Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945
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sunbathed rivers; of adventurous liners scenting the horizon; of broad-chested locomo-
tives prancing on the rails, like huge steel horses bridled with long tubes; and of the
gliding flight of aeroplanes, the sound of whose screw is like the flapping of flags and
the applause of an enthusiastic crowd.
6
Marinetti’s rant might have simply remained just that, had it not been for the
convergence of a number of historical factors. First, in terms of modernist aesthetics,
futurism was not the idea of a solitary man, but quickly developed into a multifaceted
artistic movement in Italian literature, poetry, painting, and music – a movement so
strong that it was one of the few early avant-gardes to survive the Great War of 1914
(Marinetti became a supporter of Mussolini’s fascist Italy in the 1920s). Second,
futurism influenced the development of other radical avant-garde movements during
and after the war, directly upon Bolshevik constructivism through Russian poet and
playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky, and indirectly upon the dada and surrealist move-
ments. But perhaps the most difficult and disturbing historical dimension of futurism
lay in its prescience about the near future. Barely five years after the appearance of
the manifesto, the conflagration of technological warfare would engulf Europe and
traumatize millions of ordinary people. The terrible beauty of the modern world no
longer remained an image fashioned by a futurist avant-garde, but would become
the subjective reality of the masses.
From Radical Avant-Garde to the New Sobriety
The traumatic effects of World War I upon the European economy, politics, society,
and culture were overwhelming. This applies no less to modernism than to any other
realm. In the immediate aftermath of the war, a radicalized avant-garde emerged,
survivors of the “Generation of 1914” who were ready to scrap the values of their
fathers and to construct an entirely new culture and society out of the wreckage of
industrial warfare and empire. Many of the influential figures from the radical avant-
garde belonged to the revolutionary communist left, or at least their political sym-
pathies lay in that direction. Other avant-garde artists and writers, however, moved
to the political right, and the most extreme of them became supporters of fascism.
Within a decade after the end of the Great War, modernism also began to become
domesticated into the service of corporate business and government-sponsored public
works projects. Yet the war itself was the crucible from which these developments in
modernism emerged.
As trench warfare settled into stalemate on the western front, an assortment of
nonconformists and pacifists who refused to take part in patriotic slaughter took
refuge in the Swiss city of Zurich. There, in May 1915, German expressionist writer
Hugo Ball opened the “Cabaret Voltaire,” featuring chanteuse Emmy Hennings
singing popular songs from Munich and Paris. Within a few months, the cabaret had
developed into a bohemian club, attracting a refugee clientele of artists and the
curious from Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, and Romania. Abstract and primitivist
art by Hans Arp and Augusto Giacometti adorned the walls of the Cabaret Voltaire.
“Simultaneous poetry” in multiple broken languages was performed by Tristan Tzara,
Marcel Janco, and Richard Huelsenbeck. Backed by a “brutist” musical accompani-
ment on piano, banjos, and drums, dancers in primitive masks designed by Janco
modernism 59
hopped around the stage and shouted “negro” chants. By the time the landlord
closed down the club in July 1916, because of its utter commercial failure, the per-
formances of the Cabaret Voltaire had a name: dada.
The birth of dada marked a crucial turning point for modernism as an anti-art
movement. Convinced that European art, literature, philosophy, and religion had
produced the kind of nationalistic jingoism responsible for the war, the avant-garde
project begun in the Cabaret Voltaire amounted to no less than the total rejection
of the aesthetics and values of western civilization and their replacement by dada, or
baby blather (“dada” is a child’s word for hobbyhorse in French). Deemed preferable
to the discontents of civilization, dada sought a direct connection between the objec-
tive world and subjective human experience by reducing art, language, and music to
their most primitive elements and endlessly recombining them into novel images,
poetry, and performances. Dada constituted an intellectual avant-garde as well.
