"War! We felt a cleansing, liberation, and a tremendous hope."

Many representatives of the artistic-intellectual milieu welcomed the war, among them Anton Wildgans, Georg Heym, Thomas Mann, Georg Trakl, Ernst Jünger, Max Scheler, Hermann Bahr, Georg Simmel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Musil and Oskar Kokoschka. They didn’t see an apocalypse or downfall in it; they saw change, a hopeful departure into a new and better world, free of decadence, utilitarianism and alienation. The pre-war world seemed mendacious to them, hypocritical, imbued with materialism and a distorted morality. They rejected over-satiated, blasé attitudes and rationalism, and fought against a civilisation that was supposedly blighting everything natural and genuine in the bud. The war would stop or at least partly correct the process of disintegration of culture accompanying industrialisation and the modern age.

The demand for a warlike conquest of the present was also omnipresent in the arts. It would revolutionise art, bring forth new aesthetic forms and – as Ernst Jünger wrote in his short story Storm – create a new type of human being. "Here an entirely new race bore a new view of the world by marching through an archetypal experience. The war was a primeval mist of spiritual and psychologicall possiblities, pent up with developments."

The abhorrence of the zeitgeist and the hope many intellectuals placed in the outbreak of war are particularly clear in Thomas Mann’s formulation: "We knew it, did we not, this world of peace. Did not vermin of the mind swarm about in it like maggots? Did it not ferment and stink of the decaying matter of civilisation? How could the artist, the soldier within the artist, not praise God for the collapse of a world of peace of which he was so utterly sick? War! We felt cleansing, liberation and a tremendous hope."

There were many scientists, too, who welcomed the outbreak of war – not least based on Darwinist ideas about society. They interpreted the war as a probationary period, which would weed out the weak segments of society and thus contribute to an upgrading of the national collective. "War is a touchstone upon which everything will be eliminated that is sick and rotten", wrote the psychiatrist Karl Baller in 1917 in the Allgemeinen Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und psychisch-gerichtliche Medizin.

The formula of war as a “major catharsis” was widespread particularly among doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists, who optimistically anticipated that military operations would have a therapeutic effect on the nervous complaints frequently observed in the pre-war period. In their opinion the changes associated with the modern age – increased mobility, urbanisation, mechanisation etc. –permanently damaged the nervous system. Hysteria, neurasthenia and nervous complaints were among the most common diagnoses with which psychiatry endeavoured to describe the psychiatric and mental illnesses of the pre-war generation. Many psychiatrists interpreted the military conflicts as a chance for a society –softened and degenerate in their eyes – to train its nerves and regain control over body and soul. The war, in the diction used by the leading psychiatrist Albert Eulenburg, was a "steel bath […] for nerves that are withering and pining in the dust of long years of peace".

With the outbreak of savage reality however such expectations were bitterly disappointed. The artillery bullets hit the 'genetically valuable' soldiers just as they did the supposedly 'inferior' ones, which is why the mechanised war – thus the new conclusion of many racial hygienists – favoured negative selection. Moreover, the mentally ill and traumatised soldiers emerging in masses already in the first months of the war contradicted the view that the war would be a suitable method of 'toughening up' the nerves and overcoming the "age of nervous ailments".

Translation: Abigail Prohaska