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The Generation of 1914
The generation of 1914 holds a special place in memory, affection, and myth. In this irresistible and moving book, Robert WohI rescues it from the shadows of legend and brings it fully into the realm of understanding. He tells the story of the young men--the middle class elite of five European countries, France, Germany, England, Spain, and Italy, to recreate the generational consciousness that united them as well as the unique national experience that made them different.
These were men born at the end of the nineteenth century when the world of reason was disintegrating into a world of irrationality. They were destined to rule but their lives were interrupted by the greatest of wars, leaving them searching for identity and historical continuity. Wohl recaptures this search through novels, poems, autobiographies, memoirs, sociological treatises, philosophical essays, university lectures, political speeches, conversations when recorded, letters, personal notebooks, and newspaper articles. His book is a brilliant study of European mentalities, both collective and individual.
Probing behind ideas to find the experience that inspired them, Wohl illuminates in unexpected ways the origins of World War I and its impact on its participants. His exploration of the consciousness of generational unity and the power of the generational bond enables him to place in a novel context the spread of pessimism and despair, the waning of liberal and humanitarian values, the rise of Communist and Fascist movements, and the sudden eruption of violence in Europe's progressive countries between the two world wars.
These were men born at the end of the nineteenth century when the world of reason was disintegrating into a world of irrationality. They were destined to rule but their lives were interrupted by the greatest of wars, leaving them searching for identity and historical continuity. Wohl recaptures this search through novels, poems, autobiographies, memoirs, sociological treatises, philosophical essays, university lectures, political speeches, conversations when recorded, letters, personal notebooks, and newspaper articles. His book is a brilliant study of European mentalities, both collective and individual.
Probing behind ideas to find the experience that inspired them, Wohl illuminates in unexpected ways the origins of World War I and its impact on its participants. His exploration of the consciousness of generational unity and the power of the generational bond enables him to place in a novel context the spread of pessimism and despair, the waning of liberal and humanitarian values, the rise of Communist and Fascist movements, and the sudden eruption of violence in Europe's progressive countries between the two world wars.
324 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
139 people want to read
About the author
Robert Wohl
8 booksRobert Wohl is professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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March 13, 2012
Believing as I do that the First World War is the foremost hinge upon which the twentieth century opens to reveal itself, I've tried my hand at a number of books that examine the various political and societal elements in flux before, during, and after that seminal conflict in an attempt to understand how a Europe so long at peace and thriving at various stages along the route of industrialization and imperialism could, seemingly on a mass whim, surrender itself to the irrational allure of violence and destruction.
Robert Wohl here tries his hand at the game, undertaking an exhumation of the myth of the Lost Generation of 1914—those youths born within the span of 1880 to 1900 who, chafing at the selfish and conformist restraints of the bourgeois capitalism that left them so spiritually unfulfilled and despairing—and deeming themselves blessed with an abundance of spiritual connectedness to and unique historical understanding of the modern world—marched off to the Great War aglow with excitement and nationalist fervor, only to be decimated by the mass slaughter. Those who survived the horror of the trenches returned home with an ingrained bitterness and resentment—the victors for the rich old men who with their vulgar manipulations of democracy, capital and technology had misused them so capriciously and for such inane, unworthy ends; the losers for the timid and traitorous paper-pushers and bean-counters who had soiled the honor and sacrifice of the soldiers with a selfish capitulation— and the veterans were reduced to stewing in obscurity, dissipating their potential in idleness or peregrinations, whilst the riches of an angry, restless, and energetic decade spiraled upwards into the pockets of those same gerontologic interests of both sides. This Generation—of men hardened on the outside and burned to a purity within by the trials and losses they had endured amidst a shellshocked wasteland—had seen the errors of this brutal age and embraced the idealism, the faith in the noble being, the strength of a people united in blood and tied to the soil; and it was expected that they would, at any moment, arise and cast off the shackles of a mundane world ruled by cosmopolitan mediocrities and take the helm of the state in their own firm grasp, leading the people back to the glorious ways that had allowed them to become so strong in the first place, before party politics and greedy, overweening clerks in service of a blood-thirsty elder leadership had led the people astray.
Or so the mythology unfolded. What Wohl desires is to mine that lore and determine what veins of truth run through it. Was there ever such a generation molded by the hand of destiny, or was it merely the wish-fulfillment of a minority of bourgeois elites, alienated from their own class and with vivid dreams of a connection with the sturdy masses below them? Were the best souls of youth left lifeless on the battlefield, or was this merely advanced as an excuse for the apathy and debaucheries of those who survived? What parameters would define or discern such a generation from the teeming populace aswim in the postwar world? Was it merely a rhetorical or mental conception, or one with a political or societal relevance affixed to reality? Wohl examines the development of the generational theories during the early twentieth century as it played out within five of the principal European nations: France, Germany, England, Spain, and Italy.
I enjoyed this more than I thought I would—Wohl's insights are superb and convincing, and his compact inning-break character portraits uniformly excellent. Although his writing initially tended to aridity, by the second section he vastly improves and keeps the dust motes at bay. The juxtaposition between the French and German generationists is quite intriguing: the first country emerging as a winner from the war, the other a vilified and humiliated loser, but both with a sizable contingent of middle- and upper-class intellectuals who burned with resentment and contempt for the manner in which things unfolded, both during the war and afterwards; allied with them were those dissatisfied thinkers of the previous generation, who saw in the war-bound youth the tools to tear down the societal edifice they had long raged against. While the French elites primarily conceived of this generational geist as one of a recurring mathematical regularity that would be transmitted, in this instance by literary vehicles, and result in an alteration of the idealistic mindset of a disparate youth, attuning it to a purpose serving the glory of a France returned to its historical roots, the Germans approached things in a more systematic and spiritually complex manner. They worked their way through a number of generational conceptions—all centered upon the War Generation, tested and made steely by their shared experience, uniting under a fatefully chosen führer and overthrowing the hated Weimar Republic—to determine both why these veterans had not yet made their claim for control, and how such a glorious uprising could be instigated.
In each case we have a minority of intellectuals—opposed to both the Left- and Right-wing parties vying for an electoral victory and unable to accept that the War Generation was no less variegated in its political allegiances than any other segment of society—trying to impress a rigidity in the service of their own cherished ideology upon an unruly host that would not hold still long enough to allow it. Indeed, the very idea of this nobly-inspired generation might have arisen out of an effort to find an answer to the proletariat class that had been given its own historical destiny through the prophetic writings of Marx. Two despairing national elites, both completely incapable of capturing, representing, or even really comprehending the common masses who they both despised and desperately desired to lead. You can sense the spiritual agony through the pages. This is also another of those revelatory tomes whose upturned authors make their play for the reader's attention: Wohl's detailed exegesis of Karl Mannheim's generational essay pushed me into shifting the latter's sociological opus Ideology and Utopia into the first tier of to-read material.
The generational impact upon England was of a different sort from its continental neighbors—it saw much less in the way of a sociological-empirical attempt to pin-down the constituent elements of the generational concept and its dissemination, through either literature (France) or politics (Germany), nor an elite flagging the forces of reaction in order to impose a return to the future. Rather, it materialized as The Lost Generation, a myth in which the best and the brightest souls from the middle- and upper-classes—the Flowery Youth of England—were killed in the war, leaving the nation bereft of those inspired spirits, those vibrant intellects, those stoutest of hearts who would have devolved everywhere upon the island the munificence of their boundless gifts. What was left were the disillusioned and glum survivors, with little ability to resist the machinations of the wicked old men who had not only fed the cream of Englands's crop of young men to the maws of the trenches, but had secured their position even more strongly in the process. Wohl really performs some excellent work here, setting the tone with the contradictory personality and poetry of Rupert Brooke, whose For God, King, and Country, What a lark is War! enthusiasm marked the literary output of the opening stages of the war; then, whilst the home fires still burned with the raging fires of patriotic fervor, Wohl dissects the poetry and actions of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen as the opening moves in the turn to a bitter, satirical denunciation of both the war and its deluded supporters safe and secure across the Channel.
