After reading and studying the chapter, students should be able to discuss the nature and importance of the early twentieth-century general crisis in Western thought. They should be able to assess the impact of modernism on architecture, painting, and music. They should also be able to describe the place of movies and radio in the popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s. They should be able to discuss the efforts of democratic leaders in the 1920s to establish lasting peace and prosperity. Finally, they should be able to identify the causes of the Great Depression and describe the responses of the western democracies to the challenges economic disaster created.
I. Uncertainty in Modern Thought
A. Modern Philosophy
1. Before World War I, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) proclaimed that the optimistic
Christian order of the West was obsolete, and that it stifled creativity and excellence.
He called for superior individuals to recognize the emptiness of social convention and the meaninglessness of individual life.
2. The Frenchman Henri Bergson (1859–1941) argued that immediate experience and intuition were at least as important as rational thinking and science.
3. Georges Sorel (1847–1922) described Marxian socialism as an inspiring religion, not a scientific truth. He believed that after the workers’ revolution a small revolutionary elite would have to run society.
4. World War I accelerated change in philosophical thought. Change took two main directions.
5. In English-speaking countries, logical empiricism dominated. a) Ludwig Wittgenstein reduced philosophy to the study of language, arguing that philosophers could not make meaningful statements about God, freedom, morality, and so on.
6. On the Continent, existentialism dominated. a) Existentialists generally were atheists, but they sought moral values in a world of terror and uncertainty. b) Jean-Paul Sartre argued that human beings are forced to define themselves by their choices. If they do so consciously, they can overcome life’s meaninglessness. c) Existentialism first gained popularity in Germany in the 1920s as Martin
Heidegger and Karl Jaspers attracted followers. d) Existentialism flowered during and right after World War II. The existentialists
Sartre and Albert Camus were both active in the French resistance against Hitler.
B. The Revival of Christianity
1. Loss of faith in human reason and progress led to renewed interest in Christianity.
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198 Chapter 28: The Age of Anxiety (ca 1900–1940)
2. Among the theologians and thinkers who turned toward faith in God as the only answer to the loneliness and anxiety of the world after the Great War were Karl Barth,
Gabriel Marcel, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Max
Planck, and many others.
C. The New Physics
1. The research of Marie Curie (1867–1934) and Max Planck (1858–1947) showed that the old view of atoms as stable, unbreakable building blocks of nature was inadequate.
2. Albert Einstein (1879–1955) undermined Newtonian physics by postulating the equivalence of mass and energy and by demonstrating that space and time are relative to the viewpoint of the observer.
3. Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) demonstrated that the atom could be split.
4. Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) hypothesized that it was impossible to know precisely the position and speed of an individual electron.
5. The stable, rational world of Newtonian physics dissolved into a universe of tendencies and probabilities.
D. Freudian Psychology
1. Prior to Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), most professional psychologists believed that human behavior was the result of rational calculation by the conscious mind.
2. Beginning in the late 1880s, Sigmund Freud argued that unconscious and instinctual drives were important factors in determining human behavior.
3. After 1918, Freudian psychology was popularized in the U.S. and Europe.
E. Twentieth-Century Literature
1. Nineteenth-century authors had written typically as all-knowing narrators describing characters and their relationships.
2. In the early twentieth century, authors such as Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, William
Faulkner, and James Joyce wrote from the point of view of a single, confused individual or multiple individuals.
II. Modern Art and Music
A. Architecture and Design
1. From the 1890s onward, architects in Europe and the U.S. pioneered new building styles that stressed functionalism and efficiency of design and used cheap steel and reinforced concrete.
2. In Germany, the Bauhaus school of architecture founded by Walter Gropius (1883–
1969) developed this trend in the 1920s and 1930s.
B. Modern Painting
1. Modern painting developed as a reaction to the “superrealism” of French impressionism.
2. After 1905, art became increasingly nonrepresentational and abstract.
3. Postimpressionists like Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) and Paul Gauguin (1848–
1903) sought to express a complicated psychological viewpoint as well as emotional intensity.
4. Modern art began by painting real objects but with primary attention to the arrangement of color, line, and form. Examples of this approach include Paul Cézanne
(1839–1906) and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973).
5. Art developed toward the representation of pure form without reference to real objects, as in the work of Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), and to attacks on all accepted conventions of art and behavior, as exemplified by the work of the surrealists and the
Dadaists.
C. Modern Music
1. Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) was attracted to the emotional intensity of expressionism.
2. Alban Berg (1885–1935) brought expressionism into opera.
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Chapter 28: The Age of Anxiety (ca 1900–1940) 199
3.
Some composers, such as Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951), moved in the direction of dissonance and entirely atonal music without recognizable harmonies.
