Modris EksteinsRecensioni

Diverse in subject matter, rich in anecdotes, and troubling in its conclusions, "Rites of Spring" is a worthy read for anyone interested in demystifying this society by looking at its development over time.

The highly amusing folklore surrounding the opening night of Stravinsky's symphony from which this book gets its name stuck out to me, and set the stage for an interesting and worrying connection between the avant-garde and reactionary nationalism.

Just a specific: anyone who thinks Eksteins went off-course by linking Nazism with kitsch needs to watch video of recent Scientology 'events'.½

This is a fascinating, though episodic book that touches, in turn, on:

* The debut of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring ballet as staged in Paris;
* World War I, specifically trench warfare as viewed by its participants through their letters and writing, with a long section on the spontaneous fraternization between enemy soldiers during Christmas 1914;
* The frenzy caused by the arrival of Charles Lindbergh in Paris (and later other European capitals) after his solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1927;
* The publication of and reaction to Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front; and
* The Rise and Fall of Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Of these, World War I takes up the bulk of the book and is the most fascinating. The Rite of Spring section is used to set the scene and describe the culture that existed before the war, but this connection is not particularly convincing, though the story of the debut is interesting in itself. But when Eksteins starts writing about the Great War, the book becomes a true page turner. Never before had I been so immersed in the day-to-day life of soldiers in the trenches or read such a good description of the almost miraculous in retrospect Christmas truce. The only shortcoming, as the author admits, is that most of the writing about the war comes from intellectuals and writers rather than working class soldiers with less of a literary bent. Still the story rings true, and Eksteins is especially convincing when he writes of the sense of duty that drove soldiers on both sides to follow orders and march straight into the certain death of withering machine gun fire. He does make a clear distinction between the morality of the two sides, however. In comparison to the more grounded French and English, he portrays the Germans as enthralled in a fantasy of their own making that allowed them to justify their use of "total" war and the first use of gas as a weapon. This section is not for someone who wants to undertstand all the whys, wherefores, logistical details, and eventual resolution of the war--it is for someone who wants to get into the minds of the men who actually had to fight it.

After the war, the book skips to 1927 and the overwhelming (and life-threatening) adulation Charles Lindbergh received upon his arrival in Paris. The author asserts, convincingly, that the extreme reaction was a direct result of the war that ended less than nine years earlier.

The publication of Remarque's anti-war novel is another chapter in the world's evolving reaction to the war, with many accepting it as a true story, although Remarque's time in the trenches was fairly brief and many of the scenes in his book could have been (or maybe were) lifted from other authors. In time, a reaction set in, especially among those who would eventually form the nucleus of the Nazi Party that began to take control of Germany in 1933.

The last section of the book, about the Nazis, is the least successful. Ecksteins' psychological take on Hitler, Goebbels, and the other Nazi leaders has some credibility, but it is much too short a part of the book to make a sustained, convincing argument and comes off very much as an afterthought.

This is one book where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. The Rites of Spring is well-written and almost consistently fascinating, but the connections the author makes between the events it describes are not always completely convincing and sometimes come across more as personal opinions than well-reasoned historical conclusions. Which is not, at all, to dismiss this book. What is does well, it does very well indeed, and I haven't read another book about the period that presents as engrossing a portrait of World War I than this one does.

As an aside, in his notes the author refers to permissions to use illustrations--but the Kindle version didn't include any! They are hardly necessary when the book itself is so well-written, but I still feel a bit shortchanged. I'll have to look for this book at my local library to see what I missed.

