The Age of Anxiety: Europe in the 1920s (1)

           Our age has a heightened awareness of an an unusually deep preoccupation with those
           uneasy convictions which are to some extent characteristic of all time. Though it has been
           called, by those who anticipate history, "The Age of" many different things, none of the
           other labels is quite so inclusive or seems to fit quite so well as the familiar "Age of
           Anxiety."

                                                ---Joseph Wood Krutch, The Measure of Man (1953)

      At its start, the Great War of 1914-1918 was a popular war. The war was even blessed by those thinkers and
      artists who were non-violent by nature. The war, many people sincerely believed, would be quick and glorious.
      The war soon gave way to bitter disillusionment. This bitterness is illustrated in the film Paths of Glory (1957)
      as well as in Erich Marie Remarque's novel, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). The stupidity of the war
      became apparent to all those men who fought for their nation. On the home front, of course, the story was a bit
      different. But when soldiers, lucky enough to still be alive returned home, it was to a land which knew nothing of
      the Somme or Verdun. "A land fit for heroes"? Perhaps.

      It was William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891) who remarked, in 1879, that "war is at best barbarism…. Its
      glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the
      wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell." But it was the British poet
      Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) who added, "war is hell and those who initiate it are criminals." This was the
      final verdict of the Great War, especially among the Anglo-French. "The Old Lie: Dulce et decorum est, pro
      patria mori." The initial "vision of honor and glory to country" faded quickly and was replaced by sorrow, pity
      and cruelty. For the BRITISH WAR POETS, the whole affair ended in bitterness. People felt betrayed by
      those men who were "running the war."

      The horrors of the trench -- rotting horseflesh, mud, poor food, weapons that would not fire, poison gas and the
      sheer terror of waiting for death -- these were the images and experience of the Great War. It was the Big Lie.
      There was no tangible enemy, except the one the popular press could fashion. The soldier looked across the
      parapet and saw himself. The insanity of it all! This partially explains the Christmas truce. Or the scene at the
      end of Paths of Glory: as the captured German mädchen sings, the French soldiers join in, tears in their eyes.
      A bond is created between the soldiers who fought the war, a bond the General Staff could neither understand
      nor accept. No, the war was insanity, irrationality and the triumph of unreason in a world taught that reason was
      the guide to the good life. What had happened?

      Soon the soldiers began to despise the people back home. They had no idea what the war was like. They
      knitted socks and sang patriotic songs. They were the "little fat men," as George Orwell was to call them. Men
      who made decisions carried out by wooden headed generals. The soldiers were drawn closer to one another by
      the common bond of experience. They were closer in spirit to the enemy than to those they left behind. "The
      immediate reaction of the poets who fought in the war was cynicism," wrote Stephen Spender in The Struggle
      of the Modern (1963):

           The war dramatized for them the contrast between the still-idealistic young, living and
           dying on the unalteringly horrible stage-set of the Western front, with the complacency of
           the old at home, the staff officers behind the lines. In England there was violent
           anti-German feeling; but for the poet-soldiers the men in the trenches on both sides seemed
           united in pacific feelings and hatred of those at home who had sent them out to kill each
           other.

      There's no doubt about it: war was horror, terror and futility. The romance of war had been taken out of
      warfare forever. The 19th century ideals of warfare -- Napoleonic ideals -- were no match for the new
      weapons of destruction which the Second Industrial Revolution had helped to make a reality. Technology was
      supposed to be the servant of mankind -- liberation would result from more technology. What World War One
      showed was how quickly this new technology could be put to use. In the end, it was the European idea of
      progress which became the victim of "improved technology." The rules of warfare had changed -- and with this
      change the 20th century plunged into what one historian has called, "the age of total war."

      Immediately following the end of the war, one of France's literary giants called attention to the very clear fact
      that a crisis had now overtaken the European mind in the 20th century. Paul Valéry (1871-1945) brooded on
      both the greatness and decline of Europe in his essay THE CRISIS OF THE MIND (1919). Of the greatness of
      Europe, Valéry had no doubt. Europe was "the elect portion of the terrestrial globe, the pearl of the sphere, the
      brain of a vast body." Europe's superiority, according to Valéry, rested on a combination of various qualities --
      imagination and rigorous logic, skepticism and mysticism, and above all, curiosity. "Everything came to Europe,"
      he wrote, "and everything came from it. Or almost everything."

