Happy Days

Modris Eksteins presented a tour-de-force interpretation of the political, social and cultural climate of the early twentieth century. His sources were not merely the more traditional sources of the historian: political, military and economic accounts; rather, he drew from the rich, heady brew of art, music, dance, literature and philosophy as well. Eksteins examined ways in which life influenced, imitated, and even became art. Eksteins argues that life and art, as well as death, became so intermeshed as to be indistinguishable from one another.

The title of the book, The Rites of Spring, and the plunge into the world of the Ballet Russe in the first chapter, made clear that Eksteins intended to use Stravinsky's ballet as an image for thinking about The Great War. (The ballet itself was a microcosm of war and the events surrounding the presentation of this ballet involved a war of a different sort.) He showed that, just as Anglo/Franco music and dance were stagnant and ripe for being changed, so were the political and social constructs of those nations heavy with the accumulated weight of their own self-importance. Britain, long self-satisfied, set herself as guardian of the status quo. Although she purported to be a champion of liberty and democracy, this was only true when it suited her goals. One did not need to look far to find examples of British resolutely and unashamedly trampling opposition when she felt it in her interest to do so. France, on the other hand, although supremely confident of herself in matters of taste - be it art, music, fashion or literature - had never developed a clear and exact idea of itself as a political entity. After the defeat of the Second Empire, she entered into a period of self-doubt and hesitancy.

Eksteins contends that, just as Russia was able to shock the world of dance / music with her avant-garde ideas, which were free from fetters of the expected, thus Germany also fulfilled a corresponding role politically. Germany was, relatively speaking, a new nation; new as a single nation. Russian contributions to music and dance were new; they did not date back centuries like in England, France, Germany and Italy. Politically, Germany found herself in a similar situation. She was new and wanted to make her place among the great powers; she saw herself as the innovator, a progressive spirit, as opposed to wearied France and conservative Britain.

Eksteins contends that because Germans saw themselves as the agent of (inevitable) progress, they felt their role in The Great War was defensive rather than aggressive. To attack Germany was to attack the future. This belief that they must defend their homeland from those who would deny the future, sustained the Germans during and after the war, and into the next one.

Eksteins realized that Hitler was not an anomaly; Hitler touched a sympathetic chord within the Germans. Although Eksteins discussed that any group may want to find scapegoats when things go wrong, citing the tendencies of the French to look beyond themselves for explanations of failure, he implies that, in Germany, finding scapegoats produced such horrific results because preexisting sentiments of anti-Semitism combined with the violence and power of Nazism. His depiction of the vibrant and dynamic, "pep rally‿ mentality with its appeal to deep emotions, rather than to the intellect showed how seductive Nazism was to the Germans and how it could fulfill the needs of a nation still crippled and stunned by the recent defeat.

From the preface and prologue through the last chapter of act three, Eksteins wove death and destruction as themes that tug at the participants in the war, especially the Germans. By using le Sacre du Printemps image, not only did Eksteins show the conflict between