German Studies Review

The world that went to war in August 1914 was a very ancient one. Those who specialize in the social and military history of the war may be less surprised by this opening remark than the nonspecialists among us who are accustomed to emphasizing the war’s novelties and the deep cultural schism represented by the mere date 1914. I myself embarked on the writing of this lecture with an antiquated view of the cultural history of the war and its aftermath shaped predominately by the work of the great Paul Fussell, who led me, and I think others, to believe that the war sounded the death knell for all “high diction,” and its close corollary, “high” culture, in which classical antiquity played so great a role.¹ But my inquiries, and a veritable avalanche of new scholarship, has suggested that there was, in fact, a great deal of cultural continuity across the war’s divide; and, as complementary recent work in the field now called “classical reception” has underscored, reports of antiquity’s death at the hands of the modern are grossly overrated.² The ancient world survived the war as a central part of German and European culture, and not merely as kitsch or as conservative reaction, though undeniably interwar classicism (like prewar classicism) had these forms and functions. One of my central aims in this impressionist talk—though regrettably without the many nice pictures I was able to use in the oral version—is to take the GSA’s interdisciplinary structure as license to range widely across the worlds of both bourgeois and elite culture in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the hopes of demonstrating just how much the moderns owed the ancients, and how long, even after four and a half years of mechanized mass murder, many “moderns” continued to look to antiquity for inspiration, aesthetic pleasure, and consolation. If my argument here proves convincing, I would like to ask if perhaps the time has come to ask for a bit more modesty from modernism, and some deeper recognition that the persistence of the ancient world was not only something crucial to the making of twentieth-century culture, but remains a creative force, still at work around us.

In its final pages, however, this talk takes on a second mission, and that is to explore, briefly, the history of classical scholarship in this period, and especially its relationship to changes in the wider culture of the Kaiserreich and the Weimar [End Page 239] Republic. Although there is some recognition that scholars still cared very deeply about the ancient world, including the world of the Bible, the “secular” antiquity of the Greeks and Romans, and, to a lesser extent, the world of Germanic and Indogermanic antiquity, it seems to me that today’s students of the history of the humanities, social sciences, and theology often forget just how much university scholarship (and secondary-school teaching) remained devoted to ancient things. Even the philosopher of modern racism, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, dedicated 512 of 531 pages of volume one of his Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1900) to events preceding the life of Christ, and shortly after the success of this book, threw himself into writing a play titled “Der Tod der Antigone” (1902). Chamberlain, too, at this point in his life had developed a close and mutually inspiring friendship with Vienna’s chair for Sanskrit philology, Leopold von Schroeder, who, like the vast majority of his fellow “Orientalists,” devoted his pen and his passions to the ur-ancient, rather than the modern, Orient.³ Contemporaries, and not just scholars, thought classical and biblical subjects still powerfully “relevant” in some way, though by 1905, some members of the avant-garde began to move away from historicist readings of the ancient world. During and especially after the Great War, this gap between historicizing scholarship and contemporary culture widened. Artists, poets, musicians, dancers, and playwrights sought to strip the classical tradition down to its transhistorical mythical core and its universal messages, while academic humanists, on the whole, put their efforts into resurrecting the elitist and self-serving philhellenic ideals of the Goethezeit. In describing, at the end of this talk, the origins and aims of the campaign led by classicist Werner Jaeger to establish a “Third Humanism” during the Weimar Republic, I hope to sketch the story of what I believe was a wrong turn in the history of the ur-humanistic discipline, classical philology, and to offer an opportunity for us to think about the lessons an older, and now largely forgotten, crisis in this field might have to offer to those of us facing a newfangled version of the crisis of the humanities.

We should begin, however, by surveying the presence of the ancient past in prewar Europe and America. For the sake of brevity, I will simply remind you just how omnipresent classical imagery was, particularly for city dwellers at the turn of the twentieth century. They saw it on their money, on their dinner tables, and in their great uncles’ respectable forms of porn.⁴ Commuters traveled ceaselessly, if perhaps not with much interest, past doorways held up by titans, courthouses sporting columns and classical friezes, theaters plastered with muses, and museums, libraries, and university buildings sprouting Athenas and Aristotles. Businessmen saw the Greek gods as they entered their banks and stock markets; parlor maids spent hours dusting biscuit porcelain busts of Psyche. Bored children stared at neoclassical ceiling plaster or picked over book cases full of Homer, Pindar, and Virgil. University aspirants, including natural scientists, had to have excellent Latin, and in most places, good Greek as well; military leaders were force-fed a rich diet of Thucydides and Caesar. [End Page 240] Most museums—not to mention art academies—held huge collections of plaster casts, and sent out hordes of archaeologists to collect authentic antiquities. Had the war come a little later, Karl Scheffler later quipped, the Berlin Museums would have had to make room for a whole Greek city in its basements.⁵ Even the Chief of the Prussian General Staff, Alfred von Schlieffen, owed his unshakeable conviction in lightning-quick enveloping motions to his study of Hannibal’s victory at the battle of Cannae.⁶ All of this is to say that the world of 1914 was one in which, especially for the middling and upper classes, classical antiquity was essentially part of the furniture, of the mind, and of the city. And like other domesticated furnishings, these forms of everyday classicism—which I shall term bourgeois liberal historicism—were, for their users, either comfortable and respectable, or despised but indispensible, hand-me-downs.

It might be useful to remind ourselves that the classics and classicism have always had political and aesthetic functions, some of them to our taste, some of them not. In the nineteenth century, classical imagery, to be succinct, stood for liberty, beauty, and a Eurocentric form of universality. Early on, in particular, its pagan overtones were used over and against clerical cultural domination, and its rhetoric adapted to defend freedom of thought for educated persons. Neither of these were trivial functions. But the classical, identified with Europe’s civilizing mission, was also frequently invoked to justify colonial conquest, or, in the Southern United States, slavery,⁷ and in many places, classical language learning was used to accentuate class differences, and to cordon off higher learning from the influx of utilitarian-minded underlings. And yet, there always were readers of the classics who could martial Greek or Roman materials against prevailing interpretations or political regimes. We can think here of Johann Jakob Bachofen’s Mutterrecht, constructed atop heaped citations from Herodotus; or we can think of Gandhi, who in 1908 paraphrased Plato’s apology in Gujarti, and in 1909 wrote his own Socratic dialogue, entitled Hind swaraj,⁸ destined to be one of the great texts of anticolonialism. It is fruitless to try to sort out whether classical antiquity represented reaction or innovation, the good guys or the bad, on the eve of the war. Serious engagement with the classics was certainly restricted to the European elite, but so was cultural power in general, and the elite itself spoke with many, and often forked, tongues. We will surely fail to understand continuities and breaks in classical reception during and after the Great War if we presume that antiquity before 1914 was univocal.