“DADA MEANS NOTHING,” Tristan Tzara proclaimed in the Dada Manifesto of
1918. “Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, an interlacing of oppo-
sites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.”
7
Provocation and
irony were the critical tools of the anarchistic Zurich Dada movement.
Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck returned to Berlin and linked up with leftist artists
Georg Grosz, Wieland Herzfelde, and John Heartfield to form Club Dada in January
1918. Continuing with the anti-art agenda from Zurich, the early impulse in Berlin
Dada was one of “bluff and counter-bluff, bewilderment, and parody.”
8
Club Dada
chose writer and artist Raoul Hausmann as the movement’s “Dadasopher” and
heralded an apocalyptic Christian prophet named Joannes Baader as their “Superdada.”
Yet with the collapse of imperial Germany in November 1918, the subsequent com-
munist uprisings in Berlin and Bavaria, and the slaughter of communists by the roving
paramilitary Freikorps, Berlin Dada quickly moved in a revolutionary political direc-
tion. With disdain for the newly established Weimar Republic and admiration for the
Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Berlin Dada produced deliberately provocative politi-
cal art from the ephemeral materials of mass media. Montages from newspaper print
and magazine images emphasized dehumanization within the chaos of postwar life;
photomontage posters criticized the government and military; advertising parodies
attacked the values of capitalism and the decadent lifestyles of the bourgeoisie. The
culmination of the movement was realized in the Dada Fair of June 5, 1920, accom-
panied by the publishing of the Dada Almanach. By the mid-1920s, the antics of
Berlin Dada had been largely supplanted by the even more politically committed
Neue Sachlichkeit or “New Objectivity” movement. Leading artists in the movement
included Georg Grosz and Otto Dix, who politically adhered to the German
Communist Party and painted unflinchingly critical depictions of middle-class greed,
commodified sexuality, and military and political corruption into their works. Neue
Sachlichkeit was expressed through politically engaged theatrical productions as well,
such as in Man Equals Man by Bertolt Brecht and adaptations of films and novels
staged by Edwin Piscator.
In the newly established Soviet Union, the modernist avant-garde was put directly
into the service of the Bolshevik revolution. Following the October Revolution of
1917 and after a bitterly fought civil war, Russian artists, poets, actors, and film-
makers were organized by Anatoly Lunarcharsky, the Bolshevik Commissar of
Enlightenment, into the Prolecult (“proletarian culture”) movement to proselytize
60 robin walz
the people about the virtues of communism. Many participants adhered to the
leading radical avant-garde movement of the era, constructivism, and were more than
willing to participate in the utopian political project of building a new communist
society from scratch. The Constructivist Manifesto of 1921 stated: “We consider self-
sufficient studio art and our activity as mere painters to be useless . . . We declare
industrial art absolute and Constructivism its only form of expression.”
9
Constructivists
utterly rejected the nineteenth-century notion of “art for art’s sake” and gave art an
immediate and applied function, fusing technology with modern design toward
solving practical problems in everyday life. For example, Russian futurist poet Vladimir
Mayakovsky collaborated with painter and photographer Alexander Rodchenko to
design posters, advertising copy, and product logos for Soviet consumer goods.
Motion pictures represent perhaps the supreme expression of the constructivist fusion
of technology and art. Whether or not Lenin actually said, “Of all the arts, for us
the cinema is the most important,” there is no doubt that the Soviets seized upon
film’s propaganda potential. Constructivist techniques in film montage, in both
feature films and documentaries, pioneered by Sergei Eisenstein in Battleship Potemkin
(1925), Vsevolod Pudovkin in Mother (1926), and Dziga Vertov in Man with a Movie
Camera (1929), had lasting impacts upon the development of cinema, not only in
the Soviet Union but also internationally. In the early 1920s, during the experimental
years of the New Economic Policy (NEP), the constructivist avant-garde aspired to
mold new Soviet men and women through artistically directed modern technologies,
a cultural revolution that resonated with the more utopian aspects of the Bolshevik
revolution.
