Trauma shows only its after-effects to outsiders. They never fully grasp its causes or core. Perhaps, what we really have before us when we enter the archive of Western European modernist avant-garde writing is a vast collection of texts each testifying in their own way to the trauma of literature in democratically exceptional times. Although I have focused on a mere fraction of avant-garde writers, no doubt many others could have been discussed, who worked within comparable, highly unstable constellations – of the same and other nationalities or regions, politically engaged or not. Democratic instability and war marked many other parts of the continent. This makes it likely that ‘merger-institutions’ emerged elsewhere, repeating in difference what we saw in previous chapters. Perhaps, therefore, the modernist avant-garde is best read as a large ‘lieu de mémoire,’ a memorial site to which we can always return to recall exceptions to the rule of democratic stability in the 1910s and 1920s.

Charting the effects of that trauma leads to challenging a number of complacent views about the modernist avant-garde in general, and individual writers in particular. In general, it demonstrates that the avant-garde's project to reunite art with life coincided with the confines of art being lifted for it by politics. States of exception structurally imposed on literature a near merger with politics as in pre-modern times, or, through sudden depoliticisation in times of revolution, politics put the confines of the literary sphere up for wholesale renegotiation.