"The most discordant composition ever written. Never has the cult of the wrong note been applied with such industry, zeal, and ferocity"
First of a 3-part series based on the book "Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age" by Modris Ekstiens, about the evolution of the modernist spirit in Western Europe. In this episode I discuss the tumultuous 1913 premiere of the ballet "The Rite of Spring", plus the growth of modernistic Germany prior to WW1.
To explore further:
Email feedback and suggestions to talkingmodernism@gmail.com
Photo credit: Joffrey ballet 2013 production of The Rite of Spring, NPR
"The most discordant composition ever written. Never has the cult of the wrong note been applied with such industry, zeal, and ferocity"
First of a 3-part series based on the book "Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age" by Modris Ekstiens, about the evolution of the modernist spirit in Western Europe. In this episode I discuss the tumultuous 1913 premiere of the ballet "The Rite of Spring", plus the growth of modernistic Germany prior to WW1.
To explore further:
Email feedback and suggestions to talkingmodernism@gmail.com
Photo credit: Joffrey ballet 2013 production of The Rite of Spring, NPR
Welcome! To the third episode in the series, “Talking Modernism”, the podcast about the 1920s and 30s, and how our grandparents and great-grandparents changed the world. I am your host, Michael Hauptman.
Over the next 2 episodes, I am going to talk about the spirit of modernism, that is, the mindset, motivations and values, that characterised Western Europe in the interwar period of the 1920s and 30s, the height of the modernist period. It is a dramatic story about how that society sought to adapt its way of life to a world undergoing profound change by embracing radical new approaches to art, politics and ethics. In that period we can identify the mindset that let to many positive aspects of current Western culture, especially its emphasis on the rights of the individual regardless of race, creed colour or gender. But on the other side of the coin, the interwar period also saw the creation of Soviet Communism, Italian facism and German Nazism, all to some degree also a consequence of the modernist spirit.
Now, normally a topic as complex as this would be a touch overambitious for an amateur enthusiast like myself to tackle, but luckily, someone has already done the heavy lifting for me. This podcast is very much based on an excellent book called “Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age”, published in 1989 by the Latvian-Canadian historian Modris Eksteins. In his book, Eksteins uses a series of events, commencing with the tumultuous premiere of the radical modernist ballet “The Rite of Spring” in Paris in 1913, and concluding with Hilter’s suicide in a ruined Berlin in May 1945, to explain how he believed the modernist ‘spirit” in Europe grew and developed over that period. Its a fascinating and unusual book, almost a historical fable, as Ekstiens ties together artistic and political events in an overarching narrative of the transformative effect that both WW1 and modernist thought had on European history. And whilst his book is by its very nature subjective , open to challenge, I think Eksteins supports his thesis very convincingly with quotes from a very wide range of primary sources, in English, French and especially German.
This podcast definitely presents my summarised and simplified version of Eksteins’ work – the book runs to 331 pages - so if you are interested in exploring the cultural and spiritual aspects of modernism I’d definitely recommend you to get a copy of the book. It’s very highly regarded, rates 4.1 out of 5 on Goodreads.com with 2 and a half thousand votes, and won a couple of awards, including Canada’s Wallace K Ferguson award for best historical book. I’ve included a link on the podcast website. There’s even an audiobook version, which might appeal to podcast listeners like yourselves.
As well as being shortened, the structure of this podcast is also quite different from the book. Whilst all history is subjective, Eksteins is realistic enough to acknowledge that a work of cultural history like this is particularly subjective and, indeed, creative. And so rather than write a traditional history text, he decided to structure the book in the form of a drama, with acts and scenes My podcast summary will be a much more straightforward presentation some of the key themes that link the various “acts and scenes” in the book. I hope though I do retain some of the historical detail and colour that make Esteins’ book so interesting, at least enough to encourage you to seek out the original for yourself.
Eksteins explores a number of themes -let’s start with a quick overview:
What came before – the bourgeois century
Let’s set the scene for our story by talking about the European spirit that preceded the modernist phase. And does it make sense to talk about a common outlook, especially in the days long before the European union , across nations as diverse, say, protestant Britain, catholic Austria/Hungary and Orthodox Russia? Whilst there certainly were fundamental differences in the spirit and outlook of different nations, they did all share one crucial experience during the second half of the 19th century, which was the industrial revolution.
