Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

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ECLIPSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keynes’s wartime life presents an ironic tension between the economic consequences of his expertise as a member of the wartime Treasury – in effect, negotiating the Allied loans that made possible Britain’s continuance as a belligerent – and the convictions that he shared with conscientious objectors, including his close Bloomsbury friends and the pacifists of Lady Ottoline Morrell’s circle. Indeed, he testified on behalf of his friends before the tribunals but, once the war was being waged, he told Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell, ‘There is really no practical alternative.’ And he was practical: one of his coups in the war was to see that there were certain war loans France would never repay to Britain. In 1917, when the Degas collection came up for sale in Paris after the painter’s death, Keynes suggested that the British government should buy some of the impressionist and postimpressionist masterpieces and charge them to the French government. The plan was approved, and he travelled to Paris with the director of the National Gallery, both in disguise to escape the notice of journalists, and landed several bargains, including a Cézanne.¹⁸

Keynes attended the peace treaty talks in Versailles representing the chancellor of the exchequer. In effect, terms were dictated to Germany, which had to sue for peace in November 1918. The central question was whether the peace should produce reconciliation, reestablishing Germany as a democratic state in a newly conceived world order, or whether it should be punitive to the degree that Germany would be crippled, disabled from ever again making war. The interests of the Big Three did not coincide, and after months of negotiations it became clear that the proposals of the Armistice would not be implemented and that instead an enormous reparation would be exacted from Germany, in addition to confiscation of a considerable part of German territory and redistribution to the victors of her overseas empire.

Keynes was appalled. He resigned in ‘misery and rage.’ His liberal ideals, his view of human nature, and his refusal to concur with the Clemenceau view of German nature as endemically hostile, combined with a feeling of guilt over his noncombatant part in the war (as a Treasury official he was exempt from conscription), propelled him to write his book exposing the treaty. In it Keynes expounded his economic views, as well as analysing the treaty and its effects. Keynes thought that the equilibrium between the Old and New Worlds which the war had shattered should be reestablished. Investment of European surplus capital in the New World produced the food and goods needed for growing populations and increased standards of living. Thus markets must be freer, not curtailed, as the treaty was to do for Germany. Keynes’s perspective was more that of a European than of a nationalist. Only in this way could the spectre of massive population growth, leading to further carnage, be tamed.¹⁹ Civilisation, said Keynes, must be based on shared views of morality, of prudence, calculation, and foresight. The punitive impositions on Germany would produce only the opposite effect and impoverish Europe. Keynes believed that enlightened economists were best able to secure the conditions of civilisation, or at any rate prevent regression, not politicians. One of the most far-reaching aspects of the book was Keynes’s argument, backed with figures and calculations, that there was no probability that Germany could repay, in either money or kind, the enormous reparations required over thirty years as envisaged by the Allies. According to Keynes’s theory of probability, the changes in economic conditions simply cannot be forecast that far ahead, and he therefore urged much more modest reparations over a much shorter time. He could also see that the commission set up to force Germany to pay and to seize goods breached all the rules of free economic association in democratic nations. His arguments therefore became the basis of the pervasive opinion that Versailles inevitably gave rise to Hitler, who could not have taken control of Germany without the wide resentment against the treaty. It didn’t matter that, following Keynes’s book, reparations were in fact scaled down, or that no great proportion of those claimed were ever collected. It was enough that Germany thought itself to have been vengefully treated.

Keynes’s arguments are disputable. From the outset of peace, there was a strong spirit of noncompliance with orders for demilitarisation among German armed forces. For example, they refused to surrender all the warplanes the Allies demanded, and production and research continued at a fast pace.²⁰ Did the enormous success of Keynes’s book create attitudes that undermined the treaty’s more fundamental provisions by putting such an emphasis upon what may have been a peripheral part of the treaty?²¹ And was it instrumental in creating the climate for Western appeasement in the 1930s, an attitude on which the Nazis gambled? Such an argument forms the basis of a bitter attack on Keynes published in 1946, after Keynes’s death and that of its author, Etienne Mantoux, who might be thought to have paid the supreme price exacted by Keynes’s post-Versailles influence: he was killed in 1945 fighting the Germans. The grim title of Mantoux’s book conveys the argument: The Carthaginian Peace; or, The Economic Consequences of Mr Keynes.²²

