In 1918, the guns fell silent. Harry Kessler, the Anglo-German intellectual, archetype of the pan-European aristocracy of 1913, returned from his duties at the front to his home in Weimar in western Germany:
The old coachman was waiting at the station. My dog greeted me with effusive and moving joy. My house seemed, after years of such violent events, to be almost miraculously unchanged: new and bright in the dying hours of the day, as if a Sleeping Beauty, brilliant lights turned to illuminate her; the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist paintings, the shelves of French, English, Italian, Greek and German books, the statues and statuettes of Maillol [a French sculptor], his buxom, lusty women, his beautiful, naked youths … all as if it were still 1913, and as if the many people who had been here and who are now dead, missing, scattered or who have become enemies, could just come back and European life would begin again where it had left off. It was like a temple to the Thousand and One Nights, full of all sorts of priceless baubles and half-faded tokens and memories … I found an inscription by d’Annunzio [the Italian poet and nationalist], Persian cigarettes brought from Isfahan by Claude Anet [the French writer], gifts from the baptism of the youngest child of Maurice Denis [ the French painter], a programme of the Ballets Russes from 1911 with pictures of Nijinsky …2
On the surface, little had changed. And yet, as Kessler knew too well, the ballroom switch could not be flicked back on, the chandeliers dusted off and the conversations of 1913 magically resume. The physical and psychological scars of war were too deep. The clock could not be turned back.
Europe, in particular, was changed by the war, and by the peace which followed. Everywhere, even amongst the victorious nations of the Great War, the political cultures of the past were challenged. For the defeated states, the end of the war signalled the beginning of fresh political and social convulsions. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had celebrated his twenty-fifth year on the throne with such pomp and ceremony in 1913, was forced to flee into exile in the Netherlands. The German Empire became the German Republic. In the immediate aftermath of war Communist revolutions were put down in Berlin and Bavaria by returning battalions of far-right troops, dragooned into the service of the incoming Social Democratic government. The German capital was moved from Berlin to Kessler’s quiet hometown of Weimar. Within a few years of the end of the war the German middle classes suffered a second trauma, almost as bad as the war itself, the destruction of their savings by runaway inflation. Many Germans came to feel that their country had not really lost the war – after all, German troops were still on French soil when the armistice came into effect in 1918 – but that German politicians had lost the peace. At the Versailles peace conference Germany’s new masters accepted responsibility for the war, took on a substantial burden of reparations, and agreed to a number of measures designed to reduce the largest continental European power besides Russia to the status of a geopolitical minnow.
The fate of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was equally disastrous. After holding up better than many expected in the first few years of the war, the empire imploded at its close. Out of the patchwork domains of the Habsburgs, built up over centuries, the peacemakers of Versailles carved out the new states of Czechoslovakia (with a substantial German-speaking minority), Hungary (much more homogeneous than before, but correspondingly reduced in territory) and Austria (almost completely German-speaking, but forbidden from uniting with its German cousins to the north). The grand imperial capital of Vienna began a new life as the over-sized capital of a small central European country, its horizons reduced to a tiny portion of the lands that the Viennese had become accustomed to think of as their inalienable heritage as Habsburg subjects. In eastern Europe, the map was redrawn to allow the re-emergence of Poland as an independent political entity after more than a century carved up by her neighbours. The state of Yugoslavia was conjured out of the morass of the Balkans, fulfilling the old Habsburg nightmare of a single south Slav kingdom.
To the east, meanwhile, the Russian and Ottoman empires spiralled into the abyss. Russia, forced by domestic upheaval to exit the Great War before it had finished in the west, lurched from the one revolution to another in 1917 and then to a drawn-out civil war. The Tsar and his family were shot. The capital was moved from Petrograd (the post-1914 name for St Petersburg) to Moscow. Foreign forces intervened in an attempt to keep the Bolsheviks at bay. When the victors of the Great War met at Versailles to establish the terms of the peace in 1919, Russia, one of the undisputed powers of 1913, was not even formally represented (although plenty of anti-Bolshevik Russians milled around seeking Western support for their side in the civil war).3 Japan, on the other hand, was.
Within a few years, Russia would return to greatness, not as the old Tsarist empire, but as the Soviet Union. The exit of the Ottoman Empire from the stage of history, however, was final. At the end of the Great War, the Arab territories of the empire fell under the political influence or direct control of Britain and France, with London replacing Constantinople as the ultimate master of Jerusalem. In the heartlands of Turkey a new war of survival was fought against the invading armies of Greece – a war which finally ended in 1923 with mass exchanges of Turkish and Greek population, the burning of the Greek city of Smyrna and resentments to last each country for lifetimes to come.
