The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia

by William Pfaff

A hidden moral history of the twentieth century unfolds in William Pfaff's fascinating story of writers, artists, intellectual soldiers, and religious revolutionaries implicated in the century's physical and moral violence. They were motivated by romanticism, nationalism, utopianism -- and the search for transcendence. To our twenty-first century, already plunged -- once again -- into visionary terrorism and utopian quests, they leave a warning....
The account begins with Italy's Futurists, who glorified war as "the world's only hygiene"; painted speed, action, and noise; invented "found sound" and chromatic pianos; thought violence sublime; and demanded "reconstruction of the universe."
Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet, playwright, and nationalist buccaneer, created a revolutionary utopia in a Dalmatian city stolen in 1919 from Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles Treaty makers. In doing so, he invented the political style and rituals of Fascism, as well as Third World liberation. T.E. Lawrence, archaeologist and spy, guided the Arab revolt against the Turks, becoming both "Uncrowned King of Arabia" and masochist secular saint. Ernst Jünger, artist and scientist, the German army's most decorated hero of World War I, made heroism a political ideology and became intellectual leader of the National Cause. Hitler was a follower. In World War II Jünger plotted Hitler's assassination and survived to become a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation. Willi Münzenberg, Lenin's propaganda genius and an original member of the Comintern, invented the political "front" organization, created the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and seduced a generation of "innocents" to the Communist cause before becoming a dissident himself. He wasstrangled by Soviet agents in a French forest. André Malraux, fantasist "Byron of the 1930s," world-famous novelist, emulator of T.E. Lawrence, and make-believe leader of the Chinese revolution, discovered "that daydreaming gives rise to action." He created and led an air squadron for Republican Spain, wrote himself into the script of the French Resistance as a hero -- and became one. Arthur Koestler, the most famous scientific journalist in Europe, was a Comintern spy in Spain; condemned to death there, he abandoned the cause and wrote Darkness at Noon, the most influential anti-Communist work of its time, before committing suicide in 1976.
Others with roles in The Bullet's Song are Benito Mussolini, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Che Guevara, Charles de Foucauld, Simone Weil, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Europe's terrorists of the 1970s, and "Popski" -- Vladimir Peniakoff -- the honorable man who found happiness in leading his private army to war.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

384 pages, Hardcover

First published October 26, 2004

Reviews

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I would myself propose that not only does no evidence exist of man's moral progress but that none is to be expected."

Not a cheerful point of view, true, but Pfaff's cautionary tale of lethal utopian fantasies illuminates a type of hubris we're apt to idealize. (Example: the neo-conservative project of destabilizing the Middle East in order to introduce democracy.) Pfaff explores the life and thought of six Europeans (including T.E. Lawrence, Malraux and Koestler) — a bleak but astute account how "romantic violence" leads to unromantic death and destruction.

Pfaff writes for the International Herald Tribune — every couple weeks I visit [http://www.iht.com/] and search for his most recent column. If you want to know what's going on in Europe from an American point of view, his columns are an excellent resource.

[Reading List · Rating 2 out of 5]

Competently done but not very well focused

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some striking observations and compelling accounts, though at times, the central thesis is lost in the brisk biographical style that affects all of Pfaff's historical anecdotes. The introduction and conclusion are the most gripping moments; when Pfaff follows the specifics of his subjects' lives from one historical movement to another, it can lose its momentum. Still, a wide-ranging work on this remote, turbulent period in Western history.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pending.