Naval power was the key to imperial success. Battleships were related to the control of world-wide commercial interests in a way that land armies could never be. (The classic study,
The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783
(1890), was written by a US admiral, Alfred Thayer Mahan.) The issue was brought very much to the fore in 1898. In that year, during the Spanish-American War, the US Navy stripped Spain of a string of its remaining colonies from Cuba to the Philippines. At the same time the German War Minister, von Tirpitz, took the strategic decision to launch a programme of shipbuilding and to challenge Britain’s fleet of super-battleships. The arms race was on.
Late Imperial Russia was a magnificent beast. Its obvious defects were offset by a seemingly inexhaustible store of power and energy. It had been identified long since, by Alexis de Tocqueville and others, as the only power capable in the future of challenging the USA. It possessed the largest consolidated state territory on the globe, the largest population in Europe, and the world’s largest army. It was Europe’s chief source of agricultural exports and, with untold mineral resources, the chief recipient of external investment. Culturally, Russia had recently shot forward as one of the most glamorous stars of the European firmament. The Russian language, whose earlier literary traditions were limited, had grown to sudden maturity. Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov could be counted among the giants of world literature. In the hands of Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Russian music was unsurpassed. The
Ballet Russe
and the Stanislavsky Theatre School were leaders in their field. Socially, Russia still rested on a backward peasant society of ex-serfs. But the lot of the peasants was improving; and nowhere did the Peasant Question receive more serious attention. The agrarian reforms of P. A. Stolypin in 1906–11 gave the peasants mobility and the means to buy land. In European eyes, much of Russia’s backwardness was masked by the glittering court of the Tsar and by the stream of Russian aristocrats, merchants, artists, and professors who were thoroughly integrated into every aspect of European life. Politically, Russia was thought to be making serious liberal progress after 1905; the problem of the nationalities was largely submerged. Stability was required above all; internal crises had been repeatedly provoked by the side effects of external wars. What Russia needed to realize its enormous potential was an indefinite prolongation of the European peace,
[CHERNOBYL]
Late imperial Germany was the country which felt the most cheated by the imperial experience. In many ways it was the model nineteenth-century state— modern, scientific, national, prosperous, and strong. But it has been likened to a magnificent machine with one loose cog—a machine that began to judder, to overheat, and, in its terminal explosions, to wreck the whole factory. Under Wilhelm II (r. 1888–1918), whose withered arm was seen as a mark of his country’s flaws, it assumed an arrogant and a truculent air. Germany’s mighty industrialization had occurred later than that of Britain and France. Political unification had only come about in 1871. As a result, the German colonial empire had not assumed the proportions which Germany’s pride and prowess seemed to deserve. German ideas of
Lebensraum
, or ‘living space’, were first voiced in connection with her modest colonial swag. Objectively, Germany’s disadvantage was more imagined than real: her economic penetration of adjacent areas in Eastern Europe more than offset the lack of distant colonies. Yet her psychological resentments ran deep. The Kaiser and his court did not see that peace was the key to Germany’s eventual domination of Europe’s political and economic scene.
[e=mc
2
]
Modernism
. Europe’s political unease was matched by many of the cultural trends of the
fin de siècle
, which are often subsumed under the omnibus term of Modernism. Modernism involved a series of fundamental breaks with tradition that went far beyond the usual ebb and flow of intellectual fashion. As one critic was to write, ‘The aim of five centuries of European effort is openly abandoned’.
57
It affected all the arts, and is often correlated by theorists with other fundamental developments of the period, notably with Freudian psychology, Einstein’s relativity, Frazer’s anthropology, even with anarchist politics. Whether or not it was a direct reflection of political and social tensions, it was certainly accompanied by a deep feeling of malaise,
[ARICIA] [SOUND]
The brilliant and unstable German, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), Professor at Basle, articulated many of the era’s most shocking thoughts. He once described the philosopher as a ‘stick of dynamite’; and in
Thus Spake Zarathustra
(1883–4),
From the Genealogy of Morality
(1887),
The Twilight of the Gods
(1889), and
The Will to Power
(1901) he proceeded to explode received attitudes. He railed against Christianity, and democracy, and the accepted norms of morality. ‘Morality’, he explained, ‘is the herd-instinct in the individual.’ And ‘religion is a world of pure-fiction’. Modern mankind was despicable. In its place, ‘I teach you the Superman’. Ruling élites have always prevailed through violence. ‘The blond beast, hungry for plunder and victory, is not to be mistaken.’ Most daringly, he announced ‘Gott ist tot’ (God is dead), adding, ‘there may still be caves in which his shadow will still be shown.’ God’s death was supposed to be a liberating event.
