“If an important impulse behind experimentation in the arts at the turn of the century was a quest for liberation, a break, in aesthetic and moral terms, from central authority, from patriarchy, from bourgeois conformity, from, in short, a European tradition that had been dictated to a large extent from Paris, then it was no surprise that much of the psychological and spiritual momentum for this break came from the peripheries, geographical, social, generational, and sexual. The emphasis on youth, sensuality, homosexuality, the unconscious, the primitive, and the socially deprived originated in large part not in Paris but on the borders of traditional hegemony. The modern movement was full of exiles, and the condition of exile or the battle on the frontiers…became central themes of the modern mentality….  By 1913, France, as a secure arbiter of taste, was a thing of the past. In that year, while the Germans and Russians celebrated the centenary of the first Napoleon’s defeat, the French were reminded of their decline. ‘In Paris, uncertainty rules,’ wrote Jacques-Emile Blanche. The memorable evening of May 29, 1913, at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees was to provide a vivid expression of that uncertainty.” 

In early August [1914] Germans wallow in what appears to them to be the genuine synthesis of past and future, eternity embodied in the moment, and the resolution of all domestic strife — party versus party, class against class, sect against sect, church in conflict with state. Life has achieved transcendence. It has become aestheticized. Life has become a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk in which material concerns and all mundane matters are surpassed by a spiritual life force…. Gustav Noske said later that had SDP [Social Democratic Party] caucus not approved the war credits, socialist deputies would have been trampled to death in front of the Brandenburg Gate. In sum, not only were the monarch and government influenced by the outpourings of public feeling, but virtually all opposition forces were swept up in the current as well: the crowds, in fact, seized the political initiative in Germany.

Many were never to forget the mood of those August days. Ten years later Thomas Mann would refer to those days as marking the beginning of much that was still in the process of beginning. Thirty-five years later Friedrich Meinecke, the doyen of German historians, would experience a shiver when he thought about the mood of that August, and he confessed that, despite the disasters which followed, those days were perhaps the most sublime of his life.

If, as is often stated, the great revolution in education in the 19th century came at the primary school level, then Germany was by far the most advanced and revolutionary country in the world. Renan was to say that the Prussian victory over France in 1870-71 was a victory of the Prussian schoolmaster over his French counterpart…. German scientific and technological accomplishment in the half century before 1914 is universally recognized, but what is less appreciated is the degree to which Einstein, Planck, Roentgen, and other internationally famous men were merely the best known of a large and active band.

Socially, the state tightened its grip on each person during the war. Labor and the economy were regimented, taxation was increased, international trade was disrupted, passports were introduced for travelers, rationing was imposed, and the state became involved even in art patronage. The Leviathan envisaged by Hobbes became reality. Spiritually and morally, however, soldiers and civilians in the Great War moved, by parallel routes, away from an external world — too horrible to endure — into a visionary landscape. This imagined landscape created by the war was bound to fade when the war was over, and with its disappearance, modernism, which in its prewar form was a culture of hope, a vision of synthesis, would turn into a culture of nightmare and denial. Robert Graves would speak of the “inward scream” the war provoked, “the duty to run mad.” The Great War was to be the axis on which the modern world turned.