REVIEW ESSAY

The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. By Stephen Kern (Cambridge,

Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983. 372 pp. $25.00).

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Between 1880 and 1914 technology, in the form of a series of spectacular inventions,
transformed the world and the way that Europeans and Americans experienced it. The
electric light blurred the age-old distinction between day and night; the telephone and
the wireless made it possible for people to communicate across enormous distances
instantaneously; the bicycle, the automobile, and the steamship accelerated the speed
with which people could move through the world and enlarged the range of their
effective action; the cinema offered the imagination a new way of telling stories; and
the airplane opened up to human locomotion the dimension of the heavens, formerly
reserved for God and angels, reduced the significance of natural barriers like rivers,
seas and mountains, and provided the possibility, for the first time, of looking at the
world from the top down.
Historians of this period have not sufficiently taken into account the magnitude of
these changes and the effects they had on the generations who underwent them. It
is easy enough to understand why. They were unsure of how to go about establishing
convincing and verifiable connections between technology, a domain which they happily
left to specialists, and the mainstream of culture, politics, and social-economic structures
in which they, as humanists, felt more at home. They knew that the new inventions
must have left their mark on feeling and experience; they paid passing homage to them
in their books; but they possessed no analytical instrument for studying the revolution
in perception and showing how it expressed itself in thought and action. Stephen Kern
has taken up this daunting challenge and written a book that manages to be both
impressively learned and a pleasure to read. One of its most distinctive features is
its ambition and the immodesty of its claims. By eschewing caution and pulling all
stops, Kern forces us to rethink the nature of cultural history: does such a discipline
exist and if so, what should be its methods and its objects of study?
Since Kern goes to some pains in his introduction to present his book as original,
let me begin by indicating in what its originality resides. Despite the austerely
philosophical, almost Einsteinian ring of Kern's title, his main purpose is quite in
keeping with the dominant tradition of cultural history: he wishes to characterize the
distinctive nature of European (and to a lesser extent, American) culture during the
years between 1880 and 1918 and to discover common themes. To use old-fashioned
language, he is in search of "the spirit of the age." Moreover, the material which he
marshalls in order to make his argument - the philosophical writings of Nietzsche,
Bergson and Husserl, the novels of Proust, Joyce and Mann, the paintings of Cezanne,
Picasso, Balla and Delaunay, the sculpture of Boccioni, the poetry of Mallarme and
Apollinaire, the music of Debussy and Stravinsky, the sociology of Simmel and
Durkheim, the social and political writings of Sorel, and the scientific theories of
Mach and Einstein - will be familiar to readers of Axel's Castle, Consciousness and
Society, The Banquet ~ars, 1900, and Fin-de-Steele Vienna, all books on which Kern
draws.!
Less conventional, though, are the topics on which Kern focuses his inquiry:
European and American perceptions of space, as they were given cultural expression
between 1880 and 1918. To be sure, historians of philosophy, literature, and painting

