Fracture

Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938

Philipp Blom

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857892782
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

When the Great War ended in 1918, the West was broken. Religious faith, patriotism and the belief in human progress had all been called into question by the mass carnage experienced by both sides. Shell shocked and traumatized, the West faced a world it no longer recognized: the old order had collapsed, replaced by an age of machines. The world hurtled forward on gears and crankshafts, and terrifying new ideologies arose from the wreckage of past belief.

In Fracture, critically acclaimed historian Philipp Blom argues that in the aftermath of the First World War, citizens of the West directed their energies inwards, launching into hedonistic, aesthetic and intellectual adventures of self-discovery. It was a period of both bitter disillusionment and visionary progress. From Surrealism to Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West; from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to theoretical physics, and from Art Deco to Jazz and the Charleston dance, artists, scientists and philosophers grappled with the question of how to live and what to believe in a broken age.

Morbid symptoms emerged simultaneously from the decay of the First World War: progress and innovation were everywhere met with increasing racism and xenophobia. America closed its borders to European refugees and turned away from the desperate poverty caused by the Great Depression. On both sides of the Atlantic, disenchanted voters flocked to Communism and fascism, forming political parties based on violence and revenge that presaged the horror of a new World War.

Vividly recreating this era of unparalleled ambition, artistry and innovation, Blom captures the seismic shifts that defined the interwar period and continue to shape our world today.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: 1,567 Days

PART I: 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!

PART II: 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 ...