Sara Fishko:

When did humans become truly modern and what made us that way? A big part of the answer is the Great War. When it ended a hundred years ago, a century of shock began.

 

Philipp Blom:

When a war ends, it never quite ends. It goes on in the heads of people who have experienced it.

 

Sara Fishko:

It was in their heads, and the impact of it changed everything. Music ...

 

Jon Batiste:

Oh yeah, they'd never heard anything like it.

 

Sara Fishko:

... visual art ...

 

Sabine Rewald:

There's a cynicism that is ferocious.

 

Sara Fishko:

... and how war itself was memorialized.

 

Ana Carden-Coyne:

Something about that structure people responded to, thousands of people.

 

Sara Fishko:

And the way people themselves were understood.

 

David Lubin:

It’s sort of throwing down a line between the past and the present.

 

Sara Fishko:

Not to mention machines. I'm Sara Fishko. This is Shell Shock 1919: How The Great War Changed Culture. At the start, the prevailing view was that World War I would be over quite soon in a matter of several weeks, perhaps, or many months at most. The fighting ended four years and tens of millions of deaths later. And after a century we can't stop trying to figure out the war's complicated legacy. We keep digging, looking for lessons.

 

Speaker 7:

It is really for all of those who gave their lives, the 116,000 Americans and the millions of men from all over the world.

 

Sara Fishko:

This past June 28th, Americans and Europeans joined to mark 100 years since the day of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

 

Speaker 9:

That is why the work of remembering, of commemoration, is more important than ever, to remind us that the cost of sleepwalking into catastrophe, and ...

 

Sara Fishko:

That was the still highly contested document that officially bureaucratically ended the war.

 

Speaker 9:

But 100 years gives us some time to kind of know the end of the story. We know what comes next.

 

Sara Fishko:

The centenary event offered champagne and speculation.

 

Speaker 9:

Had there been no Great Depression, had there been no Second World War, then maybe it's easy to look back on the Treaty of Versailles as a great success.

 

Sara Fishko:

In the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. Oddly, there had been a kind of naïve excitement in some quarters about a world war. The idea of battling things out on a global scale. Men in particular had been asked to think of war as a noble adventure. The feminist movement, which had just begun in earnest in the couple of years before, was already rattling men who felt their place in society was now less clear. The war for some reason might actually help men regain their status in the world. The uniforms, the battles, the songs, the sheer assertiveness of it all.

 

Philipp Blom:

The war really brought something new into the world.

 

Sara Fishko:

Philipp Blom, his book about post-war life and culture is called Fracture.

 

Philipp Blom:

Because they said finally here there's something that gives us certainty, that shows us what we have to believe in, that shows us who our enemy really is.

 

Sara Fishko:

There was at the time what some call a crisis of masculinity. We tend to think of the rise of women in America in wartime as something unique to World War II.

 

David Lubin:

Where we're talking about Rosie the Riveter and the women going into the aircraft factories.

 

Sara Fishko:

Something similar happened in World War I, observes David Lubin, author of the book Grand Illusions.

 

David Lubin:

There are many recruitment posters you can see from this era of women with blowtorches and women with pickaxes and women wearing dungarees and farming the fields.

 

Sara Fishko:

All of which worked to their advantage as women organized toward a constitutional amendment guaranteeing their right to vote. This made them stronger.

 

David Lubin:

They realized that working in the war industries not only was gratifying to them personally but also would be very difficult to deny the vote to members of the population who'd done so much to sustain the war effort.

 

Sara Fishko:

Speaking of the war industries, this was of course the first truly industrial war. Massive mechanical and chemical weaponry. A modern war of industrial sound and fury. Deaths possible on an unprecedented scale. Its hallmark and legacy was the pervasive illness soldiers began to call shell shock. Its impact resonated in the culture. If there's a well-known dramatized representation of shell shock in the First World War, it would surely be the famous scene in Stanley Kubrick's 1957 film Paths of Glory.

 

Speaker 6:

Hello there, soldier. Ready to kill more Germans?

 

Sara Fishko:

As a commanding officer makes a tour of the trenches.

 

Speaker 6:

Is everything all right, soldier?

 

Speaker 7:

All right. Yes, sir, I'm all right.

 

Speaker 6:

Aha. Good fellow. Are you married, soldier?

 

Speaker 7:

Married? Me married?

 

Speaker 6:

Yes, have you got a wife?

 

Speaker 7:

A wife? Have I got a wife?

 

Speaker 9:

He's a bit shell shocked.

 

Speaker 6:

I beg your pardon, Sergeant. There is no such thing as shell shock.

 

Sara Fishko:

The film tells the story of a disastrous manipulation of the military unit by a general hungry for the glory of battle.

 

Speaker 7:

I'm never going to see her again. I'm going to be killed [crosstalk 00:05:02].

 

Speaker 6:

Get a grip on yourself! You're acting like a coward!

 

Speaker 7:

I am a coward, sir!

 

Speaker 6:

Snap out of it, soldier! Sergeant, I want you to arrange for the immediate transfer to this baby out of my regiment! I won't have our brave men contaminated by him!

 

Speaker 9:

Yes, sir!

 

Sara Fishko:

That scene is true to the reality of the moment. Because despite Freud recent pioneering revelations about the human psyche, not everybody believed there could be such a thing. That you could lose control over your body and voice due to repeated episodes of war. In the trenches just seeing someone in that state would be devastating.

 

Philipp Blom:

Don't forget, men especially had been educated, boys and men, to be men. That means you don't try, you don't show weakness. You are hard, you are courageous, you are tough. Then you see these people simply crumbling. That was not part of the plan. That was not part of the education, nobody had prepared themselves. The psychological effect was quite powerful.

