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64 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A remarkable tour de force about The Great War, August 20, 2004
This review is from: Rites of Spring : The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Paperback)
I have read several books dealing with the First World War before, but none except for Paul Fussell's THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY can match this brilliant book for its scope and brilliance. Other books deal with the nuts and bolts of history, but Eksteins is concerned with zeitgeist, both that which animated the birth of war and the way it was altered by that war. More than anything, Eksteins is concerned with the metaphysics of the war, or the metaphysics of the world that it transformed.
The book is structured, like any good play, into three broad acts. The first deals with the world on the eve of the war, examining attitudes, especially aesthetic attitudes, in France, Germany, and England, before the onset of the war. The sections on the controversial debut of Diaghilev's production of Stravinsky's THE RITES OF SPRING (which obviously provides the book with its title), which deals in dance with a ritual blood sacrifice, are especially hypnotic. Act Two focuses on the war itself, and even if one has read previous and equally nightmarish accounts of that insane and pointless conflict, Eksteins will bring the war alive for the reader. One is especially impressed by the senselessness of the entire affair, so senseless that nonsense seemed to be at home there. World War Two at least seemed to make sense for the participants. Hitler and Tojo made the stakes all too clear, but the Great War was above all an affair of moral ambiguity, and Eksteins is brilliant at bringing this out, something that a purer historian like Martin Gilbert or John Keegan is ultimately unable to do, because he or she is limited by the task of the historian to deal with ethical and aesthetic categories. The final act deals with the world remade by the events of 1914-18. Eksteins focuses on three main aspects: Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic, the publication of and response to Erich Maria Remarque's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, and the rise of Nazism in post-war Germany.
It is an interesting question what genre RITES OF SPRING belongs to. Eksteins offers too many insights that would normally exceed the job of the historian to label it simple history, though one could resort to calling it "intellectual history." It is that, but he also becomes in his book a bit of a moral chronicler. The book is more a work of art than a work of history. Although it contains no obvious narrative, it feels as if it has a plot.
This is one of the more remarkable, haunting books I have read in recent years. Absolutely no one interested in the meaning of the twentieth century, and especially no one interested in the Great War should skip it. The only ones it will disappoint will be those primarily concerned with military strategy and body counts.
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38 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Conservative Interpretation of 20th c. European Culture, June 22, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Rites of Spring : The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Paperback)
This is a profoundly conservative critique of modern culture that takes Germany as its starting point. The author's contention is that, during the twentieth-century, Germany was the most modern nation. Modernity, in turn, is understood as "emancipation:" sexual, political, legal, and artistic. The author contrasts German modernity, with its emphasis on subjective experience and the gradual trend of this into narcisism, with the ethos of Great Britain. In the latter country, the normative 19th c. state, discipline and the subordination of the ego were paramount. Law, a social construct in which all share, took precedence over personal affirmation. The 20th c. came to regard such self-restraint as "bourgeois," and sought to replace it with a cult of self based on experience and sensation. This "liberation" took several forms. For the author, the "Ballet russes" is a good starting point, especially its rendition of Stravinsky's "Sacre du Printemps." The essential figures are Diagilev and Nijinsky. The homosexual milieu that informed the entire "corps" is, in effect, another major character. With its celebration of sacrificial death, its unconventional form, and -- to the ears of the time -- its outlandish music, the ballet separated it from European tradition. It was brilliant and innovative. It was also death-obsessed and both sexually and socially amoral. The relative stolidity of British life is contrasted with the turgid self-expression that emerged in German "kultur" early in the century. The author is in no doubt as to which was the more "modern." The discipline, self-restraint, and social integration of the personality inherent in Anglo-French civilization would be replaced by the sensationalism, narcissim, and, ultimately, nihilism that lay within German life and thought. The Great War provided the opportunity for German egoism in the arts to transform the modern European world. It so discredited the old world that long-revered words such as "duty," "courage," and "honor," became a stench in the nostrils. The nihilistic experience of the western front wiped the slate clean of the old "bourgeois" world and allowed a new, intensely personal vision to substitute for the old pieties that were external to the self. Sexuality, for instance, was liberated from "repression." Too late, Europe would discover that the seemingly "artificial" nature of these "repressive" restraints was exactly what made them socially responsible. They hedged the ego and tamed the "self." The ultimate personal vision turned out to be that of Adolf Hitler -- the ultimate nihilist. The atavistic, ritual-loving, ego-affirming creed of the Nazis simply completed