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The Restless Generation, la Génération Agitée was the generation that came of age during the Great War. Demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe outlined their Strauss–Howe generational theory using 1883–1900 as birth years for this generation. The term was coined by Gertrude Stein and popularized by Ernest Hemingway, who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The City that Never Sleeps. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to Gertrude Stein, who was then his mentor and patron.
The Birth of a Generation
The story of the “Restless Generation” fittingly begins at the time of their birth. Amphetamine[note (contracted from alpha‑methylphenethylamine) is a potent central nervous system (CNS) stimulant Amphetamine was discovered in 1887. Amphetamine was first synthesized in 1887 in Germany by Romanian chemist Lazăr Edeleanu who named it phenylisopropylamine. Shortly after, methamphetamine was synthesized from ephedrine in 1893 by Japanese chemist Nagai Nagayoshi.
Nagai was born in the Myōdō District, Awa Province in what is now the Tokushima Prefecture, as the son of a doctor and started studying rangaku medicine at the Dutch Medical School of Nagasaki in 1864. While in Nagasaki, he made the acquaintance of Ōkubo Toshimichi, Itō Hirobumi, and other future leaders of the Meiji government.
Nagai continued his studies at Tokyo Imperial University and became the first doctor of pharmacy in Japan. He was sent under government sponsorship to Prussia in 1871 to study at the University of Berlin. He was the only civilian in a group of military students sent to study in Great Britain and France, and he traveled by way of the United States and Great Britain. While in Berlin, he resided at the home of Japanese diplomat Aoki Shūzō. He was influenced by the lectures of von Hofmann, and received a doctorate with a study on eugenol while working as an assistant at von Hofmann's laboratory. He decided to take up organic chemistry in 1873. Nagai returned to Japan in 1883 to take up a position at the Tokyo Imperial University, and became Professor of Chemistry and Pharmacy there in 1893. His research centered on the chemical analysis of various Japanese and Chinese traditional herbal medicines.
Nagai was also the first to understand the stimulating properties of Amphetamine and methamphetamine. He also realized that the properties, higher alertness, wakefulness and general apparent increase in fitness may be beneficial to the Japanese soldiers fighting in the First Sino-Japanese War. The war was as fought between the Qing Empire and the Empire of Japan, primarily over influence of Korea. Since Nagai was well connected with the rest of the Meiji establishment, including the military. A few “Banzai-Pills” were developed, produced and distributed among a handful of elite soldiers.
The first test seemed promising but it also became apparent that in order to make a real difference on the battlefield Nippon needed mass production of amphetamine. The task proofed to be difficult but manageable, 10 years later the new, improved “Banzai-Pill” was ready, just at the eve of the Russo-Japanese War.
The Cult of the Offensive and the Bitter Pill
During the decades before the First World War a phenomenon which may be called a "cult of the offensive" swept through Europe. Militaries glorified the offensive and adopted offensive military doctrines, while civilian elites and public assumed that the offense had the advantage in warfareThe gulf between myth and the realities of warfare has never been greater than in the years before the Great War. Despite the large and growing advantage which defenders gained against attackers as a result of the invention of rifled and repeating small arms, the machine gun, barbed wire, and the development of railroads, Europeans increasingly believed that attackers would hold the advantage on the battlefield, and that wars would be short and "decisive"-a "brief storm," in the words of the German Chancellor Bethram Hollewg.
The Russo–Japanese War (1904–1905) was seen in the light of wishful thinking by many observer. The war was fought between the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan over rival imperial ambitions in Manchuria and Korea. The major theaters of operations were the Liaodong Peninsula and Mukden in Southern Manchuria and the seas around Korea, Japan and the Yellow Sea. The Japanese were on the offensive for most of the war and used massed infantry assaults against defensive positions, which would later become the standard of all European armies during the Great War.
A German military advisor sent to Japan, Jakob Meckel, had a tremendous impact on the development of the Japanese military training, tactics, strategy, and organization. His reforms were credited with Japan's overwhelming victory over China in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 along with a the chemically enhanced performance of the Japanese warrior. Especially the letter offered a way to explain how an inferior race, the “yellow peril” could overwhelm the European Russian soldiers.