In postwar France, the cultural and political situation was altogether different.
Unlike defeated imperialist Germany or tsarist Russia, the victorious French Third
Republic had survived the Great War. But French victory had been achieved at the
cost of more than one and a half million French soldiers killed, and more than double
that number permanently maimed and psychologically traumatized. In homage, war
memorials were constructed across northern France, the site of the western front.
Soon, though, the mood of the country shifted toward a desire to “return to
normalcy.” Some members of the prewar avant-garde retreated from some of their
more radical modernist experiments, such as Picasso who gave up cubism for a more
humanist “neoclassical” period of portraiture and paintings based on classical themes.
Others sought to forget the immediate past in the frivolities of les années folles, the
“crazy years” of the jazz age. This superficially lighthearted mood permeated Paul
Colin’s Le Tumulte noir (1927), a portfolio of color lithographs celebrating the exotic
and erotic energy of African-American entertainer Josephine Baker, the sensation
of La Revue Nègre. Popular entertainment was preferable to dwelling upon war
trauma.
For other young Frenchmen of the “Generation of 1914,” such as André Breton,
Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, and Philippe Soupault, the war was not
something to be commemorated or forgotten, but served as the impetus to revolu-
tionize art and consciousness. These young men initially embraced the provocative
tactics of dada as their mode of expression, a choice reinforced by Tristan Tzara’s
move from Zurich to Paris in 1920, and by the inclusion of artists Marcel Duchamp,
Max Ernst, and Francis Picabia in the group. Within a few years, however, Breton in
particular became dissatisfied with the anti-art stance of dada, and he proposed a new
modernism 61
movement: surrealism. Where dada dismantled art, surrealism would create a new
reality, a sur-reality that would embrace the modern world at a higher level of con-
sciousness. In the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) Breton declared: “Surrealism is
based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of associations hitherto
neglected, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.”
10
The
goal was to reconfigure consciousness by breaking old patterns of thought, what
Breton called the “paucity of reality,” and then forming entirely new, richer, and
more complex images of modern life based upon juxtapositions between seemingly
dissimilar elements. Surrealist art would not be based upon preconceived ideas or
aesthetics, but would be drawn from the vast terrain of “found” objects (la trouvaille)
littering the modern cultural landscape, as well as from the biological unconscious.
The direct encounter with such unbounded material was, the surrealists believed, a
shocking experience to the human psyche, and the art yielded by such an encounter
expressed a “convulsive beauty.” The surrealists developed a range of techniques
to invoke the kinds of uncanny, disturbing experiences that would enhance surreal
perceptions, from word-and-image “exquisite corpse” games to “automatic writing”
from semi-trance dream states. While many of the early surrealists were poets and
writers, it was later through painting that surrealism became most widely known
through the work of such artists as André Masson, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, and
René Magritte.
Like Berlin Dada and Russian constructivism, Paris Surrealism associated itself
politically with the socialist and communist left. But other avant-garde movements
and modernists moved to the fascist right. In 1919 Marinetti and other Italian
futurists participated in the foundation of the Fascist Party. After spending 21 days
in prison with Mussolini at the end of that year, Marinetti became fervently anti-
communist. In Futurism and Fascism (1924) he proclaimed his avant-garde move-
ment to be the forerunner of Mussolini’s “New Italy” and his support remained
unabated in his openly fascist journal Futurismo of the 1930s. In France, too, some
modernists were drawn to fascism. French writer Pierre Drieu la Rochelle was, like
many of his surrealist contemporaries, part of the Generation of 1914. But unlike his
leftist colleagues, Drieu had been exhilarated by the experience of war and felt
deflated afterward. In works of fiction, most notably in Gilles (1939), as well as in
his life, Drieu flirted with fascist fantasies of power. The American poet Ezra Pound
was enticed by fascism as well. Expatriated to London in 1908, Pound was the leading
Anglo-American figure in the modernist literary movements of imagism and vorti-
cism. In 1925 he moved to Italy and became an open admirer of Mussolini, even to
the point of making pro-fascist radio broadcasts during World War II (arrested as a
traitor after the war, Pound was later confined to a mental asylum for the remainder
of his life). Revolutionary fantasies within modernism did not inherently drift toward
any political direction in particular.
