Rites of Spring : The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

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Summary: An Anatomy of a Suicide
Review: An Anatomy of the Great Suicide of the European Middle Classes

I found Professor Eksteins' book interesting in a number of ways. Unlike perhaps all other accounts of the start of the Great War, Eksteins' emphasises the actions of the crowds, "the fine days of that July and August encouraged Europeans to venture out of their homes and to display their emotions and prejudices in public, in the streets and squares of their cities and towns. The massive exhibitions of public sentiment played a crucial role in determining the fate of Europe that summer. Had it been a wet and cold summer, like that of the previous year of the next one, would a fairground atmosphere conductive to soapbox oratory and mass hysteria have developed? Would leaders then have been prepared to declare war so readily? There is evidence that the jingoistic crowd scenes in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Paris and London, in the last days of July and in the early days of August, pushed the political and military leadership of Europe toward confrontation. That was certainly the case in Germany. And Germany was the matrix of the storm. . ." pp55-56.

So instead of Pan-Germanism, or Pan-Slavism, or "Germany's Grab for World Power", or the clueless Kaiser signing a blank check to a conniving Hapsburg Empire, or a coldly calculating German General Staff knowing that time is against them, or a French-Russian-Serbian plot, that is all plays of grand power politics from on high, we see the old world leadership attempting to stay ahead of their respective raging publics, attempting to keep the frenzy from turning against them. . . interesting, and doubtlessly part of the story.

The influence of artistic currents are interesting, but hardly new. Eksteins' thesis is similar in part to Werner Sombart's famous manifesto of German war propaganda of 1915, entitled "Merchants and Heroes". Obviously, for Sombart, the English were the merchants and the Germans the heroes, social carriers of two Weltanschauungen trapped in a fight to the finish, a struggle for the right to dictate the further course of "civilization" which was of course only Western in those days.

Cultural pessimism had been around since Nietzsche as Ekstein points out and reached its height around the turn of the century. From that point it became more refined, discussed at length in the intellectual circles in Heidelberg, Vienna and elsewhere. Contrary to a dominant feeling of "German" exclusivity, besides all the regional sympathies and animosities native to Germany, there were also many influential German intellectuals, such as Max Weber, a friend of Sombart's, who saw Britain's political system as offering something of a model for a politically reformed Germany. The war and the frenzy which accompanied it made any such comparisons seem to recede in importance, to the presumed duty at hand. Later such pronouncements would be considered dangerous. To Weber's credit it should be pointed out that he argued publicly for domestic liberal reform while the war was actually in progress.

Instead, centralization of state power to wage total war encompassing the total mobilization of society became the goal, not liberalization of the political system.

In other words is it a question of the dreamer, the artistic side of the German character being the catalyst for the war frenzy of 1914 or is it the other way around?

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Summary: Why Spring, you don't have to be an astrologer to know why
Review: Funny the way wars begin in spring, the traditional time of hope and renewal. It was this way for World War I (the GREAT WAR of Modris Eksteins' amazing book on this very subject) and it was this way a year ago, in Iraq, this spring, so that when in our gardens in America crocuses bloom, great clouds of smoke billow over Baghdad as they did in the No Man's Lands of France and Belgium ninety years ago now. What Modris Eksteins does is to show how modernism, and its kinship to primitive worship, created a free basin for war to fill up in, created the zeitgeist in which vast Wagnerian fantasies of brutality and mass suicide could enact themselves out.

This is a very fanciful idea, and the great thing about the book is that, very near the end, Eksteins just about convinces you that he was right. The spirits of T E Hulme, Gaudier-Brezska, and Ezra Pound haunt this book. Eventually modernism won, but at what a price! Was the price too great? Read "The Waste Land" for T S Eliot's rueful meditation on just this issue.

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Summary: Thought provoking but flawed
Review: I enjoyed this book, which I received as a Xmas present, and found the premises contained in it to be very thought-provoking (I will not go through what those are, they are well outlined by other reviewers). It set me off on a re-discovery of nineteenth and early twentieth century history, which I had sort of abandoned since my college days. The conflict of Germany (change) vs. Britain/Europe (status quo) was excellently represented. The flaws, however, are many. There is far too much emphasis placed on the horrors of World War I instead of the social histroy leading up to it. I felt the book bogged down into a standardized social history of the First World War in the second half and I frankly lost interest after the more stirring chapters the start the book.

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Summary: A remarkable tour de force about The Great War
Review: I have read several books dealing with the First World War before, but none except for Paul Fussell's THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY can match this brilliant book for its scope and brilliance. Other books deal with the nuts and bolts of history, but Eksteins is concerned with zeitgeist, both that which animated the birth of war and the way it was altered by that war. More than anything, Eksteins is concerned with the metaphysics of the war, or the metaphysics of the world that it transformed.

The book is structured, like any good play, into three broad acts. The first deals with the world on the eve of the war, examining attitudes, especially aesthetic attitudes, in France, Germany, and England, before the onset of the war. The sections on the controversial debut of Diaghilev's production of Stravinsky's THE RITES OF SPRING (which obviously provides the book with its title), which deals in dance with a ritual blood sacrifice, are especially hypnotic. Act Two focuses on the war itself, and even if one has read previous and equally nightmarish accounts of that insane and pointless conflict, Eksteins will bring the war alive for the reader. One is especially impressed by the senselessness of the entire affair, so senseless that nonsense seemed to be at home there. World War Two at least seemed to make sense for the participants. Hitler and Tojo made the stakes all too clear, but the Great War was above all an affair of moral ambiguity, and Eksteins is brilliant at bringing this out, something that a purer historian like Martin Gilbert or John Keegan is ultimately unable to do, because he or she is limited by the task of the historian to deal with ethical and aesthetic categories. The final act deals with the world remade by the events of 1914-18. Eksteins focuses on three main aspects: Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic, the publication of and response to Erich Maria Remarque's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, and the rise of Nazism in post-war Germany.