 

David Lubin:

It just wasn't the physical ailment that was visible, a blown away arm or a scar in the abdomen, but it still needed to be treated nonetheless.

 

Sara Fishko:

The pioneer in this regard was a British psychotherapist W.H.R. Rivers of the Craiglockhart war hospital in Scotland.

 

David Lubin:

He treated some of the men who had shell shock, including the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and came to understand that the suffering, the trauma that they were going through was really deeply embedded in the experience of war.

 

Sara Fishko:

The poet Wilfred Owen, first suffering from shell shock, then killed in action while still in his twenties, left the world some of the earliest World War I creations. Haunting poems evoking the sounds of the trenches. He described the stuttering rifles rapid rattle and the shrill demented choirs of whaling shells.

 

Sara Fishko:

The shock and violence of the war found its way deep into the culture of the years that followed. It was simply incomprehensible.

 

Sara Fishko:

Even during the war off the battlefields, people were reeling with a sense of disaster. Some gathered in Zurich, which due to Switzerland's neutrality had become a refuge for thinkers, politicians, and artists. It was a time for manifesto and cultural movement, and avant garde poetry in some cases.

 

Sara Fishko:

One group had its headquarters in a nightclub called The Cabaret Voltaire. Hugo Ball, a saloon piano player and author was at the center of the group. We’re told the movement called Dada was created December 5th, 1916. It started as a cabaret act. Richard Huelsenbeck and Hugo Ball were searching for a stage name for a young woman who was to join them.

 

Richard H:

A few days before she was supposed to come to the Cabaret, I went with him to him through the encyclopedia, and there upon the road, Hada.

 

Sara Fishko:

Huelsenbeck reflected on Dada's origins in 1959.

 

Richard H:

So I said to Ball, why not Dada? And he said; Dada is wooden horse or toy in french.

 

Sara Fishko:

Turned out the young women never did show up at the Cabaret, but they liked her name so they kept it.

 

Richard H:

The word Dada had kind of a magic and from now on we called many of our activities Dada.

 

Sara Fishko:

What was it exactly?

 

Richard H:

We didn't know exactly against whom we should turn, but it was very important for us to find a target for our resentment. We had this great hostility, which we had turned first against the war, and against the imperial regime. But finally we generalized in such a way that we attacked conventionalism. Bourgeoisie was one of our main targets. So I found out what is the Bourgeoisie and I made the sad discovery that these were all Bourgeoisie. So what was the use to attack the Bourgeoisie, when I was a Bourgeoisie myself.

 

Sara Fishko:

If nothing else, they wanted it to be senseless.

 

Richard H:

The irrationality of this movement was an essential fact.

 

Sara Fishko:

The groups confounding statement of purpose was written by artist Hans Arp.

 

Translator:

Dada is the old fashioned, four legged crossbow that's leading a puppy on a leash.

 

Translator:

Dada has vibrations that are stronger than a hundred triangles.

 

Translator:

Dada at times resembles a head made of wormy apple eyes.

 

Translator:

Nevertheless, everyday Dada is more beautiful than the previous one.

 

Sara Fishko:

The Dadaists were not only interested in nonsense, says the Museum of Modern Art’s Ann Temkin, they also embraced the idea of chance in art.

 

Ann Temkin:

Which would include scattering a bunch of torn papers on a surface as say, an artist like Hans Arp would do. Gluing them down where they fell. That idea of chance as a compositional method absolutely stays strong today, a hundred years later.

 

Sara Fishko:

Marcel Duchamp said later, even though your brain might say there's no such thing as chance, I know what's going to happen. You had to let go of that kind of thing.

 

Marcel Duchamp:

So it's a kind of adoration for chance, as almost a religious element. So, it's very interesting to have introduced, put it at the service of art connection.

 

Sara Fishko:

Dada embraced art connections. Tristan Tzara of the Dada group said, in principle, I am against principles.

 

Sara Fishko:

Later some of the Dadaists got together with the painter Fernand Leger to create the legendary Ballet Mecanique, a silent film with bold editing and shattering juxtapositions, using some violent modernist imagery in response to all that had happened. Leger had been injured as a soldier in WWI. And like the poet Wilfred Owen, he was especially horrified as he lay ill listening to the battles play out. He wrote in letters from the front about his acoustic fear as he heard artillery fire and detonating shells. It all found its way into that film.

 

Philipp Blom:

Ballet Mecanique is almost a sort of a first wave reaction because you see it's the fragmentation of human bodies. It's the mechanical aspect of human bodies, it's the repetitiveness and the meaninglessness. You can see how that in many ways that looks like the experience of shell shock.

 

Sara Fishko:

American composer George Antheil wrote an original score with the same title.

 

Sara Fishko:

For airplane propellers, buzzers, various electronic devices and instruments.

 

Sara Fishko:

Antheil declared his music to be streamlined, glistening, cold. Often as musically silent as interplanetary space. Also often as hot as an electric furnace.

 

Sara Fishko:

The highly passionate and influential Dada movement soon turned in another direction, observed the droll and worldly Marcel Duchamp in a TV interview.

 

Marcel Duchamp:

As usual, a group of people don't get together very long, in two years or three years, it was enough. They began fighting together, they hated each other. So they dispersed and became another group from itself on the ashes of Dada, to become the Surrealists.

 

Sara Fishko:

More later on the Surrealists.