Thus the arms race not only one of battleships and canons but of pharmaceutical factories as well. Something the German Reich especially excelled at. In the instead of a short, glorious war producing heroes the “Great War” turned out to be meat-grinder spitting out a generation of "meth heads".
Hemingway, Stein and the Restless Generation
One of these addicts was the Ernest Hemingway American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, was a physician, and his mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was a musician.
Early in 1918, Hemingway responded to a Red Cross recruitment effort in Kansas City and signed on to become an ambulance driver in Italy. He left New York in May and arrived in Paris as the city was under bombardment from German artillery. On his first day in Milan, he was sent to the scene of a munitions factory explosion, where rescuers retrieved the shredded remains of female workers. On July 8, he was seriously wounded by mortar fire, having just returned from the canteen bringing chocolate and cigarettes for the men at the front line.Despite his wounds, Hemingway assisted Italian soldiers to safety, for which he received the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery.
Hemingway returned home early in 1919 to a time of readjustment. Not yet 20 years old, he had gained from the war a maturity that was at odds with living at home without a job and with the need for recuperation. A family friend offered him a job in Toronto, and with nothing else to do, he accepted. Late that year he began as a freelancer, staff writer, and foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star Weekly. Hemingway was hired as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, and the left for Paris with his newlywed wife. In Paris, Hemingway met writers such as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound who "could help a young writer up the rungs of a career". The Hemingway of the early Paris years was a "tall, handsome, muscular, broad-shouldered, brown-eyed, rosy-cheeked, square-jawed, soft-voiced young man."
Stein, who was the bastion of modernism in Paris, became Hemingway's mentor and godmother to his son Jack; she introduced him to the expatriate artists and writers of the Montparnasse Quarter, whom she referred to as the "Restless Generation"—a term Hemingway popularized with the publication of The City that Never Sleeps. A regular at Stein's salon, Hemingway met influential painters such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Juan Gris.
Hemingway claims that Stein heard the phrase of the restless generation from a garage owner who serviced Stein's car. When a young mechanic was to hasty and almost got himself killed because he lacked any caution the garage owner only shrugged his shoulders and commented “La génération agitée." as if they were all these young man were doomed to jump into their early graves.
The Raving Twenties
What made Hemingway into the Voice, the Icon the Author of his generation was his famous book The City that Never Sleeps. In the book he describes post war Paris, but most importantly he dedicated long passages to young man who were embracing that amphetamine consumption as a new cultural revolution, an awakening.
Young people used the still wide spread amphetamine to fuel their all-night dances at Paris clubs. Hemingway described dancers emerging from clubs at 5 a.m. with dilated pupils, celebrating the drug for stimulation and alertness, which they viewed as different from the intoxication caused by alcohol commen with the “pre-war generation”. “amphetamines symbolises the smart, on-the-ball, cool image, a stimulation not an intoxication [...] greater awareness, not escape" and "confidence and articulacy" rather than the drunken rowdiness of previous generations”.
The books highlight is consequently the novel’s protagonist high on ecstasy dancing to the revolutionary electronic music of the Russian exile engineer and artist Léon Theremin, finally breaking with the pre war generations conventions, with their word, embracing the “génération agitée “ and becoming one of Paris' first “raver”.
Notes and Sources
This is a short, one shot wikipedia based timeline inspired by
Lysergacide: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
Just some additional notes:
MDMA (Ecstasy) was developed by a German pharmaceutical company in 1912. Originally known as “Methylsafrylaminc,” it was intended as a parent compound to synthesize medications that control bleeding. The date of discovery of amphetamine as wells as MDMA are both from OTL, in this timeline their medical/recreational properties are discovered a bit earlier.
As for the difference between MDMA and Amphetamine:
The primary effects of Amphetamine are increased energy, mental alertness, feelings of euphoria, and suppression of appetite.
MDMA provoke more euphoria and happiness than Amphetamine, with less difficulties to sleep and an immensely powerful feeling of being connected with other people. Especially the latter should be seductive to many young people in the timeline after the horror of the Great War.
