Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938

by Philipp Blom

Jazz became the soundtrack of an age, the incendiary charge flung into society, igniting tensions, stoking sensuality, and sapping the old order.

As I have argued in The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West 1900–14, the great shift into the modern age did not spring full-blown out of the trenches of the Western Front; rather, many of its elements were already in place well before 1914. Mass societies, consumerism, mass media, urbanization, big industry and big finance, feminism, psychoanalysis, the theory of relativity, abstract art, and atonal music all predate the beginning of the war. So why did the world suddenly seem so much more modern? Why is it that far more than a single decade seems to separate the fashions, social mores, and moral outlook of, say, 1913 and 1923?

Even before 1914 new machines, scientific inventions, and industrial processes had been transforming the lives of city dwellers

mass transportation, mass-produced goods, food imported from across the globe, work in factories and offices, newspapers and cinema, and everyday technologies

The headlong rush of history had also caused deep anxieties.

that modernity was devouring its children, that virtue and dignity were being swallowed by the rootless, internationalized, capitalist, mass-produced life of the big city. On a societal level, the newly awakened self-confidence of disenfranchised groups such as women, workers, and people subjected to racial discrimination rebelled against their exclusion.

This social and intellectual upheaval caused a multitude of reactions, most important those among men who saw their masculinity threatened by the changing patterns of power and by a personal and professional life marked by increasing speed and insecurity.

For many men, the outbreak of the war was therefore a welcome opportunity to turn their backs on the “effeminate” and virility-sapping ways of city life and conquer not only enemy territory but manliness itself.

For many, the war seemed the ideal remedy for life in a soulless modern world.

The highest hopes of heroism were dashed by the reality of mechanized warfare,

There was no more mechanized, more industrialized, more rationalized, and at the same time more obviously insane environment than the Western Front, and the armies on all sides were gigantic machines.

Fighting had become an industrial process rather than an act of personal bravery or even heroism.

Before the war, the West had been energized by an unprecedented push of economic growth, industrialization, urbanization, and culture. This combination of velocity and instability had been bearable only because the cultural foundations on which the Western project was built still seemed valid: the idea of progress, a hierarchical concept of society, and ideals such as patriotism, faith, heroic sacrifice, and honor. These pillars of a bourgeois understanding of the world were questioned only by a minority of critics. If, as Max Weber has written, the train of history was hurtling forward and the passengers didn’t know where they were headed, at least the rails appeared relatively solid.

When these rails were blasted apart by the war, the immense energy driving the engine of this prewar dynamic plowed into society itself, and the war turned inward.

Patriotism and religion had been enlisted to motivate soldiers, but their rhetoric sounded hollow after untold numbers of men had been mauled and murdered by mere machines. What values were there left to live for? This would become a crucial question during the ensuing years.

In the war’s aftermath,

the optimism about technology had been crushed, the idea of a glorious and uninterrupted march of progress lay in ruins, and faith in the values underpinning society had been profoundly shaken. The great technological transformation continued unabated, but its conflicts changed in character. As the guns fell silent, battles raged on as many societies found that they were at war with themselves.

While much of the surface evidence of life after the war suggests radical change, this is actually due to the catalytic effect of accelerating a modernity that was already well established.

another, deeper defeat: that of man by machine.

From now on, it seemed, most men and women would be the slaves of machines constructed to create the wealth of others,

This awakening in the disenchanted machine age, amid social unrest and political strife, created a strong sense of nostalgia and a fierce desire to reenchant the world, to find a new great vision that could replace the old and discredited ones, overcome the suffering and humiliation of the war, and point the way into a future in which human beings would subdue the machines and master new challenges with clean minds and healthy bodies. This ideology would also be the answer to the question of how to live in a broken age, how to carry on when all values remembered from home and school and rehearsed in speeches and essays seemed to have been unmasked as cynical mass manipulation.

The relationship of man and machine is one of the recurring themes of this book. Culturally, there is an arc from the trauma of the shell-shocked soldiers coming home from the Western Front with limbs shaking and twitching uncontrollably, the ultimate image of human impotence in the face of the machine age’s threats, to the superhuman and steeled bodies of Fascism and Bolshevism, answers of a sort to the pervasive fears that mere flesh had become a distant second to gleaming metal. It was not for nothing that Hitler would call for Germany’s youth to be “hard as Krupp steel.”

jazz

the ideal reply, the affirmation that expression and fulfillment were still possible.

The dictators of the age

Their promises were new versions of old religious visions.

gospel of the new man, a pseudo-Nietzschean creature so glorious and strong that he could vanquish all enemies and even technology itself to live in a future world of health and purity.

a rudderless time caught between hope and despair, between reconstruction and revolution.

