Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (34 page)

Malevich may have revolutionised painting, but constructivism was itself
part of
the revolution, closest to it in image and aim. Lunacharsky was intent on creating a people’s art, ‘an art of five kopeks,’ as he put it, cheap and available to everyone. Constructivism responded to the commissar’s demands with images that looked forward, that suggested endless movement and sought to blur the boundaries between artist and artisan, engineer or architect. Airplane wings, rivets, metal plates, set squares, these were the staple images of constructivism.
¹²⁵
Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953), the main force in constructivism, was a sailor and a marine carpenter, but he was also an icon painter. Like Kandinsky and Malevich, he wanted to create new forms, logical forms.
¹²⁶
Like Lunacharsky he wanted to create a proletarian art, a socialist art. He started to use iron and glass, ‘socialist materials’ that everyone knew and was familiar with, materials that were ‘not proud.’
¹²⁷
Tatlin’s theories came together in 1919, two years after the revolution, when he was asked to design a monument to mark the Third Communist International, the association of revolutionary Marxist parties of the world. The design he came up with – unveiled at the Eighth Congress of the Soviets in Moscow in 1920 – was a slanting tower, 1,300 feet high, dwarfing even the Eiffel Tower, which was ‘only’ 1,000 feet. The slanting tower was a piece of propaganda for the state and for Tatlin’s conception of the place of engineering in art (he was a very jealous man, keenly competitive with Malevich).
¹²⁸
Designed in three sections, each of which rotated at a different speed, and built of glass and steel, Tatlin’s tower was regarded as the defining monument of constructivism, an endlessly dynamic
useful
object, loaded with heavy symbolism. The banner that hung above the model when it was unveiled read ‘Engineers create new forms.’ But of course, a society that had no bronze for statues of Voltaire and Danton had no steel or glass for Tatlin’s tower either, and it never went beyond the model stage: ‘It remains the most influential non-existent object of the twentieth-century, and one of the most paradoxical – an unworkable, probably unbuildable metaphor of practicality.’
¹²⁹
It was the perfect epitome of Malevich’s objectless world.

The third of revolutionary Russia’s artistic trinity was the painter Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956). Fired by the spirit of the revolution, he created his own brand of futurism and agitprop. Beginning with a variety of constructions,
part architectural models, part sculpture, he turned to the stark realism of photography and the immediate impact of the poster.
¹³⁰
He sought an art form that was, in the words of Robert Hughes, as ‘arresting as a shout in the street’:
¹³¹
‘The art of the future will not be the cosy decoration of family homes. It will be just as indispensable as 48-storey skyscrapers, mighty bridges, wireless [radio], aeronautics and submarines, which will be transformed into art.’ With one of Russia’s great modernist poets,
Vladimir Mayakovsky,
Rodchenko formed a partnership whose common workshop stamp read, ‘Advertisement Constructors, Mayakovsky-Rodchenko.’
¹³²
Their posters were advertisements for the new state. For Rodchenko, propaganda became great art.
¹³³

Rodchenko and Mayakovsky shared Tatlin’s and Lunacharsky’s ideas about proletarian art and about the reach of art. As true believers in the revolution, they thought that art should belong to everyone and even shared the commissar’s view that the whole country, or at least the state, should be regarded as a work of art.
¹³⁴
This may seem grandiose to the point of absurdity now; it was deadly serious then. For Rodchenko, photography was the most proletarian art: even more than typography or textile design (other interests of his), it was cheap, and could be repeated as often as the situation demanded. Here are some typical Rodchenko arguments:

and:

or
a file of photographs taken of him at work and at rest, archives of his books, writing pads, notebooks, shorthand reports, films, phonograph records? I don’t think there’s any choice.
Art has no place in modern life…. Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium.

Taking this perfect constructivist material – modern, humble, real, influenced by his friend, the Russian film director
Dziga Vertov –
Rodchenko began a series of photomontages that used repetition, distortion, magnification and other techniques to interpret and reinterpret the revolution to the masses. For Rodchenko, even beer, a proletarian drink, could be revolutionary, an explosive force.

