Wanderers often go overlooked, and the lot is well illustrated by the first emissions of a man subsequently soon to be crowned the author of the Lost Generation. This centenary year, cause accrues to retrieve them from the bluer reaches where otherwise they stray unheeded. Perhaps, on account of the circumstances of 2023, what these early, disregarded lines can say will again be sharp.
Present conditions which might surprise literary-minded readers by bringing forth some relatively new sounds from these “Wanderings,” I surmise, can also act upon the ears of musical auditors, perhaps readying them to hear novel tones in the better pieces which despite today’s bleakness are composed (or, if they are not composed, otherwise made). The effect in both cases may well involve some renovation of one’s acoustic perceptivity; by this postulate, generally speaking, I am led to regard poems and the poetic in their nearness to the powers of music.
Nearing the close of the year, turning an ear back towards all that has transpired, observers of our present world-scene may have noted it down when events of the last century were invoked once more, in a frivolous reprise, as though this time the political antagonisms amongst the great powers take shape as a spectacle or a farce, albeit a terrible, fateful one for myriads of civilians throughout the world’s battlegrounds by proxy, the Ukraine above all. Analogies uttered to justify these shams, drawn badly from an ill-remembered history, mar the pronouncements the governments of Western countries have issued, politicians’ posturing one might have hoped even they would blush to indulge in, although reticence would require of them something they so obviously lack which should neutralise for a moment their own brazenness, namely, a rudimentary sense of shame. – Worse still than these statements from on high, is their acceptance by broad sectors of Western public opinion, permissive in allowing the old Great Game to recommence in the Eurasian theatre, as happened around ten years ago, and most egregiously so on the part of those countries whose history vis-à-vis Russia is the darkest. Germany first and foremost: during the last months, when one reads in the German press how the country’s deliveries of weapons to the Ukraine are applauded at home out of the belief that these armaments are helping to defeat Russian forces on the ground, thereby belatedly evening up Germany’s historical scorecard, the vicarious jubilation in this phantasma (for it pertains mainly to wishes rather than to facts) turns one’s stomach. – Here, I hasten immediately to append, from such a newfound consensus many German citizens dissent and distance themselves in the strongest terms. – Individual dissenters notwithstanding, however, the renewal of national hatred does not remain on the abstract plane of German public opinion, but has begun to colour the treatment of Russian citizens visiting the country, under this or that pretext: some on account of their nationality have found themselves barred from attending concerts (what an offence against the spirit of musical life generally!), or subjected to chicanery and depredations at the hands of officialdom, in unjust incidents which call to mind the tribulations inflicted upon Michael Kohlhaas. Not their horses but rather the automobiles of these unlucky Russians have been inhospitably, unceremoniously seized in the dead of night by the German police: one such incident which took place during the summer, though hardly noticed by German journalists, was reported in the Russian press, for example in an account which circulated widely there.* – If one is a citizen of this or that Western country, one really ought to seek to imagine, with all possible impartiality, the annoyance and anger engendered in Russia by the accretion of these low measures. (In order to avoid a great misunderstanding, let me say clearly that I consider Russian civilisation also to be Occidental, as are those of numerous countries around the world not generally now called “Western” in the narrow sense: they too embody or at least should embody a pattern of life stemming from the antiquity of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem at their best.)
* Елизавета Мелякова, “Halt российским номерам. Как у петербурженки в Гамбурге отобрали машину”
Provocations on all scales are directed at the Russians; scarcely a day goes by when the bear is not poked somehow. Fortunately for everyone, the bait thus far has not been taken, and, with regard to the Ukraine, Moscow, whatever else one might say about the overarching aims of its foreign policy, does allow these adversaries to monopolise the commodity of recklessness. Relative self-restraint in this one military theatre, then, precisely because it represents the negative of provocation, itself becomes a provocative reproach in some Western eyes, and hence provides an occasion for the launching against Russia of further rounds of insult, as though in perverse compensation. Thus, professional manipulators of public opinion, otherwise called journalists, have moved to open a minor front in the conflict, referring propagandistically to certain incidental facts in support of the calumny that the Russians, in their attitude towards it, and also in their manner of conducting it, regard war as offering the participants an æsthetic-operatic experience, thereby affiliating themselves with – l’idea di una tale genealogia era inevitabile! – practices that as deployed are specifically Fascist. So, it is supposed, the existence of a Wagner Group (Частная Военная Компания “Вагнер”) brands the Russian soldiers, or now the Russians generally, as akin to Nazis.*
* Such a variety of calumny, with some basic errors redolent of the profession’s usual speed of work, was laid out by Abel Gilbert in a mid-summer feuilleton, “El Grupo Wagner: música y guerra.” His hackwork should suffice by way of documentation: let it not be retouched later out of the historical record. – With time and inclination, a list of similarly embarrassing ephemeræ could be compiled.
Obfuscation of the inconvenient fact that neo-Nazis are plentiful in the Ukrainian armies which Western governments have so amply funded, represents one of the main aims of their propagandists the journalists. Covering over the deep conduits of corruption, the blatant theft of money of which some not insignificant portion is returned into the pockets of the big guys who lead these rackets in Washington, Brussels, and other capitals, is another. Overlooking the possible existence of institutions sited there precisely in order to evade the degree of supervision still exercised, at least in theory, over their counterparts at home, first and foremost the sinister biological and virological research laboratories, a third. Also, since the point raised against Russia pertains to its alleged æstheticising of war-experience, Western journalists’ presentation of the Ukraine conflict in the mode of a spectacle, itself comes into focus as constituting yet a further of their primary tasks.
The crookedness of many politicians, alas, is matched by the mendacities of their counterparts in the media. Castigations of Russia, from such mouths, ring hollow. And nonetheless this depraved farce marches on. – For how much longer?
Such, at the end of the day, has been the outlook of many critical observers these last years, bounded by dark anticipations. Then, beginning on October 7, we’ve heard nearly the same script, mutatis mutandis, be read again from the top.
Not the attack upon Israel, nor the avowed aim of its main enemies which is as though lifted from the party-programme of the NSDAP, has brought out numerous demonstrations in condemnation throughout the world, but rather that country’s efforts in self-defence. Even though decades of rampant over-use has stripped the small lexicon centred on the term “Nazi” of much of its reference and force, still its charge has not been depleted – and now the stigmatising power of these words is mobilised against it, by and on behalf of those whom they do indeed fit. Inversions of meaning such as this have not deterred politicians elsewhere from joining in, aware that these may be voting blocs they can pander to, while the media salivates to render the pogrom itself and the subsequent hostilities into a spectacle of horror from which many facts vital to observers seeking to reach a provisional judgement on the course of events, are actively excluded.
At worst one meets with insinuations and outright accusations directed at Israel that are simply libellous – sometimes with echoes of the old blood-libels.
The misuse of hospitals as armament-depots, a subterfuge that by the established laws and conventions of warfare renders them legitimate objects in the field of military operations, is almost entirely absent from the international media’s “reporting” – to take one egregious recent omission. Similarly with the structures under the campus of a Gazan university, even more recently unearthed, as per a report in the Israeli press.* How this discovery will figure elsewhere in the journalists’ accounts of the conflict, remains to be seen, though whether they will include it at all seems doubtful, bearing in mind their pronounced slant thus far.
* “Terror tunnel, weapons found in Al-Azhar University in Gaza”
When a university has umfunktioniert itself into a base of partisan activity, then fundamental questions about its very raison d’être do arise. Here I refer mainly to those universities in the United States which have spun out the “narratives” against Israel now taken as pretexts to attack and assault Jews for no other cause than that identity. Often the site of these outbreaks, currently, is not extra mœnia, and thereby the academic institutions really put themselves in the dock: not least because the codes pertaining to both speech and conduct they do insist on so stringently, in order supposedly to foster the well-being of the students, are entirely disregarded in this particular case. For the inconsistency they were called to account recently, in a Congressional hearing, and in the person of the heads of some of the most prestigious American universities, opted to prevaricate; but, perhaps not quite fully prepared to conceal their own beliefs in the face of a vigorous, perceptive challenge, what actually is done by the responses they did provide, though these are by turns patently frivolous and facetious, as if wanting to shield some other aspect of their opinions from scrutiny, when one listens attentively to their evasions, other than insouciantly bagatellise a massacre?*
* Of applying such a keen ear many journalists seem incapable; so to peruse an adequate report, one with some awareness of the positions semi-hidden behind the prevaricating, I recommend the summary of this Congressional hearing by a concerned layman, Bill Ackman: vide his long Tweet of December 6, 2023.
