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

by Philipp Blom

the debate about a “German physics” also stood for a wider concern: a revolt by a traditional concept of physics against the counterintuitive arrogance and opacity of modern physical thinking.

Quantum physics came to symbolize a modern world that was becoming uncanny to its inhabitants, a world that had abandoned empirical evidence and immediate understanding for arcane theory.

This revolt went beyond the image of the sciences—throughout Europe and particularly in Germany the advocates of Lebensphilosophie, a holistic “philosophy of life,” attacked what they saw as the coldly ...

Nietzsche.

To Spengler, the domination of scientific thinking was nothing less than a sign of cultural decadence,

Decline of the West: “All art, all religion and science, become slowly intellectualized, alien to the land, incomprehensible to the peasant of the soil. With civilization, decline begins.

A rational, theoretical understanding of the world, Spengler claimed, was possible only at the price of deadening the world and by “forcing the voices of the blood to be silent,” voices that connected every individual to the chain of ancestry and to destiny. Abstract thought, by contrast, was chronically unable to grasp what is truly important, namely, “the when and wherefore, Destiny, blood, all that our intuitive processes touch in our depths.”8 Modernity, then, was a race toward death, a sign of a culture having reached the end of its term.

philosophers at German-speaking universities turned away from the clarity and rationalism of thinking in the tradition of the Enlightenment and toward different forms of exploration of lived experience and immediacy,

To a considerable extent this rejection of rationalism was a consequence of experiencing the war. For the postwar generation, reason was no longer the beacon of great things to come, extolled since the Enlightenment; it had darkened, turned against its creators, and shown its potential for utter destruction and insanity.

THE SHADOW OF THE WAR and the social climate of the 1920s may indeed have contributed to the conception and formulation of a physics in which the main tenets of logical, scientific thought—identity, causality, objectivity—are dethroned and their place usurped by ambivalence, chance, and uncertainty.

an intriguing thesis put forward by the historian Paul Forman. The subatomic world described by Heisenberg and others, Forman argued, was an unpredictable and hybrid world of perspective, chance, and probable outcomes. In his view this disconcerting scenario, governed by the principle of uncertainty, had a great deal in common with the social and political realities of Weimar Germany. Science seemed to mirror society.

Seen from the vantage point of its being embedded in its cultural context, the new and puzzling quantum physics

approached the intuitive qualities of the vitalist philosophy that was so fashionable after the war.

If the mechanistic and rationalist worldview of the old order had led straight to the killing machines of the Western Front, the philosophy of irrational life forces created a counterbalance to this deadly rationality, and the new physics mirrored its cult of energy, willpower, and life. Nature, the younger generation of ph...

At a time when there seemed to be little left to believe in,

the calm arguments and mathematical formulas of science appealed hugely to the popular imagination, which was fed by a steady stream of articles and books, as well as a growing number of films focusing on scary science and mad scientists,

Science became a metaphor for society.

Richard Overy has pointed out that much of the scientific interest in the United Kingdom was focused on the idea of entropy, “a physical state which tended towards stasis, degeneration and extinction.”

the intellectual dilemma of a time increasingly and painfully caught between a scientific approach, whose intellectual advances went counter to any intuitive understanding of the world, and the ideological vacuum created by the Great War.

Richard Burton Haldane

The Reign of Relativity (1921) he tackled head-on the vast implications of Einstein’s theory and the new understanding of the natural sciences for the broader realm of culture.

“Every particular form of knowledge is relative,

Jack Haldane

man becomes a mere parasite of machinery,

The rule of the natural sciences was as compelling as it was disquieting. To many people the world appeared to have lost its metaphysical anchor, the ultimate pivot of their existence.

No author gave a sharper and more coolly despairing analysis of this than the Prague insurance clerk Franz Kafka,

WHAT IS A RATIONAL RESPONSE TO LIVING IN A WORLD THAT NO longer makes sense? In Europe, a marginal but growing and highly publicized movement believed it had found the answer: nonsense. Aggressive, subversive, gleefully celebrated nonsense. Nonsense used as a weapon.

Dada.

Tristan Tzara,

André Breton,

automatic writing

Breton

Having been unable to co-opt Dadaism for his purposes, he now proceeded to invent his own, and in 1924 he published a Surrealist Manifesto,

Breton railed against realism not so much as a style but as an attitude toward life:

For those blockheaded enough to need a dictionary definition, he duly supplied one: SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.14

Breton’s surrealism was born out of rejection—of former friends, of bourgeois reality, of artistic realism, and of the carefree anarchy of Dadaism. What the world needed, he thought, was a disciplined movement, a collective assault on bourgeois culture in an effort to subvert and finally topple it altogether.

Not yet thirty, the young man from the suburbs had quite simply invented a movement for himself to lead and turned himself into a public figure. He took to his new role with a Jacobin zeal, which led him to sanction all infractions of his unquestioned authority by cutting dissenters out of the surrealist fold and out of his life.

visual language for portraying psychological, half-conscious states and processes.

Francis Picabia

Max E...

Paul É...

exploiting the technical and artistic possibilities of film.

Ballet Mécanique was written by the painter Fernand Léger,

a machine-made nightmare of mental disintegration, an unparalleled visual dramatization of fragmented mindscapes.

Breton threw himself into political activities. He

The Party, however, remained cool. The top brass distrusted the mad antics of these young, middle-class men who refused to work with their own hands and instead spent their time with poetry, hypnotism, and weird public performances. This was not the kind of revolution they had in mind.

AS ANDRÉ BRETON IN PARIS was succumbing to the totalitarian temptation, the fame of surrealist and Dadaist works spread.

while this avant-garde landscape on the European continent was vibrant and varied, Dada and surrealism had surprisingly little resonance in the Anglo-Saxon world, and particularly in the United States.

Marcel Duchamp

Walter and Louise Arensberg, an eccentric and wealthy couple whose collection concentrated on avant-garde works long before they became fashionable in the United States. The Arensbergs’ home on New York’s Upper West Side became a meeting point for many artists and intellectuals interested in new ways of seeing,