Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: 1,567 Days
PART I: Postwar
1918: Shell Shock
1919: A Poetâs 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 dâAnnunzio
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 MĂ©canique, 1924
Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan
The âaverage American maleâ
Still from Metropolis
Fritz Kahnâs workings of the human body
Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times
Tsiga Vertovâs vision of Homo sovieticus
Le Corbusierâs 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 Sanderâs portrait of a secretary in Cologne
Michele Schirru
Hitler and Mussolini
Joseph Stalin with his daughter, Svetlana
A victim of Stalinâs 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 FĂŒrstner
Statues of athletes at a sports complex in Dresden, 1936
Mukhinaâs Worker and Kolkhos Woman
The Victor by the German sculptor Arnold Breker
Street battles in Barcelona, 1936
Pablo Picassoâs 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 Yorkâs Times Square. Crowded around the large horn of the recording machine, they began improvising their way into âCrazy Blues,â a song written for the occasion. Again and again they played, riffing and refining as they went. Perry Bradford, the pianist, remembered: âAs we hit the introduction and Mamie started singing it gave me a lifetime thrill to hear Johnny Dunnâs 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.â1
The blues dealt with disappointed loveâhow 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 Mamieâs 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, âThat Thing Called Love,â on Valentineâs Day 1920 with an all-white band of musicians, a compromise solution. No other African American had ever recorded a blues song before.
âThat Thing Called Loveâ 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 dayâs recording, the second record, âCrazy Blues,â 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 millionâa historic achievement, and not just for a black artist. Only star tenor Enrico Caruso and Al Jolsonâs hit song âSwaneeâ sold more that year.
What made Mamie Smithâs recording success so phenomenal was that both white and black households were buying âCrazy Blues.â Something new had happened. Classical singers such as Caruso and professional crooners such as Jolson had begun to carry a more popular repertoire into peopleâs lives, but always in a form as shiny and carefully arranged as Jolsonâs brilliantined hair. By contrast, Smithâs 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 womanâs 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 âQueen of the Blues,â 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 âdegenerate nigger jazz,â 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 1900â14, 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 âblind battle of forces unbound.â 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: âThe 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.â2
The warlike scenario of city life evoked here is strikingly similar to reports by soldiers from the front in the Great Warâa 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 LunĂ©ville 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 âelectric tinglingâ 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 ...