The Modern Cultural Revolution in Europe and the United States

Finding New Ways of Seeing and Thinking with Art

One cannot fully understand much of the Jewish cultural and intellectual creativity that took shape between 1880 and 1918 without considering a larger cultural revolution underway in Europe and the United States, with increasingly global reach: a vast panoply of aesthetic and intellectual experiments, impulses, questions, breakthroughs, and impasses often subsumed under the packed term modernism. The term is often used to mean in the first instance a prolonged explosion of kaleidoscopic experimentation in the arts, guided not by a single aesthetic—far from it—but by a will to break with established and received forms of representation and instead find new ways of seeing and thinking with art. 

The Paradoxes of Modernism

The term modernism invokes a collection of shared endeavors and movements of aesthetic experimentation and unfolding particularly in our period in the great metropolises of Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, New York, and St. Petersburg. Yet the term also captures a broader cultural watershed. It connotes a widespread multiform impulse toward experimentation and transformation not only in art but also in life. It connotes a strange mixture of giddy optimism and deep pessimism: a sense of unfettered human capacity to remake culture and selfhood through one’s own sovereign will coupled with rising worry about, alienation from, and even revulsion against the modern world itself. This in turn fed an urgent sense that human capacity and selfhood needed renewal or reinvention. Put in more concrete fashion, modernism can name the outpouring of tension-ridden responses by numerous artists and thinkers to the extraordinary and unsettling political, social, and economic developments that constituted a seemingly irreversible modernity: the consolidation of global industrial capitalism, mass urbanism, new forms of mass consumption and mass politics, extraordinary technological and scientific breakthroughs with vast practical implications, and the apex of Western global power. 

Modernism on this view was Janus-faced. On the one hand, it meant a thrilling impulse to fully explore modernity’s new potentials—including unprecedented potentials for intellectual, aesthetic, and lifestyle self-determination. On the other hand, it meant fierce critique of the increasingly global modern civilization that had now taken shape. Some of modernism’s chief discontents included the bourgeois society birthed by and consecrated to capitalism and the self-delusions and compromises it demanded even of the people who benefited from it; the seeming “corruptions” or “decadence” or “exhaustion” connected to the modern lifestyle; and the terrifying and dizzying sense that somehow the new civilization was destroying the last remnants of faith in old systems of value while not providing any new ones, or worse still, making it impossible to relate to life and each other in anything other than a cynical and instrumental fashion. Hence modernist art’s famously unstable mix of love and hatred of bohemianism, of the big city, and of mass culture, and its capacity to align with both reactionary and radical politics.

The Reinvention of Art: Modernist Experimentation

This double impulse invested the arts particularly with new significance. Whether in the service of realizing modernity’s possibilities or critiquing its dangers, the writer or artist was called upon to help cleanse, renew, or reinvent perception and consciousness by reinventing art. And reinvention demanded daring experimentation. For some, this meant an emphasis on discovering the specific possibilities and inner logic of each individual art. Others were driven by a powerful sense that dramatic formal innovation was necessary to better capture and represent reality, particularly the complex realities of inner life and subjectivity; here we can think of Proust’s effort to invent a kind of novelistic structure and writing that would capture the memory-mediated character of inner life, and users will find some of the same impulses in the Hebrew novelist Uri Nisan Gnessin and Yiddish novelist Dovid Bergelson. These drives to experimentation shared a hostility to existing modes of realism in fiction, drama, and the visual arts and existing canons of form and self-expression in poetry and music. They shared a desire to violate and recast the calcified expectations of readers and viewers so as to awaken them to something new. Much modernist art exhibited special fascination with “primitive” art forms (of others, often colonized others, but also of one’s own community) as a source of renewal (see, for example, Lasker-Schüler’s provocative self-presentation as Prince Yusuf and in secular Yiddish literature’s growing fascination with the very Hasidic and mystical traditions it had once derided). So too, much modernist art manifested a love-hate relationship with burgeoning popular market-driven culture and new technologies of photography and film.

