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Rites of Spring : The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

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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.

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.

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?

Professor Ecksteins' book is, on one level, a history that places the Great War in the context of the popular cultural zeitgeist that produced it. While other books have analyzed the outbreak of the war from the perspective of politicians and diplomats, Ecksteins portrays it as a popular cultural upheaval. In this way, this book distinguishes itself from other histories of the period.

On a deeper level, however, the book is a meditative essay on the problem of modernity. In a brief but elegant way, the author tells the story of how the West descended into aesthetic nihilism as it entered the 20th Century. At the turn of the 20th Century, Europe (in culture, art and thought) gave up on the prospect of reason and ethics, and placed all of its hope in aesthetics as an absolute standard of value. By abandoning the metaphysical True and Good in favor of existential Beauty, European culture freed itself to transgress all rules and restraints in pursuit of the tragic and the sublime. The author points out that this was as true on the battlefield as it was in Stravinsky. It was this cultural movement that enabled "total war" and set the tone for the century to come.

The reason this book is so important today is that modernity has not left us; indeed, it has metastasized around the globe. While this book suggests no solution to our problem, it does help to explain how we got here.

I found Ecksteins take on the first half of the twentieth century completely enthralling. Some arguments convince by logic and fact, others by force, others still by sheer eloquence. Ecksteins' work falls into the last category. And how does one defend it except by saying 'read for yourself'? Of course he may play fast and loose with events; his observations flit across the the century with the vitality and impulsiveness he attributes to the modern age itself. Basically, Ecksteins is trying to demonstrate how the Great War began as a clash or two great cultural ideas (a conservative one represented mostly by England and France, and a modernist, spritual one represented by Germany), and ended with Germany's defeat on the battlefield but the victory of her modernist spirit. these modernist sentiments were already in embryo in the years before the war, but particularly in Germany. The utter destruction and seeming senselessness of the war, its incongruity with everything we had thus far been led to believe in, assured continued life and well-being to the modernist "ethos". This ethos is difficult to explain but may be characterized as a concern with "life lived" rather than "life examined". The moment became predominant. Aesthetics took precedence over ethics, art over history. Within 15 years of the end of WWI these modernist notions resurfaced with a new terrible face, that of Nazism, whose cult of ultimate egotism, and a focus on spectacle in its mad dash to recreate the world, made it the most visible legacy of the birth of the modern. Hitler was a veteran of the trenches, this is no paradox. Ecksteins takes a very literary approach to history. Musical would be better imagery. Unconcerned with tables or statistics, Ecksteins composes a historical symphony; his text flows like music, at times with no seemingly logical connection to his facts other than that, flowing one into the other, they could not be otherwise. If you're a legalist at heart stay away. If you're a poet who loves history you may find yourself mulling over Ecksteins the way you hum an irrepressible tune.

read as part of online reading group on history and biography.
I can't recommend to highly to join and contribute to a book club, listening to other people talk about the books you've read and enjoy is a real treat.

The book is an unusual look at the spirit(geist) of European civilization and World War I. It is unusual not just because of the ideas he proposes, in particular, that WWI marks a turning point in history where a new spirit displaced the old, but in the very way he writes. For it is not history in a narrow sense of people, dates, and activities, but rather social criticism or commentary on the meaning of the events, on the big movements of ideas. Like H. Spenser or A. Toynbee, M. Eksteins is concerned with meaning, with significance, with ideology; these big powerful currents that dwarf the mere mortals that think them. This kind of writing appeals to some people and really disappoints many others, i suppose it has a lot to do with if the author sees the same big picture as you do, or if you constantly fight his analysis while reading the book.

