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  FRACTURE

  Copyright © 2015 by Philipp Blom

  Published by Basic Books

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.

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  Design and composition by Eclipse Publishing Services

  Photo and excerpt credits appear on page 415.

  A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-465-04071-1

  10987654321

  For Manfred, Peter, and Tanja and in memory of Jon, poet, teacher, and friend

  God is dead. A world has collapsed. I am dynamite. World history has broken into two halves. There is a time before me. And a time after me. Religion, science, morality—phenomena originating in the fear of primitive peoples. An era collapses. A thousand-year culture collapses. . . . The world reveals itself to be a blind battle of forces unbound.

  Man lost his celestial face, became matter, conglomerate, animal, an insane product of thoughts twitching abruptly and insufficiently. . . . And another element collided destructively and menacingly with the desperate search for a new order in the ruins of the past world: mass culture in the modern metropolis. Complex the thoughts and sensations assailing the brain, symphonic the feelings. Machines were created, and took the place of individuals. . . . A world of abstract demons swallowed individual expression, swallowed individual faces into towering masks, engulfed private expression, robbed individual things of their names, destroyed the ego and agitated oceans of collapsed feelings.

  Hugo Ball, “Kandinksy,” 1917

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction: 1,567 Days

  PARTI:Postwar

  1918:Shell Shock

  1919:A Poet’s Coup

  1920:Moonshine Nation

  1921:The End of Hope

  1922:Renaissance in Harlem

  1923:Beyond the Milky Way

  1924:Men Behaving Badly

  1925:Monkey Business

  1926:Metropolis

  1927:A Palace in Flames

  1928:Boop-Boop-a-Doop!

  PARTII:Prewar

  1929:The Magnetic City

  1930:Lili and the Blue Angel

  1931:The Anatomy of Love in Italy

  1932:Holodomor

  1933:Pogrom of the Intellect

  1934:Thank You, Jeeves

  1935:Route 66

  1936:Beautiful Bodies

  1937:War Within a War

  1938:Epilogue: Abide by Me

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Nameless horror

  Gabriele d’Annunzio

  Harlem Hellfighters

  Ku Klux Klan

  Berlin

  German war veteran

  Anna Akhmatova

  Street scene in Harlem

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Josephine Baker

  Franz Kafka

  Experimental film Ballet Mécanique, 1924

  Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan

  The “average American male”

  Still from Metropolis

  Fritz Kahn’s workings of the human body

  Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times

  Tsiga Vertov’s vision of Homo sovieticus

  Le Corbusier’s vision of Paris

  The burning Palace of Justice in Vienna

  Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna

  Betty Boop

  Steel ovens in Magnitogorsk

  Marlene Dietrich in Der blaue Engel

  August Sander’s portrait of a secretary in Cologne

  Michele Schirru

  Hitler and Mussolini

  Joseph Stalin with his daughter, Svetlana

  A victim of Stalin’s artificial famine

  Action Against the Un-German Spirit

  Osip Mandelstam photographed by the NKVD

  Strikebreakers in Rhondda, Wales

  A dust storm approaches a settlement

  After a dust storm in South Dakota, 1936

  Portrait of a Dust Bowl refugee with her children

  Wolfgang Fürstner

  Statues of athletes at a sports complex in Dresden, 1936

  Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhos Woman

  The Victor by the German sculptor Arnold Breker

  Street battles in Barcelona, 1936

  Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, 1937

  Introduction: 1,567 Days

  ON AUGUST 10, 1920, AT NINE-THIRTY IN THE MORNING, THIRTY-SEVEN-year-old singer Mamie Smith and her musicians arrived at a recording studio close to New York’s Times Square. Crowded around the large horn of the recording machine, they began improvising their way into “Crazy Blues,” a song written for the occasion. Again and again they played, riffing and refining as they went. Perry Bradford, the pianist, remembered: “As we hit the introduction and Mamie started singing it gave me a lifetime thrill to hear Johnny Dunn’s cornet moaning those dreaming blues and Dope Andrews making some down-home slides on his trombone, while Ernest Elliott was echoing some clarinet jive along with Leroy Parker sawing his fiddle in the groove. Man, it was too much for me.”1

  The blues dealt with disappointed love—how could it be otherwise? Smith sang with raw grief in her powerful alto voice as clarinet, violin, and trombone sighed and groaned alongside her, the musicians fortified by a steady supply of bootleg gin and blackberry juice. After thirteen takes and eight hours of work the musicians declared themselves satisfied with the result. They were tired and happy, in something of a collective trance. They saw out the day over plates of black-eyed peas and rice at Mamie’s apartment.

