Four Works post-WWI

Our Gregorian Calendar is based on the life of Jesus as the dividing moment in history. Everything is either BC (Before Christ) or AD (Anno Domini — In the Year of the Lord). Even if BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era have become more conventional, it is still the same dividing point.

Another dividing moment in history was the end of World War I. The Armistice that went into effect on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 inaugurated the world as we know it. If we take Armistice Day as the beginning of a new era, this is year 105.

It is not too much of a stretch to attribute much of the destruction of the twentieth century to the fallout of the First World War but, of course, at the time, no one knew that it was the only the First World War. The signatories of the Treaty of Versailles should have known that they were setting the table for the next World War. The 27 years of peace between the two wars turned out to never have been real peace when we consider how easily Hitler rose to power in Germany. Adolf Hitler was personally shaped by his participation in the First World War and politically shaped by what he perceived as the unfair treatment of Germany in the aftermath. The Holocaust was Hitler’s Mephistophelian solution to bitter resentment toward being itself.

The October 1917 Revolution in Russia preceded the Armistice but it was successful in large part because the war had so devastated the Tsar’s power at home and abroad—with the world at war there were no allies to come to his aid. Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin took over and put the Soviet Union on a collision course with the West. After becoming allies in World War II, the Soviet Union and the United States spent the rest of the century as rivals in a great Cold War and countless proxy wars and standoffs (like the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War).

In the Middle East, the Armistice meant the end of the Ottoman Empire which was the greatest geopolitical shift in the region in the last 500 years. The modern Republic of Turkey replaced the Ottoman Empire and the British and French divided former Ottoman territories into what became modern-day Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. David Fromkin wrote the aptly titled The Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East for which he should have won the Pulitzer Prize.

When I consider the years since November 11, 1918 there are four works that, in my mind, best express the spirit of our era. Without commentary, they are:

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The Wasteland (1922) — T.S. Eliot

Battleship Potemkin (1925-film) — Sergei Eisenstein

Guernica (1937-painting) — Pablo Picasso