The Worst Century Ever

William Pfaff’s The Bullet’s Song (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004) is an extended essay on the intellectual history of modernity, an attempt to discern what went wrong with the twentieth century. Pfaff, a political columnist for the International Herald Tribune and other newspapers and a former essayist for the New Yorker, eschews the term “modernity” and the postmodern vocabulary and theory that so often accompany it. But he shares with critics of modernity a profound sense of disappointment, bordering on despair, for the history of a century that began with such optimism and promise. He uses “inner history of the twentieth century” synonymously with “inner history of the modern crisis” (pp. 12, 7).

Pfaff’s introduction suggests that technology will loom large in his analysis. He avows that for many Europeans, including those he studies in this book, “modern industrial technology” is implicated in the failures of the twentieth century because it caused “immense human suffering, social and material destruction, and moral disorder” (p. 5). He considers the “‘science’ of progress” to be one formulation by which premodern romantics sought to reconcile themselves with modernity (p. 23). He describes his book as “an essay on history and morals” (p. 337), a combination reminiscent of Lewis Mumford and others who have tried to understand the implications of modern technology for the meaning of life. And at the heart of Pfaff’s story is the bullet, a technological artifact in the service of ideology and politics.

In the end, however, this promise is unfulfilled. Technology is strangely absent from The Bullet’s Song. The book is based on the premise that World War I was “the most important event of the twentieth century” (p. 8). Its transformative power, in which Pfaff believes “beyond doubt,” effected two momentous changes in Western civilization. First it destroyed chivalry, by which Pfaff seems to understand a cross between civility and humanity. Chivalry, said Ernst Jünger, author of Storm of Steel (1920) and one of Pfaff’s protagonists, “vanished forever during the battle of the Somme” (p. 104). Second, says Pfaff, World War I inculcated in a vanguard of public intellectuals a romantic, utopian faith in violence as the instrument of choice to restore the order shattered on the Somme. Pfaff argues that these two themes, the death of chivalry and the romantic embrace of violence in pursuit of a utopian order, dominated world history from 1920 to 1990. Indeed, Pfaff believes that they also explain the international terrorism currently engaging the world’s attention.

The Bullet’s Song carries these twin trajectories across the twentieth century on the backs of eight biographies. His principals were “intellectuals or artists” who shaped and reflected the transformation Pfaff envisions. Four he associates directly with World War I and the death of chivalry. Four he situates in the ensuing seventy years. His concluding chapter ties their stories together and reveals the conception that unites them in Pfaff’s mind.

An “Overture” sets the stage with Filippo Thommaso Marinetti and the futurists, an artistic movement that connected romanticism, violence, and modernity even before World War I broke out. The futurists’ enthusiasm for “action, speed, and violence” (p. 38) was so hyperbolic, and so accelerated by the horrors of World War I, that they made Mussolini look moderate, pragmatic, and rational by comparison, and thereby contributed to his ascendancy.

But the quintessential hero of Pfaff’s story comes not from this fascist trajectory but rather from an entirely quixotic encounter with modernity. Thomas Edward (T. E.) Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) is for Pfaff “The Fallen Hero,” not only the model for the romantic intellectual chasing utopia with a gun, but also the inspiration for many of Pfaff’s other subjects. Pfaff discovered Lawrence as an adolescent, when Pfaff was also developing a fascination with war, art (including the futurists), and André Malraux (another of his characters). Of course Lawrence—or Pfaff’s adolescent infatuation with him—does not stand up to the historical and intellectual scrutiny to which Pfaff subjects him here. He was not a fascist, Pfaff insists, yet we can’t help but associate him with fascism. He eschewed most of the trappings of fame to which his public life so often seemed directed; he died in 1935 in a motorcycle accident, a blue-collar laborer on his way home to a rudimentary lodging where he lived modestly and alone.

Lawrence serves as grist for Pfaff’s mill because he seems a tortured soul, captured between two worlds, one chivalric, Edwardian, and romantic, the other modern, fast, and violent. The unsurpassed master of creating a public identity for himself, he never found a private or a sexual identity with which he was comfortable. He was a master of modernity, indeed a definer of modernity, but he could not craft for himself a modern identity.

Not so Ernst Jünger, the German soldier wounded fourteen times in the trenches of World War I. “The Warrior,” as Pfaff calls him, turned his wartime diary into Storm of Steel, one of the most successful combat memoirs ever published. The ensuing wealth and fame laid the foundation for Jünger’s long, distinguished, and lucrative career as a scientist, author, and public official. He recovered from an early flirtation with the Nazis and from military service during World War II, but never escaped the perception that he perhaps loved war too much. A victim of bullets himself, he simultaneously pierced the veil of romanticism that shrouded modern war while romanticizing the heroic veteran.