From this Wohl is able to encompass the uneasy and uncertain direction of Great Britain after the war, the turn towards socialism—and its inevitable disappointments—by a significant portion of the veterans, the sudden defection of a handful of elites, like Mosley and Williamson, to create a British Fascist Party, and the outpouring of war memoirs and fiction during the late years of the 1920s. Within it all, this buttressing of the idea of a Lost Generation and its rueful atmospherics of a Great Nation robbed of its rightful due of genius, Wohl detects more than a whiff of the same wishful thinking, the same romantic nostalgia and excuse-making for the cynical survivors of the elite classes who now faced a determined claim by the masses for a share of the power; elites who lacked the belief necessary for the passionate embracing of any cause, a convenient means of shifting the blame for present inaction onto actions of the past. The chapter concludes with an outline of T.E. Lawrence, a man who paradoxically exemplified all of the heroic attributes and antics that fed the mythology of the War whilst he was involved in it, and who was the first of the elites to understand the perils of a self-pitying absorption with the conflict as it receded into the past. Caught between two worlds—this was seemingly to be the fate of many who made it back from the battlefields physically alive.
The chapter on Spain sees Wohl taking a different approach, focussing almost exclusively upon the thought and written output of the seminal Generation of 1914 Spanish thinker José Ortega y Gasset, with the chaotic whorl that encompassed the political and social upheaval of the peninsular realm over the first third of the twentieth century providing the background setting. Although comparatively unscathed by the destruction of the Great War, the latter proved a watershed moment for the Spanish state—unleashing a flood of emotion into the twin branches of the regnant ideologies of socialism and reaction and setting the stage for their brutal showdown in the late 1930s whilst encouraging the War Generation of intellectuals to try and seek their moment in the sun by means of transforming the political, social, and cultural environment that was then mired in the tepid fog of a corrupt and incompetent constitutional monarchy and a mostly illiterate peasantry still enchained by aristocratic landlords and an obscurantist church. It was this retrograde state of affairs that had led to the humiliating defeat suffered at the hands of the upstart United States during the Spanish-American War of 1898; and, yet again, Wohl details the response—bred by past humiliations and failures laid at the feet of the elder generation as set against the limitless potentiality of the future in the hands of the younger—of a self-selected group of highly educated middle- and upper-class intellectuals: a rejection of the vulgar left and the backwards-looking right in favor of the rule of an educated class of modern-thinking philosopher coevals who, in combining spiritual depth with dominant reason and removing the baleful grip on power of the greedy interests and their parties, would guide a united, forward-looking Spain to its rightful place at the seat of first-tier nations. And this response would, yet again, engender frustration, bewilderment, and despair within that elite as the masses ignored their passionately conceived and delivered vision in favor of a vociferous championing of the regnant ideologies of the parties. These brilliant young minds, it seemed, could convince few outside of their own class circle to take up their cause in the real world; perhaps because, stripped of their demagogic rhetoric, these young voices were calling only for a reinforcement of their inherent privileges absent the threat of further crass materialism or a radical revolution, in either of which they would likely have been displaced.
As mentioned, however, the study of Ortega's political-philosophical evolution is the dominant theme of the Spanish section, beginning with his initial forays into the field at the tender age of twenty—as one of the Generation of 1914 from the peninsular mesetas—and continuing on through to the period between 1932, when he withdrew from an active participation in the politics of his homeland, and 1936, when he fled abroad from the brutal Civil War that broke out between the Falangist forces of reaction and the Republic. Dubbed the master of beautiful and empty phrases by his friend and mentor Azorín, the philosophy of Ortega has never been an easy thing to pin down—a lengthy series of assertions and systematic constructions, mostly built around the pathway of Human History, that delineated his ideas in powerful language but left the concrete details somewhat open-ended and vague, presumably to be filled in by acolytes who would follow in the footsteps of their master. What Wohl concentrates upon is his initial writings, detailing how his generation had been failed by that of the previous Generation of 1898—Azorín, Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, and Ramiro de Maeztu, to name a few—whose inability to properly prepare their successors for the tasks of societal guidance had forced Ortega and his ilk to seek their educations outside of Spain, and to import modern European thought when they returned; and how these early writings pushed him into developing his own Generationist philosophy—one that, described most vividly in The Theme From Our Time and Man and Crisis, would prove to be—along with those of France's Mentré and Germany's Mannheim—the greatest of the generational tracts developed by those early twentieth century thinkers. Very briefly, Ortega's conception of generations was that of a dialectic of history biologically ingrained in humanity—operating in 15 year intervals and separated into units labelled youth, initiation, maturity, dominance, and old age—that progressed in a linear fashion but functioned hierarchically, with the newest generations always building upon the layers laid down by their forebears, and adjacent units interacting with each other through idealistic tension—occasionally buttressing each other's trains of thought, at other times in conflict or antagonism; whatever the case, each generation would thus leave their own mark upon their culture and society and wrench the collective consciousness in new directions; and this is what accounted for the changes that history wrought upon mankind.
