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

“Some people, like Gertrude Stein, so captivated, even in retrospect, by this early twentieth-century ‘happening,’ have implied that they were present when they were clearly not. Can one blame them? To have been in the audience that evening was to have participated not simply at another exhibition but in the very creation of modern art, in that the response of the audience was and is as important to the meaning of this art as the intentions of those who introduced it.” 

Eksteins describes the paramount importance of the 1913 premiere of “The Rite of Spring’s” in Paris, as those with cultural cachet—such as the writer Gertrude Stein—wished to enmesh themselves in the mythology of the evening. They wanted to be part of the audience whose first response contributed to the ballet’s seismic affect. 

“The themes were exotic, usually Russian or oriental. The music was different. And the dance was not simply an attempt to relate movement to sound but to express sound in movement.” 

In conjuring an impression of the Russian Ballet’s synesthetic appeal as it united the elements of music and dance and made them almost synonymous, rather than having the dance illustrate the music, Eksteins demonstrates the Russian Ballet’s likeness to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. The new Russian and oriental themes disrupted European bourgeois sensibilities. 

“Like Nietzsche, Diaghilev believed that autonomy of the artist and morality were mutually exclusive. A man obsessed with morality, with socially acceptable behavior, could never be free, and like […] Proust, he believed that the artist, to achieve freedom of vision, must have no regard for morality.”

This excerpt illustrates Diaghilev’s belief that morality and artistic expression were in competition with one another. This not only liberated his collaborators from the bourgeois doctrine of the previous century, but also found a parallel in the avant-garde German politics that led to the outbreak of war in both 1914 and 1939. 

“The ballet contains and illustrates many of the essential features of the modern revolt: the overt hostility to inherited form […] the emphasis on vitalism as opposed to rationalism; the perception of existence as continuous flux and a series of relations, not as constants or absolutes; the psychological introspection accompanying the rebellion against social convention.” 

Eksteins shows how “The Rite of Spring” anticipated many features of modernity and a rebellion against the structures of social convention and bourgeois morality. This quotation also notes the centrality of movement and constantly shifting perspectives to the modern experience. 

“If Britain led the way in changing the mode of life on our planet from the rural agrarian to the urban industrial, Germany more than any other state took us toward our ‘postindustrial’ or technological world, not only in an objective sense […] but also in an experiential sense, in that she more intensively than any other ‘developed’ country has given evidence to the world of the psychic disorientation that rapid and wholesale environmental change may produce.” 

Eksteins positions prewar Germany as the supreme avant-garde state, whose commitment to progress and dynamism forged a new pathway and turned its back on the past, represented by Britain. However, Germany was also modern on a psychic level, as her inhabitants were already away from the fluctuating, fragmented experience of modernity. 

“German Kultur […] was said to be concerned with ‘inner freedom,’ with authenticity, with truth rather than sham, with essence as opposed to appearance, with totality rather than the norm.” 

German Kultur did not merely refer to superficial notions of art and culture, but was concerned with an authenticity that illuminated the essential aspects of individuals and their creative potential. 

“The war had begun with movement, movement of men and matériel on a scale never witnessed before in history. Across Europe approximately six million men received orders in early August and began to move.” 

The motif of movement is present in the war from the outset and is a prelude to the seismic changes that would take place because of the war. 

“For military establishments that had been convinced that the outcome of a future war would hinge on one major battle, the stalemate in the west was impossible to accept. The previous century had been one of extraordinary technological change and movement. War it was assumed, would reflect that movement.” 

Having relished movement as an ideal of modern warfare, military ideologues were frustrated and confused by the stasis and longevity of the war.

“For the Germans this was a war to change the world; for the British this was a war to preserve a world. The Germans were propelled by a vision, the British by a legacy” 

Here, Eksteins concretely lays out the rivals’ reasons for fighting in the war. Britain wished to preserve its established order and standing, while Germany explicitly wanted to usurp each. The only way they could agree on a solution was through conflict. 

“The year 1916 saw the advent and acceptance by both sides of a new war, the intentional war of attrition, which would swallow up millions of men, not under the pretext that quick victory was in the offing […] but because the decision had been made that only by wearing down the enemy could one win this war.” 

Rather than relying on modern weaponry that would purportedly swing a decisive victory, each side quickly realized that winning required preying upon the perennial vulnerability of human beings. Rather than stunning the enemy with surprise tactics, they tried to exhaust him with an onslaught of attacks—of which gas was the most vicious. 

“Horror can turn to routine and bring on ennui - the sense that one has seen it all before and that existence no longer holds any surprises. ‘There is nothing left in your mind,’ continued Kreisler, ‘but the fact that hordes of men to whom you belong are fighting against other hordes and your side must win.” 

Here, Eksteins illustrates the thin boundary between horror and boredom that became almost interchangeable in the trenches. In order to cope with the death and destruction around them, men had to become single-minded and focus on the immediate task before them. 

