The outbreak of World War I took many highly intelligent people by surprise. On 29 June, Sigmund Freud was visited by the so-called Wolf Man, a rich young Russian who during treatment had remembered a childhood phobia of wolves. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary and his wife had taken place in Sarajevo the day before. The conversation concerned the ending of the Wolf Man’s treatment, one reason being that Freud wanted to take a holiday. The Wolf Man later wrote, ‘How little one then suspected that the assassination … would lead to World War I.”1 In Britain, at the end of July, J. J. Thomson, who discovered the electron and soon after became president of the Royal Society, was one of the eminent men who signed a plea that ‘war upon [Germany] in the interests of Serbia and Russia will be a sin against civilisation.’2 Bertrand Russell did not fully grasp how imminent war was until, on 2 August, a Sunday, he was crossing Trinity Great Court in Cambridge and met the economist John Maynard Keynes, who was hurrying to borrow a motorcycle with which to travel to London. He confided to Russell he had been summoned by the government. Russell went to London himself the following day, where he was ‘appalled’ by the war spirit.3 Pablo Picasso had been painting in Avignon and, fearing the closure of Daniel Henry Kahnweiler’s gallery (Kahnweiler, Picasso’s dealer, was German) and a slump in the market for his own works, he rushed to Paris a day or so before war was declared and withdrew all his money from his bank account – Henri Matisse later said it amounted to 100,000 gold francs. Thousands of French did the same, but the Spaniard was ahead of most of them and returned to Avignon with all his money, just in time to go to the station to say good-bye to Georges Braque and André Derain, who had been called up and were both impatient to fight.4 Picasso said later that he never saw the other two men again. It wasn’t true; what he meant was that Braque and Derain were never the same after the war.
World War I had a direct effect on many writers, artists, musicians, mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists. Among those killed were August Macke, the Blaue Reiter painter, shot as the German forces advanced into France; the sculptor and painter Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who died in the French trenches near the English Channel; and the German expressionist painter Franz Marc at Verdun. Umberto Boccioni, the Italian futurist, died on Italy’s Austrian front, and the English poet Wilfred Owen was killed on the Sambre Canal a week before the Armistice.5 Oskar Kokoschka and Guillaume Apollinaire were both wounded. Apollinaire went home to Paris with a hole in his head and died soon afterward. Bertrand Russell and others who campaigned against the war were sent to jail, or ostracised like Albert Einstein, or declared mad like Siegfried Sassoon.6 Max Planck lost his son, Karl, as did the painter Käthe Kollwitz (she also lost her grandson in World War II). Virginia Woolf lost her friend Rupert Brooke, and three other British poets, Isaac Rosenberg, Julian Grenfell, and Charles Hamilton Sorley, were also killed. The mathematician and philosopher Lieutenant Ludwig Wittgenstein was interned in a ‘Campo Concentramento’ in northern Italy, from where he sent Bertrand Russell the manuscript of his recently completed work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.7
Many of the intellectual consequences of the war were much more indirect and took years to manifest themselves. The subject is vast, engrossing, easily worth the several books that have been devoted to it.8 The sheer carnage, the military stalemate that so characterised the hostilities that took place between 1914 and 1918, and the lopsided nature of the armistice all became ingrained in the mentality of the age, and later ages. The Russian Revolution, which occurred in the middle of the war, brought about its own distorted political, military, and intellectual landscape, which would last for seventy years. This chapter will concentrate on ideas and intellectual happenings that were introduced during World War I and that can be understood as a direct response to the fighting.
Paul Fussell, in The Great War in Modern Memory, gives one of the most clear-eyed and harrowing accounts of World War I. He notes that the toll on human life even at the beginning of the war was so horrific that the height requirement for the British army was swiftly reduced from five feet eight in August 1914 to five feet five on II October.9 By $ November, after thirty thousand casualties in October, men had to be only five feet three to get in. Lord Kitchener, secretary of state for war, asked at the end of October for 300,000 volunteers. By early 1916 there were no longer enough volunteers to replace those that had already been killed or wounded, and Britain’s first conscript army was installed, ‘an event which could be said to mark the beginning of the modern world.’10 General Douglas Haig, commander in chief of the British forces, and his staff devoted the first half of that year to devising a massive offensive.
World War I had begun as a conflict between Austro-Hungary and Serbia, following the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But Germany had allied itself with Austro-Hungary, forming the Central Powers, and Serbia had appealed to Russia. Germany mobilised in response, to be followed by Britain and France, which asked Germany to respect the neutrality of Belgium. In early August 1914 Russia invaded East Prussia on the same day that Germany occupied Luxembourg. Two days later, on 4 August, Germany declared war on France, and Britain declared war on Germany. Almost without meaning to, the world tumbled into a general conflict.
After six months’ preparation, the Battle of the Somme got under way at seven-thirty on the morning of I July 1916. Previously, Haig had ordered the bombardment of the German trenches for a week, with a million and a half shells fired from 1,500 guns. This may well rank as the most unimaginative military manoeuvre of all time – it certainly lacked any element of surprise. As Fussell shows, ‘by 7.31’ the Germans had moved their guns out of the dugouts where they had successfully withstood the previous week’s bombardment and set up on higher ground (the British had no idea how well dug in the Germans were). Out of the 110,000 British troops who attacked that morning along the thirteen-mile front of the Somme, no fewer than 60,000 were killed or wounded on the first day, still a record. ‘Over 20,000 lay dead between the lines, and it was days before the wounded in No Man’s Land stopped crying out.’11 Lack of imagination was only one cause of the disaster. It may be too much to lay the blame on social Darwinist thinking, but the British General Staff did hold the view that the new conscripts were a low form of life (mainly from the Midlands), too simple and too animal to obey any but the most obvious instructions.12 That is one reason why the attack was carried out in daylight and in a straight line, the staff feeling the men would be confused if they had to attack at night, or by zigzagging from cover to cover. Although the British by then had the tank, only thirty-two were used ‘because the cavalry preferred horses.’ The disaster of the Somme was almost paralleled by the attack on Vimy Ridge in April 1917. Part of the infamous Ypres Salient, this was a raised area of ground surrounded on three sides by German forces. The attack lasted five days, gained 7,000 yards, and cost 160,000 killed and wounded – more than twenty casualties for each yard of ground that was won.13
Passchendaele was supposed to be an attack aimed at the German submarine bases on the Belgian coast. Once again the ground was ‘prepared’ by artillery fire – 4 million shells over ten days. Amid heavy rain, the only effect was to churn up the mud into a quagmire that impeded the assault forces. Those who weren’t killed by gun- or shell-fire died either from cold or literally drowned in the mud. British losses numbered 370,000. Throughout the war, some 7,000 officers and men were killed or wounded every day: this was called ‘wastage.’14 By the end of the war, half the British army was aged less than nineteen.15 No wonder people talked about a ‘lost generation.’
The most brutally direct effects of the war lay in medicine and psychology. Major developments were made in the understanding of cosmetic surgery and vitamins that would eventually lead to our current concern with a healthy diet. But the advances that were of the most immediate importance were in blood physiology, while the most contentious innovation was the IQ – Intelligence Quotient – test. The war also helped in the much greater acceptance afterwards of psychiatry, including psychoanalysis.*
It has been estimated that of some 56 million men called to arms in World War I, around 26 million were casualties.16 The nature of the injuries sustained was different from that of other wars insofar as high explosives were much more powerful and much more frequently used than before. This meant more wounds of torn rather than punctured flesh, and many more dismemberments, thanks to the machine gun’s ‘rapid rattle.’ Gunshot wounds to the face were also much more common because of the exigencies of trench warfare; very often the head was the only target for riflemen and gunners in the opposing dugouts (steel helmets were not introduced until the end of 1915). This was also the first major conflict in which bombs and bullets rained down from the skies. As the war raged on, airmen began to fear fire most of all. Given all this, the unprecedented nature of the challenge to medical science is readily appreciated. Men were disfigured beyond recognition, and the modern science of cosmetic surgery evolved to meet this dreadful set of circumstances. Hippocrates rightly remarked that war is the proper school for surgeons.
