by Philipp Blom
Weininger’s ‘scientific’ reasoning had an enormous contemporary resonance because it made explicit what had been implied in cultural debates for years: the identification of Jews and women as the two main enemies of individuality and manhood: ‘The real Jew and the real woman, both live only as part of their species, not as individuals,’ Weininger claimed, and proceeded to season his argument with lengthy statistics and analyses. Neither of them, he argued, was capable of creative and original work, both were corrupting and low by nature. Apparently driven by sexual paranoia, he had formulated a crucial insight into the culture of his time: women and Jews caused trouble, and they caused the same, sexual, trouble.
In chapter 1 we encountered the French debate about fertility, the Dreyfus case, and the role played in both by antisemitism. Capitalism, city life, newspapers, stock markets and other aspects of modern life were strongly identified with Jews, who flourished in this environment for reasons partly to do with their long-overdue legal emancipation and subsequent assimilation, and partly with their culture of learning and international, entrepreneurial outlook, after centuries of exile in a world that had closed its doors to them.
As the industrial bondage of factory work was often equated with an uprooting, a theft of identity and a symbolic castration (witness the role declining birth rates played in this debate), antisemitic stereotypes effectively portrayed Jews as effeminate city people luring virile peasants away from the fields and into their factories, where these true men and carriers of the national soul were turned into emasculated machine slaves.
The same fear is visible in many arguments against and perceptions of suffragettes, who (when not accused of being depraved and sex-crazed harlots) were regularly described as mannishly unattractive or as ‘shorthaired young ladies in spectacles, most of them puny-looking’, as a Russian deputy to the Duma had put it. Some exponents of feminist activism, such as Anita Augspurg or Madeleine Pelletier, with their suits, riding crops and bob cuts, invited such criticism, but even the most ladylike of feminists were not immune from having their sexuality and their womanliness called into question. These creatures were not considered ‘real’ women at all, but monstrous hermaphrodites, freaks of nature. They disturbed the natural order, which was divided into men and women, each within their clearly defined sphere.
Once Weininger’s rant had drawn attention to it, the parallel with women was obvious: they, too, flourished and came to new prominence in the environment of the modern city, they took jobs and educated themselves, they encroached upon male rights and male domains - and they bore fewer children. The ghetto Jew of newspaper cartoons was weedy, pale, unmanly, if not positively effeminate. The stereotype of the suffragettes saw them as mannish, thrusting lesbians. Women, it appeared, were conspiring with Jews to upset the ancient order of the sexes, to create a weird and threatening third sex, not man, not woman, a freak creature of the modern city.
Weininger had little time to enjoy the triumphant success of his book, which influenced not only right-wing thinkers but also truly interesting minds such as those of Robert Musil, Elias Canetti and Ludwig Wittgenstein. An archetypal self-hating Jew, as well as a pathological misogynist deeply troubled by his own sexual impulses, the student author became overwhelmed with revulsion at his own existence. Shortly after publication of his book he took a room in the house in which Beethoven had died and shot himself with one last, pathetic gesture. He was twenty-three.
Reality had changed for women, as for men, as Rosa Mayreder analysed so perceptively. Old values no longer reflected reality, even if the ruling elite in most countries was determined to cling on to the martial, chivalrous ideal of manhood that was a survival of a pre-industrial age. Masculinity defined as muscle power had become all but worthless in a world dominated by machines and specialized technocrats, brawn was losing out to brain, and the latter was not, despite the protestations of anti-feminist scientists, the sole dominion of men. Within economic life, muscle power was now associated with the lowliest and worst-paid of occupations, if not relegated entirely to the fairground.
Confusing the visible agents with the invisible causes of change, both antisemites and anti-feminists directed their hatred against a group they perceived as corrupt and sexually abnormal. It was a group they saw as threatening traditional manliness either with insatiable depravity (an alternative charge levied at both Jews and emancipated women), or by symbolizing a dangerously unstable sexual identity that could seemingly lurch in the blink of an eye from primeval rootedness to asexual immorality. Both Jews and women came to symbolize the male fear of being unmanned through being turned into the soulless subject of the machine. Men worried about the inhuman pace of life, sure to erode the nerves of even the strongest man and to plunge him into a shadow life, far from the laws of nature which, incidentally, decreed that his place was at the top.