Rounding out Pfaff’s suite of World War I figures is “The Happy Man,” Vladimir Peniakoff, an engineer “who found harmonies that had eluded Lawrence and Jünger” (p. 136). A Belgian of Russian extraction and veteran of brief service in World War I, Peniakoff spent many of the interwar years wasting his engineering talents in Egypt and North Africa. But when World War II came, he found catharsis leading a small sabotage and intelligence unit around the North African desert and the Italian peninsula. Pfaff believes that Peniakoff’s opportunity to reprise Lawrence’s desert adventures lent meaning to an otherwise promising but disappointing life. “The moral function of war,” says Pfaff, “is to recall humans to the reality at the core of existence” (p. 149). War, for Peniakoff, was personally fulfilling and redeeming, but as an end in itself, not a passage to utopia.

Pfaff’s second suite of biographical essays explores “Utopias,” the alternative futures envisioned and pursued by Lawrence’s successors. First comes comic opera in the person of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the writer and dandy who raised a private army and seized the port city of Fiume in 1919 when the Paris Peace Conference would not cede it (along with the rest of Yugoslavia) to Italy as a spoil of war. The narcissistic poet-warrior, intoxicated with his own rhetoric, never had any idea what to do with the city. When force was finally brought to bear to dislodge him and his Gilbert-and-Sullivan army, he flipped a coin to decide their fate and marched off without a fight. “The Mediterranean Superman,” as Pfaff calls him, would have been entirely forgettable had he not inspired Mussolini and bequeathed to the world the mischievous, binary logic that “those who are not with us are against us” (p. 169). He mastered the rhetoric of violence without ever experiencing or understanding the reality of violence.

“The Confidence Man” was far less harmless. Willi Münzenberg raised propaganda to high art. “He changed the nature of modern political communications,” says Pfaff, by “the manipulation of information, concealment of facts, and invention of virtual realities” (p. 191). A native of Thuringia, Münzenberg embraced Leninism early on and made himself useful to the Russian Revolution by propagandizing the Comintern. He was particularly innovative in exploiting “innocents”—fellow travelers, they came to be called—whose sympathy with Marxist/socialist ideology could be exploited to promote the international communist project. More a hustler than an ideologue, Münzenberg fell under the suspicion of Stalin, who shut down the Comintern in 1935 and thereafter purged the Soviet state of all perceived loci of power. Münzenberg met his fate hanging from a tree in southern France in 1940. Fleeing the invading Germans, the master propagandist appears to have run into his own NKVD.

A happier, if less romantic, fate befell “L’Homme Engagé,” André Malraux. An admirer of both Lawrence and D’Annunzio, Malraux self-consciously invented a public persona as a military hero, partially by real service and partially by inventive self-promotion. He did fight briefly in the Spanish Civil War and in World War II, but he imagined and claimed for himself more fighting than he ever experienced. One of Münzenberg’s coziest fellow travelers, and a close ally of Charles de Gaulle, with whom he shared a profound romanticism, Malraux constructed himself as the intellectual champion of a postwar France enlightened by the idealism of Marxism-Leninism but innocent of the Stalinist deluge that followed. He was, as Pfaff says, “an obscurantist to the end” (p. 248).

“The Anti-Communist” completes Pfaff’s octet. Arthur Koestler renounced his early infatuation with the Soviet experiment and his membership in the Communist Party by publishing in 1940 one of the twentieth century’s great anticommunist tracts, Darkness at Noon. The arc of his disenchantment with The God that Failed, a book (1950) to which he contributed a famous essay, stretched from his prewar divorce from communism to his 1955 confession that “the bitter passion [had] burned itself out; Cassandra [had] gone hoarse” (p. 274). In the intervening years, however, he had contributed to the war of words marking the beginning of the cold war. He also had helped to form the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-sponsored intellectual movement that sought to “out-Münzenberg Münzenberg.” Pfaff is so fascinated by the Congress that he expands on its history in an appendix.