Whether a wound disfigured a lot or a little, it was invariably accompanied by the loss of blood. A much greater understanding of blood was the second important medical advance of the war. Before 1914, blood transfusion was virtually unknown. By the end of hostilities, it was almost routine.17 William Harvey had discovered the circulation of the blood in 1616, but it was not until 1907 that a doctor in Prague, Jan Jansky, showed that all human blood could be divided into four groups, O, A, B, and AB, distributed among European populations in fairly stable proportions.18 This identification of blood groups showed why, in the past, so many transfusions hadn’t worked, and patients had died. But there remained the problem of clotting: blood taken from a donor would clot in a matter of moments if it was not immediately transferred to a recipient.19 The answer to this problem was also found in 1914, when two separate researchers in New York and Buenos Aires announced, quite independently of each other and almost at the same time, that a 0.2 percent solution of sodium citrate acted as an efficient anticoagulant and that it was virtually harmless to the patient.20 Richard Lewisohn, the New York end of this duo, perfected the dosage, and two years later, in the killing fields of France, it had become a routine method for treating haemorrhage.21 Kenneth Walker, who was one of the pioneers of blood transfusion, wrote in his memoirs, ‘News of my arrival spread rapidly in the trenches and had an excellent effect on the morale of the raiding party. “There’s a bloke arrived from G.H.Q. who pumps blood into you and brings you back to life even after you’re dead,” was very gratifying news for those who were about to gamble with their lives.’22
Mental testing, which led to the concept of the IQ, was a French idea, brainchild of the Nice-born psychologist Alfred Binet. At the beginning of the century Freudian psychology was by no means the only science of behaviour. The Italo-French school of craniometry and stigmata was also popular. This reflected the belief, championed by the Italian Cesare Lombroso and the Frenchman Paul Broca, that intelligence was linked to brain size and that personality – in particular personality defects, notably criminality – was related to facial or other bodily features, what Lombroso called ‘stigmata.’
Binet, a professor at the Sorbonne, failed to confirm Broca’s results. In 1904 he was asked by France’s Minister of Public Education to carry out a study to develop a technique that would help identify those children in France’s schools who were falling behind the others and who therefore needed some form of special education. Disillusioned with craniometry, Binet drew up a series of very short tasks associated with everyday life, such as counting coins or judging which of two faces was ‘prettier.’ He did not test for the obvious skills taught at school – math and reading for example – because the teachers already knew which children failed on those skills.23 Throughout his studies, Binet was very practical, and he did not invest his tests with any mystical powers.24 In fact, he went so far as to say that it didn’t matter what the tests were, so long as there were a lot of them and they were as different from one another as could be. What he wanted to be able to do was arrive at a single score that gave a true reflection of a pupil’s ability, irrespective of how good his or her school was and what kind of help he or she received at home.
Three versions of Binet’s scale were published between 1905 and 1911, but it was the 1908 version that led to the concept of the so-called IQ.25 His idea was to attach an age level to each task: by definition, at that age a normal child should be able to fulfil the task without error. Overall, therefore, the test produced a rounded ‘mental age’ of the child, which could be compared with his or her actual age. To begin with, Binet simply subtracted the ‘mental age’ from the chronological age to get a score. But this was a crude measure, in that a child who was two years behind, say, at age six, was more retarded than a child who was two years behind at eleven. Accordingly, in 1912 the German psychologist W. Stern suggested that mental age should be divided by chronological age, a calculation that produced the intelligence quotient.26 It was never Binet’s intention to use the IQ for normal children or adults; on the contrary, he was worried by any attempt to do so. However, by World War I, his idea had been taken to America and had completely changed character.
The first populariser of Binet’s scales in America was H. H. Goddard, the contentious director of research at the Vineland Training School for Feebleminded Girls and Boys in New Jersey.27 Goddard was a much fiercer Darwinian than Binet, and after his innovations mental testing would never be the same again.28 In those days, there were two technical terms employed in psychology that are not always used in the same way now. An ‘idiot’ was someone who could not master full speech, so had difficulty following instructions, and was judged to have a mental age of not more than three. An ‘imbecile,’ meanwhile, was someone who could not master written language and was considered to have a mental age somewhere between three and seven. Goddard’s first innovation was to coin a new term – ‘moron,’ from the Greek, meaning foolish – to denote the feebleminded individuals who were just below normal intelligence.29 Between 1912 and the outbreak of war Goddard carried out a number of experiments in which he concluded, alarmingly – or absurdly – that between 50 and 80 percent of ordinary Americans had mental ages of eleven or less and were therefore morons. Goddard was alarmed because, for him, the moron was the chief threat to society. This was because idiots and imbeciles were obvious, could be locked up without too much public concern, and were in any case extremely unlikely to reproduce. On the other hand, for Goddard, morons could never be leaders or even really think for themselves; they were workers, drones who had to be told what to do. There were a lot of them, and most would reproduce to manufacture more of their own kind. Goddard’s real worry was immigration, and in one extraordinary set of studies where he was allowed to test the immigrants then arriving at Ellis Island, he managed to show to his own satisfaction (and again, alarm) that as many as four-fifths of Hungarians, Italians, and Russians were ‘moronic.’30
Goddard’s approach was taken up by Lewis Terman, who amalgamated it with that of Charles Spearman, an English army officer who had studied under the famous German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig and fought in the Boer War. Until Spearman, most of the practitioners of the young science of psychology were interested in people at the extremes of the intelligence scale – the very dull or the very bright. But Spearman was interested in the tendency of those people who were good at one mental task to be good at others. In time this led him to the concept of intelligence as made up of a ‘general’ ability, or g, which he believed underlay many activities. On top of g, said Spearman, there were a number of specific abilities, such as mathematical, musical, and spatial ability. This became known as the two-factor theory of intelligence.31
By the outbreak of World War I, Terman had moved to California. There, attached to Stanford University, he refined the tests devised by Binet and his other predecessors, making the ‘Stanford-Binet’ tests less a diagnosis of people in need of special education and more an examination of ‘higher,’ more complex cognitive functioning, ranging over a wider spread of abilities. Tasks included such things as size of vocabulary, orientation in space and time, ability to detect absurdities, knowledge of familiar things, and eye–hand coordination.32 Under Terman, therefore, the IQ became a general concept that could be applied to anyone and everyone. Terman also had the idea to multiply Stern’s calculation of the IQ (mental age divided by chronological age) by 100, to rule out the decimal point. By definition, therefore, an average IQ became 100, and it was this round figure that, as much as anything, caused ‘IQ’ to catch on in the public’s imagination.