Crossing over for a final look at the G1914 as it unfolded in Italy provides perhaps the richest and most satisfying of the national quintet. Much like the Germany that many Italians loathed as an overly materialistic and expansionistic horde of savage brutes, Italy came late to the nationhood game, and regional and linguistic traditions pushed against the conformist structure of the unitary state. Wohl lines up a true gallery of intellectuals—Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini for the original anti-party renewalists; Marinetti and Serra as the interventionist enthusiasts; Mussolini, Balbo, and Malaparte as the opportunistic Fascist adherents of youthful (and somewhat aimless) action; Adolfo Omodeo as the positivist apostate spiritual warrior who found nobility in the sacrifice of young Italian lives during the Great War; all culminating in Wohl's excellent and intriguing analysis of the generationist thought of Antonio Gramsci, the physically deformed radical who Prison Notebooks cast a revelatory light not only upon his contemporaries in the Italian Fascist and anti-Fascist scene, but also upon the works examined previously by such profound thinkers as Mentré, Pinder, and Mannheim. With Italy proving, by a wide margin, the most reluctant amongst the European powers to cast their lot with the fortunes of war, the perfervid haranguing of the masses by the elites took on a particularly fiery, and desperate, tone; and the resentment amongst the Combattentismo for the idlers and shirkers burned especially hot when the conflict was ended with few appreciable gains for the nation. This sense of a betrayal—from allies as well as countrymen—combined with a loathing for the longstanding, collaborationist off-and-on-again government of the pragmatic Giolitti, set the stage for the March on Rome by Mussolini's Fascists in 1922; a movement that cynically embraced the young generation as important movers and shakers of destiny, whilst fobbing them off with action-oriented organizations that achieved little beyond keeping this energy directed away from Il Duce's coterie.
Wohl takes the time to point out the fact that, under Giolitti, Italy achieved the greatest rate of expansion of suffrage, education, literacy, industrial production, and wage increases in its history; but such practical, quotidian achievement meant little to these thinkers, preoccupied as they were with that rarefied metaphysical realm wherein spiritual purity and youthful willpower combined to wreak marvels upon the physical limitations imposed upon mankind by nature. It is in this area that Gramsci—and Wohl as exegete—proved himself possessed of such a subtle and acute understanding of the Generationists: for all of their inflamed and declamatory rhetoric calling for an uprising of the masses against the corrupt and mediocre liberalism of the Western European nations, at heart they were terrified of such a revolution, with its inherent likelihood of the vulgar masses forcibly seizing all of the privileges and advantages these elites held and cherished; that for all of their scorn and contempt for the bourgeois society they deemed an enervating miasma of decadence, they were imbued with this very bourgeois essence, it percolated in their blood and cast its imprimatur upon everything they thought, said, or did.
Seizing upon the native dissatisfaction and conflict endemic to the relationship between fathers and sons, the latter—living in a society where technological, transportational, and scientific change occurred at such a rapid pace that the knowledge passed down from their parents' generation to its successor ofttimes seemed a worthless legacy—took the base materials of such a cultural truism and used them to erect the Generational theories to explain the historical necessity of the present generation and its fate to both be severely tested by a horrific war and then set upon the path of altering the very society which sent them to the trenches. When they returned, however, these elite thinkers could never achieve the symbiosis of leader and followers between themselves and the public; for, at heart, all of their philosophical and historical systems and programs were designed for a conservative purpose: to maintain the current structure of middle- and upper-class status and privileges while eliminating the overwhelming dominance of capitalistic commerce and removing the threat of class warfare, the leveling down of these thinkers by the rising of the masses. Preoccupied by the Marxist prophecy of class divisions based upon socio-economic factors, these intellectuals desired to transform this prophecy into one where biological age determined one's comrades and fellow combatants. When set against the populist promises and enthusiasms of Communism or Fascism, even Liberalism, these elites never had any chance of their perorations appealing to a sizable component outside of their own class and cultural structures; as such, Wohl provides a valuable service in explaining an important component in the rise of twentieth-century totalitarianism.
