Messages From a Lost World: Europe on the Brink
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The national sensibility of the French, the Germans, the Italians and all peoples was forged over time thanks to the interaction of the multiplicity of feelings belonging to the native peoples of certain territories. If several centuries were necessary to arrive at that point, we can realistically predict it will take decades for the realization of our idea. The most important thing is to make a start. The advantage, moreover, would be to make clear publicly which European nations are today already ripe for this conception of Europe and which view it with mistrust, or even reject it outright. But I nourish the hope that all will voluntarily welcome without scepticism such a universal congress of nations, and even that a certain rivalry will moreover encourage different nations and cities to want to become the next congress city and capital of Europe.
This will be, I am fully aware, only a beginning. But it will at least provide a way of making our idea visible, more conspicuous, and does not exclude other more effective forms of action which, as long as they remain apolitical and do not entail any commitment, are I hope realistic. The plan I propose might not necessarily be one through which we will progress, but we should I sense at least get something started in some form. Let us not lose any more time, for time is not working in our favour. We can have precious little confidence in such a period of absurdity, where common sense can no longer be relied on. Let us now abandon the aloof humanist way of thinking, the airy notion that with mere words, writings and yet more conferences one can make an impact on a world saturated with weaponry and bloated with mutual distrust. Keep in mind the words of Faust, who firmly rejected the decisive statement “In the beginning was the word” and replaced it with something a little more truthful: “In the beginning was action!”
1914 AND TODAY
IF ROGER MARTIN DU GARD’S last novel, L’Été 1914, made a greater impression on me than any other book in recent years, I realize that this is not solely due to its extraordinary artistic merit. Martin du Gard’s book also has a disconcerting bearing on the present, despite the event it describes having taken place almost a quarter of a century ago. For the atmosphere of those days, which he renders with such convincing intellectual truth, on the one hand reveals a troubling resemblance to the present time, and yet on the other is strikingly different, so that on every page we can’t help but compare the situation then with that of today. Our generation, which knew both these times, will be led unceasingly to such a contradiction, and this—along with the moral, documentary and other values the work undoubtedly possesses—can only serve to strengthen its sense of responsibility and moral vitality.
L’Été 1914 is the last volume, the seventh, of the series entitled Les Thibault. We remember the first, which tells the story of a family, the school years of two brothers, the fate of a friendship, the conflicts and tensions in a family, a succession of episodes both moving and humane. We were already familiar with the lead players, almost as if they were friends, when abruptly the novel ground to a halt at the sixth volume: La Mort du père. Mutterings in literary circles back then were that Martin du Gard had destroyed the manuscript of the original seventh volume, to be called L’Appareillage, abandoning any further progress. In fact for years after no further writing appeared and one had the distinct feeling that some obstacle prevented the author from completing his work. But it now turns out that this hiatus was merely a hesitation before the final decisive ascent, for with the rewritten final volume now called L’Été 1914, and appearing in two parts, the novel suddenly reached a height from which it presided over all contemporary literature. The lonely destiny of the hero Jacques Thibault, the events in this family’s private life led inexorably to the most unambiguous facts of our epoch. The six fatal weeks between the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and the outbreak of war are viewed day by day through their chronological and moral succession in a more majestic and penetrating manner than any historical account could ever muster. This is not a war novel per se, but much more: a novel about the triggering of war. Once again we breathe the same oppressive atmosphere, feel the same emotions, in the feverish anxiety of these fateful days. You confront your memories of that time, in the light of a far clearer knowledge, purer, and naturally you are led to compare the onset of the last war with that of the war which now menaces us. We realize with horror the analogy of the situation then with now and, with still greater horror, the contrast between yesterday and today.