Toward the end of the 1920s the revolutionary fervor of the radical avant-garde
from the immediate postwar era began to moderate toward what cultural critic John
Willet has called “the new sobriety.” Increasingly, modernist ideas were taking form
as practical applications, not only by the constructivists in the Soviet Union, but also
in public works projects sponsored within the parliamentary nations of France,
Germany, and Britain. Domestic collaborations between industry, government pro-
grams, and the modernist elite were perhaps most evident in the field of architecture.
62 robin walz
In many countries the principles of formalism and functionalism in modernist
architectural design were incorporated into public housing and other government-
sponsored projects. Le Corbusier (pseudonym of Charles Édouard Jeannert-Gris), a
Swiss architect who completed his most famous work after moving to France, became
a leading figure in formalist architectural design. Although few of his grand architec-
tural plans for France and its colonies were ever realized, through Towards a New
Architecture (1922) and his articles in the modernist journal L’Esprit nouveau, Le
Corbusier’s ideas about the fusion of architectural form with function received inter-
national attention and were applied worldwide (particularly housing projects in the
United States and the urban planning of Brasilia). In Weimar Germany, the Bauhaus
school in architecture spearheaded by Walter Gropius was contracted to complete
both exterior and interior designs for the Törten housing estates of the industrial city
of Dessau, and similar modernist housing projects were realized in Berlin, Frankfurt,
Cologne, Dresden, Stuttgart, and several other cities. In Britain, perhaps the most
impressive modernist architectural achievement of the interwar era involved the reno-
vation of the London Underground subway system. Everything about the system –
from the design of the stations to public art on display within them – became an
exercise in educating the public about modernist aesthetics. Modernist architectural
design, promoting the new aesthetic of form and function over traditional forms
of architecture, was no longer the sole purview of an avant-garde, but was being
incorporated into the bureaucratic procedures of urban planning.
In many ways, the years leading up to World War II represented the nadir of
modernism in Europe. During the 1930s several radical avant-garde movements
experienced substantial setbacks, particularly in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
After the death of Lenin, Stalin brought an end to the NEP and embarked upon a
project of industrial modernization and agricultural collectivization through a series
of state-centralized five-year plans. On the cultural level, this meant an end to the
influence of the constructivist avant-garde and the rise of socialist realism as the offi-
cial cultural policy of the Soviet Union. Some modernists, such as filmmaker Sergei
Eisenstein, managed to ride the transition. Others could not bridge the distance
between revolutionary creativity and the cultural constrictions imposed by socialist
realism, like the poet Mayakovsky, who committed suicide in April 1930. Still other
artists and writers would fall victim to Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s.
In Germany, the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 not only marked the end of the
Weimar republic, but also an end to modernist experimentation. The Nazi Party
purged over 20,000 works of modernist art from museums, and then put hundreds
of the pillaged pieces on display in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition
in Munich in 1937. Works by Kandinsky, Klee, Picasso, and other renowned modernist
artists, as well as a reconstruction of the Berlin Dada Fair, were presented as examples
of “Jewish” and “Bolshevistic” art. Simultaneously, the Großen Deutschen
Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) opened in Munich to showcase
“heroic” and Volkisch “Aryan” works produced by over 1,600 approved German
artists. While officially sanctioned Nazi art is generally regarded as kitsch, nonetheless
the regime continued to recognize the propaganda value of innovative, if not
modernist, design through its patronage of such accomplished individuals as architect
Albert Speer and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. A similar trend toward heroic art
occurred in fascist Italy during the 1930s, although the reaction against modernism
modernism 63
was never as pronounced as it was in Nazi Germany. Modernist design in architecture,
for example, continued to be used in certain housing projects, and futurist Marinetti
remained a staunch supporter of Mussolini’s regime.
