The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (14 page)

Traditionally, it was Czechs, not German Gentiles, whom assimilated German-speaking Jews viewed with mistrust. It was Poles, not Germans, who ritually hanged effigies of Judas during their Holy Week parades. It was Byelorussians, not Germans, who roared with laughter when the drunken Cossack beat the skinflint Jew in the puppet theatre. It was only at the turn of the nineteenth century that this German-Jewish affinity began to break down. From the mid-1890s, however, Germans in Vienna and then in Prague began to adopt the principle of racial exclusion for membership of voluntary associations like gymnastics clubs and student fraternities. Typically, it was in Lemberg that one of the most notorious trials of Jewish brothel-keepers took place, furnishing the more salacious anti-Semites with plentiful raw material. Likewise, calls for a restriction of Jewish immigration, if not their outright expulsion, were more likely to garner applause in Königsberg than in Cologne. It was in the Danzig periodical the
Anti-Semite’s Mirror
that Karl Paasch proposed either
extermination or expulsion of the Jews as the simplest solution to the Jewish ‘question’. It was in Prague that Albert Einstein’s appointment to a professorship was delayed because of his ‘semitic origin’ – some six years after the publication of his epoch-making special theory of relativity. It was in Czernowitz, where immigration had increased the proportion of Jews in the population to more than 30 per cent, that Karl Franzos’s stories of doomed love between Jews and Gentiles seemed to make most sense. Here, in what seemed to have become once again the Eastern Marches of a beleaguered ‘Germandom’, the idea that the solution might lie in assimilation, and particularly in intermarriage, was countenanced by few. For here it was the Germans, not the Jews, who had begun to fear dissolution.

The world in 1901 was economically integrated as never before. Here Keynes was clearly right, just as he was right to see how hard that integration would be to restore once it had been interrupted. He was right, too, that economic interdependence was associated with unprecedented economic growth, though we can now see that there were marked disparities in performance between regions and countries (see
Figure 1.1
). Gross domestic product per capita was growing nineteen times faster in the United States than in China, and twice as fast in Britain as in India. Perhaps more alarming, from a
Times
reader’s point of view, the economies of nearly all Britain’s imperial rivals were growing roughly one a half times faster than her own.

Yet it was not the economic future that would have worried our prosperous and healthy white man as he leafed through his morning paper. It was, above all, the enormous potential for conflict in this world of empires and races. Was it a coincidence that the anarchists arrested in Chicago for being behind the assassination attempt on President McKinley were, to judge by their surnames, both Jews? Was there a way of bringing the war in South Africa to a swift conclusion that would not leave the Boers permanently embittered? Were the French and Germans, to say nothing of the Russians and Austrians, bound sooner or later to go to war with one another once again? And

Figure 1.1
Average annual growth rate of per capita GDP, 1870–1913

what of the social problems that were driving so many young Britons to seek their fortunes overseas? Was the country’s moral fibre being eaten away by ‘secularism’, ‘indifferentism’ and ‘irreverence’, as the Methodist Ecumenical Conference feared? Was ‘degeneration… the prime cause of criminality’, as the Congress of Criminal Anthropology in Amsterdam had been informed? All these items of news amounted, surely, to more than ‘mere amusements’. They were compelling evidence that, though it glistered, this was no golden age.

Who understood this best at the time? Perhaps it is not wholly surprising that a disproportionate number of the principal contributors to that ‘kindling fever’ recalled by Musil – the extraordinary ferment of new ideas which ushered in the new century – were Jews or the children of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe. The physics of Albert Einstein, the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, the poetry of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the novels of Franz Kafka, the satire of Karl Kraus, the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, the short stories of Joseph Roth, the plays of Arthur Schnitzler, even the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein – all owed a debt, not so much to Judaism as a faith, as
to the specific milieu of a highly numerate and literate but rapidly assimilating ethnic minority permitted by the times and circumstances to give free rein to their thoughts, but also aware of the fragility of their own individual and collective predicament. Each in his different way was a beneficiary of the
fin-de-siècle
combination of global integration and the dissolution of traditional confessional barriers. Each flourished in the ‘mishmash’ that was ‘Kakania’, an empire based on such a multiplicity of languages, cultures and peoples – held together so tenuously by its ageing emperor’s gravitational pull – that it seemed like the theory of relativity translated into the realm of politics. The time around 1901 was indeed, as Keynes said, ‘an extraordinary episode’. Too bad it could not last.