Permit one who has lived through 1914 and who is obliged to relive the dangers of a new war speedily to define this contrast. In 1914—and Martin du Gard recounts this magnificently—war had become something distant, an outmoded phenomenon which no one really believed in nor had any clear idea about. There may have been in Podolie and elsewhere, farther south in the Balkans, a handful of old hunters who had stalked bears in their youth, for even in 1914 there still existed generals and veterans from the campaigns of 1866 and 1870, hoary, gouty old men who had taken part in a European war and tended to reminisce about it. But for the great mass of the population, armed conflict between the powers had seemed for so long something unimaginable, unworthy of such a time of progress and, ultimately, something impossible in the twentieth century. No one dared espouse such a thing openly, and only the closed circles who in their heart of hearts desired it were shamelessly confessing to this desire and making ready. The emperors, chancellors, diplomats and even the officers spoke only of peace and again peace. There were no teachers, politicians or café strategists celebrating war as a necessary “bath of steel”, those who made plots merely concealed them from the people. The minority who thirsted for war knew perfectly well that it was necessary to surprise the people through a combination of speed and stratagem, and with artful cunning merely position them before a fait accompli; for not all nations were unanimous in their rejection of war and the clandestine anti-war forces in the twentieth century were always open to dangerous firebrands. In 1914 governments had to face a wave of resistance of a kind, which simply did not exist in 1866 or 1870. During this half-century the Socialist International had been formed, a community of some twenty or thirty million men in Europe whose convictions told them to sabotage any attempt to force a war. Furthermore, in the bourgeois milieux there existed powerful organizations absolutely opposed to war. Bertha von Suttner had begun to organize her pacifist propaganda campaign and numerous politicians, artists and intellectuals lent their support. In 1913 influential groups of German and French parliamentarians made candid visits. And an even more important difference! The entire European press, with the exception of Russia, was by now completely free, a channel for public opinion, which was entirely opposed to war. The pacifist forces then enjoyed total freedom of action, hundreds of thousands of workers—this too Martin du Gard’s novel ably recalls—could, till the eleventh hour, still demonstrate in the streets of Berlin and Paris; in retrospect one could say today that a few dozen leading parliamentarians who were energetically opposed to war and the machinations to bring it about could have feasibly prevented the ensuing misery of millions of men. There were in 1914 (and it is vital to stress this) colossal public forces whose action was impossible to predict and who could become dangerous if there were any talk of mobilization. That is why the emperors, kings and presidents did not know, until the very last moment, if the parliaments were approving or not the commendation to go to war, if the millions of workers would let themselves be mobilized, if international social democracy would not trigger a general strike at the last moment. And if there had been in each European nation fifty good men of the like of Jacques Thibault, they would never have allowed this world catastrophe to happen at all.
If it happened in spite of this, the reason is that (today we see it all too clearly) until the last moment no one believed war could actually happen. They thought it an impossibility: the socialist workers had confidence in their leaders who, in the decisive moment, would fearfully abandon their convictions; the bourgeoisie had confidence in parliament, the diplomats; a
nd the diplomats who, for their part, dreaded war and the onerous responsibility that would fall on them, counted on the fear of their counterparts in the opposing country. Austria thought that Serbia would retreat in the face of her threats; Russia believed that Austria would show weakness; Germany hoped that Russia would allow herself to be intimidated, until the crucial moment when, in the ensuing panic and confusion, all nations threw themselves headlong into war with delirious intoxication.
Any such impediment or restraint is completely absent today. Openly and flagrantly, certain countries express their will to expand and make preparations for war. The politics of rearming is pursued in broad daylight and at breakneck speed; every day you read in the papers arguments in favour of armament expansion, the idea that it reduces unemployment and provides a boost to the stock exchange. Whilst in 1914 every intellectual, every politician dared not speak of war or seem to glorify it, today in Europe and in Japan whole peoples are educated and disciplined solely with a view to waging war and with blatant cynicism the whole economic structure of the country is galvanized with this single aim in mind. They await war as if for a perfectly natural event, almost as if of necessity, and that is why the current generation has no excuse to be “surprised” by war as in 1914. For it is laboriously announced, prepared quite openly and lucidly. It is not only at the door, it already has its foot in the house. For those who wish it, this war will be extremely easy to ignite at the moment of their choosing, as easy as turning on the gas tap, for all resistance governments might fear, whether from inside or out, has been snuffed out in advance. There is no longer in Europe anything one might term public opinion. In more than half the countries, freedom of the press has been suppressed and even in those that remain it is under the heel of the various departments of foreign affairs. The idea of internationalism has been scattered to the winds, the League of Nations is shackled and the obligations of treaties and accords cannot be enforced. Once again, those who long for war operate today with an impunity a hundred times greater than their 1914 predecessors because they can deploy their activities openly and without embarrassment, since they are not called on to find moral cover stories to sanction their plans, and above all because they are certain of the impotence and unthinking obedience of their fellow citizens. Of course millions of people in Europe live in fear of war, but the precautions that they are taking against it are of a purely personal order, egoistic. They hoard as much gold as possible and squirrel it away somewhere in a wall, they reinforce their cellars with cement against aerial bombardment, and buy gas masks for themselves and their families. But all have abandoned any notion of collective resistance. There is no longer any pacifist organization to speak of and barely any will to form one. Even the artists and intellectuals are weary of signing manifestos, for they know well enough how absurd it is to wave a scrap of paper at an onrushing locomotive. Faced with the firm and organized resolve of certain leaders and nations to go on a war footing, there is now in Europe—and we should be fully aware of the danger—a situation of total apathy.
