History 513, European Cultural History 1880-1920 - Summary

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Lecture #1 - September 7, 1979 - 47:32 min (mp3)
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George Mosse calls the fin-de-siecle, 1880-1914, the “Indian summer of the bourgeois world”, the last flourishing of a comfortable middle-class bourgeois life.  In London, a part of the population was still employed as servants. But there also developed the first revolt against the bourgeois age. Throughout the 19th century, what had been taken for granted was questioned, as Western and Central Europe became a developed continent. A new feeling of movement accompanied industrialization and communication revolution at the beginning of the 19th century. Even Walter Scott realized this change and reflected it in his novels.  The first novel about bourgeois life in Germany in the 1840s was F. W. Hacklaender’s “Handel und Wandel.” The rise of Nationalism, a search for roots characterized by ancestor worship, went along with a constant emphasis on restraint. The harmfulness of excess was exemplified in two ways: the idea of beauty as harmony in the classical revival, in which the European concept of beauty was one of restraint, and in a new idea of beauty through which the nation expresses itself. It hit peoples’ perception through a sense of the change of time. Time was perceived to move slower in the country than in the city. One of the terms that will come back is that of nervousness; it was a symptom of the bourgeoisie’s fear of itself. Restraint was to slow the process of uprooting, an attempt to seek rest. The basic consensus on government, god and ideology that had existed up until the French Revolution and industrialization would never exist again.

Doubt, which questioned the “fundamentals”, and the unsettling of ideology marked the beginning of modern morality and was met with the training of the body.  Morality was an attempt to stop the loss of control that came with the rush of time. This change in morality was very rapid. Shame of the body, which according to Mosse did not exist before, was is only the tip of the iceberg. In Theodor Fontane’s “Jenny Treibel”, manners and morals are at the core of the novel; appearance and behavior are restrained. Masturbation was believed to ruin one’s nerves and was thus a menace to society that had to be constantly restrained. Ideology was questioned, for example by John Stuart Mill.

The whole nexus of culture changed in what Le Bon called “the age of crowds.” If up to the French Revolution court culture had dominated and other classes were not thought to have culture, at the beginning of 19th century, elite culture began to meet in the drawing rooms of the high middle class. Yet this did not last; the beginning of mass culture also meant the diffusion of culture.  Newspaper started to appear day by day, no time remained for rest, which resulted in a fear of mass culture. Culture was broadened through modern intellectual elite, not through courtiers and those who did not have to work. Now, professionals like teachers, doctors, lawyers, or politicians took their place. They still comprised a cultural elite, but one of a much more diverse profile. Furthermore, paper and printing became cheap. Popular culture, though, never changes much: even today it is still largely comprised of the same sentimental culture of utopia and of fairy tales, characterized by a love of hierarchy. The reason for this is that high culture penetrates downwards only very slowly; the reading of mass culture tends to be narcotic. A sense of hierarchy was very deeply engrained among the lower classes; domestic servants were loyal to their masters and often more conservative.  A soothing lack of change is the nature of fairy tales, as are strong stereotypes in popular culture. But the spread of culture brought the beginning of self-education, which became stronger during the 19th century. This broadening of the cultural nexus and its arena resulted in the yearning of the elite for “art for arts sake”, as expressed by Oscar Wilde or Matthew Arnold. A lot of this trend is present in “Jenny Treibel”; it went hand in hand with the idea of respectability. Two things interlocked in “Jenny Treibel”: the novel’s rich middle-class set themselves up as the authority on manners; arbiters of doing the right thing. Their respectability encompassed not only manners, but the contents of the interior of the house, such as furniture. Before the French Revolution, what was “in” was determined by what the Court did.

Having said all of this, it must be clear that the bourgeois world continued into the end of the century. Bourgeois living was by that time settled as a life style that not only became ever more pronounced, but was besieged by attacks against it, for example by writers like Wilde and by mass politics. Though the bourgeois life style was a totality that rejected non-conformity, it had some tolerance for eccentric outsiders, like Jews and homosexuals. At the same time, imagination was condensed to clarity. Attacks directed against modern art and literature came through the perception that everything modern was  a threat against  the Bourgeois life style which, although new, was insecure, and already on the defensive. Max Nordau’s famous concept of “Degeneration” captured that fear. We have to remember however that “Jenny Treibel” portrayed the upper bourgeoisie; Max Nordau was newly arrived. The years 1880 to 1914 are the climax of the bourgeois world - and the rebellion against it. The bourgeois life style was embraced by the working class, which was always conservative. In that time, called “Gruenderzeit” (founders’ time) in Germany, an age when many people did indeed advance, most of the great modern fortunes were made. Mosse uses the life of his own grandfather Rudolf Mosse as an example.

It was also the age of the first mass movements and strikes. Attacks by writers like Frank Wedekind (Springs Awakening) were more painful to the bourgeoisie than striking workers, because they came from within, from their own children. Plays about murdering one’s own father exemplified a revolt that had lasting consequences. Freud would have been unthinkable without it. We must understand the world that these people rebelled against: it was the world of “Jenny Treibel.”

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