“General Pétain saw innocent youths entering the ‘furnace of Verdun’ for the first time feigning lightheartedness and indifference. When the survivors came out they had expressions ‘frozen by a vision of terror.’ Shell shock or neurasthenia was the term eventually applied to extreme cases of this condition.” 

The phenomenon of shell shock was a common reaction to the unexpected horrors of war and while onlookers could describe what they saw at the time, they could not make sense of soldiers’ reactions. However, the soldiers’ frozen body language indicates that they experienced deep trauma. 

“As long as soldiers could somehow relate their reflexes and instinctive behavior […] to an underlying sense of responsibility, they would continue to fight, despite horror, weariness, and even despondency.” 

Eksteins shows the importance that having a purpose for fighting played in soldiers’ morale. A sense of responsibility to their country gave them a larger vision than protecting their own lives. 

“Geist and Macht, spirit and might, would be reconciled in a state of surreal harmony, of Dionysian activity together with Apollonian tranquility, in which means and ends, object and subject would be fused.” 

The German war effort was essentially an aesthetic fusion of technological prowess and idealism. The war would become a total work of art, for complete expression of the German spirit. 

“From defeat would come the idea of ‘the stab in the back,’ the notion that Germany had not been defeated at the front in honorable combat with the foe but had been laid low by calumny abroad and treachery at home. The nation most recently enraptured with newness […] would project, in a supreme feat of mental acrobatics, her own revolt onto her perceived foes, without and within.” 

This quote explains the vital notion that Germans felt that their failure in the war was not just the fault of enemy tactics, but a failure within the nation to fully believe in and support the German project. 

“Disillusionment with and alienation from the national effort were […] never rampant in Germany during the war.[…] The language and literature of disillusionment would be on the whole a postwar phenomenon – everywhere.” 

Disillusionment, the opposite of idealism, followed Germany’s defeat. It was a phenomenon spread throughout Europe in the postwar years, given that the aftermath of the war could not match up to its rhetoric. 

“Nonetheless, the inwardness, if it was not silence, literal and figurative, produced a quandary. How was one to assemble and order the experience of the war, even for oneself alone? Traditional modes of expression - words, pictures, even music - were clearly inadequate for the situation.” 

Eksteins gives a voice to the feeling that traditional modes of image-making and verbal expression were defunct after the destruction that came with the war. Silence might be a response to the confusion and disillusionment both artists and soldiers felt. 

“Overwhelmed by the sense of being alone - a feeling that the term ‘lost generation’ would capture after the war - some soldiers came to look on their isolated fraternity as hallowed.” 

Returning soldiers felt that no one understood them as their peers at the front did. Faced with the senselessness and hardship of postwar life, they idealized their times in the trenches where their purpose had been clear. 

“Lindbergh is doing more for the rapprochement of nations than all the diplomats.” 

A French newspaper’s comment that the universal awe provoked by the American aviator and modern-day hero, Charles Lindbergh, alludes to the advent of the age of celebrity whereby sportsmen, innovators, and movie stars could do more to unite disparate peoples than politicians ever could. 

“The fads and madcap behavior of the younger generation of the twenties were motivated largely by cynicism about convention in all its forms and particularly about the moralistic idealism that had kept busy the slaughterhouse that was the Western Front.” 

Eksteins explains a profound disillusionment with the ideals and morals that had driven so many young people to their deaths on the front drove the hedonistic frippery that characterized the 1920s. They could not make sense of life, so they decided to enjoy what they had of it. 

“That the war contributed enormously to the shiftlessness of much of the postwar generation is undeniable; that the war was the root cause of this social derangement is at least debatable; but Remarque never took part in the debate directly. For Remarque the war had become a vehicle of escape. Remarque and his book were, to borrow from Karl Kraus, symptoms of the disease they claimed to diagnose.” 

Like many soldiers who struggled to make sense of life after the trenches, Erich Maria Remarque retreated into his fantasy of the war. Eksteins considers that in its focus on the author’s own experiences and thoughts, Remarque’s oeuvre was symptomatic of a postwar world that struggled to make sense of a collective purpose. 

“Remarque’s success came at what we now see was in the interwar era: the intersection of two moods, one of vague, imploring hope and the other of coagulating fear.” 

Eksteins considers that Erich Maria Remarque’s knockout bestseller, All Quiet on the Western Front, was so well received because of the conflicted feelings of hope and fear during the national zeitgeist. People were living in the war’s shadow and could not make sense of its meaning. Remarque’s interpretation, therefore, was a talking point.

“Hitler stood for protest. He was a mental construct in the midst of defeat and failure, of inflation and depression. Before his speaker’s podium […] the masses actually celebrated themselves.” 

Eksteins describes how Hitler was a symptom of the psychological and economic hardships faced by the German people in the postwar years. After a decade of disillusionment, he gave the masses permission to feel confident about themselves.