One thing the Industrial Revolution did not change was the fact that society continued to be separated into classes Manners and social conventions remained rigid and fixed ordering relations within and between classes. The given certainties of religion was widely respected, even in republican France. Gender roles were fixed, with women almost exclusively homemakers. And there was little tolerance for homosexuality or other deviations from the social norm.
However the Industrial Revolution did make fundamental changes to class structure. One of the more obvious changes was the creation of a huge class of industrial workers and a smaller class of industrial capitalists. A less obvious impact though, was the huge increase in the size of the middle class, or bourgeoisie – town dwellers, urbanites, as the French called them. The bougousie were initially made up of business owners, the bankers and entrepreneurs who drove the industrial revolution, the haute bougousie, upper upper middle class. These businesses got bigger and bigger as the 1800s progressed. Also governments became much bigger, spawning numerous new branches and departments as governments began to provide much more services, such as public schools, police forces and postal services, all innovations of the 1800s. These two forces, larger business and larger government, led to the second phase of growth of the middle class, to the army of clerks, managers, lawyers and other professionals – the managerial class, the petit bourgeoise as the French call them – needed to run businesses and government. In Britain at the 1900s, perhaps 25% of the population could be classified as middle class, and other major European nations had similar percentages. Even relatively backward Russia, where the industrial revolution had arrived much later, had almost 2% of the population could be considered middle class at the start of the 1900s.
As they controlled the huge wealth created by the Industrial Revolution, the bourgeoisie came to dominate the 1800s. Many historians call the 1800s “the bourgeoisie century”. Indeed, as early as 1848, Karl Marx, with only a touch of exaggeration, wrote in The Communist Manifesto:
the bourgeoisie has . . . since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie....[which] during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.
As well as having political and economic power, the bourgeoisie created a new culture that came to characterise the time, what we now know as “Victorian attitudes” or sometimes “the petit bourgeoisie mentality”, which had a number of distinct elements.
Firstly, it was a very materialistic culture, regarding goods and property as fair reward for hard work and enterprise. And they also believed that hard work was a moral imperative, the Protestant work ethic as it has sometimes been called.
There was also a deep respect for entrepreurism and learning, and the bourgeoisie worked hard to improve themselves. The “self-made man” was one of the heroes of the middle class. And there was social mobility - a member of the lower, working class, or their children in particular, could hope to advance to the middle class by gaining qualifications or through entrepreneurial risk-taking. Thus the middle class values were shared by a substantial proportion of the working class, and so the bourgeois mentality that became the dominant and prevailing spirit of the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Victorian and Edwardian ages.
Another important aspect of these Victorian values was a strong moral and ethical sense, of right and wrong, good and evil, black and white. The “British gentleman” was another of the heroes of the bourgeoisie. In Britain this went hand-in-hand with a sense of “fair play”, engendered by their particular love of team sports like cricket, rugby and association football. Sport became a mass spectator pastime in Britain in the late 1800s, with national leagues in the various football codes starting in the 1880s. Sport became the “school of the British nation”; it spread the national British values of “fair play”, pluck and sportsmanship.
In countries like France and Germany without nearly as strong a team sport culture, the mechanism that helped inculcate common national values was compulsory conscription: 3 years in France, 2-3 years in Germany, and a whopping 6 years in Russia. And after the initial period of conscription a citizen had annual training obligations as a reservist. The army was these countries’ “school of the nation”.
Now to be fair, these values were more often than not honoured in the breach rather than in the observance, and the Victorian age is remembered at least as much for its hypocrisy as for its idealism, as authors like Dickens and Zola remind us. But Victorian society did at least have clear, widely agreed ideals.
And a final aspect of bougousie culture, more so in Britain perhaps than France and Germany, was a strong conservatism and prudishness when it came to the arts. Consider painting for instance. Today, almost 5 generations since expressionist painters like Monet, Turner and Renoir started the abstract revolution in Western art, it’s hard to appreciate how rigid and conformal was art in the Victorian period. Institutions like Britain’s Royal Academy and France’s Académie des Beaux Arts were the accepted arbiter on what was a good painting and what was not. Paintings were portraits of the great and good, or depictions of historical or biblical scenes that emphasised bourgeoisie moral and ethical values. Even still lives tended to be full of allegorical symbols, or else a display of the patron’s material possessions.
