Excerpts of Rites of Spring written by Modris Eksteins.
First published in 1989
page 45-46
All major European cities confronted similar problems in the industrial expansion of the last century, but in Paris the example of radical political action had left its mark, and social tensions surfaced twice in particularly vicious form. In the June days of 1848 and during the Commune of 1871 class hatred exploded and destroyed vast sections of the city. More people were killed in one week of street fighting in May 1871 than in the whole of the Jacobin terror, and more of the city was damaged than in any war before or after. The grand boulevards that Baron Haussmann laid out through the clogged center of the city in the 1850s and sixties to give Paris its distinctive urban elegance and cultivated airiness were said to have been designed, in part at least, to restrict the potential for barricades and to give troops both quick access from their barracks and uncluttered shooting galleries against the classes dangereuses in case of civil strife. Political tension was thus a constant in the life of Paris and reflected the general tug of war between past and future.
page 163
Surrounded by masked men during a phosgene attack at Verdun, Pierre de Mazenod was reminded of a “carnival of death.” For many, gas took the war into the realm of the unreal, the make-believe. When men donned their masks they lost all sign of humanity, and with their long snouts, large glass eyes, and slow movements, they became figures of fantasy, closer in their angular features to the creations of Picasso and Braque than to soldiers of tradition. Dorgelès called the gas mask “this pig snout which represented the war's true face.”
page 211
As the war's meaning began to be enveloped in a fog of existential questioning, the integrity of the “real” world, the visible and ordered world, was undermined. As the war called into question the rational connections of the prewar world — the nexus, that is, of cause and effect — the meaning of civilization as tangible achievement was assaulted, as was the nineteenth-century view that all history represented progress. And as the external world collapsed in ruins, the only redoubt of integrity became the individual personality. David Jones looked on the Somme offensive as the last great action of the old world. Until then, the old customs and attitudes still held. What came after, he called “the Break”: “The whole of the past, as far as I can make out, is down the drain.” Similarly Joyce's Stephen Dedalus was provoked to remark, in words reminiscent of Schopenhauer, that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” As the past went down the drain, the I became all-important.
page 246
There at Croydon airfield the reception was even more frenzied and carnavalasque than at Le Bourget a week earlier. People began arriving at the field in midmorning and by afternoon a crowd estimated by many over 100,000 had assembled.
As Lindbergh's plane was finally sighted, a few minutes before 6:00 P.M., all British self-possession dissolved, and the mass of humanity went berserk, breaking through heavy wooden barriers, wire fences, and police cordons — which, reinforced in the wake of the Le Bourget episode, were thought to be adequate to restrain the mob — trampling each other and rushing onto the runway. Seeing the crowd streaming toward him, Lindbergh had to abort his first attempt to land for fear that he would plow into the sea of welcomers. On the second approach he brought the plane down farther afield and began to taxi toward the Imperial Airways control tower, but the crowd was not to be denied. It quickly surrounded the plane and made progress impossible. Lindbergh, mindful of the damage his plane had suffered at Le Bourget, struggled to keep people off, pushing and shoving, but to no avail. Hands, hands, and more hands. They tugged at the plane, pulled at his clothes, grabbed his helmet. An eyewitness:
The police repeatedly charged the crowd to try and clear space around the machine, and the yells and cheers of the people were mingled with the frantic blowing of police whistles. Cars continually sounding their horns attempted to drive through the mob to the rescue.
page 256
As people became less able to answer the fundamental question of the meaning of life — and the war posed that question brutally in nine million cases — they insisted all the more stridently that the meaning lay in life itself, in the act of living, in the vitality of the moment. The twenties, as a result, witnessed a hedonism and narcissism of remarkable proportions. Freudian psychology was eagerly grasped as a justification for this denial of repression, and it became thoroughly unfashionable to be “repressed.” The senses and the instincts were indulged, and self-interest became, more than ever before, the motivation for behavior. The growth of political radicalism was only one manifestation of this development. The rituals of public life were still rooted in the positivistic certainties of the previous century, but the backdrop to the play acting consisted of nightmare and hallucination. “The war had knocked the ball-room floor from under middle-class English life,” recalled Stephen Spender. “People resembled dancers suspended in mid-air yet miraculously able to pretend that they were still dancing.”