It was at this point that world events – and the psychologist Robert Yerkes – intervened.33 Yerkes was nearly forty when the war started, and by some accounts a frustrated man.34 He had been on the staff of the Harvard faculty since the beginning of the century, but it rankled with him that his discipline still wasn’t accepted as a science. Often, for example, in universities psychology was part of the philosophy department. And so, with Europe already at war, and with America preparing to enter, Yerkes had his one big idea – that psychologists should use mental testing to help assess recruits.35 It was not forgotten that the British had been shocked during the Boer War to find out how poorly their recruits rated on tests of physical health; the eugenicists had been complaining for years that the quality of American immigrants was declining; here was a chance to kill two birds with one stone – assess a huge number of people to gain some idea of what the average mental age really was and see how immigrants compared, so that they too might be best used in the coming war effort. Yerkes saw immediately that, in theory at least, the U.S. armed services could benefit enormously from psychological testing: it could not only weed out the weaker men but also identify those who would make the best commanders, operators of complex equipment, signals officers, and so forth. This ambitious goal required an extraordinary broadening of available intelligence testing technology in two ways – there would have to be group testing, and the tests would have to identify high flyers as well as the inadequate rump. Although the navy turned down Yerkes’s initiative, the army adopted it – and never regretted it. He was made a colonel, and he would later proclaim that mental testing ‘had helped to win the war.’ This was, as we shall see, an exaggeration.36
It is not clear how much use the army made of Yerkes’s tests. The long-term significance of the military involvement lay in the fact that, over the course of the war, Yerkes, Terman, and another colleague named C. C. Brigham carried out tests on no fewer than 1.75 million individuals.37 When this unprecedented mass of material had been sifted (after the war), three main results emerged. The first was that the average mental age of recruits was thirteen. This sounds pretty surprising to us at this end of the century: a nation could scarcely hope to survive in the modern world if its average mental age really was thirteen. But in the eugenicist climate of the time, most people preferred the ‘doom’ scenario to the alternative view, that the tests were simply wrong. The second major result was that European immigrants could be graded by their country of origin, with (surprise, surprise) darker people from the southern and eastern parts of the continent scoring worse than those fairer souls from the north and west. Third, the Negro was at the bottom, with a mental age of ten and a half.38
Shortly after World War I, Terman collaborated with Yerkes to introduce the National Intelligence Tests, constructed on the army model and designed to measure the intelligence of groups of schoolchildren. The market had been primed by the army project’s publicity, and intelligence testing soon became big business. With royalties from the sales of his tests, Terman became a wealthy as well as a prominent psychologist. And then, in the 1920s, when a fresh wave of xenophobia and the eugenic conscience hit America, the wartime IQ results came in very handy. They played their part in restricting immigration, with what results we shall see.39
The last medical beneficiary of World War I was psychoanalysis. After the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo, Freud himself was at first optimistic about a quick and painless victory by the Central Powers. Gradually, however, like others he was forced to change his mind.40 At that stage he had no idea that the war would affect the fortunes of psychoanalysis so much. For example, although America was one of the half-dozen or so foreign countries that had a psychoanalytic association, the discipline was still regarded in many quarters as a fringe medical speciality, on a level with faith healing or yoga. The situation was not much different in Britain. When The Psychopathology of Everyday Life was published in translation in Britain in the first winter of the war, the book was viciously attacked in the review pages of the British Medical Journal, where psychoanalysis was described as ‘abounding nonsense’ and ‘a virulent pathogenic microbe.’ At other times, British doctors referred slightingly to Freud’s ‘dirty doctrines.’41
What caused a change in the views of the medical profession was the fact that, on both sides in the war, a growing number of casualties were suffering from shell shock (or combat fatigue, or battle neurosis, to use the terms now favoured). There had been cases of men breaking down in earlier wars, but their numbers had been far fewer than those with physical injuries. What seemed to be crucially different this time was the character of hostilities – static trench warfare with heavy bombardment, and vast conscript armies which contained large numbers of men unsuited for war.42 Psychiatrists quickly realised that in the huge civilian armies of World War I there were many men who would not normally have become soldiers, who were unfit for the strain, and that their ‘civilian’ neuroses would express themselves under the terror of bombardment. Doctors also learned to distinguish such men from those who had more resilient psychoses but through fatigue had come to the end of their tether. The intense scrutiny of the men on the stage in the theatre of war revealed to psychology much that would not have been made evident in years and years of peace. As Rawlings Rees noted, ‘The considerable incidence of battle neurosis in the war of 1914–18 shook psychiatry, and medicine as a whole, not a little.’ But it also helped make psychiatry respectable.43 What had been the mysteries of a small group of men and women was now more widely seen as a valuable aid to restoring some normality to a generation that had gone almost insane with the horror of it all. An analysis of 1,043,653 British casualties revealed that neuroses accounted for 34 percent.44
Psychoanalysis was not the only method of treatment tried, and in its classical form it took too long to have an effect. But that wasn’t the point. Both the Allied and Central powers found that officers were succumbing as well as enlisted men, in many cases highly trained and hitherto very brave men; these behaviours could not in any sense be called malingering. And such was the toll of men in the war that clinics well behind enemy lines, and even back home, became necessary so that soldiers could be treated, and then returned to the front.45 Two episodes will show how the war helped bring psychoanalysis within the fold. The first occurred in February 1918, when Freud received a copy of a paper by Ernst Simmel, a German doctor who had been in a field hospital as a medical staff officer. He had used hypnosis to treat so-called malingerers but had also constructed a human dummy against which his patients could vent their repressed aggression. Simmel had found his method so successful that he had applied to the German Secretary of State for War for funds for a plan to set up a psychoanalytic clinic. Although the German government never took any action on this plan during wartime, they did send an observer to the International Congress of Psychoanalysis in 1918 in Budapest.46 The second episode took place in 1920 when the Austrian government set up a commission to investigate the claims against Julius von Wagner–Jauregg, a professor of psychiatry in Vienna. Wagner-Jauregg was a very distinguished doctor who won the Nobel Prize in 1927 for his work on the virtual extinction of cretinism (mental retardation caused by thyroid deficiency) in Europe, by countering the lack of iodine in the diet. During the war Wagner-Jauregg had been responsible for the treatment of battle casualties, and in the aftermath of defeat there had been many complaints from troops about the brutality of some of his treatments, including electric-shock therapy. Freud was called before the commission, and his testimony, and Wagner-Jauregg’s, were soon seen as a head-to-head tussle of rival theories. The commission decided that there was no case against Wagner-Jauregg, but the very fact that Freud had been called by a government-sponsored commission was one of the first signs of his more general acceptance. As Freud’s biographer Ronald Clark says, the Freudian age dates from this moment.47
‘At no other time in the twentieth century has verse formed the dominant literary form’ as it did in World War I (at least in the English language), and there are those, such as Bernard Bergonzi, whose words these are, who argue that English poetry ‘never got over the Great War.’ To quote Francis Hope, ‘In a not altogether rhetorical sense, all poetry written since 1918 is war poetry.’48 In retrospect it is not difficult to see why this should have been so. Many of the young men who went to the front were well educated, which in those days included being familiar with English literature. Life at the front, being intense and uncertain, lent itself to the shorter, sharper, more compact structure of verse, war providing unusual and vivid images in abundance. And in the unhappy event of the poet’s death, the elegiac nature of a slim volume had an undeniable romantic appeal. Many boys who went straight from the cricket field to the Somme or Passchendaele made poor poets, and the bookshops were crammed with verse that, in other circumstances, would never have been published. But amid these a few stood out, and of those a number are now household names.49
The poets writing during World War I can be divided into two groups. There were those early poets who wrote about the glory of war and were then killed. And there were those who, killed or not, lived long enough to witness the carnage and horror, the awful waste and stupidity that characterised so much of the 1914–18 war.50 Rupert Brooke is the best known of the former group. It has been said of Brooke that he was prepared all his short life for the role of war poet/martyr. He was handsome, with striking blond hair; he was clever, somewhat theatrical, a product of the Cambridge milieu that, had he lived, would surely have drawn him to Bloomsbury. Frances Cornford wrote a short stanza about him while he was still at Cambridge:
A young Apollo, golden-haired,
Stands dreaming on the verge of strife,
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.51
Before the war Brooke was one of the Georgian Poets who celebrated rural England; their favoured techniques were unpretentious and blunt, if somewhat complacent.52 In 1914 there had been no major war for a hundred years, since Waterloo in 1815; reacting to the unknown was therefore not easy. Many of Brooke’s poems were written in the early weeks of the war when many people, on both sides, assumed that hostilities would be over very quickly. He saw brief action outside Antwerp in the autumn of 1914 but was never really in any danger. A number of his poems were published in an anthology called New Numbers. Little notice was taken of them until on Easter Sunday, 1915, the dean of St Paul’s Cathedral quoted Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ in his sermon. As a result The Times of London reprinted the poem, which gave Brooke a much wider audience. A week later his death was reported. It wasn’t a ‘glamorous’ death, for he had died from blood poisoning in the Aegean; he had not been killed in the fighting, but he had been on active service, on his way to Gallipoli, and the news turned him into a hero.53
Several people, including his fellow poet Ivor Gurney, have remarked that Brooke’s poetry is less about war than about what the English felt – or wanted to feel – about the events of the early months of the war.54 In other words, they tell us more about the popular state of mind in England than about Brooke’s own experience of fighting in the war at the front. His most famous is ‘The Soldier’ (1914):
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
Robert Graves, born in Wimbledon in 1895, was the son of the Irish poet Alfred Perceval Graves. While serving in France, he was wounded, lay unconscious on a stretcher in a converted German dressing station, and was given up for dead.55 Graves was always interested in mythology, and his verse was curiously distant and uncomfortable. One of his poems describes the first corpse he had seen – a German dead on the trench wire whom, therefore, Graves couldn’t bury. This was hardly propaganda poetry, and indeed many of Graves’s stanzas rail against the stupidity and bureaucratic futility of the conflict. Most powerful perhaps is his reversal of many familiar myths:
One cruel backhand sabre-cut –
‘I’m hit! I’m killed!’ young David cries,
Throws blindly forward, chokes … and dies.
