"...With
the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not
halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men
returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer, but poorer in
communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the
flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to
mouth. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has
experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience
by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience
by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation
that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the
open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the
clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive
torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body..."
-Walter Benjamin-
-Walter Benjamin-
