Free PDF Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins
As we stated previously, the modern technology assists us to always identify that life will certainly be consistently easier. Reviewing e-book Rites Of Spring: The Great War And The Birth Of The Modern Age, By Modris Eksteins routine is also one of the perks to obtain today. Why? Technology could be used to offer guide Rites Of Spring: The Great War And The Birth Of The Modern Age, By Modris Eksteins in only soft data system that could be opened up every single time you desire and also all over you require without bringing this Rites Of Spring: The Great War And The Birth Of The Modern Age, By Modris Eksteins prints in your hand.
Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins
Free PDF Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins
Rites Of Spring: The Great War And The Birth Of The Modern Age, By Modris Eksteins Just how an easy concept by reading can enhance you to be a successful person? Reading Rites Of Spring: The Great War And The Birth Of The Modern Age, By Modris Eksteins is an extremely easy task. Yet, exactly how can many individuals be so careless to review? They will certainly prefer to spend their downtime to chatting or hanging out. When in fact, reviewing Rites Of Spring: The Great War And The Birth Of The Modern Age, By Modris Eksteins will certainly offer you more probabilities to be successful finished with the efforts.
Well, e-book Rites Of Spring: The Great War And The Birth Of The Modern Age, By Modris Eksteins will certainly make you closer to exactly what you want. This Rites Of Spring: The Great War And The Birth Of The Modern Age, By Modris Eksteins will certainly be constantly excellent pal at any time. You might not forcedly to always finish over reading an e-book simply put time. It will be just when you have downtime as well as investing few time to make you feel satisfaction with what you check out. So, you can obtain the significance of the notification from each sentence in the publication.
Do you know why you ought to read this website as well as just what the relation to reading publication Rites Of Spring: The Great War And The Birth Of The Modern Age, By Modris Eksteins In this contemporary age, there are several ways to get guide and they will be considerably simpler to do. One of them is by getting the book Rites Of Spring: The Great War And The Birth Of The Modern Age, By Modris Eksteins by on-line as what we inform in the link download. The e-book Rites Of Spring: The Great War And The Birth Of The Modern Age, By Modris Eksteins could be a selection considering that it is so correct to your necessity now. To get guide on-line is really easy by just downloading them. With this possibility, you could check out guide wherever and whenever you are. When taking a train, awaiting listing, as well as awaiting somebody or other, you could review this on the internet book Rites Of Spring: The Great War And The Birth Of The Modern Age, By Modris Eksteins as a buddy again.
Yeah, checking out an e-book Rites Of Spring: The Great War And The Birth Of The Modern Age, By Modris Eksteins can add your close friends checklists. This is one of the formulas for you to be effective. As known, success does not indicate that you have wonderful points. Comprehending as well as recognizing greater than various other will certainly provide each success. Close to, the message as well as perception of this Rites Of Spring: The Great War And The Birth Of The Modern Age, By Modris Eksteins can be taken and also chosen to act.
- Sales Rank: #2711355 in Books
- Published on: 1990
- Format: Import
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 512 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
''History, as one theme of this study will try to show, has surrendered much of its former authority to fiction."
By Clay Garner
This presents the emotional, aesthetic world post war. Feelings, hatred or love, predominate. This is a valuable addition explaining the reasons for modernity. Contents -
ACT ONE
I. Paris
II. Berlin
III. In Flanders’ Fields
ACT TWO
IV. Rites of War
V. Reason in Madness
VI. Sacred Dance
VII. Journey to the Interior
ACT THREE
VIII. Night Dancer
IX. Memory
X. Spring Without End
This work requires an open mind and flexible thought. For example: ''Introspection, primitivism, abstraction, and myth making in the arts, and introspection, primitivism, abstraction, and myth making in politics, may be related manifestations. Nazi kitsch may bear a blood relationship to the highbrow religion of art proclaimed by many moderns. Our century is one in which life and art have blended, in which existence has become aestheticized. History, as one theme of this study will try to show, has surrendered much of its former authority to fiction.'' Sounds condemning, even harsh. It this valid? Eksteins presents persuasive argument.
''Ideas were much more likely to rise from a prescribed set of moral principles, derived essentially from Christianity and parenthetically from humanism. Action and behavior were to be interpreted in terms of the same principles. That buffer, between thought and action, a positive moral code, has disintegrated in the twentieth century, and in the process, in the colossal romanticism and irrationalism of our era, imagination and action have moved together, and have even been fused.'' Who can deny it?
Seems the basic theme is the drastic change in European history. Quotes Lenin - ''The European war signifies a violent historical crisis, the beginning of a new epoch,” insisted Lenin in late 1914.'' This entire work is devoted to explaining just what changed and why. Insightful and trenchant.
