Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

Eksteins’s Prologue focuses on the Italian city of Venice—a city of “imagination […] sensations and, above all, inwardness” (1). He refers to two prominent deaths in this city built on water: the real death of Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, in August 1929 and the fictitious death of Gustav Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice. 

While Eksteins concedes that Diaghilev and Mann never met, “the life of one and the imagination of the other overlapped to an obviously extraordinary degree” (3). Regarding these “two giants of twentieth-century aesthetic sense,” Eksteins traces “influences that led one to create a certain fiction and the other actually to live strikingly near that fiction” (3). “One must ask,” Eksteins writes, “whether Mann’s story was any less real than Diaghilev’s life,” given that the former lived to create fiction and the other lived it as a fictional character (3).

The book opens with a discussion of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring—the titular 1913 Russian ballet—and its surrounding culture. The ballet, featuring the sacrifice of a consecrated virgin, scandalized Parisian society when it premiered on May 29, 1913 at the Théâtre de Champs Élysées. The visceral subject matter, along with the choreography’s departure from ballet’s expected grace, and “the lack of conventional rhythms” in Stravinsky’s music, angered the audience who began shouting at the performers (12). Eksteins believes the work “certainly exploited tensions but hardly caused them,” and he analyzes how “Le Sacre represents a milestone in the development of ‘modernism,’ modernism above all as a culture of the sensational event, through which art and life both become a matter of energy and are fused as one” (15-16).

French architect Auguste Perret built the Théâtre de Champs Élysées between 1911 and 1913; it was a theatre that “belong[ed] to the first generation of buildings to be erected with reinforced concrete” and had a simple appearance, as opposed to the ornate style customary to turn-of-the-century theatres and opera houses (16). According to Eksteins, this was “a symbolic attempt to synthesize modern and traditional impulses” (21).

Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev—art impresario and founder of the company Ballets Russes—was instrumental in staging The Rite of Spring. Diaghilev, who occupied a privileged position in Imperial Russian society “had strong roots in a conservative imperial tradition,” however, “he was also clearly driven by countervailing instincts” and wanted to promote the creation of radical Russian art and display it to the world (22). Before turning his attention to Russian ballet, Diaghilev brought exhibitions of Russian paintings and operas to Paris. In 1909, he brought “fifty-five dancers trained exclusively in the imperial ballet school and on temporary leave from the imperial theatres of St Petersburg and Moscow” to the Théâtre de Châtelet (25). The choreography of Mikhail Fokine, the otherworldly grace of ballerinas Anna Pavlova and Tamara Karsavina, and especially the virile leaps of boy prodigy, Vaslav Nijinsky, caused a “sensation” (25). Diaghilev aimed “to produce a synthesis—of all the arts, of a legacy of history and a vision of the future, of orientalist and westernism […] of decadence and barbarism” (33).

Eksteins notes that “with every season Diaghilev became more daring” and in the Ballets Russes’s repertoire, Fokine’s exotic, organic choreography melded with Nijinsky’s overtly erotic creations (27). Nijinsky “insisted on expressiveness with a vengeance, deliberately rebelling against ‘the line of beauty’,” as he encouraged his dancers to break up the smooth line of their port de bras (carriage of the arms), by displaying the points of their elbows (37). Nijinsky’s 1912 ballet, L’Après-midi d’un faune featured Nijinsky as the faun in a skintight costume, simulating masturbation and orgasm over a nymph’s scarf—a feat both tantalizing and shocking (27).

Diaghilev—who, when it came to art, preferred surprise over morality—celebrated “vitality, spontaneity and change […] anything was preferred to stultifying conformism, even moral disorder and confusion” (31). In an age when homosexuality was still a crime, Diaghilev’s trysts with the male dancers in his troupe—including Nijinsky—were an open secret; he surrounded himself with an entourage that was “a kind of homosexual Swiss Guard” (34). This meant that “a sexual tension pervaded the whole experience of the Ballets Russes” both on and off stage (34).

Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring’s composer, also valued a trajectory of continual progress and refused to pander to audience expectations when he created a “jarring” score, lacking in “ornamentation, moral intention, and […] melody” (50). Meanwhile, the movement “was reduced to heavy jumping, with both feet, and walking, in either a smooth or stomping fashion” (51). Given that there was no “melody to follow, the dancers had to follow the rhythm, but even that was extraordinarily difficult, since bar after bar had a different time signature” (51). Fokine and Stravinsky intended that the ballet would be “a jolting and emotional experience” for the viewer (41). Eksteins writes how “the theme was devoid of readily identifiable moral purpose” as “birth, life and death were depicted without obvious ethical comment”; instead, “there was only energy, exultation, and necessity” (50). He concludes that the ballet:

contains and illustrates many of the essential features of the modern revolt: the overt hostility to inherited form; the fascination with primitivism and indeed with anything that contradicts the notion of civilization; the emphasis on vitalism as opposed to rationalism […] the psychological introspection accompanying the rebellion against social convention (52).

Eksteins explains that “the social and economic trappings of modernity - urbanization, industrialization, colonies, political unity - all came late to Germany in comparison with France and in particular Britain” (64). Whereas Britain and France had long been centrally organized, by 1800,

the German territories were still a quilt-like configuration of close to four hundred autonomous principalities, only loosely federated in an association with the paradoxical name of Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (64).

Political unity arrived between 1866 and 1871 and with it came “the development of an entrepreneurial spirit in the segment of the middle class” (65). “If Britain led the way in changing the mode of life on our planet from the rural agrarian to the urban industrial,” Eksteins writes, “Germany more than any other state took us toward our ‘postindustrial’ or technological world” as her modern innovators in both the sciences and arts determined “our modern urban and industrial landscape” (67). However, Germany’s contribution to modernity also took place on an “experiential” level as it “has given evidence to the world of the psychic disorientation that rapid and wholesale environmental change may produce” (67-68). As a result, “the German experience lies at the heart of ‘modern experience’” (68). Indeed, “the general impulse” of pre-war Germany was “starkly future-orientated. Where there was dissatisfaction or anxiety, it was to be overcome by change” (73). A key marker of change was the “staggering” population growth and “military victories” of the 1860s and 70s, which meant, “the Germans represented the most formidable landed military might in Europe and probably the world” (76).

Berlin, the capital of Germany, was a symbol of the country’s forward-looking, change-orientated attitude: “[I]n comparison with other European capitals, Berlin was a parvenu city, in its sprawling development in the second half of the nineteenth century more like New York or Chicago than its Old World counterparts” (74). Berliners too, “seemed to be fascinated by the very idea of urbanism and technology” and the city became a hub for artists, intellectuals, and other innovators (75).

German culture aligned itself with ‘“inner freedom, with authenticity, with truth rather than sham, with essence as opposed to appearance, with totality rather than the norm” (77). It aimed to go beyond the visible world and touch a spiritual realm. Whereas, in the words of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, “the Latin” (the French or Italian), “takes his forms from the object as it exists in nature,” the German “creates his form in fantasy, from an inner vision peculiar to himself. The forms of visible nature serve him as symbols only…and he seeks beauty not in appearance but in something beyond” (82). Germany was home to Richard Wagner and the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, a “supreme synthesis” of different art forms but also “a combination of art, history, and contemporary life in total drama” (77). More than any other nation, Eksteins argues, “Germany […] represented the aspirations of a national avant-garde” and the desire to break out of the Anglo-French “bourgeois liberalism” that had defined European culture to that point (82).

Germany was also the host of sexual liberation and Leibeskultur or body culture: “an appreciation of the human body devoid of social taboos and restrictions” (83). This desire to embrace freedom and “establish contact with the elemental in the German spirit” spread to the middle classes and became a youth movement positioned against urbanism and traditional European notions of culture and morality (84).

