Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

Vaslav Nijinsky, born in 1889, epitomized the new age of dancing more than any other dancer in the Ballets Russes. Eksteins writes how “every aesthete in Europe seemed to be in love with the ‘grace and brutality,’ […] of Nijinsky” (35). Even before he left the Russian Imperial Theatre, Nijinsky showed his rebellious sensuality when he performed to the dowager empress with “nothing over his tights” and starkly displayed the outlines of his sex (35). A virtuosic dancer, Nijinsky’s high leaps made him famous, but his true radicalism shone through in his choreography, designed to depart from the refined, ethereal niceties of classical ballet in favor of “expressiveness with a vengeance” (37). Whereas classical ballet required arms to be “so encircling that that the points of your elbows may be imperceptible,” Nijinsky disrupted such classical conventions by taking care “to make the points of his elbows not only perceptible but inescapable” (37). Rather than the aerial toe dancing and courtly positions of classical ballet, Nijinsky’s Rite favored movements that were more akin to walking or even stomping.

Nijinsky’s marriage to Romola de Pulszky, another dancer in the company, angered a jealous Diaghilev so much that he ceased working with him. In subsequent years, Nijinsky endured mental collapse much like returning soldiers from the front after the Great War. 

Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring’s composer, was born in 1882 in Lomonosov, Russia, and lived as a compulsive innovator. Not intending to lose “his shock value” Stravinsky complained that he was unable “to compose what they want from me […] which would be to repeat myself” (40). In his libretto for The Rite of Spring, he broke with the 19th century idea of plot and instead produced a piece that was “unified by a single idea: the mystery and great surge of the creative power of Spring” (9). He wanted his audience to viscerally experience the power of spring in the ballet and was prepared to accept their censure “before” they grew “accustomed” to the new “language” he was inventing with Nijinsky (41). Stravinsky’s score was extraordinarily complicated for the dancers, as every musical bar “had a different time signature” (51). This created an experience of flux for both dancers and audiences who struggled to make rational sense of the composition. Stravinsky’s alignment with sensation and disturbance over harmony and narrative logic rendered his score a cipher of modernity.

In 1888 and at age 29, Wilhelm II became the German Kaiser. Eksteins describes this figurehead as “an appropriate representative” of “burgeoning and blustering Germany” in the years leading up to the First World War (87). Wilhelm’s public appearance showed him to be a “histrionic nature” and favoring “pomp and circumstance” (87). He felt compelled to present as “the supreme war lord, the epitome of masculinity, hardness, and patriarchal resolve” (87). His mannerisms reflected the brusqueness of the modern age as he had a short attention span, grew easily bored and “demanded constant excursions and constant titillation” (88).

This front, however, masked Wilhelm’s softness and preference for the company of homosexual men over his family of seven children. With his entourage, Eksteins argues, Wilhelm found the “warmth and affection” not compatible with being the patriarch of a nation or a family (87). Though deeply invested in the newest technology, he also “delighted in the arts, particularly in lavish spectacle” (88). In his rich fantasy life, Wilhelm married “the primitive and the ultramodern” as he espoused a vision of Germany that was unequivocally cultured and militant (89). 

Championed as the “new Christ,” Charles Lindbergh, the American pilot who had successfully crossed the Atlantic by plane and without a radio, aroused the hope and admiration of the public in postwar France, Britain, and even Germany (243). Lindbergh, from Little Falls, Minnesota, sported “tousled blue-eyed fairness and ill-fitting suits [that] made him look even younger than his twenty-five years,” when in 1927, he was celebrated in numerous spectacles in Paris and London (245). Although Lindbergh “was fêted like no one else in previous history,” his chief appeals were the bravery of his feat in crossing the Atlantic and his typically American innocence (244). Although soldiers who had returned from the front nine years earlier were disillusioned about their own heroic journeys, they retained fantasies of heroism and projected them onto Lindbergh. On his tours to France and England, Lindbergh behaved like the perfect celebrity, visiting the appropriate war memorials, being “home-spun to the core,” and “solicitous about mothers, children, animals,” rather than pandering to the press’s wish for him to dance with the queue of attractive women awaiting (250). 

There was, though, a dark side to Lindbergh, given his interest in fascism. He eagerly accepted Hitler’s invitation to visit Nazi Germany in 1936 and returned in 1937 and 1938. For Hitler too, Lindbergh represented a vision of hope; there were also “propaganda benefits” from this international celebrity’s visit to the new regime (322). In 1940, Lindbergh’s wife, Anne, published The Wave of the Future, a tract that argued that fascism “was the only alternative to communism, the other manifestation of the political future” (323). Although her name was on the manuscript, there is evidence to believe that Lindbergh shared her views.

German ex-serviceman, Erich Maria Remarque, is the author of All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1929 novel that purported to give an authentic account of soldiers’ experiences on the front line. His main argument for writing the book was to “try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war“ (281). The style of Remarque’s book catered to modern, shortened attention spans and need for excitement as “brief scenes and short crisp sentences, in the first person and in the present tense, create an inescapable and gripping immediacy” (282). The book was wildly successful, reprinted numerous times, and translated into both English and French.

Remarque was an elusive character. According to Eksteins, Remarque “had a pretty boy’s face with a defiant soft mouth” (285). Remarque, who later gallicized his name, was born in 1898 Erich Paul Remark, the son of a Catholic bookbinder. Remarque’s discomfort with his lower middle class origins stayed with him for his entire life, even when he married film star Paulette Goddard and eschewed Nazi Germany and World War II by retreating to Switzerland and then New York.

A fan of classic German writer Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther in his youth, Remarque cultivated a melancholy persona, as “he professed to be a romantic; and he often toyed with the idea of suicide” (278). As Remarque’s critiques would mention, myth and mystery shrouded his actual experience at the front (278). For example, while he professed that he was wounded “either four or five times,” evidence confirmed that only one of the wounds had been serious (278).

Regardless of the truth behind Remarque’s frontline experience, he and his work are symbolic of the lack of a communal interpretation of the war and the subsequent necessity for everyone to look inwards and reach their own conclusions. As Eksteins writes, the “truth” in All Quiet on the Western Front, claimed to speak was “first and foremost, the truth about Erich Maria Remarque” (298). However, Remarque’s critics were in Eksteins’s opinion, “no nearer” the universal truth to which they referred (298).