Chapter 7

MODERNIST PROVOCATIONS

Bauhaus modernism, 1929. Source: bpk, Berlin / Art Resource, NY.

An unprepossessing handbill invited visitors to the “first international DADA-fair” in Berlin in July 1920. Founded in revulsion against the First World War in Zurich’s Café-Voltaire, this experimental art movement shocked viewers by creating a “new reality” that represented the chaos of modern life. Reacting as well to the advent of photography, artists like Georg Grosz and John Heartfield radically rejected the tradition of creating beauty, preferring instead to picture the victims of war with brutal honesty and to assemble everyday objects in startling patterns. Slogans like “art is dead” and provocative collages composed of scraps lined the exhibition’s walls, culminating in an effigy of a Prussian officer with a pig’s head dangling from the ceiling. Offended by the nihilist, communist, anticlerical, and antibourgeois thrust of this parody, the Reichswehr tried to have the show shut down, but the artists were acquitted. In many ways Dadaism was the most radical expression of twentieth-century revolt against convention that according to Raul Housman created “the beginning of modern art [on an] international scale.”1

In contrast, scientists and engineers clung to their belief in progress, manifest in the construction of the German Museum of Science and Technology. Conceived by Oskar von Miller before the war, its neomedieval halls showing “masterpieces of science and technology” opened in May 1925 with a festive parade of engineers and artisans throughout the streets of Munich. The exhibits began with early discoveries but focused on the astounding inventions of the last decades of the nineteenth century, ranging from electrical motors and chemical dyestuffs to automobiles and airplanes. The museum’s design promoted a heroic conception of technology by focusing on inventors, portrayed as daring explorers of new knowledge and creators of improvements that would benefit mankind. While they celebrated the achievements of the German genius, the displays also acknowledged the international character of scientific advancement.² Appealing especially to the curiosity of the young, this largest museum of science and technology in the world represented some of the machines that spearheaded technological innovation.

At the same time Central European intellectuals sought to come to terms with modernization in order to find “more natural and humane forms of existence under modern conditions.” Fascinated by the ambivalent effects of metropolitan existence on the human spirit, sociologist Georg Simmel pondered the centrality of money. Distinguishing between organic community (Gemeinschaft) and faceless society (Gesellschaft), Ferdinand Tönnies feared that “the entire civilization has been turned upside down by a modern way of life, dominated by civil and market society, and in this transformation civilization itself is coming to an end.” Economist Werner Sombart instead celebrated the dynamism of capitalism, contrasting creative entrepreneurs with avaricious traders whom he associated with the Germans and British respectively during the First World War. The most original thinker was Max Weber, who interpreted the confusing changes unleashed by industrialization as processes of rationalization and bureaucratization. But like his Wilhelmine peers, he viewed the impact of modernity with profound ambivalence, unsure whether it would be beneficial or problematic.3

These contradictions inherent in the encounter with modernity culminated in “Weimar culture,” which has become a cautionary symbol for the dangers of artistic extremism.⁴ The epithet is not entirely unjustified, since the collapse of the empires prompted intellectuals and artists from Central and Eastern Europe to flock to Berlin, making it a hothouse of experimentation and controversy. Moreover, the fragility of the first German democracy politicized cultural manifestations to a greater degree than concurrent movements in Paris or London, since Weimar culture appeared to involve the whole future of the defeated country, turning conflicts of style into clashes over ideology. The eventual collapse of the republic added an air of tragedy to its intellectual endeavors, while the “flight of the muses” to escape Nazi persecution dispersed creative refugees all over the world, where they spread some of Weimar’s innovations. Though the German context therefore looms large in the subsequent discussion, the cultural confrontation with modernity was a Europe-wide phenomenon with similar battles taking place everywhere.

The explosion of modernist culture in an exciting variety of movements and styles produced a severe ideological backlash. Already in the last decade before 1914 an avant-garde revolt sought to escape the stifling confines of the traditional canon. The suffering of the First World War deepened the sense of dissonance, hastened the rejection of received rules, and radicalized the attack on bourgeois (im-)morality. With the return of peace and prosperity, a popular-culture industry also emerged to entertain the masses, giving modernization an upbeat face. Capturing control of some institutions, leftist innovators succeeded in creating lasting achievements in the style of classical modernity. But traditionalist commentators complained about urban alienation, religious leaders denounced decadence, and elitists deplored the decline of standards. Moreover, neoconservative ideologues searched for an antimodern form of modernity.5 The artistic experiments therefore provoked fierce conflicts, in which the ideological extremes crushed the democratic vision between them.

MODERNIST REVOLT

At the dawn of the twentieth century many intellectuals grew frustrated with the hierarchical structure and conventional style prevalent in European capitals. While the landed and industrial elites were still firmly in control, the masses of ordinary people, organized in the labor movement, clamored for more political rights. Though bourgeois virtues of cleanliness, self-discipline, and hard work remained dominant, women activists began to rebel against Victorian patriarchy and the double standard in sexual affairs. Even if the churches were still highly esteemed, scientific discoveries such as the theory of evolution were undercutting biblical authority, and technical inventions such as electrical light were changing daily lives, raising hopes for further improvements. Whereas most architects continued to rely on historical precedents such as the neogothic, more daring designers and painters too started to search for novel forms of expression such as the decorative art nouveau style.⁶ It was this contradiction between an apparently immutable order and a growing sense of movement that inspired the modernist revolt.

