False dawn
NIGEL JONES is impressed by a cinematic look at the world after the First World War, as seen by those who were there
A World on Edge: The End of the Great War and the Dawn of a New Age By Daniel Schönpflug Macmillan, 368 pages, £25
This is a refreshing book for a German historian to write. Most such Teutonic tomes are from academics writing for other academics: thick, turgid and often tedious. But this skims along like a butterfly, briefly alighting in one place before fluttering on to the next. It is enjoyable, easily read and speedily digested.
Daniel Schönpflug selects a score of eyewitnesses to the world-shaking events of a century ago, and recounts their experiences and reflections between the end of the First World War and the spring of 1919 in his words and theirs. His choices are eclectic. Some (like Matthias Erzberger and Ferdinand Foch, who signed the armistice, as well as TE Lawrence) played key roles in the
unfolding drama. Others (Gandhi, Harry Truman and Nguyen Ái Quoc, AKA Ho Chí Minh) are destined for later fame. One, Rudolf Höss, will become notorious as commandant of Auschwitz, while a few – including an African-American soldier and a female victim of the Russian revolution – live and die in obscurity.
Given the author’s nationality and the central role of Germany in events, it is scarcely surprising that Germans and Austrians figure prominently. We see the war’s end and the subsequent social upheavals variously through the eyes of a sailor, Richard Stumpf, caught up in the mutiny of Germany’s High Seas Fleet; Crown Prince Wilhelm, as he grumps off to Dutch exile; and the Austrian femme fatale Alma Mahler, as she juggles her tangled love life against the background of revolution and counter-revolution. The savagely satirical painter George Grosz, who briefly became a Spartacist revolutionary, and the compassionate sculptor Käthe Kollwitz, neatly combine the roles of witnesses and participants as Germany plunges into chaos.
The primary picture given by this impressionistic, almost cinematic book is bleak: we see the helplessness of individuals in the firestorm as the world moves towards a peace that seems even more menacing and unstable than the conflict. A few of Schönpflug’s witnesses entertain hopes of a more just world order, and some even try to build it, but such illusions are swiftly snuffed out. Even in relatively secure Britain, Schönpflug’s sole English female witness, Virginia Woolf, is already grappling with the mental illness that will destroy her.
It all makes for a colourful, exciting read, but this is not the book for those seeking a serious analysis of 1918–19. It is, rather, a partial view of those tumultuous years as if through the fractured lens of a kaleidoscope. As soon as we adjust to one person’s view, Schönpflug gives his spyglass a twist and we are on to the next. As such, it reflects the bewilderingly fast sequence of shattering changes through the eyes of a random collection of those who lived through them and recorded them as they happened. Unlike Schönpflug’s subjects, we know the darkness that lay ahead.