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have long regarded time and space as central preoccupations of this period; but Kern
has approached these in a novel way. Instead of surveying the use of time and space
in selected fields of cultural activity (painting, the novel, music, architecture, for
example), he presents us with a series of chapters entitled "The Nature of TIme,""The
Past," "The Present;' "The Future;' "Speed," "The Nature of Space," "Form," "Distance,"
and "Direction." The advantage of these exotic and unhistorically abstract categories,
which Kern has borrowed from philosophy, psychiatry, and map making, is that they
throw the reader off his balance, prepare him to view the period with fresh unjaded
eyes, and give Kern the opportunity to introduce familiar material in unfamiliar contexts.
"Prominent figures such as Proust;' notes Kern, "have been interpreted with such
uniformity that their contributions to the cultural landscape have tended to become
as solid and fixed as a rock." (p. 3) Kern breaks up the opus of these much studied
figures; he separates them from the people with whom they have ordinarily been
associated; he pairs them with new and unexpected company; and by doing this, he
hopes to expose "fresh surfaces" of their work.
This, then, is a cultural history that offers new readings of artifacts long identified
as modernist masterpieces. But it is also more than this, because Kern wishes to show
that the perceptions of time and space he has found to be characteristic of the period
1880-1914 can be used to illuminate the events leading toward the outbreak of World
War One, the diplomatic crisis of July 1914, and the form the fighting took between
1914 and 1918. The last two chapters that precede the conclusion, "Temporality of the
July Crisis" and "The Cubist War," seek to demonstrate that Kern's method can be
used to unify the realms of elite culture and everyday life. Indeed, Kern's claims are
even greater. He argues that because time and space are universal experientai categories,
they offer a surer way of comparing different ages and cultures than those, like political
system, class, or family, which have heretofore been used. Kern conceives of his book
as a contribution to such a larger comparative project. And though he acknowledges
his debt to the work of other cultural historians, such as H. Stuart Hughes, Roger
Shattuck, and Carl Schorske, he insists that his topics are more essential "from a strictly
philosophical point of view" because they penetrate to the foundations of experience.
There is another feature of Kern's method, which I believe justifies more than any
other his claim to novelty. Most cultural historians resemble Kern in that they look
for themes that link synchronically cultural production in different fields. Few, however,
have cast their net as widely or taken their evidence from such a variety of sources.
Kern feels none of the compunctions that caused Hughes, Shattuck, and Schorske to
narrow the scope of their inquiries in the hope that they would thus deepen the
significance of their findings. For him, the theme's the thing, the theory or the work
of art ali illustration of it. In seeking to illustrate a perception, which he considers
characteristic of the period, Kern will draw on sources as varied as a scientific paper
produced in Berne, a Chicago architectural space, a Parisian poem, a Milanese
sculpture, a Stockholm play, or a German geopolitical treatise. Kern acknowledges
that there may be no causal connection among these cultural expressions. One may
be a direct response to the new technology; another may be quite independent of it.
But for Kern the theme takes priority over the context and integrity of the object; and
the thematic discoveries he makes convinces him that a revolution in structures of
human experience and forms of human expression was underway during the years
preceding the Great War. To explore that revolution, Kern uses juxtaposition, metaphor,
and analogy. Underlying his deployment of these devices, more commonly found in
poetry than history, is his belief that "any generalization about the thinking of an age
is the more persuasive the greater the conceptual distance between the sources on which
it is based:' (p. 7) To link thematically the thought of a German architect and a French
philosopher on a given subject is to penetrate more deeply the culture of a period

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than if one were to show connections between writers and artists in a city like Paris
or Vienna, or social thinkers in Italy, Germany, and France.
This is Kern's method; these are his claims. To what extent has he made them good?
No doubt about it, the method of juxtaposition makes for lively reading, at least when
practiced by someone as clever and widely read as Kern. What, for example do Ernst
Mach, Jacob von Uexkiill, Emile Durkheim, Oswald Spengler, Paul Cezanne, Pablo
Picasso, Georges Braque, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jose
Ortega y Gasset have in common? Answer: the realization that space is heterogeneous
rather than homogeneous and that there is no privileged perspective from which to
observe a given event. An even more diverse list of witnesses, which ranges from
Albert Einstein to Frederick Jackson Turner, is summoned to demonstrate that during
these years the nature of space was redefined. "The traditional view that space was
an inert void in which objects existed gave way to a new view of it as active and full."
(p. 152) Basing himself on the new developments in painting and sculpture, especially
Cubism and Futurism, Kern argues that spatial hierarchies dissolved, that background
and emptiness became positive elements in artistic, literary and musical compositions,
and that analogies to this revolution in perception can be. found in a whole range
of cultural and political activities. "The old sanctuaries of privilege, power, and holiness
were assailed, if not entirely destroyed, by the affirmation of positive negative space."
(p. 180) But Kern makes no attempt to demonstrate that those anarchists, radicals,
and Socialists who were assailing "the old sanctuaries of privilege, power, and holiness"
thought in terms of "positive negative space." He is satisfied to affirm that the new
art implied and indicated the possibility of the political questioning of traditional
hierarchies. (p. 179)
Kern sees a direct connection between the collapse of form in culture and social
relations and changes in everyday life being brought about by the new technology.
The creation of suburbs, made possible by improvements in mass transportation systems,
blurred the distinction between the city and the country. The telephone diminished
the significance of walls and opened up the sanctity of the home and the office to
outside penetration, just as the X-ray revealed the mysteries that lay beneath the body's
skin. The airplane and the wireless called into question the solidity of frontiers; while
the cabaret and the cinema brought together in a single space and a common aesthetic
experience people of different social classes who earlier had each had their own places
and forms of entertainment.
Kern is right to suggest that the preoccupation of intellectuals with the collapse of
form was related to changes taking place in society and the social structure. The crowd
became one of the most potent symbols of the age and a gauge of the anxiety the
privileged classes felt about the blurring of social boundaries and the rising tide of
what they increasingly called "the masses."But even when developingthis theme, Kern's
juxtapositions are sometimes strained; and they put us on guard against the dangers
of his method. It may be, as he claims, that the Eiffel Tower, constructed in 1889,
eliminated the distinction between the inside and outside of a building; and also that
Robert Delaunay was responding to this innovation in his multi-perspectival paintings
of 1910-1911. Yet what is one to make of the fact that many of the apartment buildings
constructed in Paris during these years were as solid and as impenetrable to light as
fifteenth-century Italian palazzi? In a similar way, Kern concedes that the division
into classes at the lower end of the social scale became especially sharp toward the
turn of the century; but this fact of political and social history does not fit in nearly
so well with his thesis about the revolution in spatial perception as Proust's observation
that the complex of aristocratic principles that had formerly protected the Guermantes
and maintained their social isolation and prestige had ceased to function and were
no longer capable of keeping out the crowd: ~ .. a thousand alien elements made their

