ABSTRACT
Age of Extremes, published for the first time in 1994, was the title of the book in which English social historian Eric Hobsbawm took stock of the ‘short twentieth century’.1 The excesses of inhumanity, the way for which was paved by the outbreak of World War I, appear to be ‘extremes’. Whether it had to do with the ‘initial catastrophe of the twentieth century’ (George F. Kennan) or should rather be called the catalyst reaction to conditioning factors from the nineteenth century remains an open question.2 In any event, the civil society of warring states in its totality, but particularly the German Reich operating on several fronts, was placed in the service of a collective struggle for life and death for the first time in history. The gigantic material battles of the ‘total war’, as it was later described by Generalquartiermeister Erich Ludendorff3 with programmatic intent, carried the European nations to the utmost limits of their material productivity. As a result of the war and its aftermath, the livelihoods of countless people became endangered. Millions of soldiers lost their lives, many returned home mutilated and emotionally broken, unable ever again to integrate themselves into civil society. The institutional structure of the constitutional states with its power controls and guaranteed rights that had formed in the course of centuries began to waver under the onslaught of new kinds of soon-to-be-called ‘totalitarian’ extreme political movements. With World War I, political ‘monsters’ such as Hitler, Lenin and Stalin, as Hans-Peter Schwarz portrayed them, came to the fore ready to sacrifice hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of lives for their hubris-driven political visions.4 Without World War I, neither the Russian Revolution nor, probably, the Bolshevik coup d’état in October 1917 in St Petersburg would have happened. Under Lenin and Trotsky, the new rulers in the Kremlin began a historically unexampled ‘cleansing’ of Russian society of all those social ‘pests’ that were seen as an obstacle to the great goal of the world revolution.5
