HISTORY THEN AND NOW
249
There were also prophets of destruction, claiming that "die Lust der
Zerstorung ist eine schopferische Lust" (Bakunin), even though most of
them never practiced what they preached. There were individuals and small
groups at the margins of society, embittered, half or totally crazy, because of
personal misfortunes or because they were genuinely convinced that the
world had become so sinful that it ought to be destroyed. These loners did
not publish newspapers. They did not widely broadcast their views nor did
they proselytize, for they had no wish to establish a political movement. But
their power was limited: "Satan's children" could burn a factory or a munic–
ipal building or rob a bank, but there was no possible way they could burn
or dynamite a hundred or a thousand. In brief, given the technical possibil–
ities of the time, their capabili ties were very limited. The firs t novels
envisaging atomic bombs were, I believe, George Griffith's
The Lord
if
Labor
(1911) and H.G. Wells's
The World Set Free
(1914), although airships and
submarines had appeared well before in Jules Verne and again in Griffith's
The Angel
if
the Revolution
(1893). These were massive projects well out of
the reach of individuals. Dr. Moreau in H.G. Wells's 1894 novel engaged in
genetic engineering, but on a faraway, isolated island. In brief, the practical
possibilities lagged behind fantasies of universal destruction.
As we enter a new fin de siecle that technological gap no longer exists.
There is a new wave of relativism and nihilism on the ideological level: the
campaign against reason, rejection of truth as corresponding to reality,
moral philosophy and so on. But there is also the new wave of alternative,
quasi-religious beliefs in wi tchcraft, magic and apocalyptic visions. All this
would be less innocuous if the upsurge of post-modernism, New Age, and
sectarianism would not coincide with striking scientific and technological
advances. It may make it possible to act out the fantasies of 1900 in the real
world of the year 2000, if they have not become a reality already.
Visions of disaster were not absent in the two decades prior to World
War I: the earthquakes of Messina and San Francisco, the
Titanic,
and spec–
ulations about Hailey's comet inspired writers and painters. Beckmann, to
mention one, painted scenes from the Messina earthquake and the
Titanic.
Interestingly, the many books about impending war published at the time
did not dwell on the horrors of war but on other aspects. Big cities col–
lapsed, not as a result of a military attack but for other, sometimes
unspecified or farfetched reasons: London drowning in mud, St. Petersburg
consumed by fire . The real horrors of war, not surprisingly, appeared as a
major theme only during the war, and thereafter. The extent of suffering
and <;lamage caused by modern war was beyond the imagination of all but
a tiny handful of contemporaries. There was something abstract, even
metaphysical about the prophecies of doom. When Nietzsche was putting
his thoughts about the coming two hundred years on paper and predicted
catastrophe and nihilism, he was not dealing with mankind as such, but
