Title: The Great War and the Classical World: GSA Presidential Address, Kansas City, 2014
Abstract: The Great War and the Classical World:GSA Presidential Address, Kansas City, 2014 Suzanne Marchand (bio) 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...
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 5
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot