Eksteins - Rites of spring: the Great War and the birth of the modern age

PRAISE FOR MODRIS EKSTEINS AND RITES OF SPRING

A Globe and Mail Best Book
A New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the Trillium Book Award
Winner of the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize

This provocative and disturbing reappraisal of modernism rings with authority.

Publishers Weekly

It is the extraordinary accomplishment of Modris Eksteinss Rites of Spring that he grasps the tortured interplay between the most ghastly war ever fought and the social, intellectual, and cultural movements of the time. A work of superb scholarship; it is profoundly moving.

William Manchester

The most fascinating interpretation of the Great War that Ive read in many years, a book that should cause us to revise long-cherished perceptions of the meaning of the central trauma of modern times. I know it has changed mine.

Robert Cowley, The Quarterly Journal of Military History

A remarkable accomplishment The book is extremely illuminating on a whole host of topics, and one reads it with fascination and intellectual gratitude. Eksteins is as gifted a stylist as he is a scholar.

Alfred Kazin

Genuinely innovative an important synthesis of the aesthetic and the historical imaginations.

Anthony Burgess

An immensely stimulating book, explaining much that has seemed confused and contradictory in our troubled century, and it deserves to be widely read.

Times Literary Supplement

ALSO BY MODRIS EKSTEINS

Theodor Heuss und die Weimarer Republik

The Limits of Reason: The German Democratic Press and the Collapse of Weimar Democracy

Nineteenth-Century Germany: A Symposium (edited with Hildegard Hammerschmidt)

Walking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century

Solar Dance: Genius, Forgery, and the Crisis of Truth in the Modern Age

VINTAGE CANADA EDITION , 2012

Copyright 1989 Modris Eksteins

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2012. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Lester & Orpen Dennys in 1989. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited.

Vintage Canada with colophon is a registered trademark.

www.randomhouse.ca

Excerpts from The Waste Land in Collected Poems 19091962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1963, 1964 by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Excerpt from Burnt Norton in Four Quartets, copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot, renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Excerpts from The Dead Fox Hunter by Robert Graves reprinted by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of the executors of the estate of Robert Graves. Excerpts from The Collected Poems of Wilfrid Owen 1963 Chatto & Windus Ltd., reprinted by permission of the estate of the author, the estate of the editor, and Chatto & Windus Ltd. Excerpts from the papers of Percy H. Jones, copyright Paul P. H. Jones, 1973, reprinted by permission. Crown copyright material in the Public Record Office is reproduced by permission of the Controller of Her Majestys Stationery Office.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Eksteins, Modris
Rites of spring : the Great War and the birth of
the modern age / Modris Eksteins.

Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN: 978-0-307-36177-6

1. World War, 19141918Influence. 2. Civilization, Modern
20th century. 3. World War, 19141918. I. Title.

Cover Design by CS Richardson
Cover images: (top) E.O. Hopp/CORBIS,
(bottom) IWM (Art.IWM ART 2242)

v3.1

For Jayne

A s one approaches the outskirts of Verdun on the Route Nationale 3 from Metz, having enjoyed a serene Vosges countryside of rolling hills and meadows, and a steady honor guard of sturdy oak trees, one is struck suddenly, a few kilometers outside the town, by a dreary sight. A blot on the surroundings. A graveyard. Piled high and in full view of the road are smashed corpses, crumpled bodies, glistening skeletons. This is, however, a graveyard without crosses, without headstones, without flowers. There are few visitors. Most travelers probably do not even notice the place. But it is a prominent memorial to the twentieth century and our cultural references. Many would say that it is a symbol of modern values and aims, of our striving and our regrets, the contemporary interpretation of Goethes invocation stirb und werde, die and become. It is an automobile graveyard.

If you continue into Verdun, pass through the town, and then proceed northeast by minor roads, you can find your way to a larger graveyard. This one has crosses. Thousands of them. Row upon symmetrical row. White. All the same. More people today pass the automobile graveyard than this one. More people can identify with the crushed cars than with the now impersonal horror that this cemetery recalls. This is the memorial cemetery for those who fell during the battle of Verdun in the First World War.

This is a book about death and destruction. It is a discourse on graveyards. As such it is also, however, a book about becoming. It is a book about the emergence, in the first half of this century, of our modern consciousness, specifically of our obsession with emancipation, and about the significance of the Great War, as it was called prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, in the development of that consciousness. And while it would appear, on the surface at least, that an automobile graveyard, with all its implicationsI think cars today are the cultural equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals, wrote Roland Bartheshas far more significance for the contemporary mind than a First World War cemetery, this book will try to show that the two graveyards are related. For our preoccupation with speed, newness, transience, and inwardnesswith life lived, as the jargon puts it, in the fast laneto have taken hold, an entire scale of values and beliefs had to yield pride of place, and the Great War was, as we shall see, the single most significant event in that development.

Our title, adapted from a ballet that is a landmark of modernism, is suggestive of our main motif: movement. One of the supreme symbols of our centrifugal and paradoxical century, when in striving for freedom we have acquired the power of ultimate destruction, is the dance of death, with its orgiastic-nihilistic irony. The Rite of Spring, which was first performed in Paris in May 1913, a year before the outbreak of war, is, with its rebellious energy and its celebration of life through sacrificial death, perhaps the emblematic oeuvre of a twentieth-century world that, in its pursuit of life, has killed off millions of its best human beings. Stravinsky intended initially to entitle his score