Consider for a moment the speech-acts chanted by the mobs which have taken to the streets against Israel over the last couple of months. Wherein does their illocutionary force consist? These maledictions imagine the entire obliteration of a country, that is, the elimination of a people, and indeed call for it to happen. Then, in the next breath, the opposing side is accused duplicitously of the very thing their own words of incitement strive to accomplish. – To dissipate the admonitory power of the key term in this connection, represents a main aim of the warfare they continue by other means. – Let me turn from these bloodthirsty incantations to the deliberately less than deft evasions uttered in the Congressional committee, and ask my question again. Precisely by dint of their seeming deficiency of rhetorical adroitness, the equivocations of these university presidents were addressed largely beyond the confines of the hearing-room: by those elusive antics in effect ignoring the interlocutors and speaking past them, they played to the virtual gallery of their fellows, so as to excite in them a frisson. – Such, I submit, was the force of these illocutions, while what they meant to express, was the professors’ own audacity in flouting the rules they demand of everyone else, in issuing an exemption to their allies amongst the mobs, doing it by pulling out that carte blanche whose use they claim for themselves alone, “the context.”
For my part, I will not heed the rules of their game, neither the activistic mobs’ nor the élite of intellectuals’, which both often modify ad libitum, whenever it suits them or their causes to do so; instead I shall conduct a small thought-experiment upon their presumptions.
Were I to address some participants in the one formation face-to-face, I should ask them whether they know of a main part of the history behind the mass-murder their chants call for, namely, the close relations to the Berlin régime up until its end maintained by leading figures amongst the Arab leadership in the territory of what was then Mandatory Palestine and elsewhere, and most obviously the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.* After all, these relations do form a part of “the context” for reasoned attempts to assess the aims and intent of those who advocate the destruction of the state of Israel. Yet I fully expect that bringing in this chapter of the history would elicit merely a blank stare on the part of many of these protesters, not despite but rather precisely because they make such free use of the lexicon whose centre is the term “Nazi” without comprehending to whom it still applies. For they know very little or hardly anything at all of the historical record. – As for the professors who made a show of insouciance in the Congressional hearing, as though they had arranged it in concert with one another, I should inquire if they would agree that to “contextualise” their performance one may refer to another notorious episode, the embrace of pamphleteering by Louis-Ferdinand Céline at the end of 1937, abundant in prescience regarding the great persecution then imminent and nearly carried away by the pleasure of anticipating it.** But more than his stance, the point in this connection is the thrill the Bagatelles pour un massacre gave to his contemporaries, by the shattering of polite conventions and standard pieties the work’s provocations and verbal violence effected, where this very extremity also suggested how a justification might be devised on his behalf, which quickly was supplied. Ce n’est pas la réalité que peint Céline ; c’est l’hallucination que la réalité provoque ; et c’est par là qu’il intéresse.*** Hence, despite his primary objective of incitement, one might also read him obliquely, as warning of the nightmares soon to advance upon, infiltrate, and overwhelm the existence which indeed did engender them. And so, if these terror-trivialising professors would agree to include this episode in the “context” by which their own public utterances in the Congressional hearing are to be understood, in order to construe them as oblique ironic warnings about the course everything is taking, they then might rescue themselves from their own predicament. However, to heed this charitable suggestion, they would have to acknowledge some parallel between their situation and his; and for that a degree of historical knowledge is required. Something which, in the case of these insouciant academics as with the grossly ignorant protestors whom they do so much to excuse, cannot plausibly be ascribed – to close out my thought-exercise with a due bluntness.
* A memorandum detailing Mohammed Amin Al-Husseini’s meeting with Hitler (held in Berlin on November 28, 1941) was compiled by Paul Schmidt, the interpreter, under the title “Aufzeichnung über die Unterredung zwischen dem Führer und dem Grossmufti von Jerusalem.” Especially in the “context” of the last couple of months, it bears reading or re-reading.
** These works have been collected in a critical edition, Écrits polémiques.
*** This explanation was proposed in the first part of the essay by André Gide, “Les Juifs, Céline et Maritain.”
Ignorance of the historical record amongst those who speak so noxiously and know so little of it, presents a grave problem. It eases the way for the recruitment of dupes to a cause which, underneath the usual pragmatic dissimulations, does actually entertain the completion of the Nazi programme. This ulterior aim, it may be remarked without much exaggeration, is kept less and less under wraps in many Western countries: the inhibitions in speech and in conduct which did remain, albeit tenuously, now are largely thrust aside. The resulting odour is pervasive: since the mass murder of Jews on October 7, the sewers have burst in country after country – as one sharp observer of these events puts the matter. Mainly in what we think of as the civilized West.* – Speaking unironically for myself, I fear the stench of it will outlive us.
* Douglas Murray, “Idiot anti-Israel protesters wreaking havoc in NYC are just fanatics wrapped up in lies”
A great surprise, however, it should not be that all those, and they are legion, who wish to bring the “civilised West” even further down than the level to which it has already lowered itself, especially since the spring of 2020, would feel some twinge of sympathy with a movement sworn to its destruction. The temptations to a more active nihilism are difficult to evade, and it may even be that they are exacerbated by attempts to wish them away or to pretend these inclinations are “not there” – but acknowledging all this will excuse no one whose voyage au bout de la nuit leads him, her, it, or whatever other pronoun is opted for, into the arms of Hamas or a like formation. Surely even today there exists an array of channels for voicing dissatisfactions about the state of Western nations that often are quite warranted?
Categorically unjustifiable, by contrast, is the peculiar consequence of the linguistic and moral inversions which mark the way to an alliance with such groups, tread incautiously by many Western leftists. (It seems to me that this nomenclature has become obfuscatory, yet the “left” still holds to it.) Implicitly a re-writing of the most important moral distinction of the Second World War is set to be undertaken – although to notice this operation, one must remember something of history . . .
Where all this may one day soon lead the Western fellow-travellers, is glimpsed clearly by a Spanish commentator, perhaps emboldened to do so by certain facts in Spain’s past and its present, including the stances taken by the current government with regard to the conflict. – In any case, in a recent essay* he puts the main point far more bluntly than I myself can. After citing the defamatory charge levelled at the country, he concludes with a section under the heading, “Una acusación falsa contra Israel para encubrir a los verdaderos genocidas,” which I now reproduce integrally.
* Contando Estrelas, “La guerra y las cifras”
Así pues, los enemigos de Israel no sólo difunden una acusación falsa cuando señalan al Estado judío como culpable de un genocidio, sino que además, al hacerlo, lo que intentan es encubrir al grupo terrorista que sí ha expresado pretensiones genocidas, que es Hamás, unas pretensiones que han quedado plasmadas en sus ataques indiscriminados contra la población civil de Israel y en sus reiteradas declaraciones a favor de exterminar a los judíos. Lanzar esa calumnia contra Israel y no acusar a Hamás de genocidio, como lo está haciendo gran parte de la izquierda y de la extrema izquierda en Occidente, es tan infame como acusar de genocidio a los Aliados y no a la Alemania nazi.
De hecho, si el antisemitismo de gran parte de la izquierda occidental ha llegado al extremo inmoral de blanquear a un grupo terrorista como Hamás, encubriendo la brutal masacre que perpetró el 7 de octubre e intentanto presentar como culpable al país agredido, cabe preguntarse cuánto tardará esa misma izquierda antisemita –porque esto lo hace por antisemitismo, por mucho que intente disimularlo– en blanquear de la misma forma a Hitler, que era un dictador como Hamás, un terrorista como Hamás y un antisemita como Hamás.