Robert Wohl here tries his hand at the game, undertaking an exhumation of the myth of the Lost Generation of 1914—those youths born within the span of 1880 to 1900 who, chafing at the selfish and conformist restraints of the bourgeois capitalism that left them so spiritually unfulfilled and despairing—and deeming themselves blessed with an abundance of spiritual connectedness to and unique historical understanding of the modern world—marched off to the Great War aglow with excitement and nationalist fervor, only to be decimated by the mass slaughter. Those who survived the horror of the trenches returned home with an ingrained bitterness and resentment—the victors for the rich old men who with their vulgar manipulations of democracy, capital and technology had misused them so capriciously and for such inane, unworthy ends; the losers for the timid and traitorous paper-pushers and bean-counters who had soiled the honor and sacrifice of the soldiers with a selfish capitulation— and the veterans were reduced to stewing in obscurity, dissipating their potential in idleness or peregrinations, whilst the riches of an angry, restless, and energetic decade spiraled upwards into the pockets of those same gerontologic interests of both sides. This Generation—of men hardened on the outside and burned to a purity within by the trials and losses they had endured amidst a shellshocked wasteland—had seen the errors of this brutal age and embraced the idealism, the faith in the noble being, the strength of a people united in blood and tied to the soil; and it was expected that they would, at any moment, arise and cast off the shackles of a mundane world ruled by cosmopolitan mediocrities and take the helm of the state in their own firm grasp, leading the people back to the glorious ways that had allowed them to become so strong in the first place, before party politics and greedy, overweening clerks in service of a blood-thirsty elder leadership had led the people astray.
Or so the mythology unfolded. What Wohl desires is to mine that lore and determine what veins of truth run through it. Was there ever such a generation molded by the hand of destiny, or was it merely the wish-fulfillment of a minority of bourgeois elites, alienated from their own class and with vivid dreams of a connection with the sturdy masses below them? Were the best souls of youth left lifeless on the battlefield, or was this merely advanced as an excuse for the apathy and debaucheries of those who survived? What parameters would define or discern such a generation from the teeming populace aswim in the postwar world? Was it merely a rhetorical or mental conception, or one with a political or societal relevance affixed to reality? Wohl examines the development of the generational theories during the early twentieth century as it played out within five of the principal European nations: France, Germany, England, Spain, and Italy.
I enjoyed this more than I thought I would—Wohl's insights are superb and convincing, and his compact inning-break character portraits uniformly excellent. Although his writing initially tended to aridity, by the second section he vastly improves and keeps the dust motes at bay. The juxtaposition between the French and German generationists is quite intriguing: the first country emerging as a winner from the war, the other a vilified and humiliated loser, but both with a sizable contingent of middle- and upper-class intellectuals who burned with resentment and contempt for the manner in which things unfolded, both during the war and afterwards; allied with them were those dissatisfied thinkers of the previous generation, who saw in the war-bound youth the tools to tear down the societal edifice they had long raged against. While the French elites primarily conceived of this generational geist as one of a recurring mathematical regularity that would be transmitted, in this instance by literary vehicles, and result in an alteration of the idealistic mindset of a disparate youth, attuning it to a purpose serving the glory of a France returned to its historical roots, the Germans approached things in a more systematic and spiritually complex manner. They worked their way through a number of generational conceptions—all centered upon the War Generation, tested and made steely by their shared experience, uniting under a fatefully chosen führer and overthrowing the hated Weimar Republic—to determine both why these veterans had not yet made their claim for control, and how such a glorious uprising could be instigated.