Interesting yet unsatisfying on several levels. I read along enjoying the review of the era, but acquiring few new insights, except perhaps in Ekstein’s depiction of the general mood at the opening of WWI as largely euphoric/ heroic / romantic, unlike the mood fraught with a sense of futility, waste and negation of the war that came afterward and which infused the post-war literature about WWI. My own exposure to the period comes largely from that literature and some contemporary fiction, such as the novels of Pat Barker. I was disappointed with the book at least partially because it strikes me as one more version of “his story”(and yes, I am aware that the etymology of the English word history has nothing to do with maleness). Ekstein makes scant mention of women throughout, never really including them in his discussion and theorizing about either European Avant-garde or popular culture before and after the war. As his touchstones, he chooses all males: Diaghilev and Nijinsky, director and primary male dancer of the Ballets russes; American pilot Charles Lindbergh, idolized for his solo flight across the Atlantic, and German novelist Erich Maria Remarque, whose All Quiet on the Western Front was (and still is) an all-time bestseller. And of course, closing out the modern era, Adolph Hitler (that is, if postmodernism commences post-WWII). Ekstein does briefly mention Josephine Baker (whose succès fou in Paris in the 1920s certainly rivaled that of Nijinksy earlier) and Isadora Duncan, but that’s about it. Women, even if not combatants, certainly both acted in and were acted upon by the war. The scientist Marie Curie with her x-ray unit that she drove from one field hospital to another and which eventually led to her death from cancer caused by radiation exposure comes to mind. As for the Moderns themselves, what about Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein? I also find the circularity of Ekstein’s argument regarding the subjective or Self centered aestheticism of modernism tedious, even tendentious. Subjectivity is not always solipsism. An aesthetic of non-sense or even art for art’s sake does not necessarily preclude social or political engagement on the part of an artist. Solipsism, disengagement, or flirtation with (or even adherence to) fascism are not to my mind, the only possible effects of a breakdown of tradition and a celebration of innovation. Ekstein’s evidence sometimes seems to follow rather than precede his conclusions.

With the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War approaching this coming year, I thought it was high time I reacquainted myself with some histories of the era. I'm embarrassed to say that I've never read this award-winning cultural history of the War, its antecedents and its aftermath - but what a book! Eksteins moves audaciously from the Russian ballet, to trench life, and onwards to the flight of Charles Lindbergh with ease, making connections all the while and drawing upon a huge range of source material. Though it's not uniformly coherent (the last section in particular, which tried to draw parallels between Nazism and kitsch, had me scratching my head), it's clear why this book was showered with praise and prizes on its release, nearly a quarter-century ago. It's an amazing piece of work.½

I was spurred to read this book by a discussion in the History of Sexuality class I am teaching this summer. I had assigned some readings exploring how the modern West has responded to political, economic, and social changes through conflicts over sexuality and gender roles. We spent some time discussing how important World War I was as an accelerant to tensions over increased sexual freedom, the roles of the New Woman and the New Man in Western society, etc. It seemed like a good time to delve deeper in these questions, so I picked up Eksteins.

Rites of Spring is an ambitious and creative work of cultural history. In it, Eksteins creates an intricate web, combining examinations of art and literature, major episodes in European cultural history, important literary, political, and cultural figures, along with considerations of culture writ large - the public reaction to the first public performance of Stravinsky's Rites of Spring in Paris, general responses of the home front to the horrors of WWI, the sweeping public support for the Great War in Germany, the European hero worship and public hysteria over Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic. I was particularly impressed by his ability to tie literary and artistic developments with both deep-seated morals and cultural values, and political and military events. He avoids the pitfalls of some works of cultural history, which end up reading more as an annotated who's who list than a coherent discussion of the complexities of culture across a population.

Eksteins' main thesis is that the modern artistic spirit is characterized in the period leading up to WWI by a transition from art as expression of moral commitment to the past, to art as "provocation and event." (23) He depicts German society as exemplifying the modern, progressive spirit -- oriented to the future, valuing the individual's mystic connection to progress over the conservative orientation to history exemplified by France and, especially, England. Eksteins argues that WWI acted as an accelerant on modernization for France and England - although there was still a general commitment to the conservative ideals of duty, honor, and conserving traditions, by the conclusion of the War, the horrors of trench warfare and total war had called into question the relevance of the past for the present experienced by English and French veterans and their families. Eksteins continues to trace this post-war development, using it to explain the rise of a spiritual crisis in the West, marked both by repression and by resistance to repression, as shown by pitched debates over increased sexual freedom, changes in gender roles, and an overall resistance to moral constraints in the 1920s. Eksteins describes the post-WWI modern culture as follows: "There is no collective reality, only individual response, only dreams and myths, which have lost their nexus with social convention." (308) He concludes with a discussion of how Hitler and Nazi Germany rose up out of this modern sensibility.

There are some uneven sections in the book. I felt that Eksteins backed into his discussion of pre-War England, and did not develop as comprehensive a description of English culture as he provided for Germany and France. The chapter on Hitler also seemed rather rushed to me, and the one place where Ekstein fell short in his ability to make certain that the general public got equal consideration with major historical figures. As a whole, though, Rites of Spring is a deeply researched, creative, and provocative approach to cultural history. Highly recommended.

