The Rest Is History - 136. 1922: The Birth of the Modern World Part 1

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

2022 marks 100 years since one of the most important years in modern history. In part 1 Tom and Dominic discuss all things 1922: Bolshevism, fascism, and the significance of The Waste Land and Ulysses.  Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. On the 18th of May 1922, the British translator and novelist Sidney Schiff hosted a dinner party at the Majestic Hotel in Paris. Forty guests were invited in all, but there were four guests in particular that Schiff wanted to bring together to generate, to see sharing dinner party chat. They were Igor Stravinsky, the great Russian composer, Pablo Picasso, great Cubist painter, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, probably the two greatest novelists of the 20th century. Stravinsky and Picasso turn up on time, but Joyce and Proust don't.

And then very late, Joyce turns up and he is very shabbily dressed and he's drunk. Yeah, he's drunk. And he's got drunk because he doesn't have evening wear. And so he's a bit stressed about that so which is a of i mean we've all we've all been in that situation this is what you've got to wear you and your deck shoes again isn't it exactly so you just get drunk and then you turn up and anyway but then in contrast to joyce he's all kind of disheveled and shabby, Proust turns up at 2.30, immaculately dressed, kind of beautiful buttonhole, white gloves.

You'd expect that. White silk scarf. And they settle down. And their conversation, the conversation between Joyce and Proust, the two greatest novelists of the 20th century, it's not – Well, there are different versions of it. It doesn't sing, does it? There are different versions. So one of them is that uh proust they they basically are only thought to

have exchanged a few words and some people say that proust said to joyce do you like truffles and uh i'm not gonna do joyce's accent a terrible accent joyce said i can't joy said yes i do that's brilliant liam neeson yeah that was the reason that we mentioned this obviously is that it's the 100th anniversary not just of that meeting but of dominant you i mean you suggested this that this that this is the year the modern begins and um it the the person actually who suggested that 1922 was a kind of year zero well actually 1921 is a year zero so 1922 is is year one yeah um was uh ezra pound uh notorious subsequently as a kind of fascist uh supporter of mussolini he went to prison didn't he I mean he got convicted in the long run yes but in his early incarnation was an incredible patron of um kind of radically brilliant writers so not just Joyce but also T.S. Eliot so uh which is and Eliot's great poem

The Wasteland is also published in 1922 so Ezra Pound is kind of moving around in the background here. And he wrote to H.L. Mencken, who was the guy who covered the monkey trial in America, Scope's trial. And he said, the Christian era ended at midnight on October the 29th to the 30th of last year, i.e. 1921. You are now in the year 1 PSU,

post scriptum ulysses, if that is any comfort to you uh and i wonder uh do you think pound was onto something is 1922 well we had lots of questions about this tom when we put it out so lauren mgm for example said why 1922 is it a spectacularly loaded year just due to a cluster of important events um and i think there is something about 1922 so there are particular years aren't there that feel you know resonant 1968 1989 um particularly in the sort of immediate aftermath and i think 1922 if to me it feels like the the great war and the great War is completely going to overshadow this episode

as it overshadowed all culture and politics at the time. The Great War had been this tremendous rupture. And then people think that the war ended and then the Roaring Twenties began. That's the way it's commonly presented in the popular imagination. But it's not really like that at all. The war doesn't end definitively because lots of fighting continues in 1919 1920 and so on yeah as well i mean the russian civil war fighting in turkey and so on irish civil war irish civil war incredibly brutal and bloody so the war doesn't

really end and there's this period of two or three years of tremendous flux and uncertainty and i think 1922 feels like the point at which things begin to settle down a bit and a new order is sort of palpable and new themes that are going to dominate the politics. Actually, in the case of one of these themes, which is Bolshevism and the existence of the USSR, that's,

I mean, the USSR is only comes into being at the end of 1922, but that's not just going to dominate the politics of the USSR, that's, I mean, the USSR only comes into being at the end of 1922. But that's not just going to dominate the politics of the 1920s. It's going to dominate politics right through to the end of the 1980s. And I think you can see, argue there is a block of history from the early 1920s right through to, let's say, the end of the 1980s that is dominated. I mean, the issue of communism versus capitalism is absolutely central to it, but also the disintegration of the great empires

and what is going to happen to the world in the wake of these European colonial empires. Yes. You could also say about other things as well. So relationship of the United Kingdom and Ireland. Yes. Dated 1922, really. The configuration of what we'd call the Middle East,

but then would have been known as the Levant. Yeah. Takes on, you know, things develop in 1922. But I wonder if we're talking specifically about, you know, 1922 as the year that the modern begins. Yeah. There are obviously that the events that we're begins. Yeah. They're obviously that the events that we're talking about now

are political ones. And you could say 1914 would be a more obvious one or 1917 for the Russian Revolution or 1918, the end of the First World War. But we began with Picasso and Stravinsky and Joyce and Proust. And there is also this idea that around this time,

culturally, things change. And that 1922 could rank there with, I don't know, Freud or Picasso or whatever. But I think the reason for this year, particularly if you're English speaking, is that the greatest English novel in English and the greatest poem in English written in the 20th century, both published in the same year. And they're both texts that cast themselves as kind of modern. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.

