took hold of the great cities with their ever-increasing number of inhabitants, the revolution profoundly changed the ways in which people thought about the world, and about themselves. It also accelerated with enormous might, taking less than a generation to undermine, batter, and eventually crush social structures, moral norms, and traditional ideas that had existed for centuries. History began to outpace humanity, identities became fragile and questionable, and technology developed faster than it could be understood.
This development is still continuing, and the wars, mass murders, ethnic cleansing, and oppression that began in the twentieth century and have continued into the twenty-first are part of this large story, just as the innovation, the liberation, and the deepening of scientific understanding are. Modernity, it turns out, stubbornly remains morally neutral as it continues to unfold and to change our identities with every passing day. Despite this constantly rising tide of change, the social and cultural effects of the interwar period have remained pervasive. Having invited the street into our intimate space, we are all living on the street now. Our lives are more public, with more diversity, a wider tolerance for different social norms, and flatter hierarchies—even if they frequently hide a discrepancy in income that exceeds anything seen in the early years of the twentieth century.
It is immensely tempting to draw parallels between our present and the world between 1918 and 1938, but while such comparisons are seductive, they can also prove to be misleading. Like the Great Depression of 1929, the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 created high unemployment and broke countless lives, especially of people who were hoping for the first time to partake of the amenities and privileges of a middle-class existence. Politicians and economists alike used this parallel to warn of a second global depression with devastating economic and political circumstances, but I believe that what is most interesting is not the similarity between the events but the difference.
Despite a stock market panic comparable to that of 1929, the economic crisis of 2008 did not turn into an economic meltdown with 25 percent unemployment, as in the United States in the 1930s, or more than 40 percent, as in Germany. We avoided this fate because lessons had been learned and institutions created. World markets were more strongly intertwined and governments were more ready to intervene, even if the chosen form of intervention—the bailout of the very banks that had caused the problem—was highly controversial. Indeed, 2008 was replete with resonances of the troubled interwar years: during the euro crisis Germany stood firmly against any policy that might risk high inflation, an attitude profoundly shaped by memories of 1923 and the tide of extremism and totalitarianism that followed.
Perhaps the similarities between the interwar years and our present are to be found on a different plane. Both the interwar years and the first decades of the twenty-first century have been marked by a pervasive sense of insecurity, and in both periods the reasons and possible remedies for this insecurity have been the subject of intensive debates. But while the situation can be analyzed from different ideological perspectives, there can be no doubt that compared with the decades immediately after the Second World War, our lives have become more precarious—not because of a war but because of political choices made by us and on our behalf by politicians elected by us. We are all living closer to personal economic catastrophe than our parents did; even in the protected meadows of academia, job security is largely gone. For decades, this rapid erosion of social rights and protections was covered by the political idea that this was the flexibility demanded by the free market, and that the reward of such risk taking was a chance of immense gains.
The ideological justification of this increasing and willed precariousness even in wealthy countries was carried by a growing distrust of the state, of democracy, and of politicians, who were regarded either as unwilling and unable to make the changes necessary or as not entitled to interfere with individual liberty. The fathers of this neoliberal school of economics, Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, were Europeans who had passed their formative years in the chaotic interwar years and whose conclusion was that state intervention and planned economies were hallmarks of dictatorship and could only lead to economic disaster and totalitarianism. They believed that it was healthier to take ideology out of politics and base the workings of society on the objective, nonideological laws of the free market.
This change of emphasis meant that citizens were no longer regarded as organs of a collective body working in unison, as in fascism, or as cogs in a gigantic machine, as in Bolshevism. Rather, they were seen as independent agents making choices in a free market, governed by principles offering opportunity and freedom without taking sides. The Enlightenment cult of reason and of the common good was replaced by the concepts of rationalization and the maximization of profits, which were applied to a reevaluation of social institutions—infrastructure, schools, universities, prisons, health care, and so on—according to business-driven criteria of profitability and cost-effectiveness. Especially in the United States but also increasingly in Europe, we began to run our societies as businesses. Beginning in the late 1970s and gaining speed in the 1980s, this gospel changed and polarized our societies—but it also provided an umbrella of meaning and necessity under which we could hide from challenges from without as well as doubts from within. For many in the West, the idea of the market became their ideological home. Living in accordance with its guiding providence and iron laws created a sense of stability, of virtue even. But 2008 shattered this collective piety and made millions understand that they had been lied to, that their precarious position was not counterbalanced by a real possibility of getting ahead, getting a better job, or paying for the kids’ college education. As country after country was rocked by the economic consequences of irresponsibility and greed in the American housing market and cynical lending practices by large banks, anger turned to bit
ter disillusionment and millions of citizens retreated from the political process, losing any hope of and even any aspiration to ever being more than a consumer whose value to society is measured by the size of his or her credit line. Politically there is nothing in it, they appear to understand; no real change is to be hoped for, and perhaps politics have ceased to matter. Today, a real revolution would have to turn not against the seat of government but against the headquarters of the corporations whose political, social, and cultural influence has so vastly increased that presidents and prime ministers seem to be little more than decorated puppets placed at center stage for cosmetic purposes.
The consequences of this collective disillusionment, which is in many ways comparable to that suffered by Europeans after 1918, did not express itself through political action. Despite movements such as Occupy, the Tea Party, or European populist right-wing parties, most citizens in the West have remained essentially passive, retreating more deeply into the private sphere, partly because their own precarious situation and the obligations created by private debt are powerful disincentives against rocking the boat. After 1918, and once again after 1929, people were faced with the question “How can I live in a world with values and ideas that have suddenly become discredited?” After 2008 this question has returned. The idea of the infallible market has become a travesty, and the gospel of growth and the myth of meritocracy have collapsed in the minds of many of our contemporaries. But in a world after the demise of the great ideologies there seems to be little or nothing to replace these things, and so they fester on.