 

Sara Fishko:

But speaking of Duchamp, don't forget 1919 was also the year he drew a mustache on a postcard of the Mona Lisa, and embellished the image with the letters L-H-O-O-Q. Quite a racy French phrase. Suggesting that beneath her enigmatic façade, the Mona Lisa was in a state of overheated desire.

 

Ann Temkin:

That Dada attack on high art was in some ways actually a life jacket sent out to art.

 

Sara Fishko:

Ann Temkin suggests that even a hundred years ago, let alone now, the Mona Lisa has already become the equivalent of a poster or a cliché. An eye-rollingly familiar image, now made eye opening.

 

Ann Temkin:

By making fun of her, giving her facial hair, making her seem like a racy women, in a way you could say that rescued the Mona Lisa by de familiarizing her, by making you blink and do a double take.

 

Sara Fishko:

Classic Dada. The take down of high art. It all sounds very clever and light hearted. The photographer Man Ray, part of the group, thought otherwise when he was interviewed in 1972.

 

Interviewer:

I always had the feeling that the 20's and the 30's and the Dada movement, and the Surrealist movement, it was a great deal of fun.

 

Man Ray:

No, not at the time. People just looked back to it and think it's a marvelous period, romantic and that. But no, it was very tense. It was very bitter, and there was no humor. But what we did was really to upset things. Subconsciously to clear the way for something new, which we didn't know yet what it might be.

 

Ann Temkin:

As far as I can think of, the Dadaists were the ones who did the most confrontational portrayal of what had happened to civil society of the war times.

 

Sara Fishko:

Not knowing quite what they were doing, that was part of it. They wanted to say something, even if it was nothing. It was modern and it was urgent. So was the memorializing of WWI. It was needed the moment the war ended, and to this day.

 

German Tourist:

I know that they have the poppy day.

 

Sara Fishko:

A German tourist is visiting the Cenotaph, the singular war memorial in Whitehall, London.

 

German Tourist:

They fill it with poppies, and I think the English glorifies their deaths. What else can they glorify at the moment, eh?

 

Sara Fishko:

This particular memorial has no noble imagery, no soldier on horseback. A stone structure rectangular in shape with the words, the glorious dead, carved into the stone.

 

German Tourist:

This is fine. This is good. But it doesn't also say from which side.

 

Sara Fishko:

The monument is situated oddly in the middle of the street. That is, traffic, going both ways around it. But it's hard to overestimate its importance in Britain.

 

Speaker 22:

I remember growing up, seeing it on the TV since I was a child, so I was literally just passing on business and I thought I'd take a photograph.

 

Sara Fishko:

Tour groups passing by quite often.

 

Sara Fishko:

In every language.

 

Speaker 23:

And it's not just those who fell that worshiped in the church of England, it is the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims, the Buddhists, so it is representative of every soul on planet earth.

 

Sara Fishko:

Cenotaph is a Greek term, kenos, meaning empty, taphos, meaning tomb. Empty tomb. That's an idea that goes back to an old naval tradition, honoring men who went down with ships. WWI historian Dr. Jay Winter puts the Cenotaph at the very center of the effort to remember and honor those that fought.

 

Dr. Jay Winter:

What makes it original is the conversion of a moment of victory into a moment of mourning. This is what's astonishing.

 

Sara Fishko:

It was modeled after a hastily made papier-mache structure, which had been temporarily situated in Paris, at the far side of the Arc de Triomphe. The British called on the architect Edward Lutyens to create the same kind of thing for them.

 

Dr. Jay Winter:

And he did it. He did it on the back of an envelope. And he built it in papier-mache again, and put it on the mall connecting Ten Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament. So it's right at the heart of official London.

 

Sara Fishko:

It was intended to last for a week or so. To somehow mark the wars' official end and honor the dead.

 

Dr. Jay Winter:

And what happened is that the people of England voted with their feet that this is the national war memorial. There were two million people that came to London for that victory parade, which wasn't about victory. It was about the dead, it was about the lost generation. What Lutyens did, which turned the Dean of Westminster and the Dean of St Paul's, both clergymen, apoplectic was he made this monument without a cross.

 

Sara Fishko:

In doing that, he made it as the war had been, non-denominational. And that proclaimed its universality. As for the level of spontaneous outpouring of shared sorrow, its something we know about from September 11th certainly, in the notes and names covering fences in New York, and at Buckingham Palace.

 

Dr. Jay Winter:

What happened when Princess Diana was killed, so many people dropped flowers and whatever in her memory, much later in the 20th century it happened then.

 

Sara Fishko:

It happened almost instantly then in 1919, in the temporary Cenotaph.

 

Dr. Jay Winter:

It was literally covered in flowers by millions of people who had no idea where their dead son was. And most of them would never have any idea of where he was.

 

Sara Fishko:

So Luchins was asked to remake it in stone.

 

Dr. Jay Winter:

And he did. He replaced it, and it remains there to this day.

 

Sara Fishko:

A fascinating bit of history, an overwhelming response.

 

Dr. Jay Winter:

The shock of that loss, the shock of that level of suffering is something for which Britain has never recovered, and the Cenotaph is the symbol of that. It's the moment that divides history and you can actually see it.

 

Sara Fishko:

In that historic dividing line, you can see a post war collaboration of sorts between the artist Lutyens, who made the monument, and the millions of people who desperately needed to use it.

 

Ana Carden-Coyne:

There was this extraordinary, somewhat un-British outpouring of emotion.

 

Sara Fishko:

I asked historian Ana Carden-Coyne what was it about the Cenotaph, what did it look like, what did it suggest?

