Friday Reads: Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

Happy Friday! This week, Interim Library Director Adam Pellman tells us about his current read, a nonfiction book about the era of World War I called Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins. 

It's always seemed to me that World War I has been overshadowed in American cultural memory by World War II. This is perhaps not surprising, given that our involvement in World War I was comparatively much shorter, and that, as time has gone by, veterans of World War II have been far more visible and celebrated in our culture as the "greatest generation." So I've been finding myself drawn more and more in recent years to books and films about World War I. This book distinguishes itself in that it's not a work of military history, but rather cultural history. It is a book about, as the author writes in the preface, "the emergence, in the first half of [the 20th] century, of our modern consciousness ... For our preoccupation with speed, newness, transience, and inwardness -- with life lived, as the jargon puts it, 'in the fast lane' -- to have taken hold, an entire scale of values and beliefs had to yield pride of place, and the Great War was ... the single most significant event in that development."

I'm only about halfway through the book, so the author is still focused on the events of the war itself, but he's already made some illuminating points. For example, he writes about the well-known Christmas truce that broke out along many parts of the western front in December of 1914, only a few months after the war began, when enemy soldiers openly fraternized, sharing food and drink and exchanging goods in a spirit of brotherhood and peace. Eksteins argues that such a widespread occurrence would have been unthinkable only a few years later, closer to the end of the war, as the shared values and "rules of war" (spoken or unspoken) had already changed so drastically. By 1917, this war, with its trenches and horrible new weapons, had become something new and different in the history of warfare. Eksteins attributes this change to Germany's initiative in altering the "methods, tactics, and instruments of war," and its position as the revolutionary power of Europe, with its willingness to "question western social, cultural, and political norms" even before the war began. "What was important above all for Germans," writes Eksteins, "was the overthrow of the old structures. That was the whole point of the war." He contrasts this with the British, whose more conservative aim in fighting the war was to restore and preserve their place as the dominant nation in western Europe, to retain the status quo. It's an interesting way to look at a country's military aims, not in relation to politics, or territory won or lost, but in relation to values. I'm looking forward to the rest of the book, to see how the author examines the war's influence on not just social and political developments, but also on literature and the arts.