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way in and all homogeneity, all consistency of form and color was lost." (Proust quoted
by Kern, p. 193) The least that can be said is that the complexity of life in Europe
during this period does not lend itself to overarching generalizations that have no clear
geographical or social locus.
The last chapters of Kern's book shift the focus from high culture to international
relations, diplomacy, and the actual fighting of the First World War. Kern wants to
show that changing attitudes toward time and space shed light on the factors leading
toward the outbreak of the war. And here he makes an interesting point. The shrinking
of distance, brought about by increases in speed and new means of transport, created
strong tendencies toward international cooperation. Standard time was adopted by most
European countries in the late nineteenth century; twenty years later even the French
had to accept the humiliation of a time whose point of reference lay in England. Between
1900 and 1914 over two hundred international organizations were created, many to
regulate and control the use of the new technology. Internationalists saw in these
developments sure indications that the world was becoming more unified and that
national isolation was a thing of the past. But when they went one step further and
predicted that these developments would bring in their wake international harmony
and reconciliation they failed to see the other side of the technological coin. For steam
and electricity made possible the creation and control of far-flung empires and pushed
the European powers toward conflict. "It is one of the great ironies of the period:'
observes Kern, "that a world war became possible only after the world had become
so highly unified." (p. 240)
One of Kern's more stimulating ideas is that the European nations possessed different
conceptions of time and space, and that this helps to explain why and how they went
to war. England and France, he says, had an internal coherence that Germany and
Austria-Hungary lacked; thus sure of their inner core, the English and the French
could radiate self-confidently outward toward their empires. The Germans, by contrast,
were condemned by their geographical position to oscillate between a "bombastic
outgoing Weltpolitik," inspired by their belief that they lacked sufficient space to nourish
a vital and growing population, and a "paranoid" fear of encirclement caused by the
existence to Germany's east of the boundless spaces of Russia. (p. 251) These different
spatial perceptions were reinforced by different visions of the past and future. England,
France, and Russia could look back to long unbroken pasts and had every reason to
believe that just as their country had always existed in the past, so would it always
exist in the future. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, by contrast, had only recently
become modem states and knew that the fragile political constructions that had not
existed yesterday might easily vanish from the scene tomorrow. When looking to the
future, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians saw dangers of a deterioration in their
relative position and therefore believed that they must act in the shortest possible delay
because time was running out. The English saw no reason to act, because they relished
things the way they were; and the Russians felt that time was working in their favor
and thus did everything possible to put off the moment of confrontation.
Still, Kern suggests, the war might have been averted had the leaders of the various
European countries not panicked under the pressure created by the new electronic
technology and their feeling that time was in short supply. "In the summer of 1914
the men in power lost their bearings in the hectic rush paced by flurries of telegrams,
telephone conversations, memos, and press releases; hard-boiled politicians broke down
and seasoned negotiators cracked under the pressure of tense confrontations and
sleepless nights, agonizing over the probably disastrous consequences of their snap
judgments and hasty actions." Kern acknowledges that there were a great many factors
which led to the breakdown of peace; but he insists that the "sheer rush of events"
was an independent cause that "catapulted Europe into war." (p. 260) The consequences

