Scholars and intellectuals have long debated the question of how the history of the war to end all wars should be approached and viewed. One group of scholars of the Great War argue that World War I was the product of economic and political tensions between the European great powers of Great Britain, France, Russia, and the new great power kid on the block, Germany. The German nation-state, as they note, emerged in 1871 after Prussia's victory in the Franco-Prussian War. It was, they assert, the nationalistic fervour that gripped and united the German speaking states in the wake of that war that was the major factor that united the German speaking states into a nation.
Other scholars of the Great War argue that the war to end all wars was the product of ethnic tensions, ethnic tensions particularly in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a multicultural empire that united German speakers, Magyar speakiers, and Slavic speakers into a tense confederation. Slavophilism, a Slavophilism manipulated by great power Russia which fancied itself as the messianic protector of Slavs everywhere, gripped parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, particularly Serbia, where ethnic tensions between it and Austria-Hungary played themselves out in deadly fashion resulting in the assassination of Austrian prince Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist in 1914. This assassination, in turn, set the war into motion thanks to the alliances that European countries had made with each other, alliances which lead Austria to declare war on Serbia, Russia to declare war on Austria, Germany to declare war on Serbia and Russia, and Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany.
For other scholars the Great War was the product of both long term great power politics and nineteenth century and twentieth century nationalisms. The match that set both low burning flames alight was, these scholars tell us, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, an event that set in motion military mobilisations which were impossible to stop after a tipping point had been reached leading inevitably to the war to end all wars.
University of Toronto professor Modris Ecksteins, in his superb Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1989), adds another dimension to the study of the political and military forces that led to the Great War, culture. While not ignoring the role that economics, politics, demography, and
geography--four of the five factors that make humans human--have played and
play in human life and human history, Ecksteins argues that culture--manners, values, norms, and morals, all things that allow social scientists to unlock the spirit
of an age--are central to understanding why World War I happened.
Eckstein begins his tragic tale about the relationship between culture, modernism, and World War I in France. In the first chapter of the book Ecksteiins focuses his historian's gaze on art entrepreneur Sergei Diagilev's, composer Igor Stravinsky's, and choreographer Rudolph Nijinsky's controversial Le sacre du printemps, the Rite of Spring, which was performed by the Ballet Russes at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in a Paris in 1913. At the heart of Paris's cosmopolitan modernist culture, according to Ecksteins, one that brought together composers, choreographers, artists, dancers, artistic entrepreneurs from the bohemian quarters of modernist Paris, was a modernist bohemian culture that defined itself in opposition to bourgeois cultural values, its other. This modernist bohemian culture, Ecksteins argues, celebrated the artist who, through his or her art, transcended or rose above the conventions, mundanities, and trivialities of modern bourgeois culture. Le sacre, in both its music and in its choreography, Ecksteins argues, was meant to offend "traditional" bourgeois sensitivities through its celebration of the primitive via its primitive violent rhythms and its primitivist and violent choreography. The ballet ended up, as Ecksteins notes, dividing its audience into warring cultural camps of modernist "traditionalists" and bohemian modernists.
Transcendent heroic modernist artist heroes like Stravinsky and Nijinsky, Ecksteins argues, were reacting against the mainstream bourgeois culture of duty that had
dominated and continued to dominate both France and Britain in the late 19th century and into the 20th. In England, according to Ecksteins, a nationalist ideal of duty filtered down from the English manorial elite to the
English bourgeoise. It was a conception of duty in which the individual meshed unproblematically with the nation-state. These French and British conceptions of duty were, according to Ecksteins, eventually allied to and aligned with
notions of progress, namely, the belief that France and Britain were helping to make the
world a better place, an ideology that dominated French and British manners, customs, values, and
morals. Duty thus, according to Eckseins, was the key symbol around which "traditionalist" French and British bourgeois culture floated. It was this concept of duty allied with notions of defending and extending civilisation, according to Ecksteins, that rationalised and justified the decision of France and Britain to go to war with Germany.
German modernist culture, a culture of moral countenence and secular outlook, on the other hand, Ecksteins's argues, defined itself in opposition to French and British and particularly English bourgeois culture. This, according to Ecksteins, made Germany the true heir to the avant garde idealist and primitivist culture represented in Le sacre. Germany was, after all, the new nation-state on the block. It was a new nation in the throes of an industrialisation and militarisation that would eventually allow the ethnocentric and nationalist German nation-state to compete on the world stage with the other great powers of Europe, if tensely. Great powers, after all, have historically had tense relationships with each other for a number of political, economic, cultural, geographic, and demographic reasons.
