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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
In the fifth of a series of six Norton Lectures given at Harvard University in 1973 on the semantics of music called The Unanswered Question and recently broadcast on BBC 2, Leonard Bernstein said that ‘ours is a century of death, and Mahler is its prophet’. A history of the twentieth century must inevitably read as a catalogue of death and any authentic prophecy about the twentieth century must have the experience of death at its centre. Since 1914 the toll has mounted as cataclysm has been overtaken by self-inflicted cataclysm until the number of those killed during the last sixty years is no longer calculable. The optimism of the nineteenth century could be maintained until the First World War, but any attempt to perpetuate it after that has been a delusion. We can hardly be optimistic any longer about a civilization that is so self-destructive. The twentieth century experience as an experience of death has its true beginning not in 1900 but in 1914. The first fourteen years of this century were really a hangover from the bouyant bourgeois idealism of the last century. The authentic twentieth century experience was possible only after 1914. Since that first holocaust Europe and North America has moved from an initial optimism about its consequences (Lloyd George’s ‘land fit for heroes’) to disillusion, unemployment, depression and further destruction in 1939. Since 1945 we have had the initial optimism of the welfare state, followed by disillusion, unemployment, successive economic crises, followed by who knows what.
Before 1914 there were a few precursors who, we can now see, gave intimations of what was to come. These prophets had already experienced the disintegration of bourgeois culture; Schnitzler, Karl Krauss, Thomas Mann in his early novels, Mahler. Others had even set about reconstructing our perception of reality, the cubist painters between 1907 and 1914, and Schönberg.
1 For an estimate see Elliot, G., Twentieth Century Book of the Dead, Harmondsworth, 1973, pp. 211–235Google Scholar.
2 Solzhenitsyn's writings up to Cancer Ward prove him to be a great writer by any standards, but his most recent publication Lenin in Zürich is so poor that the onus is now on him to show that he can maintain his former achievement in exile.
5 Barth, K., ‘Evangelical Theology in the Nineteenth Century’, in The Humanity of God, London, 1967, p. 12fGoogle Scholar.
6 Rumscheidt, H. M., Revelation and Theology: An Analysis of the Barth‐Harnack Correspondence of 1923, London, 1972, p. 10Google Scholar: ‘It is this insistence on God's otherness and in the double emphasis—God on earth and on earth God—that there is to be sought the element that influenced Barth and that was so distasteful to Harnack, namely eschatology’.
See also Moltmann, J., Theology of Hope, London, 1967, p. 39Google Scholar: After the First World War the founders of “dialectical theology” took the eschatology that had thus been suppressed by idealism and condemned to ineffectiveness, and set it in the centre not only of exegetical but now also of dogmatic study. In the second edition of his Römerbrief, Karl Barth in 1921 makes the programmatic announcement: “If Christianity be not altogether and unreservedly eschatology, there remains in it no relationship whatever to Christ” (The Epistle to the Romans, London, 1933, p. 314)Google Scholar.
7 K. Barth, Fragments Grave and Gay, London, 1971, p. 121.
8 J. Moltmann, The Crucified God, London, 1974, p. 197, n. 21: ‘Dialectical theology had no “authoritarian concept of the Word of God”. Anyone who still asserts that, misunderstands both its understanding of the Word and the concept of authority’.
9 Bultmann, R. K., ‘New Testament and Mythology’, Kerygma and Myth, London, 1972, Vol. 1, pp. 39, 41.Google Scholar
10 Bonhoeffer, D., ‘The Leader (Der Führer) and the Individual in the Younger Generation’, No Rusty Swords, London, 1970, pp. 186–200Google Scholar.
11 Whatever Bonhoeffer may have meant by ‘religionless Christianity’ he did not imply any lack of personal piety as can be seen from his personal letters, and the root of that puzzling expression must be found in Barth's view that God's righteousness brings about the abolition of religion.
12 Moltmann, J., ‘Dostoevsky and the Hope of Prisoners’, The Experiment Hope, London, 75, p. 85.Google Scholar
13 Moltmann, J., The Crucified God, London, 1974, p. 278Google Scholar.
14 Galloway, A. D., ‘The New Hegelians’, Religious Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4, December 1972, pp. 367–371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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