III. Movies and Radio
A. Movies
1. Movies became a form of mass entertainment that replaced traditional arts and amusement for rural people.
2. By the 1930s, movies were weekly entertainment for much of the population in Europe and North America.
B. Radio
1. Radio became commercially viable in the 1920s.
2. By the late 1930s, most households in Britain and Germany had inexpensive individual sets.
3. Radio was an extremely powerful outlet for political propaganda.
4. Motion pictures also became powerful tools of political indoctrination.
IV. The Search for Peace and Political Stability
A. Germany and the Western Powers
1. After Versailles, the British were ready for conciliation with Germany, while the
French took a hard line.
2. In April 1921, the Allied reparations commission ordered Germany to pay huge reparations.
3. In 1922, the German (Weimar) Republic refused to pay, prompting Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr. As the German government printed money to pay striking
Ruhr workers unemployment benefits, runaway inflation destroyed the savings of retirees and the middle class.
4. Under the leadership of Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929), Germany was able to move toward reconciliation with France.
B. Hope in Foreign Affairs, 1924–1929
1. The Dawes Plan (1924) stabilized the situation, cutting reparations and providing private American loans to pay for what remained.
2. Agreements signed among European nations at Locarno, Switzerland, in 1925 gave
Europeans a sense of growing international security.
C. Hope in Democratic Government
1. After 1923, democracy seemed to take root in Weimar Germany.
2. After 1924, the government of France rested mainly in the hands of a coalition of moderates and business interests.
3. In Britain, the rise of the Labour party and passage of welfare measures guaranteed social peace and maintained relative equality among the classes.
V. The Great Depression, 1929

1939
A. The Economic Crisis
1. In the late 1920s, American investment in the stock market boomed as direct investment in factories, farms, equipment, and so on fell.
2. Much of the stock market investment was “on margin”; that is, bought with loans. As the stock market began to fall in October 1929, investors began a mass sell-off, which caused the market to collapse.
3. Recall of private loans by American banks caused the world banking system to fall apart.
4. The financial crisis caused world production of goods to fall by more than one-third between 1929 and 1933.
5. Traditional economic theory did not recognize that government deficit spending to stimulate the economy was a possible solution in this situation.
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200 Chapter 28: The Age of Anxiety (ca 1900–1940)
B. Mass Unemployment
1. The need for large-scale government spending was tied to mass unemployment.
2. Unemployment posed grave social problems.
C. The New Deal in the United States
1. In 1933, newly elected U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began using government intervention in the economy to fight the Depression.
2. Roosevelt’s administration passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act that aimed to raise prices and farm income by limiting production.
3. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration was supposed to fix wages and prices for the benefit of all, but the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1935.
4. Under Roosevelt, the U.S. government hired many unemployed workers through the
Works Progress Administration.
5. The United States also created a national social security system and legalized collective bargaining by unions in this period.
D. The Scandinavian Response to the Depression
1. The Swedish Social Democratic party had great success dealing with the Depression by increasing social welfare benefits and using government deficit spending to finance big public works projects.
E. Recovery and Reform in Britain and France
1. British manufacturing’s reorientation from international to national markets for consumer goods alleviated the worst of the Depression.
2. In France, political disunity prevented effective action to deal with the economic crisis.
The only attempt to do so was that of Leon Blum’s Popular Front government, a coalition of communist and moderate left parties.
1.
“Political Blunders by the Western Democracies.” What political mistakes helped to increase tensions during the Age of Anxiety? Was there a leadership crisis in the postwar period? Sources:
J. Sontag, A Broken World, 1919–1939 (1971); A. Bullock, The Twentieth Century (1971).
2.
“Changing Social Strata.” How did World War I affect the social structure of Europe? Was there more social mobility after the war? Why? Sources: J. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning
(1995); C. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (1975); M. Childs, Sweden: The Middle Way
(1961); J. Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1932).
3.
“The Impact of Sigmund Freud.” How did Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis contribute to the
Age of Anxiety? How did these ideas reach the masses? Sources: A. Starr, Freud (1989); M.
White, ed., The Age of Analysis (1955); P. Rieff, Freud (1956).
4. “The Impact of Mass Leisure.” How did the development of more leisure time affect the postwar world? How was mass leisure organized? What sports and pastimes were engaged in by the masses in the 1920s? Sources: M. Marrus, ed., Emergence of Leisure (1974); W. Baker, Spoils in
Western Society (1983).
Read aloud in class “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot. Then have students read the poem again to themselves. Discuss passages that illustrate the anxiety Eliot expressed about life in the modern world. Then, have students write an essay on Prufrock as the prototypical alienated person in the Age of Anxiety.
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Chapter 28: The Age of Anxiety (ca 1900–1940) 201
I. Classroom Discussion Suggestions
A. What impact did Nietzsche’s ideas have on supporters of totalitarianism?
B. Why did the League of Nations fail?
C. How was the radio successfully exploited by political leaders of the 1920s and 1930s?
D. Discuss the development of the film industry. What effect did it have on leisure time?
II. Doing History
A. Give students an outline map of Europe and ask them to label the new nations and boundaries of Europe after World War I.
