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Déjà Vu: Cultural Crisis and Malaise
in Early 20th Century Europe
Expressions of the 17th Century
Crisis
Growing Uncertainties: What is true?
What lies ahead? What is the nature of human kind? What is authority
and where is it located?
Science: Einstein and his theories of
relativity (1905 and 1911); Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty in
science (1927)
Psychology: Freud (1856-1939); discovery
of the unconscious (Interpretation of Dreams [1900], Psychology
of Everyday Life [1904]), the workings of individual psyche [ego,
id, super ego] extrapollated to society in Civilization
and Its Discontents (1930)
Politics: disillusionment with Parliamentary
democracy; mass democracy; the rise of fascism, and the mass man who
believes in "his right to be unreasonable."
Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1930).
Under fascism "there appears for the first time in Europe a type
of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right but simply
shows himself resolved to impose his opionions. This is the new thing:
the right not to be reasonable, the reason of unreason."
The Effects of the Great War:
Paul Valery The Intellectural Crisis (1919) "The
World . . . is seeking to unite the blessing of life with the advantages
of death. A certain confusion still reigns, but yet a little while
and all will be made clear; at last we shall behold the miracle
of a strictly animla society, a perfect and final ant-hill."
T. S. Elliot, The Wasteland (1922)
Eric Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western
Front (1928)
End of European Predominance and Civilization:
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (1918): Europe
was entering another dark age, an age of iron, a souless urban society
that would be dominated by "Ceasar figures," who would ward off chaos
by moblizing ruthless energy.
Paul Valery The Intellectural Crisis (1919): The advantages
of Europe in the mechanical arts, applied sciences, and scientific
methods of war and peace--on which European predominance was based--is
gradually disappearing in favor of other areas of the world whose
brute size of populations, land area, and raw materials will exclusively
determine the order of the emerging world.
Art: Concerns about dehumanization and Pictures
of Despair
Influence of African
Art
Picasso and cubism:
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
Max Beckman:
The Night (1918-1919)
Other paintings
Art, Politics, and Propaganda
Common images in Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism, and German Nazism
Mussolini
Hitler |
