The centenary of the first world war has led to many parallels being made between the global situation on its eve and the way the world is now. The work of Christopher Clark and fellow historians has shown that there are some areas where the parallels chime, and others where they definitely don’t.
The most evident similarities lie not where they might be expected, in the practical world of geopolitics and material diplomatic alliances, but rather in the less tangible one of ideas. The great account of pre-1914 Vienna, Robert Musil’s epic The Man Without Qualities, captures this when he writes - and it is a motif of this massive novel - of the profusion of ideas and visions that existed at this time. In many ways, it was a golden age of concepts, notions and philosophies, with figures like Einstein, Freud and Lenin radically redrawing understanding of the world and humanity’s role in it.
"An idea", one character in Musil’s novel muses, "is the most paradoxical thing in the world. The flesh in the grip of an idea is like a fetish." And yet, he goes on, "ideas can never maintain themselves in the state in which they are most powerful; they’re like the kind of substance that, exposed to the air, instantly changes into some other, more lasting but corrupted form."