Much ink has been spilled in trying to locate the fons et origo of modernism, and Modris Eksteins is not the first historian to suggest that it occurred on or about the evening of May 29, 1913 at the Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps.” Eksteins’ social history, however, is as thoroughly compelling as any, re-introducing you to characters in both the balletic production, but also the broader cultural mise-en-scène: the eccentric Diaghilev and Nijinsky, the founding of the Ballets Ruses. The totally arrhythmic music, the spasmodic modes of dance, the wildness of that May night was far too much for the audience. “The ballet contains and illustrates many of the essential features of modern revolt: the overt hostility to inherited form; the fascination with primitivism and indeed with anything that contradicts the notion of civilization; the emphasis on vitalism as opposed to rationalism; the perception of existence as a continuous flux and a series of relations, not as constants and absolutes; the psychological introspection accompanying the rebellion against social convention” (p. 52). Had this primitivism been wholly confined to the stage, it may not have caused the outright riot that it did that night. But in many ways, the performance was symbolic of a number of other paradigm shifts in culture and politics which can be seen as leading up to the Great War.

While it begins with no political concerns, “Rites of Spring” does move on to all the territory you would expect of a book with the subtitle “The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age.” The unification, industrialization, and modernization of Germany is synthesized nicely with the more explicitly cultural effects this wrought – the rise of a certain vitalistic German idealism, especially seen in the eminent German social critics of the time, an increasing prevalent Kulturkampf, and the eschewal of what was perceived as the weak, bourgeois liberalism of the French and English. Not only did many Germans seek out a kind of Nietzschean transvalutation of values, but they saw this as inseparable from their innovative modes of warfare, especially toxic gas and submarine technology, which they saw as attempts to assert the superiority of the German Geist. (For a fuller treatment of these particular themes, see Fritz Stern’s excellent “Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology.”)

The sections “Reason in Madness” and “Sacred Dance” discuss the extreme effects that trench warfare wrought on soldiers, painting a stark picture of the origin of the term “shell shock.” Feelings, sympathy, and memories couldn’t survive on the battlefield; failure to expurgate them would lead to insanity. Just as he tried to delouse himself as regularly as possible,” wrote Jacques Riviere, “so the combatant took care to kill in himself, one by one, as soon as they appeared, before he was bitten, every one of his feelings. Now he clearly saw that feelings were vermin, and that there was nothing to do but to treat them as such.”

Eksteins also talks about disillusionment, which he claims, believably, never took hold in Germany during the War as it did in England and France. Where it did exist, it was much more common among the civilians than the fighting soldiers, though “the language and literature of disillusionment would on the whole be a postwar phenomenon – everywhere.” Literature describing the permanent psychological effects on soldiers is much older than the Great War, but it is rarely given the important consideration that Eksteins gives it.

One of the most compelling vignettes here is Eksteins’ extended re-telling of Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight in May, 1927. Contemporaries saw his feat as a point of historical torsion, enabling both a revival of the imagination, a rebirth of individualism, and Dionysian will. But it was also a sign for all that was gone and would never be regained. “Freedom was no longer a matter of being at liberty to do what is morally right and ethically responsible. Freedom had become a personal matter, a responsibility above all to oneself. The modern impulse before the war had possessed a strong measure of optimism, springing from a bourgeois religion of meliorism. That optimism had not disappeared entirely by the twenties, but it was now more wish than confident prediction. Its landscape was one of destruction and desolation, not simply the barrenness that the avant-garde had so despised before the war” (p. 267).

Having read and enjoyed Paul Fussel's The Great War and Modern Memory I came to Modris Eksteins’ The Rites Of Spring and discovered another great work of cultural history that both augmented and complemented Fussel's book. The author transports the reader by demonstrating the advent of the modern through a mood laced with death, movement, irony, rebellion and inwardness. The book unveils a pre-war world of German industrialization and avant-garde art, discusses the disillusionment of an unending first world war, and climaxes with the resultant rise of Nazi regime. Eksteins’ cultural history is readable as he delves into the beginning of tthe 20th century, limning the convoluted social, political and military realities through the lens of individual lives of thinkers, artists and politicians. His aesthetic style, fleeting comparisons and iconoclastic conclusions not only mimics the modes of his subjects, but engages the interest of the reader in a manner paralleled only by authors of fiction. Taking a new approach to cultural history, The Rites of Spring challenges traditional historiography that sheds new light on the spirit of the modern age. For those interested in the nexus of traditional history and culture this is an essential book.

Nijinski caused World War I.

