Study Guide Bentley, chapter 34 (part 1) An Age of Anxiety 1. Birth of a Monster? Just as Adolf Hitler changed as a result of his life experiences in the early twentieth century, so too did European society as a whole. Badly shaken by the effects of years of war, Europeans experienced a shock to their system of values, beliefs, and traditions. Profound scientific and cultural transformations that came to the fore in the postwar decades also contributed to a sense of loss and anxiety. As peoples in Europe and around the world struggled to come to terms with the aftermath of war, an unprecedented economic contraction gripped the international community. 2. Postwar Cultural Change and Technological Innovation: Although most of Western Europe and the United States wanted simply to return to prewar stability and conservatism, the war had initiated changes that could not be reversed. White-collar workers and the middle class grew substantially, but the working class declined. European refugees migrated in large numbers until the United States, Canada, and Australia enacted immigration restrictions. Women's lives changed the most. Many women had joined the work force as wage earners during the war and were reluctant to abandon those jobs. After the war, western European and U.S. women also won the right to vote. Technological innovations such as aircraft, automobiles, radio, home appliances, and electricity all changed people's lives. The cinema and jazz transformed popular culture. Advances in physics and the social sciences fundamentally altered Western cultures' view of themselves, often in very unsettling ways. The Great War's scars transformed the physical environment, as did dams, irrigation projects, and continued industrialization and suburbanization. 3. Postwar Pessimism: William Butler Yeats The Second Coming (1919) Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? “You are all a lost generation,” noted Gertrude Stein (1874– 1946) to her fellow American writer Ernest Hemingway (1899– 1961). Stein had given a label to the group of American intellectuals and literati who congregated in Paris in the postwar years. This “lost generation” expressed in poetry and fiction the malaise and disillusion that characterized U. S. and European thought after the Great War. The vast majority of European intellectuals rallied enthusiastically to the war in 1914, viewing it as a splendid adventure. The brutal realities of industrialized warfare left no room for heroes, however, and most of these young artists and intellectuals quickly became disillusioned. During the 1920s they spat out their revulsion in a host of war novels such as Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), works overflowing with images of meaningless death and suffering. 4. Attacks on Progress: The “dada” art style of the 1920s represents an attack on “progress” and “modernity” in that it rejected rationality, and so called “artistic standards.” The Great War was a grotesque expression of man’s actually self – any claims to rationality and reason were self-indulgent lies. The world revealed by the war was absurd, and Dada was a nonsense word chosen to communicate this absurdity. It declared that only irrational acts made any sense in an absurd world. The goal of dada was to destroy the false rational order and expose the irrational undercurrents beneath. The dadaists’ rejection of all previous artistic and social values had an impact on other artists who did not necessarily call themselves dadaists, including Max Ernst and George Grosz. Max Ernst – Two Ambiguous Figures 5. Stalin’s Revolution: Stalin rose to power through the ranks of the Bolshevik Party by becoming party secretary and controlling admission into the party. After Lenin's death, he managed to oust Trotsky by arguing against collectivized agriculture. Once in power, he changed his direction to implement the first of several Five-Year Plans intended to industrialize the Soviet Union at an extremely rapid pace, in large part because he knew that the Second World War was only a matter of time and the USSR was not prepared to fight Europe without some extreme measures to build up heavy industry. Stalin phrased this as part of an overall plan to achieve “socialism in one country” and prove the viability of communism. The Communist Party under Stalin established the first totalitarian regime of the twentieth-century. This totalitarian regime subordinated the life of the individual to that of the state. Through strict government control of political, economic and cultural life, and by means of coercive measures such as censorship and terrorism, the state imposed its will upon the conduct of the society. Soviet communists persecuted all individuals and religious groups whose activities they deemed threatening to the state. Using educational propaganda and the state-run media, they worked tirelessly to indoctrinate Soviet citizens to the virtues of communism. 6. Five Year Plans: Stalin's Five-Year Plans were intended to gear up the USSR's industry to compete effectively with the rest of the world, as well as to show the viability of communism to skeptics. It was reasoned that, having demonstrated that socialism in one country would work, other states would fall in line and the revolution would take place on a world scale as true communism was implemented. In reality, the Five-Year Plans were a means for Stalin to enforce his dictatorship and kick-start the economy of the USSR to prepare it for war. The Five-Year Plans were initially successful in industrializing Russia, but at great cost: in effect, Stalin declared war on the peasantry by enforcing collectivized agriculture and demanding quotas of grain and agricultural products both to feed industrialized urban areas and to provide surplus for trade. While the economy of the Soviet Union did prosper during the post-Depression years and was even one of the few places in the world that didn't suffer dramatic effects from the Depression, those who cooperated were generally fanatical communists and those who resisted or protested were exiled, killed, or sentenced to the gulag. The Five-Year Plans did, however, open positions for women in the workplace that were previously unavailable. 7. Collectivization of agriculture: Stalin ordered the collectivization of Soviet agriculture to correspond with the first five year plan. Peasants were to give up any remaining private holdings and to report for reassignment as agricultural wage workers. The idea was to create a more efficient and rapid transition to socialism in the USSR (socialism in one country, as Stalin described it). 8. NKVD: This is the Soviet secret police. The NKVD encouraged Soviet citizens to spy on one another and to “report” seditious, anti-state activities – the potential for abuse is obvious. 