Much of the confidence in the beneficent character of modernity stemmed from the spectacular advances of science during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The biological discoveries of British explorer Charles Darwin presented a rational explanation of the origin of species that conflicted with the religious account of creation. The advances in physics by Franco-Polish researchers Pierre and Marie Curie opened a door to the phenomenon of radiation while the studies of German inventor Werner von Siemens made it possible to transmit and harness the power of electricity. At the same time the investigations by French doctor Louis Pasteur and the German physician Robert Koch confirmed the existence of bacteria and inaugurated the treatment of infectious diseases previously thought incurable. Finally, the observations of Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud on the neurotic behaviors of his patients uncovered a realm of the subconscious, helping to deal with psychic disorders. This list of breakthroughs could be extended in many other directions, including the chemical experiments that produced aspirin.7

Technological inventions also contributed to the sense of progress, since they profoundly changed the quality of daily lives. The building of municipal sewage systems removed effluent from the streets, and the supply of clean water improved public health. The construction of power lines made it possible to light homes and shops, ending the tyranny of the night and changing circadian rhythms in the metropolis. The establishment of telephone connections initiated communication over long distances, facilitating business deals and personal contacts. The laying of rails for streetcars and the digging of tunnels for subway systems made it possible to move around in the burgeoning cities, while the linking of towns by railways reduced travel time between more distant places. The invention of bicycles and cars provided individual mobility and generated a new sensation of speed.⁸ By overcoming age-old constraints, such technological developments speeded up time and shrank distance, conflating modernity with rapidity and motion that called for new forms of cultural expression beyond the canon of tradition.

One sign of revolt was the secession of painters from the official academic salons in order to break with the convention of representation and free the play of color and line. When the Parisian art academy’s jury rejected impressionist paintings, Edouard Manet founded an independent Salon des Refusés in 1863 to show canvases dappled with light to the public. In subsequent decades the sculptor Auguste Rodin and the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir also organized independent exhibitions for innovative works to circumvent the control of the art market by conservative academicians. Supporting the Fauves’ experimentation with bold colors and the Cubists’ venture into abstraction of lines, this independent exposition showcased painters such as Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, and Paul Gaugin, who transcended traditional assumptions of what constituted beauty. In 1897 the Viennese artists Gustav Klimt and Otto Wagner similarly seceded from the Austrian art academy, proclaiming “to every age its art and to art its freedom.” Championed by Max Lieberman, the rebellion of the painters spread to Berlin, opening the door to an explosion of expressionism that became known as “modern art.”9

The composers’ abandonment of harmony, which introduced the shrill dissonances and hectic rhythms of metropolitan life, was another indicator of modernism. In an overripe late Romantic fashion, Richard Strauss’ expansion of the tonal vocabulary still contained flashes of humor and stunning harmonic resolutions that charmed the public. Similarly Gustav Mahler’s interminable symphonies, with their threatening dissonant crescendos, were balanced by pleasing strains of folklike melody. But Claude Debussy’s subtle experiments with shading moods and fluctuating impressions often abandoned the canon of classical forms. Finally, Arnold Schoenberg completely rejected the restraints of tonality and ventured into “a vivid, uninterrupted succession of colors, rhythms and moods” that shocked audiences accustomed to more pleasing symphonic styles. While his daring experimentation with atonality attracted devoted followers like Anton Webern and Alban Berg, the cerebral character of such “modern music” left many concertgoers bewildered, appealing only to a small coterie of the initiated.¹⁰

Yet another form of rebellion against the bourgeois order and respectability was the staging of social and psychological dramas. In realistic plays such as A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler the Norwegian author Henrik Ibsen criticized the middle-class family by revealing the disastrous consequences of a patriarchal domination that confined women to domesticity while allowing men sexual license. In a more lighthearted vein, the Irish playwright and cofounder of the Fabian Society George Bernard Shaw also ridiculed the deleterious effects of the British class system by exposing its hypocrisy in a string of well-received comedies such as Arms and the Man and Pygmalion. With stark naturalist language the German writer Gerhard Hauptmann similarly exposed the heartlessness of the capitalist system in his accusatory play The Weavers, which dramatized the hopeless resistance of Silesian artisans against the industrial competition.11 While Shaw’s productions used irony to ridicule prejudices, Ibsen’s and Hauptmann’s frontal assault on bourgeois sensibilities associated naturalist drama with scandalous provocations.

In a more muted fashion novelists also sought to escape narrative conventions by writing about taboo subjects and exploring subjective consciousness. In Germany the critic Heinrich Mann incurred the wrath of the censor by his satire of Wilhelmine arrogance in Professor Unrat, later made into a famous movie, The Blue Angel, with Marlene Dietrich. In France, the prolific André Gide sought to free himself from moralistic constraints in novels such as L’immoraliste, an audacious confession exploring his own homosexuality, the same “gross indecency” for which the British playwright Oscar Wilde was imprisoned. In Austria Arthur Schnitzler experimented with stream-of-consciousness narration in his short story “Leutnant Gustl,” probing the psychic disorders that led Viennese to suicide. In Britain the self-taught D. H. Lawrence also began to explore the passions aroused by human sexuality so frankly in books like Sons and Lovers that many critics denounced them as pornography. By abandoning realist restraint, such “modern literature” went beyond moral edification, openly confronting social problems and plumbing the depth of the psyche.¹²

The prolific artist Pablo Picasso exemplified many innovations and some problems of the artistic revolt. Born in 1881 in Malaga, the child prodigy grew up in Barcelona, where he became an accomplished draftsman. His early paintings of the blue and rose periods still used representational techniques, only exaggerating color and line so as to create a haunting beauty. But upon moving to Paris, Picasso became involved in the experiments of the avant-garde, gradually abandoning recognizable subjects for a freer play of shapes and shades. Transiting into abstraction, he became one of the pioneers of cubism in the last years before the Great War, playing with subdued colors and complex forms that transcended the iconic tradition. Celebrated as pioneering innovation, his daring paintings sold well, making him rather rich. Nonetheless, he became a communist and painted a big canvas that denounced the Nazi bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. Living a bohemian life with successive wives and mistresses, Picasso was admired and reviled as a master of modernism who revolutionized artistic expression.13