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of the acceleration of communication and the shrinking of space appeared most

dramatically in the last days of July when, with war an imminent possibility, generals
pushed diplomats from the scene and explained to monarchs and politicians that
mobilization could not be delayed, because distances could quickly be covered, and
that once the telegraph operators had sent their messages there could be no turning
back. Kern rounds off his interpretation of the outbreak of war with a long simile
based on the sinking of the TItanic. "The captain [of the TItanic] raced against time
for the fastest Atlantic crossing. Another race took place between the armies of the
great powers, which rushed to mobilize toward the end of July as the diplomacy began
to founder." (p. 269)
Kern has some difficulty when he sets out to interpret the war in terms of the
perceptions of time and space that he uncovered in the culture of the prewar period.
On the one hand, he notes that the war reversed the pre-1914 tendency toward the
exploration of private time and imposed a single homogeneous time symbolized by
the synchronized wrist watches soldiers wore while in the trenches. The war also broke
the sense of continuity with the past and the belief that the past could be useful in
understanding the present. On the other hand, the war represented the "apotheosis
of the prewar sense of speed" - witness the prominent role played in it by the rapidfiring machine gun - and accelerated the prewar tendency toward increased contact
among the European peoples. Never before had they been so intensely involved with
one another or traveled so much: more Germans went to France and Russia in August
1914 than ever before in such a short period of time. Above all, Kern thinks, the war
embodied on a massive scale the insights of Cubism about space. Like a Cubist canvass,
the war could not be grasped from a single perspective. There was a front in the West,
a front in the East, another in Turkey and the Mediterranean, a war on and under
the seas, and a war in the skies that symbolized the redirecting of Western man's
consciousness toward the heavens. All spaces in the war were of equal value; no-man'sland was the void or "positive negative space" that had so obsessed prewar artists and
thinkers. Indeed, the forms of Cubism were introduced in camouflage in order to
conceal men, equipment, and ships by breaking up conventional fields of vision. Rank
disappeared in the mud of the trenches, just as hierarchies had been dissolved in culture
before 1914. The terrain on which the soldiers fought itself resembled a Cubist
landscape. "Uniform crosses threw geometric shadows across the mass graves - a
final commemoration of the social leveling of the war." (p. 306)
The pages rush by, and one's attention never flags. Kern is always ingenious and
sometimes brilliant in his observations. He sees connections, symbols, and "eerie
omens" everywhere, and conveys these insights vigorously in a prose that moves with
Stravinsky-like rhythms and crackles with the imagery of pre-1914 technology and
machines. But the new and deeper view of culture in this period that Kern promised
us in his introduction never quite comes into focus; and the method of fragmenting
and then juxtaposing the work of individuals in widely separated fields and places
makes impossible any systematicexploration of the impact of technology on the central
figures of the era. It is interesting, for example, to discover that the man on whom
Proust based Albertine was an aviator who perished in a crash; but it hardly leads
toward a new understanding of Proust's novel. The two themes Kern singles out as
characteristic of the period - the shift from public to private time and the triumph
of perspectivism - have long been recognized as important aspects of fin-de-steele
thought and modernist art and literature. More original is Kern's claim that these
developments were somehow linked to the collapse of hierarchies, the dissolution of
social forms, and the rise of democracy. But here I think he is mistaken. The new
conceptions of time and space - in so far as they had any impact on politics - were
taken up by the enemies of democracy and integrated into the ideology of the new