If mannish women and effeminate men were among the ogres haunting the imagination of anti-modernists around 1900, the image of androgyny and other games with sexual identity had a powerful appeal to many artists. Giorgio de Chirico wickedly satirized his fellow men’s fears with his 1913 canvas The Uncertainty of the Poet (see plate section). In this work a female torso, the ultimate sex object in its headless, armless pose with pert breasts and inviting buttocks, is situated behind a bunch of ripe bananas, a whole hord of phalluses seemingly sprouting from her loins, the ultimate man-woman with more than a nod towards the supposed virility of the ‘savage’ African men in their natural splendour. Just to drive home the point, a steam train in the background ejaculates white smoke as it rushes across the horizon line. De Chirico was anything but subtle. In a variant on this motif, le rêve transformé; the head of a sad patriarchal god, Zeus or perhaps Poseidon, gazes at a bunch of bananas in front of him, impotently jumbled in front of a testicle-like pair of pineapples, while the steam train still rushes behind. Both works show disjointed, composed figures in the convention of classical civilization confronted with the brute force of nature and the exuberant force of technology, and both show sexual identities as being essentially and hopelessly out of kilter.
The Frenchman André Derain simply held his camera-like eye steady on reality. In his Bal des soldats à Suresnes (1903) he shows a soldiers’ ball at which everything is going awry. Three uniformed men stand impassively in the background, two of them with their enormous sabres planted in front of their crotches, while one soldier is being led by a woman on the dance floor, haplessly clinging to her and planting a possessive hand on her hip, without impressing her in the slightest. She is tall, confident, and obviously bored, while he tries to swivel her away from the centre of the canvas which is cutting through them like a knife. He has no chance. He is a stunted member of an inferior species, vainly trying to assert himself over a latter-day Amazon.
As sexual identities were losing themselves in the ambiguities of social construction and free will, feminine boys and boyish women invaded the imagination of writers and painters alike. They can be found in works ranging from Kokoschka’s early Dreaming Boys (1903) to Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1912), in which an ageing writer develops an overwhelming passion for a beautiful adolescent boy; from Ulrich’s incestuous relationship with his gaminish sister Clarisse in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities to the feminized boys in the paintings of the Russian Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. The same images are seen in Picasso’s early scenes and those of eccentric artists like Edith Sitwell, as well as in the lanky beauty of the young Anna Akhmatova, and the ambivalent appeal of Sarah Bernhardt. This androgyny also found its expression in Isadora Duncan’s famously flagrant interest in both women and men.
This ambivalence was not the lush, decadent eroticism of the symbolist fin de siècle with its languid youths - it was a dangerous sensuality, a threat had invaded the images and phantasms of the early twentieth century. It bore not the promise of seduction into a luxurious beyond, but the menace of selfhood undermined by the endless possibilities of hidden impulses. No man could be ce
rtain that his nervous constitution or his moral universe could resist the barrage of temptations of the modern city, or that the corseted, long-frocked appearance of a woman did not conceal a wild-eyed fury, red in tooth and claw, and ready to tear apart the thin layer of civilization: a savage, sexual animal like the ecstatic dancers painted in the rural witches’ sabbath by the German Emil Nolde. Even on canvas, women would no longer just lie down demurely.
10
1909: The Cult of the Fast Machine
It has to be said ... that automobilism is an illness, a mental illness.
This illness has a pretty name: speed ... [Man] can no longer stand
still, he shivers, his nerves tense like springs, impatient to get going
once he has arrived somewhere because it is not somewhere else,
somewhere else, always somewhere else …
- Octave Mirbeau, La 628 E-8, 1910
‘I am alone. I can see nothing at all. For about ten minutes I lose all orientation. It is a curious situation: without guidance, without compass in the air, above the Channel. My hands and feet rest lightly on the levers. I let the plane choose its own course. And then, twenty minutes after having left the French coast, I see the cliffs of Dover, the castle, and further to the west the point where I should have landed.’
