Prefigurings
Few events in the history of the modern world have had so deep an impact on European culture as the Great War; and rarely have there been major historic turning-points that were so unforeseen, destructive and traumatic. Some observers, as we saw, had envisaged the possibility of a new war. A few clearheaded minds had even put forward the hypothesis of a continental conflagration, evoking the memory of that triggered a century earlier by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, which changed the face of Europe. Predictions were not wanting, but no one could imagine that this would be a total war, nor how it would transform the Old World, changing not only its social and political structures but also its mentalities, cultures, ways of life and perceptions.
The cultural pessimism that spread across Europe in the late nineteenth century, when the idea of progress was challenged in favour of a view of modernity as decadence, did not arouse the fear of a new war. The catastrophes of the modern world, as the enemy of both man and nature, were attributed to many other factors: the advent of mass society; the ‘age of the crowd’ and democracy; the physical and intellectual degeneration of nations bound up with urbanization and the revolt of the ‘dangerous classes’; racial degeneracy produced by cross-breeding; the Malthusian growth of world population, and so on. Of the various catastrophist scenarios that were presented as imminent, scarcely anyone foresaw the millions of dead in a total war. Or else the prognosis was so abstract as to neutralize horror, as in the case of the Social Darwinists and eugenicists, who welcomed the invention of chemical weapons and saw a new war as the occasion to eliminate the world’s demographic surplus by selecting the most fit. Such was the point of view of two British scientists, Reginald Clare Hart and Karl Pearson. In an essay of 1911, the former of these wished for a ‘relentless war of extermination of inferior individuals and nations’, while the latter offered a biological justification of war as a means of strengthening national virility.1 But despite appearing legitimate in the scientific debate of the time, and certainly revealing an intellectual predisposition to the worst nationalist and racist deliriums of the following decades, these theories were never translated into a concrete project of extermination. The optimism of Comte and Spencer, who had seen industrial society as a vector of peace and progress, still prevailed. The European imaginary, with its many fruitful aspects, proved incapable of foreseeing the Great War. Intellectuals give us an image of this blindness.
Prefigurings of catastrophe came not from the social sciences but from literature and the arts, as privileged sites of utopian imagination. At the end of the nineteenth century, the science-fiction novels of H. G. Wells showed considerable premonition, particularly The War of the Worlds (1898), which heralds a dark future of decadence. Wells describes the invasion of England by an army of Martians who test on it their mechanical weapons of mass destruction: mobile cannon that anticipate tanks, and chemical weapons that prefigure not only the gas attacks of Ypres but also the atomic weapons of the Second World War. Meanwhile, the earthly epidemics that finally destroy the Martians proclaim the fear of a bacteriological war.
The connection between technology and modern warfare is present also in Émile Zola, who in the same decade published La Bête humaine (1890), a novel in which he offers a metaphor of progress as a catastrophe by describing the blind and mad course of a train pulled by a driverless engine. In his preparatory notes, Zola considered filling this train with ‘merry soldiers, unaware of danger and singing patriotic songs’, adding that this train would then be ‘the image of France’.2
Zola was far from alone in detesting technology. In a realist style that aimed to describe not the future but a tendency of the present, Giovanni Papini, an avant-garde writer and critic who would later join the fascist movement, devoted a prophetic essay to modern war. There is certainly no harm here in recalling that this appeared in 1913, the same year that the first mass-produced automobiles emerged from the Ford factories in Detroit. The new century, Papini noted, would not be happy, but rather a century of industrial extermination in which human life would definitively lose its value. His essay is a rather strange mixture of pre-fascist existentialism and Weberian resignation in the face of a modernity perceived as inhuman and oppressive mechanical rationality:
The entire life of our age is an organization of necessary massacres, visible and invisible. Those who rebel in the name of life will be crushed by life itself. After the model of warfare, industrial civilization will feed on carrion. Cannon flesh and machine flesh. Blood on the battlefield and blood in the street: blood under the tent and blood in the factory. Life only raises itself up by leaving part of itself behind it as ballast.3
The eclectic and paradoxical fusion between a romantic revolt against the disenchantment of modernity and a vitalist exaltation of technology was the premise of the ‘conservative revolution’, or, as the historian Jeffrey Herf calls it, ‘reactionary modernism’,4 which spread across Europe in the inter-war years. But this tendency had already appeared before 1914, prefigured by avant-garde tendencies such as futurism. In his famous manifesto of 1909, Marinetti invoked war as the ‘hygiene of the world’, wishing for it as a confrontation of technological forces. His aesthetic cult of the machine and speed did not yet have the existentialist accents of Ernst Jünger’s essays of the 1920s, but appealed to a bellicose irrationalism that established a continuity between pre-1914 nationalism and fascism, which the futurists adhered to almost spontaneously. Basically, futurism anticipated the ‘aestheticization of politics’ that characterized fascism and a good part of European culture between the wars. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Italian futurists were interventionists in 1914, and that when the country did join the war, a year later, they established a motorized battalion that drove to the front shouting ‘Zang-Timb-Tuuum’.5
But it was the whole avant-garde, no matter what its political divisions at the start of the conflict, that had expressed during the previous decade the symptoms of a deep historic fracture in the perception and representation of the world. The cubism of Braque and Picasso decomposed forms in painting, just as Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg and Anton von Webern broke down classical harmonies and laid the foundations of atonal and twelve-tone music. For the historian Modris Eksteins, the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in May 1913, marked the beginning of a new age.6 This piece, which critics denounced as a ‘massacre of spring’, radically challenged the traditional view of the world. By its ferocious and savage primitivism, it rejected the forms of civilization; by its vitalism, it broke away from rationalism (or maybe conquered and transformed it); and by its rejection of musical conventions and social norms, it expressed a revolt of subjectivity. The scandal that Stravinsky aroused simply heralded the collapse of the old order a year before it happened. Nor was it by accident that the painter Fernand Léger saw the ruins of Verdun as the expression a decomposed reality, fragmented into a thousand pieces. War appeared in his eyes as a kind of convergence of reality with the representations that cubist painting had already made of it in recent years. Fascinated by this landscape of destruction, which ‘authorizes every pictorial fantasy’, Léger abandoned abstract art and turned to the re-creation of mechanical figures.7
Chauvinist Fever
In August 1914, the declarations of war aroused an amazing wave of collective enthusiasm in all European capitals. The nationalistic fever suddenly took hold of culture and won over all minds, with few exceptions.8 In Paris, the union sacrée extended well beyond the supporters of Action Française.9 The French president, Raymond Poincaré, launched an appeal to the members of the Académie Française to contribute to the patriotic effort ‘with their pens’. The voices of Barrès and Maurras now mingled with those of the Dreyfusards. From Gide to Proust, Anatole France to Claudel, Durkheim to Bergson and Péguy, all greeted the war as a deliverance. The ‘Jacobin’ historian Albert Mathiez saw it as a continuation of the levée en masse of 1792. In Belgium, the medievalist Henri Pirenne broke off his friendship with his German colleague Karl Lamprecht. Across the Rhine, the Berliner Tagblatt published a celebrated manifesto in October 1914, in which ninety-three scholars of world renown, including several Nobel prize-winners, defended the German cause as that of Kultur. It was signed by such prominent individuals as the biologist Ernst Haeckel, the physicist Max Planck, the historian Karl Lamprecht, the political scientist Friedrich Naumann and the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. The philosopher of history Ernst Troeltsch wanted to ‘transform words into bayonets’,10 while the phenomenologist Max Scheler attributed to Germany the mission of ‘regenerating civilization’.11 The economist Werner Sombart contrasted the heroic spirit of the Germans with the commercial spirit of the British (Helden versus Händler).12 As for Thomas Mann, he idealized the Hohenzollern empire as a receptacle of the values of German Kultur against the corrupting tendencies of modern Zivilisation, mechanical and soulless. The ‘ideas of 1914’ confronted the principles of 1789, the starting-point of an age of ‘progress’ that had exhausted minds and distanced men from the most authentic values of existence: courage, virility, sacrifice, combat, glory. In his famous Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, Mann