In each case we have a minority of intellectuals—opposed to both the Left- and Right-wing parties vying for an electoral victory and unable to accept that the War Generation was no less variegated in its political allegiances than any other segment of society—trying to impress a rigidity in the service of their own cherished ideology upon an unruly host that would not hold still long enough to allow it. Indeed, the very idea of this nobly-inspired generation might have arisen out of an effort to find an answer to the proletariat class that had been given its own historical destiny through the prophetic writings of Marx. Two despairing national elites, both completely incapable of capturing, representing, or even really comprehending the common masses who they both despised and desperately desired to lead. You can sense the spiritual agony through the pages. This is also another of those revelatory tomes whose upturned authors make their play for the reader's attention: Wohl's detailed exegesis of Karl Mannheim's generational essay pushed me into shifting the latter's sociological opus Ideology and Utopia into the first tier of to-read material.
The generational impact upon England was of a different sort from its continental neighbors—it saw much less in the way of a sociological-empirical attempt to pin-down the constituent elements of the generational concept and its dissemination, through either literature (France) or politics (Germany), nor an elite flagging the forces of reaction in order to impose a return to the future. Rather, it materialized as The Lost Generation, a myth in which the best and the brightest souls from the middle- and upper-classes—the Flowery Youth of England—were killed in the war, leaving the nation bereft of those inspired spirits, those vibrant intellects, those stoutest of hearts who would have devolved everywhere upon the island the munificence of their boundless gifts. What was left were the disillusioned and glum survivors, with little ability to resist the machinations of the wicked old men who had not only fed the cream of Englands's crop of young men to the maws of the trenches, but had secured their position even more strongly in the process. Wohl really performs some excellent work here, setting the tone with the contradictory personality and poetry of Rupert Brooke, whose For God, King, and Country, What a lark is War! enthusiasm marked the literary output of the opening stages of the war; then, whilst the home fires still burned with the raging fires of patriotic fervor, Wohl dissects the poetry and actions of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen as the opening moves in the turn to a bitter, satirical denunciation of both the war and its deluded supporters safe and secure across the Channel.
From this Wohl is able to encompass the uneasy and uncertain direction of Great Britain after the war, the turn towards socialism—and its inevitable disappointments—by a significant portion of the veterans, the sudden defection of a handful of elites, like Mosley and Williamson, to create a British Fascist Party, and the outpouring of war memoirs and fiction during the late years of the 1920s. Within it all, this buttressing of the idea of a Lost Generation and its rueful atmospherics of a Great Nation robbed of its rightful due of genius, Wohl detects more than a whiff of the same wishful thinking, the same romantic nostalgia and excuse-making for the cynical survivors of the elite classes who now faced a determined claim by the masses for a share of the power; elites who lacked the belief necessary for the passionate embracing of any cause, a convenient means of shifting the blame for present inaction onto actions of the past. The chapter concludes with an outline of T.E. Lawrence, a man who paradoxically exemplified all of the heroic attributes and antics that fed the mythology of the War whilst he was involved in it, and who was the first of the elites to understand the perils of a self-pitying absorption with the conflict as it receded into the past. Caught between two worlds—this was seemingly to be the fate of many who made it back from the battlefields physically alive.
The chapter on Spain sees Wohl taking a different approach, focussing almost exclusively upon the thought and written output of the seminal Generation of 1914 Spanish thinker José Ortega y Gasset, with the chaotic whorl that encompassed the political and social upheaval of the peninsular realm over the first third of the twentieth century providing the background setting. Although comparatively unscathed by the destruction of the Great War, the latter proved a watershed moment for the Spanish state—unleashing a flood of emotion into the twin branches of the regnant ideologies of socialism and reaction and setting the stage for their brutal showdown in the late 1930s whilst encouraging the War Generation of intellectuals to try and seek their moment in the sun by means of transforming the political, social, and cultural environment that was then mired in the tepid fog of a corrupt and incompetent constitutional monarchy and a mostly illiterate peasantry still enchained by aristocratic landlords and an obscurantist church. It was this retrograde state of affairs that had led to the humiliating defeat suffered at the hands of the upstart United States during the Spanish-American War of 1898; and, yet again, Wohl details the response—bred by past humiliations and failures laid at the feet of the elder generation as set against the limitless potentiality of the future in the hands of the younger—of a self-selected group of highly educated middle- and upper-class intellectuals: a rejection of the vulgar left and the backwards-looking right in favor of the rule of an educated class of modern-thinking philosopher coevals who, in combining spiritual depth with dominant reason and removing the baleful grip on power of the greedy interests and their parties, would guide a united, forward-looking Spain to its rightful place at the seat of first-tier nations. And this response would, yet again, engender frustration, bewilderment, and despair within that elite as the masses ignored their passionately conceived and delivered vision in favor of a vociferous championing of the regnant ideologies of the parties. These brilliant young minds, it seemed, could convince few outside of their own class circle to take up their cause in the real world; perhaps because, stripped of their demagogic rhetoric, these young voices were calling only for a reinforcement of their inherent privileges absent the threat of further crass materialism or a radical revolution, in either of which they would likely have been displaced.