One new (to me) explanation was - ''And as the external world collapsed in ruins, the only redoubt of integrity became the individual personality. David Jones looked on the Somme offensive as the last great action of the old world. Until then, the old customs and attitudes still held. What came after, he called “the Break”: “The whole of the past, as far as I can make out, is down the drain.” Similarly, Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus was provoked to remark, in words reminiscent of Schopenhauer, that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” As the past went down the drain, the I became all-important.'' Fascinating connection!
Eksteins sees Nazism not as a few misleading many, but as logical result of cultural breakdown - ''Slowly the scale of Nazi atrocity began to surface. The toll had been horrendous: millions of Jews, millions of foreign slave laborers, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the infirm. Auschwitz, too, became an emblem of the western spirit.'' In this list, only Jehovah's Witnesses were martyrs who choose to resist as conscious decision. The others were sad victims. The Judeo/Christian morality/faith was/is justified by their record. It protected them from the breakdown and shame. They don't have the shame or guilt that racks modernity.
''After Auschwitz, for Theodor Adorno, poetry was no longer possible. Words, the main vehicles hitherto of western sensibility and rationalism, were no longer adequate or appropriate. For many, silence seemed the only proper response. The scenes uncovered by the Allied armies in 1945 were not the inevitable outgrowth of the events that took place in early 1933, but they were a probable outcome. National Socialism was yet another offspring of the hybrid that has been the modernist impulse: irrationalism crossed with technicism. Nazism was not just a political movement; it was a cultural eruption. It was not imposed by a few; it developed among many. National Socialism was the apotheosis of a secular idealism that, propelled by a dire sense of existential crisis, lost all trace of humility and modesty—indeed, of reality.''
Eksteins sees some of the extremes of Nazi ideas still present, although attenuated - ''Nazism was an attempt to lie beautifully to the German nation and to the world. The beautiful lie is, however, also the essence of kitsch. Kitsch is a form of make-believe, a form of deception. It is an alternative to a daily reality that would otherwise be spiritual vacuum. It represents “fun” and “excitement,” energy and spectacle, and above all “beauty.” Kitsch replaces ethics with aesthetics. Kitsch is the mask of Death. Nazism was the ultimate expression of kitsch, of its mind-numbing, death-dealing portent. Nazism, like kitsch, masqueraded as life; the reality of both was death. The Third Reich was the creation of “kitsch men,” people who confused the relationship between life and art, reality and myth, and who regarded the goal of existence as mere affirmation, devoid of criticism, difficulty, insight. Their sensibility was rooted in superficiality, falsity, plagiarism, and forgery. Their art. was rooted in ugliness. They took the ideals, though not the form, of the nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century avant-garde, and of the German nation in the Great War, and by means of technology—the mirror—they suited these ideals to their own purpose. Germany, the home of Dichter und Denker [poets and thinkers], of many of the greatest cultural achievements of modern man, became in the Third Reich the home of Richter und Henker [judges and hangmen],the incarnation of kitsch and nihilism.'' Superficial, fun, excitement, devoid of criticism and insight? This is not just the Nazi world, this is now!
This work is filled with such insights. Hitler and the wide appeal to the Germans covers many pages. Well done.
Anyone interested in the change to modernity and how it happened will enjoy this. Eksteins connects some of the excesses of the past to the practices of the present. Thought provoking!
61 of 69 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting But Flawed
By R. Albin
This interesting book is an effort to meld cultural/intellectual history with a broad interpretation of European history in the early 20th century. Eksteins begins with the outbreak of WWI, the experience of the war, selected features of the interwar period, and concludes with a discussion of the Nazis. Eksteins follows a number of other scholars, for example, Carl Schorske and Fritz Stern, in examining the flight from rationality seen in the pre-WWI period and its consequences. Eksteins' exemplary metaphor is the Stravinsky/Nijinsky/Diaghilev ballet The Rites of Spring. In this work, Eksteins sees the cultivation of the emotional/irrational, the preoccupation with death, and the abandonement of the rational/ethical which he identifies as the intellectual Zeitgeist of the period. Eksteins then proceeds to connect this modernist Zeitgeist with the outbreak of the First World War and ensuing events. In Eksteins analysis, the German nation is a figure of Nietzchean amorality, intoxicated with emotion and a vague idea of the future, attacking the backward looking middle class rationality of the status quo exemplified by Britain.
This book as a number of positive features. The quality of writing is unusually good. Eksteins, in a artful piece of rhetoric, proceeds to carry the Rite of Spring ballet metaphor right up to the end of WWII, giving what could have been a series of chronologically arranged essays a nearly novelistic integrity. Eksteins does very well with cultural history and cultural criticism, and this book contains a good deal of interesting information and analysis.