proclaimed his ‘disgust’ for the principles of the Enlightenment, borrowing this expression from Nietzsche. He saw war as the continuation by force of arms of a struggle that had begun long before in the field of culture.13 In Austria, all the great scholars, from Wittgenstein to Freud, were caught up in the wave of chauvinism. In Russia, such enemies of tsarism as the libertarian Kropotkin and the socialist Plekhanov joined the crusade against ‘German barbarism’, as did poets such as Blok, Yesenin and Mayakovsky. Italian nationalists, from the socialist Mussolini to the imperialist Enrico Corradini, the futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the ‘decadentist’ Gabriele D’Annunzio, called for an end to their country’s neutrality and its entry into the war against the Habsburg empire in order to liberate the irredente lands of Trentino and Trieste.14 As Noberto Bobbio has written, ‘No Italian man of letters with the authority of Romain Rolland had the courage to place himself “above the melee”’.15 England rediscovered a political passion that had not been seen since Cromwell’s Puritan revolution, and was now unleashed against Germany. H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy and the popular writer G. K. Chesterton all served as propagandists for the anti-German crusade.16 Only a few figures of the intellectual world managed to escape the chauvinist wave: Karl Kraus in Vienna, Bertrand Russell in London, Henri Barbusse and Romain Rolland in Paris, and Gramsci, still very little known at that time, in Turin.
But the patriotic intoxication evaporated as the war went on, soon showing a very different face from the mythology that had invaded the streets of European capitals in August 1914, and that the leaders of the Great Powers, all victims of the illusion of a short war, had entertained. In the face of this reality, a large number of intellectuals abandoned nationalism to join the cause of humanist pacifism. The trajectory of Siegfried Kracauer, later one the leading figures of Weimar culture, was quite exemplary in this respect. After enlisting as a volunteer at the start of the conflict, he published in the Preussische Jahrbücher in 1915 an article entitled ‘War as Lived Experience’, which perfectly summed up the intellectual climate of the time. In an exalted tone, Kracauer welcomed the war as an end to the routine and boredom of the Wilhelmine age, describing patriotism in Nietzschean terms as a kind of vital force that would enable Germany to free itself from the materialist values of a soulless world, with neither god nor prophets. He praised war as a ‘redeeming’ experience, in which the spirit is strengthened by the ‘joy of combat’.17 For the young Kracauer, war needed no social or political justification, satisfying as it did an existential demand and offering a mystical and almost religious experience. In 1917, however, Kracauer had already abandoned this patriotic rhetoric, writing an article for Das Neue Deutschland in which he acknowledged his deception. The war had shown its true nature, that of a horrific butchery in which ‘the ever deeper decomposition of European humanity’ was displayed.18 This change in perspective was no more than a condensed version of a path followed by many other European intellectuals.
The Viennese writer Stefan Zweig, who witnessed the joyous demonstrations of the fateful summer of 1914, left the most striking description of the nationalization of the masses that reached an apogee with the Great War. Although sceptical about a ‘fratricidal war’, he could not remain unmoved by the burgeoning of this mystical communion. In his memoirs, he emphasizes the striking difference between this atmosphere and that in which the outbreak of the Second World War was received, twenty-five years later:
A rapid excursion into the romantic, a wild, manly adventure – that is how the war of 1914 was painted in the imagination of the simple man, and the young people were honestly afraid that they might miss this most wonderful and exciting experience of their lives; that is why they hurried and thronged to the colours, and that is why they shouted and sang in the trains that carried them to the slaughter; wildly and feverishly the red wave of blood coursed through the veins of the entire nation. But the generation of 1939 knew war. It no longer deceived itself. It knew that it was not romantic but barbaric.19