SHOCK OF WAR

World War I intensified the assault on tradition, because the experience proved so utterly wrenching that it could not be expressed in any acceptable form. Huddled in muddy trenches, soldiers felt reduced to automatons, forced to follow incomprehensible orders, so that their horizon shrank to a constant struggle for survival, relieved only by a cigarette or a drink. Participating in mass murder and witnessing the indignity of mass death produced a loss of youthful innocence—life could never again be just beautiful and benign. The impersonal nature of killing and dying in mechanized combat gradually destroyed illusions of heroism that might have elevated the suffering as sacrifice for one’s country. Finally, the pitiful gains of many attacks and the unending prospect of further fighting raised troubling questions about the entire meaning of the conflict. Artists like Otto Dix struggled to find images for conveying the horrors of the “front experience,” which exposed the destructive side of modernity as a force beyond individual control.¹⁴ Even among intellectuals at the home front, the war left deep scars that took decades to heal.

The Great War contributed to discrediting science and technology, since their effects turned out to be deadly rather than benevolent. In the industrial form of assembly-line killing during the war of attrition, it was not individual valor but collective action and the amount of available matériel that decided the outcome. Introduced in 1915, the use of poison gas produced a slow death by a burning of the lungs that permanently scarred its few survivors. At the same time the laying of explosive mines in oceans and unrestricted use of the submarine sank ships without warning, leaving sailors helpless against such danger from the deep. While the novel threat of bombing from airplanes left soldiers defenseless on the ground, the new weapon of the armored and self-propelled tank terrified infantrymen in their trenches. Even the improved medical treatment available in field hospitals only patched up wounded bodies for renewed military duty, while psychological therapy for the “shell-shocked” served to send the mentally ill back to the inferno of the front. No wonder that after 1918 cultural imagination began to portray machines as a mechanized menace.15

World War I therefore transformed the language and style of battle descriptions from tales of heroic adventure to accounts of senseless suffering. The celebratory tone of official war reporting proved incapable of conveying the agonizing experience of trench warfare. Many of the letters from soldiers on the front lines studiously avoided any detail of the horrifying circumstances of the fighting, creating a profound chasm between the actual battlefield and the home front, which was deluged instead with hollow phrases of war propaganda. While patriotic writers like Walter Flex or Rupert Brooke initially tried to romanticize the struggle, the grossness of the actual trench experience forced British “war poets” such as Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen to strive more honestly to find words and images adequate for what was essentially indescribable. Verse written under the impact of combat therefore slowly transformed from celebration of patriotic valor to shocking portrayal of the meaninglessness of the suffering.¹⁶ These literary efforts to express such sensations enhanced modernist trends by dissolving form and meaning.

Since photography proved superior in portraying the horrors of the front, the war also enhanced the artistic turn away from classical styles of representation. In contrast to traditionally composed canvases of grand battle scenes, attempts to visualize trench warfare showed devastated landscapes with bodies strewn aimlessly about. More haunting yet were the portraits of George Grosz, who dramatized the disfiguring impact of war on the human form. The war experience reinforced the repudiation of realism, begun by Henri Matisse and the Fauves in compositions of intense hues that were no longer designed to produce photographic likeness. The fighting also accelerated the trend toward abstraction pioneered by French painter Georges Braque and Russian exile Wassily Kandinsky, who stressed the importance of bordering color with geometric lines, rejecting classical perspective. Finally, the trench experience also validated the expressionist impulse of German artists like Emil Nolde to give free play to emotions in vigorous colors and strong strokes.17 Hence World War I validated modernist experimentation in nonrepresentational styles.

The terrifying roar of the front and the din of the mechanized cities also inspired a progression from dissonance to cacophony in music and dance, tempered only by the incomprehension of the concertgoing public. As early as 1913 Russian composer Igor Stravinsky and ballet master Sergey Diaghilev had shocked Paris with a frenzied production of Le sacre du printemps, whose cascading rhythms and shrill chords suggested an orgiastic primitivism. The war itself inspired composers like Leoš Janáček, Béla Bartók, and Maurice Ravel to transform their own folk tunes into less-structured and more abstract forms. Stravinsky’s injunction “il faut absolument être moderne” dominated the postwar scene, inspiring all sorts of experimentation from Eric Satie’s subtle collages to Jean Cocteau’s posturing in favor of “music for every day.” The encounter with jazz further expanded the melodic and rhythmic vocabulary, inspiring such different composers like Darius Milhaud and Kurt Weill. While Paul Hindemith was arguing “beauty of sound is beyond the point,” Schoenberg and his disciples pushed fearlessly into a new universe of the twelve-tone system.¹⁸

In literature, the war experience accelerated the dissolution of the linear forward-through-time narrative focused on character development, by suggesting associative patterns that explored the non-linear shifts and leaps of consciousness. The hypersensitive French novelist Marcel Proust constructed his grand fifteen-volume masterpiece In Search of Things Past as an introspective quest to discover his protagonist’s experiences in Paris society through an examination of memory. The imaginative Bohemian Jewish-German writer Franz Kafka also described the absurdity of life through brilliant metaphorical texts like The Metamorphosis, which both baffled and intrigued his readers through his refusal to offer a clear-cut message. At roughly the same time the Irish Catholic avant-garde writer James Joyce, during self-imposed exile in wartime Zurich and postwar Paris, evoked his native Dublin with a stream-of-consciousness technique of great complexity in his towering work Ulysses, full of classical allusions and wry humor that initially got it banned for indecency in the United States and United Kingdom.19 These modernist texts not only shocked the authorities with their frankness in sexual matters but also opened up new realms of the previously unthinkable and unspeakable.