Eksteins' major thesis of identifying the modernist movement and the outbreak of WWI is, however, questionable. In this model, almost everything about German society, including the Schlieffen plan, is interpreted in a modernist context. The German leadership, drawn from the traditional aristocracy and upper classes, were hardly modernists intoxicated with the future. They were scared of modernization with great anxiety about democratization, the advance of socialism, and incorporation of large numbers of Catholics into the German state. The aggressive foreign policy of Wilhelmine Germany was driven in lage part by a perceived need, typical of authoritarian states under internal pressures, to use foreign adventures to paper over social fissures and to bolster legitimacy. The decision to pursue preventive war against the Franco-German alliance was a result of worries that the rapid industrialization of Russia would erode German preeminence in continental Europe. WWI was not started by daring modernists pursuing creative destruction but rather by a group of backward looking men with a profound fear of the future. Eksteins makes similar errors in his characterization of Britain, which was much more dynamic than implied by his discussions.
Eksteins discussion of WWI focuses on the experience of the Western Front and is generally quite good. This is, however, both typical and somewhat misleading. As is often the case, this account ignores all the other aspects of the war, for example, the enormous scope of the Eastern front, which was much more a war of manuever. Eksteins makes a surprising number of errors. Its not true that the Germans preferred a war of attrition, if anyone aimed at attrition, it was the Allies and their blockade of Germany. The Schlieffen plan, a number of campaigns in the East, unrestricted submarine warfare, and the great offensives of 1918 were all efforts to achieve decisive victory. Eksteins describes the German army as loyal to the end, ignoring the widespread collapse of morale and discipline in 1918. German war aims were hardly vague aspirations driven by modernist adventurism but concrete expressions of a desire to ensure German hegemony, as shown by the terms of the Brest-Litovsk treaty.
Eksteins discussions of the interwar period, focusing on the significance of Charles Lindbergh and Erich Maria Remarque, are a combination of astute criticism and not very astute psychodynamic theorizing. His discussions of the Nazis cover ground discussed by many historians who stress the emotional, anti-rational quality of the Nazi movement. Eksteins, however, neglects the specific ideology of the Nazis. This is an error, because while the Nazi ideology was fairly vague, it was important. Anti-Semitism, for example, was a key feature of Nazism but not, at least initially, of Italian Fascism, and this proved to be very important when the Nazis came to power.
123 of 130 people found the following review helpful.
A remarkable tour de force about The Great War
By Robert Moore
I have read several books dealing with the First World War before, but none except for Paul Fussell's THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY can match this brilliant book for its scope and brilliance. Other books deal with the nuts and bolts of history, but Eksteins is concerned with zeitgeist, both that which animated the birth of war and the way it was altered by that war. More than anything, Eksteins is concerned with the metaphysics of the war, or the metaphysics of the world that it transformed.
The book is structured, like any good play, into three broad acts. The first deals with the world on the eve of the war, examining attitudes, especially aesthetic attitudes, in France, Germany, and England, before the onset of the war. The sections on the controversial debut of Diaghilev's production of Stravinsky's THE RITES OF SPRING (which obviously provides the book with its title), which deals in dance with a ritual blood sacrifice, are especially hypnotic. Act Two focuses on the war itself, and even if one has read previous and equally nightmarish accounts of that insane and pointless conflict, Eksteins will bring the war alive for the reader. One is especially impressed by the senselessness of the entire affair, so senseless that nonsense seemed to be at home there. World War Two at least seemed to make sense for the participants. Hitler and Tojo made the stakes all too clear, but the Great War was above all an affair of moral ambiguity, and Eksteins is brilliant at bringing this out, something that a purer historian like Martin Gilbert or John Keegan is ultimately unable to do, because he or she is limited by the task of the historian to deal with ethical and aesthetic categories. The final act deals with the world remade by the events of 1914-18. Eksteins focuses on three main aspects: Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic, the publication of and response to Erich Maria Remarque's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, and the rise of Nazism in post-war Germany.
It is an interesting question what genre RITES OF SPRING belongs to. Eksteins offers too many insights that would normally exceed the job of the historian to label it simple history, though one could resort to calling it "intellectual history." It is that, but he also becomes in his book a bit of a moral chronicler. The book is more a work of art than a work of history. Although it contains no obvious narrative, it feels as if it has a plot.
This is one of the more remarkable, haunting books I have read in recent years. Absolutely no one interested in the meaning of the twentieth century, and especially no one interested in the Great War should skip it. The only ones it will disappoint will be those primarily concerned with military strategy and body counts.
Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins PDF
Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins EPub
Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins Doc
Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins iBooks
Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins rtf
Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins Mobipocket
Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar