"On or about December 1910 human nature changed. All human relations shifted, and when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.”
Final 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. This episode explores how the modernist spirit developed through the optimism and relaxing of social norms of the "Roaring 20s", through to its final perverted expression in Fascism and Nazism.
To explore further:
Email feedback and suggestions to talkingmodernism@gmail.com
Photo credit: Charles Lindbergh, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution.
"On or about December 1910 human nature changed. All human relations shifted, and when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.”
Final 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. This episode explores how the modernist spirit developed through the optimism and relaxing of social norms of the "Roaring 20s", through to its final perverted expression in Fascism and Nazism.
To explore further:
Email feedback and suggestions to talkingmodernism@gmail.com
Photo credit: Charles Lindbergh, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution.
Welcome! To the fifth 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.
This is the third and final episode discussing the spirit of modernism in Western Europe in the 1920s and 30s. It’s based on the book “Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age”, by historian Modris Eksteins. Let’s continue from where we ended the last episode, with the “lost generation” of Europe in the mid-1920s, who were reeling from the hammer blows of WW1 and the disorded peace that followed, betrayed by and alienated from the structured, certain bourgeois world of the previous century.
The Roaring 20s and the machine age
The sense of betrayal by Europe’s lost generation was a significant element in the hedonistic binge that forms a big part of our perceptions of the second half of the 1920s. The Jazz Age as it is called, the “roaring twenties”, somewhat inaccurately pictured today as an endless whirl of Charleston dancing, debauched parties and decadent Berlin cabarets. In this hedonism we can see the rebellion of disillusioned veterans rejecting the sober morality of a bourgeois society that had betrayed them. And their parents, consciously guilty of the war they had allowed to occur, were unable to effectively oppose their children’s rebellion.
Their were several other important aspects of modernism at play in the “Roaring 20s”. One was the continued loosening of Victorian social norms, especially relating to women. Women had got a taste of economic independence when they held high paying jobs in munition factories during the War. And this brief taste led to continued assertiveness after the war. You only need to compare pre-war women’s fashions with the post-war image of the 1920s “flapper”: short haired, flat chested, wearing a knee-length skirt and smoking a cigarette – to understand how far bounds of acceptable behaviour for women had shifted.
Their was growing acceptance of LGBTI culture too, though on a very much reduced scale and it remained officially criminal. Gay and drag clubs and drag balls were common throughout western Europe and the US. Drag acts in nightclubs were so common that the US dubbed it the “pansy craze” . In the exuberant social freedom of the roaring 20s we can see the progression of ideals that lead to many positive aspects of current Western culture, especially its emphasis on the rights of the individual and freedom of expression. The rigid social roles, manners and expectations of the previous age were severely weakened. As the pendulum swung from the bourgeois culture of the 19th century to the avant-garde, elemental human drives and desires were given precedence over rigid social roles, manners and expectations rooted in history.
Also in the 1920s we can see growing acknowledgement and acceptance of mental illness. The fledgling science of psychoanalysis had advanced rapidly under the pressure of dealing with the millions of veterans suffering shell-shock and other traumas. For instance, before WW1, pioneering psychologist Sigmund Freud had popularised the theory of human motivation known as the Pleasure Principal, that people did things because, often subconsciously, it gave them pleasure. Freud characterised the pleasure principle as “Eros”. In order to explain though the self-destructive drives of WW1 trauma victims, Freud had to extend his theory in his 1920 book “Beyond the Pleasure Principal” to acknowledge a self-destructive impulse, a “death drive” that he characterised as “Thanatos”.
There was a craze for psychoanalysis – in sophisticated circles in the 1920s one of the worst insults you could say of someone was that they were “repressed”. And this acknowledgement of the inner life of the individual was a further subtle weakening of the 19th century norms. Before, people had been taught to suppress their inner desires and drives if they contradicted the roles and duties that society expected of them. Now they were encouraged to explore and act on their inner desires even if they contradicted social norms.