And indeed, in a way, kind of a breaking down of the tradition that had gone before. I think that's absolutely right. It's the end of Victorianism, isn't it? I mean, we can argue the modern and modernism are very, very slippery concepts. Thomas Hardy talks about the ache of modernism in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, written decades before. And you can see modernist fiction, modernist culture emerging before the First World War.

You could see it in Henry James or in Joseph Conrad or something. But you're absolutely right. For anybody who's ever done English literature at university or something, 1922 is this absolute landmark year because you have, what is it, in February you have the publication of Ulysses, which is James' novel. Yeah, so it's on the second day of the second month of 1922. So it's 2222, which is Joyce's 40th birthday perfect and then at the

end of the year or towards the end of the year October the publication of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland so we've got these two great landmarks and let's talk about Joyce first because the interesting thing about Ulysses is that Ulysses is not really a 20s novel because he conceived it so long before he conceived it well before the first world war what 1906 1907 or something and it's set when is it set tom you know when it's set well it's set on the 16th of june 1904 which is um the day that joyce saw well first had a a kind of date with the woman that he would subsequently go on to marry uh who was a uh a chambermaid from galway called splendidly nora barnacle yes um and so the whole novelism is is an attempt to to to bring to life fictionally the dublin that joyce was living in on that day yeah um and it's it's a stupefying

achievement but as you say it's it's actually not a novel that is really about the First World War or the convulsions of the age at all. And in fact, Joyce spent the First World War in neutral Switzerland. He did. And kind of affected, oh, is there a war on? Yeah, he did. I mean, and, you know, this 1922 is the year of establishment of the Irish Free State, collapse into civil war.

Joyce affects complete lack of interest. Yeah. And in fact, he keeps the British passport till he dies. Yeah, he never had an Irish passport.

It's not like he's, he's, you know, he's very, very hostile to British imperialism in, in Ulysses.

The brutish empire. Yeah. And Ulysses, the funny thing about Ulysses is that the point that it's published, it's, it's describing a world that no longer exists. Because at that point, Ireland and Britain have

been embroiled in the Irish War of Independence. And within weeks, as you say, Ireland is going to be engulfed by civil war. So he's describing a Dublin that in some ways, you could argue, has kind of vanished. Well, absolutely it vanished. I mean, because it's this weird combination of incredible imagination, incredible kind of verbal pyrotechnics. You can never quite be sure where he's going to go with his imagination, with his literary styling, with all kinds of radically novel fictional techniques. But at the same time, he is deliberately trying to evoke a specific day. And so he studies all the newspapers

and he writes to people saying, what were you doing on such and such a day? And what was going on? What was shops were there? And all this kind of stuff. And I think that that's the fascination of it is that it's a novel that in a way, very self-consciously tries to fragment the literary traditions of the novel,

but also is very, very aware of itself within that tradition. Well, that's what makes it very modernist though, isn't it? Exactly. So rather like Picasso in his cubist phase, the process of kind of deconstruction depends on there being a great tradition to deconstruct i mean that's exactly so when t.s elliott writes the wasteland which we'll come to in a second and he's sort of assembling it from fragments of of poems and of novels and of kind of shakespearean references and so on it's exactly the same thing it's the sort of image of somebody smashing you know taking culture and smashing it into fragments then trying to reassemble them

to make a kind of new myth because there's a lot of myth in both of those i mean what one way perhaps in which joyce like elliot is is fair you know is responding to a sense of the modern so elliot um in his an essay he writes on the metaphysical poets so that's john dunn and people like that he famously says that we can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity playing upon a refined sensibility must produce various and complex results. Now, that's also what Joyce is basically doing. Yeah. But even to try and sum up a single day in a single city in the modern world is so difficult. The conventional forms of fiction

are inadequate to it. And so you need to kind of, that's why it has to be difficult. Now, Dominic, of course, you know, your great theme in your wonderful series of books on modern Britain is that, of course, while, you know, the radical artistic talents are doing their stuff, life goes on as normal. Yeah. And, of course, that is the backdrop, both to Ulysses and The Wasteland. So do you know who else actually had her first work published in 1929? Go on, Tom. Amaze me. Amaze me.

