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

by Philipp Blom

the real and progressing mechanization of factory work was a source of anxiety.

As the Depression began to bite after 1929, however, it began to look more like a nightmare, a competition between man and machine for the few precious jobs left.

now robot stories began to take a nasty turn verging on hysteria.

In Europe at least, bodies enhanced and to some extent created by science were already part of everyday life. Tens of thousands of mutilated veterans had received reconstructive surgery

in doing so, doctors were steering close to what was still widely considered the inviolable border between human ingenuity and divine creation.

Released in 1931, Frankenstein immediately established itself as a paradigmatic film.

Millions of soldiers had gone into the war believing that they were fighting for a good cause,

made them kill as horribly, anonymously, and senselessly as the men on the other side were killing them. Like Frankenstein’s initially meek monster or the false Maria, they had been made into something abhorrent by their masters, and now they had blood on their hands.

While Hollywood horror struck the fear of God into its viewers with visions of a creation that was not divinely sanctioned and the terrible consequences that followed, serious scientists were also interested in the metaphor of the body as machine.

Fritz Kahn,

As a metaphor, not only was man the machine easily understood, but its determinism also lent itself to being applied to social and political questions.

HUMANS AS MACHINES, either metaphorically or literally as mechanically enhanced cyborgs, haunted the imagination of the interwar years.

It was a very modern nightmare, born not only out of the experience of the war but also of city life and the Taylorized work in the factories.

1936 Charlie Chaplin’s Mo...

Mechanization was frightening, but not for everyone. The heartland of these dreams of a perfect plan for a flawless society of the future was revolutionary Russia, known as the Soviet Union

engineer and poet, Alexei Gastev,

the prophet of Taylorism, and he found an interested listener in Lenin,

Lenin wrote,

those who have the best technology, organization, discipline and the best machines emerge on top;

The goal of this process was nothing less than a total transformation of society. In the new order, Gastev wrote enthusiastically, machines would set the course and people would follow, performing standardized gestures and living standardized lives.

The ideal person was to be regarded as a production unit,

Central Institute of Labor,

swath of science fiction novels. The most famous of these, Yevgenii Zamyatin’s We,

Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 film Aelita, Queen of Mars,

Bauhaus

school’s ambitions were much more comprehensive and aimed at nothing less than a revolution of all areas of life.

Walter Gropius,

its functionality and industrial efficiency were as indebted to Taylor and Ford as Gastev’s dreams of a mechanized society in the USSR were.

some of the teachers and students were clearly interested in a purely mechanical aesthetics inspired by the idea of the human body as machine,

the designs increasingly gravitated toward mass production.

Le Corbusier, whose enthusiasm for building on a huge scale and according to industrial necessities was so boundless that he simply defined a house as “a machine for living in.”

Le Corbusier’s real passion was for designing or redesigning whole cities according to his own principles, which revolved around efficiency, clean lines, and meticulously planned intersecting zones of life, work, and transport.

Plan Voisin,

Le Corbusier proposed razing Paris to the ground and building a series of skyscrapers and highways in its place.

Brave New World.

From Frankenstein’s monster to the unhappy Aelita, Queen of Mars, from the demonic false Maria in Metropolis to R.U.R.’s murderous robots, the technological utopias of the interwar years and their visions of New Men were fraught with deep anxieties about the future.

Fear and suspicion poisoned the political...

The burning Palace of Justice in Vienna became a symbol of Austria’s fratricidal internal conflicts.

the claim made by Karl Kraus that Vienna was “an experimental station for the apocalypse,” a political and cultural microcosm of societies torn between recovery and collapse, between hope and hatred, and between socialism and fascism.

Two factions, both with armed paramilitary wings, confronted each other with implacable hatred in Vienna and throughout the country: a largely urban movement comprising social democrats, socialists, communists, and various splinter groups, and a conservative, Catholic, and often fascist faction with particularly strong support in rural areas and among the petty bourgeoisie. The conflict was nothing less than a battle for the country’s soul.

Nobody had wanted this Austria.

For monarchists, and to some degree for the educated bourgeoisie who were partly monarchist and partly international, Habsburg’s greatness lay in its authority over the vast variety of cultures it had administered and controlled,

The bourgeoisie had no interest in a small, national state called Austria, and neither had the more internationally oriented educated elite, par...

German-speaking nationalists, on the other hand, had traditionally looked toward Germany,...

Finally, the workers and the left-leaning elements of the middle classes had hoped for a revolutionary state wi...

All of these groups were now d...

The obvious challenge for the postwar republic was to provide the new country with a national identity, to invent what it meant to be an Austrian. The two main political forces had very different ideas about this.

When Vienna itself became a socialist-led federal state in 1922, the city government embarked on a hugely ambitious program of social reform

elements of a social utopia.

Karl-Marx-Hof,