Pfaff divides his utopian group into the single case of D’Annunzio–utopia as farce–and the combined cases of Münzenberg, Malraux, and Koestler. The latter three “illustrate from beginning to end the essential story of Marxism-Leninism’s bid to resolve the European crisis that followed the First World War” (p. 275). Since their moments on the stage of utopianism ended respectively in 1940, 1955, and perhaps 1968, when Malraux gave up his disappointing tenure as de Gaulle’s minister of cultural affairs, Pfaff is hard-pressed to get his story to the end of the cold war, let alone the end of the twentieth century. He adds a halfhearted chapter, “Coda: The Romantic Revolutionary,” that hopscotches from one “romantic revolutionary” to the next, from Pablo Neruda to Che Guevera, arriving finally and predictably at the World Trade Center in September 2001. Meanwhile, declares Pfaff, the intellectual dimension of “revolutionary utopianism enjoys a residual half-life on university faculties as well as among sectarian survivors of the 1960s” (p. 290).

By this time the warp threads holding this conceptual tapestry together have quite disappeared behind wefts of inchoate anecdote. The three threads of the subtitle—romanticism, violence, and utopia—appear and disappear erratically. Violence, for example, plays little role in Münzenberg’s story, save for his demise; Pfaff’s argument that “manipulation” is the intellectual counterpart of violence goes a bridge too far. Koestler’s hobbyhorse is totalitarianism; violence arises not as an avenue to utopia but as a consequence of totalitarian excess. Utopia appears often in the stories, but there was nothing particularly utopian about Lawrence or his ideas, certainly not about Peniakoff. Pfaff never makes clear what he means by “romanticism,” a notoriously ambiguous term. Indeed, Pfaff displays a consistent ahistoricism that seems oddly incompatible with his wide reading in European philosophy and politics. His notion of chivalry is equally ahistorical; he never makes clear exactly what ideals and principles Western civilization sacrificed on the Somme. Ironically, many of his subjects display that same objectification of women and callousness to the third estate that chivalry indulged between Tours and the Somme. Pfaff concedes that utopianism and violence have made common cause before and after the crisis of the twentieth century, but he writes the book as if there is nothing to compare with the aftermath of World War I. Even his title is ahistorical; it comes from Bret Harte’s nineteenth-century poem “What the Bullet Sang.”

The only threads that seem to run consistently through Pfaff’s biographies are personal, not public. Without exception, Pfaff’s heroes were shamelessly self-promoting. While most of them—Peniakoff and perhaps Lawrence are exceptions—crusaded for a utopian future, they craved the recognition of serving prominently in the vanguard. They also sought and relished a role as public intellectuals, though Münzenberg seemed more comfortable than the rest in operating behind the scenes. In some cases, they were plagued by ambiguous sexual identity, frenetic promiscuity, or simply difficulty in achieving secure sexual relationships. In all of the cases, one suspects that their public roles were shaped, if not determined, by their private neuroses. This hardly makes them unique historically, but it illustrates Pfaff’s difficulty in finding the connecting links that might tie their public lives together.

By the end of chapter 9, one suspects that the only connecting tissue is Pfaff’s own interests and predilections. A practitioner of what he calls “intellectual journalism,” Pfaff read these writers and others throughout his career in the United States and Europe. This study is something of an intellectual scrapbook, filled with snippets, quotes, and observations collected over the course of fifty years. Pfaff has a great eye for pithy, illuminating quotations and the telling personal anecdote. But his text reads at times like a quilt, patches of mini-essays and observations stitched together in sections that are sometimes just a few paragraphs long. In the end his selection of eight artists and intellectuals seems to be nothing more than a compilation of personal favorites, with no more coherence than a musical hit list. “There is a sense,” says Pfaff, “in which these people selected me” (p. 14).

For all these reasons, chapter 11, “Progress,” comes as a shock and a relief. The common thread, it turns out, is not romanticism or violence or utopia. It is progress. All of the subjects, says Pfaff, share a modern Western belief in the directionality of history, in time’s arrow. It is this faith that gave meaning to life after the death of God in the Enlightenment. It was because of their faith in progress, because of their belief in the melioration of the human condition, that they were so shocked by World War I, so disappointed in the twentieth century. Pfaff’s veterans of World War I understood more fully than most the chasm in historical continuity opened by that war; the trope of chivalry is really just a marker for the Edwardian faith in progress that died on the Somme. Likewise, the cold warriors of mid-century all flirted with “the god that failed,” the Marxist-Leninist promise of a new social order. Indeed, Marxist teleology offered them an appealing alternative to garden-variety Western progress. Mankind would move not just to a new and better social order but to the final social order, communism, representing one intellectual vision of the end of history. D’Annunzio is too silly to take seriously in this role, but even he contributed by refining a public rhetoric equal to the task at hand. Malraux, at least, took him seriously.