The aftermath of the war also turned the utopia of a liberating urban life into a dystopia of the threatening, exploitative megalopolis. The 1927 movie Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, revolved around the conflict between capitalists and proletarians in a futuristic city dominated by the big “M-machine.” Focused on the love between the son of the chief exploiter and a young working-class woman, the convoluted plot conveyed the message that “the mediator between the head and hands must be the heart!” While the film had a happy ending, its pioneering special effects, including a “machine man,” a Tower of Babel–like skyscraper, and the use of mirrors, suggested that the metropolis, dominated by machines, was a pitiless place. Similarly in his 1929 sprawling novelistic collage Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin recounted the futile struggles of the worker Frank Biberkopf, who ultimately falls victim to the indifference of the merciless class system.²⁰ In such films and novels the metropolis alienated and devoured its inhabitants, since its impersonality, social tension, and mechanization were ultimately dehumanizing.

Throughout the 1920s intellectuals also debated the meaning of the First World War, because they derived contradictory lessons from its carnage. In his autobiographical novel Storms of Steel, decorated German officer Ernst Jünger portrayed the brutality of the fighting as an exhilarating adventure that inspired heroism and comradeship, toughening men in the face of danger. In contrast, Czech writer Jiři Hašek created a timeless simpleton character with his ironic depiction of the misadventures of the Good Soldier Svejk who somehow survives his troubles, thereby satirizing the incompetence of the Austro-Hungarian army. Although he had served only briefly before being wounded in 1917, German journalist Erich Maria Remarque presented a devastating portrayal of the war’s inhumanity in All Quiet on the Western Front by recounting the experiences of a young recruit whose entire cohort got wiped out. While British writers like Siegfried Sassoon and Vera Brittain clashed over whether to celebrate bravery or decry the slaughter, their conflicting accounts agreed on the increased murderousness of modernity.21

APPEALS OF POPULAR CULTURE

The spread of mass culture seemed to present a more optimistic aspect of modern life, since it offered the toiling masses affordable diversion and leisure. As a consequence of rapid urbanization, a secular popular culture centered on pubs, voluntary associations, spectacles, and parades gradually supplanted traditional rural, agricultural, and religious folk customs. During the late nineteenth century the perfection of inventions such as the linotype press, record player, film projector, and radio receiver provided new sensory experiences to inform and entertain the elites. When mass production made these machines cheap enough to reach the general public, a growing culture industry emerged that began to democratize their content and style.²² Gradual gains in free time and improvement in living standards among the lower classes inspired the development of leisure pursuits like professional sports and mass tourism that expanded recreational possibilities. The high costs and potential profits associated with these changes, however, raised questions of political control and intellectual quality that proved difficult to resolve.

One important innovation was the development of a mass press that could enlighten as well as agitate the public. As the spread of literacy increased the number of readers, the development of the linotype press facilitated production, the practice of advertising lowered costs, and the establishment of news services like AP, Reuters, Havas, and WTB provided content. In the big cities dozens of morning and evening newspapers competed with one another, offering different levels of information, amusement, and commentary. The addition of graphics, caricatures, and photographs enhanced the visual appeal of illustrated magazines. While tabloids like the Daily Mail and the Berliner Zeitung titillated mass audiences with screaming headlines, primitive content, and blatant prejudice, more serious papers like the London Times, Le Monde, and the Berliner Tageblatt offered a restrained appearance, reliable information, and sophisticated reflection.23 For their daily subscribers these newspapers created a new intellectual space, broadening their horizons from neighborhood to city and from region to country.

The first machine that brought music or speech into people’s homes without requiring a live performance was the record player. As a replacement for player pianos or music boxes, Thomas Alva Edison invented the phonograph in 1878, which worked by converting grooves etched on a wax cylinder into sound waves. A decade later Emil Berliner shifted the recording medium to a flat rotating disk, made from shellac and standardized at 78 revolutions per minute so as to produce superior sound. During the 1920s the use of electrical devices such as microphones and electric motors as turntable drivers further improved the quality of sound reproduction. The big record companies such as Columbia, Victrola, Pathé, and Deutsche Grammophon offered a broad spectrum of styles from classical music and opera for the connoisseur down to vaudeville tunes for the shopgirl. The mechanical capacity to make music circumvented the need for laborious study of an instrument, offering unrivaled artistic performances. But once the recording industry discovered that it could sell more popular songs than highbrow compositions, it shifted to producing banal hits to entertain the masses.²⁴

Motion pictures were another technology that opened new worlds of fantasy by transcending the still pictures of the laterna magica. In Lyon the brothers Lumière added the capacity of projecting motion on a screen to Edison’s invention of recording images on film. In Berlin the first short movie was shown in 1895 in a vaudeville theater, and soon directors such as Edwin S. Porter began to experiment with showing sketches from daily life or even telling stories as in The Great Train Robbery of 1903. The key to success was the establishment of filmmaking studios, the printing of numerous copies of new releases, and their distribution to special movie theaters, which could charge less than traditional theaters offering live staged productions, thereby acquiring a mass audience. While Hollywood produced exciting Westerns, glamorous variety shows, and Charlie Chaplin comedies for a broad public, continental studios such as UFA in Babelsberg strove for artistic quality in expressionist films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.25 Especially after the arrival movies with sound, called “talkies,” in the late 1920s, the audience loved the new medium, since it combined verisimilitude of appearance with imaginary content.