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mass movements.? In politics the greatest enthusiast of movement and multiple

perspectives on reality was Mussolini; the leader who showed that subjective lived
experience could be used to unite large numbers of people for political ends was Hitler.
Kern himself points out that Lenin, the greatest social leveller of the epoch, opposed
vehemently the proliferation of spaces and times and went so far as to write a book
on the subject.
I hesitate to criticize what Kern has written on the diplomatic crisis of July 1914
and the fighting of the war because I am not certain of what he set out to do and what
he thinks he has accomplished. Perhaps he is satisfied to be suggestive. Even so, I
am disturbed by the way that he molds ambiguous evidence to fit his theories about
prewar perceptions of time and space. Most historians would acknowledge that railway
technology, the new means of electronic communication, and mobilization time tables
played an important role in accelerating the pace of diplomacy and decision-making
in July 1914. This is not new. What Kern adds is his assertion that in 1914 the European
nations had distinctive attitudes toward time and space, and that these attitudes help
to explain their behavior when confronted by the threat of war. Geopolitical
considerations were no doubt decisive in the formation of the alliance systems; and
the "new" nations, Germany and Italy, had reasons to cooperate against the "old" imperial
powers, England and France. But it seems strained to argue that the Habsburg empire
was, in the self-image of its leaders a recent creation; and it is even more misleading
to suggest that England basked in the comforting thought that what had always been
would always be. Far from radiating self-confidently outwards, England in 1914 was
caught up with its own.version of the Serbian problem in Ireland and looked forward
apprehensively to a future in which Germany was bound to be stronger and more
capable of threatening English overseas interests. Instead of focusing on national
differences in conceptions of time and space, it seems more fruitful to argue that the
leaders of all the European nations feared a relative deterioration in their position
and felt under a growing pressure to act. Ultimately, the war was fought because it
was believed to be inevitable and because the major powers believed that not going
to war was even more dangerous than taking the risk of fighting. Though it would
be convenient for Kern's thesis if the war was experienced as the "apotheosis of the
prewar sense of speed;' (p. 299) for those on the Western Front it was above all a
war of immobility and waiting. Blitzkrieg was not to come until 1939. And as for
singling out Cubist paintings as a metaphor for the Great War, I find it strange that
Kern, who gives us so many incisive readings of prewar paintings, does not bother
to ask whether those artists who portrayed the war visually had recourse to Cubist
forms and techniques. If he had, he might have discovered some surprises. Nor is
there anything Cubist about the cemeteries built to commemorate the fallen of the
1914-1918 war.
Cultural history is producing exciting work and attracting some of the brightest and
most adventurous historical minds; yet there seems to be considerable disagreement
among the practitioners of this field concerning what constitutes an interpretation and
what the proper object of study should be. 3 Some focus on individuals and seek to
relate their work to the political, social, and psychological contexts in which they lived;
others are fascinated by discourse and apply themselves to the decoding of texts floating
freely and independent of the contexts that produced them; still others look for structures
of thought and feeling by means of which an entire era can be understood. Some think
small; some think big. Some prefer the concrete; others are drawn toward the abstract.
Some take their subjects from the consciousness of the period; others impose on past
consciousness categories of their own. But all must deal with the problem of the
relationship between the lonely mountain peaks of culture where the great minds dwell
and the densely populated lowlands where culture takes different forms and experiential

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REVIEW ESSAY

change moves by different rhythms. Between 1880and 1918 the new technology became
a stimulus to thought and art; during the same years it also transformed the way that
people lived, though not in any uniform way that lends itself to easy generalization.
Both these topics deserve detailed exploration. Stephen Kern has confused and conflated
them, asserting rather than establishing connections by means of juxtaposition, analogy,
and metaphor. The result is that he has not been able to provide a satisfying study
of either. Contrary to what Kern claims, I remain convinced that more detailed and
contextual inquiries have a greater chance of penetrating to deeper levels of experience
than those, like his, which employ abstract categories. During the past thirty years
this has certainly been true in the field of fin-de-siecle studies.
University of California at Los Angeles

Robert Wohl

1. Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle (New York, 1931); H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society
(New York, 1958); Roger Shattuck, The Banquet ~ars (Garden City, New York, 1958); Edward
R. Tannenbaum, 1900 (Garden City, New York, 1976); Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna
(New York, 1980).
2. See Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche (Paris, 1983), pp. 45-57.
3. The dilemmas of cultural history, as it is practiced today in France, are brilliantly set forth
by Roger Chartier in "Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories,"
in Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan, Modem Intellectual History: Reappraisals and
New Perspectives (Ithaca, New York and London, 1982), pp. 13-46.

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FOOTNOTES