It is important to drive home this point, as it has often been forgotten that much of modernism itself was built on classical foundations. All over Europe at the fin de siècle, the avant-garde did not give up the Greeks and Romans, but deployed stripped-down and psychologized versions of classicism against historicism, against what it called “plaster cast antiquity” and “dry as dust philology.” Friedrich Nietzsche was, of course, the torchbearer of this movement, though Arnold Böcklin’s psychologizing mythology also fired the imaginations of many, including Sigmund Freud, Vladimir [End Page 241] Lenin, and Georges Clemenceau, all of whom owned prints of his “Isle of the Dead,” and Sergei Rachmaninov, who wrote a tone poem about it.⁹ This Bacchic painter was widely identified with Pan, the god chosen to be the patron saint of the Jugendstil movement, who gave his name to its most important journal. Classical tragedies—increasingly suffused with Expressionist emotion and brought to life with modern music and dance—enjoyed a Renaissance, inspiring and inspired by new directions in psychology, translation theory, costume design, and operatic composition. Across every modernist movement, in fact, we find not the rejection of antiquity, but individuals deeply engaged in repurposing classical texts and images, from Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, and Ted Shawn in modern dance, to Claude Debussy (whose real first name was Achille-Claude) and Richard Strauss in musical theater; from Gustav Klimt to Edward Burne Jones in painting; and from Auguste Rodin to Ivan Mestrovic in sculpture. As the stripped-down columns of Peter Behrens’s 1910 AEG High-Tension Factory in Berlin demonstrate, in the prewar era the classical was regularly used by architects, too, to exemplify and house the modern, over and against historicizing forms.

These avant-garde attempts at repurposing the ancient world generally emphasized not the rationality and beauty of the classics, but the irrational and violent aspects of Greek and Roman culture. Max Reinhardt’s 1910 “Oedipus Rex,” like Richard Strauss’s “Electra,” was gory, sweaty, sensual, dissonant, and grandiose; ditto the painting of Franz von Stuck and Jean Delville. Premiering in the early spring of 1914, Gerhart Hauptmann’s bloody seminaturalist play, “The Bow of Odysseus,” featured a hero whose Mordlust, or longing to kill, “made his heart pulse with joy.” These were not the bourgeois liberals’ Greeks, or the Greeks of the Goethezeit. They were complexly—usually antagonistically—related to the Greeks their bourgeois contemporaries saw every day, on the dinner tables, on their stock markets, and in their grandmothers’ curio cabinets. But the avant-garde’s Greeks were different: they were, self-consciously, modern.

The relationship between classical scholarship and this avant-garde classicism during the Kaiserreich is immensely complicated, but a few examples from the world of theater should suffice to show that there were, still, linkages. There had been a smattering of performances of classical dramas on European stages in the nineteenth century, especially in the wake of the landmark production of Antigone, with music by Felix Mendelssohn, in 1841. In the 1850s, the Comédie Française boasted a world-famous Oedipus Rex; Freud saw essentially the same production in 1886, and it remained in the repertoire an additional two decades afterwards.¹⁰ But the fin de siècle saw a huge surge in performances, so much so that it has been said that the French after the 1890s created a “veritable cult of Sophocles,” and the Greeks and Italians began staging dramas in rediscovered or restored ancient theaters,¹¹ reinforcing links between archaeology and contemporary culture. In Germany, too, [End Page 242] the number of plays burgeoned, their performance incited precisely by modernist theater directors such as Hans Oberländer, whose theaters also staged the works of August Strindberg, Frank Wedekind, Oscar Wilde, and other “moderns.”

These nineteenth-century and fin de siècle creative adaptations still aimed at edification as well as entertainment, and retained at least some aspirations to verify the historical and philological authenticity of their performances by involving academic classicists as translators and consultants. When, in 1899, Oberländer founded an association to support the production of classical plays, he made sure to secure for it the advisory services of Berlin professor Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, the leading philological authority in Germany (and at the time, in the world) on Greek tragedies. Wilamowitz agreed, and enthusiastically endorsed the making relevant of the plays. Aeschylus, he had already written in 1896, could have a powerful effect on his contemporaries, “not as an archaeological remnant, but on all simply honest and sensitive people.”¹² Oberländer used Wilamowitz’s translation for his 1900 Oedipus Rex (with a symphonic prelude by Max Schillings, and a lecture the night before the opening by the professor himself), and adopted his advice for the way in which the chorus was to intone its lines. He also took Wilamowitz’s advice on his Oresteia and his Antigone, which featured a prelude by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.¹³ As one letter to the editor of the journal Thalia wrote about the staging of Greek tragedies in the capital cities of German-speaking Europe: “Strong interest does not have to be awakened; it is already there.”¹⁴ And indeed it was; many of these prewar performances were sell-outs, and after entertaining the inhabitants of Vienna, Berlin, and Munich, productions went on tour—sometimes for years—in the provinces.