Ina Blyton. So Ina Blyton, her first volume of, it was a volume of poetry, her very first line of verse. So this is a fascinating compliment to Elliot in the Wasteland. In the garden very early, Rosamund is walking. And to her surprise, she hears lots of fairies talking oh isn't that nice which in a way so in in in the wasteland yeah people walk along backs of rivers or across london bridge and you hear strange phantasmal voices from different areas of time

well there's a but uh enid blyton said about modernism, and I'm sure she had Joyce in mind particularly, I'm young and normal, and I prefer something more wholesome. That's fantastic. Well, I mean, you see, this is one of the interesting things. So this is arguably, so the people you mentioned, Picasso, Stravinsky, Joyce, Eliot, what they all have in common is not just that they're trying to assemble new myths, new ways of seeing the world

out of the fragments of the past, out of a world that's been shattered in the first decades of the 20th century. Yeah, these fragments have I shored against my room. Exactly. But they are all, in a way that is, I think, different from the previous couple of generations. They're very controversial. And they delight in being radical and avant-garde

and getting terrible reviews. So, you know, people famously kind of walked out of the right of spring and been horrified by it when Stravinsky pioneered it in 1930. And Ulysses in 1922. I mean, 1922 is punctuated by Ulysses getting a series of absolutely terrible and hilarious reviews. So the Daily Herald set six years ofce's life to write and it will take

nearly six years of hours to read the daily express always very robust our first impression is that of sheer disgust a second of irritability a third of boredom reading mr joyce is like making excursion to bolshevist russia well this is a theme we'll come back to and my favorite one is from the sportinging Times. Can you believe the Sporting Times? The Pinkham, as it was called, reviewed Joyce. And it said, it appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality

of the literature of the latrine. So, yeah, I mean, this is... Well, of course. So if you are giving the whole of life, so Ulysses follows, well, three people, one of them, Stephen Dedalus, who is basically Joyce, a portrait of the artist as a young man. Then Leopold Bloom, who is a cook-holded Jewish salesman. And then right at the end, this great kind of single sentence soliloquy monologue from Bloom's wife, Molly. But obviously, if you're following these figures through their whole work course of the day, they have to do all kinds of things. So go to the toilet, but also masturbation,

sexual fantasy. And Joyce was actually, I mean, a tremendous prude. He didn't like vulgarity. I mean, he wrote the occasional erotic letter to Nora Barnacle. But there's so few that when they come up for sale in auctions, you know, they kind of go for 300 grand or whatever. But what reviews get on and on and on about is how obscene it is and how vulgar it is and how common it is. And the person who i know where you're going with this who famously was appalled by it was virginia wool the john lennon of the early 20th century who in my view long run who in the long run would of course but you know mrs

dalloway would be hugely influenced by ulysses but she the scratching of pimples on the body of the boot boy at claridge's well i know some know some of our listeners have a tendresse for Virginia Woolf, and I would merely say, this is how she describes Ulysses, an illiterate underbred book, the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. So that's Virginia Woolf on our listeners, because I like to think our listeners are very much the salt of the earth um and that's why we have a we have a series of penguin classics

kind of branded cups at home and I refuse to drink out of the uh Virginia Woolf mug because I won't I won't give Mrs. Woolf the satisfaction drinking from her branded mug but Virginia Woolf was was keener on the wasteland yeah so the wasteland The Wasteland comes out at the end of the year. She was kind of a mucker of TS Eliot. Yeah, she was. And The Wasteland, I think, gets a... I mean, because it's a poem, it doesn't get the same scrutiny from the popular press as a novel would.

And The Wasteland obviously isn't effectively... I mean, Ulysses doesn't come out... You can't read Ulysses in Britain until the 1930s unless you go to France or somewhere to get a copy and that of course adds to its notoriety yeah so it's I mean it's a book that lots and lots of people have both heard of and not read yeah and the vast numbers of people who haven't read it is kind of part of its fame whereas The Wasteland I think it's just a poem that most people just haven't read because most people probably don't read much poetry you know this is fantastic story

about tsa like going to buckingham palace to read it you heard this is this the one with the queen mother giggles yes the giggles he goes to read it to george the sixth the queen mother serious isn't princess elizabeth and print the current queen and princess margaret and he starts reading the queen mother says they the girls start laughing and then she starts laughing and then the king starts laughing and t.s elit is there you know shanty shanty shanty whatever and they're just laughing at him but and i guess the reason for that is that um the wasteland is is again like ulysses it's a difficult poem you know and elit has said poets in our civilization as it exists at present must be be difficult. And what he's essentially doing

is that he's saying that after the war, maybe before that, civilization has been smashed into so many pieces that you can only have fragments. And so you read it, and it is a kind of bewildering compendium of voices. And a bit like a Picasso painting, there may be a hint of a guitar or a ball in a you know

a geometric shape you get kind of hit so um in right you know april's cruelest month is famously the opening and then suddenly you get this the voice of this girl um and when we were children staying at the archduke's my cousins he took me out on a sled and i was frightened um the archduke i mean it's not saying who the archduke's, my cousins, he took me out on a sled and I was frightened. The Archduke. I mean, it's not saying who the Archduke is, but there's the echo of the incident that began the war. And the whole poem kind of operates like that. You know, you get you get very, very highbrow voices. You get voices in foreign languages. You get demotic voices.