the process begun earlier (symbolically, of course) by the Ballet russes. National Socialism, in the author's view, was thus not the reactionary movement earlier historians described. Rather, it was truly revolutionary, radical, and ultra-modern. It took the cult of individual sensibility, introspection, ego-affirmation, and experientialism that marked 20th c. European thought and gave it definitive political expression. One observer of the Nazi's theatrical rallies saw at once their essential spiritual affinity with the Ballet russes. Emancipation, in the author's view, has been the 20th century's great theme: and it has nearly ruined us. Homosexuality was primal to this process since it defied the ethos that had, quite adequately, sustained human social life since time out of hand. But, the intelligensia bears much of the blame as well. Its sneering dismissal of "bourgeois" civilization and emphasis on what was new and, above all, experiential led to the casting off of the restraint that marked European civilization up until then. The Hololcaust would have been impossible at any earlier time in European history. The complete emancipation from history, tradition, and responsibility -- a necessary concommittent of the great crime -- came only with the 20th century's fascination with the self. The book is well-written but the argument frequently wanders off into prolonged digression. We know that the Great War was horrific. Pages on this point are superfluous. The book begins with a survey of French culture on the eve of the Great War but drops the subject almost entirely for the postwar years. And, the author frequently makes sweeping statements that lack documentation. Much of his argument consists of assertion rather than demonstration. The author's ambition is much greater than Paul Fussel's seemingly similar "Great War and Modern Memory." The latter book is a spendid analysis of the impact of the war on the arts. The present book, however, is essentially an indictment of 20th c. European culture. Atavism and ego in the arts produced the Ballets russes. In politics, it produced the Nazis. This, implies the author, is what constitutes our modernity. Given what some belived to be the colossal egoism of American culture and its own emphasis on emancipation -- sexual, feminist, political, whatever -- the book is, indeed, food for thought.
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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Anatomy of a Suicide, August 15, 2002
This review is from: Rites of Spring : The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Paperback)
An Anatomy of the Great Suicide of the European Middle Classes I found Professor Eksteins' book interesting in a number of ways. Unlike perhaps all other accounts of the start of the Great War, Eksteins' emphasises the actions of the crowds, "the fine days of that July and August encouraged Europeans to venture out of their homes and to display their emotions and prejudices in public, in the streets and squares of their cities and towns. The massive exhibitions of public sentiment played a crucial role in determining the fate of Europe that summer. Had it been a wet and cold summer, like that of the previous year of the next one, would a fairground atmosphere conductive to soapbox oratory and mass hysteria have developed? Would leaders then have been prepared to declare war so readily? There is evidence that the jingoistic crowd scenes in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Paris and London, in the last days of July and in the early days of August, pushed the political and military leadership of Europe toward confrontation. That was certainly the case in Germany. And Germany was the matrix of the storm. . ." pp55-56. So instead of Pan-Germanism, or Pan-Slavism, or "Germany's Grab for World Power", or the clueless Kaiser signing a blank check to a conniving Hapsburg Empire, or a coldly calculating German General Staff knowing that time is against them, or a French-Russian-Serbian plot, that is all plays of grand power politics from on high, we see the old world leadership attempting to stay ahead of their respective raging publics, attempting to keep the frenzy from turning against them. . . interesting, and doubtlessly part of the story. The influence of artistic currents are interesting, but hardly new. Eksteins' thesis is similar in part to Werner Sombart's famous manifesto of German war propaganda of 1915, entitled "Merchants and Heroes". Obviously, for Sombart, the English were the merchants and the Germans the heroes, social carriers of two Weltanschauungen trapped in a fight to the finish, a struggle for the right to dictate the further course of "civilization" which was of course only Western in those days. Cultural pessimism had been around since Nietzsche as Ekstein points out and reached its height around the turn of the century. From that point it became more refined, discussed at length in the intellectual circles in Heidelberg, Vienna and elsewhere. Contrary to a dominant feeling of "German" exclusivity, besides all the regional sympathies and animosities native to Germany, there were also many influential German intellectuals, such as Max Weber, a friend of Sombart's, who saw Britain's political system as offering something of a model for a politically reformed Germany. The war and the frenzy which accompanied it made any such comparisons seem to recede in importance, to the presumed duty at hand. Later such pronouncements would be considered dangerous. To Weber's credit it should be pointed out that he argued publicly for domestic liberal reform while the war was actually in progress. Instead, centralization of state power to wage total war encompassing the total mobilization of society became the goal, not liberalization of the political system. In other words is it a question of the dreamer, the artistic side of the German character being the catalyst for the war frenzy of 1914 or is it the other way around?
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