Hour of tragedy! The sense of shame of 1914, with its wavering attitude, its inept resistance, but at least a will to resist still in evidence, can now appear to us today like some glorious epoch! Nothing left such a powerful impression on me as when in Argentina I visited the slaughterhouses and saw those beasts down in their enclosure, absorbed in their gentle grazing and lowing (a few pairs were even still indulging in the pleasures of love) whilst on the floor above you saw the flashes, heard the hammering of machines that ten minutes later would kill them, chop, carve, slice, disembowel and dismember them. But then the animal is enveloped by its unconscious; it has no idea to where it is led. Our human herds in Europe, who are today much closer to the butcher than they realize, have no excuse. We must not let ourselves be duped by the fact that they stroll contentedly—no doubt to drug themselves—to the theatre, the cinema, more concerned with the latest fashions and all kinds of other preposterous diversions than facing their actual fate. Deep down they all know the menace that threatens and their dearth of will to confront it. What is so tragic in Martin du Gard’s book is that, as he shows in such an admirable way, in 1914 opposition to the war could not prevent catastrophe, whilst any current work which might seek to articulate the intellectual and moral atmosphere of the war facing us will only manage to recount the following lamentable fact: that Europe, in the face of the most extreme danger, could not summon up the least spark of resistance. If we do not finally take hold of ourselves, it will not be another epic saga as in Roger Martin du Gard’s book, but merely a sad testimony to the colossal universal fatigue and incomprehensible indifference of the individual today with regard to his own destiny.
THE SECRET OF ARTISTIC CREATION
OF ALL THE SECRETS of the world, that of creation has since the beginning been the most mysterious. That is why peoples and religions have always linked the phenomenon of creation to the idea of divinity. For if we can fully grasp and understand what exists as a fact, then each time we will have a sense of the unearthly, the divine, when something suddenly appears where before there was nothing—like the birth of a child, or when under cover of night a flower suddenly bursts out from the bare earth. But where our wonder is greatest, most tending to veneration, and I might say most sacred, is when this newborn thing is not fleeting, when it does not fade away like the flower, does not die like the human being, but survives all time, eternal as sky, earth, sea, sun, moon and stars, whose workings are not of mankind but of the gods.
This perennial amazement that something can be born of nothing and yet defy time sometimes allows us to exist in another sphere: that of art. We know that every year 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 books are churned out. We are well aware that 10,000 paintings are created; a million musical beats composed. None of this is a cause of surprise to us. That writers and poets should write books seems as natural to us as the fact that the books are typeset by typesetters, printed by printers, bound by bookbinders, sold by booksellers. It is the mere phenomenon of production, no different to the baking of bread, the making of shoes or stockings. The first sign of a miracle is when one of these books, one of these canvases, owing to its state of perfection, outlives the epoch in which it was born and then many other epochs. In this case, and only this case, we feel that genius is incarnated in a certain man and that the mystery of creation is reproduced in a work. It’s a stirring thought: here is a man made just like any other; he sleeps in a bed, eats at a table, is clothed like the rest of us. We pass him in the street; perhaps we were at school together, sat on the same bench; nothing on the outside suggests that he is any different from us and yet suddenly something happens to this man that is denied to the rest of us. He has broken that law which keeps us all under a spell, he has conquered time; and while we perish, leaving no trace, he endures. And why? Uniquely because he accomplished this divine act of creation where something is born of nothing and that which is ordinarily fleeting in this case happens to persist. Because in his appearance is revealed the most profound secret of our world: the secret of creation.