      "-- until recently." The Great War had made Valéry ponder the utter fragility of civilizations, that of Europe, as
      well as Babylon, Nineveh and Persepolis. Europe's decline had begun, as Valéry saw it, long before the
      outbreak of world war. By 1914, Europe had perhaps reached the limits of modernism, which was
      characterized, above all, by disorder in the mind. By disorder Valéry meant the lack of any fixed system of
      reference for living and thinking. This lack he ascribed to "the free coexistence, in all her cultivated minds, of the
      most dissimilar ideas, the most contradictory principles of life and learning. This is characteristic of a modern
      epoch." The decline also owed much to politics which had never been Europe's strong suit, a weakness for
      which the continent was now being punished. The export of European knowledge and applied science had
      enabled others to upset the inequality on which Europe's predominance had been based. For these and other
      causes Europe as well as European man had finally succumbed to anxiety and anguish. The military crisis that
      was World War One might be over, but the economic crisis remained, as did above all "the crisis of the mind,"
      which was the most subtle cause of all and the most fateful for literature, philosophy and the arts.

      Thus Valéry, along with many of his contemporaries, announced the beginning of a new Age of Anxiety in
      European history. Despite his pessimism, Valéry would have been the first to say that Europe's greatness
      persisted, though not without signs of diminishment, through most of his lifetime. He died in 1945. It is true that
      20th century Europe lived, to a large extent, on the accumulated intellectual capital of past centuries. Some of its
      chief luminaries in science and in philosophy, for example, were born and educated in the 19th century and did a
      great deal of their important work before 1914: Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Max Planck (1858-1947),
      Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), Carl Jung (1875-1961) and Albert Einstein (1879-1955).

      But along with European greatness came decline and anxiety, as Valéry suggested. Not outsiders but Europeans
      themselves invented the expression Age of Anxiety to describe what they thought was happening to them in the
      twentieth century. They dwelt increasingly not on the growing enlightenment of their times, as so many had done
      in the 18th and 19th centuries, nor on Europe's continued greatness, but on the anxiety they felt about their
      existence, their culture, and their destiny. "Today," said the Protestant theologian-philosopher Paul Tillich at
      mid-century, "it has become almost a truism to call our time an age of anxiety." Tillich believed that anxiety
      infected even the greatest achievement of contemporary Europeans in literature, art, and philosophy. Europe,
      according to his account, had entered its third great period of anxiety, comparable in intensity to that of the
      ancient world and the Reformation.

      The special form of anxiety that Tillich identified was the ANXIETY OF MEANINGLESSNESS. He traced it
      to the modern world's loss of a spiritual center which could provide answers to the questions of the meaning of
      life. Suffering is the result of living without purpose or faith. The knowledge that man was alone caused anxiety
      because the responsibility for making whatever values there were came entirely from man. Man was free -- free
      to choose without reference to God or an ideal world of essences -- but his freedom was a dread freedom,
      involving crushing responsibility and the eternal threat of non-being.

      The death of God, announced first perhaps by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in the last quarter of the 19th
      century, was not the only observed cause of anxiety. Also cited were the death of man and the death of Europe;
      in fact, the death of all the great modern idols: God, man, reason, science, progress and history. The external
      events of 1914 to 1945 obviously had a great deal to do with the fall of the idols, and so with anxiety as well.
      However, it is interesting to notice that contemporary writers frequently used the fall and the anxiety to explain
      the events. Tillich did so, for instance, in his explanation of the success of fascism. In a time of "total doubt" men
      escaped from freedom to an authority that promised meaning and imposed answers. "Twentieth century man,"
      wrote Arthur Koestler in 1955,

           is a political neurotic because he has no answer to the question of the meaning of life,
           because socially and metaphysically he does not know where he belongs.

      Anxiety, then, was thought to be generated by that "crisis of the mind" that Valéry had detected in 1919 but that
      had been also brewing for decades.

      When we turn our attention to European culture after the war we are struck by two things. First, this sense of
      despair, bitterness and anxiety. Second, we can detect the maturation of the modernist movement. A literary
      revolution burst upon the general public in the 1920s. Although they had established themselves and their
      careers before 1914, writers like James Joyce (1882-1941), D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), T. S. Eliot
      (1888-1965), Thomas Mann (1875-1955), Marcel Proust (1871-1922) and Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
      emerged as the new giants. Collectively they are referred to as "the men of 1914." This was the "LOST
      GENERATION" -- artists who rebelled against the senseless slaughter that was the Great War. They had no
      interest in defending either the world or the values of their fathers.