Modernism and the Cultivation of Knowledge

Furthermore, some scholars see the same double modernist impulse of embrace and critique of modernity as a key not only to the arts but also to many philosophical, social scientific, therapeutic, architectural, religious, political, and even scientific currents of the age. Such scholars deem symptomatic such developments in the intellectual life of these decades as philosophy’s bifurcation between those seeking a new objective ground of knowledge and those seeking to move beyond a felt impasse of meaninglessness and contingency; sociology’s double-edged proposal that one could ameliorate some human problems if one understood that we were not free self-determining individuals but the products of social forces; or psychoanalysis’s revelation that we are not rational decision-makers but rather beings driven by needs and drives largely invisible to us and at best only partly comprehensible and controllable through painstaking self-investigation. Then too, some accounts of modernism connect artistic and intellectual transformations to what can be seen as a plethora of countercultural experiments in living. This period is replete with bold searches for a different kind of life, intentional communities of all sorts connected mostly by their shared refusal of bourgeois life, intensive contestation of gender roles, a new emphasis on the body’s plasticity, and new sexualities deemed freer than the “Victorian” age had allowed.

The Modern Cultural Revolution and Jewish Culture

What does all this have to do with Jews and Jewish culture? To this, there is one simple answer and many imprecise ones. The simpler point to make, and the most important for the sake of the Posen Library, is that numerous Jewish individuals of every background were seized by the modernist impulse, drawn to the modernist temper, and moved to create culture in a consciously experimental mode and with a conscious sense of participating in something new. This is perhaps most evident in art and thought produced by Jews fully integrated into the metropolitan American, French, German, and Russian scenes that housed so much of the era’s great modernism. But by the same token, users who trace the trajectory of Yiddish and Hebrew poetry and fiction from 1880 through to 1918 will see a clear course of dissatisfaction with fixed forms, be they realist fiction in a Victorian mode or sentimental poetry, and concomitant experimentation of all the sorts flagged above: psychological prose concerned with interiority, neo-Romantic and “primitivist” refiguring of tradition into modern myth, poetic gestures of joyful Nietzschean self-making, ruthless self-analysis, and the new rhythms of urban life.

Much less precise and satisfying answers can be offered to a different question that scholars cannot leave alone, namely, whether there was a special and particular connection between Jewish experience and the modernist temper: was there a line of modernism that we should call “Jewish” modernism? Was there some special elective affinity between Jews’ social position or cultural experience and modernist ways of seeing and thinking? It is easy to convince oneself that Jews played an outsized role in modernism if one strings together names such as Proust, Stein, Kafka, Mina Loy, Delaunay, Freud, Georg Simmel, Chagall, and Bloom, James Joyce’s Jewish protagonist in Ulysses. But one could just as easily tell a prosopography of modernism in which Jewishness is decidedly secondary, one centering around Nietzsche, Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Picasso, Bracque, Weber (the German sociologist, not the American Jewish artist), Debussy, Diaghilev, Musil, Yeats, Synge, James and James, Faulkner, Cendar, Matisse, Mussorgsky, Biely, Blok, Goncharova. . . . Similarly, it is tempting to think that the ostensible Jewish experience of outsiderhood in Western culture produced a special capacity for critical insight into the alienations, problems, and dangers modern life was seeding for humanity. Certainly, there is reason to see real connections between Kafka’s experience of Jewishness as something inescapable in a nationalizing Austro-Hungarian Empire and a racializing Europe and his insights into the special modern terror of judgments that cannot be appealed, transformations that cannot be achieved, and fates that cannot be escaped. But there were plenty of Jews whose experience of modernity did not turn them into modernists. Perhaps the one stable point we can add here is that whether it was true or not, growing numbers of contemporaries in Europe, America, and the Middle East did think there might be a special connection between modernism, modernity, and “the Jews.” Often, this was not meant as a compliment: our period saw the deepening and extension of a line of thought that identified Jews as special bearers of modernity’s inauthenticity, superficiality, decadence, unbelief, and so on. Finally, whatever our doubts about grand narratives of a special connection between Jews and modernism, it is a fact that some Jews were cocreators of global modernism in distinctive ways: Nietzscheans stood at the center of Hebrew secular culture, Tolstoyans reshaped Zionism, psychoanalysis was an almost entirely Jewish dispensation, and Jews loomed large in New York bohemian culture, global feminism, photography, and film.