812
PARTISAN REVIEW
be immersed. The first World War, somewhat paradoxically, had
almost extinguished genuine national feelings in Europe where, be–
tween the wars, it was far more important to have belonged to the
generation of the trenches, no matter on which side, than to be a
German or a Frenchman. The Nazis based their whole propaganda
on this indistinct comradeship, this "community of fate," and won
over a great number of veteran organizations in all European coun–
tries, thereby proving how meaningless national slogans had become
even in the ranks of the so-called Right, which used them for their
connotation of violence rather than for their specific national content.
No single element in this general intellectual climate in postwar
Europe was very new. Bakunin had already confessed, "1 do not
want to be
I,
1 want to be
We,"
and Nechayev had preached the
evangel of the "doomed man" with "no personal interests, no affairs,
no sentiments, attachments, property, not even a name of his own."
The antihumanist, antiliberal, anti-individualist, and anticultural in–
stincts of the front generation, their brilliant and witty praise of vio:
lence, power, and cruelty, was preceded by the awkward and pompous
"scientific" proofs of the imperialist elite that a struggle of all against
all is the law of the universe; that expansion is a psychological neces–
sity before it is a political device, and that man has to behave by such
universal laws. What was new in the writings of the front generation
was their high literary standard and great depth of passion. The post–
war writers no longer needed the scientific demonstrations of genetics,
and they made little
if
any use of the collected works of Gobineau or
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, which belonged already to the cultural
household of the philistines. They read not Darwin but the Marquis
de Sade.
If
they believed at all in universal laws, they certainly did
not particularly care to conform to them. To them, violence, power,
cruelty, were the supreme capacities of men who had definitely lost
their place in the universe and were much too proud to long for a
power theory that would safely bring them back and reintegrate them
into the world. They were satisfied with blind partisanship in anything
that respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or content,
and they elevated cruelty to a major virtue because it contradicted
"every value of the Christian and humanitarian and liberal tradition"
(F. Borkenau).
If
we compare this generation with the nineteenth-century ideol-