As well as being known as the hedonistic Jazz age, the 1920s are also known as the Machine Age. The 1920s saw the steady progression of scientific and technological breakthroughs, which held forth Modernism’s promise that science would would solve all of society’s ills. Mass production processes like the assembly line dramatically lowered the price of goods, suggesting that poverty could be a thing of the past. In 1918 the price of a Model T Ford was $500, about $10k in today’s money. By 1926 it had dropped to $364. I described in episode 2 how mass public housing projects in cities like Vienna and Frankfurt had replaced slums with high quality affordable housing. The car, aeroplane and ocean liner worked to erase distance and isolation. Radio, movies and newspapers would eradicate ignorance. Breakthroughs in hygiene and medicine – vitamins were discovered in 1913, penicillin in 1928, sulfa drugs in 1932 – would conquer disease. Psychoanalysis would dispel disorders of the mind.
Technology also provided modern new opportunities for people to perform heroic acts, it provided moral as well as material sustenance. Eksteins describes the hysterical reaction worldwide to Charles Lindbergh feat in 1927 of the first solo flight across the Atlantic in the plane Spirit of St Louis. An estimated crowd of 100k were at the Paris aerodrome to greet his arrival, causing perhaps the world’s first traffic jam. Innumerable poems and songs were written in his honor, he even inspired a dance, the Lindy Hop. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by France, the Medal of Honor by the US and the Air Force Cross by Britain. Later his reputation would be tarnished by his outspoken support for Nazi Germany – Goering presented him with a medal in 1938 - but this lay in the future.
His modest charm enthralled the world. For disillusioned and uncertain post-war Western Europe, Lindbergh was doubly inspirational. He was considered a genuine hero after four years of grinding war had debased the term. Furthermore, he was an emissary of the United States, confident, affluent and proud. The New World was a beacon to the disillusioned and weary Old World.
With the advance of technology and the example of the United States, in the late 1920s Utopia seemed just within reach. And the central assumption of modernism, that this was a time so transformed as to almost completely break with history, with the legacy of the pre-War world, became more and more convincing. And so the prescriptions of the avant-garde became more and more accepted.
In a nice piece of historical irony, on 26th May, soon after he landed in Paris, Lindbergh was hosted a a gala in his honour at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, where The Rite of Spring had premiered 14 years before. And the following evening, Diaghilev Ballet Russe had the premier of their new 20th anniversary program. This premiere got a few, polite reviews, even from papers that had excoriated The Rite of Spring at its premiere. By 1926, what had been radical in 1913 had become mainstream. By 1940, Walt Disney would use Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring to score the dinosaur sequence in Fantasia. Though Disney rearranged the composition to fit the scene, much to Stravinsky’s disgust.
The dark Valley – prelude to WW2
At the end of WW1, voters turned against their leaders who had led them through such a disastrous war, and this affected victor and vanquished alike. Britain voted out wartime leader Lloyd George, France voted out Clemenceau, Italy ousted Vittorio Orlando, the US Woodrow Wilson. Everywhere the left gained ground, partially inspired by the revolution in Russia, which itself was a reaction to the War. In 1923, the British Labour party won its first election. There were Communist inspired uprisings in Germany, Hungary, Italy. Spain and the Netherlands.
In response the opposition shifted further to the Right. Politics became more polarised, with both sides of politics becoming radicalised, and the center hollowed out. This is radicalisation is nicely depicted in the recent Netflix series Berlin Babylon, set in 1929. And this radicalisation of politics combined with the spirit of modernisation, led to Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany.
Fascism and Nazism were simultaneously reactionary and revolutionary, looking forward and backward at the same time. They embraced the more obvious aspects of modernism, which helped position them as the ideologies of the future, and tap into the excitement and optimism of the machine age. They were enthusiasts of modern technology, especially as it related to transport. Italy for instance in 1933 staged a transatlantic flight of 24 seaplanes from Rome to Chicago for the world’s fair there , led by a Fascist politician and aviator Italo Balbo. The Nazis built a huge autobahn project and they invested in motor racing so that Germany dominated the European grand prix competition in the 1930s. The Nazis in particular associated themselves with the modern field of aviation. During the 1932 election campaign Hitler criss-crossed Germany in a Junkers tri-plane, inspiring the election slogan “Hitler uber deutschland” , Hitler over Germany. Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain, on the other hand, flew in an aircraft for the very first time in 1938 to travel to Munich.
