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Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
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The Gesamtkunstwerk and the Impetus to Violence
Nineteenth century German composer and music theoretician Richard Wagner coined the concept of the “total work of art,” or Gesamtkunstwerk. The Gesamtkunstwerk was essentially the synthesis and synchronization of different art forms. Such an idea was instrumental to Diaghilev’s mutiny in ballet, as he revolutionized an art form that, by the end of the 19th century, had become “pleasant, controlled steps” and virtuoso pirouettes, with the secondary elements of music and scenery (25). Believing that each element of production should play an instrumental role, Diaghilev commissioned exotic and innovative musical scores by Rimsky Korsakov and Stravinsky and “stunning” sets by Leon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, and Nicholas Roerich, whose “bright and provocative colors and lavish features” were “an integral part of the spectacle” (25).
Eksteins notes how Diaghilev aimed to:
…produce a synthesis […] of all the arts, of a legacy of history and a vision of the future,” wishing “to fuse the double image of contemporary life - an age of transition - into a vision of wholeness, with emphasis, however, on the vision rather than the wholeness, on the quest, the striving, on the pursuit of wholeness, continuing and changing though this had to be (33).
However, in Eksteins’s opinion, Diaghilev’s endeavor reflected “a hunger for wholeness” that “because of its emphasis on experience, celebrated the hunger more than the wholeness” (33). In other words, rather than being a lulling, dreamlike experience—as one of Wagner’s operas may have been—the different elements in Diaghilev’s ballets came together in a display of frenetic energy. Audiences would leave the theatre excited and even agitated, instead of staidly satisfied.
The Gesamtkunstwerk also found political expression in Germany, both before and after the First Great War. Eksteins writes how in the weeks leading up to August 1914, when soldiers, artists and people at either end of the political spectrum united behind the war effort, life “had become a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk in which material concerns and all mundane matters are surpassed by a spiritual life force” (62). Finally, it seemed that Germany’s recent technological innovation and perennial quest for spiritual and cultural “authenticity,” were coming together at the art of the war (77).
Later, playing to the German public’s feelings of defeat and disillusionment after the defeat of the First World War, Hitler tried to revive aspects of the Gesamtkunstwerk. In a continuation of the prewar spirit, Hitler’s vision combined art and politics as he aimed to create a Germany where his idea of “beauty” dictated every aspect of life (314). Eksteins likens Hitler, aesthetic director of the new German republic, as “the executor of the ‘dictatorship of genius’” that Wagner “had craved” (315). However, given the apocalyptic nature of Hitler’s vision, which was in a large part driven by his personal insecurities and bitter prejudices against Jews and others who opposed his vision, his Gesamtkunstwerk wrought devastation in its wake. In the theatre, Diaghilev could employ techniques of the Gesamtkunstwerk to creative ends, but in the political sphere, the synchronization of all elements of society under a commander’s baton could only result in fascist despotism and violence.
Youth, Desire and Deathliness
Although Eksteins’s book is not explicitly about sexuality, the topic appears in many of his discussions of modernity, revolution, and death. In the prewar years, Diaghilev’s ballet—with their display of youthful, virile bodies in scenarios of Orientalized luxury—possessed an “eroticism” that “became more overt” with the passing years (27). The ballets presented a challenge to conventional bourgeois sexual morality, which dictated that the marriage bed should be the exclusive locus of sensuality, by staging other possibilities for the expression of sexual energy. The eroticism of The Rite of Spring appeared in the symbolic sacrifice of a virgin who danced to death. The maiden’s dance of death included 144 vertical jumps, suggestive of sexual exuberance. Then there were the pounding steps of the tribe and the animalistic, atonal score with its unmusical rhythms, which made the ballet “a thick mélange of instinct, sensuality, and fate” (52). While The Rite of Spring’s violence may have been the chief offensive to bourgeois morals, its undercurrent of frenetic sexual energy was also a contributor.
Although there had been parts of society in prewar Europe that engaged in the expression of sexuality outside of marriage, the war made this even more common. Whereas in the “nineteenth-century world morals and morale were thought to be indistinguishable; the Great War wrought havoc on their partnership and threatened to make them mutually exclusive,” as army commanders found that Western Front brothels were useful “appurtenances” for keeping up morale (223-24). On the home front, decreased supervision, greater autonomy, and sometimes sheer financial need meant that women, too, were engaging in extramarital relations. As a result, “morality and sex became not a matter of social dictate but more and more of individual conscience” (225).
After the war, sexuality persisted in ways that defied bourgeois morality. Young people, disillusioned by the old order that had sent many of their peers to their death, threw out that era’s morality, as well, and so took a hedonistic and exploratory attitude to sexuality. However, in other cases, soldiers traumatized by their frontline experiences reported sexual impotence or “greatly reduced sexual interest” (213). Symbolically, impotence and low libido represent the quenching of life force. Returning from the front, these still young men had their sexuality reoriented from the pursuit of life-affirming experiences to a confusing, deathlike indifference. Arguably, the war’s impact on human sexuality was a barometer of its profound psychosomatic imprint on those affected by it.
Heroism and the Daily Graft
On both sides of the battlefield, young men went to war with the desire to prove their heroism. Eksteins writes of young British men:
[A] segment of the population, particularly the young, looked on the war as an adventure to be welcomed, and their reason for supporting the war was not dissimilar to that of the Germans: the war was a pathway to the future, to progress, to revolution, to change (133).
Although the British wanted to preserve the established world order and the Germans wanted to change it, men on both sides viewed the war as an opportunity to display the virility of their ideology. This attitude was mirrored in the expectation of both sides—that the war would be won quickly by recourse to new technologies; however, the ensuing stalemate resulted in wave after wave of attacks, as both sides tried to exhaust the enemy. Eksteins writes,
for two years the belligerents on the Western Front hammered at each other in battles, if that old word is appropriate for this new warfare, that cost millions of men their lives but moved the front line at most a mile or so in either direction (144).
Meanwhile, especially in the years of 1916 to 1917 when “the war of attrition” was most prominent, soldiers’ daily lives took place in the trenches (144). Astonishingly, “some veterans of the Great War never experienced an attack; some never even saw the enemy, despite lengthy front-line duty” and many reported feeling “boredom” as they went about their household routines “of repairing trenches, digging new latrines […] cleaning equipment, hunting rats and lice” (153; 154; 173). Thus, the war—which consisted of a brutal muddy death or injury on the battlefield or menial tasks and long periods of waiting in the trenches—lacked the heroism it seemed to offer at the outset. In the postwar years, heroism took another blow, as German soldiers had to deal with feelings of defeat around their ideals and Allied soldiers faced harsh economic conditions—“the homes promised” to “heroes” remained “fictional palaces” (253).
Nevertheless, neither side lost its appetite for heroism, which was evident in the European reception of the American pilot Charles Lindbergh, on whom many thwarted dreams were projected; as Eksteins notes, “in the darkness Lindbergh had become Everyman, and Everyman had become Lindbergh” (244). Less content to live vicariously through a celebrity hero, Germans, beset by social and economic difficulties, answered to Hitler’s call for a second chance at heroism—both in life and on the battlefield. Eksteins likens Hitler’s rousing call to heroism as the seeming continuation of a “spring without end” (300).
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