An interesting exploration of the early part of the 20th century from two perspectives - the avant-garde art movements in Paris and Berlin, and also the rhetoric and unfolding of WW1 (with an additional look at the rhetoric of Nazism in the 30s).
While providing details about ideas, perspectives and goals of major art figures as well as political and military figures, Modris is mainly teasing out an idea that both the avant-garde movements and german militarism (and later Nazism) share certain central ideas or goals - the search for authentic experience, the need to break down old social and artistic barriers and structures, the need to build some kind of new man, new order, new aesthetic while at the same time not having a clear idea of what is to follow. The main impetus is the idea of breaking free and an extreme individualism.
Kind of interesting to think about these origins of what is the dominant western individualistic ethos of our time...
Another point that struck me was the importance of Berlin as an avant-garde centre in that time period. Paris seems to have dominated the plastic arts, but Berlin is the source of much of the modern in the living arts - architecture, technological design, furniture, etc. Kind of knew this but not as clearly.
You could say that militarism and Nazism led to a kind of void - modern plastic arts seem to have suffered the same fate. You cannot live in perpetual rebellion. The 20th C as the age of adolescence....
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