Even though they were created as art forms for the masses, suprematism and constructivism are now considered ‘high art.’ Their intended influence on the proletariat was ephemeral. With the grandiose schemes failing for lack of funds, it was difficult for the state to continue arguing that it was a work of art. In the ‘new’ modern Russia, art lost the argument that it was the most important aspect of life. The proletariat was more interested in food, jobs, housing, and beer.

It does not diminish the horror of World War
I,
or reduce our debt to those who gave their lives, to say that most of the responses considered here were positive. There seems to be something in human nature such that, even when it makes an art form, or a philosophy, out of pessimism, as Dada did, it is the art form or the philosophy that lasts, not the pessimism. Few would wish to argue which was the worst period of darkness in the twentieth century, the western front in 1914–18, Stalin’s Russia, or Hitler’s Reich, but something
can
be salvaged from ‘the Great War’.

One of the most influential postwar ideas in Europe was published in April 1918, in the middle of the Ludendorff offensive – what turned out to be the decisive event of the war in the West, when General Erich Ludendorff, Germany’s supreme commander in Flanders, failed to pin the British against the north coast of France and Belgium and separate them from other forces, weakening himself in the process.
Oswald Spengler,
a schoolmaster living in Munich, wrote
Der Untergang des Abendlandes
(literally, The Sinking of the Evening Lands, translated into English as
The Decline of the West)
in 1914, using a title he had come up with in 1912. Despite all that had happened, he had changed hardly a word of his book, which he was to describe modestly ten years later as
‘the
philosophy of our time.
¹

Spengler was born in 1880 in Blankenburg, a hundred miles southwest of Berlin, the son of emotionally undemonstrative parents whose reserve forced on their son an isolation that seems to have been crucial to his formative years. This solitary individual grew up with a family of very Germanic giants: Richard Wagner, Ernst Haeckel, Henrik Ibsen, and Friedrich Nietzsche. It was Nietzsche’s distinction between
Kultur
and
Zivilisation
that particularly impressed the teenage Spengler. In this context,
Kultur
may be said to be represented by Zarathustra, the solitary seer creating his own order out of the wilderness.
Zivilisation,
on the other hand, is represented, say, by the Venice of Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice,
glittering and sophisticated but degenerate, decaying, corrupt.
²
Another influence was the economist and sociologist Werner Sombart, who in 1911 had published an essay entitled ‘Technology and Culture,’ where he argued that the human dimension of life was irreconcilable with the mechanical, the exact reverse of the Futurist view. There was a link, Sombart said, between economic and political liberalism and the ‘oozing flood of commercialism’ that was beginning to drag down the Western world. Sombart went further and declared that there were two types in history, Heroes and Traders. These two types were typified at their extremes by, respectively, Germany – heroes – and the traders of Britain.

In 1903 Spengler failed his doctoral thesis. He managed to pass the following year, but in Germany’s highly competitive system his first-time failure meant that the top academic echelon was closed to him. In 1905 he suffered a nervous
breakdown and wasn’t seen for a year. He was forced to teach in schools, rather than university, which he loathed, so he moved to Munich to become a fulltime writer. Munich was then a colorful city very different from the highly academic centres such as Heidelberg and Göttingen. It was the city of Stefan George and his circle of poets, of Thomas Mann, just finishing
Death in Venice,
of the painters Franz Marc and Paul Klee.
³

For Spengler the defining moment, which led directly to his book, occurred in 1911. It was the year he moved to Munich, when in May the German cruiser
Panther
sailed into the Moroccan port of Agadir in an attempt to stop a French takeover of the country. The face-off brought Europe to the edge of war, but in the end France and Britain prevailed by forcing Germany to back down. Many, especially in Munich, felt the humdiation keenly, none more so than Spengler.
⁴
He certainly saw Germany, and the German way of doing things, as directly opposed to the French and, even more, the British way. These two countries epitomised for him the rational science that had arisen since the Enlightenment, and for some reason Spengler saw the Agadir incident as signalling the end of that era. It was a time for heroes, not traders. He now set to work on what would be his life’s project, his theme being how Germany would be
the
country,
the
culture, of the future. She might have lost the battle in Morocco, but a war was surely coming in which she, and her way of life, would be victorious. Spengler believed he was living at a turning point in history such as Nietzsche had talked of. The first title for his book was
Conservative and Liberal,
but one day he saw in the window of a Munich bookshop a volume entitled
The Decline of Antiquity
and at once he knew what he was going to call his book.
⁵