A few minutes later, at 5.13 in the morning of Sunday, 25 July 1909, the pilot landed on a golf course close to Dover Castle. Louis Blériot (1872-1936), a French engineer, had become the first person to fly across the Channel and claim the Daily Mail’s £1,000 prize. The crossing had taken him thirty-one minutes. Removing his leather flying cap and clambering out of the cockpit of his self-constructed machine, nursing his right foot, which had been severely burned during a flight only one month earlier (the pioneering pilot had already survived more than fifty crashes, making it necessary for his tailor to cut his suits to his deformities), he was ready to receive the reporters and the military honour guard who came running as soon as they had located him. When the first soldiers arrived at the plane, Blériot greeted them courteously. ‘Would you be so kind as to hand me my crutches?’ he asked, in English. The Channel flight was the sensation of the day. The aviator was received in Dover by huge crowds; later in the day he made a triumphant entry into London, where the powerful media baron Lord Northcliffe awarded him his prize. Newspapers all across the world put the Frenchman on their front pages. ‘England No Longer an Island!’ trumpeted Le Matin gleefully.
Flying into
history: Louis
Blériot crossing
the Channel.
The record had almost been snatched out of Blériot’s hands by his rival Hubert Latham, who had attempted a Channel flight eight days earlier. Midway across, his motor had given up the ghost and he had to be fished from the sea. But Blériot, despite his injury, had pressed on in order not to lose his chance. He had scheduled his flight for 23 June, but bad weather had delayed him. Then, at 4.35 on the morning of 25 June, he had limped to the fragile flying machine supposed to carry him across la Manche. With 17 litres of petrol on board he battled head winds that made the engine hard to control in the poor visibility; in little more than half an hour he saw the famous white cliffs rising out of the thin cloud. Shortly afterwards, the plane’s two bicycle wheels touched down, carrying with them the first human being ever to come to Britain through the air.
Blériot was not the first aeronautic pioneer, of course - there had been Otto Lilienthal in Germany and the Wright brothers in the United States, as well as several lesser-known inventors - but he was the first to mark the symbolic milestone of flying an engine-driven plane across open water, and between countries. He had shown that aeroplanes could do more than fly for a few hundred metres over a long field on a beautiful day, as the inventors of so many experimental models had proved. Now planes could actually be used as a means of travel.
Those Magnificent Men
Flying was glamorous, dangerous, irresistible. It realized an ancient dream, captured in legend by the Greek artificer Daedalus. The gods had punished him by sending his son Icarus to a youthful death by making the wax in his wings melt. Now, almost three thousand years later, humanity had broken the monopoly of the skies previously held by Olympians and birds. The gods still plucked young pilots from the air and let them perish in the flames of their contraptions - the 1912 issue of the French popular magazine Je sais tout featured an impressive group portrait of dozens of aviators killed in test flights over the past five years - but the barrier had been broken. From now on, it would be technological progress, not myth, that would dictate the pace of events.
Not only pilots exerted a magical attraction on the public at large. Car racers, rally drivers and cycling champions became popular heroes. Every step of their careers was followed in the papers; new records were broken and recorded every week. Racing was one of the obsessions of the age; speed was its drug of choice. And speed there was, nowhere more so than in burgeoning Germany, whose engineers led the world. Already on 28 October 1903 the German company AEG had tested an electric locomotive that reached 210.8 kilometres per hour (130.5 mph), becoming the fastest man-made vehicle ever. Only a week earlier, a similar locomotive produced by rival manufacturer Siemens had reached 206 kph (128.5 mph).
