War as Apocalypse. Interpretations, Revelations, Fears - LVI Study Week
Before 1914, the “prophetic” literature foretelling a looming armed cataclysm that would disrupt the political and social status quo was matched by widespread expectations for a major conflict that would regenerate the stagnant European societies, applying the rudiments of social Darwinism to the history of nations. It is thus no surprise that when war finally broke out it was widely perceived, for better or for worse, as an apocalypse. Freud spoke of the war as the terminal suicide of the best possible civilizations, while the novelist Stefan Zweig called it the end of the “golden age of security”, perceiving in the disintegration of European culture in 1914 the outlines of the subsequent totalitarian world that would force him, as a cosmopolitan Jew, into exile from his home in Vienna. For others it was an extraordinary opportunity to start a new age, as expressed in the enthusiastic slogans of a vast and varied mixture of newspaper columnists, artists, and young people in general. For many of these, however, the reality of war rapidly occluded the ideal or concept of war, and many of the intellectuals and artists who had experienced the front line suffered a profound disillusionment that led some (of those that survived) to subsequently take up radically different pacifistic or revolutionary stances.
The messianic dimensions of the Great War inevitably became interwoven with the revolutionary expectations of the time, in some respects amplifying them. This was quite blatant in some cases, creating the conditions for the overturning of existing regimes, as in the Tsarist Empire in 1917, while at other times it was more subtle, with the definition of organizational models that were interpreted as harbingers of an inevitable transformation in relations between power, economy, and people. The emphasis on military strength and the need to consolidate public bodies to direct and manage industrial production, commerce, and human resources, led universally to a marked increase in the process of state control, as clearly expressed in the “socialism of war” in Germany. As Bucharin would later note, “in a single blow the war resolved the problem of state power”. The war was the opportunity and template for the revolution, as well as a laboratory for new conceptions of the state.
The war as apocalypse was thus an extraordinarily widespread discursive theme among those who invoked it and those who set off to experience it. A theme that naturally assumed a central position in religious discourse during 1914-1918 (in the Catholic Church, which revealed its composite nature through the contrasting themes of a just or pointless war, and in the Protestant Churches) and became an effective rhetorical trump card in the vocabulary of the ruling classes and members of political movements of the most diverse inspirations.
The convention aims to:
– Historicize and relativise the apocalyptic readings of the Great War, identifying the conceptual genealogies, media precursors, and limits. This will be achieved adopting a global perspective (not exclusively Italo- nor Euro-centric) that enables contextualization of narrations of the war in cultural contexts in which the apocalypse is not thematic (Islamic cultures, for example).
– Highlight the different forms of the apocalyptic vision of 1914-1918 in various idioms (literary, visual arts, religious, political).
– Critically analyze the interpretations of the war as apocalypse (terminal cataclysm, beginning of a new era, revolutionary opportunity, fulfilment of national missions, struggle for survival, crusade against evil).
– Compare the individual countries and trace the variants of apocalypse in the different cultural contexts
Coordinamento scientifico
Gustavo Corni | Trento
Oliver Janz | Freie Universität Berlin
Marco Mondini | FBK-Isig
Convegno organizzato nell’ambito del Progetto “La prima guerra mondiale 1941-1918” Realizzato con il contributo della Provincia Autonoma di Trento