Within eighteen months Ghent would be a city occupied by a foreign army, languishing behind German barbed wire. But in 1913 Albert, King of the Belgians, could still welcome an invasion of commercial displays, of German furniture and of British arts and crafts. ‘The Ghent exhibition’, read a brochure encouraging participation, ‘should be an eloquent affirmation of the incessant progress for which the genius of humankind is responsible, in every field of its peoples’ activities’.3 The gold and white exhibition buildings were set in extensive, well-ordered gardens. At night the whole place was lit up with electric lights, bright symbol of a new age. An arriving visitor could be forgiven for thinking herself at the centre of a European universe, at the crossroads of progress and destiny.
Suitably enough it was a Belgian, Social Democrat Henri la Fontaine, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913 for his work at the International Peace Bureau (he was also the founder of the Union of International Associations, headquartered in Brussels). And it was only a hundred miles from Ghent to the Dutch city of The Hague, where in August the Peace Palace opened its doors – a home for the Permanent Court of Arbitration, dedicated to the resolution of states’ differences by force of argument rather than by trial of arms. Underwritten by the generosity of American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, the building incorporated materials from all over the world: bricks from the Netherlands, sandstone from France, granite from Sweden and Norway, and the wood for its floors from Austria. Inside, British stained glass overlooked American bronze statues, rosewood and satinwood panelling from Brazil, silk cartoons and vases from China and Japan, and carpets from Turkey. Switzerland provided the clock tower that adorned the top of the building. Germany provided the Peace Palace’s wrought-iron gates.4
To those of a certain class in particular, ‘Europe’ was not just a geographic description of a continent, or the dream of wide-eyed internationalists, it was a lived reality. For men such as Harry Kessler, an Anglo-German aristocrat who dabbled in writing – he was the author of the libretto to Richard Strauss’ wildly successful comic opera Der Rosenkavalier – Europe was an open book, to be picked up at any page, all equally intelligible to his European sensibilities. His diaries from 1913 find him dining with England’s part-German Queen Mary (whose conversational skills he denigrated), supping with the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (who advocated a Franco-German-British alliance), lunching with the Russian ballet impresario Nijinsky and visiting the French novelist Octave Mirbeau (who confided to Kessler that ‘we won’t have war because within thirty days it would turn into a stampede … and our [French] politicians know it’).5
Kessler was no doubt remarkable in the breadth of his social and political contacts – but he was not exceptional in treating Europe as a single entity, separated by national rivalries to be sure, yet entangled by common bonds of culture and class, trade and travel. Aristocrats had always been able to travel across Europe; now it was the turn of the middle classes. Young Russian composer Sergey Prokofiev accompanied his mother on a trip to Berlin, Paris, London and Switzerland that summer. When Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes finished a draft of a major book earlier in the year, he hopped on a train from London to Milan (and then a boat to Cairo) to celebrate; December found him at Roquebrune on the French Riviera.6 British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith travelled to Venice that May, revisiting the Adriatic shoreline along which he had cruised the previous summer on the Admiralty yacht the Enchantress with his wife, daughter and Winston Churchill in tow. Now, clutching his Baedeker to his breast in Venice, he became just like any other exacting European tourist of the age, interrogating his fellow gondola passengers as to ‘who had painted what saint, in which church’.7
For Europe’s leisured classes – and increasingly for the professional middle classes, or at least those who had money and the time to spend it – the continent might be experienced as a succession of train journeys from spa town to seaside resort, periodically interrupted, if at all, by the polite enquiries of differently plumed customs officials. These Europeans inhabited a continent of palace hotels, from the newly opened Carlton in St Moritz (which its owner claimed had been built as a retreat for the Russian Tsar) to the gold and marble gaudiness of the Negresco in Nice. Those seeking a health retreat might travel to the Radium Kurhaus of St Joachimsthal (Jáchymov), where Marie Curie had acquired pitchblende for her studies of radioactivity. Those seeking sun and inspiration might repair to the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Venetian Lido, the setting for a popular German novel of the previous year.8 In Monte Carlo, say, it would not be surprising to find an English gentleman conversing with an Austrian surgeon in French while he observed the losing streak of a Russian general at cards.
