In effect, China’s educated elite had to undergo two revolutions. They had first to throw off Confucianism, and the social/educational structure that went with it. Then they had to throw off the awkward amalgam of ‘Eastern ethics, Western science’ that followed. In practice, those who achieved this did so only by going to the United States to study (provided for by a U.S. congressional bill in 1908). To a point this was effective, and in 1914 young Chinese scientists who had studied in America founded the Science Society. For a time, this society offered the only real chance for science in the Chinese/Confucian context.30 Beijing University played its part when a number of scholars who had trained abroad attempted to cleanse China of Confucianism ‘in the name of science and democracy.’31 This process became known as the New Learning – or New Culture – movement.32 Some idea of the magnitude of the task facing the movement can be had from the subject it chose for its first campaign: the Chinese writing system. This had been created around 200 B.C. and had hardly changed in the interim, with characters acquiring more and more meanings, which could only be deciphered according to context and by knowing the classical texts.33 Not surprisingly (to Western minds) the new scholars worked to replace the classical language with everyday speech. (The size of the problem is underlined when one realises this was the step taken in Europe during the Renaissance, four hundred years before, when Latin was replaced by national vernaculars.)34 Writing in the new vernacular, Lu Xun had turned his back on science (many in China, as elsewhere, blamed science for the horrors of World War I), believing he could have more impact as a novelist.35 But science was integral to what was happening. For example, other leaders of the May 4 movement like Fu Sinian and Luo Jialun at Beida advocated in their journal New Tide (Renaissance) — one of eleven such periodicals started in the wake of May 4 – a Chinese ‘enlightenment.’36 By this they meant an individualism beyond family ties and a rational, scientific approach to problems. They put their theories into practice by setting up their own lecture society to reach as many people as possible.37
The May 4 movement was significant because it combined intellectual and political concerns more intimately than at other times. Traditionally China, unlike the West since the Enlightenment, had been divided into two classes only: the ruling elite and the masses. Following May 4, a growing bourgeoisie in China adopted Western attitudes and beliefs, calling for example for birth control and self-government in the regions. Such developments were bound to provoke political awareness.38 Gradually the split between the more academic wing of the May 4 movement and its political phalanx widened. Emboldened by the success of Leninism in Russia, the political wing became a secret, exclusive, centralised party seeking power, modelled on the Bolsheviks. One intellectual of the May 4 movement who began by believing in reform but soon turned to violent revolution was the burly son of a Hunan grain merchant whose fundamental belief was eerily close to that of Spengler, and other Germans.39 His name was Mao Zedong.
The old Vienna officially came to an end on 3 April 1919, when the Republic of Austria abolished tides of nobility, forbidding the use even of ‘von’ in legal documents. The peace left Austria a nation of only 7 million with a capital that was home to 2 million of them. On top of this overcrowding, the years that followed brought famine, inflation, a chronic lack of fuel, and a catastrophic epidemic of influenza. Housewives were forced to cut trees in the woods, and the university closed because its roof had not been repaired since 1914.40 Coffee, historian William Johnston tells us, was made of barley, bread caused dysentery. Freud’s daughter Sophie was killed by the epidemic, as was the painter Egon Schiele. It was into this world that Alban Berg introduced his opera Wozzeck (1917–21, premiered 1925), about the murderous rage of a soldier degraded by his army experiences. But morals were not eclipsed entirely. At one point an American company offered to provide food for the Austrian people and to take payment in the emperor’s Gobelin tapestries: a public protest stopped the deal.41 Other aspects of Vienna style went out with the ‘von.’ It had been customary, for example, for the doorman to ring once for a male visitor, twice for a female, three times for an archduke or cardinal. And tipping had been ubiquitous – even elevator operators and the cashiers in restaurants were tipped. After the terrible conditions imposed by the peace, all such behaviour was stopped, never to resume. There was a complete break with the past.42 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Freud, Karl Kraus, and Otto Neurath all stayed on in Vienna, but it wasn’t the same as before. Food was so scarce that a team of British doctors investigating ‘accessory food factors,’ as vitamins were then called, was able to experiment on children, denying some the chance of a healthy life without any moral compunction.43 Now that the apocalypse had come to pass, the gaiety of Vienna was entirely vanished.
In Budapest, the changes were even more revealing, and more telling. A group of brilliant scientists – physicists and mathematicians – were forced to look elsewhere for work and stimulation. These included Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner, all Jews. Each would eventually go to Britain or the United States and work on the atomic bomb. A second group, of writers and artists, stayed on in Budapest, at least to begin with, having been forced home by the outbreak of war. The significance of this group lay in the fact that its character was shaped by both World War I and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. For what happened in the Sunday Circle, or the Lukács Circle, as it was called, was the eclipse of ethics. This eclipse darkened the world longer than most.
The Budapest Sunday Circle was not formed until after war broke out, when a group of young intellectuals began to meet on Sunday afternoons to discuss various artistic and philosophical problems mainly to do with modernism. The group included Karl Mannheim, a sociologist, art historian Arnold Hauser, the writers Béla Balázs and Anna Leznai, and the musicians Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, all formed around the critic and philosopher George Lukács. Like Teller and company, most of them had travelled widely and spoke German, French, and English as well as Hungarian. Although Lukács – a friend of Max Weber – was the central figure of the ‘Sundays,’ they met in Balázs’s elegant, ‘notorious,’ hillside apartment.44 For the most part the discussions were highly abstract, though relief was provided by the musicians – it was here, for example, that Bartók tried out his compositions. To begin with, the chief concern of this group was ‘alienation’; like many people, the Sunday Circle members took the view that the war was the logical endpoint of the liberal society that had developed in the nineteenth century, producing industrial capitalism and bourgeois individualism. To Lukács and his friends, there was something sick, unreal, about that state of affairs. The forces of industrial capitalism had created a world where they felt ill at ease, where a shared culture was no longer part of the agenda, where the institutions of religion, art, science, and the state had ceased to have any communal meaning. Many of them were influenced in this by the lectures of George Simmel, ‘the Manet of philosophy’, in Berlin. Simmel made a distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ culture. For him, objective culture was the best that had been thought, written, composed, and painted; a ‘culture’ was defined by how its members related to the canon of these works. In subjective culture, the individual seeks self-fulfilment and self-realisation through his or her own resources. Nothing need be shared. By the end of the nineteenth century, Simmel said, the classic example of this was the business culture; the collective ‘pathology’ arising from a myriad subjective cultures was alienation. For the Sunday Circle in Budapest the stabilising force of objective culture was a sine qua non. It was only through shared culture that the self could become known to others, and thus to itself. It was only by having a standpoint that was to be shared that one could recognise alienation in the first place. This solitude at the heart of modern capitalism came to dominate the discussions of the Sunday Circle as the war progressed and after the Bolshevik revolution they were led into radical politics. An added factor in their alienation was their Jewishness: in an era of growing anti-Semitism, they were bound to feel marginalised. Before the war they had been open to international movements – impressionism and aestheticism and to Paul Gauguin in particular, who, they felt, had found fulfilment away from the anti-Semitic business culture of Europe in far-off Tahiti. ‘Tahiti healed Gauguin,’ as Lukács wrote at one point.45 He himself felt so marginalised in Hungary that he took to writing in German.