During the long history of the Western left as some still remember it, to its credit, in periods when it was at its best organised and most serious, the emergent anti-Semitism was guarded against. One should not fall for that reprehensible diversion from our pressing tasks, was the message then, and there were several good reasons for holding to this position, which I need not rehearse. Suffice it to recall how the well-known admonition, Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, first originated. As it was establishing itself in the Austrian part of the dual monarchy, throughout the early months of 1889, the Social Democratic Workers Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei) had to fend off the suborning of some workers by means of anti-Semitic agitation, mounted not least by the later Mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger. With this aim in mind, one figure amongst the Social Democrats (though he was perhaps not formally registered as a member), Ferdinand Kronawetter, addressed a local party gathering: anti-Semitism he condemned in its own right, as a mere prejudice, and also as a vulgar substitute for the real thing, seized on by their party’s political rivals. Der Antisemitismus ist nichts als der Socialismus des dummen Kerls von Wien – the press quoted him as saying, to the audience’s great amusement, Anti-Semitism is nothing but the socialism of our dumb fellow in Vienna. Presumably he referred to Lueger.*
* The remark by Kronawetter appeared in print the next day, April 24, 1889, in the Neue Freie Presse. – A small co-incidence may be mentioned here: the venue in which the meeting was held, the „Drei Engel“-Säle, had some years before hosted the writer Franz Holubek who delivered an anti-Semitic diatribe: legal proceedings were initiated against him, in which he was acquitted. (See his publication, Schwurgerichtsverhandlung gegen den Schriftsteller Franz Holubek.) The episode contributed significantly to the development of that climate of opinion in Vienna during the course of the decade, from which such large dividends were drawn by Lueger, whose tenure as Mayor instructed certain later figures in turn, as one should know from the historical record.
From the perspective of 2023 and its great ignorance, this episode will not signify, not even as a piece of ancient history. Instead, some new formula for anti-Semitism and its resurgent appeal may need to be devised. Shall I suggest one? Anti-Semitism is the audacity of dopes. Alas, our educational systems today, wherever we live, are producing them in incredible numbers. We see them now, on the march, hardly knowing why, while some have assumed the presidency of prestigious universities. – Fifteen years ago one somehow even was entrusted to lead an entire country.
Several generations have graduated by now from systems of education which, restricting myself to the subject of history, evidently teach very little of it, and nearly nothing at all of the venerable ideal of impartiality without which neither the writing nor the reading of it can ever really come into their own. Furthermore, from amongst these generations the universities are now staffed, de bas en haut, in this or that country. (When I dwelt on the strange theatrics of the professors in Washington, this global problem of which they are representative, furnished the unspoken context.) Hence, the problem become self-perpetuating, one probably should begin to ponder how conjoint action from within and from without these stagnant institutions may be required that once again they fulfil the vital functions whereby their existence is justified. For if they do not, then . . . ?
Though it may seem I’ve danced far from the topic, actually, this is my contention, the display of ignorance on the part of much of Western public opinion, as regards the two hottest wars currently drawing the world’s attention, does suggest that something like the thought-syncopating formation of the 1920s, the Lost Generation, is with us again. And this time not in the singular, but in the plural! The study of history, when pursued in an impartial spirit, should help to broaden one’s horizons; the withdrawal of historical instruction, conversely, brings many to lose their way. As such they can be led, that is to say, duped, with greater ease, and the more readily as more and more of the orientation-points in this realm are removed. After a number of generations have graduated from these anti-schools, the acts of removing the merestones – their removal began to occur long before the term “cancellation” was coined – do often go unnoticed. For the way, after all, is not the only item a considerable number will end up losing: to instance another human capacity than discernment, attentiveness also tends gradually to be diminished.
Even if there is now an aggregation of lost generations, however, the degree to which they, or some of them, currently are running amuck, whether literally in the streets, or swivelling on seats in public hearings, though in both locales casting compunctions aside, remains to be accounted for – over the last weeks, my concern has often centred on this question. The negational force of hatred inherent in anti-Semitism, while it certainly does contribute, may not quite suffice as an answer: under present circumstances another factor also seems decisive. Granted, what I offer is mere hypothesis, but let me venture to propose that the disinhibition of speech and conduct so evident since October 7, follows directly from what was unleashed in several countries beginning at the end of August 2021, under the pretext of the Corona hysteria: deliberate campaigns to vilify the unvaccinated, to impose green-pass controls, and to prepare to destroy the freedom-loving opposition, the measures which in an earlier text I sought to analyse under the rubric of the crystallising of a totalitarian form of rule. Looking back at that moment once more, it seems to me that far from having been covered over by some amnesia, the extremes towards which social relations were very nearly pushed, are indeed remembered by many, taken note of for future use. During that period of 2021, a paradigm was established, and the outbreaks witnessed over these last months, comprise what will prove to have been its first iteration, this time still somewhat in the mode of another trial-run, but already exuding confidence that one of these days the hallucination will indeed overtake the reality which provoked it, as a contemporary Gidean might suggest.
Gloomy prognoses, however, I should prefer not to articulate further, especially as they will probably have occurred already to knowledgeable observers of our world-situation. At this juncture, what may be done instead is to touch again on the conceivable linkage between the debasement of historical instruction, on one side, and the narrowing of capacities of attentiveness in the present, on the other, and to extend it into the idea that if such a nexus is ascertained, then the human impetus towards the future might also begin gradually to abate. Thus one could ponder how a lost generation, especially if it comes as the latest in a series of them, might end up virtually as a last generation. – The mood in which this topic is explored, it seems to me, will not be doleful, so much as wistful and elegiac.
That propulsive force in human life, impetus towards a future, materialises in several ways, not least by the special verve with which a new generation will speak the mother-tongue, profiling itself over against those which preceded it by its innovations, while implicitly challenging the successors to do much the same. – How better to define a generation, than by its interpretation of the language? – Perhaps this criterion can be proposed with respect to the delimiting of other kinds of groups as well (where a native language forms the implicit context). For in the rapport to the mother-tongue, is there not comprised a bond which affiliates one so nearly to the others who do speak it likewise that, in all honesty, it can hardly be said where precisely they end and someone begins, or vice versa? But, nota bene, this is no ordinary intimacy! Rather, what is met with here may be the sole instance anyone ever knows of close and yet utterly impersonal fellowship.
Quite far from this communion of interpreters (much in the sense of the word as applied to individual musicians), are the relations amongst those by whom the language they otherwise would share, instead is vandalised. Notoriously this vandalism, alas, pervades the way in which the English language is now spoken (employing the term loosely), where a bad example has been set by so many of its native speakers. Parts of speech are introduced in places they do not belong, the semantic slop is over-seasoned by expletives . . . Decades having rendered all this endemic, the linguistic degradation cannot be evaded completely: the abuses spread with ease. Exposure to them the fastidious do well to minimise, therefore, possibly seeking one another out as an alternative, thus defining themselves more and more, though inconspicuously, as something of a group in their own right.
How native speakers, perhaps uniquely, may meditate on the fate that will silence the language by stages, in anticipating the time when it shall no longer be anyone’s mother-tongue, resounds in a note sent out recently by Giorgio Agamben. Evidentemente come non è facile immaginare la propria morte, così non si ha voglia di immaginare una situazione in cui non ci saranno più italiani. Of course, though this latter situation does not hover in the distance with the utter certainty that attaches to the individual’s death, nonetheless it may be reckoned with as highly probable, if the linguistic community fails to reproduce its numbers sufficiently, and by now this deficit has become pronounced in Italy. – Mi rattrista – indeed it is a sorrowful prospect – la possibilità perfettamente reale che non ci sia più nessuno per parlare italiano, che la lingua italiana divenga una lingua morta.* Demographic facts do lend themselves well to the modelling of future outcomes (at least by comparison to the conjectural quackery of supposed experts in public health), and so in this case the current and next couple of generations in his country may prove to be the last. This portion of the story to come, his reader perhaps can infer, also saddens him.
* “Finis Italiæ”
Elegies to a unique sonority whose dying out is foreheard – this sounding of anticipation may well rest pure in its sorrow, untouched by anger, for
nicht ein Übel ist’s, wenn einiges
Verloren gehet und wenn der Rede
Verhallet der lebendige Laut*
– an elegy in advance like this, prompts me to reflect further upon the concept of a generation. In the concept too, somewhat as with the human group it delimits, there seems to be at least one impulsion, whose arc or arcs might be described better when the history correlate to this meaning of the word is recalled. Here, to tender some self-guidance, one can ask: behind the sense and prominence accorded to the term itself, what was the impetus?