Patriotism, real though it was, did not negate the active cosmopolitanism of this European society. Love of one’s own homeland did not preclude identification with one’s social peers from foreign climes, nor appreciation of the finer qualities of their countries. So it was that when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo in the summer of the following year – the event which unleashed the final approach of European war – politicians, generals and writers all found themselves on holidays on the wrong side of borders they were accustomed to cross without a second thought. Russian General Alexei Brusilov was in Germany.9 Serbian army commander General Radomir Putnik was in Austria-Hungary. Winston Churchill was at an Anglo-German naval event at Kiel, in northern Germany. British author Joseph Conrad was in Zakopane, in his native Poland.
Writing about these years later, after they had passed into much-mourned history, author Stefan Zweig recalled a French-speaking Belgian poet crying when he heard of the crash of a German Zeppelin airship, because this was a tragedy for European progress. Zweig remembered himself, an Austrian, cheering the exploits of French aeroplane pilots:
… because of our pride in the successive triumphs of our technics, our science, a European community spirit, a European national consciousness was coming into being. How useless, we said to ourselves, are frontiers when any plane can fly over them with ease, how provincial and artificial are customs-duties, guards and border patrols, how incongruous in the spirit of the times which visibly seeks unity and world brotherhood!10
Just as Europe’s leisured classes might have their sense of commonality forged by common social experience, so Europe’s progressive women shared the cause of seeking the vote, so Esperanto speakers shared the hope of a new language. And so Europe’s working classes had their sense of solidarity enshrined in the doctrines of socialism and in the practice of workers’ internationalism. European aristocrats had their rounds of regattas, casinos and social engagements with distant foreign cousins; Europe’s middle classes had their Baedekers and museums; Europe’s working classes had their socialist Second International, with its permanent bureau in Brussels. This was the Europe of Jean Jaurès, the French socialist leader, Victor Adler, the Austrian socialist, and August Bebel, founder of the powerful German Social Democratic Party – then the largest single party in the German Reichstag. Even Britain’s leftist leaders, Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, attended congresses in Stuttgart and in Basel. Most members of the European working class could not dream of foreign travel – but their representatives could, availing themselves of the same forms of transport which brought coal from the mines, and steel from the foundry.
And although socialism was riven with its own doctrinal disputes – the extent of reform that could be achieved within a bourgeois society, the potential for revolution in an agrarian society, the relationship of socialism to colonialism – international solidarity of the working classes cut across all of them. In November 1912, five hundred and fifty-three delegates from twenty-three countries gathered in Switzerland to rededicate themselves to the causes of unity and peace.11 The greatest threat to the Ghent world fair in 1913, it turned out, was not the threat of war – it was the threat of a Belgian general strike. Faced with workers’ solidarity, was not war in any case a practical impossib
ility? Would not the very concept of the nation eventually become a quaint remembrance, evoking no more loyalty than one’s region or one’s city had a generation or two previously? Would not the nation, like the state, wither away?
The continent’s cultural and intellectual elites were not immune to myths of national character, to outright nationalism or even, more worryingly, to the glorification of war. French composer Maurice Ravel pronounced that there was an ‘abyss’ between the music of the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg and ‘my way of feeling, that of France’.12 Italian Futurism, which managed to be both fiercely nationalistic and hypercritical of Italy at the same time, proclaimed that the ‘world’s only hygiene’ was war.13 Darwin’s science and Nietzsche’s philosophy, similarly bastardised, appeared to announce the inevitability of human conflict (though Nietzsche also penned the rather less famous observation that, in the meantime, ‘Europe wants to become one’).14 French ‘culture’ was frequently compared to German ‘Kultur’ (the Germans thought their sort more manly and more intellectual and that of the French more effeminate and conversational). Nor were artists or composers indifferent to their own cultural hinterlands, above, beyond and below the level of the nation. Folk culture, both of supranational groupings such as the Slavs or sub-national regions such as Brittany or Catalonia, enjoyed increasing popularity at the turn of the century, albeit alongside a wider interest in more ‘primitive’ (and not necessarily European) forms, in which fresh inspiration was thought to reside.
