Probing Cultural Frontiers

The post-WWI era brought profound pessimism and challenges to traditional beliefs. Religious certainty faltered as theologians like Karl Barth attacked liberal Christian theology, while faith in democracy weakened as people associated it with ineffective politics (though women finally gained voting rights).

Revolutionary ideas transformed our understanding of reality. Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle demonstrated the impossibility of simultaneously knowing a particle's position and velocity, suggesting we can't objectively observe reality. Meanwhile, Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theories emphasized how the unconscious mind governs human behavior more than we realize.

Artists rejected mimicking reality in favor of creating new visual languages. Movements like expressionism, cubism, and surrealism flourished, while non-Western artistic traditions from Asia, Africa, and the Pacific inspired Western painters. In architecture, the Bauhaus movement under Walter Gropius pioneered designs based on merging engineering with art.

💡 The uncertainty principle wasn't just about physics—it challenged the fundamental belief that humans could fully understand and predict the natural world, contributing to a widespread questioning of certainty in all areas of knowledge.

Global Depression

The Great Depression began with a tangled web of financial dependencies. Germany relied on U.S. loans to pay reparations to Allied nations, who needed those payments to repay their own U.S. loans. When America began withdrawing capital in 1928, the entire system became unstable.

The crash hit hard on "Black Thursday" (October 24, 1929), when panic selling sent stock prices plummeting. Many Americans who had bought stocks on margin (with borrowed money) lost their life savings. The wealthy only faced reduced incomes, while poorer citizens often went hungry.

Economic contraction spread globally as unemployment rose and consumer demand plummeted. Nations dependent on U.S. capital and import markets were devastated, creating a ripple effect worldwide. Countries like Germany and Japan, which relied heavily on exports to pay for food and fuel imports, suffered 35% unemployment rates and massive industrial production declines.

Nations responded with economic nationalism, raising tariffs and imposing trade barriers in hopes of achieving self-sufficiency. The U.S. Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 raised duties to prohibitive levels, triggering retaliatory tariffs from other countries and causing international trade to collapse. Economist John Maynard Keynes proposed increasing government spending and lowering taxes to stimulate demand, while Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal created a regulatory framework to protect American interests and set precedent for federal involvement in economic affairs.

🔑 The Great Depression wasn't just an American problem—it was the first truly global economic crisis, revealing how interconnected the world's economies had become.

Challenges to the Liberal Order: Soviet Communism

After the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia descended into civil war (1918-1920) between the Red Bolsheviks and White opposition forces. The Bolsheviks instituted the Red Terror, killing some 200,000 opponents and executing Tsar Nicholas II. They ultimately prevailed, partly due to peasant support.

During the civil war, the Bolsheviks implemented "War Communism," seizing grain from peasants to feed the Red Army. This led to widespread famine as farmers stopped producing beyond their own needs. Recognizing this disaster, Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (1921-1928), restoring limited market economics by allowing peasants to sell surpluses and returning small industries to private ownership.

After Lenin's death, Joseph Stalin emerged as leader, promoting "socialism in one country" rather than global revolution. His First Five-Year Plan (1928) demanded rapid industrialization with emphasis on heavy industry to modernize Soviet factories. Simultaneously, his collectivization of agriculture (1928-1940) forced peasants to surrender individual farms and join collective farms (kolkhozy), causing another devastating famine that killed millions.

When disaster and dissent emerged, Stalin responded with the Great Purge (1936-1938), eliminating political opponents through show trials, executions, and forced labor camps. The purge began with the assassination of Sergei Kirov and expanded to target anyone perceived as threatening Stalin's power.

⚠️ Stalin's policies show how totalitarian systems often sacrifice millions of lives for ideological goals—the Soviet famines caused by collectivization were largely preventable tragedies resulting from prioritizing industrial development over human welfare.

The Fascist Alternative

While communism took hold in Russia, fascism emerged as another challenge to liberal democracy. Fascism glorified the state, emphasized ultranationalism, promoted militarism, and required devotion to strong leaders. Unlike communism, it appealed to nationalists across all social classes.

In Italy, Benito Mussolini established the Fascist movement in 1919 through his Italian Combat Veteran League. By 1921, Italy verged on civil war, and in October 1922, Mussolini staged his famous "March on Rome," leading to his appointment as Prime Minister. Between 1925-1931, he transformed Italy into a one-party dictatorship, crushing labor unions and prohibiting strikes. In 1938, his government issued anti-Semitic laws, and in 1939, he formalized ties with Nazi Germany through the "Pact of Steel."

In Germany, Adolf Hitler became chairman of the Nazi Party in 1921 and attempted to overthrow the democratic Weimar Republic in 1923, landing him in jail. After the Great Depression hit Germany, the Nazis made rapid gains by promising to "make Germany Great Again." Between 1930-1932, the Nazi party became Germany's largest, and Hitler was appointed chancellor.

The Nazis quickly established a racial state that relegated women primarily to the roles of wives and mothers, encouraged "racially pure" marriages, and outlawed abortion. Their eugenic program began in 1933, targeting people with hereditary conditions. Their anti-Semitism was codified in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of citizenship and prohibited marriages between Jews and other Germans. This persecution escalated with Kristallnacht $November 9-10, 1938$, a wave of violence against Jewish businesses and synagogues.

📌 What made fascism especially dangerous was its ability to appeal to people across social classes by combining nationalism, economic promises, and scapegoating of minority groups—creating a sense of unity through shared hatred.

Timeline of the Interwar Period

The interwar years packed several decades' worth of transformative events into just twenty years. Einstein's special theory of relativity (1905) revolutionized physics even before the period began. The Russian Civil War (1918-1920) secured Bolshevik power, while Mussolini launched Italian fascism in 1919.

The 1920s brought Lenin's New Economic Policy (1921-1928), Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (1927), and the beginning of Stalin's First Five-Year Plan (1928). The decade ended with the catastrophic U.S. stock market crash and start of the Great Depression in 1929, the same year Hemingway and Remarque published influential antiwar novels.

The 1930s saw Hitler's rise to power in Germany (1933-1945), Stalin's Great Purge in the Soviet Union (1935-1938), and John Steinbeck's publication of "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939), capturing the human toll of economic hardship. These events set the stage for the Second World War, which would erupt in September 1939.

🌟 Understanding this timeline helps explain why many people lost faith in liberal democracy during this period—it seemed unable to solve economic problems or provide stability compared to the seemingly decisive action of totalitarian regimes.