By broadcasting programs directly into people’s homes, radio was yet another technology that transformed cultural habits. Building on wireless telegraphy, Guglielmo Marconi and others developed the technology, which was first tried in England around 1900. Because of the cost of establishing transmitters, the limited signal range, and the need for listeners to purchase sets, radio broadcasting only took off in the 1920s, but then developed quite rapidly. In Europe the problem of financing the service was solved by levying user fees. Keenly aware of the medium’s potential to shade news and commentary in their favor, governments maintained legal control, setting up public bodies like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In the beginning the programming, limited to major cities, aimed at an elite audience with sophisticated content, but the production of more affordable receivers forced stations to adjust their offerings to the simpler tastes of the masses. Dictators like Stalin and Mussolini were especially keen on supporting wireless transmission because radio promised to distribute their propaganda to a much wider audience than print.²⁶

Increases in disposable time and income also triggered the development of mass leisure, especially the expansion of sports. Originating in the British public schools, athletic competition was supposed to build character, but it could also entertain spectators. While the elites preferred expensive games like tennis, sailing, and horseback riding, the less well-off adopted cheaper pursuits like hiking, swimming, bicycling, and kayaking. Centered on the disinterested “amateur,” the Olympic movement appealed to the upper classes, whereas spectacles such as boxing, bicycle racing, and soccer attracted popular crowds. The large gate receipts at such events made it possible for participants to professionalize by training exclusively for competition. Successful athletes like German boxer Max Schmeling and Italian bicycle racer Fausto Coppi became stars, admired by thousands of fans. Understanding the propaganda value of sports, the dictatorships fanned nationalist passions in international competitions like the Olympic Games and the soccer World Cup, interpreting the medals won by their countries’ athletes as proof of the strength of their regimes.27

Easy transportation and paid vacations also contributed to the emergence of mass tourism to famous cities or to natural sites so as to broaden the mind or restore the body. In Britain entrepreneurs like Thomas Cook went beyond the traditional religious pilgrimages or the grand tour of nobles, enticing the middle classes to travel abroad as a form of diversion. Increasing free time and a bit of loose change gradually allowed even the lower classes to venture beyond their homes to nearby lakes and forests to refresh themselves on weekends. Cheaper railroad and steamship fares made it possible for people of modest means to travel longer distances to spectacular mountain ranges like the Alps or to newly built seaside resorts. While nature lovers often put up with spartan accommodations, the majority of tourists insisted on luxury, inspiring the development of an entire new industry of hotels, museums, and other attractions.²⁸ Once again, the communists and fascists quickly realized that offering cheap vacations through youth organizations such as the Komsomol and clubs for adults such as the Dopolavoro would make their ideologies more popular.

A final aspect of popular culture was the transformation of gender roles due to the cultural construction of the “new woman,” propagated by feminists and the media. While upper-class suffragettes demanded educational equality and political rights, lower-class women increasingly ventured out of the home to work as salesgirls or secretaries before marriage. All classes of women wanted to free themselves from Victorian corsets and bustles, while replacing elaborate coiffures with simpler bobbed, androgynous haircuts. By gaining the right to vote in Britain and Germany in 1919, women organized politically and influenced social policy, though hopes for liberalizing divorce laws and legalizing abortion were mostly disappointed. But in the illustrated press and film, the image of the self-confident, slim, smoking “flapper” became a fashionable icon that urban girls strove to emulate. This female liberation from some prior constraints also required a redefinition of the male role away from patriarchy and toward partnership in marriage.29 Reinforcing each other, the new century’s myriad technological advances and stylistic developments created a novel popular culture that endowed being modern with a positive appeal.

CLASSICAL MODERNITY

During the relative stability of the mid-1920s artists experimented less frenetically than in the immediate postwar period, searching instead for stable forms to express the modern condition. In Central Europe the result was a turn to a new sobriety, a neue Sachlichkeit, which no longer tried to shock but rather to express the essence of modernity. Because technical inventions, industrial production, and metropolitan life seemed here to stay, people had to get used to living with their noise, speed, and excitement. In contrast to the rural rhythm of the seasons, the seeming disorder of urban life required a different kind of aesthetic to express its own feelings and experiences. Since escaping into decorative beauty seemed unsuitable for an age of speed and power, a new matter-of-factness would more adequately capture the rational spirit of technology. This changed mood favored reportage as accurate description and photography as reliable reproduction of reality. While not ending experimentation, the spirit of objectivity dampened the profusion of styles, producing some remarkable works of lasting artistic merit that found a classical form for modernity.³⁰

The surprising discoveries of nuclear physics exposed the contradiction between uncertainty and rationality in scientific research. Already around 1900 in Berlin Max Planck had explored the basic constitution of matter by discovering the discontinuity of radiation, which he formulated in mathematical terms as a “quantum.” Half a decade later Albert Einstein, working in a Swiss patent office, claimed that light was both a wave and a particle, leading him to propose the special theory of relativity, expressed in the famous formula E = mc². After the war, Niels Bohr in Copenhagen expanded on these insights, further probing the composition of the atom. At the same time Werner Heisenberg in Göttingen found a statistical way to explain the discrepancy between atomic measurements, concluding in his “uncertainty principle” that “to measure is to disturb.”31 While the exploration of the structure of the atom appeared to destroy the mechanical order of the Newtonian universe, the mathematical tools used to describe subatomic particles reinforced faith in the power of human reason.