Like France and Britain, according to Ecksteins, German modernism centred around the key symbol of duty. The German conception of duty was, however, contends Ecksteins, different in important ways from the conceptions of duty which dominated French and English culture. Germans, Ecksteins argues, were drugged up, thanks to socialisation, on the belief that it and it alone instantiated a civilisation in which the state was the literal embodiment of the volk, the folk. Germans thus came to believe that their civilisation was a civilisation that was superior to all others, something the French and English also believed about their civilisations if in a somewhat different way. Germans, Ecksteins asserts, came to believe that Germany had a unique destiny, a messianic destiny in which Germany and German culture, thanks to its creative artist warrior culture grounded in ideologies of technique, scientism, efficiency, self control, and right, would supplant Great Britain and France as the true city on the hill. This distinct and hegemonic German culture of duty and destiny, Ecksteins contends, was an important causal factor that led to World War I.
After the Great War, Ecksteins points out, cultural disillusionment set in in France, Great Britain and Germany, a disillusion captured nicely, Ecksteins notes, in Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, a book which had a major impact on how people viewed the war all across the core nation world at the time. Thanks to Remarque's book (and others similar to it such as Charles Yale Harrison's Generals Die in Bed, I would add) This cultural disillusionment, argues Ecksteins, was driven by cognitive dissonance, the cognitive dissonance between the fervour with which men initially went off to war and the disillusionment they experienced thanks to the brutal realities of modern warfare, particularly modern trench warfare, during the war This disillusionment, in turn, one that was driven particularly in Germany by economic despair, political dysfunction, and culture wars, led to a variation on the German culture of duty and transcendence, one that was grounded less in creativity through life than in creativity through death, Nazism. Ecksteins argues that Nazism, the German cultural and political movement that was born out of the belief that for the Fatherland, in order to achieve its destiny "decadent" Germany had to recapture the spirit of comradeship, the comradeship that paralleled the comradeship of the German trenches in the Great War regardless of the cost. Nazism, Ecksteins argues, was thus kitsch. It was kitschy, Ecksteins argues, because it took selective fabrications from the past and mixed and matched them with selective fabrications of a glorious utopian future, a utopian and radiant future where all real Germans, or at least real German men, would be transformed into warriors marching ever onward even unto death for the for the messianic cause of the fatherland, Gotterdammerung.
In many ways the world of the early twenty first century seems to be cycling back to the late 1920s and early 1930s. Many in the 1930s argued that capitalism was dead thanks to the economic collapse it caused and found salvation instead in the Nazism and Bolshevik communism, a Nazism that was pulling Germany out of Great Depression thanks to military spending, industrialisation, and cultural revival and a Bolshevism that kept the Soviet Union from having a depression, again, at least in part, thanks to industrialisation. In the wake of a series of economic busts and increasing political and cultural polarisation many in the post-World War II North America, Europe, and the Antipodes, once again seem to be looking for an alternative to the political and economic systems that have dominated the core nation World since World War II. Many of them, particularly on the populist right, blame the state itself rather than capitalism, for their many difficulties.
As Ecksteins reminds us, fascism, Nazism, and Bolshevism were not the only strands of authoritarian, melodramatic, and banal kitsch that arose in the 1920s and 1930s that appealed to many on the populist right in the post World War II core nation world. As Ecksteins notes, Nazism was cousin to another kitschy cultural and political movement which emerged during the Great War and the post-Great War era, American Christian fundamentalism and, I would add, Christian fundamentalism's close cousin American Christian nationalism. Like Nazism, American Christian fundamentalism and the right wing American nationalist faith that would emerge from it mixed selective delusions of the past with selective delusions of the present. Like Nazism, the American nationalist faith was and is grounded in delusion, was and is narcissistic, was and is self affirming and self-righteous, was and is filled with hate for an evil other, and was and is stoked up on a sense of choseness and victimisation. For the Nazis, of course, the German race was victimised in particular by Jewish vermin (who Hitler wanted to gas in the same way that rats were gassed in the killing fields of Flanders and France during the Great War as Ecksteins notes), decadents, the infirm and disabled, pacifists, the irresolute, socialists, and communists. Today many American Christian nationalists and their fellow travellers believe likewise that they have been victimised by a host of vermin others including liberals, socialists, communists, gays, trans, politically and culturally incorrect books, somewhat paradoxically by Nazis, and even, in some quarters, by Jews. Like the Nazis of the past today's American Christian nationalist onward marching soldiers are as immune from self-criticism as their Nazi kissing cousins and are just as deluded, thanks to their paranoias and conspiracy theories, including one about blood rituals being performed by demonic liberals in a pizza parlour in Washington, DC. And so it goes...
Rites of Spring is a landmark book that I can't recommend more highly for anyone interested in nationalism, cultural history, and the history of ideology. Ecksteins book is a fascinating excursion into the social and cultural construction of national culture, national character, and civil or public religion. It is a book grounded more in social and cultural psychology than in a fetishised psychoanalysis that a product of the social conditions and the culture of fin-de-siecle Europe and is. as a result, all the better for it in my opinion.
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