* Friedrich Hölderlin, “Pathmos”
No doubt there exists a solid corpus of documentation of these historical and semantic contexts (which remain of prime importance to consider, the absurdities of many university professors notwithstanding), but at present I have no time to go in search of it. Mentioning a few points of a more general kind will have to suffice.
They are offered in a tentative, hypothetical spirit that nonetheless, let me hope, will not venture out of the realm of common sense.
To begin with, the concept of a generation, just because its aim is specific, seems as though it once was correlate to an event, that is, an occurrence whereby the usual continuum of history is divided, a watershed or cæsura. What kind of occurrence could this have been, first and foremost, but a great revolution? Chronologically speaking, on both sides of the upheaval, there were generations: one comprising those without whom everything would not have erupted as it did, another which, emerging in much greater numbers some years later on, the period and its effects had formed. Probably in England the year 1648 brought generations to the fore in just this way.* And certainly, during the later part of the next century, they were engendered by the years 1776, in the English colonies, and 1789, in France. That in both cases the revolutionaries, or many of them, were characterised as being of a generation, seems clear, while the emergence subsequently of another generation or generations owing much to the earlier, may be inferred by the frequency with which the surnames of the one were soon adopted to bestow the given names of the other – a commemorative honour quite common in the new United States, and known also amongst the French.**
* Perhaps there was some awareness of precisely this when, so many years later, the 1688 revolution was called “glorious” and “necessary” by the Lord Mayor of London, William Beckford (the father of the eponymous author of Vathek), in his address to George III of May 23, 1770. For without 1648 in the background, could 1688 have come to pass as it did?
** For the anthroponymy of France during the period, see Nicoline Hörsch, Republikanische Personennamen, and the issue edited by Raphaël Bange, focused on Les Prénoms révolutionnaires (October-December 2000), of the Annales historiques de la Révolution française.
Now, once the reality of these first pairs of generations were widely acknowledged, I surmise, it was but a step to begin to rely on the concept generally, as a means of categorising persons within age-ranges by reference to the major occurrences that had formed them individually. Thus they were delimited into separate groups, and so, on the threshold of the nineteenth century, thinking in terms of generations became a primary mode of comprehending all that was happening in public, at the very least, and often enough elsewhere too; the qualities discerned in, attributed to them, provided several of the points of orientation both practical and estimative by which the participants would wend through those domains. Observers, also, on the sidelines, began to depend on the concept in their assessments.
Once a definite number of them had made their debut and henceforth shared the stage, when observed as though from without, the arrangements amongst them, the various intertwinings of their relations as they arrived and departed, easily summoned to mind the profusion in orchestral music of fugal and contrapuntal structures. Such likenesses should not be pressed too far (at least if one is more interested in the realities themselves than in the hallucinations they may provoke), granted; yet by their sheer evidence they turn attention towards one feature of the succession of generations that otherwise does seem too obvious to warrant it.
After the initial generation which by its foremost members had won for itself a share of worldly immortality, whether in 1776 or in 1789, quite a few years had to pass before the generation bearing its names if not also its ideas in turn strode onto the scene. In the meantime, roughly speaking, probably two others made their debuts: first the generation immediately following that of the revolutionaries themselves, by which they were honoured when it named its own children after them, and secondly the one directly thereafter. Thus, when the system of these generations was set in motion initially, its succession described a cycle or a spiral. Hence the efforts and impetus of the progenitors might indeed be resumed, but only under quite different conditions, given that such an interval had elapsed.
Yet all this began to dawn on all the participants only once that fourth generation emerged. Tasks appeared before them, in keeping with the newly definite shape of their history. Similarly, in the other column, serious doubts about the course to be taken by such a system of generations, were not formulated until then, when the cycle had been gone through for the very first time.
Those who found themselves opposing the whole system, or more specifically the spirals it would trace, figure-work whose envisioning their own arrival on the scene had rendered possible, were placed in a quandary. Affiliating themselves to it, heeding the actions foreordained for them to take, seemed so in keeping with the natural order and its duties, that those who did conceive of themselves as being individuals, not members of a generation, nonetheless encountered their consciences calling upon them to set aside that decision. Moreover, in some cases, the inward voices of conscience would even remind them of the obligations implicitly inscribed in the very names they had been given.
A new variety of inner strife, it seems, was faced by those who were or wanted to be simply individuals, apart from that nexus of multifarious relations, a generation – a web they may have regarded with not a little horror, especially as their own consciences, as if in concert with external forces, sought to entangle them in it.
One contemporaneous remark may sound rather different if it is lifted out of its own narrow context, and read just on its own, without reference to the episode in the story wherein it figures, a first-person narrative by Washington Irving. Uncovered from it, by these means, might be some awareness of that new sort of inward difficulty. – But let me simply try out this small sonic experiment in the results obtainable by modifying the context. – Having extricated himself from a compromising situation, of which all the particulars may be omitted (rather in keeping with a tale so bare in names), Ottavio says this: My only idea was to get farther and farther from the horrors I had left behind; as if I could throw space between myself and my conscience.*
* “The Story of the Young Italian”
Parsed thus on its own, this sentence rings at least a bit differently: such too is the mutability of literature. What now does it say? If he intends to separate from his generation and its claims on him, an individual must refuse to heed the dictum of the conscience in himself. Yes, if that be the aim, then he will distance himself, as though his inwardness were a terrain, so far from it that its speech is not heard.
Conforming, that is, subordinating oneself to the system of generations and its demands, at the early moment in the century when its full circuit was first traced, with the debut of that fourth generation, already aroused an ardent response by those who wanted to be individuals, whose songs of themselves are of great interest, psychologically and philosophically, to listen to today, hum over again, and interpret as best one can. – Try then to imagine what was brought about as the pace of generation-defining events quickened further! The generations, accordingly, were succeeding one another more and more rapidly, the period of years each encompassed was shrinking; and what initially had been a cycle or spiral which in some manner would have recommenced itself with every third, from that moment onwards became a simple alternation in turns (a sequence so obviously visualised by the swinging of a pendulum). – Such a change in the relations amongst the generations, I surmise, could not have transpired without bringing about some alteration in their attitudes towards one another, which thus commenced to pulse with an ever more readily occasionable animosity.
Members of a generation who, no sooner than they took their first steps on the stage of the public, whether they aimed to chart an entirely new course of their own, or sought to stride further in the path marked out by some predecessors, already began to hear the next one lapping at their heels – should it come as a surprise that they would declaim bitterly against the entire system, whose workings they were in the best of positions to comprehend, standing as they did at the moment when a more and more rapid alternation became its modus operandi?
This feature inherent in a system which accorded an ever shorter window of time to members of the newest generation to profile themselves and thus begin to meet their individual aims, namely, the great disadvantage at which those young people were set who proceeded in line with longer and less common timetables, could arouse an intense ire. Fury like theirs – leaving to one side the whole question of whether or how far it was justifiable – was vented in two private statements from the middle of the century, each kept under seal for many decades, but eventually availed to the worldwide reading public for scrutiny. Thankfully so, for otherwise the impetus in that hallucination provoked by reality, nihilism throughout the nineteenth century and afterwards, could hardly be fathomed deeply enough, a desideratum which is, almost needless to say, also now a matter of importance, as this spectre more than haunts us all still.
The young generations made their debuts everywhere, but perhaps nowhere more noticeably than in the capital of the century, as it has been called, Paris, and so it was against that city which both statements, one in French, the other in German, trained their rage.
Je voudrais être aux portes de Paris avec cinq cent mille barbares et brûler toute la ville, quelles flammes quel ruine, quelle ruine des ruines – confided Gustave Flaubert to his notebooks, early in the 1840s.*
* Souvenirs, Notes et Pensées intimes
Ruin upon ruin, the ruin of ruins . . .
While this phantasma and frisson might be downplayed as a bit of juvenile excess, its ominous sound is amplified when juxtaposed to the other, later, German statement, even more pyromanic, an ode to violence by Richard Wagner.*
* Earlier I alluded to the lineage, so let me mention a book by Joachim Köhler, Wagners Hitler: Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker.
At the start of the 1850s, in a missive to a friend, the composer wrote as follows.