The same spirit of rational inquiry also transformed industrial production according to the principles of “Fordism,” a neologism coined by Antonio Gramsci. Prosperity advanced not only by technical inventions but also by greater efficiency in manufacturing, which lowered prices and made products accessible to a wider public. In order to increase productivity by eliminating waste, Frederick Winslow Taylor promoted “scientific management,” conducting time-and-motion studies of industrial workers. In Detroit Henry Ford applied this approach to the production of automobiles, breaking down each step into standardized routines and facilitating the assembly of parts by a moving line. As a result, he was able to produce cars, notably the famous Model T, more cheaply than his competitors so that millions of people could buy them. Such rationalization treated humans as machines and threw redundant workers and engineers out of work, as ridiculed in the Chaplin movie Modern Times. But the introduction of these American methods in Europe also advanced mass consumption and spurred the motorization of broader segments of the middle classes.³²

Inspired by such ideas, the new objectivity found its classical expression in the International Style of the Bauhaus. In 1907 the architect Hermann Muthesius had founded the German Werkbund in Munich to promote the marriage of craftsmanship with industrial design. After the war Walter Gropius created a school for architecture and other arts first in Weimar, then in Dessau, and finally in Berlin in order to construct cheap, mass-produced, and yet attractive buildings and consumer products: “We want an architecture adapted to our world of machines, radios and fast cars.” This new aesthetic, formulated by an extraordinary group of architects, furniture designers, interior decorators, and painters claimed that form should follow function, making use of new materials such as concrete, steel, and glass. Without recourse to historic models, the resulting buildings had clean lines, open spaces, and large windows, looking rational and practical. Though the Bauhaus members built only a few edifices, architects like Mies van der Rohe would spread its International Style abroad as refugees from the Nazi regime, making the Bauhaus style synonymous with modern architecture.33

The turn to objectivity had a less distinctive impact on painting, since different stylistic impulses continued to compete with one another. Of course, the return to matter-of-factness encouraged the realism of Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz, and Max Beckmann, who criticized social injustice. Other artists such as Fernand Léger and Lyonel Feininger also maintained stylized versions of the human form or presented crystallized views of seascapes, aiming at an expanded version of representation. Symbolists such as Giorgio de Chirico used realistic surfaces in order to transcend reality, a trend pushed further by surrealists like Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. But the dominant impulse of modernism was the reduction of recognizable forms to mere allusions that stood as magical shorthand for reality, as in the works of Joan Miró and Paul Klee. Painters such as Piet Mondrian went even further in distilling their pictorial language to pure line and color, abandoning any reference to something recognizable. Similarly, the sculptors Constantin Brancusi and Jean Arp worked with gleaming steel or polished stone, creating abstract forms that signaled modernity.³⁴

On the stage the new matter-of-factness left a stronger imprint by inspiring the “epic theater,” promoted by the director Erwin Piscator and the playwright Bertolt Brecht. Rejecting the emotionalized melodrama of expressionism, their approach strove for simplicity, clarity, and critical distance in order to leave spectators no doubt about their social message. While Piscator used the Berlin Volksbühne (People’s Theater) to spread Soviet ideas to a broader audience, Brecht tried to write plays that would entertain and provoke at the same time. Somewhat of a rascal and a womanizer, Brecht tried to reconcile his Marxist social conscience with his fascination for American capitalism. Many of his plays and poems were cowritten by his devoted secretary Elisabeth Hauptmann or his wife, the actress Helene Weigel. Nonetheless, his musical collaboration with the composer Kurt Weil in the Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and in the Three Penny Opera produced works that were fresh, diverting, and critical of modern society at the same time. At their best, Brecht’s plays like Mother Courage transcended their ideology by capturing timeless human suffering.35

The neue Sachlichkeit affected literature by rehabilitating more narrative writing styles that nonetheless explored social and psychological questions. In France the public read the psychological novels of the Catholic François Mauriac, while in Britain readers found comfort in the intricate family sagas of John Galsworthy. In Austria Robert Musil and Joseph Roth eloquently described the cultural reasons for the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, while in Switzerland Hermann Hesse plumbed the adolescent psyche. The most ambitious of these writers was the German Thomas Mann, who in 1901 broke onto the literary scene with his first work The Buddenbrooks, a sensitive portrayal of the decline of a patrician family in his home city of Lübeck. In his monumental work Magic Mountain of 1924, he created the figure of Hans Castorp, who debates the future of European civilization with representatives of Western rationalism and Eastern mysticism in a Swiss sanatorium. Although Mann had touted the superiority of German Kultur during the First World War, he reluctantly embraced the Weimar Republic, defending it against the onslaught of the Right.³⁶

A final achievement of the mid-1920s was the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, which provided a compelling reflection on the modern condition. The sociologist Max Horkheimer directed the Institute for Social Research, founded in Frankfurt in 1923, which attracted a group of stellar intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin for a time. Disappointed by the rigidity of communism and the timidity of social democracy, institute members sought to free the Marxist impulse from dogmatism by engaging social thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Max Weber. To create a convincing blueprint for emancipation and enlightenment, they developed a “critical theory” of thinking dialectically about such topics as economic exploitation and cultural stultification. Confronting the aesthetic pretensions of modernism, the Frankfurt School criticized the culture industry as a new form of subjugation of the masses through shallow entertainment.37 This quest developed fascinating insights into the ambivalence of modernity, seeking to reinforce its positive potential through critical reason.