The illusion, then, was short-lived. As early as 1916, in his anti-patriotic pamphlet Above the Battle, Romain Rolland denounced the conflict as a carnage from which ‘only a mutilated Europe can emerge’.20 The strongest writings against the massacre came from the pen of one of the rare individuals within the international socialist movement who opposed the voting of war credits. Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish revolutionary transplanted to Berlin, in no way experienced the demonstrations of August 1914 as an explosion of contagious joy; to her they appeared as a wave of collective hysteria, in which could be detected ‘the atmosphere of ritual murder, the Kishinev air’.21 The war had revealed the true face of bourgeois society, ‘shamed, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping with filth’. Once the façade of civility and morality, peace and law, had fallen away, it showed its true nature, that of ‘a roaring beast’ dancing ‘an orgy of anarchy’ and exuding ‘a pestilential breath, devastating culture and humanity’.22 Despite not expressing the same indignation, Franz Kafka remained equally immune to the nationalist virus. On 6 August 1914 he noted in his diary: ‘Patriotic parade. Speech by the mayor … I stand there, with my malignant look. These parades are one of the most disgusting accompaniments of the war.’23
From Field of Honour to Slaughterhouse
Between 1914 and 1918, sentiments swung from blind idealization and boundless enthusiasm to terror and horror. On the one hand, the war marked the triumph of a conception of honour and heroism expressed in the phrase ‘dying for one’s country’, and culminating in August 1914. It was with the memory of these intoxicated days in his mind that Ernst Kantorowicz, many years later, would retrace its genealogy in medieval Europe. On the other hand, the First World War destroyed the myth of death on the field of honour by revealing the horrors of technological massacre and anonymous mass death. The legend of heroic war was symbolized, in the first months of combat, by the Flanders village of Langemarck, which German soldiers had conquered in November 1914 at the cost of enormous losses, singing the national anthem.24 The Langemarck soldier was the perfect embodiment of the hero: good-looking, idealistic, virile, generous, courageous and ready for sacrifice. Such a hero cannot fear death; on the contrary, it glorifies him. According to the code of honour inaugurated by the Homeric warriors, death is the price to pay in order to attain glory (kleos). But this glory obtained at the price of the supreme sacrifice is a value that transcends life itself, being eternal and conferring the status of immortality on the martyr.25 The fatherland recognizes this and cannot forget him; it erects monuments to him and evokes his memory in ceremonies.
Max Weber, whose sociology did not prevent him from being carried away by the chauvinist wave, was certainly one of the last European scholars to adhere to the myth of death on the field of honour. He sought to conceptualize it in 1915, at the very moment when it was in the process of collapsing. In his essay on ‘Religious Rejections of the World’, he noted first of all the ‘pathos’ and ‘sentiment of commitment’ that war created among combatants, pressing them to make the ‘gift of themselves’ and realize ‘an unconditionally devoted and sacrificial community’. Grasping the nature of war as a secular crusade, he emphasized the irresistible force of such sentiment. The essential element that welds this warrior community together lies in the sacralizing of death, by which the soldier can give his existence a unique and profound meaning. Irreducible to ordinary, natural death, which belongs to the continuity of societies and permits the transmission of the experiences of one generation to another, death on the field of battle possesses a particular and sublime sense, entering into harmony with the ‘vocation’ (Beruf) of the soldier. According to Weber, ‘religions can show comparable achievements only in heroic communities professing an ethic of brotherliness’.26
These words were written a few months before the battle of the Somme, which claimed a million victims. Inaugurated with the myth of heroic death, the Great War finished with commemorations of the ‘unknown soldier’. This image represents the countless victims of a conflict in which the act of killing is transformed into a mechanical operation, and where death acquires the character of a collective experience, anonymous and lacking any specific quality – in short, that of a ‘mechanically reproducible’ death, whose ‘aura’ was forever stripped away in the mud of the trenches. Drawn by lot among so many disfigured and unrecognizable corpses, the ‘unknown soldier’, according to Roger Caillois, embodied ‘the end of heroic war’.27 Monuments dedicated to him proliferated in Europe in the postwar years. They mark a break with the romantic view of death cultivated by nineteenth-century nationalism, abandoning the notion of heroic individual sacrifice for that of collective holocaust. The Great War, therefore, marks a watershed between two antinomic images: the figure of the hero is replaced by that of the ‘unknown soldier’, death on the field of honour by death in the slaughterhouse. The delirious episode at the start of the battle of the Somme – in which British soldiers fell by the thousand, mown down by German machine guns as they advanced in compact ranks with no protection to the sound of bugles and kicking a football – indicates the unbridgeable gulf that had emerged between the traditional view of war and the