The foreboding that Germany and all of Europe was on the verge of a major change was not of course confined to Spengler. Youth movements in France and Germany were calling for a ‘rejuvenation’ of their countries, as often as not in militaristic terms. Max Nordau’s
Degeneration
was still very influential and, with no wholesale war for nearly a century, ideas about the ennobling effects of an honourable death were far from uncommon. Even Ludwig Wittgenstein shared this view, as we have seen.
⁶
Spengler drew on eight major world civdisations – the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Indians, the pre-Columbian Mexicans, the classical or Graeco-Roman, the Western European, and the ‘Magian,’ a term of his own which included the Arabic, Judaic, and Byzantine – and explained how each went through an organic cycle of growth, maturity, and inevitable decline. One of his aims was to show that Western civilisation had no privileged position in the scheme of things: ‘Each culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return.’
⁷
For Spengler,
Zivilisation
was not the end product of social evolution, as rationalists regarded Western civilisation; instead it was
Kultur’s
old age. There was no science of history, no linear development, simply the repeated rise and fall of individual
Kulturs.
Moreover, the rise of a new
Kultur
depended on two things – the race and the
Geist
or spirit, ‘the inwardly lived experience of the “we.” ‘For Spengler, rational society and science were evidence only of a triumph of the indomitable Western will, which would
collapse in the face of a stronger will, that of Germany. Germany’s will was stronger because her sense of ‘we’ was stronger; the West was obsessed with matters ‘outside’ human nature, like materialistic science, whereas in Germany there was more feeling for the inner spirit. This is what counted.
⁸
Germany was like Rome, he said, and like Rome the Germans would reach London.
⁹

The Decline
was a great and immediate commercial success. Thomas Mann compared its effect on him to that of reading Schopenhauer for the first time.
¹⁰
Ludwig Wittgenstein was astounded by the book, but Max Weber described Spengler as a ‘very ingenious and learned dilettante.’ Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche read the book and was so impressed that she arranged for Spengler to receive the Nietzsche Prize. This made Spengler a celebrity, and visitors were required to wait three days before he could see them.
¹¹
He tried to persuade even the English to read Nietzsche.
¹²

From the end of the war throughout 1919, Germany was in chaos and crisis. Central authority had collapsed, revolutionary ferment had been imported from Russia, and soldiers and sailors formed armed committees, called ‘soviets.’ Whole cities were ‘governed’ at gunpoint, like Soviet republics. Eventually, the Social Democrats, the left-wing party that installed the
Weimar Republic,
had to bring in their old foes the army to help restore order; this was achieved but involved considerable brutality – thousands were killed. Against this background, Spengler saw himself as the prophet of a nationalistic resurgence in Germany, concluding that only a top-down command economy could save her. He saw it as his role to rescue socialism from the Marxism of Russia and apply it in the ‘more vital country’ of Germany. A new political category was needed: he put Prussianism and Socialism together to come up with National Socialism. This would lead men to exchange the ‘practical freedom’ of America and England for an ‘inner freedom,’ ‘which comes through discharging obligations to the organic whole.’
¹³
One of those impressed by this argument was Dietrich Eckart, who helped form the German Workers’ Party (GWP), which adopted the symbol of the Pan-German Thule Society Eckart had previously belonged to. This symbol of ‘Aryan vitalism,’ the swastika, now took on a political significance for the first time. Alfred Rosenberg was also a fan of Spengler and joined the GWP in May 1919. Soon after, he brought in one of his friends just back from the front, a man called Adolf Hitler.

From 18 January 1919 the former belligerent nations met in Paris at a peace conference to reapportion those parts of the dismantled Habsburg and German Empires forfeited by defeat in war, and to discuss reparations. Six months later, on 28 June, Germany signed the treaty in what seemed the perfect location: the
Hall of Mirrors,
at the
Palace of Versailles,
just outside the French capital.