Within a single generation, the country had transformed itself from a flyblown patchwork of feudal statelets into an industrial giant, ready to take on all comers. She had beaten the arch-enemy France, had become an empire, acquired colonies. From the sandy flatlands of Prussia came soldiers and administrators; the rural south had become a world leader in chemical industries and precision engineering; the seaports in the north teemed with wares from all over the world, as well as goods ‘Made in Germany’; while on its western flank Europe’s largest urban conflagration, the Ruhr area, was pumping out coal and steel faster than anyone else in the old world. This unprecedented expansion had made the country rich in many ways. More and more people could afford a middle-class life and buy a classical, non-vocational education for their sons. German banks poured vast sums of money into the educational system. Universities created the most productive and original elite in the humanities and sciences the world had ever seen (more Nobel Prizes went to Germany than anywhere else), and the country sported the world’s greatest density of theatres and opera houses, fine libraries and museums, as well as a roaring market in books and newspapers. No other nation, apart from the United States, had come so far so quickly.
Swept along by this rush of development, an increasing sense of speed was a major preoccupation, a public love affair, a deep fear, and the pulse driving millions of lives. The great machines in Krupp’s plants, the chemical works of Bayer and BASF, the electrical appliance giants AEG and Siemens or the burgeoning Daimler Benz swallowed up hundreds of thousands of miners, engineers, unskilled workers and foremen who clocked in every weekday, their work counted and punctuated by the dead hands of watches and factory whistles and turning them into mechanical dolls that repeated their tasks with mind-numbing regularity. Women in telephone exchanges rapidly created connections amid the clicking of contacts and the constant hum of voices, secretaries took dictation from impatient superiors at a hundred words a minute while pneumatic messages whizzed through tubes over their heads, and telephones short-circuited the decorous ways of correspondence. Illuminated shop signs and advertisements on huge poster walls were instant messages, rushing past travellers’ eyes. The railways prided themselves on being swift and, above all, punctual; electrical trams had been running in Berlin since 1879; the cranes in Hamburg’s free harbour moved in a carefully timed ballet of loading and unloading with not a minute to lose; the giant wheels of pit-head towers rotated round the clock as one shift of workers after the next was lowered into the darkness. For industrial workers, the threatening vision of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times had become a reality long before its future creator was out of his short trousers.
The messiah of this gospel of saving time at the workplace wa
s Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), an American engineer who had devoted his life to rationalizing working practices by analysing the movements of every worker, down to the smallest gesture, dismantling the actions and reassembling the process in the most time-saving way. He came from a Quaker family and had received part of his schooling in Germany. During the steel crisis of the 1880s he had observed workers and had come to the conclusion that the old way of working - governed by a craftsmanlike application of rules of thumb and independence, and by workers dragging their feet - would no longer do. From now on, every movement was to be scientifically analysed and responsibility for practices and schedules was to be given exclusively to managers. ‘In the past,’ he wrote, ‘Man has been first. In the future the system must be first.’ Only rigorous analysis could increase working speed and efficiency, Taylor demonstrated, using the example of a fictitious worker whom he reassuringly named Schmidt. He applied his principles to many branches of industry, increasing efficiency in a bicycle works so that ‘thirty-five girls did the work formerly done by one hundred and twenty. And that the accuracy of the work at the higher speed was two-thirds greater than at the former slow speed.’
Henry Ford (1863-1947) was the first car manufacturer who famously understood that he could make more money by selling hundreds of thousands of cheap cars at low prices to people with modest incomes, than by selling a few hundred expensive ones to the rich. His most revolutionary insight was to make the unit travel to the appropriate worker, rather than making specialized workers go to every unit. Thus the assembly line was born. Introduced in 1908, Ford’s Model T car cost $825 and was the first one to be affordable for the masses, especially as efficiency gains in the works were immediately translated into price drops. By 1916, a factory-new Model T sold for $360. Everything about these cars was calculated to maximize speed and efficiency of production. Even their black paint had been chosen because it dried fastest. ‘Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black,’ Ford famously observed. It is entertaining to imagine what might have happened if pink paint had dried more quickly.