In response to developments in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, parliamentary
nations of western Europe formed a Popular Front against fascism. At the cultural
level, the International Writers Congress for the Defense of Culture held in Paris in
June 1935 marked a hiatus in modernism. The meeting, directed by André Malraux
and André Gide, featured eminent leftist literary figures such as Ilya Ehrenberg, Boris
Pasternak, Henri Barbusse, and Louis Aragon (who had left the surrealist fold and
joined the Communist Party). Members of the radical avant-garde, such as André
Breton and other surrealists, were simply barred from participation. Experimental
modernism barely registered as a cultural challenge, let alone a political one. During
the Spanish Civil War, Picasso’s Guernica (1937) graphically depicted the pain and
tragedy of the fascist bombing of that village, yet the painting’s cubist aesthetic was
no longer perceived as radical. Even surrealism, for that matter, had lost much of its
provocative edge. In French newspapers, the International Surrealist Exhibition of
1938 was judged “mysterious but inoffensive.”
11
Modernism no longer interrupted
the normalcy of modernity, but had become one of its accepted features.
The radical challenge posed by modernism for European aesthetics at the dawn
of the twentieth century did not appear as radical four decades later. Not that
modernism had lost the impulse towards experimentation and innovation; the “shock
of the new” would continue to be an operative principle of modernist art well into
the latter half of the twentieth century. After World War II, in the 1950s, the geo-
graphic center of modernism would shift from Europe to New York City, and new
avant-garde figures and movements would emerge. But the dream of the early
twentieth-century modernist avant-garde to transform the consciousness of Europeans,
and even to change western civilization itself, had lost something of its radical edge.
From our “postmodern” perspective a century later, the aesthetic innovations of the
early avant-garde appear nearly commonplace. Modernist art and literature no longer
challenge establishment traditions; rather, they have become institutionalized in art
museums and canonized in the literature departments of major universities. Techniques
of abstraction and montage, as well as the creative impulses to innovate and shock,
are no longer the domains of an artistic elite, but have become the stock-in-trade of
commercial advertising, feature films, television, and computer-generated graphics.
There is little doubt that modernism has revolutionized culture, not only in Europe
but also across the globe. Yet the social and political aspirations of the modernist
avant-garde of the early twentieth century remain an unfinished project.
NOTES
1 Eugene Lunn,
Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin,
and Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 34–7.
2 James McFarlane, “The Mind of Modernism,” in
Modernism: A Guide to European
Literature 1890–1930, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds (New York: Penguin,
revd edn, 1991), p. 92. Reference to Yeats’s The Second Coming (1921) and italics are in
the original.
64 robin walz
3 Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press,
1990), p. 6.
4 Quoted in Christopher Butler,
Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe
1900–1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 35.
5 Quoted in Butler,
Early Modernism, p. 67.
6 F. T. Marinetti, “Manifesto of Futurism (20 February 1909),” in
University of Chicago
Readings in Western Civilization, vol. 9: Twentieth-Century Europe, John W. Boyer and
Jan Goldstein, eds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 10.
7 Quoted in Robert Motherwell, ed.,
The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, 2nd edn,
Ralph Manheim, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 77, 82.
8 Malcolm Green, preface to
The Dada Almanach, Richard Huelsenbeck, ed., Malcolm
Green et al., trans. (London: Atlas Press, 1993), p. viii.
9 Quoted in John E. Bowlt, “Constructivism and Early Soviet Fashion Design,” in
Bolshevik
Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, Abbot Gleason, Peter Kenez,
and Richard Stites, eds (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 204.
10 André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924),” in
Manifestoes of Surrealism, Richard
Seaver and Helen R. Lane, trans. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969),
p. 27.