What is not in dispute is Keynes’s brilliant success, not only in terms of polemical argument but also in the literary skill of his acid portraits of the leaders. Of Clemenceau, Keynes wrote that he could not ‘despise him or dislike him, but only take a different view as to the nature of civilised man, or indulge at least a different hope.’ ‘He had one illusion – France; and one disillusion – mankind, including Frenchmen and his colleagues not least.’ Keynes takes the reader into Clemenceau’s mind: ‘The politics of power are inevitable, and there is nothing very new to learn about this war or the end it was fought for; England had destroyed, as in each preceding century, a trade rival; a mighty chapter had been closed in the secular struggle between the glories of Germany and France. Prudence required some measure of lip service to the “ideals” of foolish Americans and hypocritical Englishmen, but it would be stupid to believe that there is much room in the world, as it really is, for such affairs as the League of Nations, or any sense in the principle of self-determination except as an ingenious formula for rearranging the balance of power in one’s own interest.’²³

This striking passage leads on to the ‘foolish’ American. Woodrow Wilson had come dressed in all the wealth and power of mighty America: ‘When President Wilson left Washington he enjoyed a prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history’ Europe was dependent on the United States financially and for basic food supplies. Keynes had high hopes of a new world order flowing from New to Old. It was swiftly dashed. ‘Never had a philosopher held such weapons wherewithal to bind the princes of this world…. His head and features were finely cut and exactly like his photographs. … But this blind and deaf Don Quixote was entering a cavern where the swift and glittering blade was in the hands of the adversary. … The President’s slowness amongst the Europeans was noteworthy. He could not, all in a minute, take in what the rest were saying, size up the situation in a glance … and was liable, therefore, to defeat by the mere swiftness, apprehension, and agility of a Lloyd George.’ In this terrible sterility, ‘the President’s faith withered and dried up.’

Among the intellectual consequences of the war and Versailles was the idea of a universal — i.e., worldwide — government. One school of thought contended that the Great War had mainly been stumbled into, that it was an avoidable catastrophe that would not have happened with better diplomacy. Other historians have argued that the 1914-18 war, like most if not all wars, had deeper, coherent causes. The answer provided by the Versailles Treaty was to set up a League of Nations, a victory in the first instance for President Wilson. The notion of international law and an international court had been articulated in the seventeenth century by Hugo Grotius, a Dutch thinker. The League of Nations was new in that it would provide a permanent arbitration body and a permanent organisation to enforce its judgements. The argument ran that if the Germans in 1914 had had to face a coalition of law-abiding nations, they would have been deterred from the onslaught on Belgium. The Big Three pictured the League very differently. For France a standing army would be to control Germany. Britain’s leaders saw it as a conciliation body with no teeth. Only Wilson conceived of it as both a forum of arbitration and as an instrument of collective security. But the idea was dead in the water in the United States; the Senate simply refused to ratify an arrangement that took fundamental decisions away from its authority. It would take another war, and the development of atomic weapons, before the world was finally frightened into acting on an idea similar to the League of Nations.

Before World War I, Germany had held several concessions in Shandong, China. The Versailles Treaty did not return these to the Beijing government but left them in the hands of the Japanese. When this news was released, on 4 May 1919, some 3,000 students from Beida (Beijing University) and other Beijing institutions besieged the Tiananmen, the gateway to the palace. This led to a battle between students and police, a student strike, demonstrations across the country, a boycott of Japanese goods - and in the end the ‘broadest demonstration of national feeling that China had ever seen.’²⁴ The most extraordinary aspect of this development - what became known as the May 4 movement — was that it was the work of both mature intellectuals and students. Infused by Western notions of democracy, and impressed by the advances of Western science, the leaders of the movement put these new ideas together in an anti-imperialist program. It was the first time the students had asserted their power in the new China, but it would not be the last. Many Chinese intellectuals had been to Japan to study. The main Western ideas they returned with related to personal expression and freedom, including sexual freedom, and this led them to oppose the traditional family organisation of China. Under Western influence they also turned to fiction as the most effective way to attack traditional China, often using first-person narratives written in the vernacular. Normal as this might seem to Westerners, it was very shocking in China.

