Europe: A History (196 page)
In religious thought, the conservative Catholic hierarchy took a stronger line against communism than did the Protestant churches. But in 1937 Pius XI’s twin encyclicals,
Mit brennender Sorge
and
Divini Redemptoris
, ruled that both Nazism and communism were incompatible with Christianity. At the same time, modernist Catholic philosophers such as the neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) sought to update the Church’s social thought. Interdenominational religious debate was stimulated by the Jewish theologian Martin Buber (1875–1965), sometime Professor at Frankfurt, and by the Swiss, Karl Barth (1886–1968), whose influential
Die kirchliche Dogmatik
(1932) sought to reinstate Protestant fundamentals.
In literature, the post-war sense of devastation and disorientation was eloquently conveyed in T. S. Eliot’s marvellous
Waste Land
, in Pirandello’s play
Six Characters in Search of an Author
(1920), and in the ‘stream of consciousness’ texts of James Joyce’s novels
Ulysses
(1923) and
Finnegans Wake
(1939). The year 1928 marked the creation both of D. H. Lawrence’s unpublishable
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, a bold attack on English sexual mores, and of Berthold Brecht’s
Dreigroschenoper
(Threepenny Opera), the best-known product of a politically left-wing and unconventional artistic milieu in pre-Nazi Berlin. In that same era the novelist Thomas Mann (1875–1955), who had made his name before the war with
Buddenbrooks
(1900) and
Death in Venice
(1911), took the lead in protecting German culture from the ill repute of German politics. He published more novels,
such as
Der Zauberberg
(The Magic Mountain, 1924), which explored the dubious legacy of Wagner and Nietzsche, before emigrating and becoming the epitome of ‘the good German’ in exile. In Russia, a brief interval of literary freedom in the 1920s gave space to the powerful talents of the revolutionary poets Alexander Blok (1880–1921) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930). The advent of Stalinism divided Soviet writers into servants of the Party, such as Gorky and Sholokov, and persecuted dissidents, such as Osip Mandel’shtam (1891–1938) or Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966). The memoirs of Mandel’shtam’s widow, Nadzezhda,
Hope Against Hope
, could not be published until the 1960s; but they provide the most eloquent testimony to Russian culture in the catacombs. In Central Europe, premonitions of totalitarianism hang over Kafka’s
The Castle
(1925) and
The Trial
(1926), over Karel Čapek’s allegorical drama
The Insect Play
(1921), over Witkiewicz’s novel
Insatiability
, as in the work of the Romanian Lucian Blaga (1895–1961) and the Croat Miroslav Krleža (1893–1975). Kafka’s anti-hero ‘K’, who is arrested on charges which he can never discover, is eventually killed by two men in opera-hats to the words ‘Like a dog’. Stanisiaw Witkiewicz (1885–1939), known as ‘Witkacy’, painter and mathematician as well as writer, is now acknowledged as the pioneer of the Theatre of the Absurd. Barely known in his lifetime outside Poland, he was destined to commit suicide on the day the Red Army joined in the invasion of the Nazi Wehrmacht. Nothing gained such popular acclaim, however, as the memoirs of a Swedish doctor on Capri, Axel Munthe, whose
Story of San Michele
(1929) was translated into forty-one languages, [
INDEX
] [
WASTE LAND
]
In the social sciences, the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’ exerted a huge influence in a very short time. Opened in 1923 and closed by the Nazis in 1934, the Institut fur Sozialforschung at Frankfurt sheltered a circle of intellectuals working at the interface of philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Figures such as Max Horkenheimer (1895–1973), Theodor Adorno (1903–69), and Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) felt that modern science had yet to find effective methods for analysing human affairs and assisting their progress. Radical and left-wing, but opposed to all ideologies, including Marxism, they rejected conventional logic and epistemology, whilst fearing the evils of technology, industrial society, and piecemeal reform. Their search for a free-floating ‘critical theory’, conditioned but not determined by the times, was to impress a whole generation of social scientists both in the USA and in post-1945 Europe. The best-known fruit of their general research was the joint work by Horkheimer and Adorno,
Die Dialektik der Aufklärung
(The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, 1947).