page 258
The fads and madcap behavior of the younger generation of the twenties were motivated largely by cynicism about convention in all its forms and particularly about the moralistic idealism that had kept its forms and particularly about the moralistic idealism that had kept busy the slaughterhouse that was the Western Front. Whether the activity was socially circumscribed, like the frantic treasure-hunt parties of the “bright young things” in London's Mayfair, or more widespread like the nudist cult, or still more general, like the yo-yo craze or the new interest in travel or the fascination with film stars, it would be foolish to try to explain such preoccupations solely in terms of more leisure time with the advent of the eight- or nine-hour work day. Intrinsic to the activity was the celebration of life, not in a social or group sense, but as individual assertion against social norms and mores. The inspiration was anarchic. When Josephine Baker made her Paris debut in 1925 at the Théâter des Champs-Élysées, her waist ringed with bananas, carried onstage upside down doing splits, she was symbolizing the extravagance not just of urban bohemianism but of a western culture that as a whole had lost its moorings. For some that “liberation” was exciting, for others disquieting, but the culture as a whole was adrift.
page 290
The war boom of the late twenties and early thirties was a product of this mixture of aspiration, anxiety, and doubt. All the successful war books were written from the point of view of the individual, not the unit or the nation. Erich Maria Remarque's book All Quiet on the Western Front, written in the first person, personalized for everyone the fate of the unknown soldier. Paul Bäumer became Everyman. On this level only could the war have any meaning, on the level of individual suffering. The war was a matter of individual experience rather than collective interpretation. It had become a matter of art, not history.
page 292
Ironically, during the war French and British soldiers had become the “frontier” personalities identified with the avant-garde and with German Kultur as a whole before the war; they were the men who had experienced the very limits of existence, who had seen no man's land, who had witnessed horror and agony, and who, because of the very experience that made them heroes, lived on the edge of respectability and morality. Given the failure of the postwar era to produce the apocalyptic resolution promised by wartime propaganda, the whole social purpose of the war — the content of duty and devoir — began to ring hollow. Since the tangible results of the war could never justify its cost, especially its emotional toll, disillusionment was inevitable, and soldiers in the postwar world withdrew from social activity and commitment.
page 293
The burden of having been in the eye of the storm and yet, in the end, of having resolved nothing, was excruciating. The result often was the rejection of social and political reality and at the same time the rejection even of the perceptual self — only dream and neurosis remained, a world of illusions characterized by a pervasive negativism. Fantasy became the mainspring of action, and melancholy the general mood. Carroll Carstairs ended his book A Generation Missing in 1930 with the words “It's a weary world and the raspberry jam sent me from Paris is all finished now.”
page 304
Nazism involved, perhaps first and foremost, a love of self, not the reality of the self but the self that is reflected in the mirror. This narcissism was projected into a political movement and eventually came to encompass an entire nation. The reflection in the mirror, the image the Nazis had of themselves — blond, blue-eyed, strong as Krupp steel, eternally youthful, with a Nietzschean will to power — that was the myth. Behind the myth, though, was a total inability to define self in any conventional terms. Yet in the narcissistic complex, existence becomes a matter of aesthetics, a matter of turning life into a thing of beauty, not of right, or of good, but of beauty. Walter Benjamin pointed in this direction when he said that fascism was the “aestheticizing of politics.” But fascism was more than just an aestheticizing of existence as a whole. “The German everyday shall be beautiful,” insisted one Nazi motto.
Nazism was an attempt to lie beautifully to the German nation and to the world. The beautiful lie is, however, also the essence of kitsch. Kitsch is a form of make-believe, a form of deception. It is an alternative to a daily reality that would otherwise be spiritual vacuum. It represents “fun” and “excitement,” energy and spectacle, and above all “beauty.” Kitsch replaces ethics with aesthetics. Kitsch is the mask of Death.
Nazism was the ultimate expression of kitsch, of its mind-numbing, death-dealing portent. Nazism, like kitsch, masqueraded as life; the reality of both was death. The Third Reich was the creation of “kitsch men,” people who confused the relationship between life and art, reality and myth, and who regarded the goal of existence as mere affirmation, devoid of criticism, difficulty, insight. Their sensibility was rooted in superficiality, falsity, plagiarism, and forgery. Their art was rooted in ugliness. They took the ideals, though not the form, of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century avant-garde, and of the German nation in the Great War, and by means of technology — the mirror — they suited these ideals to their own purpose. Germany, the home of Dichter und Denker,* of many of the greatest cultural achievements of modern man, became in the Third Reich the home of Richter und Henker,* the incarnation of kitsch and nihilism.
* Poets and thinkers.
