Fracture
Page 50
The irony at the base of this situation is that the gospel of the free market is just as ideological as those of communism and fascism. The belief in the seemingly unideological power of the market has helped only a small minority, creating for the rest a world in which hundreds of millions of people live less well and more precariously than their parents. Large areas of our societies, such as health care and education, are becoming increasingly segregated between an underfunded public sector struggling to keep up standards and a private alternative run for profit. Those who can afford to opt in to the private system have to pay vastly more than people did one generation ago. Those who cannot are increasingly excluded.
And yet the very people who have to be more afraid for their livelihoods, whose standard of living is more threatened, and who have to pay more for basic needs frequently defend the system, perhaps because it offers something even more fundamental than security: hope, orientation, a kind of transcendence. We treat the market as the fundamental reality of society. It gives us something to believe in. We have chosen to adhere to a political gospel, much like the communists and fascists of the 1930s.
The belief in a perfect market has been fundamentally ideological from the very beginning. Its theory rests on unproven and unprovable assertions such as the idea that markets will regulate themselves, break up monopolies, and eliminate inefficient and antiquated structures, that it represents a level playing field on which all participants operate with a similar degree of knowledge and choice, and that the decisions of these economic actors are fundamentally rational. But experience in the real world shows that more and more powerful monopolies are being created, economic exchanges are rarely ever symmetrical and involve little real choice, and rational criteria are rarely at their base. Undoubtedly the economically most momentous decision many people take in their lives is to have children, even if this is, in the West, likely to make them poorer, more vulnerable, less able to choose. We are not rational agents, nor should we be.
In spite of this gaping abyss between economic theory and human practice, the gospel of the market has taken a deep hold on our thinking. It has its own rituals, its own priests and prophets, who parade across our screens and preach in our newspapers. The markets are described in anthropomorphic terms: they are worried, they are depressed. We must bring them sacrifices, and like in ancient Greece, the priests keep the best pieces of sacrificial meat for themselves. The interwar years brought the street into our culture; the millennium has abolished any idea of culture. The culture of the interwar years celebrated newfound freedoms; we have retreated from freedom into the realm of an imaginary perfect market in which our survival strategy is based on being more compatible with the system, more competitive, and more conformist. During the interwar years many people dreamed of a better future; today we are trying to prevent this future from materializing because we have lost all hope that change may be for the good, that we can transform our societies in the image of a common good. Our future has essentially become a threat, and all we want is to live in a present that never ends.
During the interwar years political ideologies were the answer to the sense of a moral and political vacuum following the war. They provided a framework, a family, a great explanation, and a reason to hope. They gave a positive answer to the question of how to live with values borrowed from another time by readily replacing them with new ones. Hope came with a membership number.
The alternative to this essentially religious approach to the moral void was equally limited both in its scope and in its possibilities, and it is strongly reminiscent of our own projected consumer paradise. The feckless hedonism of the flappers, the Bright Young Things, the Berlin bars, the shoppers, and party-goers everywhere offered an escape from worry about the future and from endless ideological debates, but no road toward a safer future. It was the response of a young generation not willing to live by the values of their parents and not bothering to define their own as long as there was fun to be had here and now. For tomorrow, they knew, was a long way off, and was probably not much to contemplate. Tomorrow you may die. “No future” started in the trenches.
Rigid ideology and hedonistic consumer oblivion were understandable but deeply destructive responses to a communal loss of faith. Both led to a withering of reasoned political debate. Communists and fascists exchanged bullets instead of arguments; for the flappers and their friends, another cocktail was always more pressing than musings about the future of civilization. As debate and political dialogue dried up, another war was rapidly becoming predictable and imminent.
To those who believe that we can learn from history, this parallel is certainly not reassuring. After the First World War had crushed mighty empires and the moral universe sustaining their outlook on life, millions took refuge from the challenging void and fled into ideologies or simply danced and shopped until they dropped—or, if they were too poor to participate, at least they dreamed of shopping and the high life.
The great political faiths were accompanied by a refusal to engage with the challenges of the time. There is a comparison to be made here, and we can only hope that the verdict spoken about us by the generation of our grandchildren will have cause to be kinder than the judgment we deliver about our grandparents, who lent their lives and hopes and abilities to murderous illusions.
Acknowledgments
Having finished the work of several years, it is a particular pleasure to remember all those whose suggestions, assistance, and generosity have made this project possible. As it is impossible to do justice to all contributions, the names appear in roughly chronological and alphabetic order.
At the inception of this book, the enthusiasm and support of my agents and publishers were crucial in encouraging me to undertake a project of such magnitude, dealing with a period that was so vast and so diverse. Victoria Hobbs and Sebastian Ritscher saw my ideas through their first stages. Then Lara Heimert at Basic Books in New York, Ravi Mirchandani and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books in London, Tobias Heil and Michael Krüger at Hanser in Munich, and Leonoor Broeder of the Bezige Bij in Amsterdam helped to make it possible. I have sorely tried their patience when other projects forced me to delay the delivery date of the manuscript, but their support was unflagging and immensely valuable.
Among the events intervening during the writing of this book was a great gift. Thomas Gaethgens, director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, invited me to continue my research at the institute, and my one-year stay left wonderful memories and friendships, as well as a first draft of this book. In a beautiful office overlooking the Pacific I could read, research, and write about the interwar years, and conversations with and kind suggestions by my fellow scholars and the academic staff of the institute were instrumental in the creation of this book. My thanks go out to the entire wonderful staff of the Getty Center, and especially to Thomas Gaethgens and his wife, Barbara, Alexa Sekyra and Peter Schnitzler, Angie Donougher, Amy Lind, Louis Marchesano, Sabine Schlosser, Rebecca Zamora, and my wonderful research assistant Raquel Zamora. Among the scholars, William Bainbridge Stefano Cracolici, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Thomas Hines, Gordon Hughes, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Marina Pugliese, Salvatore Setis, Alla Vronskaya, and Miao Zhe allowed me to refine and expand my ideas. The hospitality and hard work of Amy Meyers made my time in Los Angeles an unforgettable pleasure.