B. If slides are available, show students slides depicting the work of Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse,
Dali, and other artists discussed in the chapter. Discuss how the artist and artwork reflect their historical context. Students should be directed to read selections from the following sources: A. H. Barr, Wha t Is Modern Painting? (1966); J. Rewald, The History of
Impressionism (1956); H. Gardner, Art through the Ages (1961).
C. How could there have been such a resurgence of arts and letters during the politically corrupt
Weimar Republic? Are there parallels in the history of Western civilization where artistic and literary renaissances occur during periods of political dysfunction? Sources: P. Gay,
Weimar Culture (1970); T. Wolfe, From Bauhaus to My House (1981); P. Fritzsche,
Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (1990).
D. Have students read selections from one or more of the following works and write short analytical papers on the social themes presented in them: E. Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
(1926); W. Holtby, South Riding (1936); W. Greenwood, Love on the Dole (1933); H.
Fallada, Little Man, What Now?
(1932); A. Gide, The Counterfeiters; A. Camus, The Plague
(1942) and The Stra nger (1942).
III. Cooperative Learning Activities
A. Have six student teams read selections from the following modern philosophers and present the philosophers’ ideas to the class.
1. Nietzsche
2. Bergson
3. Wittgenstein
4. Sartre
5. Heidegger
6. Kierkegaard
B. Have five student teams decide on paintings that best express modern characteristics and anxieties. Have them show reproductions of the paintings in class and explain why they feel these particular paintings best represent the modern ethos.
1. On an outline map of the Western Hemisphere, have students pinpoint the birthplaces of the following significant artists and writers of the Age of Anxiety. a. Virginia Woolf b. Marcel Proust c. James Joyce d. William Faulkner e. Thomas Wolfe f. T. S. Eliot
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202 Chapter 28: The Age of Anxiety (ca 1900–1940) g. Ezra Pound h. Ernest Hemingway i. Gertrude Stein j. Salvador Dali k. Pablo Picasso l.
Paul Cézanne m. George Grosz n. Gustav Klimt o. Edvard Munch
2. Have students shade in the principal status quo powers and the principal revisionist powers on a blank outline map of Europe.
3. Using Map 28.1 (The Great Depression in the United States, Britain, and Europe) as a reference, answer the following questions. a. Where was unemployment concentrated in Europe and in Britain? Why? b. How did patterns of unemployment shape patterns of worker migration in the United States? c. How would you explain the extraordinarily high rates of unemployment in Germany in
1932?
1. 1929–1941: The Great Depression.
(25 min. B/W. National Geographic Films.)
2. Vienna: Stripping the Facade.
(25 min. Color. Media Guild Films.)
3. Picasso: Artist of the Century.
Parts I and II. (30 min. each. Color. Films, Inc.)
4. League of Nations: The Hope of Mankind.
Parts I and 11. (26 min. each. Color. Time-Life Films.)
5. Cabaret.
(134 min. Color. Films, Inc.)
6. The Blue Angel.
(91 min. B/W. Films, Inc.)
7. James Joyce.
(Videodisc. 80 min. Color. Films for the Humanities and Sciences.)
8.
Ezra Pound: Poet’s Poet.
(Videodisc. 28 min. Color. Films for the Humanities and Sciences.)
9. Gertrude Stein and a Companion.
(Videodisc. 87 min. Color. Films for the Humanities and
Sciences.)
10. Ernest Hemingway: Grace under Pressure.
(Videodisc. 55 min. Color. Films for the Humanities and Sciences.)
11. Schönberg:
Ausgewählte Lieder
(Audio CD, 1995)
12. Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky: Petrouchka / Le Sacre du Printemps (Audio CD, 1990)
13. Pablo Picasso: Official Website ( http://www.picasso.fr/anglais )
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Chapter 28: The Age of Anxiety (ca 1900–1940) 203
1. Freud Museum London ( http://www.freud.org.uk/ )
2. Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture ( http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/freud )
3. America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs
( memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html
)
4. Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation ( http://www.franklloydwright.org/ )
5. The Perspectives of Nietzsche ( http://www.pitt.edu/~wbcurry/nietzsche.html
)
6. The Hemingway Resource Center ( http://www.lostgeneration.com/hrc.htm
)
7. Existentialism ( http://www.thecry.com/existentialism/index.html
)
A. Bullock, ed., The Twentieth Century (1971), is particularly noteworthy because it is a lavish visual feast combined with penetrating essays on major developments. V. Berghahn, Europe in the Era of Two
World Wars: From Militarism and Genocide to Civil Society (2006), is short and stimulating. Two excellent accounts of contemporary history—one with a liberal and the other with a conservative point of view—are R. Paxton, Europe in the Twentieth Century , 3d ed. (1997), and P. Johnson, Modern
Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (1983). I. Cawood, Britain in the Twentieth
Century (2004), and J. McMillan, Twentieth-Century France: Politics and Society, 1898–1991 (1992), are recommended national surveys. Crucial changes in thought before and after World War I are discussed in three rewarding intellectual histories: J. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought,
1848–1914 (2000); W. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century
Thought (1997); and M. Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982).