Modris Eksteins’ [Rites of Spring] is not a history of WWI. It is a review of the causes and consequences of the Great War from social rather than political perspectives. The title comes from Stravinsky’s ballet which Eksteins claims ushered in the Modern Age and gave encouragement for the conflict to come. The experience of the war and it’s result were far from what was intended or expected and led to the manic behavior of the twenties and the build-up to WWII.
Rites of Spring begins with the arts and culture of the first two decades of the 20th century and is quite full of the personalities of the time and this section can be a little intimidating to those that are unfamiliar but it sets the table well for the thesis of this work. People and events in the last half are more familiar.
This is an insightful interpretation of the events of the early 20th century and a reminder to us all that it is not just geopolitical events that can entangle nations.

3299. Walking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century, by Modris Eksteins (read Mar 18, 2000) This is a stark book I read because I could not locate the author's Rites of Spring. (I now have, and will read it this month.) This book tells, in a hop back and forth way, of Latvia and the travails of its people, with emphasis on the Second World War. I thought the book would have been better as a straight chronological narrative, but many of the scenes of wartime are powerfully portrayed.½

3304. Rites of Spring / The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins (read Apr 18, 2000) This book has excellent chapters on the 1914 Christmas Truce, and on other selected events of the first world war. Did you know that Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Rupert Brooke all died on April 23? I did not realize that till I read this book! Most of this book was entrancing tho there are some parts heavier than I enjoy.

Ik ben enthousiast over dit boek: Het is een oorspronkelijke en overtuigende beschrijving van de culturele veranderingen die aan het begin van deze eeuw hebben plaatsgevonden, opgebouwd rond de centrale as van de eerste wereldoorlog. Op een verhelderende manier en rijk aan anekdotiek beschrijft de erudiete auteur in diverse etappes het ontstaan van de Nieuwe Tijd. Het is, voor zover mij bekend, ook een uniek werk in het gamma van de moderne geschiedschrijving: het houdt zich bezig met Zeitgeist.
Aan de goede besprekingen van andere thingamabrarians op de site van librarything heb ik niet zoveel toe te voegen.
Ter aanvulling verwijs ik graag nog naar de anderhalfpagina lange bespreking van dit boek op de immer voortreffelijke site van Dirk Verhofstadt: http://www.liberales.be/ - klik "boeken" - klik letter "E"½

an achingly sad look at the history of the Baltic nations, devastated in WWII

The first few chapters a a bit dense, but this is an excellent book on the long-reaching effects of WWI on 20th century life and thought.

Modris Eksteins presented a tour-de-force interpretation of the political, social and cultural climate of the early twentieth century. His sources were not merely the more traditional sources of the historian: political, military and economic accounts; rather, he drew from the rich, heady brew of art, music, dance, literature and philosophy as well. Eksteins examined ways in which life influenced, imitated, and even became art. Eksteins argues that life and art, as well as death, became so intermeshed as to be indistinguishable from one another.

The title of the book, The Rites of Spring, and the plunge into the world of the Ballet Russe in the first chapter, made clear that Eksteins intended to use Stravinsky’s ballet as an image for thinking about The Great War. (The ballet itself was a microcosm of war and the events surrounding the presentation of this ballet involved a war of a different sort.) He showed that, just as Anglo/Franco music and dance were stagnant and ripe for being changed, so were the political and social constructs of those nations heavy with the accumulated weight of their own self-importance. Britain, long self-satisfied, set herself as guardian of the status quo. Although she purported to be a champion of liberty and democracy, this was only true when it suited her goals. One did not need to look far to find examples of British resolutely and unashamedly trampling opposition when she felt it in her interest to do so. France, on the other hand, although supremely confident of herself in matters of taste – be it art, music, fashion or literature – had never developed a clear and exact idea of itself as a political entity. After the defeat of the Second Empire, she entered into a period of self-doubt and hesitancy.

Eksteins contends that, just as Russia was able to shock the world of dance / music with her avant-garde ideas, which were free from fetters of the expected, thus Germany also fulfilled a corresponding role politically. Germany was, relatively speaking, a new nation; new as a single nation. Russian contributions to music and dance were new; they did not date back centuries like in England, France, Germany and Italy. Politically, Germany found herself in a similar situation. She was new and wanted to make her place among the great powers; she saw herself as the innovator, a progressive spirit, as opposed to wearied France and conservative Britain.

Eksteins contends that because Germans saw themselves as the agent of (inevitable) progress, they felt their role in The Great War was defensive rather than aggressive. To attack Germany was to attack the future. This belief that they must defend their homeland from those who would deny the future, sustained the Germans during and after the war, and into the next one.