Steel-helmeted and grey and grim
Goliath straddles over him.56
This is antiheroic, deflating and bitter. Goliath isn’t supposed to win. Graves himself suppressed his poetry of war, though Poems about War was reissued after his death in 1985.57
Unlike Brooke and Graves, Isaac Rosenberg did not come from a middle-class, public school background, nor had he grown up in the country. He was born into a poor Jewish family in Bristol and spent his childhood in London’s East End, suffering indifferent health.58 He left school at fourteen, and some wealthy friends who recognised his talents paid for him to attend the Slade School to learn painting, where he met David Bomberg, C. R. W. Nevinson, and Stanley Spencer.59 He joined the army, he said, not for patriotic reasons but because his mother would benefit from the separation allowance. He found army life irksome and never rose above private. But never having been schooled in any poetic tradition, he approached the war in a particular way. He kept art and life separate and did not try to turn the war into metaphor; rather he grappled with the unusual images it offered to re-create the experience of war, which is a part of life and yet not part of most people’s lives:
The darkness crumbles away–
It is the same old druid Time as ever.
Only a live thing leaps my hand–
A queer sardonic rat –
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
And later,
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.
–‘Break of Day in the Trenches,’ 1916
Above all, you are with Rosenberg. The rat, skittering through no-man’s-land with a freedom no man enjoys, the poppies, drawing life from the blood-sodden ground, are powerful as images, but it is the immediacy of the situation that is conveyed. As he said in a letter, his style was ‘surely as simple as ordinary talk.’60 Rosenberg’s is an unflinching gaze, but it is also understated. The horror speaks for itself. This is perhaps why Rosenberg’s verse has lost less of its power than other war poems as the years have gone by. He was killed on April Fool’s Day, 1918.
Wilfred Owen is generally regarded as Rosenberg’s only equal, and maybe even his superior. Born in Oswestry in Shropshire in 1893, into a religious, traditional family, Owen was twenty-one when war was declared.61 After matriculating at London University, he became the pupil and lay assistant to a vicar in an Oxfordshire village, then obtained a post as a tutor in English at the Berlitz School of Languages in Bordeaux. In 1914, after war broke out, he witnessed the first French casualties arriving at the hospital in Bordeaux and wrote home to his mother vividly describing their wounds and his pity. In October 1915 he was accepted for the Artists’ Rifles (imagine a regiment with that name now) but was commissioned in the Manchester Regiment. He sailed to France on active service at the end of December 1916, attached to the Lancashire Fusiliers. By then, the situation at the front was in strong contrast to the image of the front being kept alive by government propaganda back home.
Owen’s first tour of duty on the Somme was an overwhelming experience, as his letters make clear, and he went through a rapid and remarkable period of maturing. He was injured in March 1917 and invalided home via a series of hospitals, until he ended up in June in Craiglockhart Hospital outside Edinburgh, which, says his biographer, ‘was the most considerable watershed in Wilfred’s short life.’62 This was the famous psychiatric hospital where W. H. Rivers, one of the medical staff, was making early studies, and cures, of shell shock. While at Craiglockhart, Owen met Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon, who both left a record of the encounter in their memoirs. Sassoon’s Siegfried’s Journey (not published until 1948) has this to say about their poetry: ‘My trench sketches were like rockets, sent up to illuminate the darkness. They were the first of their kind, and could claim to be opportune. It was Owen who revealed how, out of realistic horror and scorn, poetry might be made.’63 Owen went back to the front in September 1918, partly because he believed in that way he might argue more forcefully against the war. In October he won the Military Cross for his part in a successful attack on the Beaurevoir-Fonsomme line. It was during his final year that his best poems were composed. In ‘Futility’ (1918), Owen is light years away from Brooke and very far even from Rosenberg. He paints a savage picture of the soldier’s world, a world very different from anything his readers back home would have ever encountered. His target is the destruction of youth, the slaughter, the maiming, the sense that it might go on for ever, while at the same time he discovers a language wherein the horror may be shown in a clear, beautiful, but always terrible way:
Move him into the sun –
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds –
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved – still warm – too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
– O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
In poems like ‘The Sentry’ and ‘Counter-Attack,’ the physical conditions and the terror are locked into the words; carnage can occur at any moment.
We’d found an old Boche dug out, and he knew,
And gave us hell; for shell on frantic shell
Lit full on top, but never quite burst through.
Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime,
Kept slush waist-high and rising hour by hour
For Owen the war can never be a metaphor for anything – it is too big, too horrific, to be anything other than itself. His poems need to be read for their cumulative effect. They are not rockets ‘illuminating the darkness’ (as Sassoon described his own work), but rather like heavy artillery shells, pitting the landscape with continual bombardment. The country has failed Owen; so has the church; so – he fears – has he failed himself. All that is left is the experience of war.64
I have made fellowships –
Untold of happy lovers in old song.
For love is not the binding of fair lips
With the soft silk of eyes that look and long,
By Joy, whose ribbon slips, –
But wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong;
Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;
Knit in the webbing of the rifle-thong.
–Apologia Pro Poemate Meo, 1917
Owen saw himself, in Bernard Bergonzi’s felicitous phrase, as both priest and victim. W. B. Yeats notoriously left him out of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) with the verdict that ‘passive suffering was not a proper subject for poetry,’ a spiteful remark that some critics have put down to jealousy. Owen’s verse has certainly lasted. He was killed in action, trying to get his men across the Sambre Canal. It was 4 November 1918, and the war had less than a week to go.
The war in many ways changed incontrovertibly the way we think and what we think about. In 1975, in The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell, then a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey and now at the University of Pennsylvania, explored some of these changes. After the war the idea of progress was reversed, for many a belief in God was no longer sustainable, and irony – a form of distance from feeling – ‘entered the modern soul as a permanent resident.’65 Fussell also dates what he calls ‘the modern versus habit’ to the war – that is, a dissolution of ambiguity as a thing to be valued, to be replaced instead by ‘a sense of polarity’ where the enemy is so wicked that his position is deemed a flaw or perversion, so that ‘its total submission is called for.’ He noted the heightened erotic sense of the British during the war, one aspect being the number of women who had lost lovers at the front and who came together afterward to form lesbian couples – a common sight in the 1920s and 1930s. In turn, this pattern may have contributed to a general view that female homosexuality was more unusual in its aetiology than is in fact the case. But it may have made lesbianism more acceptable as a result, being overlaid with sympathy and grief.