The first of these new writers to make a name for himself was Lu Xun. His real name was Zhou Shuren or Chou Shu-jen, and, coming from a prosperous family (like many in the May 4 movement), he first studied Western medicine and science. One of his brothers translated Havelock Ellis’s theories about sexuality into Chinese, and the other, a biologist and eugenicist, translated Darwin. In 1918, in the magazine New Youth, Lu Xun published a satire entitled ‘The Diary of a Madman.’ The ‘Diary’ was very critical of Chinese society, which he depicted as cannibalistic, devouring its brightest talents, with only the mad glimpsing the truth, and then as often as not in their dreams - a theme that would echo down the years, and not just in China. The problem with Chinese civilisation, Lu Xun wrote, was that it was ‘a culture of serving one’s masters, who are triumphant at the cost of the misery of the multitude.’²⁵

The Versailles Treaty may have been the immediate stimulus for the May 4 movement, but a more general influence was the ideas that shaped Chinese society after 1911, when the Qing dynasty was replaced with a republic.²⁶ Those ideas — essentially, of a civil society — were not new in the West. But the Confucian heritage posed two difficulties for this transition in China. The first was the concept of individualism, which is of course such a bulwark in Western (and especially American) civil society. Chinese reformers like Yan (or Yen) Fu, who translated so many Western liberal classics (including John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Herbert Spencer’s Study of Sociology), nonetheless saw individualism only as a trait to be used in support of the state, not against it.²⁷ The second difficulty posed by the Confucian heritage was even more problematic. Though the Chinese developed something called the New Learning, which encompassed ‘foreign matters’ (i.e., modernisation), what in practice was taught may be summarised, in the words of Harvard historian John

Fairbanks, as ‘Eastern ethics and Western science.’²⁸ The Chinese (and to an extent the Japanese) persisted in the belief that Western ideas – particularly science – were essentially technical or purely functional matters, a set of tools much shallower than, say, Eastern philosophy, which provided the ‘substance’ of education and knowledge. But the Chinese were fooling themselves. Their own brand of education was very thinly spread – male literacy in the late Qing period (i.e., up to 1911) was 30 to 45 percent for men and as low as 2 to 10 percent for women. As a measure of the educational backwardness of China at this time, such universities as existed were required to teach and examine many subjects – engineering, technology, and commerce – using English-language textbooks: Chinese words for specialist terms did not yet exist.²⁹

In effect, China’s educated elite had to undergo two revolutions. They had first to throw off Confucianism, and the social/educational structure that went with it. Then they had to throw off the awkward amalgam of ‘Eastern ethics, Western science’ that followed. In practice, those who achieved this did so only by going to the United States to study (provided for by a U.S. congressional bill in 1908). To a point this was effective, and in 1914 young Chinese scientists who had studied in America founded the Science Society. For a time, this society offered the only real chance for science in the Chinese/Confucian context.³⁰ Beijing University played its part when a number of scholars who had trained abroad attempted to cleanse China of Confucianism ‘in the name of science and democracy.’³¹ This process became known as the New Learning – or New Culture – movement.³² Some idea of the magnitude of the task facing the movement can be had from the subject it chose for its first campaign: the Chinese writing system. This had been created around 200 B.C. and had hardly changed in the interim, with characters acquiring more and more meanings, which could only be deciphered according to context and by knowing the classical texts.³³ Not surprisingly (to Western minds) the new scholars worked to replace the classical language with everyday speech. (The size of the problem is underlined when one realises this was the step taken in Europe during the Renaissance, four hundred years before, when Latin was replaced by national vernaculars.)³⁴ Writing in the new vernacular, Lu Xun had turned his back on science (many in China, as elsewhere, blamed science for the horrors of World War I), believing he could have more impact as a novelist.³⁵ But science was integral to what was happening. For example, other leaders of the May 4 movement like Fu Sinian and Luo Jialun at Beida advocated in their journal New Tide (Renaissance) — one of eleven such periodicals started in the wake of May 4 – a Chinese ‘enlightenment.’³⁶ By this they meant an individualism beyond family ties and a rational, scientific approach to problems. They put their theories into practice by setting up their own lecture society to reach as many people as possible.³⁷