Eksteins realized that Hitler was not an anomaly; Hitler touched a sympathetic chord within the Germans. Although Eksteins discussed that any group may want to find scapegoats when things go wrong, citing the tendencies of the French to look beyond themselves for explanations of failure, he implies that, in Germany, finding scapegoats produced such horrific results because preexisting sentiments of anti-Semitism combined with the violence and power of Nazism. His depiction of the vibrant and dynamic, “pep rally�€? mentality with its appeal to deep emotions, rather than to the intellect showed how seductive Nazism was to the Germans and how it could fulfill the needs of a nation still crippled and stunned by the recent defeat.
From the preface and prologue through the last chapter of act three, Eksteins wove death and destruction as themes that tug at the participants in the war, especially the Germans. By using le Sacre du Printemps image, not only did Eksteins show the conflict between the status quo represented by Britain and France and the dynamism of progress represented by Germany, but he also evoked a theme wherein the main character died – was sacrificed. Eksteins built upon the theme of death being the culmination of struggle, progress and desire. In the prologue where he referred Aschenbach’s longing for Tadzio, in Der Tod in Venedig, a longing that resulted in Aschenbach’s death, Eksteins expanded to the relationship of Nazism and death. Eksteins showed the inverted, convoluted vision that was Hitler’s: his marriage came at the end of his life rather than in the early part, the marriage was followed by death rather than by a honeymoon and a new beginning, violence and love were synonymous, life and death were intermingled, Jews were symbols of what Germans loathed within themselves. These phantasmagoric images, which would be at home in Poe, Kafka or Dali, unfortunately, found expression within a man eminently capable of articulating and realizing his nightmares.

Eksteins used the plural in his title, Rites of Spring, unlike the Stravinsky ballet usually translated in the singular, Rite of Spring. Eksteins referred to the on going events that shaped European and world politics. The war was but one event and was not limited to one spring. Death and destruction continued and assumed new manifestations. Great powers were defeated and even the victors suffered numbing losses. Only much later did it become apparent that the war was not truly concluded; rather the combatants merely withdrew for a time when they simply could not continue any longer. But a generation later, the game was on once again; the war aims were much the same. Germany felt it must defend its way of life and stand up for progress. Britain wanted to defend the status quo but it used the excuse of the invasion of another country as the immediate pretext for entry: first Belgium, later Poland. In both world wars, Germany was the innovator, morally and technologically. Britain and France were fighting previous wars while Germany led the way in technology, techniques and tactics.

Eksteins provided no concrete conclusion to his work. He ended by hinting to the future – as Germany faced her worst disaster, she was envisioning an everlasting Spring. But he did not venture to predict or preclude any events. He presented his work and the audience was free to hoot and whistle, or cheer and clap, just as they were back in Paris, 29 May 1913.

Alex Hunnicutt

Rites of Spring : The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins (2000)

Another relevent book may be Lucy Moore's Nijinsky.

Chapter IV Rites of War.
Quotes Georges Blachon, whose two articles published in early 1916 in the "revue des deux mondes" entitled "La Guerre nouvelle" and "La Guerre qui se transforme sous nos yeux," on the advent of the "new" [read total] war."
He maintains that the whole point of the war for the Germans "was the overthrow of the old structures...Once that had been achieved, the revolutionary dynamic would proceed to erect new structures valid for the new situation."
Chapter IX, "Memory" Comments on the WW I veterans' withdrawal from society. They "withdrew from social society and commitment. Only a minority bothered even to join veteran's organizations. Relatively few were able to articulate their alienation, but the statistics speak loudly: of those unemployed between the ages of thirty and thirty-four in Britain at the end of the twenties, 80 percent were ex-servicemen." [This would contrast with post WW II situation? Reading "Bowling Alone" leads one to think that the outlook of the post WW II generation was sunnier.] He reminds us that the Allies dropped over 300 times the amount of bombs over Germany than the Nazis dumped on Britain.
Chapter 10. "Contrary to many interpretations of Nazism, which tend to view it as a reactionary movement, as, in the words of Thomas Mann, a pastoral folk community of thatched cottages and happy peasants, Nazism was a headlong plunge into the future, toward a "brave new world."...It was not a double-faced Janus whose aspects were equally attentive to the past and the future, nor was it a modern Proteus, the god of metamorphosis, who duplicates pre-existing forms. The intention of the movement was to create a new type of human being from whom would spring a new morality, a new social system, and eventually a new international order. That was, in fact, the intention of all the fascist movements.

War/History