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nihilist apocalyptics are Bakunin and Nietzsche, not because Nietzsche
favored nihilism but because he did not believe in progress.
One should think that most or all of the terrorists of the late ninteenth
and twentieth century belong to the optimistic tradition . If not, why both–
er killing enemies and creating havoc if the future will not be better than
the past and the present? Terrorists have a political agenda and it stands to
reason that people in utter despair will have no such agenda, be it the
demand for a state of their own or greater social justice. However, there has
always been a suicidal element in terrorism and it apparently becomes
more marked towards the end of a century. I do not mean religious fanat–
ics who believe in an afterlife in paradise where the houris will attend to
them, but to secular terrorists with no such hopes. This suicidal element
can be found among the anarchists of the 1890s and the Russian terrorists
of the following decade. It appears among the German right-wing
mili–
tants in the years following World War I, among the hunger strikers of the
IRA, among the Turkish militants, Japanese and Tamil Tiger terrorists.
Most strikingly it appeared among the Baader-Meinhof group, the Red
Army Faction, and their collective suicide at Stammheim.
I have a few examples mainly drawn from Russia and Germany; a great
deal has been written about England and France, and as far as the
u.s.
is
concerned there was no pronounced fin de siecle, an interesting issue that
remains to be investigated. I shall start with the issue of imminent war.
There was an enormous amount of literature on this subject, the most
prophetic books were those by H. G. Wells. However, at a lower level of
sophistication there were thrillers and political science fiction preoccupied
with an attack by one country on another. The British were afraid that a
continental power would dig a tunnel and thus overwhelm Britain; up to
about 1903 the main bogey man was France, which was later replaced by
Germany. However, most authors were patriots and their fear was not so
much of destruction (unlike H.G. Wells, their technical imagination was
limited), but of foreign rule. If we move on from Britain to France there
was less prophesying about war even though the militant right dreamed of
revenge for 1870-71. The vague feeling of impending catastrophe was
probably most pronounced in Germany and Russia. I have noted else–
where that these forebodings were limited in the main to the avant-garde.
Middle and low-brow culture, was, on the whole, optimistic and believed
in progress. One could go further and argue that even the avant-garde did
not really believe in disaster, that it thought in terms of a spiritual cata–
clysm rather than physical destruction. However, not all the evidence
points in this direction, certainly not in the field of plastic arts. The visions
of war were by no means limited to modernists such as Kubin (1900). I
could think of at least two well-known pictures by major painters of the
period who were anything but revolutionaries; one by Franz von Stuck