Wilamowitz’s translations and techniques deviated from the purely historicizing and positivist; he was willing to shorten plays, and eager to emphasize their moral teachings. But he was not willing to leave historicism too far behind, and his vision increasingly diverged from that of Oberländer and his young collaborator Max Reinhardt. By 1905, Reinhardt and Oberländer were moving into new spheres of dramaturgy, in which antinaturalist, exaggerated acting, lighting effects, and mass staging aimed at recreating cultic experience rather than edifying the middle classes or offering a true rendering of the original text. The last of Wilamowitz’s new translations to appear on the stage was his 1909 Alkestis (Euripides), which premiered, however, not in one of the avant-garde centers, but in Stuttgart.¹⁵ This divergence of the historicizing professor and the increasingly antihistoricist avant-garde has parallels in painting and in philology itself, in which a younger generation inspired by Nietzsche and Stefan George struggled to make itself heard, while the older generation increasingly refused to compromise a set of moral, pedagogical, and political principles rooted in the Gründerzeit.¹⁶ What is important to note, however, is that although academic philologists were falling off the cultural cutting edge by 1914, even the staunchly conservative Wilamowitz still felt himself a part of modern culture—and [End Page 243] those who called themselves cultural innovators had not entirely slammed shut the passageways between “science,” art, education, and entertainment.

I have contended, so far, that on the eve of the war, classics and classicism mattered very much to Europeans, and perhaps especially to German speakers, whether we are discussing connoisseurs of titillating paintings of Aphrodite, Expressionist theater directors, academy-educated military officers, or teachers at the humanistic Gymnasien. My next task will be to address the question: how did all of these individuals assimilate the enormity and brutality of the Great War into worldviews, aesthetic philosophies, and knowledge bases so deeply rooted in antiquity, or better, into antiquities of increasingly varying kinds? Much research remains to be done, here, but I would like to suggest that what suffered most as a result of the war were visions of antiquity that seemed too historicizing, edifying, and elitist; although propagandists occasionally, and inconsistently, invoked Rome and Carthage, Greece and Persia, these storied conflicts—so familiar from one’s schooldays—seemed too distant and sanitized to be comparable to the blood- and mud baths at the Marne and at Ypres. Classical references, as opposed to more clearly “Germanic” medievalizing forms, didn’t speak so clearly to the “Volk im Waffen,” and even to invoke the German tribes’ victory over the Romans at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest of 9 CE risked putting off the uneducated soldier, or for those in the know, positioning the modern Germans as the equivalent of the ancient “barbarians.” In terms of private usages, it is clear that higher-ranking German officers and most university-educated political leaders had not forgotten their Thucydides, as evidenced, for example, in wartime German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg’s despondent but accurate retrospective remark that the German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 “was our Sicilian expedition.”¹⁷ But at this point, we largely must depend on educated inferences; we simply don’t know as much about the military and political uses of antiquity in Germany and Austria—before or after the war—as I think we should. Perhaps modern historians have been too confident in the modernity of the war to investigate this properly.

Much remains to be done, too, to understand mainstream cultural uses of the classics during the war. I have done a fair amount of trawling through works on soldiers’ poetry, newspapers, and reading during the Great War, and it seems to me that in the German case, there is not nearly so much sentimental repurposing of Homer, for example, as Elizabeth Vandiver and Richard Jenkyns find in the case of British soldiers.¹⁸ Moreover, it is not so easy sorting out what is directly classical in some of the poems or letters, and what is being received second hand, through the filters of, say, Schiller, or Hölderlin, or Nietzsche. There are some instances, of course, including a perhaps indicative poem published in 1916 by the Jewish German poet and journalist Fritz Engel; here, Engel’s narrator, thinking back to his own elite education [End Page 244] and travels to Corfu, tells Achilles’s story to a group of peasants from Pomerania and Silesia during a quiet moment on the western front:

Wisset wohl nichts vom Achill, ihr Pommern, ihr Bauern aus Schlesien?Nun denn, ein Krieger war er, war ein Vielstarker wie ihr.Unrecht zu dulden, das war ihm verhasst, und Mannes unwürdig—Freund dem Freunde zu sein, galt ihm als Glück und als Ruhm.Uralter Sänger Geharf geht heut’ noch vom Munde zu Munde,Wie er, trunken vor Zorn, siegend den Freund hat gerächt.¹⁹

Note the use, here, of the Achilles/Patrocles story to rouse the men to take vengeance for the sake of their dead comrades. Further on in the poem Engel describes, resentfully, the still-neutral modern Greeks who peacefully till their soil while the Germans fight. These unwarlike Hellenes, he claims, are no true descendants of Achilles; rather—we saw this coming—the true heirs to his wrath and moral fiber are his German comrades, and Engel promises that Achilles will rise, from his “seeping grave” and lead his men to an epic victory on the modern battlefield. Close scrutiny of magazines and newspapers by someone with a deeper knowledge of the epics and a stronger stomach for maudlin German verse would surely reveal many more generalized adaptations of Homer to describe what we now call the “band of brothers” effect. And there are strong reminders in the works of the most famous of German war writers, Ernst Jünger, of the aristeia of Achilles, in which the “berserker” warrior hurls himself against the foe without concern for his own death. But it seems that during, and even after the war, it was much more satisfying to produce, and perhaps for soldiers to read, realistic invocations of contemporaries’ experiences, or moralizing paeans to modern heroes such as the “Red Baron.” The wartime state itself made sure that soldiers had easy access to the “right” kind of educational literature, books which emphasized, as Wolfgang Natter has shown, the “greatness” of the Great War, and it may have felt that more erudite discussions of war or heroism in general would come off as kitsch, diminish the greatness of the conflict at hand, or simply confuse the ordinary soldier.²⁰

More useful, perhaps, for inspiring the ill-fated soldiers on the western front was Simonides’s epitaph (reported in Herodotus 7.228) for the Spartans who died at Thermopylae. This tag, as Theodore Ziolkowski has shown, had already been woven into German poetry by Schiller, in his “Der Spaziergang” or “The Stroll” of 1795, as part of a gentile admonition to the Greeks for having lost their ancient freedom: “Wanderer, kommst du nach Sparta, verkündige dorten, du habest / Uns hier liegen gesehn, wie das Gesetz es befahl.” The Spartan metaphor was already in use, as Helen Roche has shown, in nineteenth-century German cadet schools, where students who [End Page 245] endured intense physical training and painful material deprivations were known as Spartaner. The epitaph was sufficiently famous by the 1870s to have been applied to the fallen of the German wars of unification.²¹ During the Great War, as Vandiver notes, the tag was used repeatedly to honor the martyrs of the trench wars, and to reassure British soldiers about to embark on seemingly suicidal missions that they would be remembered by future generations. Simonides’s epitaph was, apparently, also the watchword of Walter Flex, the German author of the wholly unironic war novel, The Wanderer Between Two Worlds, published in 1916. By the time of Flex’s death in 1917 this vaguely homoerotic novel had sold 700,000 copies, and it would sell hundreds of thousands more in the Weimar period. In the introduction to Flex’s works published after his death, the author’s brother Konrad wrote:

My brother reflected the strong impress of the idea of the state, partly as a result of his education in the Prussian-German tradition, but also partly because, like tens of thousands of our dead, he grew up with the traditions of classical antiquity. Sparta was to him the exemplar of patriotism, which during the world war melted together with the Christian idea of sacrifice. “Tell them in Lacedaemon, passerby, that here obedient to their word we lie.” This elemental phrase, in German or in Greek, rang in childhood in their ears, and German youth should never be raised in another spirit.²²

Flex’s tribute to his brother’s Spartan fixation, by the way, was quoted by the president of the German Altphilologenverband in 1933, in an attempt to ingratiate the organization with the new regime. After the Second World War, the “Wanderer” tag remained so recognizable that Heinrich Böll needed only to title his collection of antimilitarist stories, “Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa … ,” knowing that his readers would still catch the allusion.²³

What we know about German soldiers’ reading (and writing) habits does not suggest deep interaction with the classics. Soldiers’ libraries, of which there were an astonishing number on the western front, seem not to have stocked much Greek or Roman literature, and soldiers seem to have found novellas and humorous reading more attractive than philosophy or history.²⁴ Of course, many of the well-educated soldiers received regular parcels of reading material from home, and felt they should devote themselves to “serious” reading. Dorothee Wierling’s lovely new study of the bourgeois family of the Brauns during the war, for example, shows that young Otto read voraciously. Unable to stomach trivial sentimentalism, he read ancient works as well as nineteenth-century “classics”; the last text he read before his death seems to have been Longus’s “Daphnis and Chloe.”²⁵ But I think it is safe to say that while the Germans, like the British, experienced a very literary war—it is estimated that some 50,000 poems were written in the first months of the war alone—classical antiquity, [End Page 246] for most soldiers, remained a distant point of reference, and was not even significantly implicated in the disaster to earn a poem like Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” The most famous incidence of anticlassical antipathy I can think of is the caricature of the jingoist classics master painted in the 1929 movie version of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. But in the original text, Kantorek is described just as an Oberschulmeister, not as a classics teacher. The movie’s indictment of the classics, I would wager, has more to do with debates about the future of the Gymnasium in the 1920s than it does with wartime outrage. And it is worth noting how atypical Remarque’s book was in its day. By one estimate, during the war and until 1933, German war literature remained 75 percent prowar, and only 25 percent of the texts were critical of the war in any way.²⁶ In any event, the upshot is the same: for most of the men in the trenches, the classics neither helped nor hindered; the sirens did not sing to them.

For the avant-garde, on the other hand, one can make a different case. On the war’s eve, Franz Werfel had already begun work on his recasting of Euripides’s Trojan Women. The Austrian pacifist might well have been moved to take on the play by Gilbert Murray’s English translation of 1904, which was widely read as a critique of English cruelties during the Boer Wars.²⁷ But Werfel energetically pursued his adaptation of the tragedy after the war’s outbreak, publishing his version in the Weisse Blätter in 1914, and in book form in 1915. Can we imagine what it was like for a grieving mother to read Werfel’s preface, in which he posed the question: “How can mothers comprehend having become mothers, only to lose their children?”²⁸ By the time Werfel’s German version premiered at the Lessing Theater in Berlin in 1916, his agonizing portrayal of the sufferings of the now childless, husbandless, and enslaved female survivors of a lost war must have been almost unbearable for the audience to watch. The twelve productions and at least sixty-five performances of Werfel’s Troerinnen staged during the war itself were anything but “dry as dust”; writing about the 1917 Düsseldorf production, one critic commented that Louise Dumont played Hecuba “with an almost bestial mixture of grief and defiance.”²⁹ Wishing either to soft-peddle his politics or to console survivors, in the wake of the war, Werfel would add quasi-Christian language, making Hecuba less an antiwar spokeswoman than a martyr. It is striking that Werfel was retreating from pacifism just as Murray’s hardhitting version of The Trojan Women returned to the British stage in 1919.³⁰

By no means was Werfel the only German writer to use the classics to convey painful truths about the war. In 1917, Frank Wedekind chose the ultimate Greek hero as the subject of what would turn out to be his final play. But, as Wedekind described in a letter to a friend, the point was not to praise Heracles’s deeds, but to adapt Euripides to the modern purpose of understanding “the war psychosis of the warrior come home.”³¹ Otto Dix’s 1916 “Self-Portrait as Mars,” similarly, juxtaposed the war god’s (and his own) explosive anger and fragmented memory—a condition [End Page 247] we could today easily diagnose as PTSD. To take a final example, in 1916, Walter Hasenclever, working as a telegraph operator in Macedonia, drafted his own Antigone. Remarkably, his antiwar, antiauthoritarian play not only evaded the censors, but was awarded the Kleist Prize; even more remarkably, it was staged in Leipzig in December 1917.