Building on the work of Fussell, Jay Winter, in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995), made the point that the apocalyptic nature of the carnage and the unprecedented amount of bereavement that it caused drove many people away from the novelties of modernism – abstraction, vers libre, atonalism and the rest – and back to more traditional forms of expression.66 War memorials in particular were realistic, simple, conservative. Even the arts produced by avant-gardists – Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Stanley Spencer, and even Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso in their collaboration with Erik Satie on his modernist ballet Parade (1917) – fell back on traditional and even Christian images and themes as the only narratives and myths that could make sense of the overwhelming nature of ‘a massive problem shared.’67 In France, there was a resurgence of images d’Epinal, pietistic posters that had not been popular since the early nineteenth century, and a reappearance of apocalyptic, ‘unmodern’ literature, especially but not only in France: Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu and Karl Kraus’s Last Days of Mankind are two examples. Despite its being denounced by the Holy See, there was a huge increase in spiritualism as an attempt to talk to the dead. And this was not merely a fad among the less well educated. In France the Institut Métaphysique was headed by Charles Richet, Nobel Prize-winning physiologist, while in Britain the president of the Society for Psychical Research was Sir Oliver Lodge, professor of physics at Liverpool University and later principal of Birmingham University.68 Winter included in his book ‘spirit photographs’ taken at the Remembrance Day ceremony in Whitehall in 1922, when the dead allegedly appeared to watch the proceedings. Abel Gance used a similar approach in one of the great postwar films, J’accuse (1919), in which the dead in a battlefield graveyard rise up with their bandages and crutches and walking sticks and return to their villages, to see if their sacrifices were worth it: ‘The sight of the fallen so terrifies the townspeople that they immediately mend their ways, and the dead return to their graves, their mission fulfilled.’69 They were easily satisfied.
But other responses – and perhaps the best – would take years to ripen. They would form part of the great literature of the 1920s, and even later.
All the developments and episodes discussed so far in this chapter were direct responses to war. In the case of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the work he produced during the war was not a response to the fighting itself. At the same time, had not Wittgenstein been exposed to the real possibility of death, it is unlikely that he would have produced Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus when he did, or that it would have had quite the tone that it did.
Wittgenstein enlisted on 7 August, the day after the Austrian declaration of war on Russia, and was assigned to an artillery regiment serving at Kraków on the eastern front.70 He later suggested that he went to war in a romantic mood, saying that he felt the experience of facing death would, in some indefinable manner, improve him (Rupert Brooke said much the same). On the first sight of the opposing forces, he confided in a letter, ‘Now I have the chance to be a decent human being, for I am standing eye to eye with death.’71
Wittgenstein was twenty-five when war broke out, one of eight children. His family was Jewish, wealthy, perfectly assimilated into Viennese society. Franz Grillparzer, the patriotic poet and dramatist, was a friend of Ludwig’s father, and Johannes Brahms gave piano lessons to both his mother and his aunt. The Wittgensteins’ musical evenings were well known in Vienna: Gustav Mahler and Bruno Walter were both regulars, and Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet received its first performance there. Margarete Wittgenstein, Ludwig’s sister, sat for Gustav Klimt, whose painting of her is full of gold, purple, and tumbling colours.72 Ironically, Ludwig, now the best remembered of the Wittgensteins, was originally regarded by other family members as the dullest. Margarete had her beauty; Hans, one of the older brothers, began composing at the age of four, by which time he could play the piano and the violin; and Rudolf, another older brother, went to Berlin to be an actor. Had Hans not disappeared, sailing off Chesapeake Bay in 1903, and Rudolf not taken cyanide in a Berlin bar after buying the pianist a drink and requesting him to play a popular song, ‘I Am Lost,’ Ludwig might never have shone.73 Both his brothers were tortured by the feeling that they had failed to live up to their father’s stiff demands that they pursue successful business careers. Rudolf was also tormented by what he felt was a developing homosexuality.
Ludwig was as fond of music as the rest of the family, but he was also the most technical and practical minded. As a result, he wasn’t sent to the grammar school in Vienna but to Realschule in Linz, a school chiefly known for the teaching of the history master, Leopold Pötsch, a rabid right-winger who regarded the Habsburg dynasty as ‘degenerate.’74 For him, loyalty to such an entity as the Habsburgs was absurd; instead he revered the more accessible völkisch nationalism of the Pan-German movement. There is no sign that Wittgenstein was ever attracted by Pötsch’s theories, but a fellow pupil, with whom he overlapped for a few months, certainly was. His name was Adolf Hitler. After Linz, Wittgenstein went to Berlin, where he became interested in philosophy. He also developed a fascination with aeronautics, and his father, still anxious for one of his sons to have a lucrative career, suggested he go to Manchester University in England, where there was an excellent engineering department. Ludwig duly enrolled in the engineering course as planned. He also attended the seminars of Horace Lamb, the professor of mathematics. It was in one of his seminars that Wittgenstein was introduced by a fellow student to Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics. This book, as we have seen earlier, showed that mathematics and logic are the same. For Wittgenstein, Russell’s book was a revelation. He spent months studying The Principles and also Gottlob Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Fundamental Laws of Arithmetic).75 In the late summer of 1911 Wittgenstein travelled to Jena in Germany to visit Frege, a small man ‘who bounced around the room when he talked,’ who was impressed enough by the young Austrian to recommend that he study under Bertrand Russell at Cambridge.76 Wittgenstein’s approach to Russell coincided with the Englishman just having finished Principia Mathematica. The young Viennese arrived in Cambridge in 1911, and to begin with people’s opinions of him were mixed. Nicknamed ‘Witter-Gitter,’ he was generally considered dull, with a laboured Germanic sense of humour. Like Arnold Schoenberg and Oskar Kokoschka he was an autodidact and didn’t care what people thought of him.77 But it soon got about that the pupil was rapidly overtaking the master, and when Russell arranged for Wittgenstein to be invited to join the Apostles, a highly secret and selective literary society dating back to 1820 and dominated at that time by Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes, ‘Cambridge realised that it had another genius on its hands.’78
By 1914, after he had been in Cambridge for three years, Wittgenstein, or Luki as he was called, began to formulate his own theory of logic.79 But then, in the long vacation, he went home to Vienna, war was declared, and he was trapped. What happened over the next few years was a complex interplay between Wittgenstein’s ideas and the danger he was in at the front. Early on in the war he conceived what he called the picture theory of language – and it was this that was refined during the Austrian army’s chaotic retreat under Russian attack. In 1916, however, Wittgenstein was transferred to the front as an ordinary soldier after the Russians attacked the Central Powers on their Baltic flank. He proved brave, asking to be assigned to the most dangerous place, the observation post on the front line, which guaranteed he would be a target. ‘Was shot at,’ his diary records on 29 April that year.80 Despite all this, he wrote some philosophy in those months, until June at least, when Russia launched its long-planned Brusilov offensive and the fighting turned heavy. At this point Wittgenstein’s diaries show him becoming more philosophical, even religious. At the end of July the Austrians were driven back yet again, this time into the Carpathian Mountains, in icy cold, rain, and fog.81 Wittgenstein was shot at once more, recommended for the Austrian equivalent of the Victoria Cross (he was given a slightly lesser honour) and promoted three times, eventually to officer.82 At officer school he revised his book in collaboration with a kindred spirit, Paul Engelmann, and then returned as a Leutnant on the Italian front.83 He completed the book during a period of leave in 1918 after his uncle Paul had bumped into him at a railway station where Wittgenstein was contemplating suicide. The uncle persuaded his nephew to go with him to Hallein, where he lived.84 There Wittgenstein finished the new version before returning to his unit. Before the manuscript was published, however, Wittgenstein was taken prisoner in Italy, with half a million other soldiers. While incarcerated in a concentration camp, he concluded that his book had solved all the outstanding problems of philosophy and that he would give up the discipline after the war and become a schoolteacher. He also decided to give away his fortune. He did both.