Facism and Nazism were also enthusiastic users of modern mass communications. Both Italy and Germany developed low-cost radio receivers to help spread their message, the 5-valve Radiorurale in Italy and in Germany the 3-valve Volksempfänger. Both nations produced striking propaganda posters often co-opting the modernist constructionist style pioneered by Soviet communists in the early years of the Russian revolution. Art did not have a political conscionce, it could easily span ideologies.
Whilst Nazis were enthusiastic supporters of technology, of applied science, their attitude to pure scientific research was more ambivalent. The Nazi ideology valued doers rather than intellectuals, engineers rather than scientists. And their racial policies not only removed a wealth of Jewish talent, but for a time certain areas of science such as relativity and psychoanalysis where stigmatised as “Jewish science”. This neglect of science would contribute to their downfall in WW2, when the British and Americans were able to much more effectively harness the work of their scientists in support of the war, with the allies leading the way in key areas such as radar, jet engines, operations research and, of course, the atomic bomb.
Despite the trappings of modernity however, fascism in particular was fundamentally reactionary in that it drew its support from the middle class who were frightened by threats to their wealth, both economic and political. Italy saw severe economic recession in the years immediately after WW1. By the end of 1920 the lira was worth only one-sixth of its 1913 value. Many firms went bankrupt, and 2 million were unemployed. Also Italy went through political turmoil when in 1918 it extended the voting franchise to all men. This had the result of replacing the traditional, corrupt but stable 2-party system with a fragmented multi-party system, with the socialist party the largest party with 31% of the vote. The period from 1919 to 1920 saw many communist-inspired uprisings, and were known as the biennio rosso, the 2 red years,. In the rural south peasants seized land, in the urban north workers occupied factories. The various coalition governments were unable to effectively respond, and a directionless Italy seemed to be headed for ruin.
Into the breach stepped Benito Mussolini. He had formed the Fascist party in 1915, and at the end of the war it was fringe Milanese group with perhaps 1k members at most. But by setting themselves against the socialists, by projecting strong unity and effectively using violence to get their way, they appealed to property owners and middle class professionals dismayed by the post-war turmoil. The Fascist also championed traditional values, for instance seeking to undo small advances in women’s rights and return women to the home. By 1921 their membership soared to 250k.
Their appeal though was still limited. In parliamentary elections in 1921 they had managed to get only 5% of the vote. But with a few seats in parliament, the following year, through daring and bluff, Mussolini was able to seize the post of Prime Minister from a weak and divided government. Once in power, he quickly removed all political opposition and established Italy as a one party state under Fascism.
The rise of Hitler and the German Nazi party was similar in many respects. Like Italy, Germany had a severe economic crisis after war, worse in many ways as it tipped into hyperinflation by 1924. It had a new, unproven multi-party parliamentary system, the Wiemar republic. And they had the equivalent of Italy’s biennio rosso in the widespread communist uprisings in the 9 months between the Armistance and August 1919. Short-lived socialist republics were declared in Bavaria, Saxony and Bremen. Adolf Hitler managed to position the tiny Nazi party at the centre of a network of extreme far-right groups attacking the communists, particularly the bands of veteran militias known as friekorp. And like the Italian fascists they championed traditional values and respect for authority, and this resonated as the pendulum of German public opinion swung against the permissiveness and cynicism of the 1920s. Nazi toughs disrupted showings of the movie of “All Quiet on the Western Front” as a slander on the glorious German army.
But like the Italian Fascist, they were not very successful at the ballot box – in the 1924 elections they received only 3% of the vote. And through the 1920s, conditions in Germany improved. The Wiemar government successfully organised large loans from the US, and the economy roared back – some historians call the second half of the 1920s Germany’s Golden Age. German workers became some of the highest paid in Europe. In the 1928 elections the Nazi’s share of the vote had dropped to 2.6%, and commentators described them as a spent force, yesterday’s men.
