Nineteen-hundred and fourteen was a transformative year in world history, one which saw the utter destruction of 19th century modes in literature, politics, philosophy, and art. The advent of World War I (1914-1918) eventuated the collapse of several major European empires, including the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Russian Empire, enabling the emergence of the Soviet Union. The casualties, both military and civilian, in the Great War, as it was known before 1939, were catastrophic. Europe had been fractured both culturally and politically, its populations bereft of 40 million souls, and its infrastructure was left in rubble and ruin. In the wake of this unprecedented carnage came a profound existential crisis—who are we now?—which accelerated the Modernist movement. Poetically, this moment is best exemplified by Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot in his 1922 poem, “The Waste Land.” Modernism, which was nascent before the war, finally touched all branches of prestige culture, from literature, art, and philosophy, to architecture, filmmaking, and music, positing a rejection of previous paradigms in favor of the surreal, the futuristic, the subjective, the new.