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History 513, European Cultural History 1880-1920 - Summary
Lecture #30 - December 12, 1979 - 49:03 (mp3)
(Save As or file will load and play in the page, load time depends on connection speed)In this last lecture of the semester, Mosse admits that there were many things he did not cover, especially music, like Wagner, or Jazz in France, but the idea was to cover the main contents. Dealing with modern culture in Europe, he goes on, is rather bewildering, considering the number of movements. But they all defined themselves against the existing establishment. This course has presented European culture rather through the eyes of those who opposed it: it has not really dealt with popular culture, because popular culture does not change much. Popular culture is largely a quest to escape industrial society by stressing pre-industrial society. This would hold true even for those on a higher level of education. A great part of the sameness of all popular culture lies in its opposition to industrialism. WWI strengthened this. We find a combination of utopia and technology in Fascism and “Victorian” Communism today. In a second kind of nostalgia, nature itself becomes a utopia. Snowy mountains, for example, become the last bastion of human adventure, of goodness, of getting away from human society; the American Indian becomes the equivalent of the mountain climber. (Mosse says he has recently talked to American Indians in Oklahoma who had been to Germany, and who were appalled because the Germans had really treated them like “noble savages.”) This nostalgia mediates between industrial society and innocence. Aviation was a form of mediation as well: when an aviator was shot down in the war, he was never treated as POW.
After the war, aviation and similar adventures (including the Romanticization of Arabs in England) became a motif in literature. The tendency to make myths out of people and nature went along with an individualization of nature. The decline of individualism, though, was accepted much more in industrial societies after the war; even Expressionists became Socialists after WWI. Collectivity was accepted, but combined with individualism. The collective had to be a community of individuals and of affinity, not a society. People joined it voluntarily because they were of the same race or ideology. This idea of a voluntary collectivity meant an encouragement for nationalism. Nationalists operated with that image, which went hand in hand with direct democracy. There were of course people who despaired: the Existentialists, as Celine in “Journey to the End of the Night”, or the early Sartre, who concluded that all you could do is shrug. Another kind of despair is that of Spengler, whose admiration for the “new barbarian”, the primitive as the genuine, was turned into an admiration of Africans and African art. Admiration for primitives involves brutality. Mosse notes a “funny thing about intellectuals”: they have a great longing for brutality and love for primitivism. The barbarian as part of another utopia goes back to Nietzsche. The history of the barbarian in Europe goes all the way from the peasant to the SS. The SS-man was generally regarded as the new barbarian. The Sartrean shrug, it turns out, is very hard to keep up: you either become a barbarian or a Socialist (like Sartre himself).
A related phenomenon is hero-worshiping. The hero is a substitute for God after the decline of Christianity. They, too, are pre-industrial: heroes are never workers, but agriculturalists or mountain climbers. (Mosse states that Mussolini was a jogger, and that jogging is a fascist activity.) The hero is not above the collectivity of the people, he is just a little bit better.
All of this can be summarized as the attempt to keep control. The best way to keep control is to appropriate a bit of eternity, like the sky, mountains, or the nation. It gives one the strength to keep control in a changing situation. The human stereotype of beauty was a part of keeping control. According to Mosse, “There are no accidents in history, everything is explainable.” The idea of classical beauty, but also of the Bauhaus, helped people to keep control because the idea of restraint was built into it. Sexual control was lifted only twice in Europe: in the Berlin of the 1920s, and in the early Soviet Union. But lifting of restraint never lasts.
The combination of community and individuality explains a great deal of popular culture. The opposition to established society was a form of resistance to positivism. Camaraderie of the trenches became a myth, the prototype of community. All of this contains another, more basic element: the longing for totality, which only came with industrialization. It is no surprise that Hegel lived when he did and became the prophet of totality. The idea that man is fragmented, and that a person is different according to a particular situation, complimented the division of labor and life. There was nothing divided, though, in peasant life because peasants had no leisure. Hegel argued that one could overcome this division by becoming conscious of oneself. He believed that the re-appropriation of the self would come about by the progress of history. This belief perhaps explains the Hegelian revival in Marxism after 1918. The quest for self-knowledge had to interact with the quest for change, which necessitated an understanding of the existing reality. The longing for individualism and community is the contradictory longing throughout modern cultural history that is at the basis of everything we have studied. The rebellion of man against Positivism has to do with (economically) good times and bad times: in good times, one cannot be a good Positivist, as can be seen in Madison in the 70s. Culture only progresses in a crisis.
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