At the heart of this history of attitudes and strategies deployed throughout the interwar years are not politicians and armies but perceptions, fears, and wishes, ways of dealing with the trauma of the war, with the energies released by industrialization, with the confusing and exhilarating identities that became possible in an industrial mass society, especially once the old values had been shattered.

the living debris of the Great War. In Britain alone, fully 10 percent of the officers and 7 percent of the ranks were eventually diagnosed with shell shock,

Soldiers home on leave from this monstrous reality often found themselves more frustrated than relieved. Having lived in an ongoing butchery that had come to seem senseless, having slept alongside unburied corpses and witnessed friends and comrades ripped apart by the random, anonymous destruction of a shell fired from miles away, having lost trust in old faiths and respect for their superiors, and having come to doubt the justice of their national cause, they returned home to a world dominated by patriotic rhetoric and the wisdom of armchair warriors who continued to regard the war as just and as an opportunity for heroism and manly combat—in effect, as a kind of operetta war, a view that took no account of the savage reality and merely added insult to terrible injury.

Owen’s death at the age of twenty-five became symbolic of the fate of his whole generation—the “lost generation,” as it was quickly called, though more in romantic legend than historical truth. The old men who were thought to have cheated the young generation of their hard-won victory and the ideals they had been fighting for were the generals, the politicians, the bosses, portrayed in angry articles and novels as the cynical and incompetent survivors of the Victorian age.

After the war, it was widely felt, the deaths of these young men meant that there was virtually no one left to carry on the work of empire, of industry, of art and science. The great bloodletting resulted in “the embarrassing spectacle of men of minor powers wrestling with major responsibilities” during the interwar years.

Perhaps the best-known literary chronicle of this perceived collapse was Vera Brittain’s 1933 autobiographical novel Testament of Youth,

BRITTAIN’S SENSE OF ALIENATION was shared by many of the returning soldiers,

It was not easy to be a man in 1914. Traditional forms of manliness and social hierarchies had been undermined by industrialization and urbanization.

Feminism was another prewar phenomenon that did much to shake the image of what it meant to be a man.

Many men had greeted the outbreak of the war as an opportunity to reconquer their questioned manliness, saber in hand, braving the firestorms to reemerge stronger and purified of the dross of weakness and complexity that characterized modern life. Their hopes had been cruelly disappointed, largely because they found themselves fighting the wrong war. In fact, it was the very lack of real fighting that became a lasting trauma of the war.

The soldiers were little more than sitting targets identified by reconnaissance planes and then mercilessly shelled from afar.

a war in which machines had finally and totally overpowered human beings.

AT THE SOMME and elsewhere, the war was particularly lethal to young men from the social elite.

Despite these numbers, the lost generation is still largely a myth.

THE NOTIONS OF “SHELL SHOCK” and the “lost generation” became deeply embedded in the British memory of the war precisely because they went some way toward explaining the feeling of betrayal and uncomprehending horror that seeped into the national consciousness after 1918. A whole continent felt shell-shocked by the events it had lived through, and the symptoms of former soldiers served as a useful shorthand, a metaphor for collective trauma.

After November 1918, having endured what no one should ever endure and seen what no one should ever see, soldiers on all sides often found the demobilization they had so dreamed of in the field a painful, bewildering, and enraging experience. On their return, many of them felt abandoned in a peaceless postwar existence in which nothing seemed to be as it had been.

The war both revealed profound divisions and opened new ones—between veterans and noncombatants, those on the right and those on the left, the young and the old, those seeking to create a new world and those wishing to restore their idea of an old order. All societies became not only more impoverished but also less cohesive, less hopeful, and more unsettled. Their economies had been shattered (with the exception of the United States), and the societies themselves and their values had been shaken to their very foundations.

“Spanish flu”

The end of the war saw the European countries plunged into a series of potentially devastating emergencies. There was a demographic disaster, a political disaster, and an economic disaster; they all converged in a cultural catastrophe.

IF THERE WAS A NEW WORLD in the making, it came out of the lack of understanding of what had taken place and why, out of a sense of shock. What had been familiar before the war appeared to have become strange, what had been understood suddenly incomprehensible.

As millions of traumatized soldiers were demobilized and returned home, they found that there was no way of communicating what they had lived through, of understanding what had happened, and why. All they knew was that they had been betrayed and put in harm’s way under false pretenses, that the thrusting, vertiginously energetic, but also fundamentally optimistic world they had inhabited only four years earlier was irrevocably lost.

A deep sense of suspicion settled between the veterans and the society they had defended.