  Smith had left the grim Cincinnati neighborhood where she grew up and made a reputation for herself in vaudeville theater in Harlem before beginning to appear in bars and speakeasies. It was a life at the edge, but it had its rewards. Her expressively dark and flexible voice soon brought her a local following, and eventually even the great Victor label became interested in making a record with her. They eventually dropped the idea, however, ostensibly on artistic grounds, but more probably out of fear. Smith was black, and southern customers in particular had warned record firms that they would boycott their products if they began to record and credit black artists on their discs. Finally a smaller firm, the OKeh Phonograph Company, had decided to defy the threats and give Mamie a chance. She had recorded her first blues song, “That Thing Called Love,” on Valentine’s Day 1920 with an all-white band of musicians, a compromise solution. No other African American had ever recorded a blues song before.

  “That Thing Called Love” had done well for the company, and for the second record Smith was allowed to play with her regular band. When she had heard of the decision, she broke into a spontaneous dance of joy. Now, after a long day’s recording, the second record, “Crazy Blues,” was ready for pressing and distribution. It would sell seventy-five thousand copies in Harlem alone in just one month. Throughout the United States, sales soon topped one million—a historic achievement, and not just for a black artist. Only star tenor Enrico Caruso and Al Jolson’s hit
song “Swanee” sold more that year.

  What made Mamie Smith’s recording success so phenomenal was that both white and black households were buying “Crazy Blues.” Something new had happened. Classical singers such as Caruso and professional crooners such as Jolson had begun to carry a more popular repertoire into people’s lives, but always in a form as shiny and carefully arranged as Jolson’s brilliantined hair. By contrast, Smith’s singing conveyed unvarnished emotion. A whole culture found its voice in hers. She combined the bellow of a street hawker and the vocal punch of an angry washerwoman with the sorrow of centuries of humiliation and a young woman’s sheer lust for life. It was not the first time popular singers had sung with such raw sassiness, of course, but it was the first time such a performance had been recorded. The voice of the down-and-dirty people came into the polite living rooms of the middle and upper classes, and young listeners in particular decided that it spoke for them, too.

  As Mamie Smith was riding a wave of success as “Queen of the Blues,” other black artists broadened the appeal of jazz in the United States and beyond. Jazz was much, much more than danceable tunes. It was the child of slavery and speakeasies, the inspiration for indecency and irresponsibility, acoustic subversion, the musical infiltration of lives lived at the margins into the center of society. In America, young black musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington were often restricted to segregated or illegal clubs and bars. In Europe, which was still reeling from the nightmare of the First World War, they toured the great cities and were welcomed as heralds of a new age. Jazz somehow embodied everything that had changed, and more: it embodied the fact that nothing was the same now as it had been in 1914.

  Jazz became the soundtrack of an age, the incendiary charge flung into society, igniting tensions, stoking sensuality, and sapping the old order. Even the Nazis would pay tribute to the power of its message by fighting a culture war against “degenerate nigger jazz,” wary of its immense pull and eloquence yet unable to replace it with anything but cheerily sterilized swing music, military marches, and Viennese waltzes corrupted into vehicles of National Socialist feeling. But they never felt safe. Syncopation, it seemed, was lurking in every corner.

  A paradox lies at the heart of this image of an all-new world suddenly risen from the war. As I have argued in The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West 1900–14, the great shift into the modern age did not spring full-blown out of the trenches of the Western Front; rather, many of its elements were already in place well before 1914. Mass societies, consumerism, mass media, urbanization, big industry and big finance, feminism, psychoanalysis, the theory of relativity, abstract art, and atonal music all predate the beginning of the war. So why did the world suddenly seem so much more modern? Why is it that far more than a single decade seems to separate the fashions, social mores, and moral outlook of, say, 1913 and 1923?

  Perhaps this apparent paradox can be resolved by another one. The First World War is generally accepted to represent a radical break for the societies concerned, followed by a new beginning. This assumption of a sudden rupture may appear to explain why the world looked different after 1918, but when studying the period one is struck time and again by the great forces of continuity originating around 1900, traversing the war years, and reaching far into the future.

  In the epigraph at the beginning of this book the German poet Hugo Ball draws the apocalyptic scenario of a world ending, a “blind battle of forces unbound.” Ball was writing in 1917, and while his poetic analysis appears to fit the interwar period after the supposed rupture of 1918, he is actually describing life before 1914. Even at the turn of the twentieth century, metropolitan areas had already become battlegrounds of modernity, about which he could remark: “The world became monstrous, uncanny, the relationship with reason and convention, the yardstick vanished. . . . The science of electrons caused a strange vibration in all surfaces, lines and forms.”2

  The warlike scenario of city life evoked here is strikingly similar to reports by soldiers from the front in the Great War—a hellish place of machines and technology, of constant threat and individuality annihilated, a place ruled by abstract demons. Ball himself had volunteered for military service but had been classed as unfit for service. His only direct confrontation with life at the front came when he went to visit a wounded friend near Lunéville in late 1914. What he saw behind the front lines was deeply shocking to him, and as his lecture three years later made clear, he identified the existential rift and the historical rupture with the “electric tingling” of modernity and its supreme expression: the fascination and danger of life in the big city.3

  Even before 1914 new machines, scientific inventions, and industrial processes had been transforming the lives of city dwellers—and, to a lesser degree, those of people in the countryside. The denizens of the growing urban agglomerations had already come to rely on mass transportation, mass-produced goods, food imported from across the globe, work in factories and offices, newspapers and cinema, and everyday technologies such as condoms, which were made from vulcanized rubber and which facilitated easier and less risky access to sex. These technological possibilities changed not only daily lives but also the sense of self of those living in this way.