It is his belief that technology, the growth of population in cities, contribute to a changing spirit of the age(geist) that found in the destruction and death of WWI, a sympathetic note and a turning point. He starts with art and artists as embodied ideology that represented a nihilism, a challenge to the 19thC bourgeois values that had dominated European culture up until this point in time. This is the ballet and music that give the book its name, ballet as art in rebellion, music as jarring noise to force people out of their normal paths of thinking. This and the details of the contention form chapter one-"Paris". He moves from there to "Berlin", chapter two, an analysis of the geist of Germany, its newness as a coherent unified state, and the problems of modernisation. "In Flander's Field" is about the war itself, and why men fight, in particular, why did the British and German fight? What principles pushed them, what ideals motivated them, and how they responded to the conditions of total war in the trenches. Chapter four, "Rites of War", feels almost like a paraphases, an explanation of some of the details of the war. "Reason in Madness" is why do men keep fighting even in such atroctious conditions. This chapter and seven, "Journey to the Interior" i believe are the best in the book, and are readable by themselves, i would browse these two in order to decide to buy and read the whole book. Seven is about the changing psyche of those involved in the battles, what they thought as primarily seen in journals and poems they kept or sent home. It is the climax of the book, and is the chapter most anchored to details, to primary documents, so that M. Eksteins ideas are supported better here then elsewhere in the book. The book winds down with a chapter each, on the Lindberg flight across the Atlantic, the book "Alls Quiet on the Western Front" and the rise of Hitler.

The big question for me was why did men go into the trenches? continue to stay there for 4 years? and most mysterious go over the top to certain death? He handles this multiple part question in terms of what ideas motivated people and continued to sustain them over the years. I found this of particular interest.

I am afraid that the book will have only a small natural audience, read "Journey to the Interior" to see if you fall into this class of people that like their history with grand views and social criticism, i do and appreciate what turned out to be an interesting and challenging read. I was disappointed at part 3, which starts with "Night Dancer" the story of Lindberg, i think i would have rather read more supporting data and how things tied together during the war. Then have the aftermath of the war be another book. This is the primary reason i gave the book 4 start rather than 5, he builds up to chapter 7 then it really drops in quality and intensity as it moves to analysis of the world after the trenches. He is best when dealing with a strand of thought, starting from a journal note or a poem, through the meaning of this to the writer, then switching levels to see how this is indicative of a geist that was shared among many troops and the folks back home. He is weak were he talks in sweeping generalities and tries to encompass too much with too little supportive data, especially when the data is art, ballet or music.

Modris Eksteins "Rites of Spring" is already considered a classic by many after only slightly more than a decade in print. It's a daring *cultural* history of World War I; Eksteins' controversial thesis is that modernism caused the war. Usually the Great War is seen as the last gasp of old Europe and the sentimental Victorian age, and modernist angst was ushered in by the psychological impact of the bloodbath. Eksteins demonstrates that the savagery was in the air beforehand--the horrors were well underway in the minds of European artists and intellectuals before the first shot was fired. The title comes from Stravinsky, of course, who was one of those artists who glorified the idea of purgation through violence (they were playing with fire). The concept reached its logical conclusion with Joseph Goebbels' proclamation that war was "spring without end!" Eksteins writes in a cool but passionate style that is unusually compelling. This is a must read for history buffs and anyone who wants to know why the last century was a slaughterhouse.

A brilliant book and one that should be read by anyone with an interest in the first half of the twentieth century. Eksteins brings a fresh and thought provoking outlook to the tired tropes about the Great War. It was the first book I read that signaled a new shift in the perspective of that war. Other writers that take off from here are Paul Fussell, Niall Ferguson and Hew Strachan. But this is the first and by far the best. Don't miss this extraordinary book.

Eksteins' masterful book is a representation of how History should be written. Too often historians concentrate on just one aspect of life or of an issue (politics, economy, art, etc.) and forget that nothing in "real" life is so simple. Everything is linked to everything else, and everything influences everything else. There could be no war without governments, no governments without nations, no nations without culture and traditions, no culture and traditions without people, etc, etc... This is the only book I have ever read that so skillfully links all of life's elements together to try to understand how we became who we are. Eksteins also make the people themselves the heroes of his book. He does not forget that History is not only made by politicians, but also by all the anonymous faces we meet on the street everyday. Althought I do not always fully agree with some of his conclusions, and althought some connections do seem sometimes weak, this book still remains a must-read. It is definitely one of the most important books written on 20th century history.

It's hard to add to the many reviews already written. This book is simply excellent -- it clearly shows how we entered the modern age in terms of warfare, culture, values, and community. The focus is mostly on the west, Germany, Great Britain, and France get the most attention, although Italy, the U.S. and Russia also get some treatment as the author tells how the world grew up.

In the end, what got me was the sense of the permanent change experienced by all, not just the combatants, in all aspects of society and livlihood. This is a MUST read to get the complete picture of WWI European history.