The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  The Dynamo ...

  The 1900s were nothing if not dynamic. Everything appeared bigger today than it had yesterday: cities, industrial production, railway networks, streets with automobiles hurtling along, high-rise buildings with stern façades, populations, media and entertainment, mass culture, speed records. Gripped between the steely jaws of industry and the emerging global market, millions were uprooted and forced to invent new identities in an unfamiliar world.

  Despite this dynamism, the spectre of degeneracy and decline was a haunting, constant presence in European minds. Eugenicists warned about the decline of the race; conservative publicists foretold the end of civilization; empires anxiously eyed one another’s military might. Never before had there been so much reason to be optimistic, and never before had people looked towards the future with stronger misgivings. The sheer speed of change made people weary, but while they were uncertain of what was to come, Europeans were also increasingly doubtful about the values and achievements of power. Unlike the Victorians, they no longer tacitly assumed that they were Christian soldiers marching onward to paradise.

  The twentieth century began compromised. Its most visible expression, the 1900 Paris World Fair, was symptomatic of the lack of confidence in the aesthetics of a new world, of a need to cover up the manifestations of tomorrow in a cloak borrowed from yesterday. A miniature medieval Paris lured consumers with its swordfights, souvenirs and chocolate advertising, the historicist national pavilions sat by the banks of the Seine like a row of grotesquely overbred pedigree dogs, and the colonial exhibition suggested a harmonious world which every visitor who had read about the events in Africa in the morning paper knew to be a lie. More than ever before, the programme of the fair itself was questioned. It was, in fact, a political exercise, reflecting the anxieties and misgivings of a society undermined by the divisiveness of the Dreyfus trial and by the debate about depopulation, declining manliness, and the man-eating city.

  Elsewhere, the century began with the Boer War and the death of Queen Victoria, two events that did much to shake the moral confidence of the world’s greatest empire. The death of the old Queen marked the end of an era (Henry James feared that the ‘wild waters’ would break loose), but the sordid war against the Boers and the uncovering of the monstrous regime in the Congo did much to undercut any idea of the mission civilisatrice that white Europeans were supposed to fulfil in the world. Japan’s victory in 1905 only reinforced a widespread sense that the great powers were acting out of doubtful motives, were often badly led, and that the European ‘race’ itself was in permanent decline. The eugenics movement was born out of this anxiety, but its plans to create a master race only served to emphasize and exaggerate the impression that Europe’s societies were in a sorry state.

  As social realities seemingly shifted with every new day, the previous guarantor of stability, Europe’s old ruling caste, went into terminal decline, taking with it the traditional social order and its values. The descendants of the knights and princes of old had been defeated - not by invading armies but by refrigeration and steam turbines. The new ruling class, the bourgeoisie, brought its own, pragmatic, ideals, and even if industrialists liked to play at being country noblemen every now and then, the game was played strictly by capitalist rules. The stately piles they bought as playthings were equipped with electrical light and modern sanitation. Their fortunes and industry held the real power now, and a factory prettified with mock-Gothic turrets was still a factory.

  In the fast-living and constantly expanding universe of the city, certainty became a rare commodity. The rule of the dynamo not only accelerated things, it apparently made them spin out of control. Newspapers were full of reports of car accidents, of street violence and suicides, and even the advertising sections whispered disquieting messages: Are you man enough? they asked of the men; Are you beautiful enough? of the women; Are you healthy enough to withstand the pressure? of both. Those uncertain were discreetly informed of the existence of tonics and healing apparatuses, of sanatoriums and patent medicines, of life insurances as the last remaining certainty in the quicksand of existence.

  Industrial production was rapidly overtaking traditional manufacture. Food imports from around the globe had long outstripped the capacities of domestic farming, and identities were increasingly cast in an industrial mould. The great majority of people had become consumers who did not themselves produce the goods they needed, but who exchanged their labour or services for money in order to buy labour, services and prefabricated goods from others. New social realities were created as the swelling ranks of workers were organized in trade unions and socialist parties, creating a considerable political force whose goal was the revolution of societies, and a large part of the equally radical feminist movement originated with female industrial workers. Church attendance declined dramatically, while political parties and associations grew, and even sports became a focus of tribal identities, particularly among working-class football followers. These were the new tribes.

  Much of this transformation had taken place in less than a generation, and as there were fewer traditional certainties to hold on to, members of European societies felt a need for new points of reference. New creeds used the vocabulary of science to satisfy the need to feel chosen and superior. Nationalists and racial thinkers ‘proved’ their own excellence and deduced from it a claim to political domination and a right to violence if necessary. A little more subtly, eugenicists argued that ‘superior’ white middle-class Europeans and Americans had not only the right but the urgent duty to determine whether other, ‘inferior’, people should be allowed to have offspring. The majority simply decided to amuse themselves. Where once Christianity had projected images of belonging, duty and hope in people’s minds, the projection screen of the early cinema and the façade of the department store now replaced the Church as dream-weaver. It was a secular, industrial world that was shown here, but it was pretty, affordable, and entertaining. Already by 1910, those who could afford it shopped themselves out of existential trouble.