Evident in German foreign policy, as well, was the desire to be “elemental” and “rebel against suffocating and stultifying norms” (86). Given Germany’s promotion of “change with a vengeance” and “aggressive attitude to other states and peoples,” the nation set itself up for military confrontation (86). Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had a “love of pomp and circumstance,” and a “restless nature” that “demanded constant excursions and constant titillation,” embodied this “burgeoning and blustering Germany” (87-88). He was interested in art, both conventional and avant-garde, in addition to having “an insatiable appetite for new technology”—especially when it came to automobiles and weaponry (88).

The Germans’ sole military strategy, the Schlieffen plan, “foresaw a rapid attack through Belgium, a sharp left wheel in the north of France […] whereupon all resources could then be turned against Russia” and promised “total victory in Europe on the basis of one major battle in the north of France” (89). Eksteins considers that the scheme resembled Richard Wagner’s conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk in its scope, given how it “elevated a limited tactical adventure to a total vision” (89).

When Germany went to war in August 1914, most Germans regarded it as “a spiritual necessity,” or a “quest for authenticity, for truth, for self-fulfillment” and in opposition to “materialism, banality, hypocrisy, tyranny” (92). The latter features were associated with England and its old-world culture, which “became Germany’s most hated enemy after she entered the war on August 4” (92). Eksteins argues strongly for the war being “a matter of art,” an “affirmation” of Germany’s “vitality” and a sacrificial “rite of spring” for the newly energized nation (94).

Eksteins describes the great “movement” that the war initiated:

[T]he war had begun with movement, movement of men and matériel on a scale never witnessed before in history. Across Europe approximately six million men received orders in early August and began to move (98).

Given that the 19th century had seen “extraordinary technological change and movement,” most thought that the war would reflect this and was to be decisively and quickly won (101). However, the myth of a quick-fix victory was laid to rest in the first five months when both sides accumulated a “staggering” amount of casualties; in fact, by the end of 1914 “most of the French and German Western Front was manned by reserves” (100). Worse still, many of the casualties were not only a result of battle, but from a “new war” against nature, that began in late 1914 (103). The number of men who died of “frostbite, rheumatism, and trench foot” outnumbered those killed in “actual combat” (103).

While the French and English purported to loathe the Germans—and vice versa—there was an element of “fraternization” on Christmas of 1914, when the two sides stopped fighting, exchanged Christmas greetings and gifts, and even played football (111). However, whereas the Christmas-time truce was widely reported in the British press, the French press, “muzzled all mention of fraternization” (134).

In Eksteins’s opinion, Britain entered the war “to preserve a system of British order, national and international, that was seen to be under attack by everything that Germany and its introverted Kultur represented” (116). From the British perspective, “by the beginning of the twentieth century Germany had […] replaced France as the incarnation of flux and irresponsibility in the world,” though they “stood for the reverse: stability and responsibility” (116). Throughout the expansion of its great empire and civilization, Britain’s mission was, in author Rudyard Kipling’s words, “to introduce ‘lesser breeds’ […] to ‘the law’” (117). Therefore, Britain became the “conservative” counter to Germany’s modernizing force (117). The British vision of progress was one “governed by a respect for the law” and liberty was less concerned with personal freedom, than “the freedom to do one’s duty” (118).

While the average British soldier believed that German aggression started the war, they also viewed it as an opportunity to demonstrate the superiority of British values and tactics. In his Queen’s Hall speech of September 19, 1914, Prime Minister David Lloyd George said that the British public had been:

living in a sheltered valley for generations. We have been too comfortable and too indulgent… and the stern hand of Fate has scourged us to an elevation where we can see the great everlasting things that matter for a nation […] Honour [sic], Duty, Patriotism, and clad in glittering white, the great pinnacle of Sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven (132-33). 

Young, British men adhered to their prime minister’s belief, viewing the war “as an adventure to be welcomed” and “a pathway to the future, to progress, to revolution, to change” (133).

Eksteins argues that the Victorian and Edwardian eras “were ages seeking certitude” (128). There was “a craving for fixities, the belief that experience should be subservient to order” (128). In contrast, the war in 1914 was for both sides, something that could shake things up—a game where attitude mattered more than certainties.