Conclusion

The year 1929 was to prove just as fateful as 1914 had been. In 1914, World War I began an orgy of death, causing tens of millions of casualties and the destruction of major dynasties. For four years, the war promoted military technology, fierce nationalism, and the control of everyday life by bureaucracy. As dynasties fell, the Peace of Paris treaties of 1919–1920 left Germans bitterly resentful. In eastern and central Europe the creation of new states by the treaties failed to guarantee a peaceful future. Massive migrations produced additional chaos, as refugees fled political upheaval such as that in Russia and as some new nations expelled minority groups.

War furthered the development of mass society. It leveled social classes on the battlefield and in the graveyard, standardized political thinking through wartime propaganda, and extended many political rights to women. Production techniques, improved during wartime, were used in peacetime for manufacturing consumer goods. Technological innovations—from the prostheses built by Jules Amar to air transport, cinema, and radio transmission—became available. Modernity in the arts intensified, probing the nightmarish war that continued to haunt the population.

By the end of the 1920s, the war had so militarized the population that strongmen had come to power in several countries, including the Soviet Union and Italy, with Adolf Hitler waiting in the wings in Germany. These strongmen and their followers kept alive the wartime commitment to violence. Many Westerners were impressed by the tough, modern efficiency of Fascists and Communists who made parliaments and citizen rule seem out of date, even effeminate. When the U.S. stock market crashed in 1929 and economic disaster circled the globe, authoritarian solutions and militarism continued to look appealing. What followed was a series of catastrophes even more devastating than those of World War I.