ANTIMODERNIST BACKLASH

Frightened by the speed of change, many Europeans rejected modernity and resented modernism as its cultural expression. Conservative religious groups abhorred science, preferring to place their faith in scripture instead. Artisans disliked machine technology, priding themselves in their skilled craftsmanship. Critics of capitalism denounced industrialization, looking back to a more stable corporate order. Psychologists worried about the neurasthenia of urbanization and longed for a healthier rural life. Members of the embattled elites feared the rise of the masses and denounced the loss of deference and hierarchy. Idealists attacked the rise of materialism, altruists complained about the spread of hedonism, moralists condemned the prevalence of licentiousness, and sexists deplored the advance of feminism. Finally, defenders of taste decried both the experiments of the avant-garde and the crudeness of popular culture. Feeling provoked, a host of traditionalists attributed the collapse of conventions, values, and order to modernism, symbolized by the Jews, and loathed its effect as chaos to be halted at any price.³⁸

Among the leaders of antimodernism were members of the clergy, on the defensive against the claims of science that undercut biblical authority by providing an alternate explanation of creation. The Catholic Church, especially, warned against the heresy of modernism in doctrinal statements, because it was afraid that the unrestrained application of human reason would destroy the basis of faith. In 1910 Pope Pius X required all clergy and religious teachers to swear an oath rejecting the modern idea “that dogma may be tailored according to what seems better and more suited to the culture of each age,” reaffirming instead “the absolute and immutable truth preached by the apostles.” Mainstream Protestantism was somewhat more open to scientific inquiry, but even there many neoorthodox theologians called for a literal reading of scripture and a return to Martin Luther and other reformers. Various sects were even more hostile to rational thought, completely withdrawing from the contemporary world or awaiting the Second Coming, which they believed to be imminent.39 For believers more open to modern thinking this ongoing conflict created a permanent dilemma of how to reconcile science with religion.

In contrast, racists claimed to draw on scientific inquiry when trying to justify the hoary prejudice of anti-Semitism with new biological arguments. One of its pioneers was the French nobleman Arthur de Gobineau, who celebrated the superiority of the Aryan race over its black and yellow competitors. When combined with social Darwinist notions of the “struggle for survival,” such racial thinking legitimized the imperialist rule of the white race over the rest of the globe. In contrast to the religious form of Judeophobia, science-based anti-Semitism no longer allowed conversion to Christianity as an escape but instead considered Jewishness to be ineradicable. By proclaiming “the Jews are our misfortune,” the National Liberal German historian Heinrich von Treitschke had popularized such biological resentment in academic circles.⁴⁰ The British Wagner devotee Houston Stewart Chamberlain further justified the primacy of the Aryan race in his anti-Semitic Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. After the First World War, such confused notions encouraged a transnational eugenics movement that sought to improve racial stock through sterilization.

Proponents of cultural pessimism criticized modernist experiments as a decline of standards and coherence, calling for a reinvigoration of tradition. Already during the last decades of the nineteenth century critics like Matthew Arnold in Britain had rejected Victorian optimism. In Germany the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche deprecated contemporary education as superficial and weakening, calling instead for a new race of supermen in order to master the challenges of the future. Other popular intellectuals like Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn attributed the malaise of modernity to Jewish emancipation, holding it responsible for cultural decadence.41 After the war the historian Oswald Spengler popularized such ideas by depicting in his The Decline of the West the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations and arguing for a fusion of Prussianism and socialism as cure for the modernist ills. In Britain the poet T. S. Eliot, in his famous canto The Wasteland, echoed a more sophisticated skepticism about the decline of European culture, while the philosopher Arnold Toynbee presented a history of world civilization in the same pessimistic vein.

Many cultural elitists deplored the vulgarity of popular culture’s catering to the masses, which would allow the public to be manipulated for sinister ends. In his 1896 bestseller The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, the French physician Gustave Le Bon warned against the loss of rational control within a crowd, since “the collective mind” would inevitably lead to primitivism. A generation later the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset expressed such phobias even more persuasively in his treatise The Revolt of the Masses. As a Castilian educated in Germany, he deplored the rise of “mass man,” extending this figure from the proletarian rabble to the middle-class functionary, a theme already intoned by the French philosopher Julien Benda in his essay on the treason of intellectuals. In his denunciation of “homogenized mass society” Ortega summed up a series of cultural fears about the loss of standards in “mass culture,” tending toward the sentimental and primitive.⁴² Ironically, these neoconservative critics of Vermassung through Americanization provided intellectual justification for just those trends of totalitarian manipulation that they claimed to oppose.

Other thinkers tried to restore order in the chaos of modernity by supporting irrational or authoritarian solutions. The deliberately obscure German philosopher Martin Heidegger rejected the entire Western philosophical tradition, arguing instead for a more existential reflection in Being and Time, his chief work of 1927. While some of his formulations (man’s responsibility for his own existence, for example) were open-ended, other statements on technology and the superiority of imagination to reason showed an antimodernist penchant that contributed to undercutting progressive thought. Similarly, in his commentaries on liberal democracy the brilliant legal theorist Carl Schmitt stressed the power of the state, its freedom to declare an emergency, and the division into friend and foe as the essence of politics. In the crisis of the Weimar Republic this kind of legal decisionism favored the authority of the executive vested in the president over the deliberation of Parliament, legitimizing the suspension of constitutional rights.43 No wonder both thinkers became favorites of intellectuals troubled by modernity.