Bis jetzt kennen wir die äußerung der geknechteten menschlichen natur nur im Verbrechen, das uns anwidert und erschreckt: – wenn jetzt raubmörder ein haus anstecken, so muß uns dieß mit recht recht gemein und ekelhaft vorkommen: – wie wird es uns aber erscheinen, wenn das ungeheure Paris in schutt gebrannt ist, wenn der brandt von stadt zu stadt hinzieht, wir selbst endlich in wilder begeisterung diese unausmistbaren Augeasställe anzünden, um gesunde luft zu gewinnen? – Mit völligster besonnenheit und ohne allen schwindel versichere ich Dir, daß ich an keine andere revolution mehr glaube, als an die, die mit dem Niederbrande von Paris beginnt: – eine Junischlacht wird man dort nicht wieder schlagen, – denn der mensch ist sich heilig geworden, nicht aber sind dieß mehr die mauerlöcher, in denen sie zu bestien werden.
How many would be the steps from this vehemence to the literary “style” of the Bayreuth generation, not quite thirty years further on, the writers with a swampy German all their own, unclear and exaggerated (ein eigentliches Sumpf-Deutsch der Unklarheit und Übertreibung), whom Nietzsche subsequently was to mock?* – Yet, read on its own, without thinking of anyone or any event afterwards, and referring only to the great disappointments of 1848, the statement is not so easy to dismiss. – But be the evaluation what it may: let me try to convey the force of the composer’s outburst into English (noting in passing the ambivalent orthography). Until now we have witnessed the expressions of a human nature reduced to slavery only in the form of criminality which repels and shocks us. When murderous bands set a house ablaze, it must needs appear to us to be a low, appalling act. Yet how will it look in our view if that monstrous locale, Paris, is burned to ashes, if the conflagration leaps from city to city, and finally we ourselves, with wild enthusiasm, light a fire in these Augean Stables that cannot otherwise be cleared out, to procure a healthier air? After serious consideration, without any light-headedness, I can assure you that I no longer believe in any revolution but the one which begins by burning Paris to the ground. There the June Days will not be struck down twice: for the human being now regards himself as sacred, while the city’s walls no longer are riddled with the holes they were chased into, as brutes. – Regeneration though violence was his hope. – Starker nerven wird es bedürfen, und nur wirkliche menschen werden es überleben, d. h. solche, die durch die Noth und das großartigste Entsetzen erst zu menschen geworden sind.** Strong nerves will be required, and only real human beings shall survive it, that is, those who will first have become human beings by passing through severe hardship and the greatest consternation.
* notebook, August-September 1885, “Neue unzeitgemässe Betrachtung,” 7
** letter to Theodor Uhlig, October 22, 1850
To judge from the tenor of these remarks by Flaubert and Wagner, the wish aroused in the opponents of the system of generations (to be sure, many of them also opposed much else besides), at the moment when they faced the increasing acceleration in the rate at which the youngest would be overtaken by the debut of an even younger, evinces an outright nihilist character. And when these wishes were translated into actions (for only some remained in the obscurity of private documents), as happened more and more often, the movement of this generational system underwent a further speeding-up in turn. How so? Because a greater number of these actions succeeded in becoming generation-defining events in their own right, as the nineteenth century wore on. Some of the victories of the Russian “underground,” which were written about in an earlier essay, I should now like to suggest, constituted events of this sort.
Probably no earlier than this juncture did observers begin to ponder the likelihood that the entire system of generations was rushing ever more quickly towards – something like a cataclysm. Were one carefully to re-read the best-known novel of Turgenev, while bearing our own circumstances in mind, perhaps discernible, already in the middle of the 1860s, is a sense of it in its approach, and the sounding in advance of some notes of solace.
However, rather than the seeking of solace, another aim, perhaps a better one (for, after all, the matter pertained to a human construct, not to any automatic function of nature), was to dwell amidst as much perplexity as could be borne regarding a system whose very own impetus seemed to drive it towards its destruction. And, make no mistake, this prospect remains perplexing! Thus, today also, one does well to ponder the compact, slightly enigmatic insight which, in 1871, that other novelist, Dostoevsky, offered through the mouth of Ivan Shatov. From neither reason nor knowledge, he averred, stems the motive power in the life of collectivities. Народы слагаются и движутся силой иною, повелѣвающею и господствующею, но происхожденіе которой неизвѣстно и необъяснимо. Эта сила есть сила неутолимаго желанія дойти до конца и въ то же время конецъ отрицающая.* Peoples are formed and moved by a different force, a commanding and dominating one, though one of which the origin is unknown and inexplicable. This force is the force of an unquenchable desire to reach the end while at the very same time disowning the end. (The verb “отрицать,” with which his observation concludes, can express a broad range of negational actions. Amongst them it is “to disown” which seems to me to offer the right nuance in this context.)
* Бѣсы, bk. ii, ch. i, vii (Русскій Вѣстникъ, vol. xciv, no. 7)
End, in this connection, also encompasses their own ending, the culmination of all that they have done, not least that which they did to themselves and made of themselves, under the circumstances in which they lived. To a considerable extent it resulted from the accumulation of their efforts, and so, whenever attention later is paid to it, at moments even more ulterior, it gets categorised as something they engendered, as having been ultimately their progeny. Hence, yet not only while they abide on the heights of life, there besets them the half-obscure inkling, the tremulous inner urge by which their eventual ending would be disowned.
Although, on its face, the remark concerns peoples or perhaps nations (народы), one hardly twists its meaning by applying it to the arrangement of generations which developed with increasing velocity as the nineteenth century progressed. Simultaneity of desiring and disowning the end, typified that generational nexus also, and even more markedly, as it was of such recent vintage while already over its longevity grave doubts were starting to hover. In its movement onwards the hastening was obvious, but some furtive attempts at halting could be noted too.
Towards the last years of the nineteenth century, the alternation of generations, the pendulum-swings by which an even younger would shunt aside the one before it, sped up so far that most could do nothing in response but rush. Expending one’s allotment of time on vanities, hurrying up pour se faire remarquer, whoring away whatever moments of eternity one should have taken pains to preserve: into all this it was so easy to slip, amidst those conditions of haste, though therewith, as if in reprisal, the tense rapport with the ending became even more fraught. Hours when someone might carefully limn the death he would prefer one day to die, not out of fin de siècle sorrow, but rather that a better form could be lent to the time availed him, were ever scarcer, while yet ever more needful. For, increasingly with each new year, how could one really have become a single individual, rather than letting one’s moments go to waste, getting lost within a generation, without them?
Around 1900, probably no one compressed these difficulties into a question so well as did Rilke. That often it fell upon deaf ears, already called out for judgement.
Listen to just one stanza of his, dated 1903. (For the reader without German, I have sought to offer some taste of lines which are quite inimitable.)
Denn dieses macht das Sterben fremd und schwer,
daß es nicht unser Tot ist; einer der
uns endlich nimmt, nur weil wir keinen reifen;
drum geht ein Sturm, uns alle abzustreifen.*
(For by this is dying made hard and strange,
that the death is not ours: it does arrange
at last to take us – none ripens of our own;
thus there comes a storm, to wipe us out alone.)
The storm, of course, even then was no mere figment of a poet’s imagination, and yet Rilke it seems already heard something of a cataclysm of mortality on the advance, perhaps even intuiting how it would actually strike. Animosity of the generations towards one another, might well contribute some impetus to the outbreak, when it did happen – this anticipation one might also discern in his work before the World War.
* Das Stunden-Buch, bk. iii, “Herr: Wir sind ärmer denn die armen Tiere”
As the most serious international crises erupted one after another, just a few years into the twentieth century, war in some shape seemed more and more likely to be precipitated, as did happen ultimately in 1914.
Quite possibly, however, the system of generations had already in effect collapsed some years before the World War, in consequence of the multiplication of the largest events and the abbreviation of the window of time during which any single generation would have had to emerge onto the public scene. Thus that system, like so much else, had been ground down under the sheer acceleration which was commencing to reign in all domains of life.
