The Age of Anxiety and Uncertainty in the Interwar Period

  • Allied diplomats: optimistic peace plans unmet.

  • WWI, Russian Revolution: damage, no return to pre-war.

  • Age of anxiety until 1950s.

  • Search for meaning.

  • Impact on thought, art, culture; political uncertainty, failure to re-establish peace (1919-1939).

-- Uncertainty in Modern Thought:

  • Revolution in thought before WWI, widespread after.

  • Questioning Enlightenment values: progress, reason, rights.

  • Before 1914: progress, Newtonian physics, individual rights.

  • Since 1880s: thinkers rejected optimism.

  • War: humans violent, irrational.

  • Dictatorships, Great Depression: disorientation, pessimism.

Modern philosophy

  • Nietzsche: challenged progress, rationality; rejected Christianity, "slave morality," "God is dead."

  • Bergson: intuition, experience = rational thinking.

  • Sorel: socialism = religion.

  • Logical empiricism: rejects traditional philosophy.

  • Wittgenstein: philosophy = language clarification; God, freedom = senseless.

  • Existentialism: moral values in terror, uncertainty.

  • Sartre: humans define themselves, "condemned to be free."

Revival of Christianity

  • Renewed interest due to loss of faith.

  • Christian existentialists: sin, faith, forgiveness.

  • Kierkegaard: religious commitment.

  • Barth: human imperfection, accept God.

  • Marcel, Maritain: Catholic Church, denounced anti-Semitism.

New Physics

  • Challenges to optimism.

  • Curie, Planck, Einstein, Rutherford, Heisenberg: radium, quanta, relativity, atom splitting, uncertainty.

  • New universe: uncertain, no absolute reality.

Freudian Psychology

  • Irrational behavior, unconscious drives (id).

  • Ego, superego: mediate, specify.

  • Drives vs. controls, sexual experimentation.

  • Undermined rational mind.

20th-Century Literature

  • Pessimism, relativism, alienation.

  • Limited viewpoint, complexity, irrationality.

  • Proust, Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce: memories, monologues, wanderings.

  • Anti-utopias: Spengler, Eliot, Kafka, Orwell.

Modern Art and Music

  • Experimentation, new expression.

Architecture and Design

  • Functionalism: useful buildings.

  • Le Corbusier: "house is a machine."

  • Wright, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe: modern designs.

Modern Painting

  • Revolt against impressionism.

  • Postimpressionists: inner emotion.

  • Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky: visions, mysticism, form, color, geometry, abstraction.

  • Dadaism, Surrealism: attack standards, dreams.

Modern Music

  • Expressionism.

  • Stravinsky, Berg, Schönberg: irrationality, violence, abstract patterns.

Movies and Radio

  • Commercial entertainment.

  • Chaplin, German films: escape.

  • Marconi: transatlantic communication.

  • Political propaganda: Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, Riefenstahl.

Search for Peace and Political Stability

  • Versailles: shaky truce.

  • Germany, France, Britain, US, Eastern Europe: problems.

  • 1925-1929: hope, collapse.

Germany and Western Powers

  • Germany key, Treaty harsh.

  • France, Britain disagreed.

  • Keynes: reparations impoverish.

  • Ruhr occupation, inflation.

  • Stresemann: compromise.

Hope in Foreign Affairs

  • Dawes Plan: reduced reparations.

  • Locarno, Kellogg-Briand Pact: agreements.

Hope in Democratic Government

  • Crushed Hitler's plot.

  • Moderate businessmen sought relations.

  • France: small business, family farms.

  • Britain: unemployment, Labour Party.

Great Depression, 1929-1939

  • Severity, duration.

  • Social, political consequences.

Economic Crisis

  • sssygyywse3azs3az3US stock market crash.

  • Imbalance, speculation.

  • Borrowed money,