11 Elyette Benassaya, “Le Surréalisme face à la presse,”
Mélusine 1 (1979): 144–5.
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature
1890–1930, revd edn (London: Penguin, 1991). A comprehensive survey of modernist
literary movements, poetry, novels, and drama across Europe.
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Michael Shaw trans. (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984). A critical evaluation of the failure of the modernist avant-garde of
the interwar era to create an autonomous artistic and intellectual sphere independent
of either mass culture or the institutionalized art museum.
Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900–1916
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). A detailed treatment of the early development of
modernist aesthetics, identity, urban poetics, movements, and the avant-garde in France,
Italy, Germany, and Britain.
Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch,
Postmodernism, 2nd edn (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1987). A history of ideas
that sets modernity, the avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism within a broader
concept of the modern extending from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.
Peter Childs, Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000). Thematic overview covering major
nineteenth-century intellectuals who prefigured modernism, genres of modernist art and
literature, and interpretations of key modernist works.
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, revd edn (New York: Knopf, 1991). Companion book
to the BBC/Time-Life series of the same title that provides a comprehensive overview of
modernist art internationally across the twentieth century.
Alice Yeager Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual
Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). A provocative treatment of fascist
tendencies in the work and thought of French writers and intellectuals.
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1983). An intellectual history of the multiple technological, cultural, and intellectual
innovations that reconceived time and space in such terms as synchronicity, speed, and
simultaneity.
modernism 65
Michael Levenson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999). A collection that critically reevaluates primarily Anglo-American
modernism both by theme (philosophy, cultural economy and politics, gender) and by dis-
cipline (poetry, drama, novel, visual arts, film).
Donald M. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982). An intellectual history that argues the epistemic shift from linearity to multi-
perspectivity occurred in Europe during the decade 1905–15.
Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, revd edn, Richard Howard, trans. (Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). The foundational treatment of the origins and
developments of dada and surrealism.
Peter Nichols, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
A comprehensive survey of modernist literary movements throughout Europe, from
Baudelaire and the symbolists in the late nineteenth century through futurism, dada, and
surrealism in the early twentieth century.
Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Gerald Fitzgerald, trans. (New York: Icon
Editions/Harper and Row, 1971). A classic work that charts the development of the idea
of an artistic and intellectual avant-garde in Europe across the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
Michael T. Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London
Underground (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). A cultural history that explores the
union of modernist aesthetics and industrial craft among British modernists, best illustrated
in the renovation of the London Underground during the 1930s.
Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and
Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). An intellectual history
that views modernism as a response to the success of the Enlightenment to produce a new
civilization of material, cultural, and demographic abundance.
John Willitt, Art and Politics in the Weimar Period: The New Sobriety 1917–1933 (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1978). A landmark study of the relationships between modernist move-
ments, social transformations, and political change in interwar Europe.
Chapter Five
The Cult of Youth
Elizabeth Harvey
Celebrating youth and youthfulness, and attributing to the years between puberty
and young adulthood a whole range of attractive characteristics – beauty, health,
purity, energy, idealism, creativity, boldness, vision – had plenty of precedents in
Europe before 1900. But there are good reasons for seeing a “cult of youth” as
having a particular significance in this epoch. It was a time of burgeoning discourses
about youth, youthfulness, and the notion of a “young generation.” These were
typically produced by cultural critics, politicians, artists, scientists, and educationalists
who identified themselves with or claimed expertise about “youth.” But the
discourses about youth were also shaped by young people in their teens and early
twenties, particularly those involved in youth movements of one sort or another,
celebrating themselves and promoting their own versions of the “youth myth.”
