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How is the “age of anxiety” reflected in philosophy, literature and art in the period 1914-1950?
(Examples of figures to consider, Freud, Nietzsche, Bergson, Sorel, Valery, Spengler, T.S. Eliot, Erch Maria Remarque, Sartre, Camus, Geroge Orwell, Planck, Einstein, Rutherford, Heisenberg, Picasso, Kandinsky, Gropius, Salvador Dali, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schonberg, etc..)
The Age of Anxiety: Europe in the 1920s
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929 wrote:
“I am young, I am twenty Years Old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing; — it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?”
At its start, the Great War of 1914-1918 was a popular war. The war was even blessed by those thinkers and artists who were non-violent by nature. The war, many people sincerely believed, would be quick and glorious. The war soon gave way to bitter disillusionment. This bitterness is illustrated in the film Paths of Glory (1957) as well as in Erich Marie Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). The stupidity of the war became apparent to all those men who fought for their nation. On the home front, of course, the story was a bit different. But when soldiers, lucky enough to still be alive returned home, it was to a land which knew nothing of the Somme or Verdun. “A land fit for heroes”? Perhaps.
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word–the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
(Philip Larkin, MCMXIV)
It was William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891) who remarked, in 1879, that “war is at best barbarism…. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.” But it was the British poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) who added, “war is hell and those who initiate it are criminals.” This was the final verdict of the Great War, especially among the Anglo-French. “The Old Lie: Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.” The initial “vision of honor and glory to country” faded quickly and was replaced by sorrow, pity and cruelty. For the BRITISH WAR POETS, the whole affair ended in bitterness. People felt betrayed by those men who were “running the war.”
The horrors of the trench — rotting horseflesh, mud, poor food, weapons that would not fire, poison gas and the sheer terror of waiting for death — these were the images and experience of the Great War. It was the Big Lie. There was no tangible enemy, except the one the popular press could fashion. The soldier looked across the parapet and saw himself. The insanity of it all! This partially explains the Christmas truce. Or the scene at the end of Paths of Glory: as the young German girl sings, the French soldiers join in, tears in their eyes. A bond is created between the soldiers who fought the war, a bond the General Staff could neither understand nor accept. No, the war was insanity, irrationality and the triumph of unreason in a world taught that reason was the guide to the good life. What had happened?
Soon the soldiers began to despise the people back home. They had no idea what the war was like. They knitted socks and sang patriotic songs. They were the “little fat men,” as George Orwell was to call them. Men who made decisions carried out by wooden headed generals. The soldiers were drawn closer to one another by the common bond of experience. They were closer in spirit to the enemy than to those they left behind. “The immediate reaction of the poets who fought in the war was cynicism,” wrote Stephen Spender in The Struggle of the Modern (1963):
The war dramatized for them the contrast between the still-idealistic young, living and dying on the unalteringly horrible stage-set of the Western front, with the complacency of the old at home, the staff officers behind the lines. In England there was violent anti-German feeling; but for the poet-soldiers the men in the trenches on both sides seemed united in pacific feelings and hatred of those at home who had sent them out to kill each other.
There’s no doubt about it: war was horror, terror and futility. The romance of war had been taken out of warfare forever. The 19th century ideals of warfare — Napoleonic ideals — were no match for the new weapons of destruction which the Second Industrial Revolution had helped to make a reality. Technology was supposed to be the servant of mankind — liberation would result from more technology. What World War One showed was how quickly this new technology could be put to use. In the end, it was the European idea of progress which became the victim of “improved technology.” The rules of warfare had changed — and with this change the 20th century plunged into what one historian has called, “the age of total war.”
Immediately following the end of the war, one of France’s literary giants called attention to the very clear fact that a crisis had now overtaken the European mind in the 20th century. Paul Valéry (1871-1945) brooded on both the greatness and decline of Europe in his essay THE CRISIS OF THE MIND (1919). Of the greatness of Europe, Valéry had no doubt. Europe was “the elect portion of the terrestrial globe, the pearl of the sphere, the brain of a vast body.” Europe’s superiority, according to Valéry, rested on a combination of various qualities — imagination and rigorous logic, skepticism and mysticism, and above all, curiosity. “Everything came to Europe,” he wrote, “and everything came from it. Or almost everything.”
“– until recently.” The Great War had made Valéry ponder the utter fragility of civilizations, that of Europe, as well as Babylon, Nineveh and Persepolis. Europe’s decline had begun, as Valéry saw it, long before the outbreak of world war. By 1914, Europe had perhaps reached the limits of modernism, which was characterized, above all, by disorder in the mind. By disorder Valéry meant the lack of any fixed system of reference for living and thinking. This lack he ascribed to “the free coexistence, in all her cultivated minds, of the most dissimilar ideas, the most contradictory principles of life and learning. This is characteristic of a modern epoch.” The decline also owed much to politics which had never been Europe’s strong suit, a weakness for which the continent was now being punished. The export of European knowledge and applied science had enabled others to upset the inequality on which Europe’s predominance had been based. For these and other causes Europe as well as European man had finally succumbed to anxiety and anguish. The military crisis that was World War One might be over, but the economic crisis remained, as did above all “the crisis of the mind,” which was the most subtle cause of all and the most fateful for literature, philosophy and the arts.
Thus Valéry, along with many of his contemporaries, announced the beginning of a new Age of Anxiety in European history. Despite his pessimism, Valéry would have been the first to say that Europe’s greatness persisted, though not without signs of diminishment, through most of his lifetime. He died in 1945. It is true that 20th century Europe lived, to a large extent, on the accumulated intellectual capital of past centuries. Some of its chief luminaries in science and in philosophy, for example, were born and educated in the 19th century and did a great deal of their important work before 1914: Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Max Planck (1858-1947), Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), Carl Jung (1875-1961) and Albert Einstein (1879-1955).
But along with European greatness came decline and anxiety, as Valéry suggested. Not outsiders but Europeans themselves invented the expression Age of Anxiety to describe what they thought was happening to them in the twentieth century. They dwelt increasingly not on the growing enlightenment of their times, as so many had done in the 18th and 19th centuries, nor on Europe’s continued greatness, but on the anxiety they felt about their existence, their culture, and their destiny. “Today,” said the Protestant theologian-philosopher Paul Tillich at mid-century, “it has become almost a truism to call our time an age of anxiety.” Tillich believed that anxiety infected even the greatest achievement of contemporary Europeans in literature, art, and philosophy. Europe, according to his account, had entered its third great period of anxiety, comparable in intensity to that of the ancient world and the Reformation.
The special form of anxiety that Tillich identified was the ANXIETY OF MEANINGLESSNESS. He traced it to the modern world’s loss of a spiritual center which could provide answers to the questions of the meaning of life. Suffering is the result of living without purpose or faith. The knowledge that man was alone caused anxiety because the responsibility for making whatever values there were came entirely from man. Man was free — free to choose without reference to God or an ideal world of essences — but his freedom was a dread freedom, involving crushing responsibility and the eternal threat of non-being.
The death of God, announced first perhaps by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in the last quarter of the 19th century (
Architecture! Walter Gropius – The Dessau Bauhaus (2/3)