“The tragedy,” Hasenclever wrote, “became a war cry against the power principle embodied in Creon and his regime”³²—and those who read or saw the play had little trouble identifying Creon with Wilhelm II. Like Werfel, Hasenclever softened his political punch in his conclusion, which has Creon abdicate voluntarily, and the chorus end with a prayer rather than with a revolution. Still, one can only imagine the depth of pain Hasenclever probed in his many public readings of the poem, usually in dark, candlelit rooms. The printed version sold briskly; an eighth edition was already needed by 1919. Already in February of that year—when revolution in Berlin had only just been suppressed, and was raging elsewhere—the first postwar production of the play commenced in Frankfurt. Max Reinhardt staged it at his Grosses Schauspielhaus in 1920, but in Darmstadt those who called it a “poison for the nation” won, and managed to have it banned.³³ By 1919, nearly two million German soldiers had lost their lives; but it would be a further five years before the French and German states permitted grieving German family members to visit the graves of their sons, husbands, and fathers. It is hard to believe that it was cathartic for these people to watch a drama centered on the struggles of a woman desperate to bury her brother, and to have a place to mourn him.³⁴ Perhaps, in fact, Hasenclever’s Antigone was too relevant; by the mid-1920s performances had petered out, and unlike Werfel’s Trojan Women, which would be frequently revived after being banned by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945, Hasenclever’s Antigone has seen few productions in the postwar era.³⁵

As Peter Jelavich has noted, even amongst combatant intellectuals, the war did not make everyone a realist; Franz Marc was still searching for more spiritual truths when he died in 1916 at Verdun.³⁶ Surrealists and expressionists in particular continued to believe that titanic ancient forces lay deeper than modern “decadent” ones. Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term “surrealist” while recovering from a shrapnel wound, which, he said, made him feel he was giving birth to new wisdom; he titled his 1917 manifesto “The Breasts of Tiresias,” invoking a figure who would make many interwar appearances, including in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Another major Expressionist manifesto of the same year, Theodor Tagger’s “Marsyas and Apollo,” portrayed the god of mainstream poetry and song as a jealous, rule-imposing tyrant, who flays and destroys Marsyas, an obvious stand-in for the Orphic and ecstatic avant-garde poet. Some of those who went from the classical schools to war had already been exposed to the darker antiquity of Nietzsche, Freud, and Stefan George, and found it relatively easy to reconcile ancient elemental truths and the cruel realities of modern warfare. The musical modernists, for example, discovered that they could continue to use [End Page 248] antiquity to explore sexuality and Orphic chaos.³⁷ Gottfried Benn’s 1917 collection of poems, Fleisch, combined realistic gore with invocations of the myth of Icarus. Pace Fussel, most good poets would not feel they had to turn to the modern trench experience, to gangrene and gas, to capture human truths after the war was over.

It is certainly the case that the postwar period neither dispensed with classical forms, nor treated them purely with cynicism; quite the contrary. In fact, the postwar era teemed with attempts to repurpose classical imagery and mythology, and to revive, even in the bodies of the war’s survivors, the aesthetics of classical sculpture.³⁸ This was as true for Germany as for the other European nations. The Italian fascists, of course, were eager to deploy romanità for their purposes, the most important of which was manufacturing the belief that Mussolini was a new Caesar and Italy actually had historical and social coherence.³⁹ Kenneth Silver has shown that French modernism in the 1920s was essentially defined by neoclassicism—that of Picasso, and that of the “Purist” Le Corbusier, whose pursuit of clean lines entailed the persistent evocation of the Parthenon and the Heraion at Paestum.⁴⁰ After the war, T.E. Lawrence sat down to translate The Odyssey, and the Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos to translate Thucydides into modern Greek. Those who think neoclassical painting was dead in high-tech America should plan a visit to Boston to see John Singer Sargent’s cycle of classicizing murals for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, commissioned in 1916. Sargent was painting idealized but abstracted Greeks on the Museum’s ceilings when he was interrupted by another commission, to visit the western front, and provide a painting for a planned American Hall of Remembrance. He took time away from the MFA project to complete the gigantic and painfully realistic “Gassed” (1919) which references the language of ancient heroism by taking the form of a classical frieze. Sargent then returned to the MFA to complete the murals, whose style I might describe as a mixture of proto Art Deco and Maxfield Parrish. They reflect, I would argue, a nineteenth-century realist’s struggle to embrace together the ancient and the modern. They are not nearly as successful in this as is “Gassed.” But they are proof positive that even after the experience of mass mechanized death on Flanders’s fields, good artists could still take their classical imagery seriously.

German and Central European architecture, in the 20s and early 30s, betrays enduring signs of the stripped classicism of Behrens and Le Corbusier, evident in the works of Mies van der Rohe. Nor could modern dancers, composers, poets, novelists, or for that matter, philosophers, do without ancient and mythological referents.⁴¹ After the war, as just before its outbreak, the avant-garde latched on to some of the darker figures—Orpheus, Dionysus, Demeter—and those figures would continue to be the darlings of classicizing poets such as Gottfried Benn for decades to come.⁴² In two elegant books, Theodore Ziolkowski, has shown how extensively modernist writers, including Germans and Austrians, drew on Virgil’s Eclogues, and on Ovid’s Metamorphosis.⁴³ Following a brilliant insight made long ago by Northrup Frye (and [End Page 249] invoked, almost against his own claims, by Paul Fussell), I would submit that writers and readers found that an ironic modernism which emphasized the frustration and powerlessness of the individual pressed the imagination backward into the world of myth, where superhuman and inexplicable forces dominate: that might help to explain the work of C.S. Lewis or J.R. Tolkien (both Great War Tommies), or, in the German case, Thomas Mann’s transition from Hans Castorp’s antibildungsroman, The Magic Mountain to his biblical-mythological Joseph trilogy, or Hermann Broch’s passage from the historicizing-ironic Sleepwalkers (1932) to the mythopoetic Death of Virgil (1945).⁴⁴ Though it lies far beyond the scope of this paper, it is also the case that, thanks to the avant-garde, and to globalization, the 1940s and post-1945 period witnessed a rich profusion of modernist works that draw on classical myths and motifs, including French films, African theatrical works, Russian music, and German novels and poetry.⁴⁵ Antigone and The Odyssey alone—to cite but two major works—have left deep traces on the late twentieth century.⁴⁶ And there are texts of gay and lesbian liberation in which figures such as Antinous, Patrocles, and Sappho play major roles. I submit in any event, that postwar modernism did not constitute a rejection of the classical and the mythological, but a reconstitution and dehistoricization of these persistent western preoccupations.