Nevertheless they are both additictive, bad for health etc. There is some evidence that it might help posttraumatic stress disorder, but self medication as it happens in the timeline is obviously not a good solution, and should be letft to trained psychatrist.
The Birth of a Generation
The story of the “Restless Generation” fittingly begins at the time of their birth. Amphetamine[note (contracted from alpha‑methylphenethylamine) is a potent central nervous system (CNS) stimulant Amphetamine was discovered in 1887. Amphetamine was first synthesized in 1887 in Germany by Romanian chemist Lazăr Edeleanu who named it phenylisopropylamine. Shortly after, methamphetamine was synthesized from ephedrine in 1893 by Japanese chemist Nagai Nagayoshi.
Nagai was born in the Myōdō District, Awa Province in what is now the Tokushima Prefecture, as the son of a doctor and started studying rangaku medicine at the Dutch Medical School of Nagasaki in 1864. While in Nagasaki, he made the acquaintance of Ōkubo Toshimichi, Itō Hirobumi, and other future leaders of the Meiji government.
Nagai continued his studies at Tokyo Imperial University and became the first doctor of pharmacy in Japan. He was sent under government sponsorship to Prussia in 1871 to study at the University of Berlin. He was the only civilian in a group of military students sent to study in Great Britain and France, and he traveled by way of the United States and Great Britain. While in Berlin, he resided at the home of Japanese diplomat Aoki Shūzō. He was influenced by the lectures of von Hofmann, and received a doctorate with a study on eugenol while working as an assistant at von Hofmann's laboratory. He decided to take up organic chemistry in 1873. Nagai returned to Japan in 1883 to take up a position at the Tokyo Imperial University, and became Professor of Chemistry and Pharmacy there in 1893. His research centered on the chemical analysis of various Japanese and Chinese traditional herbal medicines.
Nagai was also the first to understand the stimulating properties of Amphetamine and methamphetamine. He also realized that the properties, higher alertness, wakefulness and general apparent increase in fitness may be beneficial to the Japanese soldiers fighting in the First Sino-Japanese War. The war was as fought between the Qing Empire and the Empire of Japan, primarily over influence of Korea. Since Nagai was well connected with the rest of the Meiji establishment, including the military. A few “Banzai-Pills” were developed, produced and distributed among a handful of elite soldiers.
The first test seemed promising but it also became apparent that in order to make a real difference on the battlefield Nippon needed mass production of amphetamine. The task proofed to be difficult but manageable, 10 years later the new, improved “Banzai-Pill” was ready, just at the eve of the Russo-Japanese War.
The Cult of the Offensive and the Bitter Pill
During the decades before the First World War a phenomenon which may be called a "cult of the offensive" swept through Europe. Militaries glorified the offensive and adopted offensive military doctrines, while civilian elites and public assumed that the offense had the advantage in warfareThe gulf between myth and the realities of warfare has never been greater than in the years before the Great War. Despite the large and growing advantage which defenders gained against attackers as a result of the invention of rifled and repeating small arms, the machine gun, barbed wire, and the development of railroads, Europeans increasingly believed that attackers would hold the advantage on the battlefield, and that wars would be short and "decisive"-a "brief storm," in the words of the German Chancellor Bethram Hollewg.
The Russo–Japanese War (1904–1905) was seen in the light of wishful thinking by many observer. The war was fought between the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan over rival imperial ambitions in Manchuria and Korea. The major theaters of operations were the Liaodong Peninsula and Mukden in Southern Manchuria and the seas around Korea, Japan and the Yellow Sea. The Japanese were on the offensive for most of the war and used massed infantry assaults against defensive positions, which would later become the standard of all European armies during the Great War.
A German military advisor sent to Japan, Jakob Meckel, had a tremendous impact on the development of the Japanese military training, tactics, strategy, and organization. His reforms were credited with Japan's overwhelming victory over China in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 along with a the chemically enhanced performance of the Japanese warrior. Especially the letter offered a way to explain how an inferior race, the “yellow peril” could overwhelm the European Russian soldiers.
Thus the arms race not only one of battleships and canons but of pharmaceutical factories as well. Something the German Reich especially excelled at. In the instead of a short, glorious war producing heroes the “Great War” turned out to be meat-grinder spitting out a generation of "meth heads".