CHERNOBYL
C
hernobyl,
see
CZARNOBYL. A small town on the River Pripet in Ukraine, 20 versts from the confluence of the Dnieper, and 120 from Kiev. Inhabitants 6,483—Orthodox 2,160; Old Believers 566; Catholics 84; ‘Israelites’ 3,683. The castle of the estate, which is the property of Count Wtadyslaw Chodkiewicz, is charmingly set on a hill overlooking three rivers. The town lives from the river-trade, from fishing, and from growing onions.’
1
The Polish
Geographical Dictionary
, from which the above extract is taken, was published in 1880 with a misleading title designed to beat the tsarist censorship. It contains an entry on every town and village that had ever belonged to the Polish Commonwealth. Chernobyl was a typical town of those vast territories which had once been part of Poland, and which were later to become part of the Russian empire and of the Soviet Union. Its Jewish inhabitants would have called it their
shtetl
. The Polish landowners, the Jewish townsfolk, and the Ruthenian peasantry had lived there side by side for centuries.
Chernobyl first appeared in a charter of 1193, described as a hunting-lodge of the Ruthenian Prince Rostislavitch. Some time later it was taken into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where it became a crown village. The castle was built for defence against marauding Tartars. In 1566, three years before the Grand Duchy’s Ukrainian provinces were transferred to the Kingdom of Poland, Chernobyl was granted in perpetuity to a captain of the royal cavalry, Filon Kmita, who thereafter styled himself ‘Kmita Czamobylski’. In due course it passed by marriage to the Sapiehas, and in 1703 to the Chodkiewicz family. It was annexed by the Russian empire after the second partition of Poland in 1793.
Chernobyl had a very rich religious history. The Jewish community, which formed an absolute majority, would probably have been imported by Filon Kmita as agents and arendators (leaseholding managers) during the Polish campaign of colonization. Later on, they would have included Hasidic as well as Orthodox Jews. The Ruthenian peasantry of the district would have largely turned to the Greek Catholic (Uniate) religion after 1596, only to be forcibly converted to Russian Orthodoxy by the Tsars. The Dominican church and monastery was founded in 1626 by Lukasz Sapieha, at the height of the Counter-Reformation. In those days Chernobyl was clearly a haven of toleration. There was a group of Old Catholics, who opposed the decrees of the Council of Trent, just as the seventeenth century saw the arrival of a group of
raskolniki
or Old Believers from Russia. They all escaped the worst horrors of Khmyel’nytsky’s rising of 1648–54, and that of 1768–9, when one of the rebel leaders, Bondarenko, was caught and brutally executed by
Chodkiewicz’s hussars. The Dominican monastery was sequestrated by the Tsarist authorities in 1832, the church of the Raskolniki in 1852.
Since 1880, Chernobyl has seen many changes of fortune. In 1915 it was occupied by the Germans, and in the ensuing civil war was fought over by Bolsheviks, Whites, and Ukrainians. In the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–20 it was taken first by the Polish Army and then by the Red Cavalry. From 1921 it was incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR, and experienced the mass killings of Stalin’s collectivization campaign and Terror-Famine. The Polish population was deported during the frontier clearances of 1936. The Jewish community was killed by the Nazis during the German occupation of 1941–4. Twenty years later, it was chosen as the site of one of the first Soviet nuclear power stations. From 1991, it was joined to the Republic of Ukraine,
[HARVEST] [KONARMIA]
The
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
mentions none of these facts. A six-line entry talks only of a regional city of the Ukrainian SSR, which possesses an iron foundry, a cheese plant, a ship-repair yard, an artistic workshop, and a medical school.
2
As it happens, the name of Chernobyl/Czarnobyl is taken from one of the Slavonic words for the wormwood plant
(artemisia)
, which flourishes in the surrounding marshes. In the Bible, wormwood is used as a synonym for bitterness and hence for the wrath of God:
And there fell a great star from Heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters. And the name of the star is called Wormwood… . And many men died of the waters because they were made bitter.
3
For anyone who takes their New Testament literally, the explosion at Chernobyl on 26 April 1986 was surely caused by the wrath of God.
Nietzsche seemed to be preaching that life had no meaning beyond the mastery of the strong. He was seen by his enemies as the prophet of wickedness, and of cultivated irrationality. He was to philosophy what Kierkegaard had been to theology. Both were pioneers of existentialism. ‘Christianity resolved to find that the world was bad and ugly,’ declared Nietzsche, ‘and has made it bad and ugly.’
58
[FOLLY]
e = mc2
O
N
28 January 1896 Germany’s Interior Ministry approved an unusual application for renouncing state citizenship. The applicant, resident in Switzerland, was only 16 years old. He had failed the entrance exam to the
Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule
in Zurich, and was studying at the cantonal school in Aarau. Born at Ulm and raised in Munich, the refugee student hated the regimentation of German schooling. He disliked his Catholic primary school, and fled his Gymnasium early. He felt very insecure after his family moved to Milan. Like many young ex-Jews, he was anti-religious, pacifist, and attracted by radical socialism. His one talent was with mathematics.