In the world of academic humanism, it is perhaps true that absorption in the ancient world diminished somewhat after the war. But it is also the case that many of the most important innovators of the 1920s continued to work with ancient sources. In classics proper, we can point to the cutting-edge work of Felix Jacoby in editing the fragments of Greek historians, or the extension of prewar work on Greek and Roman mystery religions by Franz Cumont, Richard Reitzenstein, E.R. Dodds, and Fritz Saxl, or the pioneering of the study of late antiquity by Hans Lietzmann, and in a different way by Karl Reinhardt and Hans Jonas. Milman Parry published his first studies of Homeric formulae in 1928. But by this time the study of ancient religions, myths, art, and archaeology had become a global and globally relevant near-obsession, practiced by individuals such as Joseph Campbell, C.G. Jung, Karl Kerenyi, Josef Strzygowski, Rabindranath Tagore, Bronislaw Malinowski, and a few years later, Mircea Eliade. James Georg Frazer and Freud became household names; philosophers—including Martin Heidegger—devoted new attention to the pre-Socratics. Many of these scholars drew on nonwestern as well as classical traditions, and spotlighted periods and places that had been largely ignored or abhorred by previous humanists. “What is left of the grand Wilamops?” asked Stefan George. “Perhaps the dirt that Nietzsche shook from his coattails.”⁴⁷ George’s quip was both cruel and inaccurate; Wilamowitz’s legacy was much greater than George admitted, and German classical scholarship remained a vibrant field until at least 1933. But where it did remain cutting-edge it did so by embracing avant-garde modernism—including the quasi-Nietzschean interest in the irrational, the cultic, and the Oriental—not by rejecting it. [End Page 250]

One realm in which the Germans seem to have largely resisted classicizing was in the design of Great War monuments. Many readers will be familiar with at least a few of the Allies’ memorials, and perhaps especially with Sir Edwin Lutyens’s semi-classicizing “stones of remembrance,” which were placed alongside his “crosses of sacrifice” in every Commonwealth cemetery, from Hamilton (Ontario) to Singapore. (The crosses of sacrifice and the inscription on the stones, “Their Name Liveth Evermore,” from the book of Ecclesiastes, remind us too that Christian and Biblical symbolism also did not die in the course of the war.) In fact, the Entente powers erected an astonishing number and variety of classicizing monuments, in places ranging from Melbourne to Asiago, from Atlantic City to New Dehli. Monument builders thought the classical proper to staunch grief and to offer hope, to ensure immortality and to demonstrate national gratitude for the soldiers’ ultimate sacrifice. The classical still signified to many universality and beauty; it was considered a safer style than the outwardly Christian for official monuments, and was adopted to a myriad of purposes, to entomb Unknown Soldiers, to document the sufferings of the massacred at Dinant, and to represent the proper, but sadly unsuccessful, attempt at internationalism represented by the League of Nations. Even the monument for carrier pigeons in Lille was built in a classical style.

Allied architects and decorators drew on the triumphal arch and the trophy, the laurel wreath and the gladius, the fasces and the figure of winged victory; they adapted the rotunda and the column. Monument designers employed the proscenium, the arch, and the altar. Sculpturally, the dying hero was a favorite, especially for school monuments. Many commentators have argued that the amalgamation of classical and Christian imagery employed in these monuments induced an unhealthy sort of amnesia about the war’s raw brutality. Very often the soldier figures are nudes, modeled on well-fed ephebes, and usually their bodies are fully intact. Having unveiled a large number of these over the course of the 1920s, Sir Ian Hamilton complained that England was being overrun with “a sort of bastard Greek sculpture.”⁴⁸ But, as Ana Carden-Coyne reminds us, we need not see postwar classicism exclusively as class-based, racist, or protofascist delusion: it also expressed profound longings to reconstruct civilization, to express the endurance of democratic ideals, to unite humanity, and to provide healing in the wake of so much destruction and death. Larger and more elaborate Commonwealth and American cemeteries, such as the British cemeteries at Pozières or Vis-en-Artois, were often given something like classical colonnades or Propylaea in order to give mourners a focal point, adding elements that reach upward, as Jay Winter has movingly described, in the direction of hope.⁴⁹

Perhaps hope was not available in such ample supply in Central Europe after 1918; it is also the case that German and Austrian governments, in the war’s wake, had little cash to spend on monuments—and most of their dead lay on fields now tended by other farmers. During the war itself, the German high command actually [End Page 251] tried to prevent the use of classical forms in its cemeteries, fearing its referents would be devalued by mass-produced casts of warrior-heroes or seem snooty or strange to those Pomeranian peasants Engel sought to instruct. The Kaiser had managed to get a classicizing graveyard built, anyway, at Saint Quentin in 1915—though he did not prevail in his desire to install in it a huge version of the Achilles statue on display at the imperial palace on Corfu.⁵⁰ Interestingly, although the Germans had already begun building classicizing monuments for military heroes before 1914, after 1915, they built relatively few. They could not, in any event, get away with Nikes or victory arches, and perhaps the classical in general works best for the victors. Perhaps, too, in the wake of the lost war, and of the sensational success of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918), many Germans did not want to identify themselves so directly with a symbolic language that was increasingly being identified with democracy, and with “the West.” In any event, perhaps the fact that in German-speaking Europe, the classical was not so deeply associated with sorrow or with the lost war left this language open to its heroic repurposing by Nazi-era architects such as Albert Speer and Paul Troost, whose grandiose forms of stripped-down classicism were not intended to offer consolation, but to stage revenge.

If we sum up our findings with respect to postwar avant-garde and modernist usages of the classical—in dance, music, literature, and even in western war monuments—we find, in general, fewer breaks than continuities in formal development, and even in content. Above all, we find processes of dehistoricization and abstraction, of the embrace of myth, dissonance, and tragedy. This is clearly the case in art; but the monuments, too, show a drift away from the archaeological, and toward the abstract. But precisely that sort of remaking of the classical made for a postwar “crisis of the humanities” that I want to discuss in my final pages, and from which I would like to try to distill a few lessons.