The May 4 movement was significant because it combined intellectual and political concerns more intimately than at other times. Traditionally China, unlike the West since the Enlightenment, had been divided into two classes only: the ruling elite and the masses. Following May 4, a growing bourgeoisie in China adopted Western attitudes and beliefs, calling for example for birth control and self-government in the regions. Such developments were bound to provoke political awareness.³⁸ Gradually the split between the more academic wing of the May 4 movement and its political phalanx widened. Emboldened by the success of Leninism in Russia, the political wing became a secret, exclusive, centralised party seeking power, modelled on the Bolsheviks. One intellectual of the May 4 movement who began by believing in reform but soon turned to violent revolution was the burly son of a Hunan grain merchant whose fundamental belief was eerily close to that of Spengler, and other Germans.³⁹ His name was Mao Zedong.

The old Vienna officially came to an end on 3 April 1919, when the Republic of Austria abolished tides of nobility, forbidding the use even of ‘von’ in legal documents. The peace left Austria a nation of only 7 million with a capital that was home to 2 million of them. On top of this overcrowding, the years that followed brought famine, inflation, a chronic lack of fuel, and a catastrophic epidemic of influenza. Housewives were forced to cut trees in the woods, and the university closed because its roof had not been repaired since 1914.⁴⁰ Coffee, historian William Johnston tells us, was made of barley, bread caused dysentery. Freud’s daughter Sophie was killed by the epidemic, as was the painter Egon Schiele. It was into this world that Alban Berg introduced his opera Wozzeck (1917–21, premiered 1925), about the murderous rage of a soldier degraded by his army experiences. But morals were not eclipsed entirely. At one point an American company offered to provide food for the Austrian people and to take payment in the emperor’s Gobelin tapestries: a public protest stopped the deal.⁴¹ Other aspects of Vienna style went out with the ‘von.’ It had been customary, for example, for the doorman to ring once for a male visitor, twice for a female, three times for an archduke or cardinal. And tipping had been ubiquitous – even elevator operators and the cashiers in restaurants were tipped. After the terrible conditions imposed by the peace, all such behaviour was stopped, never to resume. There was a complete break with the past.⁴² Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Freud, Karl Kraus, and Otto Neurath all stayed on in Vienna, but it wasn’t the same as before. Food was so scarce that a team of British doctors investigating ‘accessory food factors,’ as vitamins were then called, was able to experiment on children, denying some the chance of a healthy life without any moral compunction.⁴³ Now that the apocalypse had come to pass, the gaiety of Vienna was entirely vanished.

In Budapest, the changes were even more revealing, and more telling. A group of brilliant scientists – physicists and mathematicians – were forced to look elsewhere for work and stimulation. These included Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner, all Jews. Each would eventually go to Britain or the United States and work on the atomic bomb. A second group, of writers and artists, stayed on in Budapest, at least to begin with, having been forced home by the outbreak of war. The significance of this group lay in the fact that its character was shaped by both World War I and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. For what happened in the Sunday Circle, or the Lukács Circle, as it was called, was the eclipse of ethics. This eclipse darkened the world longer than most.

The Budapest Sunday Circle was not formed until after war broke out, when a group of young intellectuals began to meet on Sunday afternoons to discuss various artistic and philosophical problems mainly to do with modernism. The group included Karl Mannheim, a sociologist, art historian Arnold Hauser, the writers Béla Balázs and Anna Leznai, and the musicians Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, all formed around the critic and philosopher George Lukács. Like Teller and company, most of them had travelled widely and spoke German, French, and English as well as Hungarian. Although Lukács – a friend of Max Weber – was the central figure of the ‘Sundays,’ they met in Balázs’s elegant, ‘notorious,’ hillside apartment.⁴⁴ For the most part the discussions were highly abstract, though relief was provided by the musicians – it was here, for example, that Bartók tried out his compositions. To begin with, the chief concern of this group was ‘alienation’; like many people, the Sunday Circle members took the view that the war was the logical endpoint of the liberal society that had developed in the nineteenth century, producing industrial capitalism and bourgeois individualism. To Lukács and his friends, there was something sick, unreal, about that state of affairs. The forces of industrial capitalism had created a world where they felt ill at ease, where a shared culture was no longer part of the agenda, where the institutions of religion, art, science, and the state had ceased to have any communal meaning. Many of them were influenced in this by the lectures of George Simmel, ‘the Manet of philosophy’, in Berlin. Simmel made a distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ culture. For him, objective culture was the best that had been thought, written, composed, and painted; a ‘culture’ was defined by how its members related to the canon of these works. In subjective culture, the individual seeks self-fulfilment and self-realisation through his or her own resources. Nothing need be shared. By the end of the nineteenth century, Simmel said, the classic example of this was the business culture; the collective ‘pathology’ arising from a myriad subjective cultures was alienation. For the Sunday Circle in Budapest the stabilising force of objective culture was a sine qua non. It was only through shared culture that the self could become known to others, and thus to itself. It was only by having a standpoint that was to be shared that one could recognise alienation in the first place. This solitude at the heart of modern capitalism came to dominate the discussions of the Sunday Circle as the war progressed and after the Bolshevik revolution they were led into radical politics. An added factor in their alienation was their Jewishness: in an era of growing anti-Semitism, they were bound to feel marginalised. Before the war they had been open to international movements – impressionism and aestheticism and to Paul Gauguin in particular, who, they felt, had found fulfilment away from the anti-Semitic business culture of Europe in far-off Tahiti. ‘Tahiti healed Gauguin,’ as Lukács wrote at one point.⁴⁵ He himself felt so marginalised in Hungary that he took to writing in German.