      In Paris in 1919, a group of writers and artists launched a protest against everything. They named it Dada
      ("hobby horse" in French). Everything was nonsense: literature, art, morality, civilization.  Action is vain, art is
      vain, life is vain, everything is absurd. Or, as Tristan Tzara announced:

                                DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING

      The activities of the dadaists were an expression of post-WWI bitterness. Without WWI as a backdrop, there
      may have been no dadaism at all. "In Zürich in 1915," wrote Hans Arp,

           losing interest in the slaughterhouses of the world war, we turned to the Fine Arts. While
           the thunder of the batteries rumbled in the distance, we pasted, we recited, we versified, we
           sang with all our soul. We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save
           mankind from the furious folly of these times.

      The dadaists held public meetings at which poets made brash statements about art, literature and a hundred
      other things. Sometimes, whole manifestoes were read by ten, twenty thirty people at once. Here's a sample:

           No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more
           religions, no more republicans, no more royalists, no more imperialists, no more anarchists,
           no more socialists, no more Bolsheviks, no more politicians, no more proletarians, no more
           democrats, no more armies, no more police, no more nations, no more of these idiocies, no
           more, no more, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING.

           Thus we hope that the novelty which will be the same thing as what we no longer want will
           come into being less rotten, less immediately GROTESQUE.

      One audience, there to see Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977), left the hall in the dark, after having thrown coins at
      the readers. Later, audiences replaced the coins with eggs. Such a gala effect! One journalist, an adversary of
      the dadaists, described a show of Max Ernst's (1891-1976) collages in the following way:

           With characteristic bad taste, the Dadas have now resorted to terrorism. The stage was in
           the cellar, and all the lights in the shop were out; groans rose from a trap-door. Another
           joker hidden behind a wardrobe insulted the persons present. The Dadas, without ties and
           wearing white gloves, passed back and forth. . . . Andre Breton chewed up matches,
           Ribemont-Dessaignes kept screaming "It's raining on a skull" Aragon caterwauled, Philippe
           Soupault played hide-and-seek with Tzara, while Benjamin Peret and Charchoune shook
           hands every other minute. On the doorstep, Jacques Rigaut counted aloud the automobiles
           and the pearls of the lady visitors. . . .

      Tristan Tzara, one of Dada's Swiss founders, made poetry by clipping words from newspaper articles, putting
      them in a bag, shaking them up and then taking them out at random. Here's the result of one such exercise:

                The airplane weaves telegraph wires

                and the fountain sings the same song

                At the rendezvous of the coachman the aperitif is orange

                but the locomotive mechanics have blue eyes

                the lady has lost her smile in the woods

      A poem such as this does have some charm. What it doesn't have is much meaning. Dadaism was a thing of the
      moment -- but in the 1920s it became the vanguard of another artistic and literary movement -- surrealism.

      Dada deranged meaning. It also held out the possibility of violent and disruptive political protest. Surrealism was
      all this plus more. The surrealists borrowed from Freud and later Carl Jung, the idea that in dreams the mind is
      freed from the tyranny of reason. The result would most certainly be fresh and authentic symbols. And these
      symbols were necessary for surrealism in art meant imagery based on fantasy. The term surrealism, was first
      coined by the French writer Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) in 1917 but the artistic movement itself came
      into being only after the French poet Andre Breton (1896-1966) published his DECLARATION. Breton
      suggested that rational thought repressed the powers of creativity and imagination and thus was a hindrance to
      artistic expression. A Freudian, Breton believed that contact with the hidden part of the human mind could
      produce poetic truth.

      Surrealism became a kind of mysticism -- its practitioners tended to tap sources of inspiration beyond the realm
      of rational concepts. They played with time, space and speed. "From around 1880 to the outbreak of World
      War I," writes Stephen Kern,

           a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of
           thinking about and experiencing time and space. Technological innovations including the
           telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile, and airplane established
           the material foundation for this reorientation; independent cultural developments such as
           the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and the theory of relativity
           shaped consciousness directly. The result was a transformation of the dimensions of life and
           thought.

