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

by Philipp Blom

Duchamp formed a direct connection between Paris and New York,

as did another artist, the American Man Ray,

only with the advent of Nazism would there be a massive influx into New York of surrealist artists

The war was present in the work of the surrealists, but mainly as a background attitude, a disillusionment with all values of bourgeois society, from its morality, its rationality, and its idea of objective truth to its concepts of beauty.

In Germany

painters George Grosz and Otto Dix

had initially used the devastated faces and amputated bodies of veterans as an expression of their anger.

early 1920s. Instead, the United States presented a burgeoning immigrant society with apparently infinite improvements in living standards. Here, a critical generation of artists and intellectuals faced other challenges.

What connected artists on both sides of the Atlantic was Breton’s idol Sigmund Freud,

Freud’s teachings lent themselves wonderfully to a very American gospel of self-improvement, even self-transformation, which for the first time was also tapped into by professional advertisers,

Both prompted and repulsed by this commercial pressure, artists and writers were trying to understand the relationship between individuals and society in a time increasingly dominated by mass production, media, advertising, conspicuous consumption, and convenience.

Psychoanalysis provided a framework for asking these questions because it contained not only an idea of self-transformation but also a critique of social conventions. If society demanded that sexual impulses were to be suppressed, and if this resulted in people being stunted and unhappy, then Americans had to develop a new relationship with their own bodies and emotional lives and a rejection of the frantic, commercialized society that made these demands. “Something oppressed them,” wrote the novelist Malcolm Cowley. “It was the stupidity of the crowd, it was hurry and haste, it was Mass Production, Babbittry, Our Business Civilization; or perhaps it was the Machine, which had been developed to satisfy men’s needs, but which was now controlling those needs and forcing its standardized products upon us by means of omnipresent advertising and omnipresent vulgarity.”

Georgia O’Keeffe.

she discovered the exhilaration and the drama of a modern city,

Another painter, Edward Hopper, treated not the intrinsic beauty of city life but its dystopian potential.

Like O’Keeffe and Hopper, many artists were experimenting and debating whether traditional art could conquer the big city as a subject, or whether such art was even an appropriate means for treating it.

Photography was to painting what jazz was to classical music—a contemporary idiom, born out of the social and technological realities of a new era.

From illustrations in the daily papers to artworks in galleries, photography was changing how people looked at the world and how their interest could be manipulated.

The men assembled at Robinson’s decided they could provide a precedent that would serve the ACLU’s needs and in the process create publicity—and business opportunities—for their own obscure town in Rhea County.

William Jennings Bryan,

The Germans, he reasoned, had taken Darwinian teachings to their extreme and decided that their wealth and influence entitled them to rule the world: might made right.

Billy Sunday Crusades drew up to two hundred thousand people, marching and singing, accompanied by bands and even Ku Klux Klansmen in full white-hooded regalia.

When the Butler Act was finally passed, many Tennessee lawmakers admitted they had voted for it less out of conviction than because they had feared being portrayed as godless themselves.

in effect, a battle for America’s soul. As with Prohibition, the lines were being drawn between Christian fundamentalists, on the one hand, and moderate believers and secularists, on the other. It was in essence a battle between rural and urban, and between states’ rights supporters and federal rights supporters; symbolically, if not strictly geographically, it was a battle between South and North.

Darrow had kept his greatest weapon for last: calling his opponent, Bryan, as a hostile witness, he tried to put fundamentalism on the stand. But despite his sharp questioning Bryan would not budge from his literalist position, and the jury was no more convinced by the cross-examination than it had been by the expert witnesses or by Darrow’s speech.

The event that many papers had dubbed the “trial of the century” had ended without the spectacular rhetorical victory of either side.

In Europe, the case for evolution had been decided three decades earlier, but it touched on other issues that were very much alive and raw. Those issues focused on the two individuals William Jennings Bryan had regarded as the archenemies of religion and of all morality: Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Even before the war, these two quite unrelated theoretical edifices—one strictly scientific, the other more poetry than philosophy—had been fused into a single monstrosity, usually known as social Darwinism.

The idea was almost distressingly simple: if Darwin says that the fittest are destined by nature to survive and if Nietzsche says that only the fittest should survive and that ideas such as empathy or solidarity are nothing but “slave morality,” then the only natural and moral result is rule by a race of strong and ruthless supermen, weeding out everything that is, or is perceived to be, weak and unable to impose itself on others. Of course, neither thinker had said any such thing.

