2. Tate Museum’s Definition of Modernism
“Modernism refers to a global movement in society and culture that from the early
decades of the twentieth century sought a new alignment with the experience and
values of modern industrial life. Building on late nineteenth-century precedents,
artists around the world used new imagery, materials and techniques to create
artworks that they felt better reflected the realities and hopes of modern
societies.” (my emphasis)
www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/modernism
Kazimir Malevich, Black Square 1913/1915.
One of the seminal works of modern art. Revolutionary. Art did
not represent reality, but was its own abstract thing unto itself.
A dividing line between art before and after?
3. Modernism and the Creation of Cultural Memory
• Was war a dividing line between innocence and
disillusionment?
• Did a new generational consciousness emerge and if so what
did the “children of `14” create?
• Did modernism “triumph” over traditionalism or did tradition
“win” out?
• How to express/represent the experience?
4. • “war was a product of modernism
rather than modernism a product
of the war” Modris Ekstein, Rites
of Spring: The Great War and the
Birth of the Modern Age (1989)
• self-consciousness
• experimental (with forms)
• rejection of realism/tradition
• irony
Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910,
The Art Institute of Chicago
Modernism and War
5. DADA Rejection of this and everything else: 1916 at Cabaret Voltaire,
Zurich café. Cultural nihilism that said no to everything
including war. “We want to end the war with nothing.”
Raoul Hausmann, The Art Critic 1919–20 (Tate) Hugo Ball performing at Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 Cover of the first edition of Dada
by Tristan Tzara; Zurich, 1917
6. Dada Manifesto by Hugo Ball.
Read at the first public by Dada soirée, Zurich, July 14, 1916.
. . . . How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and
delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism,
worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the
pawnshop. Dada is the world's best lily-milk soap. Dada Mr Rubiner, dada Mr Korrodi. Dada Mr Anastasius Lilienstein. In plain
language: the hospitality of the Swiss is something to be profoundly appreciated. And in questions of aesthetics the key is quality.
I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. Dada Johann
Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m'dada. Dada mhm dada da. It's a question
of connections, and of loosening them up a bit to start with. I don't want words that other people have invented. All the words are
other people's inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my
own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words for it that are seven yards long. Mr Schulz's words are only two and a half
centimetres long.
It will serve to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a
cat meows . . . Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn't let too many words out. A
line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers' hands, hands
worn smooth by coins. I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words.
Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn't I find it? Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch, and
Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence,
your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the
first importance.
7. Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the
Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919)
8. Trench Poets and the Myth of the War Experience
• George L Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World
Wars and “Myth of the War Experience” (MWE): The creation of or
shaping of meaning of the war experience. Has to have more meaning
than just mass death, has to be for something.
• Mosse argued: “The reality of the war experience came to be
transformed into what one might call the Myth of the War
Experience, which looked back upon the war as a meaningful and
even sacred event.” (p. 7)
Otto Dix, Trench
9. Refashioning the Memory of War
• MWE: Masked and legitimized war experience; displaced reality of war.
• MWE sanctified war experience. Nation provided with new depth of
religious feeling, new saints and martyrs, new places of worship.
• Trivialized it. War represented through objects of daily life (kitsch).
• Transcendent: Personal regeneration tied to national regeneration. “War
as a communal experience was perhaps the most seductive part of the
MWE, enabling men to confront and transcend death, and the idealized
common soldier was an indispensable part of this myth, as well as an
example of the new man who would redeem the nation.” (Mosse, p. 65)
• How was this reflected in poetry?
10. Domesticating War
Tankard made from a shell case by
a sapper at Ypres
Kitchener Commemorative plate depicting scenes
from WWI from Till & Son/s
Rigid airship pilot badges
11. The cult of the fallen soldier (CFS)
For Germany particularly: Centerpiece to Myth. Focal point of the “religion of nationalism after the
war” (Mosse, p. 7)
CFS: Praise for the simple soldier as the true representative of the people and admiration for his
strength, common sense, and courage
CFS: Symbolized all that youth could be. “Greek in harmony, proportions and controlled strength”—
Greek Ideal combined Modern weapons—nude with machine gun or a gladiator with a steel helmet
and rifle. Transcendent!