In the mid-nineteenth century, it can be argued, historicism in the arts, in literature, and even in warfare paralleled the historicist teaching and research so prevalent in Gymnasien and universities. The paths began to diverge by the 1890s, as school reformers began to raise the dreaded question of “relevance,” but as I have argued above, classicists such as Wilamowitz were still sometimes able to meet modernizers halfway, though they remained largely hostile to those (such as J.J. Bachofen, Jane Harrison, James George Frazer, or Max Weber) who wanted to incorporate irrationality, anthropology, or antiestablishment criticism into their scholarship. Despite partially successful attacks on the gatekeeping function performed by the classical Gymnasien with respect to the universities and the professions, classical philologists and ancient historians remained key players in the shaping of the cultural institutions of the Kaiserreich. But the war shook the confidence of classicists that the nation needed their cultural leadership; “It is all so meaningless, isn’t it, what we poor pupils of the muses do or don’t do?”⁵¹ agonized the middle-aged philologist Eduard Norden [End Page 252] in a letter to fellow classicist written in 1915. Tormented by their seeming irrelevance to the national cause, quite a number of historians, classicists, and archaeologists did throw down their pens, or, rather, devoted them to signing nationalist manifestos.

I am sorry to say that in Germany, at least, classicists were more likely than natural scientists to add their names to such hypernationalist effusions as the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three. Many tried to reiterate Germany’s philhellenic tradition as a means to answer Entente accusations that the “Huns” had never been anything but violence-loving barbarians. On the contrary, bellowed Adolf Lasson, “In scholarship, in poetry, in civic life we are students of the school of Athens, continuers of Greek freedom of thought.” Lasson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin, then gilded the patriotic lily, adding, embarrassingly: “One only has to read the speeches of our Kaiser, and of our Chancellor; they are worthy of being quoted by Thucydides.”⁵² Wilamowitz threw himself into the writing of violently nationalist speeches, and so vigorously urged enlistment that his own son, the highly promising scholar of Greek tragedy Tycho von Wilamowitz Moellendorff, departed immediately for the eastern front—to die there already in October 1914.⁵³ Three years later, Wilamowitz dedicated a book to his son’s memory: the subject was, of course, The Iliad, but only those who knew Wilamowitz intimately could have guessed at the sorrow and horror buried deep beneath the book’s historicizing footnotes.⁵⁴ The wartime saber-rattling of the professoriate would endear these conservatives to the Kaiser and the military brass; but would prepare them only for bitter disappointment when the Kaiserreich itself, and its lavish support for museums, excavations, and elite education, came to an abrupt, and unheroic end.

What the war wrought, in the field of German classics and classical education, deserves a book all of its own. The impact was not only to accelerate dissatisfaction with rote language learning, but to provoke a grander debate about the modernization and democratization of schooling. Very soon the universities found themselves swamped with students, and academic humanists confronted a future in which the old aristocracy and the Bildungsbürgertum were losing their grip on Germany’s cultural steering wheel. For many professors, including the now aged Wilamowitz, this was not a sign of health but of impending apocalypse. The postwar students, they complained, were utterly unprepared and directionless, or committed only to obtaining a degree that would net them a good job.⁵⁵ Worse, students seem to have found pure philology harder to endure, and enrollments in classics dropped;⁵⁶ Weimar republicans began serious campaigns to disband some, if not all, of the classical Gymnasien. Responding to Weimar’s version of “the crisis of the humanities,” academic and Gymnasium classicists loudly trumpeted the virtues of elite education. Especially important to them was preserving the study of ancient Greek, as a means to access the fifth-century Athenians directly, without mediation by the moderns. Wilamowitz, tellingly, wrote books about Plato and Greek religion rather than reaching out to contemporary theater [End Page 253] directors or writers; his public lectures now drew between twenty and forty rather than two hundred or more young listeners.⁵⁷ Seeking a Perseus who would rescue and restore the world of prewar bourgeois neoclassicism, Wilamowitz, together with many other academic classicists and Gymnasium teachers, turned to Werner Jaeger, a much younger, philosophically oriented philologist who seemed to have the right mix of linguistic bona fides, institutional piety, and semivitalist yearnings to evade the Kraken of democratizing reform.⁵⁸

The story of Jaeger’s invention and leadership of the movement that would be called “the Third Humanism”⁵⁹ is too complex to detail here, but what is worth emphasizing is, firstly, the enormous burden placed on Jaeger to preserve from reform a version of humanism that fetishized language learning and aimed at reaestheticization of a select set of classical texts. Whether Wilamowitz knew it or not, Jaeger during the war had already developed a master narrative which could be deployed to defend the relevance of the ancient Greeks for modern men: the Greeks, Jaeger argued, alone had conceptualized “paideia” (used already in The Iliad), which he translated with the heavily freighted German word Bildung, meaning the cultivation of the individual. Jaeger’s appointment to Wilamowitz’s Berlin chair in 1921 offered him a bully pulpit from which to preach the gospel of “paideia” as a means to defend the ideas and the institutions of the Kaiserreich, and in particular the classical Gymnasium. In the next 15 years, he did indeed use this pulpit, speaking regularly not only to academic audiences but also to secondary school teachers, working hard at Gymnasium graduations and anniversary parties to shore up faith in elitist classical education. In 1924 Jaeger oversaw the creation of a new, high-profile society for the promotion of classical culture (Gesellschaft für antike Kultur), a related organ of classicizing propaganda, the semipopular, neoromantic journal titled Die Antike, and a more historicizing professional journal of reviews directed at uniting the academic community, entitled Gnomon.⁶⁰ In 1925, he delivered a keynote address at a conference of Gymnasium teachers, who afterward formed the Altphilologenverband; by 1930 its membership had reached 4,000.⁶¹ Jaeger became the darling of the antireformers, and more than anyone else, I would argue, was responsible for the staving off of most school reform before 1933, the year in which Jaeger made what turned out to be an unsuccessful bid to ingratiate himself with the new Propaganda Ministry.⁶²