26
[
ANNALES
]
In art, traditionalist styles continued to disintegrate. After Symbolism, Cubism, and Expressionism came Primitivism, Dadaism, Suprematism, Abstractionism, Surrealism, and Constructivism. The leading experimenters included the Russian exile Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944), a Jewish exile, Marc Chagall (1889–1985), the left-wing Catalan exile Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), the Italian exile Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920), the Swiss Paul Klee (1879–1940), the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), the Frenchman Jean Arp (1887–1966), and the Spaniard
Salvador Dali (1904–89). France was their Mecca. Their eclectic inventiveness matched their longevity. Klee painted abstractions in pure colour; Dali painted disturbing Freudian dreamscapes; Arp dropped pieces of paper onto the floor.
WASTE LAND
T
. S. ELIOT’S
The Waste Land
appeared in 1922, the work of an American who had settled in Europe. The original draft began: ‘First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place.’ The published version began:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Eliot’s 433-line poem, largely written in Switzerland, was inspired by the legend of the Holy Grail, and was composed from a string of arcane literary allusions and fragments. The overall effect resembled a ramble through the relics of a shattered civilization.
The final section deals, among other things, with the decay of Eastern Europe:
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon …
A note refers to a quotation from the Swiss novelist Hermann Hesse: ‘Beautiful at least is that eastern half of Europe which is travelling drunk after the Holy Grail on the road to Chaos, singing like Dmitri Karamazov.’
The poem concludes:
London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down.
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli af fina
Quando flam ceu chelidon
.—O swallow, swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
.
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then lie fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
‘Various critics’, Eliot explained later at a Harvard lecture, ‘have done me the honour to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world … To me … it was just a piece of rhythmic grumbling.’
1
ANNALES
V
OLUME
1, number 1 of the journal
Annales d’histoire économique et sociale
was dated Paris, 15 January 1929.
1
A short preface ‘To our readers’ was signed by the two directors, Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) and Marc Bloch (1886–1944). It expressed the belief that the new review would ‘make its mark in the sun’. Four main articles were published: Gustave Glotz on the price of papyrus in Greek antiquity; Henri Pirenne on the education of medieval merchants; M. Baumont on German industrial activity since the last war; and G. Méquet (Geneva) on the population problem in the USSR. A second section on ‘Scientific Life’ contained various news items, together with a technical description of
plans parcelaires
, or ‘sketch-plans of landed property’, by Bloch and an outline of the career of Max Weber by Maurice Halbwachs. A review section carried a dozen essays covering topics varying from Sicilian slavery to Welsh economic history. The back cover carried advertisements for the ‘Collection Armand Colin’, the journal’s principal sponsor, and for the 22-volume
Géographie universelle
of Paul Vidal de la Blache and L. Gallois.
Annales
was to launch not just a journal but a school of history of unrivalled authority. Its aims were to break the dominance of established fields, and to broaden historical studies by techniques and topics drawn from the social sciences. Not just economics and sociology, but psychology, demography, statistics, geography, climatology, anthropology, linguistics, and medical science were all to have their place. Special emphasis was to be laid on the interdisciplinary approach.
2
The intellectual pedigree of
Annales
is revealing. Febvre met Bloch at the University of Strasbourg. He had made his name through a regional study of the Franche-Comté. Bloch was working on French rural history. Neither felt attracted to the historical stars of the day such as Renouvin, the diplomatic historian, or Fustel de Coulanges, the apostle of documentary research. Both had come under the influence of very different masters. One of these was Émile Durkheim (d. 1917), pioneer sociologist. The second was the Belgian, Henri Pirenne (1862–1935), author of problem-centred studies on medieval democracy and ‘the social history of capitalism’. The third was Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918), professor at the École Normale Supérieure and the founder of human geography. It was Vidal who had inspired Febvre and Bloch to go out into the countryside in search of new sources and perspectives on the past.
3
Most revealing, perhaps, was the professional sin against which the original directors of
Annales
were preparing to do battle. It was the sin of specialization. Historians were concentrating their efforts ever more narrowly behind their own
cloisonnements
or ‘dividing walls’. The appeal was unambiguous:
‘Nothing would be better if all legitimate specialists, whilst carefully tending their own gardens, would take the trouble none the less to study the work of their neighbours. Yet the walls are so high that very often the view is blocked. It is against these formidable divisions that we see ourselves taking our stand.’
