ABSTRACT
German physicist Max Planck’s sense of crisis, as expressed in his 1932 book Where is Science Going?, echoes William Butler Yeats’s famous lines from ‘The Second Coming,’ written in 1919 (Haughey 2002: 161) and published in 1920: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’ (466). German feminist and radical socialist Rosa Luxemburg articulated this experience of crisis as the preexisting condition for political revolution, demanding action and progress and rejecting the status quo. In a 1904 letter to a friend she insists: ‘for a revolutionary movement not to go forward means – to fall back. The only means of ghting opportunism in a radical way is to keep going forward’ (Luxemburg 2011: 183). ‘Red Rosa’, as Luxemburg was known, was a erce proponent of revolutionary activity in Europe; her brazen state-sanctioned murder in 1919 by a group of paramilitary men shook Weimar Germany’s fragile democracy. These three instances show how varied and widespread the intellectual and cultural responses to the modernist groundswell were, spread across the elds of science, politics, economics, and the arts, giving rise to the formation of diverse modern identities.
