Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

In 1929, the German writer Erich Maria Remarque published All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel that was to become the fictitious chronicle of “truth about the war” (298). The book was an astonishing success—not only in Remarque’s native Germany, but also in France and England—and described the soldiers at the front as, “a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war” (281). The book’s protagonists enter battle “bursting with energy and conviction, enthusiastic knights of a personal and national cause,” however, “one by one they are ripped apart at the front, not only by enemy fire but also by a growing sense of futility” (281). The book’s style was “basic, even brutal” as “brief scenes and short crisp sentences, in the present tense, create an inescapable and gripping immediacy” (282). 

Critics were divided on the book: Some touted it as “the great war novel” and claimed that it spoke to the truth of soldiers’ experience at the front while others sought to ascertain the veracity of Remarque’s experience, which Eksteins notes there are sufficient grounds to believe, “was not […] extensive” (276-79).

The novel faced opposition from both the political left and right. The communist left, “derided the novel as an example of the sterility of bourgeois intelligence: the bourgeois mind, incapable of locating the real source of social disorder, resorted, in its treatment of the war, to tearful sentimentality and regret” (287). On the other side of the spectrum, the conservative right dismissed the novel as “commercialized horror and filth,” which lost sight of “the beauty of sacrifice, and the nobility of collective purpose” (287). At the most extreme end, when the Nazi minister of the interior Wilhelm Frick came to power in 1930, he wasted no time in taking the book off school syllabi, claiming that “it is time to stop the infection of the schools with pacifist Marxist propaganda” (290). Once Hitler’s conquest of Germany was complete, in May 1933, Remarque’s books “were among those burned symbolically at the University of Berlin as ‘politically and morally un-German’” (298).

In view of the book’s success and the disparate responses to it, Eksteins concludes that “the truth” most reflected in the text was “the truth about Erick Maria Remarque in 1928” and was not a universal testament about soldiers’ experiences in the war (298). However, Remarque’s critics “were no nearer ‘the truth’ of which they too spoke” as they “expressed merely the tenor of their own endeavors” (298). At the end of the 1920s, Remarque’s book and the many ensuing war novels represented less a historiographic effort to commemorate the war “than a perplexed international self-commiseration” (298). 

When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, he declared a “national renewal” would continue the wartime spirit started in 1914 (301). In the mid-1930s, Hitler declared “within ten years Berlin would be so transformed that no one would recognize it” (302). He could not have predicted that by 1945, Berlin would be starving and bombed-out, and that occupying Allied powers would be picking through the full-scale atrocities of the Nazi regime—including the concentration camps that sentenced millions of Jews, foreign slave laborers, homosexuals, gypsies and disabled people to slave labor and death.

The Nazi regime decided to get rid of all such people so that it could follow through with its scheme of “aestheticizing Germany as a whole” and making “the German everyday […] beautiful” (304). At the center of Nazism’s aesthetic plan was the creation of “a new type of human being from whom would spring a new morality, a new social system, and eventually a new international order” (303).

Hitler’s aesthetic training began in his career as a failed artist, when the Vienna Academy of Arts rejected his application. In 1914, Hitler viewed the outbreak of the First World War as a galvanizing opportunity, and set out for the front “with feelings of pure idealism” (306). Hitler described the war as the primary event of his young life and his chief mode of education; in fact, he “lived the front-line experience from almost the beginning to the end” (307). For Hitler, “the war did not end in 1918,” as he was “incapable of accepting that the most invigorating experience of his life should end in defeat” (308). Like those on the conservative right, Hitler saw the Treaty of Versailles—that defined Germany’s defeat and demanded payment of heavy reparations—as the betrayal of traitors at home in league with the foreign enemy. In subsequent years, Hitler sought a return to the “supreme exultation” of the First World War before Germany’s defeat (309).

The Nazis’ message that Germany had been betrayed by the Treaty of Versailles echoed the concerns of voters on the right as the world “Kultur was used constantly […] to summon up the spirit” of the First World War (310). Once Hitler had complete power over Germany, militarism returned with a vengeance, and “the quip ‘when I hear culture I reach for my gun’” became popular (327). Under Hitler, “Kultur was to be stripped of its elitist implications and given a genuinely populist meaning” once it became a concern of “the Volk” or ordinary people, as opposed to intellectuals (327).

The idea of continuous battle was central to National Socialism, since Hitler placed importance on “the act of assertion, of conquest, of victory, of struggle and of dynamic life in war” (307). Similarly he wanted to cleanse Germany—and eventually the world—of the forces “that stood in the way of that dynamism - the materialists, the pedants, the infirm, the irresolute” (307). Eksteins argues that Nazism shared “many of the impulses of the avant-garde,” despite its ironic rejection of avant-garde art (311). Hitler “looked on himself as the incarnation of the artist-tyrant Nietzsche had called for, as the executor of the ‘dictatorship of genius’ Wagner had craved” (315).

Hitler’s battle to conquer German hearts and minds was a “mental revolution” rather than a violent one (315). While, importantly, “Germans were not forced to become Nazis […] they were attracted by the force of the movement” and so embraced the violence and terror aestheticized by the movement (315). Hitler’s obsession with technology led him to conceive that the next war would feature the latest weaponry and be even more dynamic than its famous predecessor was. “It was,” Eksteins explains, “a war of movement, of mechanized divisions, a Blitzkrieg, prepared carefully in advance” (321). Aviation was also central to the war and in both 1936 and 1937, Lindbergh, touted as a hero by the Nazis, came to pay a visit and was awarded the Sacred Cross of the German Eagle. The admiration was mutual, as Lindbergh “viewed the western democracies as degenerate and incapable of competing with Germany” (323).

Hitler’s scapegoating of Jews for all of Germany’s ills was, in Eksteins’s view, “associated with all the dark instincts in his own personality and sexuality” (319). Hitler, who was not the blue-eyed, blond-haired Aryan specimen that he proclaimed as an ideal, transferred all of his insecurities onto the Jew, who “became a negative function of the self” (319).