Then came the Great Depression. The Great Depression affected most of the world, but it affected Germany particularly hard. US loans and US trade which had fuelled German’s Golden Age, and that tap was turned off overnight. By 1932, industrial production was only 58% of its 1928 levels. By 1933, the unemployment rate was over 30%. There was a run on the banks and several folded. Desparate and frightened voters turned to the charismatic and compelling Hitler. Unlike Italian Fascism, the Nazi voter base did not skew to the middle class, at least in the early years, the Nazis attracted Germans of all classes. The Nazi vote in the 1932 elections increased to 18.3%, second only to the Social Democrats. And like Mussolini, once Hitler had a toe-hold in government he was able to quickly sieze power and eradicate all opposition. By 1933 Germany was a one-party Nazi state.
In foreign policy, both Fascism and Nazism were decidedly reactionary, harking back to the nationalist, colonial mindset of the earlier century. Both ideologies wanted to create empires, living space for their citizens, lebenstraum in German, spazio vaitale in Italian. Germany would reclaim Alsance-Lorraine and take lands to the slavic east, Italy would recreate the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean and north and east Africa.
But Fascism and Nazism did not simply seek to return their countries to prosperity, rid them of the communist menace and carve out an empire. They had a totally new modernist conception of politics. In episode 3 I mentioned Diaghilev’s conception of ballet as a gesamptkunstverk, a total work of art. Nazism, Facism and Soviet communism were all, to a greater or lesser degree, totalitarian regimes, where the state sought to regulate almost every aspect of life and work towards a single political objective. Society was to become these regimes’ gesamptkunstverk. These regimes saw citizens not as constituents who needed to be represented, but rather as raw material to be shaped and molded, like clay under a sculptor’s knife. Fascism, Nazism and Communism all had the concept of the “new man”, re-made with the attitudes and behaviours of their ideology’s philosophy.
The concept of gesamptkunstverk had a romantic, heroic image of the artist, as having a unique, transformative inner vision of the final artistic work, plus the practical skills, the command of the materials, to bring the vision into being. Fascism and Nazism similalry believed that they were led by men of unique vision and capability, Hitler and Mussolini. And that these men should not be governed by the rule of law, but were indeed the ultimate source of authority. Like Moses, they were the ultimate givers of the law. In Germany this was called the Führerprinzip. The modernist revolution in art at the turn of the century had shifted the focus from the subject to the observer. Similalry, the modernist political innovations of facism and nazism shifted the focus from the governed to the leader.
In 1883 the German philospher Friedrich Nietzsche had put forward the concept of Übermensch, which loosely translates as “beyond human”, an aritist-tyrant who would bring meaning to the world. The Nazis distorted Nietzsche’s philosphy’s - the ubermencsh became defined on racial terms. But Nietzsche’s concept of the supreme artist-tyrant fascinated Hitler. A former art student, Hitler considered himself an artistic genius as well as a political genius. He saw himself as the coming of the Übermensch that Nietzsche had foretold.
Mussolini did not share Hitler’s artistic pretensions. But in a particularly striking crossover between the worlds of modernist art and modernist politics, the Italian futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti co-authored both the Futurist manifesto in 1909 and the initial manifesto of the Italian Facists in 1919.
The parallels between art and totalitarianism were noted in particular by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin who in 1936 coined the phrase the “Aestheticization Of Politics” to describe nazism. He noted that in place of democratic structures and processes that allowed the citizen to effect political change, facism and nazism offered instead a host of spectacles, events and rituals – the annual Nuremberg rally for instance, or Italy’s annual commemoration of the March on Rome, plus innumerable smaller celebrations and rallies. In these events the citizen was made to feel validated – that they were part of a harmonious, vital community, and their leaders had their interests at heart. And this had parallels with the aims of the artistic avant-garde, which sought to deliver revelation through extreme artistic experiences. The event of the 1913 premiere of the Rite of Spring could in some ways be seen as a precursor to the gargantuan and theatrical 1935 Nuremberg Rally that Leni Riefenstahl depicted in the film Triumphy of the Will. But instead of a divided audience hissing at each other, the audience was now united in universal acclaim.