These changes in the constellation of European power were a serious enough break from how the world had looked in 1913. But, as many saw it, they were merely symptoms of an even greater world historical process: the beginning of the end for Europe’s predominance in the affairs of the world, and for its claim to civilisational superiority. For if the Great War had shown one thing, was it not that European civilisation, once hailed as the most progressive and most advanced in the world, was really nothing more than a thin veneer for barbarism? Chinese intellectual Yan Fu noted that ‘the European race’s last three hundred years of evolutionary progress have all come down to nothing but four words: selfishness, slaughter, shamelessness and corruption’.4 The French writer Paul Valéry wondered aloud whether Europe, which once had been the magnetic centre of the world and the chief source of foreign capital invested abroad, would ultimately become little more than a geographic expression, ‘a little promontory on the continent of Asia’.5 The German writer Oswald Spengler wrote a surprisingly popular pseudo-historical tract on the subject, published in two volumes in 1918 and 1922, entitled simply Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West).
To be sure, London and Paris remained the capital cities of the world’s largest empires after the Great War – indeed the territory under their control was somewhat expanded by the award of quasi-colonial mandates by the newly founded League of Nations. But this was not quite a return to the situation in 1913. The war had eroded Europe’s civilisational credibility. The dependence of Britain and France on the armed forces of their empires in order to defend their home territory had been exposed. And though it was not immediately applied beyond Europe, the principle of national self-determination enshrined in the Versailles Treaty signalled that henceforth nations, not empires, would be considered the essential units of world order. Over the course of the 1920s, bushfires of colonial unrest flared in Egypt, Iraq, Indonesia and India. Ireland became an independent Dominion under the British monarchy in 1922. The model of a world ruled – and thereby civilised – by European empires had begun to fray.
The only countries to emerge from the Great War stronger, richer and more influential than they had been in 1913 were Japan and the United States. The presence of Japan at the Versailles peace conference confirmed its great power status, as a global rule-maker rather than a global rule-taker. But it was the delegation of the United States, led by President Wilson, which arrived at the Versailles peace conference with the greatest international credit. Unlike Britain, which had spent money hand over fist during the war, and which had run down its foreign investments and gold reserves substantially in the process, the United States’ economic and financial position in the world had been bo
osted by war. Having played a crucial role in settling the outcome of the war militarily, President Wilson intended the United States to play a key role in the peace. In the following decade, however, rather than leading the world, America retreated from it. The US Senate voted to keep the United States out of the League of Nations which its President had done so much to establish, ensuring that the new organisation, rather than breaking the European balance of power, would enshrine its importance to international relations. American trade tariffs increased. New restrictions on immigration came into force, with the aim of protecting the wages of American workers and maintaining the ethnic and national composition of the American population. Domestic policy trumped foreign policy.
With Europe weakened as the core of the global system and the United States unable and unwilling to take the reins of leadership, many of the certainties of 1913 – amongst them an expectation of ever-increasing global economic integration – turned into question marks. Internationalism had been a fact of life before the Great War. Now it became a cause in itself.6 The Gold Standard, lynchpin of the pre-war financial order, was re-established in the 1920s, with London attempting to recreate itself as the hub of global finance that it had been in 1913. But with so much gold now drained across the Atlantic, London’s monetary hegemony, and therefore its credibility as the conductor of the world’s financial affairs, was eroded. Worse, as countries re-entered the Gold Standard at pre-war rates of exchange which no longer reflected their true economic and financial position – forcing themselves into a financial straitjacket which no longer fitted – the Gold Standard came to be seen as a mechanism for generating economic insecurity rather than one for achieving financial stability. In 1931, in the face of the Great Depression, Britain left. The principles of liberal free trade – and of the economic interdependence which this implied – were replaced with aspirations to economic self-sufficiency, with the result that global trade did not reach its 1913 share of global output again until 1970. The flows of global migration which had bound the world together in a web of human relationships in 1913 were interrupted by the Great War. After the war, they atrophied.
Somehow, somewhere, the world of 1913 had gone.