Adjoining the Salon de la Guerre, the Galérie des Glaces is 243 feet in length, a great blaze of light, with a parade of seventeen huge windows overlooking the formal gardens designed in the late seventeenth century by André Le Nôtre. Halfway along the length of the hall three vast mirrors are set between marble pilasters, reflecting the gardens. Among this overwhelming splendour, in an historic moment captured by the British painter
Sir William Orpen,
the Allied
leaders, diplomats, and soldiers convened. Opposite them, their faces away from the spectator, sat two German functionaries, there to sign the treaty. Orpen’s picture perfectly captures the gravity of the moment.
¹⁴

In one sense, Versailles stood for the continuity of European civilisation, the very embodiment of what Spengler hated and thought was dying. But this overlooked the fact that Versailles had been a museum since 1837. In 1919, the centre stage was held not by any of the royal families of Europe but by the politicians of the three main Allied and Associated powers. Orpen’s picture focuses on Georges Clemenceau, greatly advanced in years, with his white walrus moustache and fringe of white hair, looking lugubrious. Next to him sits a very upright President Woodrow Wilson – the United States was an Associated Power – looking shrewd and confident. David Lloyd George, then at the height of his authority, sits on the other side of Clemenceau, his manner thoughtful and judicious. Noticeable by its absence is Bolshevik Russia, whose leaders believed the Allied Powers to be as doomed by the inevitable march of history as the Germans they had just defeated. A complete settlement, then, was an illusion at Versailles. In the eyes of many it was, rather, a punishment of the vanquished and a dividing of the spoils. For some present, it did not go unnoticed that the room where the treaty was signed was a hall of mirrors.

Barely was the treaty signed than it was exploded. In November 1919
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
scuttled what public confidence there was in the settlement. Its author, John Maynard Keynes, was a brilliant intellectual, not only a theorist of economics, an original thinker in the philosophical tradition of John Stuart Mill, but a man of wit and a central figure in the famous Bloomsbury group. He was born into an academically distinguished family – his father was an academic in economics at Cambridge, and his mother attended Newnham Hall (though, like other women at Cambridge at that time, she was not allowed to graduate). As a schoolboy at Eton he achieved distinction with a wide variety of noteworthy essays and a certain fastidiousness of appearance, which derived from his habit of wearing a fresh boutonnière each morning.
¹⁵
His reputation preceded him to King’s College, Cambridge, where he arrived as an undergraduate in 1902. After only one term he was invited to join the Apostles alongside Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, G. Lowes Dickinson and E. M. Forster. He later welcomed into the society Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was among these liberal and rationalist minds that Keynes developed his ideas about reasonableness and civilisation that underpinned his attack on the politics of the peace settlement in
The Economic Consequences.

Before describing the main lines of Keynes’s attack, it is worth noting the path he took between Cambridge and Versailles. Convinced from an early age that no one was ever as ugly as he – an impression not borne out by photographs and portraits, although he was clearly far from being physically robust – Keynes put great store in the intellectual life. He also possessed a sharpened appreciation for physical beauty. Among the many homosexual affairs of his that originated at Cambridge was one with Arthur Hobhouse, another Apostle. In 1905 he wrote to Hobhouse in terms that hint at the emotional delicacy at the centre of
Keynes’s personality: ‘Yes I have a clever head, a weak character, an affectionate disposition, and a repulsive appearance … keep honest, and – if possible – like me. If you never come to love, yet I shall have your sympathy – and that I want as much, at least, as the other.’
¹⁶
His intellectual pursuits, however, were conducted with uncommon certainty. Passing the civil service examinations, Keynes took up an appointment at the India Office, not because he had any interest in India but because the India Office was one of the top departments of state.
¹⁷
The somewhat undemanding duties of the civil service allowed him time to pursue a fellowship dissertation for Cambridge. In 1909 he was elected a fellow of King’s, and in 1911 he was appointed editor of the
Economic Journal.
Only twenty-eight years old, he was already an imposing figure in academic circles, which is where he might have remained but for the war.