During the 1920s neoconservative critics rejected both liberalism and communism, searching for a third way that might reconcile nationalism and socialism. The French writer Maurice Barrès was one influential forerunner, because he propagated an integral nationalism, spurned the Third Republic, and embraced a biological anti-Semitism. His associate Charles Maurras went even further, founding an antirepublican movement in the Action Française, which instilled generations of intellectuals with right-wing ideology. In Germany the historian Moeller van den Bruck propagated the idea of a national revolution through the founding a Third Reich behind an inspiring leader—a prophecy that the Nazis were only too happy to endorse. An even more radical Fighting League for German Culture polemicized against racial degeneration through the rise of “subhumans,” calling for a cultural rebirth from ethnic roots. Similarly, the Austrian Catholic philosopher Othmar Spann called for a corporate state as an alternative to failed democracy and bloody Bolshevism.⁴⁴

Ironically most of these antimodernists were themselves a product of the tendencies they detested, since they used modern arguments and methods to combat modernity. While thinkers like the French writer Drieu de la Rochelle hated scientism, industrialism, materialism, feminism, liberalism, and socialism, they also knew that they could not just go back to a mythic rural past but had to find solutions within their own time. In order to reach this goal, the neoconservatives selectively appropriated modern elements such as the quasi-scientific justification for racial anti-Semitism, hoping to create a right-wing mass movement strong enough to erase degeneration and revitalize their nations. In deploring excesses of experimentation their writings also often employed avant-garde styles, and they were not shy about using contemporary media to propagate their ideas. Instead of returning to an earlier romanticized order, they strove to create an alternative future—dynamic, virile, and inspiring. By stressing youth, action, and danger, the revolt against modernity was therefore shot through with the very elements that it sought to repudiate.

CULTURE WARS

Inspiring an explosion of creativity, the encounter with modernity between 1900 and 1930 left behind some remarkable cultural achievements that have enriched human understanding. The scientific break-throughs in nuclear physics altered our sense of the universe, the medical discoveries of bacteria made it possible to cure many diseases, and the technological advances such as the automobile and the telephone improved transportation and communication. In music, Stravinsky’s rhythmic explorations, in painting Picasso’s cubistic canvases, in sculpture Brancusi’s shining steel, in theater Brecht’s epic plays, in literature Mann’s magisterial novels, in architecture the Bauhaus style, just to mention a few works, were successful efforts to use the stylistic freedom of modernism coupled with a measure of self-restraint to explore new dimensions of the human condition. In such innovative works artists radically questioned man’s destiny and yet found forms of a simplicity that could only be called classical. Impressive as it was, this explosion of creativity proved, nonetheless, unable to stop the descent into another catastrophe.45

The provocation of modernist style and content triggered an intense ideological struggle in which the future of human civilization seemed to be at stake. The revolt against tradition saw itself as a progressive attempt to break with convention and overthrow censorship in order to establish new forms of artistic expression and address previously taboo subjects. The shock of the Great War forced intellectuals to choose between hypernationalism and internationalism by asking them to decide whether to uphold or dismantle the myth of heroic combat. With the return of peace, the advent of a technologically inspired popular culture posed novel questions about the commercialization of its contents and the vulgarity of its styles. At the same time, the conflict shifted the control of cultural institutions such as museums and concert halls, with the innovators gaining a partial foothold but defenders of tradition vigorously fighting back against the new barbarians.46 As a result, promoters of innovation generally allied themselves with the parties of the Left while defenders of tradition flocked to the movements of the Right.

Though the avant-garde modernists struck a revolutionary pose in fighting against the constraints of bourgeois culture, they fundamentally disagreed on how to supplant it. For bohemian intellectuals it was easy enough to applaud Kurt Tucholsky’s satires of the German ruling classes because they were witty and imaginative. Due to the widespread suffering of the war, the pacifist message of the French author Romain Rolland also fell on willing ears after 1918. Moreover, the triumph of the Soviet Revolution inspired hopes for ending exploitation, even if it could land imitators like the radical poet Ernst Toller in jail. But leftist critics bitterly disputed whether they should speak for the oppressed or let workers themselves produce art as in the proletkult movement of the Soviet Union. Supporting communism also raised the question of artistic independence, since the party preferred to dictate the production of agitprop posters or shows simple enough to mobilize the proletariat. While the trenchant critique of the Left resonated among intellectuals, its innovative artists failed to find a form and message that would reconcile freedom with equality.⁴⁷

The antimodernists similarly agreed on the need to combat “cultural Bolshevism” but were divided about how to accomplish that aim. Since they still controlled many cultural institutions, defenders of tradition like the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal could try to hold the line, hoping that the avant-garde onslaught would pass. In this defensive stance, they appealed to the religious and conservative parties to safeguard the influence of the churches and defend the curricular canon. But a younger generation realized that the war had so discredited the monarchs, generals, and bishops that it was foolish to expect their return. Instead these neoconservatives embraced the message of the youth movement that rejected the decadent habits of urban life such as alcohol, smoking, and sex, longing for a romantic return to a healthier existence through hiking in the countryside.48 Like the German Free-Corps fighter Ernst von Salomon, this new Right called for a “conservative revolution” so as to found an alternate vision of community. But their fantasy would turn out to be even more destructive in fascism.

In these culture wars, democrats were assaulted from both sides and eventually crushed between them. When French intellectuals founded a Human Rights League during the Dreyfus Affair, many artists rallied to defend the rights of citizens wrongly accused. Led by republican politicians such as Ferdinand Buisson, this group went international in 1922, seeking to foster cooperation in the spirit of the League of Nations.⁴⁹ The German branch was supported by the publicist Carl von Ossietzky, editor of the Weltbühne, as well as by the pacifist Ludwig Quidde. But since the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia for a time fascinated even the likes of British philosopher Bertrand Russell, and the rise of fascism in Italy captivated such an eminent literary figure as the American poet Ezra Pound, democrats found themselves between both political extremes. In Weimar a moderate group of “republicans by reason” such as the German historian Friedrich Meinecke sought to defend the constitution. But because modernist artists wanted to be more radical, while neoconservative intellectuals looked for a national rebirth, most of the creative spirits failed to come to the defense of democracy.⁵⁰