Crucible has been swirling around in my mind as an idea for a book for several years, as a way of telling a story about the momentous period at the end of the Great War which goes beyond the memorialisation of the years 1914–1918 and gets into the disorder and the dynamism of the years which followed.
In 1917, with revolution in Russia and the entry of America into the war, Europe passed a point of no return. Things would never go back to how they were before; the social and political order of the Continent was no longer tenable. In 1924, long after the Great War itself had formally ended, a superficial sense of orderliness returned, with peace across the Continent and economic recovery across the world. But in between, everything seemed up for grabs. These were years of extraordinary violence, marked by revolutions, civil wars, lynch mobs, putsches and famines. From that violence, from the ruins of the old world, new ideologies emerged: fascism, communism and a virulent strain of anti-Semitism. But these were also the years of Dadaism and surrealism, when relativity was accepted and the psychoanalytical account of the human mind flourished, the years which re-energised the civil rights movement in the United States and produced the first nationwide successes of the suffragette movement in Europe and America. The tragic and the heroic, the absurd and the comical, the good and the evil: all life is here.
My intention with this book has been to trace trajectories, rather than portray static sets of ideas or completed historical processes. Crucible is about movement: rises and falls, arrivals and departures. Hopefully the use of the present tense conveys a sense of immediacy, as if the moments described in the book are like scenes in a moving picture which we have not yet seen to the end. Crucible is also about how those trajectories intersected. It is perhaps these intersections which give the true, unsettling and eclectic flavour of the times, one of those rare and ‘terribly thrilling’ moments in history, as Freud described it in 1918, when ‘the old has died, but the new has not yet replaced it.’
This was a world in which Benito Mussolini, the bowler-hatted former socialist, could tout Italian fascism as the most relativist phenomenon of the age (without mentioning Albert Einstein by name). André Breton’s surrealism drew on his experiences working in a psychiatric hospital during the war and his veneration of Freud (until he met him). German nationalists saw Mustafa Kemal’s success in rejecting a peace imposed by the victorious powers of the war as a token for what they might achieve themselves. Marcus Garvey saw a relationship between his fight for worldwide black empowerment and the struggle of Éamon de Valera to achieve recognition for an independent Ireland.
Adolf Hitler looked admiringly over the Atlantic Ocean at Henry Ford, the American automobile manufacturer who helped popularise a conspiratorial anti-Semitic slander cooked up in the last days of the Russian Empire, a slander finally proven as fake by a British journalist in Istanbul, aided by an American diplomat who once refused a meeting with Lenin in Switzerland in 1917 because he had a tennis date. Emmeline Pankhurst spent several months of that revolutionary year not campaigning in Britain for women’s suffrage at home, but in Petrograd, visiting battalions of women soldiers sent to fight for democratic (non-Bolshevik) Russia against the Kaiser’s Germany. Years later, her daughter Sylvia was back in Russia, the Bolsheviks now having taken over and ruling a resurrected Red empire from Moscow, arguing with Lenin about how quickly Britain should move to full-on proletarian revolution (Pankhurst was more extreme).
Fascism and communism both emerged in these tumultuous years, each proclaiming itself the sworn enemy and polar opposite of the other. But Mussolini was perhaps more honest when he expressed his admiration for the scale of the Bolshevik experiment in Russia, and spoke about the affinities between the two movements. (Lenin, when he heard about the March on Rome, chuckled that it was ‘a merry story’, and reflected that the experience of having men like Mussolini in charge might finally awaken the Italian proletariat to the need for communism.) Both political creeds found their footing in Europe at the same time, and developed side by side, evolving and mutating in response to and occasionally in emulation of the other.
Coincidence is not causality, and certainly not equality; but nor is it entirely innocent of meaning. When the old order collapses, the new order does not emerge fully formed, and every experience, every prejudice, every idea floating around the world outside–even those of one’s enemies–becomes a potential source of inspiration, for good and for ill. It is in such times, when established hierarchies are collapsing and people are searching for new meaning in the world, that the most unlikely characters–a field-runner from the Bavarian army, a professional revolutionary in exile in Zurich, a mushroom-picking Austrian doctor–are given their chance. Which comes first: the character or the times?
