In 1903 Samuel Butler’s bitter semi-autobiographical The Way of All Flesh had been posthumously published. In 1904 Frank Wedekind had fiercely attacked social and sexual hypocrisy in his play Pandora’s Box. In 1905, Thomas Mann’s brother Heinrich had shown a tyrannical schoolmaster ruined by an affair with a nightclub singer in Professor Unrat (better known in its 1928 film version as The Blue Angel). In 1907 the respectable writer and critic Edmund Gosse had anonymously published Father and Son, an autobiography recording what he called “a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs.”
In that same year (1907), Picasso and Georges Braque had founded the Cubist movement, with its slogan, “Paint not what you see but what you know is there.” In 1909 La Nouvelle Revue française had been inaugurated as a forum for younger writers. In 1910 Wassily Kandinsky had produced a Postimpressionist painting defiantly entitled First Abstract Work; the Russian authorities had banned Rimsky-Korsakov’s two-year-old Le Coq d’or because of its satire on government; and Sir Norman Angell had published The Great Illusion—an attempt to demonstrate the futility of war, even for the supposed victors. The year 1913, finally, had seen the publication of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poems Alcoöls and the beginning of Marcel Proust’s great novel Remembrance of Things Past.
The 20th century had begun, then, with what might be termed cultural parricide—an attack on the paternalistic, stuffily religious, and sexually repressive features of the century before. Younger writers and artists such as Joyce, Lawrence, Gide, Picasso, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot formed what the novelist Ford Madox Ford called “a proud and haughty generation,” determined, in Pound’s words, to “make it new.” Yet, looking back in 1937, Wyndham Lewis wrote ruefully:
We are not only “the last men of an epoch” (as Mr Edmund Wilson and others have said): we are more than that, or we are that in a different way to what is most often asserted. We are the first men of a Future that has not materialised.
What had blocked that future was war—“The Great War,” as its stunned contemporaries called it. Not for nothing did the poet and novelist Robert Graves call his 1929 war reminiscences Good-bye to All That. He was bidding farewell to his prewar schooldays and to his first marriage; but what stuck in the minds of his readers was the cause of the leave-taking—the horror of life and death in the trenches of the Western Front. Graves was by no means the only writer to experience and report that visceral shock. In 1914, despite Angell’s warnings, the idea of war had still borne vestiges of glamour. Idealistic young poets such as Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell had gone to war, initially, with eager innocence. After the slaughter on the Somme and the stalemate of trench warfare, the key word became Disenchantment, the apt title of C.E. Montague’s account of the process. It pervaded the work of Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen in Britain, of Henri Barbusse (author of Under Fire) in France, and of Erich Maria Remarque (author of All Quiet on the Western Front) in Germany.
Through conscription, and, to a lesser extent, through air raids, the war had involved and affected far more of the population than any previous international conflict. By the time of the Armistice, in November 1918, there was widespread weariness in Europe and a sense of disillusion that gave the years before the war a retrospective autumn radiance, as if a dream had died.
Real deaths, indeed, had been numbered in millions. In the whole of the previous century, from the Napoleonic Wars to the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, Europe had lost fewer than 4.5 million men. Now, at least 8 million had died in four years, while more than twice as many had been wounded, some of them crippled for life. Millions more had succumbed to the worldwide influenza epidemic that had ended in 1918. The outcome, in all countries, was imbalance between the sexes—a shortage of men that at the time was sometimes called “the problem of surplus women.” During the war, women had had to be recruited into the civilian work force—in factories “for the duration,” in offices sometimes for good. The net result was to encourage women’s emancipation. In 1918, British women over the age of 30 were given the vote—although women’s suffrage was delayed until 1944 in France and 1945 in Italy. The year 1921, moreover, saw the opening of the first birth control clinic in Britain.
Wartime comradeship helped to reduce not only barriers between the sexes but also rigidities of class. Government control of the war economy—known in Germany as Kriegssozialismus, or war socialism—was also a general phenomenon that left a permanent mark, especially encouraging economic nationalism. Nowhere was this process more intense than in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, where it was known as “war communism.”
Nationalism had been a feature of Europe since at least the French Revolution. Napoleon had embodied its classic, democratic, or Gallic variety—the nation as a people bearing arms. Equally powerful, and more deeply rooted in history, was Romantic, cultural, or Germanic nationalism—the nation as an entity based on age-old racial and linguistic allegiance. Both forms of nationalism were encouraged by the war and its aftermath; and the latter was especially furthered by some of the provisions in the Treaty of Versailles.
The mood of Versailles
The peace conference that met in Paris from January 1919 to January 1920 and which produced, among other things, the Treaty of Versailles was both vengeful and idealistic.
Public opinion in France and Britain wished to impose harsh terms, especially on Germany. French military circles sought not only to recover Alsace and Lorraine and to occupy the Saar but also to detach the Rhineland from Germany. Members of the British Parliament lobbied to increase the reparations Germany was to pay, despite the objections of several farsighted economists, including John Maynard Keynes.
The Versailles treaty, signed on June 28, 1919, met most of these demands. It also stripped Germany of its colonies and imposed severe restrictions on the rebuilding of its army and fleet. In these ways, the peace settlement could be seen as punishing the defeated enemy, as well as reducing its status and strength. Not unnaturally, this caused resentment among the Germans and helped to stimulate the quest for revenge.
At the same time, however, Versailles was imbued with more constructive aims and hopes. In January 1918 the U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, set out his peace proposals in the “Fourteen Points.” The general principles were open covenants openly arrived at, freedom of navigation, equality of trading conditions, the reduction of armaments, and the adjustment of colonial claims. Wilson also proposed “a general association,” which became the League of Nations, but his more specific suggestions were concerned less with unity among nations than with national self-determination. His aim, in effect, was to secure justice, peace, and democracy by making the countries of Europe more perfect nation-states.