And it's it's disorienting and i think brilliant in its impact and again pound has a crucial influence on this because he elliot sends him the first draft of it and he revises it and he has what is my all-time favorite response of um a friend reading uh another friend's work compliment Complimentary, you bitch. I am wracked by the seven jealousies. And I think if writers are being honest, we've all slightly better. That's right, because when a friend of yours

sends you something to read, you basically want it to be, you don't want it to be terrible, but you want it to be just slightly better than mediocre, don't you? And when it's brilliant, you just think, oh no, disastrous. Yeah, there's perhaps a slight element of that. slightly better than mediocre don't you when it's brilliant you just think oh no yeah yeah

but you know standing back from from particularly from the wasteland um i mean we're going to come on to the politics of the 20s in a second um but to me it feels so indelibly marked by the great war i mean it's that moment when there are the crowds of the dead coming across the, is it London Bridge? Unreal city under the brown fog of a winter dawn, a crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many I had not thought death had undone so many. And that's sort of, I mean, everybody in 1922 is living in a world

where, you know, there are families on every street who are mourning people lost in the war, where so many of the old certainties have been destroyed. Empires, countries, assumptions, political parties, institutions, and so on. But also, of course, Spanish flu. I mean, that's one thing that that really looms large now looking from our sort of covid stricken viewpoint well that i mean that phrase the brown fog of a winter dawn i remember um actually walking across london bridge in the depths of the lockdown uh and remembering that it was last january remembering that that phrase the brown the brown fog of a winter dawn as emblematic of disease yeah and the sort of uh when we come onto the politics so much of the language that people

use they talk about viruses and germs and the bacillus of Bolshevism and stuff and and that stuff is there's a kind of morbidity there's a historian called Richard Overy who's written a brilliant book about Britain, about British culture in the 1920s and 30s called The Morbid Age. And he talks again and again in this book about how there's this sense of civilization having cracked and then inevitable doom and decadence and degeneracy awaiting.

And that is essentially the theme of The Wasteland, and it doesn't really offer redemption. Well, at the end, there's the sort of, doesn't the water fall on the dried earth? Kind of, kind of. But in the long run, Eliot will find redemption in becoming very conservative. So he gets baptised into the Church of England.

He becomes a kind of royalist and a traditionalist. And he does kind of stitch back together the great kind of inheritance of tradition that he smashed in the wasteland. And so maybe that was recognized by the woman who provided the money to publish the Criterion, which is the magazine in which The Wasteland was published. Yes. So people always get the publications wrong with modernism because they think it's all about little magazines and the Criterion and so on. But actually, of course, as you know, Tom, the money for the Criterion is put up by

Lady Rothermere, the wife of Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail. And of course, the Daily Mail also played a very important part in the genesis of modernism, because Joseph Conrad had been a great Daily Mail man, and indeed at one point signed a contract to be a columnist for the Daily Mail. Did you know this? Great writers.

The Daily Mail employs nothing but the best. Well, you know what? Joseph Conrad, he couldn't get on with this, actually. He wasn't good at writing to deadline. Did he find it? His integrity wouldn't allow him. No, he did not. He desperately wanted to do it. I think in some ways, Joseph Conrad was probably too conservative for the Daily Mail. He couldn't do it on time. So do you know who he got to ghostwrite his articles for him? No, I don't. The poet Edward Thomas. Brilliant.

Edward Thomas wrote for the Daily Mail as Joseph Conrad. How about that? But you know, Pound's take on the Rothermears. No, I don't. Oh, no, Tom. A family, Pound wrote damningly to Elliot. The Rothermears are a family which is not interested in good literature. Well, Elliot did not agree because not only did Elliot publish The Wasteland and The Criterion,

but in Kevin Jackson's book about 1922, I know you've read. Constellation of Genius. He has a full note, I think it is, where he's talking about a trial where a couple have been, they've been hanged for the murder of the woman's husband. And the woman, it's a very, so basically this woman was having an affair. And she said to her lover, God, I wish my husband was dead. So her lover killed her husband. He jumped out of a bush, didn't he? He did.

So the lover was understandably found guilty and hangs but so was she even though she hadn't really meant you know she hadn't really been an accessory to it or anything and the murderer said that she wasn't yeah so basically very harshly very harshly there's a tremendous outcry about it and the daily mail took a very, you know, robust... Stephen Lawrence? No, it took a very robust... Oh, it did it. Okay. So did Elliot. Elliot thought...

And Elliot wrote to the paper and said, thank God you've taken such a strong view. I'm glad you haven't gone in for that... What did he call it? Flaccid sentimentality. Something about hanging. So Elliot wanted more women to be hanged. So anyway...

Elliot was very robust. Well, robust is probably not... And a bit like Virginia Woolf, he was a bit of a snob. Elliot was very robust. Well, robust is probably not a word. And a bit like Virginia Woolf, he was a bit of a snob. He was a bit, actually, yes. He also was obsessed with spotty men. Yeah, he was. So like Virginia Woolf

going on about the spotty people. Is it the young man carbuncular? The young man carbuncular, one of the low on whom assurance sits as a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. Right. We should probably take a break, Tom, because we've got quite bogged down in...

I think we've got bogged down? I think we were taking wing. Have you seen? Yeah. I think in writers writing to the Daily Mail, I think that's really the definition of getting a bit bogged down. But I think after the break,

what we'll do is we will step back a bit and widen our focus, and we'll talk about the context for all this, which is the splintering of all those old certainties the collapse of empires and the international outlook so uh we shall see you after the break i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club.