There is a huge amount of historical scholarship and writing which has shaped my own approach to these years, and which I hope readers of Crucible will be encouraged to explore after reading this book. The recognition that the Great War did not end neatly in 1918 with the armistice in the West, nor in 1919 with the signing of the Versailles Treaty, is the underpinning thesis of Robert Gerwarth’s The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923 (2016), showing how the violence continued across Europe, from Ireland to the Baltic, in Russia and in Turkey, long after the guns had fallen silent on the Western Front. Jay Winter’s seminal Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995) reminds us that, for those societies which had lived through war, the absence of military conflict did not bring a full sense of peace for years afterwards. The scars remained, and they were deep.
Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) made the link between the experience of the war and the birth of modernist literature in what he called the ‘dynamics of hope abridged’. Other historians, less focused on the direct links between the war’s specific impact on cultural history, have written about the raucous, riotous onset of modernity with similar verve. Peter Conrad’s Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the Twentieth Century (1998) is an endlessly fascinating vision of the cultural history of the bloodiest century of human existence. Kevin Jackson’s Constellation of Genius: 1922, Modernism and All That Jazz (2012) provides a diaristic account of the cultural happenings of that seminal year, which offered a partial inspiration for the approach taken in Crucible. Philipp Blom charts the social and cultural history of the interwar period in the twenty-one kaleidoscopic chapters of Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918–1938 (2015).
At the centre of Crucible is the story of the collapse of four European or Eurasian empires: German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian (though the Soviet Union ended up resurrecting the last under the guise of world communism). While hinted at here, another book would be needed to describe the erosion of assumptions of European superiority which followed the Great War, and the global conflicts and anti-colonial movements which emerged from its ashes. David Fromkin, Sean McMeekin, Eugene Rogan and James Barr have all written on the consequences of the war for the shape of the Middle East–consequences which resonate down to today. But the change went far wider than that, to India and China and beyond. As the Chinese intellectual Yan Fu wrote after the war, ‘the European race’s last three hundred years of evolutionary progress have all come down to four words: selfishness, slaughter, shamelessness and corruption’.
Margaret MacMillan’s brilliant Peacemakers (2001) inspired in me a fascination with the world in which the peace was made after 1918, and the constraints under which the peacemakers were operating–they acted like gods, but were they really in control? Adam Tooze’s The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order (2015) broadens and reshapes that story of how the world was remade, as does Robert Boyce’s The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization (2009). William Mulligan’s The Great War for Peace (2014) takes a refreshingly different view of the role of the war in early twentieth-century history. David Reynolds’ book The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century (2013) widens the frame to the whole of the century. There is an increasing interest, sparked by Ernst Nolte and others, in the notion of a ‘European civil war’, running from 1917 (or earlier) to 1945. In reality, of course, no periodisation really fits. All history is the story of lives and ideas which meet for an instant, connect, transform each other and eventually dissipate back into the flow of time. There are no breaks; just influences, consequences and memories.
Almost every character in this book has multiple biographies written about them, most of which I have dug into at some point during the research for this book. Among the most enjoyable are Robert Service’s trilogy on Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s wonderful The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War (2013), John Röhl’s epic biography of Kaiser Wilhelm, Colin Grant’s Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of Mother Africa (2008) and Andrew Mango’s Atatürk (1999). Tim Snyder’s The Red Prince: The Fall of a Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Europe (2009) is a gem, as is Tim Butcher’s unusual The Trigger: The Hunt for Gavrilo Princip: The Assassin who Brought the World to War (2014). Tim Pat Coogan’s twin biographies of de Valera and Michael Collins are to early twentieth-century Irish history what Robert Service’s books are to early Soviet history, giving a human shape to the politics.
And behind all the biographers are those who have collated, edited and translated the sources on which the labours of the later historian depend: the editors of Lenin’s Collected Works (whose memorialisation of the dictator began before he was even dead and buried), the historians who have collected the papers of the UNIA so that its story can be told, or those engaged in the ongoing and colossal project of collecting and translating the papers of Albert Einstein. Writing a book feels like a solitary task sometimes. In fact, writing a history book is a collective one, where you are constantly thankful for the work that others have done, sometimes years or decades before, in a dusty archive somewhere, without which you would have nothing to say at all.