Now, if this conjecture is plausible, then one or another of the generations prior to the Lost Generation would effectively have been the last in the sequence, while the terminology itself continued to be used only faute de mieux. Then, in the stead of the earlier conflicts amongst generations, what one would have started to witness flaring up were other varieties of strife, more difficult to categorise, but most likely evincing on a minor scale the qualities of a bellum omnium contra omnes.
During a well-known parliamentary address, in 1910, probably some alarms of an imminent world-conflagration sounding in his mind, Jean Jaurès with great eloquence berated the ruling class on account of the recklessness of its policies domestic and foreign, arraigning it as a betrayer of every earlier generation, and claiming the whole heritage had passed into the hands of the cause he stood for.
In summation he said this: Messieurs, oui, nous avons, nous aussi, le culte du passé. Ce n’est pas en vain que tous les foyers des générations humaines ont flambé, ont rayonné ; mais c’est nous, parce que nous marchons, parce que nous luttons pour un idéal nouveau, c’est nous qui sommes les vrais héritiers du foyer des aïeux ; nous en avons pris la flamme, vous n’en avez gardé que la cendre.* – In situ a spirited retort!
* speech in the Chambre des députés, January 21, 1910
Yet, when read again, one may note in his words some degree of rhetorical excess, and begin to wonder whether he himself entertained doubts about the edifice of the generations he spoke of, as an inheritor. How easily, all too easily, would come the very idea of it as such, when the thing itself no longer was there to inherit, once the generational system had broken down, the modicum of stability specific to it having been destroyed on account of its own accelerating impetus. A man so well versed in the philosophy of the nineteenth century as Jaurès, the several philosophies of history in particular, could readily have inferred from the sheer obviousness with which the idea appeared, that that to which it pointed already had departed, historically speaking, and that that which commonly was taken for it, was nothing other than the massive remnants those generational relations did actually leave behind once their span of time was over.
During its own lifetime the system of those relations induced perplexity in them who passed through it – imagine then how more perplexed those must have been (I refer to the more acute) who strove to fathom their situations in its aftermath!
This matter constitutes no mere pastime or parlour game, but should be regarded in all seriousness. The attitude of the young towards a society which more and more seemed positively to take delight when it provided no place to many of them, such that the ranks of those who were, so to speak, dispossessed in advance, swelled up enormously – this attitude becomes a factor of the first importance. Some decades into the twentieth century, from amongst this group not a few would voyage quite a ways further than au bout de la nuit, attaching themselves to causes which earlier even they would have eschewed. Desperation does tend to take one quite far! But already in 1914, amongst the youth, some of the enthusiasm for the war when it broke out, can be traced back to this prospective awareness of the meagre scraps of a future otherwise in store for them. – Enlisting then did appear to offer a way out of the impasse.
A statement of the bewilderment, indeed the consternation, wherein the young found themselves, once the generational system had died or been murdered, and they were propelled and propelled themselves into the quandaries that sprung up thereafter, is included in the novel by Lawrence which gestated in the war years. Quite incisively, at one crux the narrator is moved to observe of Gerald Crich: He knew that all his life he had been wrenching at the frame of life to break it apart. And now, with something of the terror of a destructive child, he saw himself on the point of inheriting his own destruction.* His own destruction – ponder the ambiguity in this phrase! How ever much or little he may have thought about putting things into a new order, he had destroyed his share, and now found he himself was one of those things (era una de esas cosas), as Jorge Luis Borges might say.** To have to live with – as though inheriting it – such a self largely of one’s own making, is simply terrifying. What kind of thinking would still be possible for a mind lost amidst this terror?
* Women in Love, ch. xvii
** “Deutsches Requiem”
Around a century earlier, those who wanted to be individuals, not members of a generation, may have been placed in difficulty, in their rapports with their own consciences (and, who knows, perhaps other faculties of mind or sense as well), but apart from these relatively infrequent cases, the animosities which the generational system provoked seem to have been mainly external in nature: antipathies of the generations against one another. But now – towards the end of the 1910s – hostility was breaking out everywhere and within everyone, and especially the young, for no longer were generations arriving on the scene to which they would belong, and thus neither could one distance oneself from such an affiliation in the aim of becoming an individual. And, as regards the activity for the sake of activity that began to be propounded as a remedy, often it exacerbated the problems, whenever it brought about an interpenetration, an explosive, irritable mélange of juvenile and obsolescent tendencies in the character of those who followed the prescription habitually.
While at the end of the war, revolution did break out in a defeated Germany, it was swiftly put down. This is not the place to delve into the particulars, but I shall say that some of its critics then and later were not really wrong to discern a lack of seriousness at work in it, such as fundamentally to distinguish the German 1918 from the revolutions of the late eighteenth century.* Hence no initial generation came together, no system of generations was instaurated there in that year. What emerged instead, was the Weimar Republic.
* Especially in Munich, the uprisings seem largely to have been the handiwork of the literati, who showed themselves less interested in taking political power than in staging a bloody carnival that calls itself a revolution (dieser blutige Karneval, der sich Revolution nennt), as Max Weber castigated their undertakings. (This view his widow and editor Marianne Weber reported later, in an annotation included in the Gesammelte politische Schriften.) However, the events in Berlin did manifest a different character, and their memory does endure.
Probably because the post-war constitutional arrangements in Germany were widely perceived from the first as a substitute for a real new beginning, or in any event as a bad compromise, during the Weimar years an incisive skepticism set the tone in political and cultural life. Inquisitive, even querulous eyes and ears were also turned upon the past, and often pierced right through the outer layers to discern the actual functioning of institutions previously esteemed and ignored: in keeping with the researches of Nietzsche and Weber and energised by them, the taming, disciplining, and breeding (Züchtung) of human beings was uncovered as that which those establishments’ real aim all along had been. To what end was all this done, however – both by those institutions themselves and by those who investigated them in this newly searching way – to that question plausible answers were not given.* But could they have been given then at all, when the generational system had died years before, the youth of 1914 in immense numbers shortly thereafter, and by the war’s end an entire world’s sense of its own direction?
* Perhaps they hesitated to imagine what manner of Züchtung a retrospective glance from some distant year might uncover in their own probing inquiries.
Incisiveness in the posing of questions coupled with some deficit of curiosity about the reason for the questioning – that is one hallmark of a nihilist attitude. And all the more so, when this mode of inquiry is trained by the young upon a defunct institution from which nonetheless they too have sprung, namely, the system of generations, henceforth considered as having been a structure akin to a cage (Gehäuse). Nihilism like this turns not least on the nihilists themselves – of whom many still desire it even while they disown it.
Roughly speaking, this situation took on a more and more definite shape, from 1918 onwards. Towards the end of the war Karl Jaspers began to fathom it and its vicissitudes. Consider this sentence, published in 1919: Wenn ein Gehäuse als Gehäuse, als Züchtungsmittel durchschaut wird, so tritt Nihilismus auf; besonders dann, wenn keine positive Kraft das frühere Gehäuse sprengt, sondern bloße Wahrhaftigkeit und Kritik.* Although the remark is difficult to render precisely into English, on account of the resonances accruing since Nietzsche and Weber to the main terms that figure in it, nonetheless the gist can be put as follows. If an institution qua institution, as a means for breeding the human being, is seen through, then nihilism takes the stage, especially whenever it was not a positive force which shattered that earlier domicile, but rather mere veracity and the urge to criticise. – Note that nihilism is ascertained as responding to this latter inclination, and how both are typified as almost theatrical varieties of posturing.
* Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, ch. iii, 5, a, ii, 2
A year before Germany, Russia too had been defeated in the war, undergoing revolution in consequence. Neither of its two upheavals can be denigrated as bloody carnivals and nothing more: both, and especially the October Revolution, did grip the world’s attention in something of the way the French Revolution once had done. And yet, the generational system that dates back to the close of the eighteenth century having expired in the meantime, but not an abiding memory of the hopes buoyed up by 1789 and then rudely punctured, unsurprisingly the later iteration in Russia was also soon abjured by a few who anticipated where it would go, the standards it would debase, taking an early stand by virtue of what they knew of both the matter and the ideals of history. Their objection drew upon that positive force (positive Kraft) – I refer to opponents of the October Revolution whose principles were decidedly of the left, and most especially to one of the first and sharpest of them, Rebecca West. (In this context, the term “left” is anything but obsolete.) To her, committed as she was not to wish away history’s bleakness, we owe a prescient statement of why at bottom the French Revolution has exerted such an appeal. Although she published these insights after the Second World War, they may well been noted down during the heyday of the Lost Generation. Possibly they even were formulated with a view towards it and its predilections.