Finally admitted to the ETH, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) cut the lectures but conducted electrodynamic experiments of his own in the laboratories. He was friendly with Friedrich Adler, who later assassinated the Austrian Prime Minister in Vienna. When employed at the Swiss patent office in Berne in 1901–5, he continued to puzzle over the theoretical implications of work by Maxwell, Hertz, and Mach.
It is said that Einstein’s hunch about the relativity of time and space was stimulated by daily tram-rides up the Kramgasse in Berne, where he imagined that he was travelling towards the clock-tower at the speed of light. Presuming that the light waves reflecting his image were moving at the same speed, he wondered for years whether or not he could have seen himself in the driver’s mirror. At all events, in the principle of ‘the relativity of simultaneity’, he came to realize that Nature knows no instantaneous interactions. Whilst the speed of light is absolute, c.186,300 miles per second, intervals of time and space are relative. In 1905, in the
Annalen der Physik
, he published an article entitled ‘Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?’. It contained the equation which would overturn classical physics and would lay the foundations for the nuclear age. Where e = energy,
m =
mass, and c = the speed of light, e =
mc
2
.
In due course, in addition to this Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein produced the General Theory of Relativity (1916), replacing Newton’s Laws of Gravitation. It made a major contribution to quantum physics. He moved to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin in 1914, receiving a Nobel Prize in 1921.
In the days before his theories were shown to be correct, Einstein worried constantly. ‘If Relativity proves right,’ he once said, ‘the Germans will call me a German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss, and the French will call me a great scientist. If Relativity is proved wrong, the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German, and the Germans will call me a Jew.’
1
In 1933, when Einstein sought refuge in Paris from the Nazis, the College de France refused him employment because of his German citizenship, thereby obliging him to leave for the USA. Europe’s most brilliant mind was lost to Europe.
SOUND
L
ATE
in 1888, or early in 1889, at his London home, the ageing poet Robert , Browning was invited to recite some of his poetry for the benefit of Edison’s ‘perfected phonograph’. He started on his most popular verse:
I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three.
‘God Speed!’ cried the watch, as the gatebolts undrew;
‘Speed!’ echoed the wall to us galloping through.
Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.
Not a word to each other, we kept the great pace
Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our pace;
I turned in my saddle, and … and …
1
After a few lines he faltered, and confessed that he had forgotten the words written more than forty years before. Recovering, he said to applause that he would never forget the day when he had talked for Mr Edison’s famous machine. This impromptu and undated performance gave rise to one of the very earliest sound recordings to have survived.
2
In that same year the German, Emile Berliner, demonstrated his Gramophone, which in place of wax cylinders used discs that could be more readily copied. Manufactured by the toy firm Kammerer und Reinhardt of Waltershausen in Thuringia, the gramophone quickly became the basis of sound recordings for the mass market—a central fea-ture.of modern life.
3
Recorded sound has transformed the world of music and of musical appreciation. For Mozart’s bicentenary in 1991, for instance, it was possible to mount an exhibition demonstrating the evolution of the quality and variety of performed sound over the last 200 years. Visitors to Vienna’s Neue Burg were equipped with stereo headphones that responded to infra-red signals as they moved from one ‘sound zone’ to another. They could listen to Leopold Mozart’s own violin playing excerpts from his famous Primer published in the year of Wolfgang’s birth, or compare the sounds of valveless horns and trumpets to those of modern brass instruments. They could listen to the extraordinary slow tempo of an early operatic recording from 1900, with Wilhelm Hersch singing the aria ‘0 Isis und Osiris’, or watch as a computerized sonograph screen analysed the harmonic range of Edita Gruberova singing ‘The Queen of the Night’. One could not hear Mozart himself, alas. But the least expert of listeners could tell how tremendously the performance of Mozartian scores has evolved over time. Here was Mozart’s changing ‘sound world’ brought to life.
4
Sound recording has revolutionized people’s perception of their past in many ways. Before 1888, the historical record lacked one of its most vital dimensions: it was silent. Documents and artefacts are deaf and dumb. There is no trace of the roar of Napoleon’s battles, the tempo of Beethoven’s concerts, the tone of Cavour’s speeches. After 1888, history received its soundtrack and has been immeasurably enriched.
The National Sound Archive of the British Library, which possesses Browning’s flustered recital, is typical of scores of similar collections that now exist in every European country. The first such ‘phonothèque’ opened in Paris in 1910. Members of the International Association of Sound Archives (IASA) range from the vast collections of national broadcasting corporations to tiny local or private concerns. Apart from music, the main divisions relate to folklore, literature, radio, oral history, and dialectology.
5
In Eastern Europe, Count Tolstoy was among the pioneers recorded for posterity. In 1910, the March issue of
Talking Machine News
commented: ‘An order has been issued prohibiting the sale of Tolstoy’s record in the Czar’s territory. When will the Slavs rise up and do away with such narrow-mindedness?’
6