To illustrate just how different were attitudes to art in the Victorian era, here is a story from my hometown of Sydney, Australia. In 1884 there were some additions to the city’s sandstone GPO, the General Post Office building. The Sydney GPO is a very prominent building right in the centre of town, built in an Italian Renaissance Revival style, with the facade covered in relief sculpture. It was the sculptures on the new addition caused a huge controversy at the time, with an investigation by Parliament and opinion sought from the Royal Academy in far distant London. Some went as far as to call the sculptures obscene. And why were the sculptures so offensive? Not because of nudity, or lurid scenes of depravity. But because they depicted scenes of everyday, contemporary Sydney life, of shopkeepers, builders and dock workers, rather than uplifting allegorical scenes or reproductions of ancient Roman or Greek statues. Simply because they lacked a moral purpose, they were seen as immoral. Luckily the decision was made to leave them in place, so we can still see today how easily scandalised were our 19 century forebears. I’ve included a link to photos of the scandalous sculpture in the podcast website.
One of the most notorious examples of the collision between bourgeoise artistic traditions and the avant-garde, the tipping point perhaps, was the premier in Paris on 29th May 1913 of the ballet Le Sacre du Printemps, The Rite of Spring.
The Ballet Russe and The Rite of Spring
It was the Ballet Russe that presented the ballet on that fateful day back in 1913. The Ballet Russe was a troupe formed in 1909 by Russian Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, a dynamo artistic impresario who worked between Russia and the west, organising exhibitions of painting, concerts and finally ballet.
Ballet at the time, in its birthplace of Italy and France, had become hidebound, rigid and formulaic, not to mention boring. In England and Germany, it had pretty well died out alltogether. But Russia had taken the Western form of ballet and improved it with new approaches and athletic styles When the Ballet Russe troupe introduced the Russian style to western Europe it created a huge sensation, reinvigorating the art of performing dance, and revitalised ballet in the West. Indeed, the formation of England’s Royal ballet company in 1931 was initially inspired by the Ballet Russe, and its formation was led Ninette de Valois a former ballerina with the Ballet Russe.
Diaghilev had a new conception of ballet, he saw it as an example of the German concept “gesumptkuntsverk”, which loosely translates as “total work of art, which I mentioned in episode 2 of this series in the context of architecture. Diaghilev saw ballet as the new exemplar of gesumpkunstverk, superior to Wagner’s operas which were the original gesumptkuntsverk as he felt dance would more directly engage with an audience than singing as there was no need to strain to interpret the words in an operatic aria. Sets and costumes were designed by leading artists, with bold, exotic designs and striking colours, in contrast to the pedestrian traditional sets of the western convention at the time. For the music, new works were commissioned from leading composers like Stravinsky and Debussy. And unlike in the Western ballet tradition, where the dancers simply attempted to relate their movements to the music, the Ballet Russe sought to express the music in their movement. Indeed, they reached out for guidance here to the new dance philosophy of ‘eurythmics’, of which the American Isadora Duncan was a famous proponent.
Innovation piled on innovation. With each new season Diaghilev, “the charlatan ‘con brio’”, with spirit, as he described himself, presented programs that were ever more daring and innovative. He was seeking to astonish, to provoke a reaction from his audience.
And Diaghilev was seeking to provoke not just because he was a consummate showman who appreciated the publicity value of public outrage. The desire for art to shock, to surprise, was a key aim of the avant-garde art movement because they believed that the aim of art was not the middle-class aim to teach and reinforce the moral values of the 19th century bougouise society, with depictions of heroic cavalry charges, or of sentimental domestic scenes of Madonna and child.
The avant-garde felt that society was going through an unprecedented upheaval, and the received values of bougousie morality, the product of a more ordered and stable time, were no longer appropriate.
The avant-garde generally weren’t prescriptive as to what values would arise in its place, they didn’t want to simply replace one set of rigid rules and prejuidices with another. Rather, they emphasised the role of the individual, both artist and audience, to derive meaning based their emotional and aesthetic response to the artistic work. For centuries painting had focused on the subject, using the rules of perspectives to present the observer with a fixed point to observe the subject being depicted. Now, cubist painters like Picasso provided the observer multiple viewpoints at once, and post-Impressionist painters like Cezanne exposed to the observer the uncertainty the painter had faced in its depiction. The aim of avant-garde art, intuitive and spiritual rather than moral or rational, was to provoke an emotional reaction from the audience, and thereby help them make better sense of their dynamic new world.
