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

Eksteins notes, “the question of what kept men going in this hell of the Western Front is central to an understanding of the war and its significance” (171). Many soldiers endured shell shock or neurasthenia, emerging from battle with “expressions ‘frozen by a vision of terror’” (172). Some soldiers became “like weak children, crying and waving their arms madly, clinging to the nearest man and praying not to be left alone”; others, though, became numb and indifferent over time (173). Further, there was little time for soldiers to process their experiences, as “life in the line demanded so much menial work - repairing trenches, digging new latrines […] that [they] rarely had time or energy to contemplate meaning and purpose in the war” (173).

Eksteins writes:

…after the gloss of heroism had worn off in the first month of the war, and as the war settled into the enervating phase of attrition, the concept of duty became the linchpin to the effort. […] As long as soldiers could somehow relate their reflexes and instinctive behavior in moments of reflection to an underlying sense of responsibility, they would continue to fight, despite horror, weariness, and even despondency (175).

Duty was a linchpin of 19th century bourgeois morality and subordinated “the interests of the individual” to “the public good” (177). In the trench environment a soldier’s “regiment became the focus of duty” (180). The “intense sense of belonging” and responsibility to one’s comrades in the trenches were reasons for continuing with the war (180).

By 1917, however, “duty […] began gradually to disappear from the active vocabulary of soldiers,” many of whom were new conscripts determined “despite fatigue and despondency, to ‘carry on,’ to ‘stick it to the end’” (182). This pragmatic attitude was typical of methodical Anglo-French warfare, which employed “tactical thinking,” rather than making use of the “surprise tactics” as did the Germans (187). Unfortunately, military triumph came at the cost of an enormous loss of life and a resulting “generation of widows, orphans, and cripples” (191).

Eksteins argues that in 1914, Germans saw the war as an “aesthetic” endeavor—one that would unite the disparate strands of innovation and nationalism in German society (193). The German notion of Pflicht, or duty, was equally idealistic: it was “anchored to a view of history as myth, as poetic justification of the present and future” (194). Pflicht involved more than the defense of German territory; it also “contained a strong subjective ingredient consisting of personal honor and will” (195). Rather than being mere “blind obedience to the rules of behavior […] it involved personal inspiration and initiative” (195). Whereas the Anglo-French model pitted the individual and society in conflict, the Germans knew no such distinction, as “the truly German individual was the nation […] And in turn the nation was simply ‘a higher human being’” (195). Given this mantra of personal initiative, it was no surprise that the motto of German special forces unit the 24th Brandenburgers was “do more than your duty,” making each individual into a warrior (196).

The war, with its “ever-increasing fury […] was regarded by many as merely an intensification of its aesthetic meaning” (201). Casualties mounted, yet the war became “spiritualized” and forced people to “come to terms with death” (202). Still, German soldiers—like the British and French—“suffered from fatigue, depression, and trauma,” but rather than clinging to “social and historical values,” the Germans waged an internal battle to retain the “spirit of 1914” (205).

When defeat came for Germany in 1918, accusations spread that the fault was not only with the enemy, but also with “treachery at home,” in the failure of idealism (205). In a grand reversal of hope and idealism,

the nation most recently enraptured with newness, with experiment and a rejection of old forms, would project, in a supreme feat of mental acrobatics, her own revolt onto her perceived foes, without and within (205).

Eksteins argues that while “disillusionment and alienation from the national effort” were not features of Germany during the war, they would define postwar culture throughout Europe (207). 

Eksteins argues that from a cultural standpoint, the “war […] acted as a veritable exhortation to the revolutionary renewal for which the prewar avant-garde had striven” (209). It thus provided febrile ground for imaginations seeking to break with old forms of expression and embrace new ones. Creatives responded to the war in numerous ways, the most radical of which was the Dadaists who argued that after the war’s destruction, “the only sense was nonsense, the only art anti-art” (210).

Soldiers returning from war increasingly retreated inward, as they relied on their “imagination” for “sustenance” and “the war became increasingly a matter of individual interpretative power” (212). They often struggled to adjust to civilian life, feeling that they could not find the words to describe their experiences. Some soldiers were “overwhelmed by the sense of being alone - a feeling that the term ‘lost generation’ would capture after the war” (229). The struggle for expression amongst soldiers found a mirror in artists’ experiences after the war.

Amongst intellectuals, there was mistrust of the “great rolling phrases” of the prewar years and a feeling that “grand words” such as “glory” and “courage” had utterly lost their meaning (218). As language became “robbed of its social meaning,” it “became a highly personal and poetic instrument,” which could be manipulated for the user’s own purposes (219).

The war had also ebbed away at traditional sexual morality. Eksteins explains, “in the nineteenth-century world morals and morale were thought to be indistinguishable; the Great War wrought havoc on their partnership and threatened to make them mutually exclusive” both at the front and in civilian life (223). As a result, “morality and sex became not a matter of social dictate but more and more of individual conscience” (225).