9. Purges/show trials: After the civil war, the Soviet government began implementing “show trials” to punish those who had collaborated with the White armies and their foreign allies. The show trials were later extended to large landowners and even better off “kulaks” under the rule of Joseph Stalin 10. Kulaks: This is a class of independent, relatively small landowners across Russia. Lenin encouraged the growth of the kulak class under his program known as the “New Economic Policy.” After the devastation of the Great War, and then the civil war, Lenin saw the acceptance of market principles in agriculture as a means to rapidly increase agricultural production. Many kulak farmers prospered under the NEP – they resisted Joseph Stalin’s reversal of the NEP with the implementation of “collectivization” – Kulaks resisted by destroying their crops, milk supplies and livestock -- many millions were killed or sent to “reeducation camps” (slave labor camps) 11. Gulags - These are the Soviet “labor camps” that were strewn across Siberia. The victims of these camps (those “sentenced” to prison terms) were basically utilized as slave labor in mining, agriculture and infrastructure development 12. Market Crash: The Depression in the 1930s was the deepest and most widespread economic collapse in history. After the stock market crash, consumption and production of manufactured goods around the world declined. Unemployment rose drastically. American banks called in overseas loans to offset their losses. Nations deeply in debt from war loans or reparation payments could not afford early repayment, and panic spread. Nations erected protective tariffs, resulting in ruined export industries and additional reductions in world trade. Still, some nations fared better than others. France and Britain were to some extent insulated from the world economy by their overseas colonies. Those colonies, particularly India, also fared well. Nations that were heavily dependent on imported food and raw materials suffered the most from the Depression. Exported agricultural crops, such as Malayan rubber, Caribbean sugar, and Brazilian coffee, were very hard hit. Widespread economic distress had profound political consequences. For example, the United States enacted sweeping New Deal legislation, and radical politicians came to power in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Nations devastated by declining monocrop exports consciously imitated those new dictatorships and exercised authoritarian control over their peoples and economies. Those political changes had particular significance in the decade leading toward World War II. 13. Global industrial production and world trade: Both production and trade declined dramatically. In the United States 25% unemployment, Germany 50% unemployment with similar numbers in-between for England, France, and Japan. Tariff barriers raised by each of the respective nations increased the problem. 14. Define fascism: A governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism. Fascism was a form of corporatism, but extreme and violent with an emphasis on the group over the individual and on the obliteration of anyone who did not agree or was seen as outside the group. 15. Rise of fascism: Mussolini was the first to use fascism in Europe as a policy of dictatorship. He found a ready audience because of the economic instability after the war, a disgruntled and unemployed population, and the effects of the Depression on an underindustrialized country. His idea was to control not only the parliament but also the industries and the press and to eliminate any criticism against him or his methods. He promised to fight off the evils of communism, which was seen as a plot to steal private property, and restore Italy's national pride, as well as to modernize its economy, army, and society and bring back full employment. 16. Mein Kampf: In his autobiographical work Mein Kampf (My, Struggle), published in 1925, Hitler set forth a fanatical theory of "Aryan racial superiority" that would inspire some of the most malevolent episodes in the history of humankind, including genocide: the systematic extermination of millions of Jews, along with thousands of Roman Catholics, gypsies, homosexuals, and other minorities. Justifying his racist ideology, he wrote: “What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted to it by the creator of the universe.” Mein Kampf exalted the totalitarian state as "the guardian of a millennial future in the face of which the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit." "The state is a means to an end," insisted Hitler. "Its end lies in the preservation and advancement of physically and psychically homogeneous creatures." 17. Germany and the Nazis: Hitler also used the ideology of a centralized state and addressed a country that was in economic collapse. In addition, he gave the German people someone to blame (Jews and communists) and attempted to reinstill national pride through his idea of the racial superiority of the German people. He quickly espoused a plan to rebuild the German Empire by “liberating” all German-speaking peoples and enslaving the undesirable. 18. Japan and the militarists: Japan has very few natural resources that are essential to maintain and expand an industrial economy. The Japanese depended on exports to purchase industrial commodities such as iron, coal and oil from international suppliers (including the United States). The depression and resulting tariff barriers thrown up by Japan’s buyers deepened the economic crisis in Japan. The militarists basically staged a coup d’etat and seized political control of the Japanese government. The militarists (the military), saw imperial expansion as the means to secure the resources Japan would need to remain economically viable and secure. This meant that Japan would steadily encroach upon China and then into the areas controlled by the European and American imperialists in East and Southeast Asia. This was the Japanese master plan: make a bid for control of East Asia and secure the resources, especially oil, at the expense of rival imperialists. The Japanese plan was to become the imperial, hegemonic power in Asia. 19. Spanish Civil War -- Dress rehearsal for WWII: In Spain, the struggle between the polarized political ideologies turned into a civil war in 1936 when right-wing army officers revolted against the democratically elected Popular Front government. Both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany supported the right-wing rebels, but the only support the Republican government had came from the Soviet Union, as the democracies remained neutral, although some of their citizens volunteered to fight for democracy. The right-wing forces led by Francisco Franco were victorious in March of 1939. See Part 2