Viewed from this perspective, Pfaff’s tapestry begins to reveal other threads that were not at first obvious. Technique is a case in point. Münzenberg offered technique, not vision. His service to the Soviet project was instrumentalist, not utopian. He taught the others to tell what Pfaff calls “lies about the future” (p. 10), a formulation that says more about Pfaff than it does about Münzenberg and the others. Pfaff implies that these visionaries could and did see the future and that they chose to misrepresent it. Neither proposition is supported by the evidence in this book. Like most people, these artists and intellectuals saw what they wanted to see and represented it to serve their own purposes. They saw the past with comparable myopia, and represented it with the same motives. Their worst lies were about themselves, not about history or the future. It was a coincidence of history that the totalitarian state was inventing the big lie just as these intellectuals were inventing themselves.

But what about technology? Do bullets and guns and violence appear in this tapestry with the pride of place suggested by the book’s title? Where is the material side of “progress”? Where is the futurists’ love of machines, the “science” of progress invoked in Pfaff’s “Overture,” the “modern industrial technology” indicted in the preface? What is the bullet’s song? And how does it carry Pfaff’s message? Unfortunately, these warp threads, for which Pfaff held out such promise, disappear beneath the weft of traditional intellectual history. The Bullet’s Song is a history of ideas. Some of the principals, like Lawrence and Jünger, were men of action, but it is only their ideas that interest Pfaff. This is an understandable prejudice, but Pfaff attempts to comprehend their ideas without contextualizing them in the material world in which they grew to fruition. This lacuna suggests a belief that the intellectual and the material world run in parallel universes, each unaffected by the other. Had Pfaff sought to embed his story more completely in the material world, he might have achieved a fuller understanding of his topic and a richer and more satisfying picture of what happened and why. It is not fair to criticize a book for what its author chose not to do, but it is fair to imagine what this intellectual history might have looked like had the machine been introduced. A few suggestions may suffice.

First, the Marxist experiment, the ideology that dominated the twentieth century, would be more understandable and more illuminating if it came with a little materialism. Marx saw the world in material terms and he saw politics as the struggle to control the means of production. The great crisis of the twentieth century, in the Marxist view, was not World War I but the Depression, the living proof that the last stage of capitalism was at hand. World War I was not so much a crisis as an opportunity, the disjuncture in history that opened the door to the Soviet experiment. Politically, World War I had been a disappointment to Marxists, for contrary to socialist theory, the laboring classes of the industrialized nations had failed to make common cause, allowing the false consciousness of nationalism to trump their shared, international class interests. The utopia of Marx and Lenin was a society of plenty distributed equitably among all the people. It was about stuff, not eschatology.

Pfaff’s claims for World War I also want substantiation. The Somme surely fed the erosion of Enlightenment faith in progress, but so too did the counterintuitive irrationality of relativity and quantum physics, the horror of nuclear weapons, the degradation of the environment. General Electric’s claim that “progress is our most important product” still had public appeal through the 1950s, even if intellectuals were coming to see “progress” as part of the problem. World War I had its greatest impact on the European intellectuals with whom Pfaff is fascinated, but their history is not the history of the twentieth century. Nor is their war, the one constructed by British intellectuals and analyzed in Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), the war experienced in east Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, or the Americas.

A more parsimonious explanation for the shock of World War I can be found simply in the scale of the carnage. And for this, materialist explanations have as much power as intellectual ones. World War I, in fact both the world wars, were wars of industrial production. The geometric increase in the lethality of war in the modern world resulted not so much from a collapse of faith or rationality as from the mechanization of death. The machine gun, the icon of World War I, was the ultimate labor-saving machine, a product of the Industrial Revolution and the productive capacity of modern free-market capitalism. The bullet’s song was actually a chorus, a growing crescendo of mass destruction that would finally reach its climax in the hydrogen bomb. The seeming madness of the twentieth century, and the flight to utopianism it spawned in some quarters, had as much to do with the escalating, material power of destruction as it did with despair for the loss of chivalric values that never really did what the romantics imagined. The intellectual history of the twentieth century is inseparable from the material history.

Pfaff also missed an opportunity to fully comprehend the instrumentalist thinking inherent in the writers he examined. The utopia that most of them sought was a figment of their imaginations, an escape from the real world in which they found themselves, a retreat from the disappointments of the twentieth century into a realm that never was, where they would shine as philosopher kings. While their instincts were personal and self-promoting, their ambitions were idealized and ideological. To the extent that they thought about bullets at all, and most of them did not, they thought instrumentally. Ideas were instruments of their ideology. Violence could be an instrument of ideas. The “barrel of a gun” was an instrument of violence. And the bullet, a technological artifact, was the instrument of the gun.