The Sunday Circle’s fascination with the redemptive powers of art had some predictable consequences. For a time they flirted with mysticism and, as Mary Gluck describes it, in her history of the Sunday circle, turned against science. (This was a problem for Mannheim; sociology was especially strong in Hungary and regarded itself as a science that would, eventually, explain the evolution of society.) The Sundays also embraced the erotic.⁴⁶ In Bluebeard’s Castle, Béla Balázs described an erotic encounter between a man and a woman, his focus being what he saw as the inevitable sexual struggle between them. In Bartók’s musical version of the story, Judith enters Prince Bluebeard’s Castle as his bride. With increasing confidence, she explores the hidden layers – or chambers – of man’s consciousness. To begin with she brings joy into the gloom. In the deeper recesses, however, there is a growing resistance. She is forced to become increasingly reckless and will not be dissuaded from opening the seventh, forbidden door. Total intimacy, implies Balázs, leads only to a ‘final struggle’ for power. And power is a chimera, bringing only ‘renewed solitude.’⁴⁷

Step by step, therefore, Lukács and the others came to the view that art could only ever have a limited role in human affairs, ‘islands in a sea of fragmentation.’⁴⁸ This was – so far as art was concerned – the eclipse of meaning. And this cold comfort became the main message of the Free School for Humanistic Studies, which the Sunday Circle set up during the war years. The very existence of the Free School was itself instructive. It was no longer Sunday-afternoon discussions – but action.

Then came the Bolshevik revolution. Hitherto, Marxism had sounded too materialistic and scientistic for the Sunday Circle. But after so much darkness, and after Lukács’s own journey through art, to the point where he had much reduced expectations and hopes of redemption in that direction, socialism began to seem to him and others in the group like the only option that offered a way forward: ‘Like Kant, Lukács endorsed the primacy of ethics in politics.’⁴⁹ A sense of urgency was added by the emergence of an intransigent left wing throughout Europe, committed to ending the war without delay. In 1917 Lukács had written, ‘Bolshevism is based on the metaphysical premise that out of evil, good can come, that it is possible to lie our way to the truth. [I am] incapable of sharing this faith.’⁵⁰ A few weeks later Lukács joined the Communist Party of Hungary. He gave his reasons in an article entitled ‘Tactics and Ethics.’ The central question hadn’t changed: ‘Was it justifiable to bring about socialism through terror, through the violation of individual rights,’ in the interests of the majority? Could one lie one’s way to power? Or were such tactics irredeemably opposed to the principles of socialism? Once incapable of sharing the faith, Lukács now concluded that terror was legitimate in the socialist context, ‘and that therefore Bolshevism was a true embodiment of socialism.’ Moreover, ‘the class struggle – the basis of socialism – was a transcendental experience and the old rules no longer applied.’⁵¹

In short, this was the eclipse of ethics, the replacement of one set of principles by another. Lukács is important here because he openly admitted the change in himself, the justification of terror. Conrad had already foreseen such a change, Kafka was about to record its deep psychological effects on all concerned, and a whole generation of intellectuals, maybe two generations, would be compromised as Lukács was. At least he had the courage to entitle his paper ‘Tactics and Ethics.’ With him, the issue was out in the open, which it wouldn’t always be.