Yet in some respects the continent’s intellectual and artistic scene, like that of its working or its leisured classes, was evolving towards a set of common European movements, defined more by their relationship to what had gone before than to their relationship to any particular national school.15 European architects built in remarkably similar styles, took up frequent commissions abroad, and dealt with the same problems of the modern city in Berlin as in London or Vienna. Europe’s leading artists and authors frequently exhibited, and even lived, outside their home country: French painter Robert Delaunay enjoyed a one-man show in the Berlin Der Sturm gallery in 1913, while Irish author James Joyce lived in Italian-speaking Austro-Hungarian Trieste, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky in Munich, Russian author Maxim Gorky on the Italian island of Capri, and Italians Modigliani and de Chirico in Paris, alongside the Spanish Picasso and the Russian-Jewish Chagall. In the realm of the unconscious, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was first published in an English edition in 1913.
European tastes in art and music were not only defined by national publics, but by an active class of international collectors, and by pan-European magazines of cultural criticism which would be as available in Viennese coffee houses as in Parisian cafés. In dance, all of Europe was preoccupied with the popular craze for the tango in 1913 – to the extent that some church and political leaders attempted to ban it. At a rather more elevated level, European tours of musicians and dancers – Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes being the outstanding example – helped create a protean European contemporary culture.
In music in particular, while there were certainly definable national composers over the last few decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth – Wagner in Germany, Bruckner in Austria-Hungary, Elgar in England, not to mention Grieg in Norway, Tchaikovsky in Russia, Smetana in Czech-speaking Austria-Hungary – nationality was hardly an insuperable obstacle to transferability. Music from fellow European countries could be heard in most cities. It could be studied anywhere: Vera Brittain remembered how, before the war, her brother fully intended to study musical composition in Leipzig or Dresden.16 The nationality of artists or composers neither guaranteed popularity in their own country, nor excluded it in others. Even in Paris, capital of the country that coined the word ‘chauvinism’, the most played composer in the city’s concert halls in 1913 was Beethoven – featured in no fewer than 716 concerts. (The most popular French composer, Saint-Saëns, featured in just 279 concerts, behind Wagner – whose centenary was celebrated in 1913 – as well as Schumann and Chopin, the famously French-speaking Pole.)
In Jean Christophe, a ten-volume novel published between 1904 and 1912, Romain Rolland, the French biographer of Beethoven, aspired to write a truly European novel charting the career of a German composer Johann Christopher Krafft, and his French comrade Olivier Jeannin, the two united by a common European musical canon.17 This was a vision of a transcendent culture, and one that found readers both in France and in Germany. It was not universally shared, of course: the Belgian ambassador in Paris noted applause for French anti-German sentiment in the city’s theatres, and the success of an anti-German play, L’Alsace (and even Rolland himself drew the line somewhere, believing that Alsace and Lorraine should certainly be French not German).18 But in amongst such disputes, and in amongst the petty everyday nationalism that percolated popular life, the idea of a wider European culture was not yet extinguished – in many respects it was being rejuvenated.
In the summer of 1913, when Europe’s intellectual aristocracy gathered for a cultural festival in Hellerau – itself a German garden city inspired by a British model – they formed a truly European artistic avant-garde. This was not quite the European unity of the Middle Ages, defined by the cultural autocracy of the Catholic Church and Latin script – though that still counted, of course, for millions who worshipped in the same language each Sunday. It was a fractious, dynamic artistic scene. It was nonetheless more European than it was national, aspiring to be more universal than particular.
