High Modernism? Or Modernism in Crisis?

Abstract

The end of the Second World War (1939–45) saw a Europe of devastated cities and tens of millions dead. At the heart of European culture was the awareness that it had witnessed the most appalling atrocities, that had only finished when the United States added to the catalogue of horrors by using the atom bomb to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Logistically, and morally, Europe could no longer claim to be the centre of global communications and its colonial infrastructure, whilst theoretically intact, was destined for disintegration. The Modernist desire for a functional rationality had been reduced to the ability to dispassionately commit mass murder; the desire for liberation through technology had ended in the industrial efficiency of the Nazi death camps like Auschwitz. Far from the Futurist vision of cultures ultimately cleansed by war, the culmination of the Second World War, first in Europe and then in South East Asia, simply led to further global, lower-level armed conflicts, as relationships between the United States and the USSR turned into an ideological struggle called the Cold War.¹