Set Adrift

Thus the grand tradition of European art was unmoored and the great ship, for the first time in centuries, went adrift, its passengers nervously exited the ballroom and went out on deck, no longer watching the horizon, but watching each other with suspicion, wondering who will get a place on the lifeboats. And if the ship should sink? To where would the survivors row?  The answer was clear: America.

What for Thomas Mann was the end of everything good in the world (as his “hero” Hans Castorp lay in wait up above in the Alps while the world below tumbled into war) was for Louis Armstrong, Frank Capra and William Faulkner a beginning: it was the birth of jazz music and Hollywood films, the birth of America as the cultural leader of the western world for the next forty years—that is, until the next blow to idealism hit Americans on their home turf: the Vietnam War. And once again Modernism stepped in to fill the gap.