The world is changing. Natural resources are being devoured to fuel ever faster, ever more powerful machines. Chaos seems to be on the horizon as once great empires show signs of breaking. Around the world racial tensions are high while nationalism is on the rise. In the midst of all this, one group is looking forward with arms wide open to all the future might bring. They were the futurists, and this was one hundred years ago.
In 1909, Filippo Marinetti found his fingers on the pulse of European society when his Futurist Manifesto was published. A 32-year-old Italian aristocrat born in Egypt, Marinetti was a keen observer of his time. In his writings Marinetti embraced violence and destruction which he saw at the heart of modern life. He was the first driver of the movement called futurism. In love with speed and power, the futurist totally embraced the upheaval brought by the Industrial Age.
In their Manifesto, Marinetti calls for speed and dynamism in art as well as a violent restructuring of the social order. At times his words are bombastic and nearly contradictory:
“And like young lions we ran after Death, its dark pelt blotched with pale crosses as it escaped down the vast violet living and throbbing sky.
But we had no ideal Mistress raising her divine form to the clouds, nor any cruel Queen to whom to offer our bodies, twisted like Byzantine rings! There was nothing to make us wish for death, unless the wish to be free at last from the weight of our courage!”
Later Marinetti calls for war, claiming it to be “the world’s only hygiene” and he would eventually expound upon this in an essay of a similar name.
There is no mistake that what Marinetti was proposing was a radical message of nationalism, Social Darwinism and other warped concepts of the time. At first glance the Manifesto comes off as outrageous; one could almost laugh at it and in fact many people did. But Marinetti never wavered and in the end his call for war and a violent reordering of Europe would be answered twice.
Of the many accusations history has leveled at the futurist movement “hypocritical” is not among them. In the early days of the First World War, then called the Great War, Marinetti loudly demanded for Italy to honor its alliance with Germany and Austria and join the fighting. Though Italy backed out of its pact with the Germans and Austrians, it did enter the war in May 1915 on the side of Allies.
True to their word, most futurists enlisted. Some, including Marinetti, were placed in the Lombard Volunteer Cyclists unit. As the Great War raged on, countries continued innovating and producing new and more violent weapons: poison gas that liquefied the lungs, powerful machine guns that mowed down soldiers as they tried to storm enemy trenches, grenades and flamethrowers. Though the futurist may have desired such a war few could have known what they were getting into.
As old ideas about warfare were upended by new technology, Europe found itself adrift in a sea of death with no end in sight. War and genocide raged on for four years until Germany, crippled by loss and starving, gave in and signed the Treaty of Versailles. By its end in November, 1918 World War I had claimed the lives of nearly 40 million people.
