Modris Eksteins

This is history through a cultural lens. Eksteins posits that World War I was a key event in shaping our modern age from a cultural standpoint in addition to the many other ways already recognized. Germany lost its military war, but the postmodern avant-garde movement that drove it won the world over - through the subsequent despondency, the heavy preponderance of a destructive instinct. The fast-paced anything-goes life that we lead today, the worship of youth and defiance of tradition and show more authorities, began here. This is a case where political action presaged cultural change. Unaddressed is whether the formula can be reversed. Can we predict political events based upon observable cultural trends?

Eksteins sets the stage by looking at a series of significant moments within the frame of larger events: the debut of Stravinsky's ballet from the title, the crowds in Berlin who pressured the Kaiser into declaring war, and the Christmas 'truce' of 1914. These establish the starting points, illuminating initial cultural attitudes: German openness to the new, stemming from its own youthful beginnings, versus staid British and French morality firmly resting on tradition and historical values. The Russian Ballet was embraced by the former, but nearly started a riot in Paris. The German rationale for war was made much more understandable for me here than how Barbara Tuchman described it in "The Guns of August", even if I still find it difficult to fathom.

This is followed by examining the catalysts of change that emerged during the war: Germany's headlong introduction of revolutionary war methods that defied conventions (poison gas, flamethrowers, submarines); a shifting in western nations' driving sense of duty that saw them through the war but created a longer-term ebbing of its effects; and the impact on Germany's communal fighting spirit and identification with the state as it met with the realities of wartime. Also considered here is the alienation felt by soldiers in light of the dichotomy between experiences in the trenches and at home.

The results could be seen in art: the Dada movement, veterans who painted scenes from the battlefield or who shared their experience in fiction and non-fiction. More could be seen in the international influence of American culture, which began taking hold and would be further amplified after World War II. Esksteins presents the decade of the Roaring Twenties as not a relief from war and hedonistic indulgence in peacetime, but as an age of worldwide repression of memory. The Great War had inquired too baldly into the meaning of life, and an answer was not forthcoming. The only alternative was to dodge the question while dodging despair. Esksteins carries forward his motif of structuring his argument around key events: the successful crossing of the Atlantic by Charles Lindbergh, and the publication of Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front".

The similarity of feeling between post-war western nations and pre-war Germany feels more to me like coincidence than an expansion or a passing on. For Britain and France, it arose from the devastation wrought by war that cast a shadow over past values and beliefs. Some passages made me think of how another author of history will one day examine the impacts of the Covid pandemic on the 2020s and perhaps find eerie parallels from a century earlier: "Freedom was no longer a matter of being at liberty to do what is morally right and ethically responsible. Freedom had become a personal matter, a responsibility above all to oneself." Eksteins' skewering of the Nazi regime is spot on, striking at it more precisely in just a couple of pages than entire other volumes can manage, presented as the apotheosis of irrationalism. He is wonderful with description and imagery, making me wonder if he missed a calling in producing fiction. I only regret his absurd fondness for exclamation marks! show less

Much ink has been spilled in trying to locate the fons et origo of modernism, and Modris Eksteins is not the first historian to suggest that it occurred on or about the evening of May 29, 1913 at the Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps.” Eksteins’ social history, however, is as thoroughly compelling as any, re-introducing you to characters in both the balletic production, but also the broader cultural mise-en-scène: the eccentric Diaghilev and Nijinsky, the show more founding of the Ballets Ruses. The totally arrhythmic music, the spasmodic modes of dance, the wildness of that May night was far too much for the audience. “The ballet contains and illustrates many of the essential features of modern revolt: the overt hostility to inherited form; the fascination with primitivism and indeed with anything that contradicts the notion of civilization; the emphasis on vitalism as opposed to rationalism; the perception of existence as a continuous flux and a series of relations, not as constants and absolutes; the psychological introspection accompanying the rebellion against social convention” (p. 52). Had this primitivism been wholly confined to the stage, it may not have caused the outright riot that it did that night. But in many ways, the performance was symbolic of a number of other paradigm shifts in culture and politics which can be seen as leading up to the Great War.

While it begins with no political concerns, “Rites of Spring” does move on to all the territory you would expect of a book with the subtitle “The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age.” The unification, industrialization, and modernization of Germany is synthesized nicely with the more explicitly cultural effects this wrought – the rise of a certain vitalistic German idealism, especially seen in the eminent German social critics of the time, an increasing prevalent Kulturkampf, and the eschewal of what was perceived as the weak, bourgeois liberalism of the French and English. Not only did many Germans seek out a kind of Nietzschean transvalutation of values, but they saw this as inseparable from their innovative modes of warfare, especially toxic gas and submarine technology, which they saw as attempts to assert the superiority of the German Geist. (For a fuller treatment of these particular themes, see Fritz Stern’s excellent “Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology.”)