What we need to hold Russia back from revolution is a small victorious war.

Vyacheslav Pleve (
attributed
)

In September 1895 Tsar Nicholas II received an unusual gift: an oil painting by the German artist Herman Knackfuss, based on a sketch by his sovereign, the Emperor William II. Entitled ‘The Yellow Peril’, it depicted seven women in martial attire gazing anxiously from a mountaintop towards an approaching storm. The iconography bears the unmistakable stamp of the Kaiser’s unsubtle mind. Each of the women symbolizes one of the principal European nations; Britannia is instantly identifiable by the Union Jack on her shield. A large white cross hovers in the sky above them. Gesturing grimly towards the storm clouds, within which lurks a cross-legged Buddha, is a winged angel, a fiery sword in his hand. Already, lightning from the storm has struck the many-spired city on the plain below; fire is raging. Lest anyone fail to grasp the meaning of the allegory, the Kaiser himself explained it in an accompanying letter. It depicted, he wrote,

The powers of Europe represented by their respective Genii called together by the Arch-Angel Michael – sent from Heaven – to
unite
in resisting the inroad of Buddhism, heathenism and barbarism for the Defence of the Cross. Stress is especially laid on the
united
resistance of
all
European powers…

On the border of his original sketch, William had inscribed a passionate plea: ‘Nations of Europe, defend your holiest possessions.’
The possession he had in mind was their common Christian heritage. The ‘Yellow Peril’ was plainly the ‘heathenism and barbarism’ of Asia. The implication was that the European empires and the United States would need to unite if the subjugation of Asia were to be maintained. For months before the painting of ‘The Yellow Peril’, the Kaiser had been urging the Tsar to act in concert with him ‘to cultivate the Asian Continent and to defend Europe from the inroads of the Great Yellow race’.

The Kaiser’s fantasy was soon realized. Just five years later, Germany did indeed join forces with Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Italy, Russia and the United States – as well as, it should be noted, Japan – to suppress the Boxer Rebellion, an inchoate, anti-Christian movement that had arisen in the impoverished province of Shandong in 1898. The Boxers (‘The Righteous and Harmonious Fists’) initially directed their ire at European missionaries, dozens of whom were murdered; then, with the encouragement of the Empress Dowager Cixi, they proceeded to besiege the Western embassies in the heart of the imperial capital, Beijing, killing the German Minister. ‘It may be’, William declared as the German expeditionary force set sail, ‘the beginning of a great war between the Occident and Orient.’ Evoking the memory of fifth-century Huns, he urged his troops to ‘make the name German remembered in China for a thousand years so that no Chinaman will ever again dare even to squint at a German’:

You have to remedy the serious wrong which has been done… Live up to Prussia’s traditional steadfastness! Show yourselves Christians… Give the world an example of virility and discipline!… No pardon will be given, and prisoners will not be made. Anyone who falls into your hands falls to your sword!

Nothing could have better symbolized the dominance the West had established over the East by the end of the nineteenth century than the destruction of the Boxers, whose faith in martial arts and animistic magic availed them naught against the well-armed eight-power expedition.
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Having raised the siege of the Beijing legations, the international
force staged a ‘grand march’ through the Forbidden City, pausing only to ‘acquire’ some ancestral Manchu tablets for the British Museum before holding a memorial service for the recently deceased Queen Victoria at the Meridian Gate. They then undertook punitive raids deep into Shanxi province, Inner Mongolia and Manchuria. In Baoding, for example, local officials suspected of involvement in the deaths of missionaries were tried by military courts and publicly beheaded; temples and sections of the city wall were symbolically blown up. In Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi, the governor was executed for his support of the Boxers; a public memorial to the ‘martyred’ missionaries was also erected. There was political as well as symbolic retribution. Under the so-called ‘Boxer Protocol’ signed in 1901, the European powers were granted the right to maintain their own military forces in the imperial capital; a heavy indemnity (£67.5 million) was also imposed on the Chinese government, and arms imports suspended. If, as the journalist George Lynch wrote, this was a war of civilizations, there seemed little doubt as to which one was winning. Yet this victory was to prove deceptive. In reality, the first cracks in the edifice of a united Western hegemony were just about to appear.