Few books can have had such a tortuous birth as the Tractatus. Wittgenstein had great difficulty finding a publisher, the first house he approached agreeing to take the book only if he paid for the printing and the paper himself.85 Other publishers were equally cautious and his book did not appear in English until 1922.86 But when it did appear, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus created a sensation. Many people did not understand it; others thought it ‘obviously defective’, ‘limited’ and that it stated the obvious. Frank Ramsay, in the philosophical journal Mind, said, ‘This is a most important book containing original ideas on a large range of topics, forming a coherent system …’87 Keynes wrote to Wittgenstein, ‘Right or wrong, it dominates all fundamental discussions at Cambridge since it was written.’88 In Vienna, it attracted the attention of the philosophers led by Moritz Schlick – a group that eventually evolved into the famous Vienna Circle of logical positivists.89 As Ray Monk, Wittgenstein’s biographer describes it, the book comprises a Theory of Logic, a Picture Theory of Propositions and a ‘quasi-Schopenhauerian mysticism.’ The argument of the book is that language corresponds to the world, as a picture or model corresponds to the world that it attempts to depict. The book was written in an uncompromising style. ‘The truth of the thoughts that are here communicated,’ so runs the preface, ‘seems to me unassailable and definitive.’ Wittgenstein added that he had found the solution to the problems of philosophy ‘on all essential points,’ and concluded the preface, ‘if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved.’ The sentences in the book are simple, and numbered, remark 2.151 a refinement of 2.15, which cannot be understood without reference to the remarks in 2.1. Few of these remarks are qualified; instead each is advanced, as Russell once put it, ‘as if it were a Czar’s ukase.’90 Frege, whose own work had inspired the Tractatus, died without ever understanding it.
It is perhaps easier to grasp what Wittgenstein was driving at in the Tractatus if we concentrate on the second half of his book. His major innovation was to realise that language has limitations, that there are certain things it cannot do and that these have logical and therefore philosophical consequences. For example, Wittgenstein argues that it is pointless to talk about value – simply because ‘value is not part of the world’. It therefore follows that all judgements about moral and aesthetic matters cannot – ever – be meaningful uses of language. The same is true of philosophical generalisations that we make about the world as a whole. They are meaningless if they cannot be broken down into elementary sentences ‘which really are pictures.’ Instead, we have to lower our sights, says Wittgenstein, if we are to make sense. The world can only be spoken about by careful description of the individual facts of which it is comprised. In essence, this is what science tries to do. Logic he thought was essentially tautologous – different ways of saying the same thing, conveying ‘no substantial information about the world.’
Wittgenstein has been unfairly criticised for starting a trend in philosophy – ‘an obsession with word games.’ He was in fact trying to make our use of language more precise, by emphasising what we can and cannot meaningfully talk about. The last words of the Tractatus have become famous: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’91 He meant that there is no point in talking about areas where words fail to correspond to reality. His career after this book was as remarkable as it had been during its compilation, for he fulfilled the sentiments of that last sentence in his own highly idiosyncratic way. He fell silent, becoming a schoolteacher in the Austrian countryside, and never published another book in his lifetime.92
During the war many artists and writers retreated to Zurich in neutral Switzerland. James Joyce wrote much of Ulysses by the lake; Hans Arp, Frank Wedekind and Romain Rolland were also there. They met in the cafés of Zurich, which for a time paralleled in importance the coffeehouses of Vienna at the turn of the century. The Café Odèon was most well known. For many of those in exile in Zurich, the war seemed to mark the end of the civilisation that had spawned them. It came after a period in which art had become a proliferation of ‘isms,’ when science had discredited both the notion of an immutable reality and the concept of a wholly rational and self-conscious man. In such a world, the Dadaists felt they had to transform radically the whole concept of art and the artist. The war exploded the idea of progress, which in turn killed the ambition to make durable, classic works for posterity.93 One critic said the only option facing artists was silence or action.
Among the regulars at the Café Odèon were Franz Werfel, Aleksey Jawlensky, and Ernst Cassirer, the philosopher. There was also a then-unknown German writer, a Catholic and an anarchist at the same time, named Hugo Ball, and his girlfriend, Emmy Hennings. Hennings was a journalist but also performed as a cabaret actress, accompanied by Ball on the piano. In February 1916 they had the idea to open a review or cabaret with a literary bent. It was ironically called the Cabaret Voltaire (ironic because Dada eschewed the very reason for which Voltaire was celebrated)94 and opened on the Spiegelgasse, a steep and narrow alley where Lenin lived. Among the first to appear at Voltaire were two Romanians, the painter Marcel Janco and a young poet, Sami Rosenstock, who adopted the pen name of Tristan Tzara. The only Swiss among the early group was Sophie Taueber, Hans Arp’s wife (he was from Alsace). Others included Walter Serner from Austria, Marcel Slodki from Ukraine, and Richard Hülsenbeck and Hans Richter from Germany. For a review, in June 1916 Ball produced a programme, and it was in his introduction to the performance that the word Dada was first used. Ball’s own journal records the kinds of entertainment at Cabaret Voltaire: ‘rowdy provocateurs, primitivist dance, cacophony and Cubist theatricals.’95 Tzara always claimed to have found the word Dada in the Larousse dictionary, but whether the term ever had any intrinsic meaning, it soon acquired one, best summed up by Hans Richter.96 He said it ‘had some connection with the joyous Slavonic affirmative “Da, da,” … “yes, yes,” to life.’ In a time of war it lauded play as the most cherished human activity. ‘Repelled by the slaughterhouses of the world war, we turned to art,’ wrote Arp. ‘We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the furious madness of those times … we wanted an anonymous and collective art.’97 Dada was designed to rescue the sick mind that had brought mankind to catastrophe, and restore its health.98 Dadaists questioned whether, in the light of scientific and political developments, art – in the broadest sense – was possible. They doubted whether reality could be represented, arguing that it was too elusive, according to science, and therefore dubious both morally and socially. If Dada valued anything, it was the freedom to experiment.99
Dada, no less than other modern movements, harboured a paradox. For though they doubted the moral or social usefulness of art, the Dadaists had little choice but to remain artists; in their attempt to restore the mind to health, they still supported the avant-garde idea of the explanatory and redemptive powers of art. The only difference was that, rather than follow any of the ‘isms’ they derided, they turned instead to childhood and chance in an attempt to recapture innocence, cleanliness, clarity – above all, as a way to probe the unconscious.