It is an interesting question what genre RITES OF SPRING belongs to. Eksteins offers too many insights that would normally exceed the job of the historian to label it simple history, though one could resort to calling it "intellectual history." It is that, but he also becomes in his book a bit of a moral chronicler. The book is more a work of art than a work of history. Although it contains no obvious narrative, it feels as if it has a plot.

This is one of the more remarkable, haunting books I have read in recent years. Absolutely no one interested in the meaning of the twentieth century, and especially no one interested in the Great War should skip it. The only ones it will disappoint will be those primarily concerned with military strategy and body counts.

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Summary: End of the Old World,Beginning of a New
Review: I read this book several years ago and was astonished at the author's range of knowledge and his creative approach. His coverage of World War I is fascinating, bringing you right into trench life. His cultural history is a revelation. He deals with everything from The Rites of Spring to Lindburgh's flight. In the post World War II period he speculates that the increasing difficutly and danger of mountian climbing undertaken is a result of the lack of war as an outlet. The book seems to have escaped the notice of my circle, as I have found no one else who has read it. That is unfortunate. This is a very important book worthy of the attention of anyone with an interest in this momentous period in history.

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Summary: From the Trenches
Review: I'm no expert on war history, but from reading this book I had a real vicarious "in the trenches" experience of World War I which was frankly quite fascinating and shocking at the same time. Modris Eksteins successfully takes the reader through the twilight of the growing pains of modernity, and we get a real sense of how much innocence was lost and what sort of brave new world was ushered in under the modern war machinery. Eksteins should be applauded for his ability to show both the political situation and individual citizen's attitudes towards the war, both in and off the frontlines. The losses of attrition recounted here are redolent of the French attempt to deter Bismark in 1870-1871; cold, brutal winters, large numbers of casualties, and patriotism facing a wall of death. Don't let one or two negative reviews about Rites of Spring mislead you- this book takes you into the trenches like you are really there. This is superb historical psychology and can help us all to understand the roots of the violent modern theatre and the existential disenfranchisement of our humanity.

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Summary: History as event: Takes you into the heart of a mystery
Review: If you want to understand how World War I forever changed the psyche of the western world, get this book. Eksteins explains how the Germans associated the war with "liberation and freedom", and how that view differed from the English or French viewpoint. The book reads more like a novel than a history book, because it is admittedly a subjective viewpoint. But this is one of the points of the book: that since WWI there can no longer be an objective view. While the book is short on details about the war itself, it is rich in detail about the intellectual mindset of the time. He takes up where Paul Fussel, in his book The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Mind, leaves off. It's a very entertaining read, but is more likely to appeal to the intellectual historian or the ordinary person interested in history than war buffs. Highly recommended, but not for everyone.

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Summary: A Conservative Interpretation of 20th c. European Culture
Review: It's hard to add to the many reviews already written. This book is simply excellent -- it clearly shows how we entered the modern age in terms of warfare, culture, values, and community. The focus is mostly on the west, Germany, Great Britain, and France get the most attention, although Italy, the U.S. and Russia also get some treatment as the author tells how the world grew up.

In the end, what got me was the sense of the permanent change experienced by all, not just the combatants, in all aspects of society and livlihood. This is a MUST read to get the complete picture of WWI European history.

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Summary: Already a Classic
Review: Modris Eksteins "Rites of Spring" is already considered a classic by many after only slightly more than a decade in print. It's a daring *cultural* history of World War I; Eksteins' controversial thesis is that modernism caused the war. Usually the Great War is seen as the last gasp of old Europe and the sentimental Victorian age, and modernist angst was ushered in by the psychological impact of the bloodbath. Eksteins demonstrates that the savagery was in the air beforehand--the horrors were well underway in the minds of European artists and intellectuals before the first shot was fired. The title comes from Stravinsky, of course, who was one of those artists who glorified the idea of purgation through violence (they were playing with fire). The concept reached its logical conclusion with Joseph Goebbels' proclamation that war was "spring without end!" Eksteins writes in a cool but passionate style that is unusually compelling. This is a must read for history buffs and anyone who wants to know why the last century was a slaughterhouse.

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Summary: A Brilliant Professor, a Brilliant Writer.
Review: Modris Eksteins was my history professor for two years, and is one of the most respected professors at the University of Toronto in Canada. This man has the most unbelievable passion for history that is contagious to all. He is an awe inspiring speaker and his writing style is just as powerful. He is one of the most intelligent and empathetic people I have ever been aquainted with, and his book "The Rites of Spring" is as powerful and eloquent as he is. One will experience many emotions upon reading it, and will not only gain a new respect for those who fought in the 'Great War', but will also be introduced to the arts and culture of the time. Whether you are an avid historian or just curious, Modris Eksteins will captivate you with his brilliant writing style, and most passionate understanding of World War I and the birth of modernity in the 20th century.