It was in her view – and, granted, the proposal delivers a small shock even today – the low theatre of the event, the nonsensical spectacle it provided, which did the trick. Stagings of make-believe were taken for an accomplished reality, seemingly by everyone, as though a universal consensus obtained: such an efficacious formula it proved! The French Revolution has given pleasure to all subsequent generations because it was an outstanding event which afterwards proved never to have happened. That is, perversely, it achieved little to nothing of what its protagonists had set out to do. Moreover, it was emulated not despite but precisely on account of its failure (though then this word may be a misnomer), taken simply as such, not as an occasion whereby later generations would be afforded the chance to set it right by some contribution of their own. The Russian Revolution, which is plainly going to be a source of still greater satisfaction, achieves a more perfect balance; for, with an enormously greater expenditure of blood than France ever saw, it slowly reconstituted the Tsardom it destroyed, identical in spirit, and reinforced in matter; so that the waste of the revolutionaries’ creative effort is manifestly more extravagant.* – Squandering, ressentiment, Schadenfreude: yes, one does have reason to take this dim view as published, as having been reached amidst the situation of the 1920s.
* The Meaning of Treason, i, 6
Inclination at most only half-hidden to take delight in rivers of blood shed for no reason, spread far after the World War, and even those who deemed themselves immune to the temptation might have found themselves given quite a surprise. Many were the paths by which it surged up, and those of the Lost Generation often did travel them, or seemed poised to, though not without some disowning of the ends towards which desire of it would conduce.
Attended by the fear it called forth, her insight that the historical stature of the French Revolution to begin with, and also those which emulated it, was a result of dramatising over and over before the eyes and ears of the public an immense spectacle of wasteful, pointless expenditure: orgies of self-destruction whose motive force shattered the bounds of any plausible rationality – this observation surely not she alone had arrived at, during the 1920s. After all, it does closely match the horrifying experience of the World War from which the Lost Generation had emerged.* Moreover, in that decade, the observers’ fear found its counterpart in the other, yet more insidious, which tinged the concern, even the consternation, amongst many of the members of that group, just as they began to realise how difficult might prove the effort to free themselves from the force of attraction of those spectacles of expenditure. For the manifold appeal ran deeper than many knew or could admit. To mention only the most salient point, should they bid good-bye to all that, the leave-taking would also require of them to abandon further remnants of what they themselves had been given and still were. Quite bereft already, how much more might they be willing to lose?
* Whether actually the Lost Generation was a post-generational group, as I surmise, is of little importance in this connection.
The Lost Generation, then, was likely an unmentioned environ, a context left unspecified, where this insidious fear began to manifest itself, after the World War.
Almost ten years later, when he sought to characterise that experience whose vector was so difficult to define, Angst, one might conclude Martin Heidegger had thought hard about the insidious prevalence of fear. Were the “whence” of Angst not fully indeterminate, his major work, published in 1927, suggested, then it could not be Angst, although care was taken to withhold this fuller corollary from the statement. Das Wovor der Angst ist völlig unbestimmt. Where precisely Angst comes from, the exact spot at which it is provoked, this one cannot locate. Daher »sieht« die Angst auch nicht ein bestimmtes »Hier« und »Dort«, aus dem her sich das Bedrohliche nähert. Daß das Bedrohende nirgends ist, charakterisiert das Wovor der Angst. – No more than the sense of his remarks shall I try to give, for their resonances probably a poet alone could replicate. – Therefore Angst does not even “see” a definite “here” and “there” from out of which whatever poses a threat does approach. That the threat posed is nowhere, characterises the “whence” of Angst. If it is “nowhere,” then, although the “whence” is indeterminable, the meaning of “nowhere” evidently can be delimited. »Nirgends« aber bedeutet nicht nichts, sondern darin liegt Gegend überhaupt – a startling reversal, which the whole passage may have been devised to arrive at. “Nowhere,” however, does not signify nothing at all, rather, therein one’s surroundings in general lie. Now, with this turn of phrase, he seems to aver that the surroundings (die Gegend) abut against one in some inimical manner – this nuance forms one of the elusive resonances of which he was a master. But then, one’s “surroundings” are also, indeed quite potently, within oneself, for by that juncture, in the 1920s, if not already years earlier, the insidious fear induced inner upheavals whereby one became a most tenacious antagonist to oneself. One might then meet with threats issuing out of what in earlier ages had been called the core of oneself. Neither, therefore, can the threat approach by a definite direction from within the vicinity; it is already “there” – and yet nowhere, it is so near that it presses one down and makes breathing hard – and yet nowhere. Das Drohende kann sich deshalb auch nicht aus einer bestimmten Richtung her innerhalb der Nähe nähern, es ist schon »da« – und doch nirgends, es ist so nah, daß es beengt und einem den Atem verschlägt – und doch nirgends.* – At once nowhere, everywhere, anywhere . . . where then to go, if one wished no longer to burden oneself with Angst?
* Sein und Zeit, pt. i, sec. i, ch. vi, § 40
A more properly human existence involves a confrontation with, rather than an evasion of Angst, if only in order to find the best dosage with which to administer it to oneself – this recommendation, which an analysis might eke out of his words, seems weak. And for whom would it have been prescribed really?
Not only as a sign of Angst, disturbance of breath in any form poses not so much a “threat” (das Bedrohliche, das Bedrohende, das Drohende, whatever those terms were invented to encompass) but rather a practical problem of the first order to several types of musicians. That is obvious. Less so, but not very, is the likelihood that such disturbance impinges upon the creativity of poets, insofar as it affects the awareness they have of time, and therewith disorders the fine-tuning of their sense of meter. (The capacity to recite their own poems well, while composing them, I mention in passing.) Slightly more obscure is the importance of breath to the thinkers, but in their main activity it seems to play some vital roles also.
For the kind of “surroundings” wherein Angst is least well comprehended, elsewhere in his book Heidegger devises a rubric whose facets he explores at length: average everydayness (die durchschnittliche Alltäglichkeit). Where it holds sway, illumination of this and other like matters is hardly to be expected – hence there, in accordance with the remark I’ve tried to clarify, taking the philosopher at his word (though to do so in this case is admittedly contra-indicated), difficulty in breathing will be a common occurrence, as frequent as the several outbreaks of Angst. With this, even if readers understand the idea of respiration in a more figurative way, they could infer that he was touching upon a problem widespread during the 1920s, one of the several later consequences of the war years. So perhaps, in short, the dilemmas of the Lost Generation preoccupied him too.
In 1931, some time after he had heard of the death of Mayakovsky, a poet in whom can be espied admixtures of the musician and the thinker, and a figure whose trajectory could confirm that after the war Russia too knew a group akin to the Lost Generation, his friend Roman Jakobson dedicated an essay that is both mournful and scintillating to the departed, aiming the remarks at a generation that has squandered its poets. The brief interval did have its reasons, he explained. Сейчас больней, но легче писать не об утраченном, а скорее об утрате и утративших. It’s more painful now, yet easier to write not simply about him whom we’ve lost, but rather about loss and us who have lost him. And indeed, the undertaking does seem implicitly to focus on the question, though of course without stating it, What killed him? To this one answer appears to be, daily life, that is to say, the present housed in its own ordinariness, a condition the poet came to find intolerable, especially on account of the war and all that so many suffered, and for what? Творческому порыву в преображенное будущее противопоставлена тенденция к стабилизации неизменного настоящего, его обрастание косным хламом, замирание жизни в тесные окостенелые шаблоны. Имя этой стихии – быт.* The creative impulse towards a future transformed, is opposed to the inclination to stabilise the unchanging present, to befoul it with inert rubbish, to congeal life within constricting, ossified moulds. The name of this latter element: “daily life.” Amidst those viscous surroundings, one infers, the poet found he could hardly breathe.
* “О поколении, растратившем своих поэтов”
Ordinary existence, whichever be the term settled on for its designation, as the 1920s elapsed had become stifling, a condition felt widely in the countries that experienced the war. Stifled to some degree was not least the possibility of speaking anything other than banalities in the public realm, or else into the void-like spaces newly if not bravely emergent in its stead.
