20c - Caught Between Wars: Life in the Interwar Years (Lesson)
Caught Between Wars: Life in the Interwar Years
Information below is adapted from the Giant EHAP Review Guide at HistoryTeacher.net
Influences on Twentieth Century Culture
In the twentieth century, small movements in new directions from prior decades became dominant in many fields. Psychology, literature, and art probed the irrational and surreal.
Sigmund Freud's discoveries had huge influence and implications. Freud stated that the mind was divided into the unconscious, the subconscious, and the conscious, and that people were driven by the id (instinctual urges residing in the unconscious), which is controlled by the ego, which is told to do so by the superego (conscience imposed by society). He also found that all memories were kept, in some form, and that repression of memories from the conscious mind led to neuroses. Freud invented psychoanalysis to cure patients of their neuroses. From Freud's discoveries, many inferred that greater candor in society would lead to a happier population. Carl G. Jung broke from Freud and developed a theory of the collective unconscious (a common bond between whole peoples expressed in rituals.)
Movements in Literature.
Surrealism - the surrealists applied Freudian ideas directly and believed art had to penetrate the subconscious. Both an artistic and literary movement, surrealism explored inner thoughts and dreams.
Other writers, though not necessarily surrealists, explored human irrationality. For example:
- Marcel Proust - wrote Remembrance of Things Past and focused on interior monologue and the expression of the narrator's feelings
- Franz Kafka - wrote descriptions of twisted fantasies, Metamorphosis
- James Joyce - wrote Ulysses, which told a day in the life of the average Dubliner in epic proportions
- Virginia Woolf - was a political activist and feminist, A Room of One's Own
In general, novelists turned away from the clear, chronological narratives of the past and focused more on controversial issues and the exploration of dreams and fantasies.
Movements in Art.
In all the arts, the new craze was to shock the audience by presenting absurd things, etc. The Dadaists were excellent at this and used their bizarre routines to infuriate the proper Paris bourgeoisie. The Futurists in Italy were obsessed with speed, and the Fauvres in France and the Expressionists in Germany aimed to wildly break conventions.
In painting, the Cubists and Expressionists confused people with their strange designs, often incorporating violence and amorality. This scared most people.
Consider this: Dada artists attempted to do the unexpected, to shock their audience. This print (on the right) from Marcel Duchamp does just that. He takes the classic Mona Lisa and simply adds a mustache and goatee. IMAGE - LHOOQ by Marcel Duchamp, Public Domain.
More information about Art styles during this time can be found below.
Movements in Philosophy.
The major philosophical work of this time was by Oswald Spengler and was called the Decline of the West. He treated civilizations as living organisms and stated that WWI was the beginning of the end for Western Civilization. Jose Ortega y Gasset was just as pessimistic in The Revolt of the Masses, for he stated that the masses would use their rising power to destroy civilization's achievements.
In Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead stated that philosophers should only worry about things that were precise and empirically demonstrable. Ludwig Wittgenstein agreed in his related system of local positivism, and, in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he tried to limit thought by insisting on symbolic logic. These new analytic philosophers emulated science and tried to get rid of any statements that did not have a precise meaning. Philosophy became more specialized.
Advances in Science.
By this time, science had become incomprehensible to the average person. It became increasingly specialized, and even though people generally knew the implications of the theories, they did not really understand them. Many laws were overturned during this time as well.
Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, in 1887, started one line of new thinking by challenging the theory that the universe was filled with a substance called ether. Albert Einstein followed up on this (and then some) in his Theory of Relativity, which stated that space and time were not absolute.
Physicists were also finding a new understanding of matter. In 1895, Willhelm Roentgen discovered x-rays, and two years later J.J. Thomson proved that the electron existed. Researchers like Pierre and Marie Curie explored radioactivity and further proved the divisibility of the atom. Ernest Rutherford followed up on this by associating radioactivity with the breakdown of large atoms.
This led to quantum physics, or the attempt to explain why Newton's laws didn't work for subatomic particles. Max Planck challenged Newton in 1902 by showing energy was emitted in quanta and had many properties of matter, and in 1919, Rutherford changed an atom by bombarding it with subatomic particles. But they could find no unified theory to explain the subatomic world. Werner Heisenberg then came up with the Uncertainty Principle, which stated they really couldn't know anything for sure. By this time Newtonian physics (in some cases) and the old conception of the atom had been thrown out the window. Science became ultra-complicated, and now there were no more popularizers like Voltaire to make it understandable to everyday people.
In biology, advances were made in the study of heredity and in the isolation of viruses (which led to new drugs like penicillin). In sociology, Emile Durkheim (who used statistics to analyze customs) and Max Weber (the "ideal type") were concerned with the customs that held society together and were concerned about what happened when group norms broke down.
Popular Culture.
There were many new technologies (such as cars, radios, planes, etc.) and lots of excitement in the 1920s. New and daring styles of architecture became popular, as did advertising.
Movies took full advantage of the trend toward distortions in time and perspective. They also became exceedingly popular as well as very profitable. All sorts of people, from the rich to the poor, attended the movies, although movies became more specialized to each country with the introduction of sound in 1929. Spectator sports became all the rage, with competitions drawing large crowds to see who could create and beat new records.
