Cultural Visions in Hard Times

Responding to the hard times and political menace, cultural leaders in the democracies captured the spirit of everyday struggle. Some sympathized with the situations of factory workers, homemakers, and shopgirls straining to support themselves and their families; others looked to interpret the lives of an ever-growing number of unemployed. Artists portrayed the inhuman, regimented side of modern life. In 1931, French director René Clair’s film Give Us Liberty likened the routine of prison to work on a factory assembly line. In the film Modern Times (1936), the Little Tramp character created by Charlie Chaplin is a factory worker so molded by his monotonous job that he assumes anything he can see, even a coworker’s body, needs mechanical adjustment.

Media portrayed women alternately as the cause and as the cure for society’s problems. The Blue Angel (1930), a German film starring Marlene Dietrich, contrasted a powerfully seductive woman with an impractical, bumbling professor, showing how mixed-up gender roles could destroy men—and civilization. Such films worked to strengthen fascist claims. In comedies and musicals, by comparison, heroines pulled their men out of the depths of despair. In such films as Keep Smiling (1938), the British comedienne Gracie Fields portrayed spunky working-class women who remained cheerful despite the challenges of living in hard times. To drive home their antifascist, pacifist, or pro-worker beliefs, writers created realistic studies of human misery and the threat of war that haunted life in the 1930s. The British writer George Orwell described the unemployed in the north of England and published an account of atrocities committed during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). German writer Thomas Mann, a Christian, was so outraged at Hitler’s ascent to power that he went into voluntary exile. Mann’s series of novels based on the Old Testament hero Joseph convey the struggle between humane values and barbarism. One volume praised Joseph’s welfare state, in which the granaries were full and the rich paid taxes so that the poor might live decent lives. In Three Guineas (1938), one of her last works, English writer Virginia Woolf attacked militarism, poverty, and the oppression of women, claiming they were interconnected parts of a single, devastating ethos undermining Europe in the 1930s.

Scientists in research institutes and universities pointed out limits to human understanding—limits that seemed at odds with the grandiose pronouncements of dictators. Astronomer Edwin Hubble in California determined in the early 1930s that the universe was an expanding entity and thus an unpredictably changing one. Czech mathematician Kurt Gödel maintained that all mathematical systems contain some propositions that are undecidable. The German physicist Werner Heisenberg developed the uncertainty, or indeterminacy, principle in physics. Scientific observation of atomic behavior, according to this theory, itself disturbs the atom and thereby makes precise formulations impossible. Even scientists, Heisenberg asserted, had to settle for statistical probability. Approximation, probability, and limits to understanding were not concepts that military dictators lived by.

Religious leaders helped foster a spirit of resistance to dictatorship among the faithful. Some prominent clergymen hoped for a re-Christianization of ordinary people so that they might choose religious values rather than fascist ones. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth encouraged opposition to the Nazis, teaching that religious people had to take seriously biblical calls for resistance to oppression. In his 1931 address to the world on social issues, Pope Pius XI (r. 1922–1939) condemned the failure of modern societies to provide their citizens with a decent, moral life. To critics, the proclamation seemed an endorsement of the heavy-handed intervention of the fascists. In Germany, nonetheless, German Catholics opposed Hitler, and religious commitment inspired many other individuals to oppose the rising tide of fascism and protect Jews and other fellow citizens whose lives were now threatened.