The sections “Reason in Madness” and “Sacred Dance” discuss the extreme effects that trench warfare wrought on soldiers, painting a stark picture of the origin of the term “shell shock.” Feelings, sympathy, and memories couldn’t survive on the battlefield; failure to expurgate them would lead to insanity. Just as he tried to delouse himself as regularly as possible,” wrote Jacques Riviere, “so the combatant took care to kill in himself, one by one, as soon as they appeared, before he was bitten, every one of his feelings. Now he clearly saw that feelings were vermin, and that there was nothing to do but to treat them as such.”

Eksteins also talks about disillusionment, which he claims, believably, never took hold in Germany during the War as it did in England and France. Where it did exist, it was much more common among the civilians than the fighting soldiers, though “the language and literature of disillusionment would on the whole be a postwar phenomenon – everywhere.” Literature describing the permanent psychological effects on soldiers is much older than the Great War, but it is rarely given the important consideration that Eksteins gives it.

One of the most compelling vignettes here is Eksteins’ extended re-telling of Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight in May, 1927. Contemporaries saw his feat as a point of historical torsion, enabling both a revival of the imagination, a rebirth of individualism, and Dionysian will. But it was also a sign for all that was gone and would never be regained. “Freedom was no longer a matter of being at liberty to do what is morally right and ethically responsible. Freedom had become a personal matter, a responsibility above all to oneself. The modern impulse before the war had possessed a strong measure of optimism, springing from a bourgeois religion of meliorism. That optimism had not disappeared entirely by the twenties, but it was now more wish than confident prediction. Its landscape was one of destruction and desolation, not simply the barrenness that the avant-garde had so despised before the war” (p. 267). show less

With the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War approaching this coming year, I thought it was high time I reacquainted myself with some histories of the era. I'm embarrassed to say that I've never read this award-winning cultural history of the War, its antecedents and its aftermath - but what a book! Eksteins moves audaciously from the Russian ballet, to trench life, and onwards to the flight of Charles Lindbergh with ease, making connections all the while and drawing upon a huge show more range of source material. Though it's not uniformly coherent (the last section in particular, which tried to draw parallels between Nazism and kitsch, had me scratching my head), it's clear why this book was showered with praise and prizes on its release, nearly a quarter-century ago. It's an amazing piece of work. show less

This is a fascinating, though episodic book that touches, in turn, on:

* The debut of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring ballet as staged in Paris;
* World War I, specifically trench warfare as viewed by its participants through their letters and writing, with a long section on the spontaneous fraternization between enemy soldiers during Christmas 1914;
* The frenzy caused by the arrival of Charles Lindbergh in Paris (and later other European capitals) after his solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1927;
* show more The publication of and reaction to Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front; and
* The Rise and Fall of Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Of these, World War I takes up the bulk of the book and is the most fascinating. The Rite of Spring section is used to set the scene and describe the culture that existed before the war, but this connection is not particularly convincing, though the story of the debut is interesting in itself. But when Eksteins starts writing about the Great War, the book becomes a true page turner. Never before had I been so immersed in the day-to-day life of soldiers in the trenches or read such a good description of the almost miraculous in retrospect Christmas truce. The only shortcoming, as the author admits, is that most of the writing about the war comes from intellectuals and writers rather than working class soldiers with less of a literary bent. Still the story rings true, and Eksteins is especially convincing when he writes of the sense of duty that drove soldiers on both sides to follow orders and march straight into the certain death of withering machine gun fire. He does make a clear distinction between the morality of the two sides, however. In comparison to the more grounded French and English, he portrays the Germans as enthralled in a fantasy of their own making that allowed them to justify their use of "total" war and the first use of gas as a weapon. This section is not for someone who wants to undertstand all the whys, wherefores, logistical details, and eventual resolution of the war--it is for someone who wants to get into the minds of the men who actually had to fight it.

After the war, the book skips to 1927 and the overwhelming (and life-threatening) adulation Charles Lindbergh received upon his arrival in Paris. The author asserts, convincingly, that the extreme reaction was a direct result of the war that ended less than nine years earlier.

The publication of Remarque's anti-war novel is another chapter in the world's evolving reaction to the war, with many accepting it as a true story, although Remarque's time in the trenches was fairly brief and many of the scenes in his book could have been (or maybe were) lifted from other authors. In time, a reaction set in, especially among those who would eventually form the nucleus of the Nazi Party that began to take control of Germany in 1933.

The last section of the book, about the Nazis, is the least successful. Ecksteins' psychological take on Hitler, Goebbels, and the other Nazi leaders has some credibility, but it is much too short a part of the book to make a sustained, convincing argument and comes off very much as an afterthought.

This is one book where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. The Rites of Spring is well-written and almost consistently fascinating, but the connections the author makes between the events it describes are not always completely convincing and sometimes come across more as personal opinions than well-reasoned historical conclusions. Which is not, at all, to dismiss this book. What is does well, it does very well indeed, and I haven't read another book about the period that presents as engrossing a portrait of World War I than this one does.

As an aside, in his notes the author refers to permissions to use illustrations--but the Kindle version didn't include any! They are hardly necessary when the book itself is so well-written, but I still feel a bit shortchanged. I'll have to look for this book at my local library to see what I missed. show less