The Cambridge History of the First World War: Volume 3, Civil Society by Jay Winter

Author:Jay Winter [Winter, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

Mobilising bodies and minds

We should nevertheless remember that the intellectual did not suddenly emerge as the social type best prepared for war. Stereotypes to which a level of Europe-wide anti-intellectualism had contributed made of him a study-bound, writing-obsessed creature, cut off from the realities of his time, far from battle-hardened in body, of doubtful social usefulness, and possessing a peacetime ethos that could only be brutally disturbed by the experience of war. The war additionally turned all the practices of peacetime upside down – intellectual and scientific work, the institutions that sheltered and sponsored it, the exchanges and circulation within intellectual communities. Seen from such a perspective, is it relevant to try to identify pathways of behaviour or of a moral economy that might be specific in wartime? At least we should not label their forms of intervention as monolithic, for their activities bear witness to the diversity of the ideological spectrum, their disciplinary practices and their personal dispositions.

For the intellectual professions – no different from the rest of society in this respect – answering the call to arms was a commitment of the highest priority. ‘Joining up’ was on every generation’s lips: those of the sons, whose martyrologies rapidly invaded the obituary notices of universities and colleges, the columns of journals and the minutes of learned societies; and those of their elders who, like the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, alluded to the humiliation he felt at the age of 37 ‘to find myself too much in safety while so many Frenchmen are going to the slaughter’, and who repeated in August 1914 that ‘I will regret for the rest of my life never having been under fire’,22 or like the rector of Berlin University, Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, who was enthusiastically involved in the general mobilisation and who, when he spoke about the war, began by recalling the sacrifices of his students: ‘A university is not just we who are condemned to stay here; it is the others too, over there, those who have the good fortune and the honour to bear arms for the Kaiser and the fatherland. It is exactly one year since my own son died that fine death.’23 Doubtless the zeal shown by numerous intellectuals mobilised in the war of words had as its deepest justification the ‘obsession of those who may not contribute to the nation’s defence’, in the words of the mathematician Émile Picard, who himself lost three children in the conflict. To ‘join up’ with their pens was, for the guild of intellectuals who were no longer of fighting age, a means of overcoming the guilt they felt at belonging to a protected generation.

Some joined up despite their age and condition: Filippo Marinetti enlisted at 40; Max Weber, at 50, requested to be recalled as an officer in the reserve; the philosopher Alain at the age of 46, as a radical pacifist excused military service, requested a posting as an artillery gunner – he eventually became a telephonist; Marie Curie shuttled back and forth to

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