If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. hello welcome back to the rest is history we are talking 1922 it's 100 years ago this year and dominic um you're very keen on doing this um because you're seriously arguing that this is a year where in a sense kind of the modern begins. But of course, 1922 exists in the context of the monumental civilizational smash-up that was the Great War. So how is the world kind of healing in the wake of the war?

Well, I don't think healing is really the word, actually. There's a general sense of rubble, I think. And I think maybe in this sort of second half... A wasteland, even. Yeah, it's very much a wasteland. So we're going to do two episodes on this, really, aren't we? And I think in this second half, we should concentrate on three countries in particular.

So one of them, the most obvious one that has been sort of maimed, dismembered... Porporized. Yeah, is Germany. So Germany has lost its empire. It's been reduced. Actually, 1922 specifically is not, I mean, it's not as bad as some years for Germany.

So Germany has gone through a revolution. There has been kind of fighting between the Spartacists and the Freikorps but by and large the Weimar Republic has kind of got things back under control there are sort of

straws in the wind though so Hitler has joined the Nazi party he's become the Nazi party he's making mischief in Munich exactly he's sort of giving

rabble rousing beer hall speeches to kind of paramilitary so this is the point where he's discovered his gift for

he has exactly so having infiltrated the Nazi party initially as a kind of paramilitary. So this is the point where he's discovered his gift for oratory. He has, exactly. So having infiltrated the Nazi party initially as a kind of army sort of informer. Yeah, exactly. He has become the great orator of the Nazi party and has become

its leader. But he hasn't quite got the sort of national following that he'll get later because he hasn't done his kind of beer hall putsch yet. So he's still a sort of demagogic rabble-razzer rather than a sort of national player. But you do have a sense, I think, in Germany. So there's a guy called Wouter Rathenau,

who is the foreign minister who negotiates a deal. He gets assassinated. He gets assassinated exactly by right-wing paramilitaries. So there's a real sense of the instability at the core of the Weimar Republic. You also have in Germany the sort of the cultural expression of the kind of

the morbidity and the dissolution. So you have things like the film Nosferatu. Yeah. Reworking of Dracula, isn't it? Exactly, of Dracula, a vampire story. And that sort of obsession,

there's a kind of vampiric obsession in German expressionist kind of cinematic culture in the 20s. George Grace's cartoons are horrible. Incredibly horrible, scatological scathing.

All of that stuff. Yeah. Or Fritz Lang does his first Dr. Mabusev films in 1922. Again, sort of brooding, dark, sort of vampiric stuff. So famously, in the long run, the Nazis will come to power by saying that Germany hadn't actually lost the First World War. They've stabbed in the back. In 1922, do Germans feel that they are a defeated people or do they feel that they've been betrayed

and that they could have carried on? I think it depends on the German, actually. I think some, you know, let's say the people that Ratanau kind of represents, so that would be the kind of, you know, you have a part of Germany that is invested in the Weimar Republic, and they would be kind of liberal-minded, middle-class, sort of democratically-minded people. But you have an enormous number of people in the kind of conservative, on the conservative wing of the spectrum, who, you know, they don't really ever

accept the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic. They do think that Germany was betrayed in some way. I mean, this is the argument that Erich Ludendorff, former sort of co-dictator of Germany at the end of the First World War, is pushing by this point in the early 20s. He's saying, well, we could have fought on, but the politicians wouldn't let us and we were betrayed by fifth columnists and all this sort of thing. And obviously the chief scapegoats are the jews um and you and you definitely see this already and there's a sort of paramilitary quality of german politics already yeah um and part of that so the communists fighting um the the right the hard right yeah um in berlin and munich and and

so on presumably what the effect of that is that it is kind of delegitimising every kind of authority, every kind of break on the resort to violence. Yeah. I think violence, a kind of paramilitary violence, is built into, is

implicit in the post-war Germany from the very beginning. Because its early months are scarred by so much fighting, kind of attempt to set up a Soviet in Munich and so on, kind of Bavarian socialist republic, endless sort of putches

and coups and so on and this sort of sense of that the Weimar, thatimar Republic never has, it never really commands widespread acceptance across German society. And I think that means that although later on in the 20s there has this brief period where it seems like it's becoming a bit more stable,

that's after the great inflation of 1922-1933 has abated. So the inflation. Yeah. So the inflation. Yeah. And the inflation is absolutely crazy. That's the key. I mean, that's the real killer. Yeah. So the inflation, I think at the beginning of 22, a mark is worth, you can get something like 350 marks to the dollar. And by the end of 1922, it something like um what is i mean it sounds unbelievable 7400 marks to the dollar so that's a i'm in a colossal change a colossal sort of debauching of your currency and then by late 1923 it's billions of marks to the dollar so i mean