The Rite of Spring, Le Sacre du Printemp in French, of the 1913 season was to be Diaghilev’s ultimate provocation.
What exactly was this revolutionary work? No film exists of the original, but in to mark the centenary in 2013, a recreation of the ballet, as faithful to the original as possible, was staged at the original theatre, and I’ve included a link to a film of that on the podcast website. Do yourself huge favour and take a the time to watch it.
The composer of the Rite of Spring was Igor Stravinsky. Born in 1882, he was 30 when he composed the work, having leapt to international fame a couple of years earlier with his scores for the Ballet Russe works The Firebird and then Petruska.
The ballet is 40 minutes long. Sub-titled "Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts" it is, in Stravinsky’s words:
"a musical-choreographic work, [representing] pagan Russia ... unified by a single idea: the mystery and great surge of the creative power of Spring".
Like Diaghilev, Stravinsky was seeking to create a radical sensation with his new work. He wrote to his mother “Do not be afraid if they whistle at Le Sacre”. That is in the order of things”.
His music for the Rite of Spring reflected the artistic avant-garde’s embrace of the primitive, the elemental. By embracing the primitive and elemental, the avante-garde movement aimed to get at the essence of art, stripped of all the centuries of accretive conventions, norms and ephemera, and thus recreate it, fresh and new. In music composition, this mean discarding the tradition since Mozart of structuring works based large building blocks of music: scales, arpeggios, long cadences. And replacing them with short motifs or even individual notes. To let you hear what this sounded like, here is a section from the earliest recording we have of the work from 1928, conducted by Pierre Monteaux, the conductor at the 1913 premier.
[Short musical interlude]
Hearing it today, more than 100 years since its debut, that piece does not sound particulalrly unusual. It could be the soundtrack to any number of action movies. But imagine the impact to the audience back in 1913. Debussy called it “primitive music with every modern convenience”. A more unkind critic described it as:
“The most discordant composition ever written. Never has the cult of the wrong note been applied with such industry, zeal, and ferocity”
The choreography was prepared by the legendary dancer Vasilav Nijinsky. Like Stravinsky, Nijinsky was brought to prominence by the Ballet Russe and was the male dancing phenomenon of the age, legendary for his grace and athleticism. Now at the age of 24, La Sacre would be only the second work he had choreographed.
And seized with the same modernist fervour as Diaghilev and Stravinsky, Nijinsky was determined that the dancing would be as revolutionarily elemental as the rest of the production. The steps omitted every traditional virtuosity of ballet. There was not a single jete, nor a pirouette nor an arabesque. Movement was reduced to walking, or heavy stomping. Arms, instead of flowing gracefully, were defiantly crooked. The traditional ballet stance had the feet turned out: Nijinsky had his dancers knock-kneed, their feet turned in.
The theme of the ballet was similarly elemental and modernistic. It lacks any plot, rather it is a sequence of episodes of an ancient tribe celebrating spring, culminating in the sacrificial suicide of a maiden. In one account he gave of its origin Stravinsky states
“I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of Spring. “
This atavistic attitude, of death and destruction as a gateway to growth was a long way from mainstream civilised bourgeoise values. But the avant-garde was suspicious of civilised bourgeoise values, and felt that values more appropriate to the modern age could be discovered by focusing on primitive and elemental drives of humanity and nature, the same way that Stravinsky pursued the primitive and elemental in music ,and Nijinski pursed the primitive and elemental in dance. Themes of regeneration and rebirth were popular though with the avant-garde,. We can see this in Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play Salome, about the death of John the Baptist. The Italian Futurist’s manifesto of 1909 took this to misogynistic extremes in one of its 11 articles:
“We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for women.”
The build up to the ballet’s premiere was intense. An extended publicity campaign told Parisians to expect something extraordinary from the Ballet Russe’s 1913 season. The venue was the newly opened Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, appropriately in the then ultra-modern art-deco style, a radical contrast to the heavily decorated beaux-art theatres, like the georgeous Palais Garneier that Paris was accustomed to.
Ballet was a hot ticket in Paris in the early 1900s, and the audiences then were much more partisan and animated than today’s dull, respectful crowd. The writer Jean Cocteau reported of the premiere that
‘the smart audience in tails and tulle, diamonds and osprey, was interspersed with the suits and bandeaux of the aesthetic crowd. The latter would applaud novelty simply to show their contempt for the people in the boxes’
Journalist Gustav Linor also wrote of that night, "Never ... has the hall been so full, or so resplendent; the stairways and the corridors were crowded with spectators eager to see and to hear".