      For instance, we have the novels of the French writer, Marcel Proust (1871-1922). Proust was born in Paris in
      1871, the elder son of a wealthy Roman Catholic doctor and his cultivated Jewish wife. The young Proust was
      coddled by his mother but it was his younger brother Robert, who remained closer to his father and who later
      became a doctor. Extreme sensitivity and a Jewish background separated Proust from his schoolmates, and
      early in life he sought to leave his solid, middle class life for the world of aesthetic sensation. Never of sound
      health, Proust suffered from asthma from the age of nine. He spent nearly all his time at home where he was
      pampered by his mother. His was a cloistered and morbidly self-centered existence. Nevertheless, Proust was
      an excellent student and eventually mastered law and political science as well as literature.

      In 1905, his mother died and Proust undertook his greatest challenge. He also withdrew from society. He had
      the walls of his room lined with cork to shut out light and sound and there he retreated to think and to write,
      sleeping during the day and venturing forth at night. He recorded his thoughts. He recorded his processes of
      thinking as well as his dreams. Again, the Freudian elements ought to be clear here. All this introspection gave
      way to a suspension of time. Proust came to recognize that the memory has a life all its own, independent from
      that life to be found outside the soundproofed room. So Proust used this stream of consciousness approach to
      write his eight volume novel, Remembrance of Things Past. When Proust died in 1922 the novel was 4000
      pages long and, according to Proust's account, only two-thirds finished! Proust's novel concerns the narrator's
      attempt to recapture the past through a sustained effort of memory, whose recreations of experience are based
      on trains of association sparked by chance events.

      When we turn to the works of the Irish author, JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941) we find another twentieth
      century literary giant whose novels were experimental. They were also daring and controversial. For instance,
      his novel Ulysses, published in 1922, was banned in both Britain and the United States until the 1930s. Joyce
      has been recognized as the writer who gave the novel a new subject and a new style. The author of Ulysses is
      not a narrator describing a subject outside himself. He is instead a recorder of what is sometimes called "the
      stream of consciousness" -- the haphazard progress of reflection, with all its paradoxes, irrelevancies and abrupt
      shifts of interest. By this means Joyce made his characters the authors of his work while, as creator of both them
      and their thoughts, he viewed their actions down the long perspective of history and myth, imposing structure on
      what, at first, seems merely random.

      Above everything else, Joyce always thought of himself as a poet. While he was a student he composed
      numerous poems and prose sketches which he called "epiphanies." An epiphany, literally, a "showing forth" of
      inner truth, Joyce hoped to portray the nature of reality so faithfully as to reveal its significance without further
      comment. This was an extreme form of naturalism that Joyce had already detected in the works of Flaubert and
      Ibsen. Ulysses was the culmination of Joyce's early career. It was the fulfillment of the pledge made by the
      character Stephen Dedalus at the end of the Joyce's novel, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "to
      forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." Through his work with epiphanies, Joyce
      had regarded this task as a long encounter with reality, the literal texture of Dublin life. So it was that Ulysses,
      which relates the events of a single day in the lives of two Dubliners on June 16, 1904, makes Dublin as familiar
      a place as the London of Charles Dickens. Joyce visited Dublin for the last time in 1912.

      And finally, there was D. H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930). Over a period of twenty years, Lawrence published
      more than forty volumes of narrative fiction, poetry, criticism, travel writing and social commentary. It's been
      said that Lawrence probably did more than any other write of his time to alter the course of the English novel.
      His importance depends less on his technical accomplishments than it does on his choice of subject matter and
      intense personal convictions. The son of an illiterate coal miner and schoolteacher, Lawrence was born in the
      Nottinghamshire village of Eastwood in 1885. He attended Nottingham University, qualified as a teacher in
      1908 and worked in a London school until 1912. In that year he met Frieda Weekley, a married woman who
      left her husband and three children to live with Lawrence. Their eventual marriage in 1914 exemplified many of
      Lawrence's concerns in his novels: the breakdown of social barriers, the flouting of moral convictions, and the
      conflict between the psychological and physical needs or men and women. Lawrence and his wife left England
      in 1919, returning on several occasions. They traveled throughout Europe and Australia, spent a long period in
      New Mexico and died it Italy in 1930.