Many other discussions helped to shape and focus my ideas and to develop an understanding of the anatomy of the interwar period. Thomas Angerer, Rainer Rosenberg, Barbara Coudenhove-Calergi, Franz Koessler, Cornelius Obonya, Timothy Snyder, Jürgen Osterhammel, Karl Schlögel, Ulrich Sieg, Ana Jornet, Herbert Freudenheim, Robert Neumüller, Jasper Sharp, Christian Witt-Döring, and Elisabeth Stein all listened carefully to my ideas or allowed me to develop my understanding by building on theirs. Carl Bodenstein kindly helped me with bibliographical research.
A particular debt of gratitude is owed to Veronica Buckley, my wife, who not only supported me in every way possible during t
he writing of this book but was there to encourage me when I was daunted by my task and without whose constant love, searching questions, insightful observations, editorial queries, and surprising perspectives this book would never have been completed. Thank you, my darling. You made all the difference; you always do.
Credits
Photographs
Page 20: Nameless horror. Bildrecht. Otto Dix, Der Krieg. “Verwundeter.” Aus dem Radierzyklus: Der Krieg von Otto Dix. 1924/© Bildrecht, Wien, 2014
Page 42: Gabriele d’Annunzio. Public Domain
Page 50: Harlem Hellfighters. Public Domain
Page 53: Ku Klux Klan. AKG Images
Page 74: Berlin. Bildrecht. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, The force of the new: design for an office building in central Berlin, 1921/© Bildrecht, Wien, 2014
Page 76: German war veteran. Bundesarchiv, Koblenz
Page 87: Anna Akhmatova. Hulton Archive
Page 99: Street scene in Harlem. Getty Images
Page 101: W. E. B. Du Bois. Public Domain
Page 111: Josephine Baker. Public Domain
Page 129: Franz Kafka. AKG Images
Page 141: Ballet, mécanique. © Bildrecht, Wien, 2014
Page 154: Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. Public Domain
Page 166: The “average American male.” Public Domain
Page 176: Still from Metropolis. AKG Images
Page 183: Fritz Kahn’s workings of the human body. Thilo von Debschitz
Page 185: Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. Modern Times © Roy Export S.A.S. Scan Courtesy Cineteca di Bologna
Page 189: Tsiga Vertov’s vision of Homo sovieticus. Public Domain
Page 193: Le Corbusier’s vision of Paris. Bildrecht. Le Corbusier, plan Voisin (für HC) Paris, Plan Voisin, 1925/© Bildrecht, Wien, 2014
Page 196: The burning Palace of Justice in Vienna. Getty Images
Page 200: Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna. AKG Images
Page 216: Betty Boop. AKG Images
Page 238: Steel ovens in Magnitogorsk. Bundesarchiv, Koblenzk
Page 251: Marlene Dietrich in Der blaue Engel. AKG Images
Page 260: August Sander’s portrait of a secretary in Cologne. Bildrecht. August Sander, Sekretärin beim Westdeutschen Rundfunk in Köln, 1931/© Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur-August Sander Archiv, Köln/Bildrecht, Wien, 2014
Page 268: Michele Schirru. Public Domain
Page 274: Hitler and Mussolini. AKG Images
Page 289: Joseph Stalin with his daughter, Svetlana. AKG Images
Page 292: A victim of Stalin’s artificial famine. Getty Images
Page 298: Action Against the Un-German Spirit. Getty Images
Page 313: Osip Mandelstam photographed by the NKVD. Getty Images
Page 319: Strikebreakers in Rhondda, Wales. AKG Images
Page 335. A dust storm approaches a settlement. Public Domain
Page 337: After a dust storm in South Dakota, 1936. Public Domain
Page 342: Portrait of a Dust Bowl refugee with her children. AKG Images
Page 356: Wolfgang Fürstner. Bundesarchiv, Koblenz
Page 362: Statues of athletes at a sports complex in Dresden, 1936. Getty Images
Page 365: Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhos Woman. AKG Images
Page 370: The Victor by the German sculptor Arno Breker. Bildrecht. Arnold Breker, Der Sieger/© Bildrecht, Wien, 2014
Page 374: Street battles in Barcelona, 1936. Getty Images
Page 386: Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, 1937. Bildrecht. Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937/© Succession Picasso/Bildrecht, Wien, 2014
Poetry
Pages 54, 107: Claude McKay. Public domain.
Page 136: Tristan Tsara. Excerpt from Chanson Dada. Translation c. 1987, 2005 by Lee Harwood. Black Widow Press, Boston, MA. www.blackwidowpress.com.
Page 137: André Breton. Reprinted from The Lost Steps by André Breton by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1924, 1969 by Editions Gallimard. English translation copyright 1996 by Mark Polizzotti.
Page 173: Mina Loy. Selection reprinted with permission of Dalkey Archive Press.
Page 224: John Betjeman. Excerpt from “For Patrick, aetat: LXX” from Collected Poems by John Betjeman. Copyright © 2006 by The Estate of John Betjeman. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, LLC.
Page 338: Archibald MacLeish. Excerpt from Land of the Free by Archibald MacLeish. Copyright © 1938 and renewed 1966 by Archibald MacLeish. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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