World War I felt to participants like will beyond human agency

Evidence

This feeling was already widespread during the war when Rudolf Binding wrote: “[This war] is not to be compared with a campaign. For there one leader pits his will against that of another. But in this War both adversaries lie on the ground, and only the War has its will” (ibid., p. 67). — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2585

Categorization

• XREF: This sense of impersonal catastrophe as its own agent connects to Arendt’s broader argument that totalitarianism dissolves individual agency; resonates with We by Zamyatin. — connects to: Post-war existentialism thrived on the excitement of a shattered world — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 529