that's your classic image of the wheelbarrows full of banknotes. And obviously that destroys people's savings. It erodes middle-class people's faith in the system. And it pauperizes the middle classes. Yeah, completely. Absolutely. And a pauperized middle class is always the wellspring of revolutionary activity. And don't forget that all this is happening, Tom, against the backdrop of what we're going to talk about in a few minutes, which is Bolshevism, which is the arrival of what we're going to talk about in a few minutes which is bolshevism which is the arrival of the russian revolution i think okay but dominic just on the topic so we're looking at 1922 as you know the year that modernity begins one of one of the enduring

effects of the great inflation in germany is a german horror at inflation. Yeah. Which has been a massive, massive factor in the evolution of the European Union. It has, yes, that's true. So in that sense, the economics of Germany in 1922 continue to reverberate right the way up into the present day. Yeah, I think they do,

because of course, the German response to the Eurozone crisis was partly informed by the fact that generations of German politicians have always sort of said, never again, you know, inflation is the great enemy, which is ironic because actually the thing that really brought the Nazis to power was not the inflation. It was the unemployment caused by the onset of the Great Depression

after 1931. But, you know, it's the inflation, oddly, that has become the defining image of Weimar Germany, of its failure to... Well, I suppose Germany was so rich and prosperous and successful before the war that the, you know, impoverished bourgeois carrying mark notes on wheelbarrows. I mean, it's...

Well, I think actually what you get is... I don't know if you've read that book by... So Colm Tabin had a book last year about Thomas Mann and a novel about the life of Thomas Mann. So Thomas Mann wrote

the great book about kind of bourgeois German Victorianism, Buddenbrooks, about this family in Lübeck. And when you read the Colm Tabin book about Mann's life,

just that journey that nobody really in the English speaking world can possibly contemplate, that you go from pre-war, you know, Germany, the most dynamic, the most sort of self-satisfied, prosperous country in Europe. And in many ways, most progressive. Yeah. And very progressive to this basket case in the 1920s

and then the horrors of the 30s and 40s and so on. I mean, it's just the most extraordinary trajectory. And so if we're talking about the horrors of the 1930s and 40s, and indeed the horrors of the 20th century generally, the fact that... So 1922 is a key year

in... So it's the establishment of the soviet union yeah it's effectively the establishment of stalin's primacy because although lenin is still alive he's had the stroke and stalin has made himself general secretary of the communist party and he uses this as a way to essentially muscle out the opposition and bring Lenin under his thumb. So communism, obviously, is a massive theme for the decades that are to come. But also in 1922, and we did an episode on the Rubicon a little bit earlier this week, but you have Mussolini's March on Rome,

and so the rise of fascism. Absolutely. And I think those two things are completely intertwined. So what happens in italy well maybe we'll come on to russia in just a second um so italy italy had entered the first world war very foolishly in my view to try and get more territory it had basically changed sides um done a dirty deal to come in on the allied side because they want to snatch bits of the austro-hungarian empire um. The Italian army had performed incredibly poorly.

Soldiers very heroically, but the generals utterly inept. They'd lost 700,000 men. They'd run up colossal debts. They'd gained virtually nothing. And at the end of the war, as they see it, they're fobbed off by the other allies. They're not given the great empire they want in the Adriatic. They're given a bit of territory,

but nothing like what they think they're going to get. And there's this tremendous sense in Italy that they have been utterly shortchanged, that they've had this horrendous experience. I mean, the fighting, the Italian front. They're kind of blowing off the tops of mountains,

aren't they? It's awful. It's absolutely awful. They fight. There's the battle of the Asonzo. There were 12 battles of the Asonzo. They're just constantly charging at the Austrians and just being machine gunned. So, some of all, I went to Lake Como, which I'd never been to, and climbed up a mountain.

And there was this tunnel that kind of went through. I mean, it went through a mountain that had been hacked out with handpicks. And you just saw the absolute waste of effort that went into all that. The Italian front is so horrible that there are all these stories of Italians charging up their caste, which is this sort of exposed limestone mountainous region

in the sort of Italian-Slovenian border. There are all these stories of Italians charging up these hillsides, and the Austrians at the top of the hill shouting at them to go back basically saying if you if you turn back and run away we won't shoot at you because you know we're going to kill you and they the italians just keep coming and the austrians just mow them down and the austrian army is completely inept itself so the fact that it's able to hold off the italians yeah tells you how badly the italian generals are performing anyway um this is a bit of a segue a bit of sidetrack rather uh the attack Italy is a terrible in a terrible state at the end

of the first world war it's absolutely in the early 20s it is riven by labor unrest there are whole waves of factory occupations there's tremendous unemployment there's great hostility sort of class hostility and so on. And what you have by 1922 is that this guy, who has been a socialist journalist, Mussolini, completely shamelessly basically changes his colours and offers his support and basically all the radical energy that he had previously put into the left-wing sort of cause he basically gets into bed with the landowners the factory owners and the right and says you know my squad

risti my my squads my kind of paramilitary units are at your disposal to fight off bolshevism um and there's a series of punch-ups and there's a real sense of kind of seething violence. And then there's a general strike in the late summer that fails. And against that backdrop, Mussolini launches his famous march on Rome. Which isn't really a march, is it? No, it's an absolute con. It's a complete con.