Jaeger’s “paideia” concept was in no way purely historicizing and without “relevance” for his contemporaries. His basic storyline in the synthetic book that evolved out of his lectures (titled, of course, Paideia) traced the transformation of Homeric, martial areté into Platonic spiritual and moral civic nobility. Volume 1 of what would eventually be a three-volume series, was subtitled Die Formung der griechischen Mensch and published by Walter de Gruyter in Berlin in 1934. Here, Jaeger unabashedly celebrated aristocratic learning, or even breeding, and belittled “racially and mentally foreign” non-European civilizations, which in Jaeger’s view [End Page 254] had no comparable notion of culture or even of humankind.⁶³ He dismissed comparativism à la Frazer as well as Spenglerian relativism, and did his best to deflect or ignore scholarship which emphasized Greek irrationalism or debts to the Orient. Perhaps worst of all, he failed to evoke any of the work of the contemporary or prewar avant-garde, fearing perhaps that he would offend his antimodernist mentors, or give comfort to the vitalist followers of Stefan George. Jaeger’s was an idealized, even Apollonian classicism, which glorified service to the state without glorifying democracy, and without reflecting at all on the horrors and tragedies of the war. He failed to acknowledge that the Greeks themselves had recognized that violence and destruction, as well as cultivation of the human spirit, is part of the human psyche, and human societies. Tellingly—as Ludwig Curtius noticed—Jaeger’s antiquity was one with little tragedy or lyric, and as Arnaldo Momigliano and Moses I. Finley later complained, Jaeger largely ignored the niceties of political history, and completed three full volumes without once mentioning slavery.⁶⁴ Naturally, women and their travails were sidelined. Even for a cultural history, Jaeger’s was exceedingly thin, focusing on Platonic ideals and omitting what could have been powerfully relevant points of reference, from Antigone’s lamentations to the Melian dialogues, from Achilles’s atrocities to the all too relevant outcome of the Second Punic War. His essays and lectures were, in some way, the equivalent of the missing classicizing monuments, which would have linked death and sorrow, too, to the ancient world. Instead, the “relevant” issues he addressed were purely those of the survival of the Gymnasium and the classicist guild, and he left his acolytes, and more importantly, their students, with a classicism empty of empathy for the brokenness of the modern condition, one irrelevant to Weimar’s many Hecubas and Ajaxes, or useful only to those, like Hitler, who wanted to make war and violence heroic once more.

Let me now try to come to a conclusion, and perhaps to say something about the problem of the classical in the modern, or even about the problem of relevance that we in the humanities worry about so much these days. We do not have to blame Werner Jaeger for the rise of fascism to see what is wrong with the kind of humanism he promoted in the interwar era. Jaeger and his allies in the Altphilologenverband failed dismally to make the case for the importance of the classical in the modern world. They did not invoke Picasso, Joyce, or Freud, or the architecture of Lutyens and Le Corbusier; they did not even invoke the exciting new departures in classical scholarship, such as Milman Parry’s work on the Homeric epics, or Franz Cumont’s work on Oriental mystery cults. Rather than engaging the suffering, war-ravaged world of the 1920s, the Third Humanism tried to turn the cultural clock back to 1813, or to a highly idealized Athenian fifth century, and in doing so, I would argue, turned Medusa’s head on themselves, turning something still living into something of stone. We in the United States made the mistake of adopting some of this ourselves, after Jaeger left Berlin for the University of Chicago in 1936; in 1939, James Conant then [End Page 255] begged him to move to Harvard to shore up its classics department and to serve as a university professor.⁶⁵ Thanks to Jaeger’s new bully pulpit, his charisma, and the success of the English translation of Paideia, he worked some of his magic here too, helping to shape our “Plato to NATO” versions of western civ, which also reaestheticized and idealized a few ancient figures and ideas at the cost of other, more “Dionysian” and diverse subjects. In many ways, classics has had to pay for the deeds of this false Perseus for decades afterward, and it is only in the last twenty years that the field has embraced, quite marvelously, its history and its modernist legacies.

I do not want us to forget that Jaeger and his followers were not purely positivist scholars; they too cared about relevance, but the “relevant” political and social world they cared about was exclusively that of the classicizing humanities, and of elite, highly educated German men. Their aim was self-protection, and the guarding of their own rights to continue to live and work as they had done before the war. They could have learned other forms of relevance from Homer and Euripides—mediated through Hasenclever or Werfel or even Hölderlin. From them, they might have learned how to construe a different, more tragic if you will, kind of relevance, one that took seriously the destructive forces of human history and psychology, and tried to engage the soldiers, widows, and orphans so ubiquitous in the Weimar world. Rather than emphasizing the beauty of Greek tragedy, they might have understood, as did George Steiner, its painful messages about “superior” individuals; “In Sophocles,” Steiner writes, “heroism does not blunt tragedy. It makes it more wasteful.”⁶⁶ But they did not, and shutting out the darker side of both ancient Greece and modern Germany left their discipline without a lifeline to the creative world, or war-ravaged society in which they lived.

I do not contest that in this lecture I have focused on a few works. By no means were the majority of cultural products written, painted, or played at this time classicizing; it would be absurd to insist that everything we call “modern” can be traced to the repurposing of antiquity. But perhaps in the past we have undercounted those works which did owe debts to the ancients, and treated them as pure kitsch or pure conservative reaction rather than taking them seriously as contributions to the making of modern cultural history. And perhaps we owe at least some of our blindness here to Jaeger’s Third Humanism, which painted a purely positive and antimodern portrait of the Greek past, and continues to inform we modernists with too reactionary a view of the supposedly dead white men and trivial aesthetic forms of the ancient world. The ancient world was relevant to the modernists—Plato spoke to Gandhi as well as Wilamowitz; Sophocles spoke to Bertolt Brecht and Martha Graham as well as to Werner Jaeger. In the past we may have advertised all too much the great divide between modernism and classicism, perhaps out of an excess of admiration for what Robert Hughes once called “the shock of the new”—or perhaps because we, particularly in North America, have accustomed ourselves to an image of classical antiquity which is all too Jaegerian, and shuts out the darker elements of Greek and [End Page 256] Roman thought. I also think that all too often our insistence on being relevant and critical ends up being a kind of hubris with respect to the past—and a naïve belief that by thinking critically we can overcome all the heartbreaking tragedies and spasms of violence humanity seems fated to endure. Perhaps what we really need to teach is not more criticism, but more of the kind of creative affection for works like The Odyssey that made James Joyce or Derek Walcott engage it so attentively, or that recently provoked a group of Syrian refugee women in Amman to stage their own production of The Trojan Women. If we approached modernism with a bit more modesty, and our antiquity with greater openness to the painful truths about the human condition that it might teach us, there is no telling what new forms of humanism we might create.