  Speed and thedisintegrationof the self:Metzinger’sracing cyclistfuses man,machine, andthe crowd.

  Artists and intellectuals recognized the compromised, damaged aspect of their time and were obsessed by formulating a new aesthetic and a genuine morality, but they could not agree exactly what to base it on. Official Western culture - Christianity, the Enlightenment - appeared to have spawned the meaninglessness of consumer life, the cruelty of capitalism, the anonymity of the big city, the moral bankruptcy of society itself. Many creative minds agreed that a real basis for renewal - aesthetic as well as moral - could be found only outside of Christian civilization in Africa (Picasso, Braque, Gide), Oceania (the anthropologist Marcel Mauss), South America (the intellectual historian Aby Warburg), in the pioneer spirit of the United States (Adolf Loos, Henry Adams), or in the pre-Christian pagan civilizations of Europe in the countryside (Bartók, Kodály, Kandinsky) or in classical antiquity (Nietzsche, already dead, or Freud, Hofmannsthal, Klimt, Strauss).

  The Futurists were not interested in primitive civilizations. They used the achievements of civilization against itself. Their weapons (wielded exclusively in manifestos and early artistic happenings) were modern machines such as fast cars, huge turbines and big guns. Their propaganda consisted in snippets of daily life: in newspaper clippings and nonsensical sounds gleaned from street noise and the screeches of engines in factory halls and railway stations, in the attempt to catch all that was transitory and to find heroism in iconic moments connecting speed and technology. Their hero was not the noble soldier or missionary, but the racing pilot, the cyclist fusing muscle power and body into a fast machine: an early bionic man.

  ... and the Virgin

  The growth of industrialized society and the shift in attitudes between the sexes, and about sex, came by stealth. It slipped under the bed sheets and into people’s minds. Nobody had written the Little Red Book of this revolution; no one great battle was fought over i
t; no Bastille stormed. Often imperceptibly and by small increments, ideals and expectations about men and women lost their anchorage and were cast adrift.

  Spearheaded by the suffragettes in Britain and by feminist writers such as Emmeline Pankhurst and Rosa Mayreder, the cause of women’s liberation forced itself into the public debate. Sometimes there were no more than a handful of these courageous women, and their demonstrations seem perfectly innocuous today, but this was the dawn of the media age, and newspapers are always out to expose the remarkable, the scandalous, the strange. Women in cycling trousers, rioting campaigners and activists with short hair were sure to get their photos into the papers (whether or not they wanted to), and to be read about by millions around the Continent. They were often met with derision and even hatred, but they could no longer be ignored.

  But there were also more subtle, less spectacular but no less pervasive changes. All over Europe, women were having fewer children year on year; all over the West, they were becoming more educated and many were earning their own money in factories, shops, and soon also in the professions. They were very obviously taking more decisions for themselves, because they chose not to risk too many pregnancies and to invest in the future of a smaller number of better-educated children. If we can believe the learned contemporary authors writing about this phenomenon, commentators were taken by surprise and, what is more, they took it personally. It had apparently not occurred to them that sinking birth rates were evidence of social competence and mutually agreed decisions made by couples - instead they wrote about the decline of men, the spectre of la dépopulation , as one of them put it. While France had reason to be worried about this, it was a phantom problem for countries such as Britain and Germany, where populations continued to grow despite a dip in birth rates, but the same concerns were raised here.

  This exaggerated reaction points to another phenomenon of the time. As women grew more assertive and appeared to be assuming new roles, men were suddenly on the defensive. It was Freud who had written that his research showed man to be ‘no longer master in his own house’, and this was true in more ways than one. Their physical strength made useless by machines that could be operated by a child, and their position questioned by social change and sexual uncertainty, men retreated into an assertion of exaggerated ideas of manliness. There was more duelling between 1900 and 1914 than there had been in the thirty years before, there were more people in uniform in the streets, there were chaps with bigger moustaches, body builders with bigger muscles, battleships with bigger guns. There were racing cars and speed records, sporting heroes and endless advertising for electrical belts and other remedies for lost ‘manly vigour’. Little wonder that the sinking of the sleek, fast, powerful Titanic in 1912 was such an emblem of disaster for the period. Freud might have understood this, had he not, after all, been a child of his time: he conveniently diagnosed suffragettes as suffering from penis envy.

  Feminist writers were not afraid of dismissals such as this one and took the fight to their critics. Their own analysis of society exposed male anxiety and patriarchal power structures with the greatest ease. ‘Modern man suffers from his intellectualism as from an illness,’ Rosa Mayreder had written. ‘To be masculine … as masculine as possible … that is the true distinction in their [men’s] eyes; they are insensitive to brutality of defeat or the sheer wrongness of an act if only it coincides with the traditional canon of masculinity.’ This analysis from a woman’s perspective questioned the very certainties that men relied on most, and few male writers (George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Schnitzler and August Bebel among them) had the far-sightedness and the moral courage to acknowledge the need for radical change.

