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age of security" (Stefan Zweig), they also remembered how they had
hated it and how real their enthusiasm had been at the outbreak of
the first World War. Not only Hitler and not only the human fail–
ures thanked God on their knees when mobilization swept Europe
in 1914. They did not even have to reproach themselves with having
been an easy prey for chauvinist propaganda or lying explanations
about the purely defensive character of the war. The elite went to
war with an exultant hope that everyt hing they knew, the whole
culture and texture of life might go down in its "storms of steel"
(Ernst Juenger). In the carefully chosen words of Thomas Mann,
war was "chastisement" and "purification"; "war in itself rather
than victories, inspired the poet." Or in the words of a student of
the time, "what counts is always the readiness to make a sacrifice,
not the object for which the sacrifice is made"; orin the words of a
young worker, "it doesn't matter whether one lives a few years longer
or not. One would like to have something to show for one's life." And
long before one of Nazism's intellectual sympathizers announced,
"When I hear the word culture, I draw my revolver," poets had
proclaimed their disgust with "rubbish culture" and called poetically
on "ye Barbarians, Scythians, Negroes, Indians, to trample it down."
Simply to brand as outbursts of nihilism this violent dissatisfac–
tion with the pre-war age and subsequent attempts at restoring it
(from Nietzsche and Sorel to Pareto, from Rimbaud and T. E. Law–
rence to Juenger, Brecht, and Malraux, from Bakunin and Nechayev
to Alexander Blok) is to overlook how justified disgust can be in a
society wholly permeated with the ideological outlook and moral
standards of the bourgeoisie. Yet it is also true that the "front" gen–
eration, in marked contrast to their own chosen spiritual fathers,
were completely absorbed by their desire to see the ruin of this whole
world of fake security, fake culture, and fake life. This desire was
so great that it outweighed in impact and articulateness all earlier
attempts at a "transformation of values," such as Nietzsche had at–
tempted, or a reorganization of political life as indicated in Sorel's
writings, or a revival of human authenticity in Bakunin, or a pas–
sionate love of life in the purity of exotic adventures in Rimbaud.
Destruction without mitigation, chaos and ruin as such assumed the
dignity of supreme values.
The genuineness of these feelings can be seen in the fact that
