The Age of Anxiety

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The Age of Anxiety

• McKay Chapter 28 1920s Europe

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Europe in 1919
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Uncertainty in modern thought

• Effects of WWI
• Intellectual crisis
• In philosophy, psychology, literature, etc.
• Questioned liberal beliefs that had guided
  intellectuals since the Enlightenment
• Rejected
• progress reason
• existence of a knowable orderly Newtonian
  society
• Philosophers (writers)
• Attacked optimism of pre-1914
• Noted irrational and violent element of human
  behavior
• Paul Valérys Crisis of the Mind (p. 922)
• Wrote about the crisis of the cruelly injured
  mind
• Claimed war ("storm") had left a "terrible
  uncertainty"

Valery is noted for his ruthless and harshly
realistic depictions of Weimar society and of the
brutality of war
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Modern philosophy

• Traditional belief in progress and the rational
  human was attacked by Nietzsche, Bergson, and
  Sorel before 1914
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• believed that Western civilization was in decline
  
• Weakened by Christianity
• Slave Morality which praised humility, the weak
• W. Civ overstressed rational thinking at the
  expense of emotion and passion

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Nietzsche God is dead. Western Christians no
longer really believed N. believed that a few
superior supermen had to become the leaders of
the herd of inferior people Very influential
among German radicals (later influenced Hitler)
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Modern philosophy

• Logical empiricism
• claimed that philosophy was nothing more than the
  logical clarification of thoughts, language
• Called for
• Moral, ethical, religious questions are not
  "cognitively meaningful" because they can not be
  proven
• could not answer the great issues of the ages
  such as the meaning of life

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
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• Existentialism
• stressed that humans can overcome the
  meaninglessness of life by individual action
• individuals create the meaning and essence of
  their lives, as opposed to deities or authorities
  creating it for them
• Absence of a transcendent force (such as God)
  means that the individual is entirely free, and,
  therefore, ultimately responsible.
• Up to humans to create an ethos of personal
  responsibility outside any branded belief system
• Most famous were French existentialists, Sartre
  and Camus, who became big only after WW II

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The revival of Christianity

• Christianity under attack since Enlightenment
• Before WWI theologians tried harmonize religious
  belief with scientific
• A revitalization of fundamental Christianity took
  place after World War I
• Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) revived
• criticized the worldliness of the church and
  stressed commitment to a remote and majestic God

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Karl Barth (1886-1968) stressed the imperfect and
sinful nature of man Man can not reason out
Gods ways T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis other
literary figures were caught in in revival Graham
Green One began to believe in heaven because one
believed in hell.
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The new physics

• Pre-1920 physics was based on a Newtonian
  weltanschauung
• World machine
• Planck and Einstein undermined belief in constant
  natural laws
• Plank
• work with subatomic energy showed that atoms
  were not the basic building blocks of nature
• Einstein
• EMC2
• postulated that time and space are relative
• They can be altered (curved) with energy
• the universe is infinite
• matter and energy are interchangeable

Prof. Albert Einstein, Princeton U.
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Rutherford Atom was not smallest, solid
matter Identified subatomic particles
(neutron) new physics instead of Newton's
rational laws, there are only tendencies The
world was not a perfect predictable harmonious
machine!!!!
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Freudian psychology

• Prior to Freud, it was assumed that the conscious
  mind processed experiences in a rational and
  logical way.
• According to Freud, human behavior is basically
  irrational.
• The key to understanding the mind is the
  irrational unconscious (the id), which is driven
  by sexual, aggressive, and pleasure seeking
  desires.

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Freud Behavior is a compromise between the needs
of the id and the rationalizing conscious (the
ego), which mediates what a person can do, and
ingrained moral values (the superego), which tell
what a person should do. Instinctual drives can
easily overwhelm the control mechanisms yet
rational thinking and traditional moral values
can cripple people with guilt and neuroses. Many
interpreted Freudian thought as an encouragement
of an uninhibited sex life.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
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Twentieth century literature

• The postwar moods of pessimism, relativism, and
  alienation influenced novelists.
• Literature focused on the complexity and
  irrationality of the human mind
• Writers such as Proust embraced psychological
  relativity--the attempt to understand oneself by
  looking at one's past
• Novelists such as Woolf, Faulkner, and Joyce
  adopted the stream-of-consciousness technique, in
  which ideas and emotions from different time
  periods bubble up randomly
• Some literature, such as that of Spengler, Kafka,
  and Orwell, was anti-utopia--it predicted a
  future of doom.