Hemingway, Stein and the Restless Generation
One of these addicts was the Ernest Hemingway American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, was a physician, and his mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was a musician.
Early in 1918, Hemingway responded to a Red Cross recruitment effort in Kansas City and signed on to become an ambulance driver in Italy. He left New York in May and arrived in Paris as the city was under bombardment from German artillery. On his first day in Milan, he was sent to the scene of a munitions factory explosion, where rescuers retrieved the shredded remains of female workers. On July 8, he was seriously wounded by mortar fire, having just returned from the canteen bringing chocolate and cigarettes for the men at the front line.Despite his wounds, Hemingway assisted Italian soldiers to safety, for which he received the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery.
Hemingway returned home early in 1919 to a time of readjustment. Not yet 20 years old, he had gained from the war a maturity that was at odds with living at home without a job and with the need for recuperation. A family friend offered him a job in Toronto, and with nothing else to do, he accepted. Late that year he began as a freelancer, staff writer, and foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star Weekly. Hemingway was hired as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, and the left for Paris with his newlywed wife. In Paris, Hemingway met writers such as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound who "could help a young writer up the rungs of a career". The Hemingway of the early Paris years was a "tall, handsome, muscular, broad-shouldered, brown-eyed, rosy-cheeked, square-jawed, soft-voiced young man."
Stein, who was the bastion of modernism in Paris, became Hemingway's mentor and godmother to his son Jack; she introduced him to the expatriate artists and writers of the Montparnasse Quarter, whom she referred to as the "Restless Generation"—a term Hemingway popularized with the publication of The City that Never Sleeps. A regular at Stein's salon, Hemingway met influential painters such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Juan Gris.
Hemingway claims that Stein heard the phrase of the restless generation from a garage owner who serviced Stein's car. When a young mechanic was to hasty and almost got himself killed because he lacked any caution the garage owner only shrugged his shoulders and commented “La génération agitée." as if they were all these young man were doomed to jump into their early graves.
The Raving Twenties
What made Hemingway into the Voice, the Icon the Author of his generation was his famous book The City that Never Sleeps. In the book he describes post war Paris, but most importantly he dedicated long passages to young man who were embracing that amphetamine consumption as a new cultural revolution, an awakening.
Young people used the still wide spread amphetamine to fuel their all-night dances at Paris clubs. Hemingway described dancers emerging from clubs at 5 a.m. with dilated pupils, celebrating the drug for stimulation and alertness, which they viewed as different from the intoxication caused by alcohol commen with the “pre-war generation”. “amphetamines symbolises the smart, on-the-ball, cool image, a stimulation not an intoxication [...] greater awareness, not escape" and "confidence and articulacy" rather than the drunken rowdiness of previous generations”.
The books highlight is consequently the novel’s protagonist high on ecstasy dancing to the revolutionary electronic music of the Russian exile engineer and artist Léon Theremin, finally breaking with the pre war generations conventions, with their word, embracing the “génération agitée “ and becoming one of Paris' first “raver”.
Notes and Sources
This is a short, one shot wikipedia based timeline inspired by
Lysergacide: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
Just some additional notes:
MDMA (Ecstasy) was developed by a German pharmaceutical company in 1912. Originally known as “Methylsafrylaminc,” it was intended as a parent compound to synthesize medications that control bleeding. The date of discovery of amphetamine as wells as MDMA are both from OTL, in this timeline their medical/recreational properties are discovered a bit earlier.
As for the difference between MDMA and Amphetamine:
The primary effects of Amphetamine are increased energy, mental alertness, feelings of euphoria, and suppression of appetite.
MDMA provoke more euphoria and happiness than Amphetamine, with less difficulties to sleep and an immensely powerful feeling of being connected with other people. Especially the latter should be seductive to many young people in the timeline after the horror of the Great War.
Nevertheless they are both additictive, bad for health etc. There is some evidence that it might help posttraumatic stress disorder, but self medication as it happens in the timeline is obviously not a good solution, and should be letft to trained psychatrist.
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