  The social consequences and the possibilities created by these technological changes began to transform all aspects of life. Within less than a generation, many aspects of life such as entertainment, education, and travel had become more democratic; women had demanded equal rights and were fighting for them; and workers were increasingly organized and ready to defend their interests through trade unions and strikes. To those at the bottom, life in the metropolis was miserable, but those who were already one rung up—those who had enough to eat and a roof over their heads—profited from access to cheaper goods, cheaper food, and more possibilities for learning about and encountering different people, places, cultures, and perspectives, even if only through cinema shorts, badly reproduced photographs in a newspaper, and a weekend third-class railway outing for the family.

  The world had grown, and it had accelerated. Clocks, conveyor belts, timetables, telegrams, and telephones sped up daily life; racing cars, bicycles, planes, and even trains and ships dominated the news as new records were set and then broken every day in a contest between human mechanical ingenuity and nature. Machines extended human abilities beyond most people’s dreams.

  The headlong rush of history had also caused deep anxieties. On a philosophical level, writers of various political stripes ranging from the fanatical and self-hating anti-Semite Otto Weininger to the left-leaning humanist Émile Zola all emphasized the point that modernity was devouring its children, that virtue and dignity were being swallowed by the rootless, internationalized, capitalist, mass-produced life of the big city. On a societal level, the newly awakened self-confidence of disenfranchised groups such as women, workers, and people subjected to racial discrimination rebelled against their exclusion. From the colonies of all major powers came a growing wave of civil rights agitation, national pride, violent protests, and civil disobedience; from women came the campaigns of the suffragettes and the strident analysis of writers such as Rosa Mayreder, who declared traditional masculinity obsolete; and from workers came an increasing ideological and individual commitment to revolution.

  This social and intellectual upheaval caused a multitude of reactions, most important those among men who saw their masculinity threatened by the changing patterns of power and by a personal and professional life marked by increasing speed and insecurity. Those who could not cope with the new demands were declared “neurasthenics” and sent to mental hospitals to recuperate away from the constant haste of city life. Others sought refuge in rituals of masculinity such as bodybuilding and a cult of health and fitness. Uniforms were in fashion, and more duels were being fought than ever before, while small advertisements in newspapers from Chicago to Berlin asked their readers to consider whether they migh
t be suffering from a secret “manly weakness” or from “nervous exhaustion,” and proposed tinctures and electric baths to stimulate virility.

  For many men, the outbreak of the war was therefore a welcome opportunity to turn their backs on the “effeminate” and virility-sapping ways of city life and conquer not only enemy territory but manliness itself. As the first enthusiastic soldiers volunteered in Munich and Manchester, Linz and Lyon, their ears were ringing with sermons, lessons, and public exhortations to follow the noble call of the fatherland and find death or glory on the battlefield of honor, where they would engage in a holy fight, blessed by the Lord, that pitted man against man, saber against saber, courage against courage. For many, the war seemed the ideal remedy for life in a soulless modern world.

  The enthusiasm at the outbreak of the war in the summer of 1914, what is in German simply called the “August experience,” is one of the factors often used to portray the years before 1914 as naive and all too willing to rush to war. To some extent that was certainly the case. But this is only half the story, a half told and retold countless times until very recently, partly because it fitted the narrative of a war-crazed German emperor and an out-of-control military caste plunging all of Europe into misery.

  Recent research paints a more nuanced picture. There was indeed enthusiasm, and there is abundant evidence for this, mainly because the most enthusiastic—often young men from middle-class backgrounds—were precisely the kind of people who were likely to leave evidence in the form of letters, diaries, poems, and memoirs. This image, however, ignores the opposition to the war coming from workers and farmers on all sides (the former because their families would go hungry and they saw the war as a capitalist plot, the latter because their fields would be left untended), and it disregards the large, usually socialist peace demonstrations in Paris, Berlin, and London, as well as the many voices declaring their shock and predicting a catastrophic end to the war even as early as August 1914.

  The enthusiasm of the summer of 1914 has become a received historical truth, but that truth chooses to forget the extent to which the myth of the “August experience” was a conscious creation. More than two hundred thousand copies of the Kriegsbriefe deutscher Studenten (War Letters by German Students), a highly selective and propagandistic work of retrospective hero worship published in 1916 by Philipp Wittkop in Germany, were in circulation by the time Hitler came to power, and its popularity still informs the common assumption that soldiers as well as entire societies went into the war with feverish enthusiasm.