By the end of 1919 the Sunday Circle was itself on the verge of eclipse. The police had it under surveillance and once went so far as to confiscate Balász’s diaries, which were scrutinised for damaging admissions. The police had no luck, but the attention was too much for some of the Sundays. The Circle was reconvened in Vienna (on Mondays), but not for long, because the Hungarians were charged with using fake identities.⁵² By then Lukács, its centre of gravity, had other things on his mind: he had become part of the Communist underground. In December 1919 Balázs gave this description: ‘He presents the most heart-rending sight imaginable, deathly pale, hollow cheeked, impatient and sad. He is watched and followed, he goes around with a gun in his pocket…. There is a warrant out for his arrest in Budapest which would condemn him to death nine times over…. And here [in Vienna] he is active in hopeless conspiratorial party work, tracking down people who have absconded with party funds … in the meantime his philosophic genius remains repressed, like a stream forced underground which loosens and destroys the ground above.’⁵³ Vivid, but not wholly true. At the back of Lukács’s mind, while he was otherwise engaged on futile conspiratorial work, he was conceiving what would become his most well known book, History and Class Consciousness.

The Vienna–Budapest (and Prague) axis did not disappear completely after World War I. The Vienna Circle of philosophers, led by Moritz Schlick, flourished in the 1920s, and Franz Kafka and Robert Musil produced their most important works. The society still produced thinkers such as Michael Polanyi, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Karl Popper, and Ernst Gombrich – but they came to prominence only after the rise of the Nazis caused them to flee to the West. Vienna as a buzzing intellectual centre did not survive the end of empire.

Between 1914 and 1918 all direct links between Great Britain and Germany had been cut off, as Wittgenstein discovered when he was unable to return to Cambridge after his holiday. But Holland, like Switzerland, remained neutral, and at the University of Leiden, in 1915, W. de Sitter was sent a copy of Einstein’s paper on the general theory of relativity. An accomplished physicist, de Sitter was well connected and realised that as a Dutch neutral he was an important go-between. He therefore passed on a copy of Einstein’s paper to Arthur Eddington in London.⁵⁴ Eddington was already a central figure in the British scientific establishment, despite having a ‘mystical bent,’ according to one of his biographers.⁵⁵ Born in Kendal in the Lake District in 1882, into a Quaker family of farmers, he was educated first at home and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was senior wrangler and came into contact with J. J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford. Fascinated by astronomy since he was a boy, he took up an appointment at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich from 1906, and in 1912 became secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society. His first important work was a massive and ambitious survey of the structure of the universe. This survey, combined with the work of other researchers and the development of more powerful telescopes, had revealed a great deal about the size, structure, and age of the heavens. Its main discovery, made in 1912, was that the brightness of so-called Cepheid stars pulsated in a regular way associated with their sizes. This helped establish real distances in the heavens and showed that our own galaxy has a diameter of about 100,000 light-years and that the sun, which had been thought to be at its centre, is in fact about 30,000 light-years excentric. The second important result of Cepheid research was the discovery that the spiral nebulae were in fact extragalactic objects, entire galaxies themselves, and very far away (the nearest, the Great Nebula in Andromeda, being 750,000 light-years away). This eventually provided a figure for the distance of the farthest objects, 500 million light-years away, and an age for the universe of between 10 and 20 billion years.⁵⁶

Eddington had also been involved in ideas about the evolution of stars, based on work that showed them to consist of giants and dwarves. Giants are in general less dense than dwarves, which, according to Eddington’s calculations, could be up to 20 million degrees Kelvin at their centre, with a density of one ton per cubic inch. But Eddington was also a keen traveller and had visited Brazil and Malta to study eclipses. His work and his academic standing thus made him the obvious choice when the Physical Society of London, during wartime, wanted someone to prepare a Report on the Relativity Theory of Gravitation.⁵⁷ This, which appeared in 1918, was the first complete account of general relativity to be published in English. Eddington had already received a copy of Einstein’s 1915 paper from Holland, so he was well prepared, and his report attracted widespread attention, so much so that Sir Frank Dyson, the Astronomer Royal, offered an unusual opportunity to test Einstein’s theory. On 29 May 1919, there was to be a total eclipse. This offered the chance to assess if, as Einstein predicted, light rays were bent as they passed near the sun. It says something for the Astronomer Royal’s influence that, during the last full year of the war, Dyson obtained from the government a grant of £1,000 to mount not one but two expeditions, to Principe off the coast of West Africa and to Sobral, across the Atlantic, in Brazil.⁵⁸