World War I Memorial at the
Biebrich Cemetery, Wiesbaden, Hessen
Machine Gun Corps in Hyde Park (1919 by Derwent Wood)
“Saul hath slain his thousands but David his tens of thousands”
13. History Loves Irony, Or at least the British
• Fussell: “Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war
constituted an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically
disproportionate to its presumed ends.” (The Great War and Modern Memory, 7)
• Eight million people destroyed because 2 people (Franz Ferdinand and Sophie)
shot. WWI the most ironic war because “It reversed the Ideas of Progress.” (p. 8)
Why so ironic? Starts out with so much innocence and such strong beliefs in
established values (honor and glory). War will make innocence lost and values an
obscenity.
• Jay Winter in Remembering War: Irony British response not shared by other
combatants (e.g. French writing more earnest; more directly affected by warfare
or national character?). Winter: “British intellectuals did indeed privilege irony in
a way which has informed the construction of a canon of war literature.” (p. 118).
Irony “explodes heroic pretensions.” (Winter, p. 123)
14. Defining Irony
• Gr. Eironeia, originally “dissimulation,” especially through understatement
Modern usage-understatement where “expressed meaning is mild, and the
intended meaning is intense” (American folk humor typically uses overstatement)
• Context important (“wonderful weather” when it’s not)
• Contraction or foreshadowing often used in irony, also naiveté (innocence or
simplicity)
• Dramatic irony (think Greek plays): Spectators know more than the protagonist,
Character reacts in a way contrary to what is appropriate or wise, parody, and
marked contrast between what the character understands and what text
demonstrates about character’s actions
• Robert Graves sums up the British sense of irony about the war experience:
“only those who tell lies about the war can actually tell the truth.” (p. 124)—
What makes this even more ironic is that Graves’ great uncle Leopold van Ranke,
the great German historian.
15. Oh! What a Literary War!
How to describe the generation of 1914 and their outlook? They
describe themselves!
The first great literate war. Higher rate of literacy than previous major
wars. Men and women shape the cultural memory through writings.
War Poems and Imagery and Language: Trench Poets
Siegfried Sassoon
(1886-1967)
Wilfred Owen Robert GravesCharles Hamilton Sorley
16. Why does poetry matter?
People wrote and read poetry!
Scan of a final draft of
Anthem for Doomed Youth
by Wilfred Owen,
penned by the author (1920).
One calculation: 1.5 million poems
published in Germany in Aug. 1914
Over 800 artists killed in war
Over 2,000 poets had works published in
Britain and over 3,000 vols, of poetry
published
Poetry ultimate expression of emotion
Consider what is being expressed
How it is being expressed
17. How to respond?
• Cling to old modes of thought? Embrace killing? Spiritual confusion?
• “un-ironic” responses: French infantry lieutenant Alfred Joubaine in diary
shortly before killed “Humanity is mad! It must be mad to do what it is
doing. What a massacre! What scenes of horror and carnage! I cannot find
words to translate my impressions. Hell cannot be so terrible. Men are
mad.” (Ellis, Eye-Deep, p. 5).
• How to find the words? How to describe the unimaginable?
• Poets “wrote to express their horror of a war that they could hardly
comprehend as a meaningful part of the historical process. The horror and
the confusion are the enduring message in what they wrote. For them the
war had no meaning and the ideals that had sustained them in the
beginning had become an irrelevancy.” (Ellis, MG, 145).
18. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854)
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854 in Crimean War
19. Popular Tastes and Literary Efforts
John Oxenham’s hymn, ‘For Men at the Front’, sold five-seven million copies, Wilfred Owen unknown to
general public.
Rupert Brook more popular (“The Soldier”). John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” hugely popular.
Paul Fussell considered Isaac Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches as the greatest poem of the war
“For The Men At The Front” John Oxenham
Lord God of Hosts, whose mighty hand
Dominion holds on sea and land,
In Peace and War Thy Will we see
Shaping the larger liberty.
Nations may rise and nations fall,
Thy Changeless Purpose rules them all.
