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.”