No one succeeded in this more than Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters. Arp produced two types of image during the years 1916–20. There were his simple woodcuts, toylike jigsaws; like children he loved to paint clouds and leaves in straightforward, bright, immediate colours. At the same time he was open to chance, tearing off strips of paper that he dropped and fixed wherever they fell, creating random collages. Nonetheless, the work which Arp allowed into the public domain has a meditative quality, simple and stable.100 Tristan Tzara did the same thing with poetry, where, allegedly, words were drawn at random from a bag and then tumbled into ‘sentences.’101 Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) made collages too, but his approach was deceptively unrandom. Just as Marcel Duchamp converted ordinary objects like urinals and bicycle wheels into art by renaming them and exhibiting them in galleries, Schwitters found poetry in rubbish. A cubist at heart, he scavenged his native Hanover for anything dirty, peeling, stained, half-burnt, or torn. When these objects were put together by him, they were transformed into something else entirely that told a story and was beautiful.102 Although his collages may appear to have been thrown together at random, the colors match, the edges of one piece of material align perfectly with another, the stain in a newspaper echoes a form elsewhere in the composition. For Schwitters these were ‘Merz’ paintings, the name forming part of a newspaper advertisement for the Kommerz- und Privat-Bank, which he had used in an early collage. The detritus and flotsam in Schwitters’s collages were for him a comment, both on the culture that leads to war, creating carnage, waste, and filth, and on the cities that were the powerhouse of that culture and yet the home of so much misery. If Edouard Manet, Charles Baudelaire, and the impressionists had celebrated the fleeting, teeming beauty of late-nineteenth-century cities, the environment that gave rise to modernism, Schwitters’s collages were uncomfortable elegies to the end of an era, a new form of art that was simultaneously a form of relic, a condemnation of that world, and a memorial. It was this kind of ambiguity, or paradox, that the Dadaists embraced with relish.103
Towards the end of the war, Hugo Ball left Zurich for the Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, and the centre of gravity of Dada shifted to Germany. Hans Arp and Max Ernst, another collagist, went to Cologne, and Schwitters was in Hanover. But it was in Berlin that Dada changed, becoming far more political. Berlin, amid defeat, was a brutal place, ravaged by shortages, despoiled by misery everywhere, with politics bitterly divided, and with revolution in the wake of Russian events a very real possibility. In November 1918 there was a general socialist uprising, which failed, its leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg murdered. The uprising was a defining moment for, among others, Adolf Hitler, but also for the Dadaists.104
It was Richard Hülsenbeck who transported ‘the Dada virus’ to Berlin.105 He published his Dada manifesto in April 1918, and a Dada club was established. Early members included Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Hannah Hoch, who replaced collage with photomontage to attack the Prussian society that they all loathed. Dadaists were still being controversial and causing scandals: Johannes Baader invaded the Weimar Assembly, where he bombarded the delegates with leaflets and declared himself president of the state.106 Dada was more collectivist in Berlin than in Zurich, and a more long-term campaign was that waged by the Dadaists against the German expressionists, such as Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde, who, they claimed, were no more than bourgeois German romantics.107 George Grosz and Otto Dix were the fiercest critics among the painters, their most striking image being the wretched half-human forms of the war cripple. These deformed, grotesque individuals were painful reminders for those at home of the brutal madness of the war. Grosz, Dix, Hoch and Heartfield were no less brutal in their depiction of figures with prostheses, who looked half-human and half-machine. These mutilated figures were gross metaphors for what would become the Weimar culture: corrupt, disfigured, with an element of the puppet, the old order still in command behind the scenes – but above all, a casualty of war.
No one excoriated this society more than Grosz in his masterpiece Republican Automatons (1920), where the landscape is forbidding, with skyscrapers that are bleak in a way that Giorgio de Chirico, before long, would make menacing. In the foreground the deformed figures, propped up by prostheses of absurd complexity and yet at the same time atavistically dressed in traditional bowler hat, stiff high collar, boiled shirt, and sporting their war medals, wave the German flag. It is, like all Grosz’s pictures, a mordant image of virulent loathing, not just of the Prussians but also of the bourgeoisie for accepting an odious situation so glibly.108 For Grosz, the evil had not ended with the war; indeed the fact that so little had changed, despite the horror and the mutilation, was what he railed against. ‘In Grosz’s Germany, everything and everybody is for sale [prostitutes were a favourite subject]…. The world is owned by four breeds of pig: the capitalist, the officer, the priest and the hooker, whose other form is the socialite wife. It was no use objecting … that there were some decent officers, or cultivated bankers. The rage and pain of Grosz’s images simply swept such qualifications aside.’109
Tristan Tzara took the idea of Dada to Paris in 1920. André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault, who together edited the modernist review Littérature, were sympathetic, being already influenced by Alfred Jarry’s brand of symbolism and its love of absurdity.110 They also enjoyed a tendency to shock. But unlike in Berlin, Dada in Paris took a particularly literary form, and by the end of 1920 there were at least six Dada magazines in existence and as many books, including Francis Picabia’s Pensées sans langage (Thoughts without Language) and Paul Eluard’s Les Nécessités de la vie et les conséquences des rêves (The Necessities of Life and the Consequences of Dreams). The magazines and books were reinforced by salons and soirées in which the main aim was to promise the public something scandalous and then disappoint them, forcing the bourgeoisie to confront its own futility, ‘to look over into an abyss of nothing.’111 It was this assault on the public, this fascination with risk, this ‘surefootedness on the brink of chaos,’ that linked Paris, Berlin, and Zurich Dada.112
Unique to Paris Dada was automatic writing, a psychoanalytic technique where the writer allowed himself to become ‘a recording machine,’ listening for the ‘unconscious murmur.’ André Breton thought that a deeper level of reality could be realised through automatic writing, ‘that analogical sequences of thought’ were released in this way, and he published a short essay in 1924 about the deeper meaning of our conscious thoughts.113 Called Manifeste du Surréalisme, it had an enormous influence on artistic/cultural life in the 1920s and 1930s. Even though surrealism did not flower until the mid-1920s, Breton maintained that it was ‘a function of war.’114
Across from the Austrian front line, where Wittgenstein was writing and rewriting the Tractatus, on the Russian side several artists were recording hostilities. Marc Chagall drew wounded soldiers. Natalya Goncharova published a series of lithographs, Mystical Images of War, in which ancient Russian icons appeared under attack from enemy aircraft. Kasimir Malevich produced a series of propaganda posters ridiculing German forces. But the immediate and crude intellectual consequence of the war for Russia was that it cut off the Russian art community from Paris.
Before World War I the Russian artistic presence in Paris was extensive. Futurism, begun by the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti, in 1909, had been taken up by Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharova in 1914. Its two central ideas were first, that machinery had created a new kind of humanity, in so doing offering freedom from historical constraints; and second, that operating by confrontation was the only way to shake people out of their bourgeois complacencies. Although it didn’t last long, the confrontational side of futurism was the precursor to that aspect of Dada, surrealism, and the ‘happenings’ of the 1960s. In Paris, Goncharova designed Le Coq d’or for Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexandre Benois worked for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Guillaume Apollinaire reviewed the exhibition of paintings by Larionov and Goncharova at the Galérie Paul Guillaume in Les Soirées de Paris, concluding that ‘a universal art is being created, an art in which painting, sculpture, poetry, music and even science in all its manifold aspects will be combined.’ In the same year, 1914, there was an exhibition of Chagall in Paris, and several paintings by Malevich were on show at the Salon des Indépendants. Other Russian artists in Paris before the war included Vladimir Tatlin, Lydia Popova, Eliezer Lissitzky, Naum Gabo, and Anton Pevsner. Wealthy Russian bourgeois collectors like Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov collected some of the best modern pictures the French school had to offer, making friends with Picasso, Braque, Matisse, and Gertrude and Leo Stein.115 By the outbreak of war, Shchukin had collected 54 Picassos, 37 Matisses, 29 Gauguins, 26 Cézannes, and 19 Monets.116
For Russians, the ease of travel before 1914 meant that their art was both open to international modernistic influences and yet distinctively Russian. The works of Goncharova, Malevich, and Chagall combined recognisable themes from the Russian ‘East’ but also images from the modern ‘West’: Orthodox icons and frozen Siberian landscapes but also iron girders, machines, airplanes, the whole scientific palette. Russian art was not backward before the revolution. In fact, ‘suprematism,’ a form of geometrical abstraction born of Malevich’s obsession with mathematics, appeared between the outbreak of war and revolution – yet another ‘ism’ to add to the profusion in Europe. But the explosion of revolution, coming in the middle of war, in October 1917, transformed painting and the other visual arts. Three artists and one commissar typified the revolution in Russian art: Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexandr Rodchenko, and Anatoli Lunacharsky.