To add further tension, there was an anti-Diaghilev, anti-Nijinsky faction ready to boo and hiss the performance on principle.
The Rite was not the only ballet on the bill that night. It was preceded by 2 conventional pieces, Les Sylphides, the nymphs, by Chopin, then Le Spectre de la Rose, the spirit of the rose, by Berlioz. Pedestrian pieces both, not doubt chosen to build suspense ahead of what the audience had really turned up to see.
Finally, after an intermission full of tense expectation, the orchestra stuck up the overture to the Rite.
[Play overture]
Then, apparently, bedlam ensued.
Much has been written about the riot at the premiere to The Rite of Spring, but the accounts are so inconsistent we don’t have a clear picture of what actually happened. A little bit like the Woodstock music festival of 1969, the 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring has become a mythical event, with fact and embellishment became inextricably combined. Did the police really eject 40 of the audience? Did it really spark a duel fought at dawn the next day? Did the Comtesse de Portales really exclaim “I am 60 years old and this is the first time anyone has dared make fun of me!”
People who were at that premiere, or at least claimed to be at that premiere, reckoned the audience clamour was such that it drowned out the orchestra for the full 40 minutes of the performance, which seems unlikely as the newspapers’ music critics managed to file reviews of the music the next day. But what is certain is that the new ballet provoked a huge reaction, with the traditional faction of the audience first hissing the Ballet Russe, then the avant-garde faction, the aesthetics as Cocteau called them, hissing the traditionalists and finally the 2 factions hissing and shouting at each other. Rather than “Le Sacre du Printemps”, the rite of spring, wits quickly dubbed it “Le massacre du printemps”,the massacre of of spring. The premiere fully satisfied the avant-garde aim to provide the audience and indeed the performers with an experience. And this is why it is often noted as one of the milestones of modernism.
The ballet played at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées for a further 5 performances without notable incident. The 1913 season of the Ballet Russe was then thrown into disarray when Nijinsky married a Hungarian lady Romola de Pulsky, which caused a Diaghilev to fire him. Possibly because Diaghilev wouldn’t employ married dancers, more likely because Diaghilev and Nijinsky had been lovers at the time.
German modernity prior to 1914
It was in Berlin that Diaghilev held the first dance rehearsals for the Rite iof Spring, which was fitting as Germany at the time was the European nation at forefront of urbanism and industrialisation, which were the preconditions for modernism.
Germany entered the twentieth century at the gallop. Germany, which had only come into existence as a nation in 1871 from a federation of 25 independent provinces and duchies, had transformed, in a scant 40 yearsfrom a rural, agricultural society to an urban industrial nation second only to the USA Here are a few statistics to illustrate.
Underpinning this extreme growth and transformation of the German economy was a similarly extreme growth and transformation of German society. In the 38 years between 1875 and 1913, Germany’s population increased by almost half, from 43 million to 65 million. The population of Britain, by comparison, only grew by 18% over the same period, from 38 to 45 million, and France scarcely grew at all, from 37 to 39 million.
As well as growing like Topsy, Germany’s population became rapidly urbanised. In 1870, Germany’s population was 2/3 rural. By 1914, that ratio had been reversed, and 2/3 of Germans lived in an urban setting. In 1871 there were only 8 German cities with populations over 100 thousand. By 1913 there were 48! By then almost twice as many labourers worked in industry as in agriculture, and almost a third of the population consisted of industrial workers and their families.
To achieve this astonishing level of growth, industrialisation and urbanisation, Germany developed a national competence in management, what they collectively referred to in German as “Technik”. This in turn had its roots in the Prussian tradition of efficient government stretching back to Frederick the Great. In parallel, Germany had perhaps the world’s strongest education system for what we call STEM subjects – Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Most of the western world introduced compulsory elemental schooling in the 1850s, but in parts of Germany this legislation went back to the 1500s. Their secondary, vocational and university systems were similarly first rate, and all this helped drive the breakneck growth in industry. To illustrate, in the coal-tar industry, between 1886 and 1900 the 6 largest German firms took out 948 patents: in the same period their British counterparts took out only 86.