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Modern painting

• French impressionism replaced with to
  non-representational expressionism
• sought to portray the worlds of emotion and
  imagination
• Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Matisse

Vincent van Gogh Starry Night 1889
Paul Gauguin Tahitian Women On the Beach)
1891
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Themes in Early Modern Art

1. Uncertainty/insecurity.
2. Disillusionment.
3. The subconscious.
4. Overt sexuality.
5. Violence savagery.

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Edvard Munch The Scream (1893)
Expressionism

• Using bright colors to express a particular
  emotion.

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Franz Marc Animal Destinies (1913)
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Gustav Klimt Judith I (1901)
Secessionists

• Disrupt the conservative values of Viennese
  society.
• Obsessed with the self.
• Man is a sexual being, leaning toward despair.

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Gustav Klimt The Kiss (1907-8)
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Georges Braque Violin Candlestick (1910)
CUBISM

• The subject matter is broken down, analyzed, and
  reassembled in abstract form.
• Cezanne ? The artist should treat nature in terms
  of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone.

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Georges Braque Woman with a Guitar(1913)
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Pablo Picasso Les Demoiselles dAvignon (1907)
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Picasso Studio with Plaster Head (1925)
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Pablo Picasso Guernica (1937)
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George Grosz Grey Day(1921)
DaDa

• Ridiculed contemporary culture traditional art
  forms.
• The collapse during WW I of social and moral
  values.
• Nihilistic.

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George Grosz The Pillarsof Society(1926)
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Raoul Hausmann ABCD (1924-25)
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Marcel Duchamp Fountain (1917)
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Marcel Duchamp Nude Descending a Staircase(1912)
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Salvador Dali Soft Construction with Boiled
Beans (Premonition of Civil War), 1936
Surrealism

• Late 1920s-1940s.
• Came from the nihilistic genre of DaDa.
• Influenced by Feuds theories on psychoanalysis
  and the subconscious.
• Confusing startling images like those in dreams.

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Salvador Dali The Persistence of Memory (1931)
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Salvador Dali The Apparition of the Face and
Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938)
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Salvador Dali Geopoliticus Child Watching the
Birth of a New Man (1943)
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Walter Gropius Bauhaus Building (1928)
Bauhaus

• A utopian quality.
• Based on the idealsof simplified formsand
  unadornedfunctionalism.
• The belief that the machine economy could deliver
  elegantly designed items for the masses.
• Used techniques materials employed especially
  in industrial fabrication manufacture ? steel,
  concrete, chrome, glass.

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Walter Gropius Lincoln, MA house (1938)
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Charlie Chaplin The Tramp
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Movies and radio

• The general public embraced movies and radio
  enthusiastically.
• The movie factories and stars such as Mary
  Pickford, Lillian Gish, Douglas Fairbanks,
  Rudolph Valentino, and Charlie Chaplin created a
  new medium and a new culture.
• Movie going became a form of escapism and the
  main entertainment of the masses.

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Radio, which became possible with Marconi's
"wireless" communication and the development of
the vacuum tube, permitted transmission of speech
and music, but major broadcasting did not begin
until 1920. Then every country established
national broadcasting networks by the late
1930s, three of four households in Britain and
Germany had a radio. Dictators and presidents
used the radio for political propaganda. Movies
also became tools of indoctrination In Germany,
Leni Riefenstahls Triumph of the Will propaganda
film for Hitler
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The Mass Media
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The search for peace and political stability

• The search for peace was difficult Germany hated
  the Treaty of Versailles, France was fearful and
  isolated, Britain was undependable, and the
  United States was not interested. Besides,
  Eastern Europe was in ferment and the
  international economy was disrupted and poor.
• Yet, from 1925 to late 1929, it appeared that
  peace and stability were within reach. But the
  collapse of the 1930s ended that quest.

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Germany and the Western powers

• Germany was the key to lasting peace, and the
  Germans hated the Treaty of Versailles.
• France believed that an economically weak Germany
  was necessary for its security and wanted massive
  reparations to repair devastated northern France.
  
• Britain needed a prosperous Germany in order to
  maintain the British economy.
• J. M. Keynes, an economist, argued that the
  Versailles treaty crippled the European economy
  and needed revision.
• His attack on the treaty contributed to guilt
  feelings about Germany in Britain.
• As a result, France and Britain drifted apart.

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Germany and the Western powers

• When Germany refused to continue its heavy
  reparations payments, French and Belgian armies
  occupied the Ruhr (1923).
• The Germans stopped work in the factories, and
  France occupied the German Rhineland this left
  many Germans unemployed.
• Inflation skyrocketed prices soared and savings
  were wiped out.
• Resentment and political unrest among the Germans
  grew many blamed the Western governments, and
  some blamed the Jews and communists.
• Under Stresemann, Germany agreed to revised
  reparations payments, and France agreed to
  re-examine Germany's ability to pay.
• Stresemann represented a new compromising mood in
  both Germany and France.

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Hope in foreign affairs (1924-1929)

• The Dawes Plan (1924) provided a solution to the
  reparations problem the United States lent money
  to Germany so it could pay France and Britain so
  they could pay the United States.
• In 1929, the Young Plan further reduced German
  reparations.
• The treaties of Locarno (1925) eased European
  disputes.
• Germany and France accepted their common border.
• Britain and Italy agreed to fight either France
  or Germany if either country invaded the other.
• Germany joined the League of Nations in 1926.
• The Kellogg Briand Pact (1928) condemned war, and
  the signing states agreed to settle international
  disputes peacefully.

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Hope in democratic government

• The Ruhr crisis saw the emergence of the radical
  right under Hitler his beer hall plot failed,
  but he set out his theories in Mein Kampf.
• But after 1923, democracy took root in Germany as
  the economy boomed.
• However, there were sharp political divisions in
  the country.
• The right consisted of nationalists and
  monarchists.
• The communists remained active on the left.
• Most working-class people supported the socialist
  Social Democrats.

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• In France, the democratically elected government
  rested in the hands of the middleclass oriented
  moderates, while communists and socialists
  battled for the support of the workers.
• Northern France was rebuilt, and Paris became the
  world's cultural center.
• Britain's major problem was unemployment, and the
  government's efforts to ease it led the country
  gradually toward state sponsored welfare plans.
• Britain's Labour party, committed to revisionist
  socialism, replaced the Liberals as the main
  opposition party to the Conservatives.
• Labour, under MacDonald, won in 1924 and 1929,
  yet moved toward socialism gradually.

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The Great Depression (1929-1939)

• The depression of 1929-1939 was worldwide and
  long lasting--and it caused many to turn to
  radical solutions.
• The economic crisis
• The depression began with the American stock
  market crash (October 1929).
• Net investment in factories and farms fell while
  share prices soared.
• Many investors and speculators had bought stocks
  on margin (paying only a small part of the
  purchase price and borrowing the rest from their
  stockbrokers).
• When prices started to fall, thousands of people
  had to sell their shares at once to pay their
  brokers, and a financial panic started.

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Financial crisis led to a decline in production,
first in the United States and then in Europe,
and an unwise turn to protective tariffs. The
absence of international leadership and poor
national economic policies added to the
depression. Mass unemployment As production
decreased, workers lost their jobs and had no
money to buy goods, which cut production even
more. Mass unemployment also caused great social
and psychological problems.
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The Scandinavian response to Depression

• Backed by a strong tradition of community
  cooperation, socialist parties were firmly
  established in Sweden and Norway by the 1920s.
• Deficit spending to finance public works and
  create jobs was used to check unemployment and
  revive the economy after 1929.
• Scandinavia's welfare socialism, though it
  depended on a large bureaucracy and high taxes,
  offered an appealing middle way between
  capitalism and communism or fascism in the 1930s.

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Recovery and reform in Britain and France

• Britain's concentration on its national market
  aided its economic recovery--so that by 1937
  production had grown by 20 percent.
• Government instability in France prevented
  recovery and needed reform.
• The Socialists, led by Blum, became the strongest
  party in France, and his Popular Front government
  attempted New Deal-type reforms.
• France was drawn to the brink of civil war, and
  Blum was forced to resign (1937), leaving the
  country to drift aimlessly.