As mentioned, however, the study of Ortega's political-philosophical evolution is the dominant theme of the Spanish section, beginning with his initial forays into the field at the tender age of twenty—as one of the Generation of 1914 from the peninsular mesetas—and continuing on through to the period between 1932, when he withdrew from an active participation in the politics of his homeland, and 1936, when he fled abroad from the brutal Civil War that broke out between the Falangist forces of reaction and the Republic. Dubbed the master of beautiful and empty phrases by his friend and mentor Azorín, the philosophy of Ortega has never been an easy thing to pin down—a lengthy series of assertions and systematic constructions, mostly built around the pathway of Human History, that delineated his ideas in powerful language but left the concrete details somewhat open-ended and vague, presumably to be filled in by acolytes who would follow in the footsteps of their master. What Wohl concentrates upon is his initial writings, detailing how his generation had been failed by that of the previous Generation of 1898—Azorín, Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, and Ramiro de Maeztu, to name a few—whose inability to properly prepare their successors for the tasks of societal guidance had forced Ortega and his ilk to seek their educations outside of Spain, and to import modern European thought when they returned; and how these early writings pushed him into developing his own Generationist philosophy—one that, described most vividly in The Theme From Our Time and Man and Crisis, would prove to be—along with those of France's Mentré and Germany's Mannheim—the greatest of the generational tracts developed by those early twentieth century thinkers. Very briefly, Ortega's conception of generations was that of a dialectic of history biologically ingrained in humanity—operating in 15 year intervals and separated into units labelled youth, initiation, maturity, dominance, and old age—that progressed in a linear fashion but functioned hierarchically, with the newest generations always building upon the layers laid down by their forebears, and adjacent units interacting with each other through idealistic tension—occasionally buttressing each other's trains of thought, at other times in conflict or antagonism; whatever the case, each generation would thus leave their own mark upon their culture and society and wrench the collective consciousness in new directions; and this is what accounted for the changes that history wrought upon mankind.
Crossing over for a final look at the G1914 as it unfolded in Italy provides perhaps the richest and most satisfying of the national quintet. Much like the Germany that many Italians loathed as an overly materialistic and expansionistic horde of savage brutes, Italy came late to the nationhood game, and regional and linguistic traditions pushed against the conformist structure of the unitary state. Wohl lines up a true gallery of intellectuals—Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini for the original anti-party renewalists; Marinetti and Serra as the interventionist enthusiasts; Mussolini, Balbo, and Malaparte as the opportunistic Fascist adherents of youthful (and somewhat aimless) action; Adolfo Omodeo as the positivist apostate spiritual warrior who found nobility in the sacrifice of young Italian lives during the Great War; all culminating in Wohl's excellent and intriguing analysis of the generationist thought of Antonio Gramsci, the physically deformed radical who Prison Notebooks cast a revelatory light not only upon his contemporaries in the Italian Fascist and anti-Fascist scene, but also upon the works examined previously by such profound thinkers as Mentré, Pinder, and Mannheim. With Italy proving, by a wide margin, the most reluctant amongst the European powers to cast their lot with the fortunes of war, the perfervid haranguing of the masses by the elites took on a particularly fiery, and desperate, tone; and the resentment amongst the Combattentismo for the idlers and shirkers burned especially hot when the conflict was ended with few appreciable gains for the nation. This sense of a betrayal—from allies as well as countrymen—combined with a loathing for the longstanding, collaborationist off-and-on-again government of the pragmatic Giolitti, set the stage for the March on Rome by Mussolini's Fascists in 1922; a movement that cynically embraced the young generation as important movers and shakers of destiny, whilst fobbing them off with action-oriented organizations that achieved little beyond keeping this energy directed away from Il Duce's coterie.
