October 28, 2007
Winners and Losers Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:10 PM EST An interesting show now at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City is titled “Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945.” A wall placard near the beginning of an exhibit of photomontages, in 1918 a new and now almost a vanished art form, notes that in Germany photomontage sought to capture what the placard calls the fragmentation and mechanization of modern life, with the implication that in Germany the form rarely conveyed a sunny view of life, but notes that in Poland and Czechoslovakia, where independence from foreign subjection and domination were the outcome of the First World War, photomontage was more optimistic and even celebratory. Looking over the exhibits, this seemed fair enough, and the placard reminded that events often described as catastrophic are not catastrophic for everyone; for some people they are in fact good news. The First World War is a particularly pointed example of this phenomenon. From the German point of view, it was a bitter defeat culminating in gross injustice. The latter half of that view was soon echoed by many decent (perhaps excessively decent) Englishmen, who were within a decade prepared to see the war as a catastrophe, as were most Americans. This is the view we have inherited. Pick up almost any textbook on twentieth-century history, and World War I is depicted as a catastrophe, a tragedy, a senseless slaughter, etc. If you are a Pole or Czech, of course, the First World War meant national liberation. That process was interrupted in 1939, which saw German annexation of the Czech lands, Soviet reoccupation of Eastern Poland, and the subsequent murder of six million Poles, followed by more than 50 years of Soviet-imposed tyranny. Now the Czechs and Poles are again masters in their own house, and my guess is that World War I still looks like liberation to them, merely the first installment, but liberation all the same. If you are a Czech or a Pole, was it worth it? My guess is that it was, and that this view is underappreciated in the English-speaking world because people who have not lost their political independence to a foreign conqueror in a thousand years—and who may secretly mourn the loss of domination of a quarter of the globe—probably underestimate the sweetness of being master in one’s own house. My guess is that most Irishmen also see the First World War as something less than a pure catastrophe, and for similar reasons. Of course, there used to be a good joke (the punch-line was “the Elephant and the Irish Question”) about the tendency of Irish nationalists to quite absurdly see every phenomenon through the prism of their own national myth, but it was, I am fairly certain, an English joke. The death of millions of people may seem like a stiff price to pay for the political independence of some Poles, Czechs, and Irishmen. And wouldn’t they have gotten their freedom anyway, had the war not broken out? Maybe, maybe not, and in any case the First World War was the graveyard of four empires, the Russian, German, Hapsburg, and Ottoman, and while it briefly expanded three others, the French, British, and Japanese, we now think it left them as walking corpses. So add to the list of nations in the long run freed by the war most of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. National independence has been accompanied by other kinds of catastrophe in many of those lands, but cries for the return of the former masters are still pretty muted. An educated person shown in 1914 a prevision of what was to come would very possibly have quoted Heraclitus: “War is the father of all and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free.” Most of us no longer know Heraclitus, or the Greek in which an educated middle class European would a century ago have quoted him, which does not make our world worse than the one the wars destroyed. The tag from Heraclitus is true, whether we know the tag, or agree with it. To bring this up to date, most of the evidence suggests that the outcome to date of the Iraq war still looks less unrelievedly disastrous to many Shiite and almost all Kurdish Iraqis than it does to Sunni Iraqis, Europeans, and Americans. That placard at the Guggenheim rather startlingly reminded me of this.
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