4
If the menace was recognizable in 1929, it was to grow inexorably in the decades which followed.
In music, the neo-Romantic and Modernist styles launched before the war both found new advocates in the Russians Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Rachmaninov, in the Pole Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937), and the Hungarian Béla Bartok (1881–1945). The prominence of East Europeans, both as composers and as instrumentalists, emphasized the cultural bonds which overarched the growing political divide, [
STRAD
] The German Carl Orff (1895–1982) distinguished himself both in composition and in the realm of musical education. His popular secular oratorio,
Carmina Burana
(1937), set medieval poems to strong, deliberately primitive rhythms, [
TONE
]
In architecture and design, the German Bauhaus was founded at Weimar by Walter Gropius (1883–1969) and closed down by the Nazis. It drew its inspiration from Expressionism and Constructionism in turns, and pioneered functional methods. Its stars included Itten, Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky, and Klee.
Except in music, where international barriers were most permeable, the East European contribution to the cultural avant-garde remained long and widely unrecognized. A number of groups or individuals gained renown either through migrating to the West, like the Romanian sculptor, Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957), or through state-sponsored Soviet exhibitions in the 1920s which brought attention to figures such as Kazimierz Malewicz (1878–1935), Pavel Filonov (1882–1946), Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953), or Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956). Naturally, the full acceptance of the avant-garde proceeded slowly everywhere. But in Eastern Europe the advent of fascism and the still longer reign of communism drove non-conformist culture into the shadows for half a century. The ‘Osma Group’ of early Czech Cubists, for example, centred on painters such as Antonin Prochazka (1882–1945) or Bohumil Kubista (1884–1918), was known only to the most specialized experts. The importance of the pioneer Lithuanian symbolist Mikalojus Ciurlionis (1875–1911) or of Władysław Strzemiński (1893–1952), theorist and practitioner of Constructivism, or the strength of the Jewish presence, was not revealed until exhibitions planned in the 1990s.
27
The cultural unity of a politically divided Europe was much deeper than was realized at the time.
TONE
I
N
1923 Arnold Schoenberg completed his
Serenade
. It was the first piece composed entirely by the rules of dodecaphony or ‘twelve-tone serialism’. Dodecaphony was the chosen medium of the pioneering school of atonal music.
1
Ever since the Middle Ages, the twelve keys, in major or minor mode, had formed a fundamental element of European musical grammar; and the eight-note octave of each key presented composers with the pool of notes from which to build their melodies, chords, and harmonies. In dodecaphony, in contrast, the traditional keys and octaves were abandoned in favour of a basic set or ‘row’ of notes using all points of the twelve-point chromatic scale. Each set could begin at any pitch on any point in the scale, and could be arranged in inversions and regressions, giving 48 possible patterns to every series. The resultant music was filled with previously unknown intervals and combinations of notes and was, to the unaccustomed ear, excruciatingly discordant. It represented a break with the past as radical as abstract, non-representational art, or non-grammatical ‘stream-of-consciousness’ prose. Its principal practitioners after Schoenberg were Berg, Webern, Dallapiccola, Lutyens, and Stravinsky.
Atonality, however, was not the only way of deconstructing musical form. The Parisian ‘Six’, who took Erik Satie (1866–1925) as their master, and who included Artur Honegger (1892–1955), Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), and Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), experimented with
poly-tonality
, that is, using two or more keys simultaneously. Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) extended tonal harmony by exploiting harmonic series. Olivier Messiaen (1898–1993), organist of St Sulpice, developed complex rhythms inspired by oriental music, melodies based on bird-song, and musical tones matched to visual colours. Henryk Gorecki (b. 1933) sought inspiration in medieval harmonies and in free time. Harrison Birtwhistle (b. 1934) turned Renaissance monody to new uses. Anthony Burgess (1917–93) wrote ‘post-tonal’ music alongside criticism and fiction.
2
Both Messiaen and Górecki were Catholic believers, seeking modernist methods to recapture old effects. The former’s
Quattuor pour la fin du temps
(1941), written during wartime imprisonment in Silesia, and the latter’s phenomenally popular Symphony No. 3 (1976), also motivated by wartime experiences in Silesia, reflect a special sensitivity to time and mood. They appealed to a wider musical audience than the cerebral dode-caphonists ever could.
3