The notion of a “cult of youth” evokes two contradictory meanings. On the one
hand, it implies the lavishing of attention on the actual young, based on a view of
the life-cycle in which youth is valued all the more because of its transience and its
“otherness.” From this perspective, youth is expected to express itself, to be rebel-
lious, romantic or escapist, tender or tough, graceful or virile, but at any rate to “be
different” and to “be itself.” On the other hand, the cult of youth suggests the cele-
bration of the “vital” qualities of youthfulness and the quest for individual and
collective “rejuvenation” – making youthfulness not an attribute of the life-cycle but
a quality to which society as a whole could aspire. To be eternally “youthful” was to
escape, in the imagination, from adult responsibilities and the passage of time and to
remain in a constant state of “openness,” characterized by uncertainty and vulnerabil-
ity, but also by energy, mobility, and dynamism. It was an ideal trope upon which to
project the idea of the modern individual.
As a slogan of cultural criticism and political campaigning, “Youth!” was as vacuous
as they came. It suggested simply a radical rejection of establishments and the old
order – “our civilization is senile and rotten” – and a bold message for the future:
“make way for the young!” The cult of youth could thus serve as a substitute for
political analysis and strategies for political change. As Frank Trommler has pointed
out, “myths of youth are easier to produce than revolutions.”
1
the cult of youth 67
At the same time, the cult of youth did carry a distinct political charge in two
senses. Firstly, it consistently coded youth as masculine: the creativity associated with
youthfulness was typically equated with virility and potency. In an era of feminist
challenges to patriarchal thinking, the cult of youth usually functioned as a rearguard
defense of masculinity-in-peril. Young women’s inclusion within the positively charged
discourse of youthfulness, their access to the social power bestowed upon the young,
would entail them being constructed as more boyish or androgynous, more
“comradely.”
2
Secondly, the cult of youth suggested that the fundamental cleavages in society
were generational ones. Generational identities and generational conflict could be
presented as a key to contemporary history: accentuated by the watershed of World
War I, the impression of a rapid succession of age cohorts, each identified as a “gen-
eration” in relation to a distinct historical moment, served to underline the sense of
discontinuity and rupture in the modern world.
3
Those who sought to base a political
program on the idea of generations tended to reject class struggle and parliamentary
government in favor of “organic” notions of solidarity and vaguely conceived
“renewal.” It was a type of politics that dovetailed easily with hostility to Marxism
and classic liberalism as well as feminism.
This essay will consider five aspects of the “cult of youth.” Firstly, it will ask how
it reflected responses on the part of educated elites before World War I to modernity.
Secondly, it will look at how it translated into contrasting formations of youth culture
before 1914. Thirdly, it will consider how World War I added new meanings to the
cult of youth and fueled the idea of “generations” in political life. Fourthly, it will
examine the cult of youth in the interwar period in its guise as a cult of the youthful
body. Fifthly, it will explore how fascist movements in the interwar period deployed
ideas of youth and the “young generation” as a legitimating claim for their particular
brand of reactionary “revolution.”
Against Degeneration
One explanation for the virulence of the cult of youth in Europe in the period from
the 1890s up to World War I can be found in the “biological thinking” that charac-
terized contemporary comment on issues of the day. Whatever was at stake – the fate
of the “white race” versus other races in the global contest, the future of particular
nation-states in the struggle for supremacy in Europe, the disorders of societies
undergoing modernization or the deficiencies of modern political or intellectual life
– diagnoses were offered that drew on evolutionary theory about the survival and
adaptation of species and ideas about cycles of human development in which cultures,
nations, races, and civilizations naturally grew, flourished, and decayed, to be sup-
planted by other, more vigorous organisms. Born out of this thinking, the specter of
biological degeneration loomed over Europe at the turn of the twentieth century,
conjured up by cultural critics, imperialists, military planners, criminologists, and
medical experts.
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The logic of the biologistic discourse of degeneration suggested to intellectuals
that a culture gripped by forces of decay could be rescued only by an infusion of
virile youth. In 1874 Friedrich Nietzsche had evoked a race of youthful “warriors
and serpent-slayers” that would redeem culture from the dominance of “old men”;