  To many men, the twin spectres of declining birth rates and of suffragettes throwing stones and attacking politicians seemed to herald the end of civilization. A society of mannish women and effeminate men was an aberration, conservative critics warned, an enfeebled stock that could only be submerged by ‘inferior races’ which had retained their vitality and virility because they had remained untouched by the corrupting influences of modernity. While women were demanding societal changes from within, away from ideas of domination and violence and towards a life of cooperative dialogue, many male writers (as well as some female ones) saw this as the road to ruin and demanded a revival of the warrior spirit and the faith they recognized in earlier centuries.

  This male-female conflict in ideology which had roots in the feminist agitation of the 1900s was also transposed into racist ideas. Antisemitism was also, importantly, an expression of male anxiety, based on the perception that ‘unmanly’ Jews were symbolically castrating gentiles by yoking them to machines and making them subject to capitalist manipulations. The orientalist fascination with African cultures was strongly influenced by the perceived sexual freedom men enjoyed within them, be it the idea of the endlessly potent pasha with a harem of submissive women or the perceived natural virility of sub-Saharan Africans whose supposed sexual prowess and pride was a recurrent motif in novels and in graphic art. To dominate the colonies gave proof of European manliness, and it was all the more disturbing to be forced to admit the excesses of colonial brutality which inconveniently pulled the reality of near-slavery and abuse out of the realm of the symbolic and into the political sphere. As European identities were questioned on the most basic level - in considering men and women and their relations - political and social questions developed strongly sexual connotations, oscillating between direct sexual anxiety about questions such as masturbation, homosexuality, potency and mental illness, and a metaphorical level at which different groups were substituted for the real object of anxiety. Sublimation and displacement were the technical terms Freud had proposed for these mechanisms, which he had observed in patients unwilling to confront their innermost desires.

  Lost in Space-Time

  As the reign of the dynamo began, time and space themselves - which Kant had called the ‘categories of perception’ - mutated into something strange. For Einstein they had fused into space-time, a mysterious continuum that would warp and expand as well as contract. Scientists were investigating space at the level of the atom and had stopped time altogether, photographing bullets in flight, breaking up sequences of movements into their constituent parts in photographs, capturing series of static moments and bringing them to life again on film. Distance had shrunk due to wireless telegraphy and the telephone, railway lines transformed seaside towns, which had seemed unreachably far away only a generation earlier, into popular holiday destinations for the masses. People went faster; further. The commuter and the garden suburb were made possible by new trains, and at the same time the world came to them in wired newspaper articles and even in photographs, in the movies, on gramophone records.

  The single space and the unique moment ceased to exist. Just a few years earlier, an aria performed at the Metropolitan Opera had been imprinted only on the memories of those present, or else lost into the ether. Now it could be recorded, copied thousands of times and sent around the world, to be played and replayed at will. There were photographs of colonial atrocities in the Congo and the fighting in the Boer War, and part of the sensation of one of the first short movies ever made, the Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon, 1895, was the novelty, the sheer amazement, of seeing ordinary working women leaving their factory, a fleeting moment captured one late afternoon in a French city in 1895 that could be replayed at will in Cape Town or in Oslo.

  Artists responded to this new, less certain sense of being in the world. Picasso and Braque showed objects and faces from several points at once, giving the viewer an unsettling omnipresence in the depicted room; Giacomo Balla and Marcel Duchamp pressed movements through time into a single picture frame; novelists and playwrights such as Schnitzler and Strindberg blurred the space between reality and imagination, dream and waking. Life was ‘more fragmented and faster-moving than in previous periods’, the Cubist painter Fernand Léger wrote in 1913: ‘a modern man registers a hundred times m
ore sensory impressions than an eighteenth-century artist.’

  Man and machine entered into a strange marriage, a fused, bionic body, a second creation. Frederick Taylor revolutionized industrial processes by describing the human body as a mechanism that must be employed with ideal efficiency. Human personality was nothing but a fiction masking a stream of sensory impressions, much like exposures of a camera, in Ernst Mach’s analysis. The sculptor Jacob Epstein created his uncannily robotic Rock Drill in 1913, the painter Umberto Boccioni and other Italian Futurists were endlessly fascinated by the melding of flesh and steel which they expressed in sculptures that to us seem to come right out of Star Wars, and in the minds of psychiatric patients rose the spectre of the Great Influencing Machine, directly controlling minds and emotions over great distances. The robotic self was becoming a reality. As the cinema projectionist and hero of Luigi Pirandello’s 1915 novel Shoot commented of his relationship to his projector: ‘I cease to exist. It walks now, upon my legs. From head to foot, I belong to it: I form part of its equipment.’