reality of total war. This was a gulf between the modernization of society and the persistence of old mentalities that were particularly tenacious among military hierarchies, formed by aristocratic elites and placed at the head of mass armies. As Dan Diner writes, war was not only a conflict between armies, but had become ‘a war between man and machine’.28 From the field of honour to the slaughterhouse, that was the real anthropological mutation that took place within Europe.29 Kantorowicz draws this conclusion very clearly at the end of his genealogical essay on the idea of ‘dying for one’s country’ (pro patria mori). This seems to have triumphed in 1914, when the Christian view of self-immolation of the warrior for God, king and country found its secularized form in the sacrifice of the soldier on the altar of the corpus mysticum of the nation. With the advent of total war, however, the state imposed death on the soldier without offering him either an emotional substitute or a glorious posterity for the gift of his life. The Second World War, with its impersonal mechanisms of technological extermination, completed the disenchantment of death. As Kantorowicz concludes, ‘deprived of any idea of encompassing humanitas, be it God or king or patria, [war] will be deprived also of the ennobling idea of self-sacrifice’.30
This metamorphosis can be illustrated with the help of two singularly antinomic passages written during and after the war, by the historian Marc Bloch and the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The first is a patriotic plea inspired by a tragic and solemn sense of honour; the second a rejection of war that leads to a sarcastic apology for cowardice. On 1 June 1915, just before returning to the front after a period of convalescence in Paris, Bloch wrote a letter to his family anticipating his death:
I died voluntarily for a cause that I loved; in leaving, I made the sacrifice of myself; it’s the finest of endings. I would lie if I said that I don’t regret life; I would be unfair to you who have been so sweet to me; but you have taught me to place certain things above life itself … For my part, I die certain of victory, happy – yes, truly happy, I say so with all the sincerity of my soul – to spill my blood.31
After the war, this kind of rhetoric aroused mockery on the part of Céline, who made Ferdinand Bardamu, the hero of his Journey to the End of the Night, the perfect antithesis of the soldier ready to die for his country. Interned in a psychiatric hospital, Bardamu delivers himself to an outrageous praise of cowardice:
‘Oh, Ferdinand! Then you’re an absolute coward! You’re as loathsome as a rat…’
‘Yes, an absolute coward, Lola, I reject the war and everything in it […] Because I’m the one who knows what I want: I don’t want to die.’
‘But it’s not possible to reject the war, Ferdinand! Only crazy people and cowards reject the war when their country is in danger…’
‘If that’s the case, hurrah for the crazy people! Look, Lola, do you remember a single name, for instance, of any of the soldiers killed in the Hundred Years War? … Did you ever try to find out who any of them were? … No! … You see? You never tried … As far as you’re concerned they’re as anonymous, as indifferent, as the last atom of that paperweight, as your morning bowel movement …32
The view of war as a slaughterhouse was also sketched by Churchill in the early 1920s, in a lecture that is striking for its clarity and force. Here he describes the First World War as a horrible wound inflicted on European civilization, in a passage that is all the more significant in coming from a conservative politician who had a military career behind him, a representative of imperialism who reflected on the state of the world that he had helped to bring about:
The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought. All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them … No truce or parley mitigated the strife of the armies. The wounded died between the lines: the dead mouldered into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam. Every effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered, often slowly, in the dark recesses of the sea. The fighting strength of armies was limited only by the manhood of their countries. Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.33
The apocalyptic landscape that emerges from this description is no longer that of a classical war, a war between states. It is that of a total war that engulfs nations, in which armies destroy civilian populations, and where there are quite simply no longer any rules but that of the complete destruction of the enemy. In short, it genuinely was a civil war on a continental scale.
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1See Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 79–81.
2Ibid., p. 106.
3Giovanni Papini, ‘La vita non è sacra’, Lacerba 20 (1913), p. 208, quoted in Mario Isnenghi, Il mito della Grande Guerra de Marinetti a Malaparte’ (Bari/Rome: Laterza, 1970), p. 94.