*
‘All the bridges between our today and our yesterday and our yester-years have been burnt’, wrote Stefan Zweig in the early 1940s, in his memoirs of the Vienna before the war, a time he termed the ‘golden age of security’.7
To those who had not known it – and even to some of those who had – the world of 1913 eventually became a kind of dream world, a metaphor for a time before disenchantment, an Eden to which one could not return. In Europe, the Great War was memorialised both in the monuments to the dead raised in towns and villages across the continent, and also in published war diaries, memoirs written long after the event and fictional accounts of the war, sometimes written by authors not even born when the events they described had taken place.8 Individual memories of war were now elided into the collective tragedy of a generation, the collective catastrophe of a world now out of reach. For Lara in Boris Pasternak’s 1950s novel Dr. Zhivago, the war lay at the origin of Russia’s slide into contemporary darkness: ‘I believe now that the war is to blame for everything, for all the misfortunes that followed and that dog our generation to this day’.9
Viewed in the light of the disasters Russia had experienced since, the world before the war appeared a more straightforward, more moral time:
I remember quite well how it was in my childhood. I can still remember a time when we all accepted the peaceful outlook of the last century. It was taken for granted that you listened to reason, that it was right and natural to do what your conscience told you. For a man to die by the hand of another was a rare, an exceptional event. Something quite out of the ordinary run. Murders happened in plays, newspapers and detective stories, not in everyday life.
And then there was a jump from this calm, innocent, measured way of living to blood and tears, to mass insanity and to the savagery of daily, hourly, legalised, rewarded slaughter.
Rightly or wrongly, this is the culturally-received image we now have, a century on, of the world of 1913 – a world bathed in the last rays of the dying sun, a world of order and security, a world unknowingly on the brink of the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century. It is an image full of pathos and poetry, of figures moving silently towards their destiny, flickering shadows on the surface of time. It provides 1913 with an afterlife which speaks to us today – a parable of lost times. But it also provides us with an opportunity to consider our own times in fresh perspective, to take stock of our past and consider our future, not as a foregone conclusion, not as a pre-determined course of events, but as a future we have yet to build.
Notes
1F. W. Hirst, The Six Panics, and Other Essays, 1913
2Hamburg-American Line, Girdling the Globe: Around the World on the Palatial Steamship ‘Cleveland’, 1911
3To take just a few of the more well-known and the most recent: Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland, 1962; Eckart Kehr, Primat der Innenpolitik, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., 1965; A. J. P. Taylor, War by Timetable, 1969; James Joll, The Origins of the First World War, 1984; Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War, 1998; Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War, 2011; Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, 2012
4Jack Beatty, The Lost History of 1914: How the Great War was not Inevitable, 2011
5Op. cit. (1998), Ferguson
6For accounts of the war itself, or aspects of it, see Hew Strachan, The First World War, 2001; David Stevenson, 1914–1918: The History of the First World War, 2005; Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–1917, 1998
7Niall Ferguson, ed., Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, 1997
8Op. cit., Clark
9Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War, 1890–1914, 1966
10Michael S. Neiberg, Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I, 2011
11Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage, 1913 edition (originally published 1910)
12Leopold von Ranke, Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1495 bis 1514, 1824
13E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1987
14There are a number of leading historians who have explored the themes of globalisation, and the idea of ‘global history’, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. For example: C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World: Global Connections and Comparisons, 2004; John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970, 2009; Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain made the Modern World, 2003; Gary S. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, eds, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914, 2010; Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany, trans. Sorcha O’Hagan, 2010 (original German edition 2006); Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860– 1900, 2011
15G. P. Gooch, History of Our Time, 1885–1911, 1912
I Centre of the Universe
1Commandant Renier, L’Oeuvre civilisatrice au Congo. Héroisme et patriotisme des Belges, 1913
2Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, 1998
3Quoted in M. Puel de Lobel, Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Gand, 1913, 1914
4The New York Times, 28 August 1913; 7 September 1913
5Laird McLeod Easton, The Red Count: The Life and Times of Harry Kessler, 2002
6Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1983
7Ronald Storrs, The Memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs, 1972
8Thomas Mann, Tod in Venedig, 1912
9Michael S. Neiberg, Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I, 2011
10Stefan Zweig, The World of Y
esterday, English edition, 1943
11Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914, 1966
12Op. cit., McLeod Easton
13Futurist Manifesto, 1909
14Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, quoted in Stefan Elbe, ‘“Labyrinths of the future”: Nietzsche’s genealogy of European nationalism’, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2002
15Liliane Brion-Guerry, ed., L’année 1913: Les formes esthétiques de l’œuvre d’art à la veille de la première guerre mondiale, vols 1 and 2, 1971; vol. 3, 1973
16Quoted in David Blackbourn, ‘“As dependent on each other as man and wife”: Cultural Contacts and Transfers’, in Dominik Geppert and Robert Gerwarth, eds, Wilhelmine Germany and Edwardian Britain: Essays on Cultural Affinity, 2008
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