Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE BASIC REFLECTIONS
- PART TWO THE CHANGING REALITIES OF WARFARE
- PART THREE WAR AGAINST NONCOMBATANTS
- PART FOUR POLITICIANS, SOLDIERS, AND THE PROBLEM OF UNLIMITED WARFARE
- PART FIVE MOBILIZING ECONOMIES AND FINANCE FOR WAR
- PART SIX SOCIETIES MOBILIZED FOR WAR
- 22 Mobilizing German Society for War
- 23 Women's Wartime Services Under the Cross
- 24 Pandora's Box
- 25 Painting and Music During and After the Great War
- Index
25 - Painting and Music During and After the Great War
The Art of Total War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE BASIC REFLECTIONS
- PART TWO THE CHANGING REALITIES OF WARFARE
- PART THREE WAR AGAINST NONCOMBATANTS
- PART FOUR POLITICIANS, SOLDIERS, AND THE PROBLEM OF UNLIMITED WARFARE
- PART FIVE MOBILIZING ECONOMIES AND FINANCE FOR WAR
- PART SIX SOCIETIES MOBILIZED FOR WAR
- 22 Mobilizing German Society for War
- 23 Women's Wartime Services Under the Cross
- 24 Pandora's Box
- 25 Painting and Music During and After the Great War
- Index
Summary
During my time as a soldier in World War I,” Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) wrote,
I was a member of a string quartet that served our commanding officer as a means of escape from the miseries of war. He was a great music-lover and a connoisseur and admirer of French art. It was no wonder, then, that his dearest wish was to hear Debussy's String Quartet. We rehearsed the work and played it to him with much feeling at a private concert. Just after we had finished the slow movement the signals officer burst in and reported in great consternation that the news of Debussy's death [on March 25, 1918] had just come through on the radio. We did not continue our performance. It was as if the spirit had been removed from our playing. But now we felt for the first time how much more music is than just style, technique and an expression of personal feeling. Here music transcended all political barriers, national hatred and the horrors of war. Never before or since have I felt so clearly in which direction music must be made to go.
This is a rich, and indeed challenging, document that seems to take us into the dying aristocratic world of Jean Renoir's (1894-1979) La Grande Illusion (1937), especially if we know that the commanding officer was Graf von Kielmannsegg. But more important, it confronts us at once with the imperishable value of the arts - “highbrow,” “lowbrow,” or “middlebrow” - as a response to the fundamental human need for color, dance, drama, music, spectacle, and the world of the imagination. Although influenced, inevitably, and, to some degree, constrained, by the conventions and modes of representation of the period in which they were produced, the arts are nonetheless the creation of particular individuals with peculiar talents. This chapter eschews all Marxist nonsense about the arts (or, for that matter, works of history) as mere texts that, when deconstructed, reveal themselves as bourgeois propaganda designed, as Hay den White puts it with respect to what he calls “historical narrative,” to reconcile the oppressed masses “to the social formations in which they are indentured to live out their lives.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Great War, Total WarCombat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918, pp. 501 - 518Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000