 

Ana Carden-Coyne:

It's an empty tomb. There's nothing in it. Yet it sort of looks like a severed limb. It sort of looks like an invisible superstructure, it has scale and permanency. And it, in one sense it references the absent body, on the other hand it reforms it. It's sort of eternal and modern at the same time. It was so successful that it was replicated all over the empire. Even in small towns you might have a mini Cenotaph.

 

Sara Fishko:

Which is not to say that there are not other deeply moving memorials, too many to mention. In contrast to the Cenotaph, one notable one is by the artist Kathe Kollwitz. Emma Chambers, a Tate Modern curator for the WWI art exhibit “Aftermath,” says Kollwitz allowed her own son to go off to war right at the start.

 

Emma Chambers:

And he was killed in October 1914, and she never forgave herself for having allowed him to go.

 

Sara Fishko:

Kollwitz's monument is called Grieving Parents. Two figures sculpted in gray stone kneeling, one bent over. They face her son Peter's grave in the Vladslo German war cemetery in West Flanders, Belgium.

 

Sara Fishko:

Efforts to remember, but also to repair the human figure persisted in the next decades - part of a changing culture after WWI.

 

Sara Fishko:

You're listening to Shell Shock 1919, I'm Sara Fishko. Back after a break.

 

Sara Fishko:

Back to WNYC's Shell Shock 1919. Exploring art, culture, and society after the first world war. I'm Sara Fishko.

 

Sara Fishko:

The use of the human figure had returned after the war, following the art world’s love affair with abstraction in the pre-war years; 1911, ‘12, and ‘13, says Ann Temkin.

 

Ann Temkin:

One of the phrases that's used often, particularly with French art, is the return to order.

 

Sara Fishko:

Picasso for example, let abstraction go for a moment, finding fragmentation less appealing. His monumental human figures of the time, were modeled after classical Greek imagery. And Matisse famously traveled to Nice toward the end of the war to make more lyrical work.

 

Ann Temkin:

But in all of those cases, it's a return to a legible human configuration. It's almost like wow, all of these people blew apart, let’s put some people back together.

 

Sara Fishko:

There were artists who felt that impulse to put people back together more literally. So many men had been injured and disfigured in the trenches. People encountering the soldiers on the street would seem to faint from shock at the sight of their distorted faces. And fine artists like Anna Coleman Ladd put their personal work on hold. The American artist, Ladd, had heard that a British sculptor was successfully creating prosthetic faces for soldiers who couldn't be helped by plastic surgery.

 

David Lubin:

She went to the American Red Cross, and said I think that I have the skills to do this as well. Can you set me up in Paris to help French and American soldiers.

 

Sara Fishko:

Historian David Lubin says Ladd was funded to set up a studio on the Left Bank.

 

David Lubin:

Pretty soon, the studio was filled with men who had been defaced in the war. The French called them les Gueles Cassees, the broken mugs.

 

Sara Fishko:

And Anna Coleman Ladd sculpted faces for them.

 

David Lubin:

She would take a mold of the man’s face as it was, and then, looking at photographs of the man before he was wounded, she would construct a mask to put the nose and jaw back in. They would attach it to the man’s face by eyeglasses.

 

Sara Fishko:

In episodes of Boardwalk Empire, the cable series of a few seasons ago, the character Richard Harrow had been seriously injured and disfigured and had returned home from WWI with one of these tailor-made masks. Not an uncommon sight in the period toward the end of the war and after. Presumably made by one artist for another, someone like Ladd.

 

David Lubin:

She also had to give the man a characteristic expression because this was the expression he was always going to wear in public. Maybe at home he'd take his mask off, but when he went out onto the streets this would be his face. So she tried to figure out what was the characteristic look of the man. Her team made about 97 masks before the war was ended and the studio was closed.

 

Sara Fishko:

An attempt to create, build, and restore might also describe the Bauhaus, the distinguished German design and architecture school founded in 1919. Germany had just been forced to face and accept responsibility for the war, in need of a restorative movement. In keeping with the moment the Bauhaus said make something new and write a manifesto. Theirs asserted the ultimate aim of all visual arts, is the complete building. Together let us strive for, conceive, and create the new structure of the future.

 

Sara Fishko:

What about this particular movement suggested that a manifesto was necessary, and whose idea was it to make a manifesto?

 

Marion von Osten:

The Bauhaus manifesto by Walter Gropius is the first architecture manifesto of a long line of artists’ manifestos or of political activists’ manifestos.

 

Sara Fishko:

Marion Von Osten is co-creator of the exhibition and book Bauhaus Imaginista.

 

Marion von Osten:

It came out of a revolutionary moment where artists and architects said we want to have a new form of education. We need to intervene in how we are educated.

 

Sara Fishko:

They wanted to integrate the building process into the culture, with all of the arts unified. Their hope was that art could play a new role in society.

 

Marion von Osten:

We see how provocative that was. All of this was a revolution, I mean literally.

 

Sara Fishko:

After the chaos, a fresh start.

 

Marion von Osten:

Nothing was clear anymore. So, if a generation wants to get rid of the idea of the fathers, the forefathers. If there is no tradition anymore, then you have to reinvent everything.

 

Sara Fishko:

In America, moving into the 1920s, there was an architectural reinvention going on. A building boom in urban areas. Skyscrapers going up changing the profiles of New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit. Then Seattle, and Los Angeles. After the cruel losses of the war, artists couldn't take their eyes off the towering buildings. It was a utopian strain, says the Montclair Art Museum's Gail Stavitsky.

 

Gail Stavitsky:

Kind of trying to make a better world. The optimism and energy, but just the whole technological revolution.

 

Sara Fishko:

No manifesto there, but a name given to a group of artists by critics and observers: the Precisionists. Georgia O'Keeffe fell into that group for a time with a famous series of paintings.

 

Gail Stavitsky:

Of skyscrapers, and of views of the city from this elevated perspective.

 

Sara Fishko:

O'Keeffe was in a unique position, painting skyscrapers from a skyscraper. The Shelton hotel where she lived in an apartment of the 30th floor. In 1927, some of the artists from the group worked to put together the Machine Age Exposition near New York’s Steinway Hall on 57th Street. The exhibit mixed the inspiration with the outcome.

 

Gail Stavitsky:

And it was just hundreds of machines, and the artwork that was influenced by the machines.

 

Sara Fishko:

E.B White wrote in the New Yorker that year that the show combined art with cogs, motor boat propellers, crane valves, insides of pianos. Another kind of mechanical ballet. Dadaism, Purism, Precisionism, arranged from deep anger to that utopian optimism. That range had played out in American popular culture too right after the war.

 

David Lubin:

People were coming back from the war with disabilities, with shellshock, with a sense of despair and disillusion. The ‘20s was an extreme reaction against the audterity measures of the war, where people had to save and scrimp. There was kind of a mass debauchery in America in the ‘20s.

 

Sara Fishko:

An individualistic moment.

 

David Lubin:

And a lot of this had to do with a sense of physical perfection.

 

Sara Fishko:

The desire for and aspiration to physical beauty took on a new life.

 

David Lubin:

Where movie stars now, were the reigning authorities in our society. People turn to them for tips on what car to drive and what mouthwash to use, what clothes to wear.

 

Sara Fishko:

At this point being beautiful and being an American became one in the creation of the Miss America Pageant, 1921.

 

David Lubin:

And Miss America, I mean think of the patriotic connotations of that. The idea was Miss America is not a feminist, she's not a foreign-born person, she's an all-American girl, representing all-American values.

 

Sara Fishko:

In that year on the boardwalk of Atlantic City, New Jersey, Margaret Gorman was chosen as “the most beautiful bathing girl in America.” She was 16. In this era of beauty worship, people found plenty of ways to enhance their appearance.

 

David Lubin:

The makeup industry is born at this time and becomes a billion dollar industry pretty early on.

 

Sara Fishko:

Makeup tsars Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, and Charles Revson were all in competition and on the rise in the ‘20s.

 

David Lubin:

In a sense, people learned that the masks of WWI really did serve people well if they had been disfigured. Well what about if you're not disfigured, you still feel like you can't market yourself properly in society because you're not as handsome as Gary Cooper, or Greta Garbo.

 

Sara Fishko:

Society said you can be, if you buy things to improve yourself.

 

David Lubin:

Makeup, plastic surgery, bodybuilding.

 

Sara Fishko:

And horror films flourished, based on much earlier work such as Frankenstein, first published in 1818, Dracula from 1897.

 

David Lubin:

I mean these stories, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hugo goes back into the early 19th century. But after WWI, Hollywood suddenly embraces these stories and retells them. Phantom of the Opera, which had originally been written in 1909. We think of the classic horror films in the ‘20s and ‘30s, I can't help but wonder if somehow they were a delayed response to the war. Sort of manifesting themselves as these fantastical monsters and vampires, and werewolves stalking the streets of Hollywood's version on London.

 

Sara Fishko:

While we're on the subject of bodies, masks, and Hollywood, it's worth mentioning Lon Chaney who was rising to stardom in 1919 on the basis of his role in the film of that year, the Miracle Man. Chaney was especially adept at playing disfigured or physically compromised characters. Soon he was a megastar with the gift of becoming unrecognizable through makeup and prosthetics, and with a nickname; the man of a thousand faces. A particularly apt title for this moment.

 

Sara Fishko:

These masked and twisted figures do seem like characters we somehow needed to see reexamined and redeemed.

 

Sara Fishko:

In later sound versions, they've stayed with us, some with the desired happy endings such as Charles Laughton’s memorable bell ringer and his fight for acceptance by society.

 

Sara Fishko:

So, one way or another throughout the popular culture, the war kind of hung in the air. Even if it may have dropped from the public consciousness in the ‘20s for example, it always bubbled up. Certainly in literature with a newly modern tone.

 

David Lubin:

Hemingway and John Dos Passos basically recreate the war novel in the mid ‘20s, and suddenly everywhere there's a real interest in the war again.

 

Sara Fishko:

A Farewell to Arms was made into not one, but two films.

 

Sara Fishko:

There were the war films, and the beauty obsession, and Freud who was a major figure of the time examining the insides of our psyches with intensity.

 

Philipp Blom:

The Viennese society, and do I live in Vienna. I know what I'm talking about, is very much of cultural façades.

 

Sara Fishko:

Author of Fracture, Philipp Blom.

 

Philipp Blom:

And as long as you know the outside is perfect, you can do on the inside whatever you like. Freud was one of the first people to say if that is so, that's going to do something with people. If they suppress something that they find is unacceptable on the façade, then that is not simply going away. That's going to stay there and work its way through them. Even something that seems on the surface inconsistent, or wrong, or it doesn't seem to make any sense, must have a deeper meaning. And it is his role to unearth that deeper meaning.

 

Sara Fishko:

These principles and techniques in a somewhat different form, found their way to America by the way of Freud's nephew.

 

Philipp Blom:

His nephew, Edward Eddie Bernays who was an advertising executive, a public relations specialist as he called himself in New York. After the first world war industrialists came to him and said, we have a problem. We have increased productivity, fantastically because of the war, but now peace has broken out and what are we going to do if we no longer have customers for our stuff.

 

Philipp Blom:

Bernays had read his uncle’s works, but he had never met him. He said, well if you want to keep selling stuff, don't sell cars, sell dreams. Don't tell people that this is a car that doesn't rust and that goes a hundred thousand miles and needs very little petrol. Tell them that if you buy this car, you're a real man. That is the beginning of advertising driven consumption at a scale that the 19th century had simply not known.

 

Sara Fishko:

Talk about a revolution. This is a complete shift in the relationship of humans to civilization. A different image of what a person actually is.

 

Philipp Blom:

Namely no longer the enlightened image of a sovereign, rational being that will make decisions based on facts, but now an instinct-driven being that is a bundle of insecurities and lusts, which can be manipulated if you only have the key. That of course is something that it is still very much at work in our world today.

 

Sara Fishko:

This view of the human, as one whose mind and body are deeply related, was coming to light in the early 20th century. Shell shock itself had helped to reveal the connection. Even earlier in 1889, Freud had written The Interpretation of Dreams and that too provided a shift in thinking. Among other things, dreams contained inspiration for art. The idea that an artist could access a dream. That the real information was now thought to be inside rather than outside, changed everything.

 

Sara Fishko:

Our friend Marcel Duchamp talked about the transformation, in an interview in 1958. His observation was that art up to that point had been what he called retinal.

 

Marcel Duchamp:

You look at a painting for what you see, what you comes on your retina. You add nothing intellectual about it, nothing else than the visual side of the painting. The painting is absolutely nothing but then you should look and register with your eyes and see. That's why I call them retinal.

 

Sara Fishko:

Then, the shift.

 

Marcel Duchamp:

It did change a bit of that by saying, why should we be only interested in the visual side of the painting. There might be something else too.

 

Sara Fishko:

The something else was the dream, the unconscious mind. The surrealists looked to their psyches to put their inner impulses and dreams on canvas. Naturally, they had a manifesto. 1924, written by Andre Breton. We are still living under the reign of logic, it said. But in this day and age, logical matters are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. Freud, Breton wrote, very rightly brought his critical faculties to bare upon the dream.

 

Sara Fishko:

You're listening to WNYC's Shell Shock 1919. Considering how art and culture changed after the Great War. Coming up, the surrealists make a movie; Harlem seems new; and then there's jazz. I'm Sara Fishko, back after a break.

 

Sara Fishko:

Back to WNYC's Shell Shock 1919. Reflecting on the persistent cultural impact of WWI. I'm Sara Fishko.

 

Sara Fishko:

The surrealists, says author David Lubin, were bringing dreams to the surface in a way.

 

David Lubin:

Sp the surrealist’s assumption is that we all walk around with masks all of the time, that our face, characteristic, expressions on our face, the way we greet each other, that's a phony aspect. That's a mask that we create for ourselves. The idea of surrealism is to delve beneath the mask.

 

Sara Fishko:

Film, the most dreamlike of all mediums, was a perfect foil for surrealism. By 1929, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali were teaming up for a surrealist film, or THE surealist film you might say, the celebrated Un Chien Andalou. Bunuel and Dali had met on holiday.

 

Translator #2:

We thought of Un Chien Andalou because of the dreams we had.

 

Sara Fishko:

Bunuel talked about it later.

 

Translator #2:

He dreamt his hand was full of ants. And I dreamt of a knife cutting an eye. He said we could make a film with that, using those irrational elements.

 

Sara Fishko:

They wrote it in seven days, and it was funded, said Bunuel, by his mother.

 

Translator #2:

I had a phonograph behind the screen. I played Argentine tangos and Tristan and Isolde. I had my pockets full of stones, so that if the audience booed I could throw them. But it was an extraordinary success. Everyone in Paris was there. Le Corbusier, Picasso. It was a success, and I was stunned. So I threw the stones discreetly to the ground.

 

Sara Fishko:

So it was Freud and the dream in addition to the war that provided this chapter of art and anti-art, and led to the famous melting clocks. Later to the Hitchcock dream sequences in Spellbound and all the rest. The unconscious mind had been liberated for the surrealist to access and use. The inside had come into view post-WWI. It appears to have extended beyond art.

 

Philipp Blom:

You really have a feeling that here is a building that looks fantastically beautiful and it’s got its whole façade simply blown off by this war. All of a sudden you see all of the rooms behind, and what's going on in them. People conducting affairs, people running the heating, people in the elegant salons. And you understand that things are not quite like what the façade wanted to make you believe. And I think that was a sensation a lot of people had after the war. That they felt you know, this is not what we were led to believe, this is not what we were educated for.

 

Sara Fishko:

By the end of the war, those who had lived through it, had been led to believe we had become a new society. Just after the fighting had ended in 1918, President Woodrow Wilson had suggested in his speech that nations had been drawn together in a combination of moral force that would be irresistible. That we had united in victory over oppressive autocratic governments. There were limits however, to the victory and America for one was still grappling with which people exactly were included in this united society.

 

Sara Fishko:

Ironically, in their years abroad, black soldiers had felt at last they were seen as Americans.

 

Emily Bernard:

There was a lot of faith in the idea for black men, if we served valiantly in the war, that will then earn us a place on the national stage.

 

Sara Fishko:

Historian Emily Bernard edited the book Remember Me to Harlem.

 

Emily Bernard:

This idea that if we demonstrate that we are citizens, then we will earn that respect back home.

 

Sara Fishko:

Among the returning soldiers, the head of the celebrated 369th infantry, soldier and musician James Reese Europe, whose band known as the Harlem Hellfighters had created a sensation abroad. Their homecoming was a legendary New York moment. A huge parade celebrating the end of WWI. They started downtown and marched all the way up Fifth Avenue.

 

Emily Bernard:

They come back and it's just a party in the streets of Harlem. So much hope and faith, soldiers are walking in the streets and they’re wearing their uniforms.

 

Sara Fishko:

But after the triumphant march, a violent reaction. The official end of the war in 1919 was met in America by what became known as the Red Summer of 1919, a wave of lynchings and racially motivated riots in cities across the nation. Chicago, Houston, Washington D.C, Omaha, Tulsa, many others.

 

Emily Bernard:

Direct pushback, I think a fear of the expression of proud black masculinity. So threatening that it led to black men hanging from trees, and it was a real shock.

 

Sara Fishko:

The shock resonated in Harlem where activists and NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois, with a new toughness, expressed the connection to WWI in a memorable and much quoted editorial of the day. Says David Levering Lewis who wrote When Harlem Was in Vogue.

 

David Levering Lewis:

“We return fighting. We return from fighting. We return to fighting, and by god we will save America in the same way we saved democracy abroad or know the reason why.” By goodness, that's a new voice.That's not Dr. Booker T. Washington anymore.

 

Sara Fishko:

Those were the early words of the Harlem Renaissance movement, an effort to do nothing less than to redefine the black community for all to read, see, hear, and experience. As with women who had played new roles and had found new strengths during the war, blacks saw a chance to turn this shocking moment into an opportunity.

 

David Levering Lewis:

Langston Hughes rushed in to publish his The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.

 

Sara Fishko:

The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain became the unofficial manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance.

 

David Levering Lewis:

And he said, I want the essence of our people to be propagandized, to be appreciated. Our vitality will be a gift to the country, but let's get out of the drawing rooms and let’s get out of the offices of the NAACP. No, let's seek our profile in the street to use the art for real politics.

 

Sara Fishko:

Art for real politics was the spirit of the time. The movement had been spurred by the Great Migration. Nearly half a million blacks had come north by 1915, 1916. Followed by more as the first world war's demand for men emptied out factories in the north, which created a huge demand for workers to fill those spots. And it was a challenge for art.

 

Emily Bernard:

And you have black populations from the Caribbean, from Africa, homegrown African Americans. The artists are working out in their art, what is the common thread, what joins us besides the color of our skin? It's just fertile ground for black artists and it has never been seen before.

 

Sara Fishko:

So the Harlem Renaissance addressed all of that in writings: by Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Nella Larson. It defined, says Bernard, what was then called the New Negro.

 

Emily Bernard:

The New Negro represented so much, not only a way of thinking and a way of making art that was supposed to be free of white expectation. But also, literally the body. Black writers of the period were writing about a new kind of physical presence.

 

Sara Fishko:

Redefining the stature and appearance of the community with the elegant and natty W.E.B. Du Bois as a model.

 

Emily Bernard:

You know, he was very self conscious about the presentation of black people. So, the corrective measure of the New Negro extended to the optics.

 

Sara Fishko:

The Harlem Renaissance was an artistic circle and all around it there was music. And the music and other arts bounced off each other.

 

Emily Bernard:

The freedom, I'm thinking of a figure like Gladys Bentley. The kind of atmosphere she could create. The boldness of this woman.

 

Sara Fishko:

Bentley was a blues singer, and jazz had also found itself during WWI and just after, says Jon Batiste, pianist and band leader. It was a magical moment for the form.

 

Jon Batiste:

It really represented so much more than just music. It spoke to the national identity and the consciousness of people at the time.

 

Sara Fishko:

From the late 1800s to around 1917, ragtime was the popular form. Scott Joplin was the king.

 

Jon Batiste:

If you think about ragtime, ragtime is march music that is put onto the piano, but the dum,dum, of the left hand, that's the tuba and the bass drum in a marching band. If you hear the [sings], that's the flutes, and clarinets and the trumpets playing the melody. He's doing all of that in just a piano's context, which is really amazing.

 

Sara Fishko:

A little later it was that same James Reese Europe of the Harlem Hellfighters, a major figure in the development of jazz who took the next steps by loosening it up.

 

Jon Batiste:

There was a level of complete freedom inside of the structure, so that kind of is the transition from march music and ragtime to improvisation and the roots of jazz, through Louis Armstrong and others around that time.

 

Sara Fishko:

With radio just getting started then, jazz exploded.

 

Jon Batiste:

It's crazy how fast it happened. Things really traveled through world of mouth.If somebody put a record out, people heard Louis Armstrong's records, Hot Five and Hot Seven, and they heard him playing King Oliver even, it was just like, what is this?

 

Sara Fishko:

So in the wake of the war, art had good reason to be bursting out. Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois shared that belief that art could be a crucial catalyst.

 

David Levering Lewis:

They said we’re starting out to do something, we’re starting out to use the arts for civil rights purposes.

 

Emily Bernard:

For both of them, there was an understanding that the work that they were doing could potentially enable black progress in the political realm. So, art and politics and working out that connection is something that continues today.

 

Sara Fishko:

Art and politics coexisted dramatically in the efforts to build a new Germany as well.

 

Sara Fishko:

Germany's reaction to WWI wasn't necessarily instantaneous, in the creation of the Weimar Republic in 1919. The German nation had been ordered by the Treaty of Versailles to pay reparations to the allied countries. The Kaiser had been forced to abdicate. The images, spirit, philosophy, and sound of Weimar Germany are still very much alive. Although, the so-called democratic experiment, Germany's first such adventure would die in the 1930s.