Wohl takes the time to point out the fact that, under Giolitti, Italy achieved the greatest rate of expansion of suffrage, education, literacy, industrial production, and wage increases in its history; but such practical, quotidian achievement meant little to these thinkers, preoccupied as they were with that rarefied metaphysical realm wherein spiritual purity and youthful willpower combined to wreak marvels upon the physical limitations imposed upon mankind by nature. It is in this area that Gramsci—and Wohl as exegete—proved himself possessed of such a subtle and acute understanding of the Generationists: for all of their inflamed and declamatory rhetoric calling for an uprising of the masses against the corrupt and mediocre liberalism of the Western European nations, at heart they were terrified of such a revolution, with its inherent likelihood of the vulgar masses forcibly seizing all of the privileges and advantages these elites held and cherished; that for all of their scorn and contempt for the bourgeois society they deemed an enervating miasma of decadence, they were imbued with this very bourgeois essence, it percolated in their blood and cast its imprimatur upon everything they thought, said, or did.
Seizing upon the native dissatisfaction and conflict endemic to the relationship between fathers and sons, the latter—living in a society where technological, transportational, and scientific change occurred at such a rapid pace that the knowledge passed down from their parents' generation to its successor ofttimes seemed a worthless legacy—took the base materials of such a cultural truism and used them to erect the Generational theories to explain the historical necessity of the present generation and its fate to both be severely tested by a horrific war and then set upon the path of altering the very society which sent them to the trenches. When they returned, however, these elite thinkers could never achieve the symbiosis of leader and followers between themselves and the public; for, at heart, all of their philosophical and historical systems and programs were designed for a conservative purpose: to maintain the current structure of middle- and upper-class status and privileges while eliminating the overwhelming dominance of capitalistic commerce and removing the threat of class warfare, the leveling down of these thinkers by the rising of the masses. Preoccupied by the Marxist prophecy of class divisions based upon socio-economic factors, these intellectuals desired to transform this prophecy into one where biological age determined one's comrades and fellow combatants. When set against the populist promises and enthusiasms of Communism or Fascism, even Liberalism, these elites never had any chance of their perorations appealing to a sizable component outside of their own class and cultural structures; as such, Wohl provides a valuable service in explaining an important component in the rise of twentieth-century totalitarianism.
April 9, 2015
I don't think of myself as particularly credulous, but until reading this book I had unassumingly used the term "generation" to refer to what I thought of as my age group and never realized the total lack of empirical basis for such a category: where does "my generation" starts and where does it end? There seems to be little reason why someone a year younger than me should be "categorically" similar to me, while someone forty years older should not.
It turns out that I was not the only one to take such a thing for granted: in this book Wohl sets out to describe a cornucopia of modernist ideologies who linked their radical credentials to their youth, placing them back into the context of an ongoing sociological debate as to the nature and composition of generations, and the occasional appropriation of the idea by conservative critics.
If the theme itself is already quite original and to me very appealing, it is not, however, the real strength of the book: that would be the author's incredibly broad ranging culture, which covering French, English, German, Italian and Spanish, allows him to practice a real comparative approach, and in turn provides his reader with wide-ranging and highly entertaining portrait of youth, as it was imagined and remembered, rather how it actually was, in the first half of the XXth century.
It turns out that I was not the only one to take such a thing for granted: in this book Wohl sets out to describe a cornucopia of modernist ideologies who linked their radical credentials to their youth, placing them back into the context of an ongoing sociological debate as to the nature and composition of generations, and the occasional appropriation of the idea by conservative critics.
If the theme itself is already quite original and to me very appealing, it is not, however, the real strength of the book: that would be the author's incredibly broad ranging culture, which covering French, English, German, Italian and Spanish, allows him to practice a real comparative approach, and in turn provides his reader with wide-ranging and highly entertaining portrait of youth, as it was imagined and remembered, rather how it actually was, in the first half of the XXth century.
November 14, 2008
A deep and important study of the intellectual malaise in Europe that led to the rise of fascism in the 1930s.
July 22, 2017
Call it 2.5 stars. Very dense book in very small type. Interesting but disappointing. I read the chapters of England, France, and Germany but skipped Spain and most of Italy. Conclusion: WW I was the dividing point in modern history.
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