25. WORLD WAR I AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1914

Introduction for Chapter 25

World War I and Its Aftermath

1914–1929

Grieving Parents

Before World War I, the German artist Käthe Kollwitz gained her artistic reputation with woodcuts of handloom weavers whose livelihoods were threatened by industrialization. From 1914 on, she depicted the suffering and death that swirled around her—and never with more sober force than in these two monuments to her son Peter, who died on the western front in the first months of battle. Today one can still travel to Peter’s burial place in Vladslo, Belgium, to see this father and mother mourning their loss, like millions across Europe in those heartbreaking days. (Kathe Kollwitz / photo © Paul Maeyaert / Bridgeman Images / © 2015 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.)

JULES AMAR, A FRENCH EXPERT on improving the efficiency of industrial work, changed his career as a result of war. After 1914, as hundreds of thousands of soldiers returned from the battlefront missing body parts, plastic surgery and the construction of masks and other devices to hide deformities developed rapidly. Amar devised artificial limbs that would allow the wounded soldier to return to normal life by “making up for a function lost, or greatly reduced.” The artificial arms featured hooks, magnets, and other mechanisms with which veterans could hold a cigarette, play a violin, and, most important, work with tools such as typewriters. Those who had been mangled by the weapons of modern technological warfare would be made whole, it was thought, by technology such as Amar’s.

Jules Amar did his part to confront the tragedy of the Great War, so named by contemporaries because of its staggering human toll—forty million wounded or killed in battle. The Great War did not settle problems or restore social order as the European powers hoped it would. Instead, the war produced political chaos, overturning the Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian Empires. The burden of war crushed the European powers and accelerated the rise of the United States, while colonized peoples who served in the war intensified their demands for independence. In fact, the armistice in 1918 did not truly end conflict: many soldiers remained actively fighting long into what was supposed to be peacetime, and others had been so militarized that they longed for a life that was more like wartime.

CHAPTER FOCUS What political, social, and economic impact did World War I have during the conflict, immediately after it, and through the 1920s?

World War I transformed society, too. A prewar feeling of doom and decline gave way to postwar cynicism. Many Westerners turned their backs on politics and in the Roaring Twenties embraced life with wild gaiety, shopping for new consumer goods, enjoying once forbidden personal freedoms, and taking pleasure in the entertainment provided by films and radio. Others found reason for hope in the new political systems the war made possible: Soviet communism and Italian fascism. Modern communication technologies such as radio gave politicians the means to promote a utopian mass politics that, ironically, was antidemocratic, militaristic, and violent—like the war itself. A war that was welcomed in some quarters as a remedy for modernity destabilized Europe far into the following decades leaving Europeans, including Jules Amar and those he helped, to deal with its violent aftermath.