This “politics of happenings” of course it was superficial, focusing on feelings and impressions rather than genuine political empowerment, hence Benjamin’s choice of the phrase Aestheticization Of Politics. Benjamin also identified the concept of “kitsch” in both art and politics, in the sense of banal, superficial and manufactured sentiment. In art, kitsch related to mass produced pictures of dogs playing poker or syrupy-sentimental scenes of children at play. In politics, kitsch related to the glib, simplistic promises of Nazism and Facism. The simple promise that life under these reigimes would be ‘beautiful’, a promise that required a suspension of all impulse to criticism and objective reflection. Ironically the Nazis passed an”anti-kitsch” law in 1933 to restrict the swastika symbol being used on paper napkins and the like, whilst the whole ideology was, at its core, fundamentally kitsch.
And what was the new society that fascism and nazism were seeking to create? Essentially they were seeking to recreate and recapture the spirit of community and common purpose that the nations had enjoyed during WW1, the Augusterlebnis, or Spirit of August that I discussed in the previous episode. A sense of community and common purpose that stood in stark contrast to the divisions and faction fighting after the war. A commentator had said
One of the most beautiful things that the war brought is the fact that we no longer have a rabble
Facism and Nazism would also eliminate the rabble. By pursasion if possible, by the fist, castor oil and reeducation camp if necessary.
In particular the two totalitarian regimes were seeking to recreate the community of the WW1 trenches. Both Hitler and Mussolini had served with distinction in WW1 – though interestingly neither rose beyond the rank of corporal - and they saw the martial brotherhood of the trenches as the acme of social order. Both parties favoured WW1 veterans for leadership roles – the fascists called this la tincercrazia, the"Aristocracy of the Trenches". Both ideologies formed paramilitary wings named for those countries elite shock troops of WW1, the fascist “Arditi” and the Nazi “Sturmabteilung”
The other aspect of WW1 that facism and nazism celebrated with the concept of the glorious sacrifice. Indeed, they have often been described as cults of death as much as political movements. The war dead were sanctified as a glorious sacrifice, it became illegal to criticise the army. Both facism and nazism created new pageantry around party members fallen in political street-battles, The facists had the ritual of calling the roll of fallen colleagues with the assembly responding “presente”, present. The most precious treasure for the nazis was their Blutfahne, or “blood flag”, the swastika flag stained with the blood of wounded from the 1923 Munich putsch.
And both ideologies were strongly militaristic, glorifying war. And in this rejection of traditional ethical values – which in the case of Nazism would lead to the Holocaust - we can see the completion of the assault on the bougouse ethical values of the 19th Century that progressed from the artistic avant-garde celebrating sacrifice in The Rite of Spring, through the post-Kantian ethical system of Wilhelmine Germany though to the decimation of the Western Front in WW1. The German Nazi party even considered a reform of christian theology under the “Positive Christianity” doctrine, which would push the idea that Christ was aryan, and emphasise concenpts of national rather than universal brotherhood.
And how can we explain the appeal of such violent and immoral ideologies to Italy and Germany? And why did similar ideologies make less headway in Britain and France, which also faced disruption in the interwar period? A partial explanation is the relative weakness of their parlimentary systems. Both German and Italy had unstable multiparty coallitions which appeared unable to effectively respond to the interwar crises. The parlimentary system of Britain in particular was relatively more stable.
The key factor though seems to be that both Italy and Germany had a strongly held sense of nationalistic grievance that the programs of facism and nazism promised to resolve. Italy, one of the victors of WW1, had felt cheated when the redrawn map of Europe at the Treaty of Versailles denied her Dalmatia, Albania and the city of Fiume, nor was she allowed any new colonies in Africa or Asia. By 1939 the Facists had annexed both Fiume and Albania, and invaded and colonised Ethopia.