Skills in “Technik” was a major part of how Germans regarded themselves, their self-image. And their self-regard, on the back of the meteoric rise of their new nation, was very high indeed. Politically, they believed they had achieved a unique path to success, what they termed “Sonderweg”, a special way, a special way unique to the German character. Through Sonderweg Germany had achieved a strong , effective and principled central government whilst avoiding the autocracy of backward, tsarist Russia or the weak, decadent and ineffective liberal democratic governments of Britain and France
As well as being uniquely skilled in Technik and governance, they tended to believe that, as a people, they had special insights into the human condition, or ‘soul’. In German there was widespread national enthusiasm for philosophy – a continental European preoccupation that English speaking nations tend to regard with some incomprehension and bemusement: an interest in philosophy doesn’t seem to be a big part of the Anglo-Saxon temperament. Now it might seem incongruous that the nation beating the world in hard-nosed disciplines like science, industry and technology could simultaneously be interested in metaphysics, symbols, metaphor and myth, but it was indeed the case. Bismark, the chancellor of the new nation of Germany, had championed the idea of a unique German sensibility - ‘kultur’ [KUUL] + [TOO] + [UH] , and this kultur had a strong focus on philosophy . A line of doggerel by the German poet Emanuel Geibel (g-ay-b-eh-l) sums it up nicely: “Denn am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen” - “by the German soul, the world will be made whole”.
Now, I am no means well versed in philosophy. What I know about philosophy you could write on the back of a postage stamp, so please excuse me whilst I try and present a very simplified and somewhat inaccurate summary of the predominant German philosophical views on the eve of WW1. And again, I encourage you to read Ekstein’s book for a more detailed and reliable discussion.
The dominant strain of German philosophy at the time could be described as “neo-Kantian”, after the Prussian philosopher Emanuel Kant. Kant revolutionised the philosophical world with his publication in 1781 of “The Critique of Pure Reason”. Amongst many other ideas, Kantian philosophy recognised that the world, the universe, contained things and concepts that, whilst real – and ethics was an important example - could not be properly comprehended by the rational brain, But rather could best be understood on an intuitive level, the realm of “spirit”, the “soul”. The romantic realm of myths and symbols. Of action and experience rather than cause-and-effect reasoning. It’s significant that the goals of avant-garde artists like Diaghilev were also intuitive and emotional rather than moral or rational. Not surprisingly perhaps, Diaghilev’s works met with more ready applause in Berlin than in Paris, and the Emperor Wilhelm II was an official patron of the Ballet Russe. Britain, who tended to follow the rational philosophies of the Utilitarianism when it thought about philosophy at all, was less enthusiastic about avant-garde. In 1905 the trustees of the Britain’s National gallery refused the gift of an impressionist painting by Degas on the grounds that Degas was still alive, and they only showed the art of dead artists.
One important contributor to Kant’s ideas was fellow philosopher Georg Hegel. Hegel contributed the concept of the Weltgeist, or “world spirit”, that could be described as the dominant collective feelings, beliefs and perception of a group or society, And just as an individual’s spirit contributes to the overall Weltgeist, an individual’s spirit can be considered to be influenced and directed by the Weltgeist: for Hegel it worked both ways. Neo-Kantain philosphy underpinned a German system of ethics - based not on abstract notions of universal absolutes of right or wrong, but rather focused on the laws and conventions of society, since an individual was part of society, part of its Weltgeist. They regarded the British championing of supposedly objective “liberal values” and “equal rights” that spanned societies, of free trade for instance, as nothing more than blatant hypocrisy. Britain’s empire gave her the world’s largest trading network, so no wonder they were champions of free trade: they were hardly disinterested observers. “Britain rules the waves, so Britain can waive the rules”, as a saying went.
This tendency of Germans to judge concepts based on how those concepts accorded with their out;ook, their Weltgiest led to some strange outcomes. A good example is the success of the history book “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Centuryby British-born German philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain. It’s basic theme, as future president Theodore Roosevelt wrote in a review, was that “the nineteenth century, and therefore the twentieth and all future centuries, depend for everything worth mentioning and preserving upon the Teutonic branch of the Aryan race.” And the converse to Teutonic excellence were the Jews: non-creative, materialistic and morally degenerate. The book even put forward the thesis that Jesus wasn’t really Jewish but was from an Aryan community located in the middle east. Published in 1899 the book was a big success, going through eight editions and selling 100 thousand copies by 1914. Now, Chamberlan wasn’t relying on rational argument to convince that Jesus was a proto-German: the mere fact that it “felt right” was justification enough for his eager readers: it coincided with their Weltgiest. If it wasn’t true, it should be. Now, to be fair, “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century” got good reviews in Britain and the US too. It wasn’t just Germany who embraced magical, non-rational thinking, but in 1913 that nation was perhaps its leading proponent.