If, taking one’s chances, one spoke seriously there, this “Wagnis der Öffentlichkeit,” as Jaspers’ exemplary venturing into the public realm during the Weimar years and then again from 1945 onwards, later was called by Hannah Arendt,* forays premised upon, she noted, a kind of trust, difficult to formulate, in some capacity of the human being, all too often did not obtain an adequate hearing for what was said. Even the sound of it got distorted or squelched, as though to underscore one of Heidegger’s topical sarcasms** by an acoustic adaptation: the reverberance of the public drones out everything. Noise became a destructive element in which many were ceasing to notice their immersion: for them soon enough its locus would indeed be “nowhere.” Amidst these surroundings, ears for the actual voices of conscience, both inward and outward, were placed at a disadvantage; while more and more frequently heard were those that appealed to their “consciences” as though these somehow should guarantee whatever they said. And probably they could have found no other way to draw attention publicly, than by such voluble sub-rhetorical throat-clearings – but thereby a paradigm had been set which was followed repeatedly decades later, in the Germany of the Federal Republic, once it became obvious, by the early 1960s, that the opportunity at war’s end of starting anew had been squandered. As transpired when the statute-of-limitations legislation was under debate in Bonn in 1965. Not surprisingly, Jaspers stepped up to draw attention to the parliamentarians’ tell-tale theatrics. Das Gewissen wird zum lauten Anspruch, um sich dem Gewissen zu entziehen. Wir haben es 1933 erlebt.*** “Conscience” becomes merely a loud claiming of attention, so that one may evade real conscience. We saw it in 1933. And by no means only in public, he added immediately, but amongst those whom one thought one knew well. Thus the basis of trust in the human being, without which no venture into the public realm could be risked, was put under threat and endangered wherever one went.
* interview with Günter Gaus, ad finem
** Sein und Zeit, pt. i, sec. i, ch. iv, § 27
*** Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik?, Zweites Stück, v
That exposed situation, I contend, we now again are nearing, especially since 2020, in the “civilised West” at least. Ever fewer allocations of a future, lead many to lose their way, and for this reason I’ve traced the backstory of the Lost Generation, at a moment which exults in knowing neither history nor caution.
What of Hemingway’s poems? I do have to say something about them, after all.
Prose was his forte; these excursions into poetry (appearing in the January 1923 issue of the eponymous journal) come as a surprise. While one sees why he barely did persist in that line, even so there is something there that seems like it matters, regardless of its measure over against all that he later would do, publish, and be.
Because his “Wanderings,” by now entered into the half-forgotten reaches of the public domain, are also wonderings and ponderings, including the text of the poems as first printed is permissible and appropriate, as is giving them in inverse order, last to first, retro-traversing them for the sake I hope of a sharper commentary.
To begin with, then, the ultimate poem, “Chapter Heading.”
For we have thought the longer thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devils’ tunes,
Shivering home to pray;
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day.
This thinker remonstrates with himself, though softly, faulting himself for not thinking through the shorter thoughts, those which wanted further consideration to unfold them, while having refrained from setting out on the longer road, that is, really wandering. And for all this he arraigns himself not merely as one alone, but also representatively – as being of a generation that has lost its way. Here the World War already lurks in the background. Where were those dark dances held? In trenches at the front. What now is home for them? Ordinary days to which they subordinate themselves, in order to divert their thoughts from all that they had lived through, while dwelling upon it at night, and especially upon the memory of their fellows who did not return, as though this debt they never could cease to pay. An antagonism towards themselves they then regarded as incumbent upon them: without it, how ever hard it proved to maintain and observe, they would not be. Yet quite possibly it would have done them or something within them well to wander far from themselves and thus not to be. – A further topic to think over.
Syncopations, irony, anacolutha flit by through “Champs d’honneur” (for in fact they mainly were fields of horror), the penultimate poem.
Soldiers never do die well;
Crosses mark the places–
Wooden crosses where they fell,
Stuck above their faces.
Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch–
All the world roars red and black;
Soldiers smother in a ditch,
Choking through the whole attack.
Meagre honours paid them are, if viewed with a clear eye, signs of disrespect, even of contempt. Perhaps into these memorials there enters an admixture of pleasure taken in the sheer pointlessness of their sacrifice. (Think here of West’s clarity of insight into the actual attractiveness of great events.) Then the commemorative words ring hollow, and all the hollower if the sonority of the suffering is brought back to mind – the ears set ringing and deafened by explosions, the breaths made a vector of torture by flame-throwers and poison gas. But such comprehension of what the soldiers went through, is forestalled by the bits of poorly-remembered old novels in too many minds, which magnify the heroic aspect of a very different kind of warfare, as if nothing much changed in the century since. Recollections of literature which cloud their vision, encourage them to shout in support of the war, while those on the frontlines quite often return having lost all ability to speak.
It is the insistent music underneath speech that one can hear in the fourth poem, “Riparto d’assalto.”
Drummed their boots on the camion floor,
Hob-nailed boots on the camion floor.
Sergeants stiff,
Corporals sore.
Lieutenants thought of a Mestre whore–
Warm and soft and sleepy whore,
Cozy, warm and lovely whore:
Damned cold, bitter, rotten ride,
Winding road up the Grappa side.
Arditi on benches stiff and cold,
Pride of their country stiff and cold,
Bristly faces, dirty hides–
Infantry marches, Arditi rides.
Grey, cold, bitter, sullen ride–
To splintered pines on the Grappa side
At Asalone, where the truck-load died.
This poetic music recapitulates the mnemonic devices by which objects, incidents, assaults are kept in mind which otherwise would slip from or shatter the grasp of anyone’s attentiveness. Obvious elements of assonance and rhyme enter into and fortify it, in accord with the soldiers’ unsubtle needs. And, as battle approaches, it may do more than sustain the capacity of attention of the élite unit of the title; beyond that, it may help to fix in their minds some cartographic and topographic points of orientation they will soon require in the field or on other terrains. This too is a question wanderers could ponder: how far guidance, in quite a literal sense, does constitute one amongst the less often recognised powers of music.
With the third poem, consideration is given to the “rough rider” and man in the arena par excellence, “Roosevelt,” and to the mystique engendered around him.
Workingmen believed
He busted trusts,
And put his picture in their windows.
“What he’d have done in France!”
They said.
Perhaps he would–
Perhaps,
Though generals rarely die except in bed,
As he did finally.
And all the legends that he started in his life
Live on and prosper,
Unhampered now by his existence.
A hundred years on, they are being undone as his memory is manœuvred into public non-existence, his statue removed from the vicinity of the institution which would hardly have grown up in the same way without him. – How will those at the forefront of these contemporary “cancellations” fare, once an even younger group turns its nihilist ire on them? Assuming, of course, that everyone is not cancelled out in the meantime by the even worse nihilists now in high places, or otherwise turned into specimens on display in some museum.
The second poem, “Oily Weather,” broods erotically in a way one might expect from the later author of the collection Men Without Women.
The sea desires deep hulls–
It swells and rolls.
The screw churns a throb–
Driving, throbbing, progressing.
The sea rolls with love,
Surging, caressing,
Undulating its great loving belly.
The sea is big and old–
Throbbing ships scorn it.
But since I will refrain from connecting these poems to any of the subsequent work, such tempestuous oceanic sentiment may be left to sing on its own behalf the best it can.
Coming now to the first poem, “Mitrailliatrice,” I should acknowledge that it is the one which intrigued me initially.
The mills of the gods grind slowly
But this mill
Chatters in mechanical staccato.
Ugly short infantry of the mind,
Advancing over difficult terrain,
Make this Corona
Their mitrailleuse.
A hundred years ago, the rat-a-tat of the typewriter was the sound of warfare conducted by other means. – Since 2020, hallucinatory unease provoked by a virus has been a main political weapon in maleficent hands. We have most likely not heard the last of those theatrics, which were deployed so effectively the first time. – As for the affiliation of vicarious war-fantasies with old racial hatreds, more and more openly espoused recently, and especially since October, its history extends back much further than a century. But all that will remain a tale for another time.