Lunacharsky was a sensitive and idealistic writer of no fewer than thirty six books who was convinced that art was central to the revolution and the regeneration of Russian life and he had firm ideas about its role.117 Now that the state was the only patron of art (the Shchukin collection was nationalised on 5 November 1918), Lunacharsky conceived the notion of a new form of art, agitprop, combining agitation and propaganda. For him art was a significant medium of change.118 As commissar for education, an authority on music and theatre, Lunacharsky had Lenin’s ear, and for a time several grandiose plans were considered – for example, a proposal to erect at well-known landmarks in Moscow a series of statues, monuments of great international revolutionaries of the past. Loosely interpreted, many of the ‘revolutionaries’ were French: Georges-Jacques Danton, Jean-Paul Marat, Voltaire, Zola, Cézanne.119 The scheme, like so many others, failed simply for lack of resources: there was no shortage of artists in Russia, but there was of bronze.120 Other agitprop schemes were realised, at least for a while. There were agitprop posters and street floats, agitprop trains, and agitprop boats on the Volga.121 Lunacharsky also shook up the art schools, including the two most prestigious institutions, in Vitebsk, northwest of Smolensk, and Moscow. In 1918 the former was headed by Chagall, and Malevich and Lissitzky were members of its faculty; the latter, the Higher State Art Training School, or Vkhutemas School, in Moscow, was a sort of Bauhaus of Russia, ‘the most advanced art college in the world, and the ideological centre of Russian Constructivism.’122
The early works of Kasimir Malevich (1878–1935) owe much to impressionism, but there are also strong echoes of Cézanne and Gauguin – bold, flat colour – and the Fauves, especially Matisse. Around 1912 Malevich’s images began to break up into a form of cubism. But the peasants in the fields that dominate this period of his work are clearly Russian. From 1912 on Malevich’s work changed again, growing simpler. He was always close to Velimir Khlebnikov, a poet and a mathematician, and Malevich’s paintings have been described as analogues to poetry, exploiting abstract, three-dimensional forms – triangles, circles, rectangles, with little colour variation.123 His shapes are less solid than those of Braque or Picasso. Finally, Malevich changed again, to his celebrated paintings of a black square on a white background and, in 1918, a white square on a white background. As revolution was opening up elsewhere, Malevich’s work represented one kind of closure in painting, about as far as it could be from representation. (A theoretician of art as well as a painter, he entitled one essay ‘The Objectless World.’)124 Malevich aimed to represent the simplicity, clarity, and cleanliness that he felt was a characteristic of mathematics, the beautiful simplicity of form, the essential shapes of nature, the abstract reality that lay beneath even cubism. Malevich revolutionised painting in Russia, pushing it to the limits of form, stripping it down to simple elements the way physicists were stripping matter.
Malevich may have revolutionised painting, but constructivism was itself part of the revolution, closest to it in image and aim. Lunacharsky was intent on creating a people’s art, ‘an art of five kopeks,’ as he put it, cheap and available to everyone. Constructivism responded to the commissar’s demands with images that looked forward, that suggested endless movement and sought to blur the boundaries between artist and artisan, engineer or architect. Airplane wings, rivets, metal plates, set squares, these were the staple images of constructivism.125 Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953), the main force in constructivism, was a sailor and a marine carpenter, but he was also an icon painter. Like Kandinsky and Malevich, he wanted to create new forms, logical forms.126 Like Lunacharsky he wanted to create a proletarian art, a socialist art. He started to use iron and glass, ‘socialist materials’ that everyone knew and was familiar with, materials that were ‘not proud.’127 Tatlin’s theories came together in 1919, two years after the revolution, when he was asked to design a monument to mark the Third Communist International, the association of revolutionary Marxist parties of the world. The design he came up with – unveiled at the Eighth Congress of the Soviets in Moscow in 1920 – was a slanting tower, 1,300 feet high, dwarfing even the Eiffel Tower, which was ‘only’ 1,000 feet. The slanting tower was a piece of propaganda for the state and for Tatlin’s conception of the place of engineering in art (he was a very jealous man, keenly competitive with Malevich).128 Designed in three sections, each of which rotated at a different speed, and built of glass and steel, Tatlin’s tower was regarded as the defining monument of constructivism, an endlessly dynamic useful object, loaded with heavy symbolism. The banner that hung above the model when it was unveiled read ‘Engineers create new forms.’ But of course, a society that had no bronze for statues of Voltaire and Danton had no steel or glass for Tatlin’s tower either, and it never went beyond the model stage: ‘It remains the most influential non-existent object of the twentieth-century, and one of the most paradoxical – an unworkable, probably unbuildable metaphor of practicality.’129 It was the perfect epitome of Malevich’s objectless world.
The third of revolutionary Russia’s artistic trinity was the painter Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956). Fired by the spirit of the revolution, he created his own brand of futurism and agitprop. Beginning with a variety of constructions, part architectural models, part sculpture, he turned to the stark realism of photography and the immediate impact of the poster.130 He sought an art form that was, in the words of Robert Hughes, as ‘arresting as a shout in the street’:131 ‘The art of the future will not be the cosy decoration of family homes. It will be just as indispensable as 48-storey skyscrapers, mighty bridges, wireless [radio], aeronautics and submarines, which will be transformed into art.’ With one of Russia’s great modernist poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Rodchenko formed a partnership whose common workshop stamp read, ‘Advertisement Constructors, Mayakovsky-Rodchenko.’132 Their posters were advertisements for the new state. For Rodchenko, propaganda became great art.133
Rodchenko and Mayakovsky shared Tatlin’s and Lunacharsky’s ideas about proletarian art and about the reach of art. As true believers in the revolution, they thought that art should belong to everyone and even shared the commissar’s view that the whole country, or at least the state, should be regarded as a work of art.134 This may seem grandiose to the point of absurdity now; it was deadly serious then. For Rodchenko, photography was the most proletarian art: even more than typography or textile design (other interests of his), it was cheap, and could be repeated as often as the situation demanded. Here are some typical Rodchenko arguments:
Down with ART as bright PATCHES
on the undistinguished life of the
man of property.
Down with ART as a precious STONE
midst the dark and filthy life of the pauper.
Down with art as a means of
ESCAPING from LIFE which is
not worth living.135
and:
Tell me, frankly, what ought to remain of Lenin:
an art bronze,
oil portraits,
etchings,
watercolours,
his secretary’s diary, his friends’ memoirs –
or a file of photographs taken of him at work and at rest, archives of his books, writing pads, notebooks, shorthand reports, films, phonograph records? I don’t think there’s any choice.
Art has no place in modern life…. Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium.
Don’t he.
Take photo after photo!136
Taking this perfect constructivist material – modern, humble, real, influenced by his friend, the Russian film director Dziga Vertov – Rodchenko began a series of photomontages that used repetition, distortion, magnification and other techniques to interpret and reinterpret the revolution to the masses. For Rodchenko, even beer, a proletarian drink, could be revolutionary, an explosive force.
Even though they were created as art forms for the masses, suprematism and constructivism are now considered ‘high art.’ Their intended influence on the proletariat was ephemeral. With the grandiose schemes failing for lack of funds, it was difficult for the state to continue arguing that it was a work of art. In the ‘new’ modern Russia, art lost the argument that it was the most important aspect of life. The proletariat was more interested in food, jobs, housing, and beer.
It does not diminish the horror of World War I, or reduce our debt to those who gave their lives, to say that most of the responses considered here were positive. There seems to be something in human nature such that, even when it makes an art form, or a philosophy, out of pessimism, as Dada did, it is the art form or the philosophy that lasts, not the pessimism. Few would wish to argue which was the worst period of darkness in the twentieth century, the western front in 1914–18, Stalin’s Russia, or Hitler’s Reich, but something can be salvaged from ‘the Great War’.