He gets up in Naples and sort of gives this tremendous speech saying, we should all march on Rome and seize... Our program is simple. We want to rule Italy. Yeah. But then he doesn't go himself. He's such a coward. He doesn't go.

He goes off to Milan instead. Well, they all, he says, you, you, you, you, and you, you can lead the march. I'll just weigh in. And then the king, the king makes him, appoints him prime minister. So the king, it's a really interesting um parallel with what happens in germany in 19 you know the end of 32 early 33 um the italian prime minister is a guy

called luigi factor and he basically says you know these fascists are a rabble there's 20 000 of them they're pouring with rain they're very bedraggled we don't have anything to fear from them i've got more troops i'll declare a state of emergency, crush them, you know, and it'll be fine. And the king panics and refuses to sign the order of Victor Emmanuel III. And he says, he thinks, no, maybe the

thing to do is, because he's obviously quite conservative himself, he thinks maybe the thing to do is bring Mussolini on side, you know, and let's not have any trouble. And he appoints Mussolini as prime minister. And Mussolini turns up for the ceremony in his black shirt and the top hat. Yeah. Well, Dan Jackson has been on our podcast

to talk about the birth of the railways and the top hat, but he wasn't wearing a black shirt. No, he wasn't. Well, he also wasn't about to become prime minister of Italy, to be fair to Dan. No, he wasn't. So, yeah, so obviously the rise of fascism in Italy, I mean, if you're looking at 1922, that's an absolutely massive moment

because then people start in Germany saying, where is our Mussolini? Well, but Dominic, you said, so Mussolini goes from being a socialist to being a fascist. Yeah. And that this was a total reversal. In a way, I mean, he's not becoming a kind of supporter of liberal economics or capitalism. No, no, no.

Adam Smith or something. I mean, essentially, the energies of the fascists and the communists, they're so electrifying because they're so similar. Isn't that right? Yeah, you're right. I mean, we could get into a huge conversation here, couldn't we, about the sort of the protein and the sort of the ambiguity. Because they're national socialists. Yeah, the ambiguity of fascism in the early 20s, that it appears both radical and conservative.

Of course, it appears both modern and anti-modern. So fascist parties classically use radio, cars, planes. They glory in their modernity at the same time as they're harking back to a and idealized yeah to idealize past and and the the guy who blazes the trail for that for Mussolini's Denunzio terrible man absolutely the man who got Italy into the first world war in the first place yeah and and he establishes a kind of proto-fascist state in Trieste which is where Joyce had been where he yeah and of course Denunizio is another poet. Another poet?

Yeah, like Enid Blyton. Yeah. Okay. Well, anyway, so that's enough about fascists. What about communists? Yeah, I think, you see, I think, I don't know what you think, Tom. I think the two keys to this whole period of the

Great War and communism, because it's fear of communism that drives a lot of the the sort of right-wing stuff not the right-wing stuff doesn't have roots of its own but i think that paralyzing fear of bolshevism i mean paralyzing is the wrong word actually it's an energy it's an energizing fear of of communism so russia it's had its revolutions um it's been through this period uh sort of from 1918 to 1920 of civil war of this incredibly weird civil war lots of different people and the czechs are involved and the allies are sending troops most of the sort of the civil war is done and dusted by 1920 but there's still

they're still mopping up in central asia in 1922 And in fact, extraordinarily, the last Allied forces, so the last Japanese forces, don't leave Siberia until 1922. They're in Vladivostok and they leave in the summer and then the Red Army marches into Vladivostok on the 25th of October. But what's also going on, which

I hadn't really appreciated until reading up on this, was that there's a lot of attention given to the sort of famine caused by Stalin's collectivisation measures later on. But there's a tremendously horrendous famine in Russia itself in 1922. So about 5 million people probably die of starvation. You don't even... On the Volga.

And that barely even registers in places like kazan and samoa yeah exactly that now so much has happened that i mean five million people that that's kind of lost um while the spanish flu is also yeah of course spanish flu is kind of becoming well there are i suppose okay but you've But you've had the First World War, millions die. Spanish flu, millions die. This famine, which I'd never even heard of. I've heard the one in Ukraine, but I haven't heard this one. Something like 10 million people have died in the Russian Civil War.

I mean, colossal. I mean, just unbelievable figures. I mean, you know, and it's like Hitler says, when you start talking about millions, the brain fades. You tune out. I think that's absolutely what happens. The loss of one life is a tragedy. And a million is a statistic, exactly.

But the Soviet Union, well, it's not yet the Soviet Union. Russia is in a very uncertain place because they've had what they call war communism, where they basically seized estates and they tried to suppress all capitalism. Then in 1921, Lenin had slightly changed course and he had said, well, we'll allow some rule, some small enterprise to happen and peasants can sell their surpluses. And this is what it's called is new economic policy, NEP. But then, as you say, Lenin has this stroke in May 1922. It's a great what-if, actually, Tom. I mean, it's the great what-ifs that

Trotskyists and Stalinists have argued about for decades. What would have happened if Lenin... What did Lenin really want for Russia? Lenin has this stroke, and as you said, Stalin, he really begins his rise. He controls Lenin, he controls access to Lenin, he really begins his rise. He controls Lenin.