According to the German’s world view, ethics and values should be based on realism, not baseless idealism or hypocritical reference to rules that served the established order of things, often to Germany’s detriment. From their perspective, the facts on the ground were that Germany, a dynamic new nation breaking all records, and furthermore graced with the mystical gift of kultur, had the right to assert itself. And in the age of colonialism at the turn of the 1900s, assertiveness meant that German must join the club of colonial nations, expand its geographic bounds or else suffer an inevitable decline. From 1896, this was official government foreign policy. This led Germany, already the largest army in Europe after Russia and certainly the most proficient, to build a battleship fleet big enough to challenge Britain, the ruler of the seas at the time. In 1880 the ratio of British to German naval tonnage was 7 to 1. By 1914, thanks to a hugely expensive arms race between the 2 nations, that ratio had shrunk to less than 2 to 1. Alarm at Germany’s growing military and growing assertiveness drove other European nations to form a network of defence alliances: France and Russia formed an alliance in 1893, ending 25 years of diplomatic isolation for Russia after the war in 1877 between it and Turkey, France and Britain, plus an alliance between Britain and France, the Entente Cordiale, in 1904.
The friction between Germany and Britain, France and Russia came to a head in 1911 in what is known as the Agadir Crisis. According to a treaty signed in 1905, Germany and France had agreed to uphold each other’s economic interests in what was nominally independent nation of Morocco. In 1911 a rebellion broke out in Morrocco, and Germany responded by sending a gunboat and later a cruiser to the Moroccan port of Agadir to “Protect its interests there”, an action they considered consistent with the 1905 agreement. France violently disagreed. Britain backed France, one of the first tests of the Entente Cordiale, and sent battleships to Morocco. Germany backed down, and eventually reached an agreement with France, where Germany recognised France’s control of Morocco in exchange for some colonies in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Now, some of you listeners may be hearing this account of great power rivalry in long ago early 1900s and thinking: “Hang on. Never mind the early 1900s, doesn’t this describe what is happening today with China versus the US and Northern Pacific nations?” Even Imperial Germany’s conviction of the superiority of its Sonderweg has echoes in China’s conviction of the unique wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party. Many commentators have indeed noted that similarity. In fact, in a 2015 articiule fo the Atlaintic magazine, the American political scientist Graham T Allison drew an analogy between the wars between rising Athens and established Sparta in the long ago Peloponnesian wars, coining the phrase “The Thucydides Trap”, named for Thucydides, the ancient historian who documented those wars.
Now we know the friction between Athens and Sparta ended in war, just as the friction between Germany, Britain, France and Russia eventually ended in war. Should we assume that the current friction between China and the US and its partners will inevitabilitly lead to war? I believe it won’t come to that for the simple reason that neither party, China, US or its allies, wants a repeat of WW1. Knowing very well the forces and causes of that terrible conflict, they will pull back from a shooting war and avoid completely falling into Allison’s Thucydides Trap. More likely I think, China’s strategy in the South China Sea for instance is a replay of the Agadir crisis, but one where a Germany with a bigger navy did not withdraw its lone cruiser in the face of Britain’s several battleships. And where it staked its claim close to its border rather than in the far distant Mediterranean. And no doubt the current disastrous and tragic example of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will be informing China’s estimation of the risks and rewards of this strategy.
But back to our story. Whilst a diplomatic solution had eventually been reached, the Agadir Crisis made Germany realise that it was surrounded on all sides by an unsympathetic alliance of Britain, France and Russia. War had been averted in 1911, but in the German public’s mind, the question of a European war changed from “if” to “when’.
And that “when” came on 28th June 1914 when the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were assassinated in Sarajevo.
On that dramatic note, let’s leave our podcast for now. Join me next time when I’ll conclude the story of the growth of European modernist spirt, how the impulse behind Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring were nurtured and shaped by the horrors of WW1 and the optimism of the machine age, to find its ultimate perverted expression in Facism and Nazism. I look forward to speaking to you then.