Introduction for Chapter 26

26 The Age of Anxiety

1880–1940

When Allied diplomats met in Paris in early 1919 with their optimistic plans for building a lasting peace, most people looked forward to happier times. After the terrible trauma of total war, they hoped that life would return to normal and would make sense in the familiar prewar terms of peace, prosperity, and progress. Their hopes were in vain. World War I and the Russian Revolution had mangled too many things beyond repair. Great numbers of people felt themselves increasingly adrift in an age of anxiety and continual change.

Late-nineteenth-century thinkers had already called attention to the pessimism, uncertainty, and irrationalism that seemed to accompany modern life. By 1900 radical developments in philosophy and the sciences had substantiated and popularized such ideas. The modernist movement had begun its sweep through literature, music, and the arts, as avant-garde innovators rejected old cultural forms and began to experiment with new ones. Radical innovations in the arts and sciences dominated Western culture in the 1920s and 1930s and remained influential after World War II. A growing consumer society, and the new media of radio and film, transformed the habits of everyday life and leisure.

Even as modern science, art, and culture challenged received wisdom of all kinds, international relations spiraled into crisis. Despite some progress in the mid-1920s, political stability remained short-lived, and the Great Depression that began in 1929 cast millions into poverty and shocked the status quo. Democratic liberalism was besieged by the rise of authoritarian and Fascist governments, and another world conflict seemed imminent. In the early 1920s the French poet and critic Paul Valéry described his widespread “impression of darkness,” where “almost all the affairs of men remain in a terrible uncertainty. We think of what has disappeared, and we are almost destroyed by what has been destroyed; we do not know what will be born, and we fear the future, not without reason.”1 Valéry’s words captured the gloom and foreboding that dominated the decades between the wars.

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Life in the Age of Anxiety. Dadaist George Grosz’s Inside and Outside is a disturbing image of the class conflict wrought by the economic crises of the 1920s. Wealthy and bestial elites celebrate a luxurious New Year’s Eve “inside,” while “outside” a disabled veteran begs in vain for money from uncaring passersby. (akg-images. Art © Estate of George Grosz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. www.vagarights.com)

CHAPTER PREVIEW

Uncertainty in Modern Thought

How did intellectual developments reflect the general crisis in Western thought?

Modernism in Architecture, Art, Literature, and Music

How did modernism revolutionize Western culture?

An Emerging Consumer Society

How did consumer society change everyday life?

The Search for Peace and Political Stability

What obstacles to lasting peace did European leaders face?

The Great Depression, 1929–1939

What were the causes and consequences of the Great Depression?

Chronology

1919 Treaty of Versailles; Freudian psychology gains popularity; Keynes publishes The Economic Consequences of the Peace; Rutherford splits the atom; Bauhaus school founded
1920s Existentialism, Dadaism, and surrealism gain prominence
1922 Eliot publishes The Waste Land; Joyce publishes Ulysses; Woolf publishes Jacob’s Room; Wittgenstein writes on logical positivism
1923 French and Belgian armies occupy the Ruhr
1924 Dawes Plan
1925 Berg’s opera Wozzeck first performed; Kafka publishes The Trial
1926 Germany joins the League of Nations
1927 Heisenberg formulates the “uncertainty principle”
1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact
1929 Faulkner publishes The Sound and the Fury
1929–1939 Great Depression
1933 The National Socialist Party takes power in Germany
1935 Release of Riefenstahl’s documentary film Triumph of the Will
1936 Formation of Popular Front in France