Modern European Intellectual History

1. Modern EuropeanIntellectual History Lecture 13 World War I in European Intellectual History

2. outline • intellectual enthusiasm for the war • the trench experience: lament and activation • the variety of responses • Oswald Spengler and historical pessimism • Ernst Jünger and permanent mobilization

3. intellectual enthusiasm for war • Rupert Brooke: “old, and cold, and weary” • Ezra Pound: “a botched civilization” and “an old bitch gone in the teeth.” • Thomas Mann in late 1914: “War! It was purification, liberation we felt, and an enormous hope,” it “set the hearts of poets aflame” for “how could the artist, the soldier in the artist, not praise God for the collapse of a peaceful world with which he was fed up, so exceedingly fed up!”

4. a sick civilization • Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf: “To me those hours seemed like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time. A fight for freedom had begun, mightier than the earth had ever seen; for once Destiny had begun its course, the conviction dawned on even the broad masses that this time not the fate of Serbia or Austria was involved, but whether the German nation was to be or not to be. … What a man wants is what he hopes and believes. The overwhelming majority of the nation had long been weary of the eternally uncertain state of affairs; thus it was only too understandable that they … hoped for the final settlement. I, too, was one of these millions.”

5. Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1917) Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundering like a man in fire or lime. Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in. And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

6. war poetry and “modern memory” • Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) • Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

7. Oswald Spengler (1880-1936)

8. Spengler’s historical pessimism • Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 1 (1918, rev. ed. 1923), vol. 2 (1922) • —, “Pessimism?” (1921) • —, “Reconstruction of the German Reich” (1924) • —, The Hour of Decision (1933) • culture v. civilization • “There is no aging Mankind. Each culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return” (359). • Germany as “the last nation of Western culture.” • “Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant” (360). • Friedrich Hölderlin: “Where the danger is strongest, there emerges hope for a saving force.”

9. Ernst Jünger (1895-1988)

10. “total mobilization” • Jünger, The Storm of Steel (1920) • —, War as an Inner Experience (1922) • —, “Total Mobilization” (1930) • —, On the Marble Cliffs (1942) • “…the new man, the storm pioneer, the elite of Central Europe. A whole new race, strong, and filled with will. What reveals itself here as a vision will tomorrow be the axis around which life revolves still faster and faster. The path will not always … have to be forged through shell craters, fire, and steel, but the double-quick step with which events are prosecuted here, the tempo accustomed to iron, that will remain the same” (19). • Friedrich Nietzsche: “Live dangerously,” “a good war hallows any cause.” • Jünger: “the exposure of oneself to risk,” “essential is not what we are fighting, but how we fight” (20).

11. war and purification • War as an experience of Dionysian de-individuation: “Once again: the ecstasy. The condition of the holy man, of great poets, and of great love is also granted to those of great courage. The enthusiasm of manliness bursts beyond itself to such an extent that the blood boils as it surges through the veins and glows as it foams in the heart… It is an intoxication beyond all intoxication, an unleashing that breaks all bonds. It is a frenzy without caution or limits, comparable only to the forces of nature. There [in combat] the individual is like a raging storm, the tossing sea and the roaring thunder. He has melted into everything. He rests at the dark door of death like a bullet that has reached its goal. And the purple waves dash over him. For a long time he has no awareness of transition. It is as if a wave slipped back into the flowing sea.” • “The bourgeois person is perhaps best characterized as one who places security among the highest of values and conducts his life accordingly.” • “The human heart is in need not only of security but of danger too. Yet this desire is capable of revealing itself in bourgeois society only as protest.” • “Today man is again seeking to come to his true self.”

12. “reactionary modernism” • Why the Weimar republic fails: “This makes imperative the act of total mobilization. Its task is to pose to every phenomenon, both human and material, the brutal question of its necessity. Instead, in the years since the war, the state has occupied itself with things that are not just superfluous to an endangered existence but harmful, and it has neglected other things that are critical to survival” (376). • War as “the forge in which the world will be hammered into new limits and new communities. New forms filled with blood and power will be packed with a hard fist. The war is a great school and the new man will be taken from our race.”