 

Sara Fishko:

Gathering in 1919 in the Weimar Republic, named for the town of Weimar but situated in Berlin, was an unparalleled group of artists. Some coming home from the front, and working with what was called a new objectivity.

 

Sabine Rewald:

These painters served in WWI, came back broken in their bodies and in their minds, and in their hearts and they wanted to show the viciousness of human behavior.

 

Sara Fishko:

Sabine Rewald, the Metropolitan Museum curator, was responsible for the notable Met show of Weimar art around a decade ago called Glitter and Doom. She says their art was unofficial by choice.

 

Sabine Rewald:

They showed the victims, the prostitutes, cripples. Otto Dix was asked to paint a portrait of a German politician, Lutter, but Dix refused because he would not paint important politicians. He showed the victims.

 

Sara Fishko:

Otto Dix was very much a part of the Weimar culture but he was also a one-off, because he was unlike his colleagues Max Beckmann, or George Grosz, or others who suffered from nervous breakdowns during the war.

 

Sabine Rewald:

Otto Dix was a very hardened man and he served on the eastern front, he served on the western front, and when the war was over he actually wanted to fight further because he wasn't done yet, which was very usual. And he painted when he came back to let out his anger.

 

Sara Fishko:

Among his works, a group of almost painfully graphic pictures, of men with lost limbs, prosthetic devices, injuries of every kind. Done with Dix's frank and satirical style. A card game with a bizarrely patched together table of players, for example...the Skat Players.

 

Sabine Rewald:

It's a horrifying, wonderful image.

 

Sara Fishko:

Another of this group of Dix pictures, called War Cripples, depicted four men in uniform in various states of extreme disfigurement and damage on a Berlin street. And those works became celebrated.

 

Sabine Rewald:

To be painted by Otto Dix was as sitting for your X-ray in which all your weak qualities are apparent and then he also exaggerated them. He for example, painted a good friend who was a doctor and that doctor looks as if he is about to murder you. Usually doctors are kind people who sit on your bedside and console you. This one is full of medical equipment that are torture instruments.

 

Sara Fishko:

So the Weimar style, though very distinctive, was an extension of what the Dadaists had started a few years before. Dada had begun with a kind of nealistic nonsense approach in response to what they saw as the nonsense of war. The Weimar artists shaped it to reflect their newly formed and out of control society in a period noticeably fascinating to us today. For its art, music, gender fluidity and racial mix.

 

Sara Fishko:

Sabine Rewald has thought a lot about the Weimar period and the republic itself. I gave her a quotation by a distinguished English theater critic and writer.

 

Sara Fishko:

Kenneth Tynan said it was as decadent as any place could be but also very democratic. It seemed to be moving towards socialism, he said. That would have been ideal. Socialism and self gratification at the same time?

 

Sabine Rewald:

Yes, it would have been ideal but the Weimar Republic, which was funded in 1919 in a way did not have an instruction sheet. So you had a lot of politicians who were inexperienced so they didn't know how to do it. And they had a very good foreign minister, Rathenau, Walther Rathenau. He was killed, another politician died after three years in office. So then you had Von Hindenburg who was a general from the first world war. This old man then became the president. You had inexperienced people, and you would not want to have a republic run by people who don't know how to do it.

 

Sara Fishko.

The Weimar republic failed. In fact it’s often been defined by its tragic end. It fell to the Nazis in 1933.

 

Lotte Lenya:

We left in 1933, we had to leave overnight.

 

Sara Fishko:

The legendary singer and actress Lotte Lenya who lived and worked in Berlin in those years, talked about it later with Schuyler Chapin.

 

Schuyler Chapin:

Why overnight?

 

Lotte Lenta:

Otherwise we would be in Auschwitz if we wouldn't have left.

 

Schuyler Chapin:

You had a friend who...

 

Lotte Lenya:

Yes, who warned us. A famous publisher. We were told he joined the Nazi party in order to be able, in case something drastic would happen that he could warn all of those people to get out of Germany and that's what happened. He warned us, he warned Brecht, and we all left.

 

Sara Fishko:

The visual artists were in the same position.

 

Sabine Rewald:

All of their paintings were confiscated in 1933. George Grosz went into exile, Otto Dix went into exile. But Otto Dix went into exile somewhere in southern Germany and he painted landscapes and trees and just horrible paintings. And you would not think it’s the same artist. But you see, it is like George Grosz, what propelled him, the anger was the fluid for his pen. So these artists were good when the anger lasted.

 

Sara Fishko:

As WWII approached, there would be more fluid for his pen.

 

Sara Fishko:

So maybe that's what happened to art and culture. The link between art and politics was forged once and for all. The violence, the shock, the anger. Fluid for all of the pens, brushes, instruments ,and for the dreams and psyches for all of us. Those who make art and create culture, and those who consume it.

 

Sara Fishko:

A hundred years later, that history and knowledge may sustain us, as we too long for a world that will have its own return to order.

 

Sara Fishko:

You've been listening to Shell Shock 1919. Produced at WNYC in New York. Technical Director is Edward Haber. Associate Producer Olivia Briley. Editor Karen Frillmann. With help from Terence Mickey in Berlin, Meara Sharma in London, and Frederic Castel in Versailles. And with the voices of Michael Wist as Hans Arp, and Alexis Cuadrado as Luis Bunuel. I'm Sara Fishko. 

 

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