Such fears were shared by many cultural commentators and intellectuals in inter-war Europe. They are reflected in films like Chaplin’s Modern Times, René Clair’s À nous la liberté and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The Belgian symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck expressed these ideas in best-selling books of what might be described as ‘cultural entomology’ in which he compared the social habits of insects to those of humans. His Life of Termites in 1926 was a cautionary tale warning that the crushing of individual freedom under Bolshevism was reducing humans to the level of termites.
