HISTORY THEN AND NOW
247
(1894), who personified tradition, the other by Boecklin (1896 and
after)-both called "Der Krieg." They were frightening, particularly
Boecklin's picture, but it was more a matter of allegory than of impending
disaster. Even Stefan George's writings about the "many who would be
massacred by the holy madness, the holy pestilence and the holy war"
spoke of tens of thousands
(Der Stern des Bundes
1913-14), rather than mil–
lions.
The decadents were not much preoccupied wi th public affairs but
rather the pleasures or the pains of the flesh, especially their own flesh, but
it has been frequently noted that the distance to political activism and
especially extremely aggressive nationalism was not that far. The famous
examples are Maurice Barres and, more strikingly d'Annunzio, "the child
of pleasure" (the title of d'Annunzio's first major novel) became a
condot–
tiere
and a national hero occupying Fiume, and holding it for fifteen
months against the expressed wish of the leading statesmen of the world
assembled in Versailles at the end of World War
I.
This phenomenon was by no means limited to the far right, for it can
be found with equal ease on the extreme left. A famous example is
Johannes R. Becher who began his career in the years before the first
World War as perhaps the most extreme singer of everything chaotic, ecsta–
tic and apocalyptic among the German expressionists and ended up as a
minister of culture in the East German government after World War II.
There was no more ardent Stalinist, not just in politics but also in his cul–
tural view than this erstwhile decadent poet.
There is an apparent contradiction, or at least an incongruence,
between the views of the decadents and the exercise of violence.
It
is dif–
ficult to imagine Oscar Wilde and his friends throwing bombs and
it
is of
course true that the apocalyptic mood,
"die
Lust am Untergang," was not
permanent and all-pervasive. But there seems to have been a common
denominator, namely boredom, a general disgust with life.
I shall try to show what I mean by referring to two literary works
which appeared about one hundred years ago. They were very widely read
at the time, and are totally forgotten now. Boris Savinkov (alias Ropshin)
was one of the leaders of the Russian Social Revolutionaries, or to be pre–
cise, of their military arm, the B.o. At the time of the March revolution
of 1917 he became a deputy minister of war, an aide to Kerensky.
In
1925
he returned illegally from Paris to the Soviet Union, was caught and exe–
cuted. He was a very well-known figure at the time; Winston Churchill
included him as one of his "famous contemporaries."
Savinkov-Ropshin published in 1909 his
Diary OJA Terrorist
in which
he describes the assassination of Plehwe and other leading Russian estab–
lishment figures of the day. What also emerges from this book is the
strongly religious motivation of the terrorists. A fair number of them were