Eddington was given Principe, together with E. T. Cottingham. In the Astronomer Royal’s study on the night before they left, Eddington, Cottingham, and Dyson sat up late calculating how far light would have to be deflected for Einstein’s theory to be confirmed. At one point, Cottingham asked rhetorically what would happen if they found twice the expected value. Drily, Dyson replied, ‘Then Eddington will go mad and you will have to come home alone!’⁵⁹ Eddington’s own notebooks continue the account: ‘We sailed early in March to Lisbon. At Funchal we saw [the other two astronomers] off to Brazil on March 16, but we had to remain until April 9 … and got our first sight of Principe in the morning of April 23…. We soon found we were in clover, everyone anxious to give every help we needed … about May 16 we had no difficulty in getting the check photographs on three different nights. I had a good deal of work measuring these.’ Then the weather changed. On the morning of 29 May, the day of the eclipse, the heavens opened, the downpour lasted for hours, and Eddington began to fear that their arduous journey was a waste of time. However, at one-thirty in the afternoon, by which time the partial phase of the eclipse had already begun, the clouds at last began to clear. ‘I did not see the eclipse,’ Eddington wrote later, ‘being too busy changing plates, except for one glance to make sure it had begun and another half-way through to see how much cloud there was. We took sixteen photographs. They are all good of the sun, showing a very remarkable prominence; but the cloud has interfered with the star images. The last six photographs show a few images which I hope will give us what we need…. June 3. We developed the photographs, 2 each night for 6 nights after the eclipse, and I spent the whole day measuring. The cloudy weather upset my plans…. But the one plate that I measured gave a result agreeing with Einstein.’ Eddington turned to his companion. ‘Cottingham,’ he said, ‘you won’t have to go home alone.’⁶⁰

Eddington later described the experiment off West Africa as ‘the greatest moment of my life.’⁶¹ Einstein had set three tests for relativity, and now two of them had supported his ideas. Eddington wrote to Einstein immediately, giving him a complete account and a copy of his calculations. Einstein wrote back from Berlin on 15 December 1919, ‘Lieber Herr Eddington, Above all I should like to congratulate you on the success of your difficult expedition. Considering the great interest you have taken in the theory of relativity even in earlier days I think I can assume that we are indebted primarily to your initiative for the fact that these expeditions could take place. I am amazed at the interest which my English colleagues have taken in the theory in spite of its difficulty.’⁶²

Einstein was being disingenuous. The publicity given to Eddington’s confirmation of relativity made Einstein the most famous scientist in the world. ‘EINSTEIN THEORY TRIUMPHS’ blazed the headline in the New York Times, and many other newspapers around the world treated the episode in the same way. The Royal Society convened a special session in London at which Frank Dyson gave a full account of the expeditions to Sobral and Principe.⁶³ Alfred North Whitehead was there, and in his book Science and the Modern World, though reluctant to commit himself to print, he relayed some of the excitement: ‘The whole atmosphere of tense interest was exactly that of the Greek drama: we were the chorus commenting on the decree of destiny as disclosed in the development of a supreme incident. There was dramatic quality in the very staging: – the traditional ceremonial, and in the background the picture of Newton to remind us that the greatest of scientific generalisations was now, after more than two centuries, to receive its first modification. Nor was the personal interest wanting: a great adventure in thought had at length come safe to shore.’⁶⁴

Relativity theory had not found universal acceptance when Einstein had first proposed it. Eddington’s Principe observations were therefore the point at which many scientists were forced to concede that this exceedingly uncommon idea about the physical world was, in fact, true. Thought would never be the same again. Common sense very definitely had its limitations. And Eddington’s, or rather Dyson’s, timing was perfect. In more ways than one, the old world had been eclipsed.