All of them had more faith in pens than guns. Münzenberg, for example, put words and ideas into the service of the state, leaving the violence to Stalin. Lawrence, Jünger, Peniakoff, and Malraux actually served in war before retiring to lives of the mind. D’Annunzio, the Chaplinesque victim of his own rhetoric, actually took up arms in peacetime, only to walk away from the adventure when real guns showed up at the gate of Fiume to dislodge him. Half of these personalities had sought bubble reputations staring down the bullet in their youth, but thereafter bullets for them were rhetorical tools. Only Malraux played a role in World War II, and there was less to his service than meets the eye.

The explanatory power of the bullet as the defining icon of the twentieth century is further diminished by the trajectory of war since World War II. Deaths from war, which had been spiraling upward since the Industrial Revolution, and had reached such appalling heights in the world wars, peaked in 1945 and began a steady decline that continued through the cold war and after. This “long peace,” as historian John Lewis Gaddis has called it, is attributable to an alternative icon of violence in the twentieth century, the mushroom cloud of nuclear weaponry. Finally humans had perfected a weapons technology so horrific and destructive that a taboo settled on it use. Hiroshima and Nagasaki appeared to have convinced the world’s leaders that great-power war between industrial states was no longer sane; it could only end in suicide. The revelation did not arrest the bullet’s song. Violence continued to hold its instrumental appeal for those in search of wealth and power. But the deadliest violence in the world was no longer the tool of Marxist ideologues or expansionist nation-states. In Death by Government (1994), political scientist R. J. Rummel argues that the deadliest violence of the twentieth century came in the form of democide, states killing their own people. From the fascistic nightmare of World War II, through the communist totalitarianism of Stalin and Mao, to the political and ethnic cleansing of Cambodia and Rwanda, it was the state that sang the bullet’s song to its own people. The nuclear umbrella actually stayed the slaughter of industrialized war, but the killing song of bullets and bombs continued.

But even the mushroom cloud is not the best icon of the twentieth century. The golden arches might be better. If, as Charles Tilly claims, the Western nation-state has become the model of political, economic, and social development around the world, then it is Western consumerism, or neoliberal capitalism, that defeated the Marxist vision of utopia. “Marxism is over,” writes Ronald Aronson, a self-professed member of Marxism’s “last generation.” Perry Anderson, founding editor of the New Left Review, has called for “a lucid registration of historical defeat” (“Renewals,” New Left Review, ns 1 [January–February 2000], at 28 May 2004). This is a triumph of the material over the ideological, of stuff over ideas. If the bullet was the instrumental embodiment of the utopian impulse, then the hamburger is the instrument of capitalistic consumerism.

The twenty-first century may yet witness a clash of civilizations, a rebellion of spiritual values against the marketplace of consumption. The wave of terrorism currently gripping the world, which orbits Pfaff’s analysis without ever being captured by it, may sing the bullet’s song for the next hundred years; 9/11 may have been our Somme. But for the twentieth century, the record is clear. The world beaters were McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Disney, and their fellow travelers, materialists all. Stuff trumped ideology. Marx always knew this; he just hoped that his ideas could change the pattern. He should have known better.

Pfaff’s book positions itself at the intersection of history and progress. He and his crazy quilt of thinkers and doers thought that time’s arrow had been deflected by the violence of World War I, and they flirted with violence as a force that might set it right. This belief puts them in league with the critics of modernity who blame materialism. Pfaff’s octet lamented the injustice of capitalist excess, the epidemic of mindless consumerism, the rape of the environment, the indiscriminate destruction of modern war, what Lewis Mumford called the subordination of the organic to the mechanical, the natural to the artificial. They did not, however, map a plausible route from the Somme to utopia.

Pfaff’s true heroes, he reveals at the end of his already surprising conclusion, were Simone Weil and Charles de Foucauld, aesthetes who conquered materialism. Weil spent her whole life in seclusion and self-abnegation, pursuing a spiritual transcendence that would unlock the mystery of life. Soldier and geographer Foucauld gave up a life of independent wealth and traditional success and achievement to bring Christianity and civilization to the Tuareg people of the central Sahara. Instead of converting them, he was instead assimilated into the tribe, converted to their primitive Islam, and finally murdered by them at the outbreak of World War I. Weil and Foucauld wrote extensively, but never published in their lifetimes. Their common intellectual goal was understanding through spiritual transcendence. One wonders if they or Pfaff had any chance of understanding history in the most material of centuries.