Art during the In Between Years
As explained above, the art of this period is often meant to shock and pieces are represented in unusual ways. It is seen as a reaction to the horrors of war and representative of the new disillusionment felt in Europe.
Son of Man by Rene Magritte
This painting is in a private collection and the images are not yet in the public domain. Photographic reproductions of the painting can be found at http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_of_Man
Surrealism as defined by Larry Treadwell of thecaveonline.com:
Also indebted to Freud; explores the dream world, a world without logic, reason, or meaning; fascination with mystery, the strange encounters between objects, and incongruity; subjects are often indecipherable in their strangeness; the beautiful is the quality of chance association. Values: the dream sequence; illogic; fantasy.
Dadaism is an offshoot of surrealism.
Dadaism as defined by thefreedictionary.com:
A revolt by certain 20th-century painters and writers in France, Germany, and Switzerland against smugness in traditional art and Western society; their works, illustrating absurdity through paintings of purposeless machines and collages of discarded materials, expressed their cynicism about conventional ideas of form and their rejection of traditional concepts of beauty.
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View Sue Pojer's powerpoint over Early Modern Art Links to an external site..
Quoted from the Boundless Art History section on Dadaism and Surrealism Art:
Dadaism
Dada was a multi-disciplinary art movement that rejected the prevailing artistic standards by producing “anti-art” cultural works. Dadaism was intensely anti-war, anti-bourgeois, and held strong political affinities with the radical left. For many participants, the movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests, which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity—in art and more broadly in society—that corresponded to the war. Many Dadaists believed that the reason and logic of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality.
The origin of the name Dada is unclear. Some believe that it is a nonsensical word while others maintain that it originates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara’s and Marcel Janco’s frequent use of the words “da, da,” meaning “yes, yes” in Romanian. Another theory posits that the name “Dada” came during a meeting of when a knife stuck into a French–German dictionary happened to point to dada, a French word for “hobbyhorse.” Likely, the origin of the name Dada is another attempt to devalue a system of logic, namely that of language.
Dada began in Zurich in 1916. Key figures in the Dada movement included Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, and Raoul Hausmann, among others. The movement influenced later styles like avant-garde, and movements including Surrealism, Nouveau Réalisme, pop art, and Fluxus.
Dada was an informal international movement with participants in Europe and North America that employed all kinds of media but is known especially for collage, writing, photomontage, and performance. Dadaists worked in collage, creating compositions by pasting together transportation tickets, maps, plastic wrappers, and other artifacts of daily life. Dada artists also worked in photomontage, a variation on collage that utilized actual or reproductions of photographs printed in the press. In Cologne, Max Ernst used photographs taken from the front during World War I to comment on the war. Another variation of collage used by Dadaists was assemblage, the assembly of everyday objects to produce meaningful or meaningless pieces of work, including war objects and trash.
When World War I ended in 1918, most of the Zurich Dadaists returned to their home countries, while some began Dada activities in other cities.
Like Zurich, New York City was a refuge for writers and artists from World War I. Frenchmen Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia met American artist Man Ray in New York City in 1915. The trio soon became the center of radical anti-art activities in the United States.
During this time, Duchamp began exhibiting “readymades” (everyday objects found or purchased and declared art) and was active in the Society of Independent Artists. In 1917, he submitted the now famous Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition. (pictured, right) Initially an object of scorn within the arts community, the Fountain has since become almost canonized by some as one of the most recognizable modernist works of sculpture. The committee presiding over Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize in 2004, for example, called it “the most influential work of modern art.”
By 1921, most of the original Dadaists moved to Paris, where Dada experienced its last major incarnation. Inspired by Tristan Tzara, Paris Dada soon issued manifestos, organized demonstrations, staged performances, and a number of journals.
While broad, the Dada movement was unstable. By 1924, artists had gone on to other ideas and movements including surrealism and social realism. Some theorists argue that Dada was the beginning of postmodern art.
Surrealism
Surrealism was a cultural movement beginning in the 1920s that sprang directly out of Dadaism and overlapped in many senses. Surrealist works drew inspiration from intuition, the power of the unconscious mind, and various psychological schools of thought. The work often features unexpected juxtapositions, non sequiturs, and elements of surprise.
First and foremost, Surrealist artists and writers regarded their work as an expression of the philosophical movement, with the artwork being an artifact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement. Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory.
As the Surrealists developed their philosophy, they believed that Surrealism would advocate the idea that ordinary and representative expression was vital and important, but that expression must be fully open to the imagination. Freud’s work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious was of utmost importance to the Surrealists as they developed methods to liberate their imaginations.
Like Dada, Surrealism aimed to revolutionize human experience, in terms of the personal, cultural, social, and political aspects. Surrealists wanted to free people from false rationality, and also from restrictive customs and structures. Breton proclaimed that the true aim of Surrealism was “long live the social revolution, and it alone!”
In your notes, respond to the following.
Mass politics became an established reality during the interwar period. At the same time, the new technology of film allowed for the spread of dramatically new images of mass mobilization and participation in politics. Use these clips to discuss what new cultural and political realities got communicated in the following two movies. Potemkin was Bolshevik propaganda. Triumph of the Will was Nazi propaganda.
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