Changes in the world of the intellect are harder to measure. The sense of
doom, of being wounded, of living in a diminished, irrational, and dangerous
world penetrated the circles of Europe's artists and writers. As Raymond
Sontag put it, 'Among intellectuals and artists in France and throughout
western Europe, no less than in defeated Germany and in the fragments of
the Austrian empire, there was recognition that the Europe of earlier
centuries was broken, possibly beyond repair." ' Artistic movements like
the dadaists and surrealists pointed to the meaninglessness of the world
around them and the need to flout old social conventions. Memoirs and
novels such as Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That (1929) and Erich Maria
Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) pointed to the senseless
horror of the war and the equally senseless sacrifices the young men of
Europe had made. The American writer Ernest Hemingway presented his
recollections of the war on the Italian front with equal bitterness in A
Farewell to Arms, also published in 1929. Numerous European and American
artists and writers echoed those themes.
But the lasting impact of the war on the world of intellectuals and artists is
elusive. Figures like Hemingway and the French writer-adventurer Andre
Malraux, for example, committed themselves to the new political challenge
of fighting fascism, first in the Spanish Civil War, then in World War II.
Sometimes, as in the case of Malraux, communism for a time provided a
political compass for renewed and meaningful activity. The participation of
writers like J. B. Priestley—for many Britons the voice of their country along
with Winston Churchill between 1940 and 1945—in the great effort of World
War II shows the lessened alienation as the distance from 1918 grew.
In the visual arts, the war had a traumatic and lasting effect on German
artists like Kathe KoUwitz and Otto Dix. Already a critic of social injustice
in her work before 1914, Kollwitz became a committed pacifist in response
to the carnage that cost the life of her younger son Peter in Belgium in 1914.
She expressed her ongoing grief in a sculptured memorial entided The
Parents, placed at the cemetery in Roggevelde, Belgium, in 1932. Dix, who
served for four years on both the eastern and western fronts, made the war
and its human cost a central motif of his painting for decades after the
Armistice. The burden the war placed on him, visible in Self Portrait as
Mars (1915) and Star Shells (1917), was still in evidence in paintings like
Trench Warfare in 1932.
But the revolutionary developments in modem art—such as expressionism
and cubism—had appeared before the war, and giants of the art world
such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse had already done their most
imaginative work. Thus, historians of art such as Hugh Honour and John
Fleming see the war as an event "cutting short a great outburst of creative
genius in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." Matisse abandoned
the forceful painting of his prewar work for a more refined style,
while Picasso threw his talents into a variety of different styles. The war
had been a cultural calamity, and "western civilization has never recovered
from it." 13 Thus, the war may have stifled the great artistic innovations in
prospect; certainly, it redirected artistic energy and vision.
World History
