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Book Review: Michael White: Generation Dada: The Berlin Avant-Garde and the First World War

‘joining up’ the ‘two extremes of time, the end and the beginning, the origin and the destination’ (p. 162). It is precisely this sentiment one finds already in 1803 in Goethe’s remarkable poem, Dauer im Wechsel, whose final stanza includes the words, ‘Let the start and end so fusing / Join in one and unify’ (Laß den Anfang mit dem Ende / Sich in eins zusammenziehn!). In the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud remarked: ‘I don’t much like to think about growing old, and I have strange reactions when I’m reminded of it’ (Freud, Standard Edition, 6: 31). This stance stands in marked contrast to what one finds Goethe saying, at the beginning of his very late period, in a letter to Sulpiz Boisserée of 3 November 1826: ‘As an ethical-aesthetic mathematician’, he wrote, ‘I must in my late years still work towards final, ultimate formulae, by means of which alone the world is still comprehensible and bearable for me’. So another chief characteristic of Goethe’s very late period is this astonishing tenacity, despite or because of his well-documented denial of the reality of death, a sort of élan vital which can perhaps only be explained by the insight that a life is brought to completion by its conclusion as a painting is by its frame. Ageing is not a ‘decline’, it is an ‘accomplishment’; it is, as Vergely says, une œuvre (Une vie, p. 77). Is, then, growing (very) old the greatest form of art available to the individual? For, as Lee poignantly observes (p. 19), ‘only in old age can one truly have the depth of experience, but also the courage, necessary to say “es war”’.