According to Eksteins, the fierce war that raged in the trenches and the feeling of isolation of the fighters when they returned home is also a reflection of those same feelings. The description of the battlefields, despite the rot and horror, is full of imagery that seeks solace in the artistic. The "lost generation" would not be a fair epigraph, but the synthesis of the symptoms of the postwar emptiness on both sides of the contenders, of silence and the absence of glory, adventure and the aesthetic feeling of the instinctual fervor that had dominated the "land no one's” on the battlefields of Verdun, Ypres and Somme. Something else was behind the pragmatic interpretation of mundane events, and bold conclusions about this hidden sphere have given Freud his prominence ever since. In the field of witnesses, it was only in 1929, after the nausea had passed, that, in search of clear answers, interest in the meanings of the War was formed; and the novel Nada de Novo no Front , by Erich Maria Remarque, a former German combatant, was until then one of the best-selling and acclaimed books of all time. The portrayal of the “truth about the war”, as the advertisement for the launching and dissemination of the work said, aroused the sympathy even of those who had fought against Germany, but aroused the ire of a large part of Remarque's countrymen, who saw in the sentimentality of the universal soldier painted by the author a betrayal of the true Germanic spirit in the War, and the pity he had aroused in his enemies just one more aggravating factor in the humiliation suffered in defeat. What little was known, and is known to this day, as Eksteins reveals, is that Remarque was a false hero who was not qualified to be the spokesman for the generation that perished with pride in the War, that he had acted only in the rear of the front and only for eighteen months, half of which in a field hospital recovering from a self-inflicted wound. At this point Eksteins turns to Faulkner, who declared in 1931: "America was conquered not by German soldiers who died in the French and Flemish trenches, but by German soldiers who died in German books." Art again played its role in representing the world. Just as it would later in the individual sphere of the failed artist seeking redemption in a Spring to whom the sacrifice had already been made in the First War: Hitler. The same scenarios and circumstances, but other intimate experiences under the guise of collective aesthetic motives would have formed the personality and yearnings of the indefatigable courier under the crossfire of trenches in the First World War and who, two decades later, would become the harbinger of practical achievement of the most hallucinatory that the spirit of the world of Hegel possessed, and that of the most cruel and contempt for life contained the Nietzschean tyrant hero.

   Eksteins embarks on a rather complex subject and seeks a perspective that is not very uncommon to crystallize into aphorisms, but rather prone to stumbling when daring to coin it into practical examples. The vast “war literature” produced so far on the subject was one of the stumbling blocks he managed to avoid when dwelling on the most singular chronic cases of day-to-day combat, when horror becomes habitual and the sense of humor returns. to flourish, which also provided him with tools that prevented him from spilling the broth, prolonging itself more than it should in the, say, psychocultural analysis of the time. But Remarque's case and Faulkner's quote, for example, betray his initial theoretical conception, which runs through much of the book, as they refer to a more trivial dimension of art, make-up, forgery, and non-revealing of reality, either whatever drives feed it, yesterday or today. Furthermore, symbols and parables, precisely because they are synthetic, static representations, do not fully reveal their content to those who only see them from the outside: although Diaghilev's ballet (which maintained a homo-affective relationship with Nijinsky) presented the same sign of oppression of instincts as Germanic aspirations evoked something very different.  Likewise, the vision of art as transfiguration and transience perhaps does not encompass more than the worldview of the very aestheticians who produce and enjoy it, very different from the cosmovision of the thousands of ordinary citizens who clamored to take up arms at the time. Another trap seems to go unnoticed by him, a ubiquitous catch of the disciplines of history and political science: the eternal tensions between vitalism and rationalism which he attributes to the opposing currents that actually went down the path in War, are not entities in themselves; that is to say, adopting a vitalist or rationalist view, whatever meanings you give them, depends on the moment or side on which you are in the dispute. Germany was looking for a place in the sun, Britain to keep hers. As José Ortega y Gasset would say in A Rebelião das Massas, in the spring of that same year of 1929: “being on the right or on the left is just one of the ways a man can choose to be an idiot”.

  The dense journalistic and epistolographic documentation of the time, on which Modris Eksteins based his arguments and organized the chronology, constitutes a virtue apart from his book, which, by the way, also has a touch of historical romance and recalls the investigation detective. Whichever angle you choose to look at the events that Eksteins outlines, even the aesthetic or the philosophical, The Rite of Spring always brings something to the surface from a little deeper in the misty waters that surrounded the First World War and the advent of modernity, whether because of the sheer magnitude of that deluge of fire, or because even today we are somehow far away living in the aftermath of its developments, as we always will be in relation to the salvation boards of the past, if we want to understand it.