Germany’s grievances were even more extensive. She felt she had been tricked by the terms of the Armistance, unfairly blamed for starting WW1, and subject to ruinous war repatriations. She had lost all her overseas colonies, plus forced to cede Alsance-Lorraine to France, and parts of East Prussia to the new state of Poland. Firmly convinced of the superiorty of its force of arms, it rationalised its loss in WW1 as due to treachery by unpatriotic forces at home – Germany had been stabbed in the back by “November criminals”. The Nazi party gave voice to all those grievances. And once in power, quickly acted to set them right. In 1933 Hitler repudiated war reparations,and in 1934 he began expanding the armed forces. In 1936 he reoccupied the Rhineland, in 1938 he effecetd the anscluss, or union, with Austria, and all these actions were in violation of the treaty of Versailles. Germans, who might initially have been anti-Nazi or at least ambivalent, were overjoyed. The Nazis as restored to Germany the sense of national pride from prior to WW1. Germans were prepared to rationalise the less palatable aspects of the Nazi program in view of their acheivements in giving voice to their core grievances and in their apparent success in resolving them. This accomodation, this rationalisation, would lead to Germany following Hitler into the irrational catastrophe of WW2 and the Holocaust.
Today, we have politicians who share many of the characteristics of Hitler and Mussolini. Populist demagogues like Trump and Putin are able to tap into voters’ sense of nationalist grievance, of manufacturing jobs lost to globalisation in the US, or Russia’s chaotic transition from communism under the misguidance of the World Bank. And under Putin, there is even a militarist, expansionist program. Opposition is stifled but by rather than by castor oil and reducation camps it is by gerrymander, voter supporession and jailing the opposition on trumped-up charges. Nowadays the pretence of multi-party democracy is maintained. But one thing thing that is missing from your modern demagogue is the desire to remake society. The catastrophic failures of facism, nazism and soviet communism, have probably innoculated the world forever against promises that there is a prescrption for the perfection of society. There is no manifesto of Trumpism or manifesto of Putanism. The modest goal of today’s demagogue is simply to remain in power.
In summary – how eras change
And so we come to the end of of the discussion of the modernist spirit. Over three episodes we’ve seen how Western Europe’s middle class values and culture began to shift under the influence of the avante garde, and this change accelerated with the catastrophic disruption of WW1 and its aftermath. And we’ve seen how this spirit of change was tragically hijacked by facism and nazism and lead Europe to the most destructive war in history.
And what meaning can we draw from this story, intersting as it is? For me, this is the story of how societies transition from one age to another. In 1855, as the certainties of religion where being challenged by advances in archeology and science – Darwin would publish The Origin of the Species in 1859 -, the poet Matthew Arnold wrote of what It was like to live at a time of transition:
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride—
I come to shed them at their side.
The 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring was a milestone in what would prove to be the start of the modernist age. In a 1924 essay Virginia Woolf wrote:
On or about December 1910 human nature changed. “All human relations shifted, and when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.”
In some ways, facism, nazism and soviet communism were the ultimate manifestations of the modernist spirit, and with their demise the modernist age came to an end. So which age are we in now? And are we in a period of change?
Adrian Pabst, professor of politics at the University of Kent recently wrote an interesting book on this very subject “Postliberal Politics: The Coming Era of Renewal”. He argues that western society is in a time of transition from the free-market culture characterised by Margaret Thatcher – who famously said “there is no such thing as society” - which sought to encourage capitist enterprise, focused on central government rather than state or local governents, and reduce the role of the state for social support or wealth redistribution. These free market policies have been shown to be unable to navigate the economic shocks of the 2008 recession, nor effectively respond to the covid pandemic, and Pabst suggests we may be transitioning to a new pos-liberal age which places a new emphasis on community and social support. I’ve included a link on the podcase website.
And so finaly we come to the end of the episode. I hope you’ve enjoyed these last three episodes exploring Modris Ekstein’s book,. I’ve very much enjoyed making them, certainly feel like I’ve learnt a lot about modernism in the process. And once again I encourage you to seek out Ekstiens book for yourself. Join me next time when I’ll be talking about Tel Aviv’s “White City”, how the internation style of architecture of Le Courbousier and Ernst May found its greatest expression on the shores of far distant Palestine in the 1930s. I look forward to speaking with you then.