At the apex of society were the grandest Europeans of them all, the continent’s monarchs, forming a dynastic web of kinship thick with common European blood. There were three monarchs in particular whose own reputed qualities and defects defined the countries of which they were the head: the United Kingdom’s George V, dependable and dull; Wilhelm II of Germany, erratic and proud; Nicholas II of Russia, loyal and conservative to some, easily led and weak to others. Together, these three – all cousins to one another; all descended from Queen Victoria; George and Nicholas so alike in looks that they could be mistaken for one another – personified the European family of nations.
In mid May 1913 the three cousins gathered in Berlin for a royal wedding between Princess Victoria Luise, popularly referred to as the Prinzesschen (‘the little princess’), the only daughter of the German Kaiser, and Prince Ernst August of Cumberland. A ‘galaxy of princes’ were in attendance.19 Billed as a final reconciliation between the royal house of Hohenzollern, of which Kaiser Wilhelm was the head, and that of Hanover, of which Prince Ernst August was the scion, the wedding settled a private dynastic quarrel. But it also played a public role. It provided a focal point for a social season ‘without precedent for prosperity and gaiety’.20 The story of the royal couple overcoming dynastic differences under the star of true love seemed a royal magnification of the universal themes of popular cheap novellas. Souvenirs of the bridal pair were depicted with ‘the unbridled sentimentality dear to all true Berliners’.21 Victoria Luise, rather better at managing the modern press than her father, who liked only to be photographed in a pose of stupendous magnificence, happily ‘smiled, posed and changed position, so as to give each photographer his chance’.
Symbols of the permanence of European order. Cousins Tsar Nicholas II and King George V at the wedding of the daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II – also their cousin – in Berlin, 1913. ‘Guests who rule a third of the world’, ran a newspaper headline.
The wedding occupied the social pages of Europe’s newspapers for a week. Inevitably the presence of the British King and Russian Tsar gave the occasion a wider meaning to those who read about it, or to those who watched newsreels rushed back from Berlin to picture houses in London, Paris or St Petersburg. The presence of the three rulers confirmed, perhaps, the value of monarchy as a conciliatory, if waning, force in European politics. While no one expected much diplomatic business to pass between the monarchs themselves – indeed much effort might be spent by the mona
rchs’ respective diplomats ensuring that they did not freelance their way beyond their intellectual (or constitutional) limits – the meeting would, at the very least, reinforce trust. ‘When great potentates who are near relatives can meet in public and give full rein to their natural affection’, opined the Daily Graphic, ‘it is always legitimate to assume that the political horizon is clear’.22 Berlin shops sold portraits of the British King and Queen, and Union Jacks to wave at them. King George took the opportunity to speak to the British community in Berlin, telling them that ‘by fostering and maintaining kindly relations and good understanding with the people of this, your adopted home, you are helping to ensure the peace of the world’.23 (Later that summer the King would send his son Edward, Prince of Wales, to Germany, where he took a motor trip up the Rhine, dropped in on his cousins, and visited the Kaiser in Berlin.)24
Given the frayed nerves of the past couple of years – with war in the Balkans and Franco-German stand-offs over North Africa – King George’s words were a valuable reminder of common interests, and an antidote to the outbursts of the hotheads. In 1913, retired German general Friedrich von Bernhardi was still basking in the popularity of his book Germany and the Next War, which advised Germany that her best hopes of greatness lay in waging war within the next few years.25 The preface to a patriotic book issued by the Crown Prince Wilhelm only a few weeks earlier had denigrated contemporary society as ‘only too willing to boast of its international cosmopolitanism’ and declared ‘visionary dreams of the possibility of an everlasting peace’ as un-German.26 Just as lightning represented the inevitable release of electrical tension between differently charged clouds and land, so war would be a natural release for the dynamic energy of a young power unreasonably constrained, he suggested.
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