Rites of Spring

My life is divided between before reading this book and after. Nothing has changed the way that I understand the world or altered how I experience art and reality like this book.

Eksteins is a historian with the gifts of an artist. He intertwines World War I with Njinsky’s inelegant movements and Stravinsky’s discordant sounds and somehow creates an interpretation, an understanding of the past that can only come through artful means. I’ve had to buy three copies of this book because I wore out the first two. I expect I’ll soon be needing a fourth copy.

This book is beautiful even as its subject is ugly: how the shock of the Great War led inexorably in Germany to the rise of Hitler.

I loved the aesthetics of this book. Eksteins begins by transporting us back to Paris, sitting us in the audience on opening night in May 1913 for Stravinsky's ballet The Rites of Spring, which caused mayhem because of the wild dance techniques and jarring music. Eksteins then takes us on a journey through the culture of Weimar Germany as Berlin seized the title of Europe's cultural capital from Paris.

I was enraptured by the… show more.

Another timeless classic. Inspired by Fussell’s The Great War in Modern Memory, Modris Eksteins produced a daring new attempt to explain the First World War in cultural terms over a decade later. Rites of Spring took analysis of the cultural meaning of the war in another direction in terms of understanding what was true and how such understandings impacted the material world. Whereas Fussell had shown how Anglophone culture had been changed by the war, Eksteins implied that the artistic imagination was in some sense responsible for the war. Whereas Fussell focused upon memoirists who had fought, Eksteins chose… show more.