      From his first novel, The White Peacock, published in 1911, through Lady Chatterley's Lover, published in
      1928, Lawrence was constantly prosecuted for obscenity. He dared utter the word orgasm in his novels.
      Worse still, he acknowledged that women, in fact, had orgasms. This got him into trouble with a rather prudish
      English audience, still reeling over the effects of late 19th century Victorianism. But Lawrence pressed on and an
      entire generation of young writers saw in Lawrence the attempt to interpret human emotion on a deeper level of
      human consciousness than that handled by his contemporaries The problem with some of his novels lay in his
      frank approach to human sexuality and the use of words not permitted in polite discourse. Nineteenth century
      taboos were still strong. But Joyce and Lawrence were bold enough to write about women who indeed had
      orgasms, and they were bold enough to express their thoughts on sexuality.

      For Lawrence, sex was important because it was part of nature and hence, part of life. Only those who truly live
      know also how to truly love. Sex was the key to creativity -- it was the source of energy, beauty, religion and
      everything wonderful. The very clear fact that Freud had made sex one of the centerpieces of his psychoanalytic
      theories made sex a prime topic of conversation and discourse among a new generation of writers. As one
      historian has noted: whereas the problem of the 19th century had been religion, the 20th century turned to the
      new problem of sex.

      The excitement produced by the new literature of the men of 1914 tended to probe the inner world in all its
      irrationality, its emotionality, its nastiness and vibrant realities. With the novels of Lawrence, we are drawn into
      the characters. We don't simply "relate" to them -- Lawrence makes us be his characters as the struggle with
      their lives. Their struggle is our struggle. Overall, there is a genuine excitement and creativity at work here. At
      the same time, however, much of this enthusiasm led to a rejection of public life.

      In the Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) novel, Mrs. Dalloway¸ the main character, Mrs. Dalloway, cannot endure
      her life as the wife of a leading politician -- the whole thing simply bores her. The new artists saw Europe now
      plunging into total decadence, a decadence worse still then the one identified by Nietzsche and other thinkers a
      generation earlier. When civilization is in the process of decay, the only recourse of these writers was in artistic
      endeavor and not politics or public life. "I hate politics and the belief in politics, because it makes men arrogant,
      doctrinaire, obstinate and inhuman," wrote Thomas Mann. The English writer, Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
      added, "I have to recognize that I don't care a penny for political principles." And the German Expressionist,
      Ludwig Marcuse, wrote, "I don't remember if I voted in those years -- certainly not for whom." It was the Age
      of the Common Man -- but for the troubled intellectuals of the post-war generation, the common man was a
      sad joke, democracy a farce and politics became the enemy of culture.

      The inter-war years also brought a new architecture and a new music. In Switzerland, Le Corbusier
      (1887-1965) led a whole school of architecture that denounced the 19th century style of eclecticism and
      demanded instead, buildings for the machine age. Buildings must be functional: "form follows function." In
      Germany, Walter Gropius (1883-1969) created the Bauhaus movement. Located at Weimar, Bauhaus was a
      community, an art school and a place for creative design to flourish. The hope was that art could transform
      society and so it was social art. Architects and artists like Gropius, Mies van der Rohe , Paul Klee
      (1879-1940) and Vassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) created a style suitable for the twentieth century: it was
      urban, industrial and technologically modern. With the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1933, Bauhaus was closed and its
      members brought their genius to England and the United States in a massive wave of emigration often referred
      to as the Great Sea Change.

      In music, atonality or the abandonment of rules of tonality, was the counterpart of cubism and surrealism in art
      and the functionalism of Bauhaus. One had to escape what was called the "Beethoven century" in order to really
      accomplish something different. Already in May 1913, Igor Stravinsky's (1882-1971) ballet, The Rites of
      Spring, had led to riots in the theater as the dancers danced flat footed and their toes pointed inward.

      In all these movements -- in literature, in art, in music -- the post-war theme is similar: abandon tradition,
      experiment with the unknown, changes the rules, dare to be different, innovate, and above all, expose the sham
      of western civilization, a civilization whose entire system of values was now perceived as one without
      justification. This was modernism: a reaction against the conventions of liberal, bourgeois, material, decadent
      western civilization. It's what we might call the avant garde, or bohemian or abstract today. But for the lost
      generation of post-war Europe, it seemed to be the only way out of either depression or suicide. In a world
      now proven to be without values, what else was left but what had not yet been tried before? The words of
      Nietzsche seemed to be the conscience of the European artist and intellectual.

                                    copyright © 1998 Steven Kreis

                                        stevek@pagesz.net

                                  Last Revised --diciembre 13, 1999