It was made all the more attractive by the apparent degeneration engendered by modernity, and by the apparent superiority of Western civilization over other cultures, particularly in the colonial empires of the European countries.

The results of this activity not only had been used by all sides to justify the war itself

but also had inspired political theories and social programs, particularly eugenics,

Eugenics was widely accepted and promoted across the political spectrum,

from a purely biological perspective, eugenic ideas appeared justified at the time. Even toward the end of the nineteenth century, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of heredity claiming that learned characteristics can be passed on genetically to future generations had significant support in the scientific community,

Many members of the social elite, across the entire political spectrum, were active supporters of eugenic ideas.

virtual who’s who of British intellectual life.

Eugenics spoke to a determination to defend privilege as well as a genuine idea of bettering society and a very American hope of personal and social transformation through technology and a grand narrative of US history.

WHILE EUGENICS enjoyed broad popular support, the ugly ideological concoction that was social Darwinism could be looked at from a more philosophical standpoint, emphasizing Nietzsche’s importance over that of Darwin and culture over biology. Hardly any thinker was immune to this, and no author could avoid dealing with Nietzsche and his legacy in some more or less bastardized form.

In Germany, Oswald Spengler’s ideas were saturated by Nietzsche, as was the poetry of Stefan George and the novels of Thomas Mann, while the rising revolutionary conservative movement around Adolf Hitler saw itself as an avant-garde of supermen. But the influence went much further. It made itself felt in France as well as in Mussolini’s Italy, from north to south, and from the political right to the far left.

Debates about Darwin and Nietzsche, about evolution and radical moral doubt, echoed through this deeply unsettled period. They represented the two most important ways to conjure up the spirit of the age and its great ideal: the New Man, the answer to the trauma of the war and the reign of anonymous technology. New Men could be bred selectively, and they could create themselves through an act of heroic self-transcendence. It was a great but ambiguous dream, and the image of this great hero was enlisted to serve ideas on both the right and the left, pursued by scientists and occultists alike, venerated in many forms and rituals. The dream of the New Man was evident in the work of artists and the earnest idealism of nudist associations venerating sun and air, in the public fascination with competitive sport, fashion for new body lines, and scientific advances. But it was an ambiguous dream now, teetering on the verge of nightmare. The experience of the First World War had shown that technological progress was no longer inherently positive, that machines could become malign, and that, like Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, humanity could no longer rid itself of the spirits it had called. The New Man was simultaneously the era’s most potent promise and its greatest threat.

“Il fait l’amour comme une machine à coudre,”

Metropolis

Directed by Fritz Lang

the film flopped in spite of its impressive technical wizardry, the creation of an entire futurist city, dramatic crowd scenes, and amazing sequences,

anti-technological utopia, in which machines and innovation stood for a soulless dictatorship, while salvation apparently lies in turning to the past.

Maria can also be read as a cipher for many of the anti-Semitic stereotypes of the time. Like the Jews of contemporary anti-Semitic caricature, she is quite literally a product of an urban, technological, ultramodern world of industry and capitalism, devoid of feelings and originality, and dedicated to corrupting the purity of the people. She is not rooted in anything and merely mimics the soulfulness of those around her while in reality seducing them with her neurotic sexuality and leading them to their destruction. These were all accusations leveled at the Jews by anti-Semitic writers,

Metropolis was to be a metaphor of the threat of a world ruled by soulless technology, a theme that was particularly popular among conservative and right-wing thinkers and politicians. The anti-Semitic dimension of the story, which is not immediately obvious anymore, is all the more disturbing in that the liberation of the enslaved people becomes possible only when the false Maria is burned at the stake and the flames sear off the simulacrum of flesh to reveal the automaton’s iron physique.

Half high-tech tale and half medieval legend, Metropolis betrays a very German ambivalence toward the rush of modernization that had swept the country along for a generation and had covered more ground in less time than anywhere else.

Germany was obviously not at ease with the rapid unfolding of the new. The city of Metropolis and its rulers are decadent, cruel, and technocratic, while true spirituality and indeed salvation lie in the quasi-medieval piety of Maria and her followers.

Both helpful and potentially threatening, robots were everywhere in the culture of the 1920s.