B. Smith,
Modernism’s History: A Study in Twentieth-Century Thought and Ideas
(1998), is admirably straightforward with a global perspective, and J. Winders, European Culture Since 1848: From
Modernism to Postmodern and Beyond (1998), is lively and accessible. S. Aschheim, The Nietzsche
Legacy in German, 1890–1990 (1992), considers the range of responses to the pioneering philosopher.
J. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Meaning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995), is an excellent study of the war’s influence on literature, art, and society. J. Rewald, The History of
Impressionism (1961), and R. Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the
Wars (1995), are excellent and also reflect changing tastes in art history. H. Jaffe, Pablo Picasso
(1982), is a visual feast and highly recommended. P. Collaer, A History of Modern Music (1961), and
H. R. Hitchcock, Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1958), are good introductions, whereas T. Wolf, From Bauhaus to My House (1981), is a lively critique of modern architecture. L.
Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein (1952), is a fascinating study of the new physics. A. Storr,
Freud (1989), and P. Rieff, Freud (1956), consider the man and how his theories have stood the test of time. T. Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century
(1998), probes the moral and intellectual issues of the modern age. H. Liebersohn, Fate and Utopia in
German Soc iology (1988), analyzes developments in German social science. B. Jules-Rossette,
Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image (2007), tells the fascinating story of the
American black dancer who won fame and fortune in Paris. D. Kertzer and M. Barbagli, eds., The
History of the European Family , Vol. 3: Family Life in the Twentieth Century (2003), is a distinguished collection of essays by experts. M. Marrus, ed., Emergence of Leisure (1974), is a pioneering inquiry into an important aspect of mass culture. H. Daniels-Rops, A Fight for God , 2 vols. (1966), is a sympathetic history of the Catholic church between 1870 and 1939.
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204 Chapter 28: The Age of Anxiety (ca 1900–1940)
G. Ambrosius and W. Hibbard, A Social and Economic History of Twentieth-Century Europe (1989), and I. Berend, An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Europe: Economic Regimes from Laissez-
Faire to Globalization (2006), are recommended and interesting to compare. P. Cohrs, The Unfinished
Peace After World War I: America, Britain, and the Stabilization of Europe, 1919–1932 (2006), and C.
Rosenberg, Policing Paris: The Origins of Modern Immigration Control Between the Wars (2006) are two important studies on aspects of the postwar challenge. J. Jacobson, Locarno Diplomacy: Germany and the West, 1925–1929 (1972), is a superb study of Stresemann and enduring tensions after the
Locarno breakthrough. B. Martin, France and the Apres Guerre: Illusions and Disillusionments (1999), is a solid work with masterful portraits of key figures. S. Reynolds, France Between the Wars: Gender and Politics (1996), are major reconsiderations of French politics from different perspectives. R.
McRibben, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (2000), is recommended. I. Berend, Decades of
Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe Before World War II (2001), is a stimulating, up-to-date study of the complex region. M. Childs, Sweden: The Middle Way (1961), applauds Sweden’s efforts at social reform. O. and L. Handlin, Liberty in America Since 1600 , vol. 4 (1994), argues that the United States has erred in moving from equality of opportunity to equality of results since 1920. The crisis of the interwar period comes alive in R. Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (1950), in which famous
Western writers tell why they were attracted to and later repelled by communism; J. Ortega y Gasset’s renowned The Revolt of the Masses (1932); and F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), a famous warning of the dangers to democratic freedoms.
In addition to Rothermund’s and Kindleberger’s excellent studies of the Great Depression cited in the
Notes, P. Temin, Lessons from the Great Depression (1987), is a judicious evaluation by an outstanding economic historian. J. Garraty, Unemployment in History (1978), is noteworthy, though novels best portray the human tragedy of economic decline. W. Holtby, South Riding (1936), and W. Greenwood,
Love on the Dole (1933), are moving stories of the Great Depression in England. Hans Fallada, Little
Man, What Now?
(1932), is the classic counterpart for Germany. Also highly recommended as commentaries on English life between the wars are N. Gray, The Worst of Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression in Britain (1985), and George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Among
French novelists, Andre Gide painstakingly examines the French middle class and its values in The
Counterfeiters ; Albert Camus, the greatest of the existential novelists, is at his unforgettable best in The
Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947).
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