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

The motif of spring is sustained and persistent in Eksteins’s book. One observer of The Rite of Spring, Jacques Rivière, likened the ballet to “spring seen from the inside, with its violence, its spasms, and its fissions. We seem to be watching a drama through a microscope” (52). Thus, the often-sentimentalized season of new life was presented as a collection of dynamic forces by the Ballets Russes. This understanding of spring is featured throughout Eksteins’s analysis of the war and German ideology. Prewar Germany, Eksteins shows, is a definitively spring-like state in its restless pursuit of innovation and novelty in almost every sphere of life. By contrast, 19th century heavyweight Great Britain could be likened to the season of autumn, given its desire to reap what it had long ago sown.

The war itself began in a spring-like spirit with the mass movement of young men and their green hopes to prove themselves as battlefield heroes. However, in the largely static “war of attrition,” where men spent enormous amounts of time merely doing maintenance work in trenches and then endured brutal deaths on the battlefield, the ideal of spring-like dynamism was challenged (144). Far from finding an outlet for its heroism, youth was nipped in the bud.

Amidst postwar disillusionment, Eksteins shows how spring flourished in myriad disconnected ways. For example, there was the hedonistic display of “vitality” by young people, who decided that “the act of living” to the fullest, should be the purpose of life (256). Then, there was the prominence of modern-day heroes, such as American Charles Lindbergh, who embodied spring-like promise in flying over the Atlantic: “a perfectly free act, devoid of meaning other than its own inherent energy and accomplishment” (251). An action hero from America—a promising new continent to most Europeans—Lindbergh represented “a harbinger” of a new world, different from the one that had led them to the bloody trenches (251).

Adolf Hitler, the dictator who wanted to resurrect the spring-like spirit of the First World War, used it for destructive ends. He saw the ideal Germany as a dynamic ballet of Aryan super-humans and the expansion of that movement in the Second World War. However, ironically, in 1945, when a popular German song, “It Is Spring Without End” topped the charts, the dynamic invading force was not German fascist, but Russian communist (331). Here Eksteins shows that the spring-like movement set in motion by The Rite of Spring was a precedent for modernity and set to continue.

In Eksteins’s book, the city of Berlin symbolized utopian modernity. Paris, the world capital of culture, was increasingly “the site go an overwhelming ennui,” and the Parisian, a conservative creature “who tried to retain a local and community atmosphere in his quartier” and was enslaved to notions of good taste (44; 75). Although Paris was the host to numerous cultural innovators—from the Ballets Russes to the Cubists and Charles Lindbergh—there was the sense that its cultural attitude remained in the 19th century.

In contrast, Berlin, the capital city “representative […] of the transformations that Germany” experienced at the start of the twentieth century, was in Eksteins’s view “more like New York and Chicago than its Old World counterparts” (73-74). Even the look of Berlin possessed the aura of “an oil city of the American West, which had grown up overnight,” as “everything was new and extremely clean; streets and buildings were spacious, but there was a lot of tinsel meant to look like gold” (75). Additionally, like America, Berlin was host to multiple immigrant groups from both Eastern and Western Europe. Berliners “enjoyed and consciously promoted” their “city’s cosmopolitanism and sense of novelty,” which made it a fitting location for all of the cultural and technological innovations that were taking place there (75). Berlin was thus a microcosm of the German prewar desire to establish a new world order.

While Hitler did not espouse the prewar cosmopolitan ideal, he also regarded Berlin as a place of continuing progress and revolution, using the city as the chief stage for his power and boasting that “within ten years Berlin would be so transformed that no one would recognize it” (302). Hitler’s rhetoric implies that he intended to work with the city’s inherent spirit of progress and innovation and to further aggrandize it. However, the city’s devastation at the end of the Second World War, by Allied bombing and the march of the conquering Red Army, put an end to this plan. Arguably, the destruction of Berlin is symbolic of quashing not only Nazi Germany, but also the optimistic spirit of innovation and challenge that the city suggested from the outset of the 20th century.