4See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
5See Renzo De Felice, ed., Futurismo, cultura e politica (Turin: Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1988).
6See Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (London: Bantam, 1989), pp. 10–16.
7See Philippe Dagen, Le Silence des peintres. Les artistes face à la Grande Guerre (Paris: Fayard, 1996), pp. 173–83.
8See Wolfgang Mommsen, ‘Der Erste Weltkrieg und die Krise Europas’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich and Irina Renz, eds, Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch… Erlebnis und Wirkung des Ersten Weltkrieges (Essen: Klartext, 1993), pp. 30–52.
9On France, see Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la patrie. Les intellectuels et la Première Guerre mondiale (1910–1919) (Paris: La Découverte, 1996), and Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of the Intellect: French Scholars and Writers During the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Some indications of this are also given in Michel Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1997), Chapter 15.
10Quoted in Roland N. Stromberg, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914 (Lawrence, KS: Regent Press of Kansas, 1982), p. 137.
11Max Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg (Leipzig: Weissn Bücher, 1915), p. 65. On the nationalist mobilization of the German intelligentsia, see Kurt Flasch, Die geistige Mobilmachung. Die deutsche Intellektuellen und der Erste Weltkrieg (Berlin: Alexander Fest Verlag, 2000).
12Werner Sombart, Händler und Helden (Munich/Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1915). On Sombart during the Great War, see Arthur Mitzman, Sociology and Estrangement: Three Sociologists of Imperial Germany (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1987), pp. 254–64.
13Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985). On Mann and the Great War, see Eckart Koester, ‘“Kultur” versus “Zivilisation”. Thomas Manns Kriegspublizistik als weltanschaulich-ästhetischer Standortsuche’, in Wolfgang Mommsen, ed., Kultur und Krieg. Die Rolle der Intellektuellen, Künstler und Schriftseller im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), pp. 249–58.
14See Isnenghi, Il mito della Grande Guerra.
15Norberto Bobbio, Profilo ideologico del Novecento (Milan: Garzanti, 1990), p. 129.
16See Stromberg, Redemption by War.
17Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Vom Erleben des Krieges’, in Schriften 5.1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), p. 21.
18Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Max Scheler. Krieg und Aufbau’, in ibid., p. 27. On Kracauer’s evolution, so symptomatic of a whole current in Germany, see Enzo Traverso, Siegfried Kracauer. Itinéraire d’un intellectual nomade (Paris: La Découverte, 1994), pp. 18ff.
19Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 230.
20Romain Rolland, Above the Battle (CreateSpace, 2012), p. 20.
21Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Crisis in German Social Democracy’, in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review, 2004), p. 312. Kishinev had been the site of an infamous pogrom in 1903.
22Ibid., p. 313.
23The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken, 1988), p. 302.
24See Bernd Hüppauf, ‘Schlachtenmythen und die Konstruktion des “Neuen Menschen”’, in Hirschfeld, Krumlech and Renz, Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch, pp. 43-84; and George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 70–3.
25See Antonio Scurati, Guerra. Nazioni e culture nella tradizione occidentale (Rome: Donzelli, 2003), p. 52.
26Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 335–6.
27Roger Caillois, ‘Le vertige de la guerre’, Quatre essais de sociologie (Paris: Perrin, 1951), p. 107.
28Dan Diner, Das Jahrhundert verstehen. Eine universalhistorische Deutung (Munich: Luchterhand, 1999), p. 40.
29Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, p. 160.
30Ernst Kantorowicz, ‘Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought’, American Historical Review 56: 3 (April 1951), p. 492.
31Marc Bloch, ‘Lettre d’adieu’, in L’Histoire, la Guerre, le Résistance (Paris: Quarto/Gallimard, 2006), p. 188.
32Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (New York: New Directions, 2006), pp. 53–4.
33This passage, from Winston Churchill, The World Crisis 1911–1918 (New York: Macmillan, 1942), pp. 19–20, has attracted the attention of several historians: see George Lichtheim, Europe in the Twentieth Century (New York: Praeger, 1972), pp. 105–6; and Hagen Schulz, État et nation dans l’histoire de l’Europe (Paris: Seuil, 1996), p. 300.