* Judges and hangmen.
page 311
Nazism took as its point of departure the subjective self, feeling, experience, Erlebnis, and not reason and the objective world. That objective world was simply discarded. It could provide no hope, no warmth, no consolation. When Hitler returned from the war (WWI) he had no job, no homeland, no profession, not even an address. In conventional terms he was nothing, a nullity. All that he possessed of a positive nature was his conviction of his merit as an artist and his war experience. He was able to define himself not in any standard social terms, only in terms of personal emotions and a style — an aesthetic sense about how things must be done and the way in which meaning ought to be given to life.
page 312
It was Hitler's style, his oratorical talents and his remarkable ability to transmit emotions and feelings in his speeches, that took him to the leadership of the ragtag party of misfits and adventurers that he joined in Munich in 1919 an that called itself the German Workers' Party... Early on, to arouse a sense of belonging, of “community,” the party began to emphasize the importance, above everything else, of ritual and propaganda — the flags, the insignia, the uniforms, the pageantry, the standard greetings, the declarations of loyalty, and the endless repetition of slogans. Nazism was a cult. The appeal was strictly emotion. The assault was on the senses, primarily visual and aural. The spoken word took precedence over the written. Drama, music, dance, and later radio and film were accorded more importance than literature. Nazism was grand spectacle, from beginning to end. In a country devoted for centuries to its “poets and philosophers,” all this was new.
page 314
If the tendency of modernism, from its roots in romanticism, was to “objectify the subjective,” to translate into symbol subjective experience, Nazism took this tendency and turned it into a general philosophy of life and society. For the French collaborator Robert Brasillach, fascism was poetry — “the poetry of the twentieth century.” For Hitler, life was art, his movement a symbol.
page 323
As the years went by, more and more attention was paid to the staging of party functions, particularly the annual September rallies at Nuremberg. These became the piėces de résistance of the Nazi festal cycle. “Seven days yearly,” as Francois-Poncet put it after finally attending one of these staged festivals, “Nuremberg was a city devoted to revelry and madness, almost a city of convulsionaries.”
The enthusiasm was kindled by meticulous attention to detail: high-precision parades, forests of banners, carefully rehearsed catechetical speeches. At the end came Hitler. His concluding oration was timed to end as night fell. The rally would close under the magical spell of Speer's “cathedral of ice”: hundreds of searchlights pointing to the sky. Of the grandeur of the rally he witnessed, Nevile Henderson said, “I had spent six years in St. Petersburg before the war in the best days of the old Russian ballet, but for grandiose beauty I have never seen a ballet to compare with it.” That he should have been provoked to such a comparison is not accidental. Albert Speer, who designed the visual effects for the rallies, was very interested in the dance theories of Mary Wigman. Her ideas about “choirs of movement” that would “conquer space” were in turn influenced by Émile Jaques_Dalcroze and Rudolf von Laban, who became ballet master of the Prussian state theaters. All these people had either worked with or been stimulated by the Russians.
page 327
The quip “When I hear the word culture I reach for my gun” became so popular that its origin was attributed to virtually every leading Nazi. It captured the petit bourgeois resentment of the regime toward intellectuals and also expressed the movement's refusal to allow itself to be associated with ant traditional social group. Kultur was to be stripped of its elitist implications and given a genuinely populist meaning. Culture was a matter of people, the Volk, not of intellectuals.
page 328
One is tempted initially to accept the designation of Nazism as “reactionary modernism,” but the implication of such a description is that Nazism used the tools and technology of modernity in an attempt to impose on Germany a vision of the past. As we have argued, that would be to misinterpret, in fact to reverse, the central thrust of the movement in the context of its age. Postwar Germany inherited from the imperial era, especially its last decades, an aggressive urge to expand, to establish its predominance, at least on the continent of Europe, which was still regarded as the center of the world. She had been in the pre-1914 age the national incarnation of rebellion against the bourgeois Anglo-French epoch of materialism, industrialism, and imperialism. At the same time, she was also its offspring: the personification of youth, rejuvenation, and technical efficiency. Her defeat in the war paralleled the death of a young generation, and her frustrations were emblematic of the frustrations of the confused, neurotic, rebellious survivors who in droves everywhere in the twenties took up the torch of the prewar avant-garde and turned rebellion against the hated bourgeois into a matter no longer of individuals, or even of one nation, but of an entire generation. Germany remained the foremost national representative of that revolt. The Great War was the psychological turning point, for Germany and for modernism as a whole. The urge to create and the urge to destroy changed places. The urge to destroy was intensified; the urge to create became increasingly abstract. In the end the abstractions turned to insanity and all that remained was destruction, Götterdämmerung.