He controls access to Lenin. He's general secretary of the party. So he's sharing power with two other guys, particularly Kamenev and Zinoviev. But there is this sort of sense that Stalin, because he has the party machine, he is the coming man. And it's Stalin who is probably the key player in the creation of the USSR. Which is announced in December, is it? December, exactly. They have the big meetings to decide it,

so 28th and 30th of December. It's not quite what Lenin wanted. So Lenin had wanted a Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia and Stalin changed the title to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I think partly because Lenin wanted, Lenin seems to have wanted a slightly more kind of federal system.

He hated the idea of great Russian chauvinism. Liberal. And Stalin, sort of paradoxically, despite the fact he was Georgian, was not so keen on that. He didn't want to encourage nationalism. So they take out the Europe and Asia stuff, and it's just the union of soviet socialist republics and it ends up you know it basically covers the old czarist empire but isn't it also that lenin was um you know in the best marxist sense wanted uh universal revolution um and it's stalin in the long

run who will go for socialism in one country in one country. In one country. Yeah, exactly right. So you're starting to see the process by which the Soviet Union, as it becomes in December, will essentially become a communist equivalent of the Tsarist Empire. Yeah, I think that's right, actually, Tom. Because although for the time being, Stalin is allied to Zinoviev, who wants to kind of export. He's the head of the Comintern. And Trotsky as well, of course.

In charge, of course, of Trotsky. But you're right that he's going to start moving that way. But, of course, nobody else knows this. And I think we've probably gone on long enough on this episode, but this is the point at which we should end this. Nobody else knows that that's where Bolshevism is going to go. So they all think it's going to be exported. And you've got, we mentioned the Comintern. That's why you have partly one reason

why you have the paramilitary politics in Germany. It's why you have fascism in Italy and so on, because it's against this, I said paralyzing again, and it's completely wrong, this i said i said paralyzing again it's completely wrong this sort of enervating energizing fear um and you see that in i i what i love about the early 20s that i think is so often missed by kind of the the sort of roaring 20s cocktail glasses and f scott fitzgerald view of it is the is the mad kind of paranoia and you see that in so much popular culture so I used to read these books when I was at my at school which were utterly utterly

inappropriate um I think by today's standards which were the Bulldog Drummond books we talked about Bulldog Drummond yes in James Bond he's an ancestor and in 1922 Sapper who is the um his real name is H.C. McNeill. And yet to pick up a theme of this podcast, Tom, he is encouraged into writing for the Daily Mail. He had been in the Royal Engineers. The Daily Mail has basically created modernity. Yeah, exactly.

So he writes these books about this guy called Captain Hugh Drummond, and he's a demobbed soldier. And like so many people, like so many of the people who joined, you know, Mussolini's black shirts or the Freikorps in Germany, he's come back from the war, Drummond, and he's bored. He doesn't know what to do, and he wants to fight people. And in this book, published second book in 1922, he sets up a group called the Black Gang,

and they dress up in black cokes, very Ku Klux Klan and they go around beating up communists who are infiltrating Is this written in the consciousness of what Mussolini's doing? No, I think it, well, I suppose he probably must know to some, but I don't think I definitely don't think

it's deliberately inspired but people sort of say, you know there's a point, I won't read out because i've been sending you quotes for the last few days utterly utterly unrepeatable but there's a point in which two people are talking about what's going on one of them says to the other um that there is an organized and well-financed conspiracy to preach bolshevism in england we have known for some time how well organized it is we did not realize but as you'll see there is not a single manufacturing town or city in great britain that has not got a branch of that organization installed he says you can see in front of you the proofs of their appalling spread

of these proletarian sunday schools with their abominable propaganda and their avowed attempt to convert the children who attend them to a creed whose beginning is destruction and whose end is chaotic anarchy but dominic aren't i right then that communism is just christianity monke well it's proliferating sunday schools but you know picking up that stuff we were saying about the spanish flu and viruses and the language of the wasteland that the same character then goes on to say we're a free country sir john but the time is coming when freedom as we understand it in the past will have to cease that's very fascistic we can't go on as the cesspit of europe sheltering microbes who infect us as soon as they are here we want disinfecting we want it

badly and this isn't italy or germany this is britain and this is a these are a series of books that are immensely popular and are made into films throughout the 1920s. They're immensely popular, kind of middle class, law-abiding, self-consciously respectable kind of people. And 1922

is, I think, the year when the British Empire is, geographically speaking, at its largest extent. Britain is the victor in the first world war so so that's the thing that it was um you know it's absolute peak but as we shall find out in part two it is in many ways a colossus with feet of clay as bart van loo would put it very good um so dominic we'll come we'll uh we'll do another episode, put that out tomorrow, and that will be on Britain, Ireland, the Levant, and America.

And Richmond Crompton. And Richmond Crompton, of course. Yes, just William. Okay. So thanks very much for listening to this. We will see you tomorrow. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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