Though his mistaken allusion to Attila’s sack of Rome somewhat spoilt the effect, the Kaiser’s depiction of the ‘Yellow Peril’ implicitly alluded to previous invasions of Europe from the East: the Moorish conquest of Spain in the seventh century, the depredations of Genghis’s and Timur’s Mongol hordes in the thirteenth and fourteenth, the Ottoman siege of Vienna in the seventeenth. It was a common
fin-de-siècle
nightmare that this process could be repeated in the twentieth. The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin warned the European empires against their ‘great game’ in Asia: ‘Since Asiatics number in the hundreds of millions, the most likely outcome of these intrigues… will be to awaken this hitherto immobile Asian world, which will overrun Europe once again.’ The philosopher and poet Vladimir Solovev discerned ‘a dark cloud approaching from the Far East’, as well as a ‘locust swarm uncountable / and insatiable like it too’. In his ‘Short Tale of the Antichrist’, he prophesied that the Japanese and Chinese would join forces to invade and conquer all of Europe as far as the English Channel. Dmitri Mamin-Sibiriak’s short story ‘The Last
Glimmerings’ warned of ‘a real flood of… yellow-faced barbarians… surging over the continent’. Such anxieties were present in Britain too. The Oxford historian Charles Pearson warned: ‘We shall wake to find ourselves… thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down upon as servile, and thought of as bound to minister to our needs.’ Though it might be ‘lower’, Pearson warned, Asian civilization was more ‘vigorous’ and ‘resilient’. ‘That the future will have a “Yellow” question – perhaps a “yellow peril” – to deal with,’ wrote Sir Robert Hart, who ran the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs, ‘is as certain as that the sun will shine tomorrow.’

In reality, however, it was a ‘white peril’ that menaced Asia – and indeed the rest of the world. In all history, there had never been a mass movement of peoples to compare with the exodus from Europe between 1850 and 1914. Total European emigration in that period exceeded 34 million; in the decade 1901 to 1910 it was close to twelve million. Of course, most of this movement was transatlantic, part of an exodus from Western Europe to the Americas that had been going on since the 1500s. This now reached its climax. Between 1900 and 1914, a total of 1.5 million people left the United Kingdom for Canada, most of whom settled there permanently. Nearly four million Italians and more than a million Spaniards also left Europe, the majority bound for the United States or Argentina. However, a rising proportion of European emigrants were now heading eastward. Scotsmen and Irishmen in particular were flocking to Australia and New Zealand; by the eve of the First World War, nearly one in five British emigrants was bound for Australasia; by the middle of the century it would be one in two. Settlers from Britain, Holland and France were also busily establishing themselves as planters in Malaya, the East Indies and Indo-China. Meanwhile, a growing number of Central and East European Jews, inspired by Zionist leaders like Theodor Herzl, were moving to Palestine in the hope of establishing a Jewish state there.
*
Finally, as we shall see, a very large number of Russians were also heading east, to Central Asia, Siberia and beyond. All this movement was in large measure voluntary, unlike the enforced shipment of millions of Africans to American and Caribbean plantations that had taken place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, comparable numbers of indentured labourers from India and China were also on the move in 1900, their condition only marginally better than slavery, to work in plantations and mines owned and managed by Europeans. Asians would have preferred to migrate in larger numbers to America and Australasia, but were prevented from doing so by restrictions imposed on Japanese and Chinese immigration in the late nineteenth century.
*