Ap European History Chapter 26 Section 5: Cultural and Intellectual Trends in the Interwar years

1. Ap European HistoryChapter 26 Section 5: Cultural and Intellectual Trends in the Interwar years

2. The artistic and intellectual innovations of the pre-World War I period, which had shocked many Europeans, had been the preserve primarily of a small group of avant-garde artists and intellectuals. • Four years of devasting war had left many Europeans with a profound sense of despair and disillusionment. • The Great War indicated to many people that something was dreadfully wrong with Western values.

3. In Decline of the West , the German writer Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) reflected this disillusionment when he emphasized the decadence of Western civilization and posited it collapse.

4. Nightmares and new visions: art and Music • Abstract painting became ever more popular as many pioneering artists of the early 20th century matured in the decades after the war.

5. Dadaism attempted to enshrine the purposelessness of life. • Tristan Tzara (1896 -1945), a Romanian-French poet and one of the founders of Dadaism, expressed the Dadist contempt for the Western tradition in a lecture on Dada in 1922.

6. Perhaps more important as an artistic movement was Surrealism, which sought a reality beyond the material, sensible world and found it in the world of the unconscious through the portrayal of fantasies, dreams, or nightmares.

7. Salvador Dali (1904-1989) became the high priest of Surrealism and in his mature phase became a master of representational Surrealism. • In The Persistence of Memory, Dali portrayed recognizable objects divorced from their normal context.

8. Especially important in the spread of functionalism was the Bauhaus School of art, architecture, and design founded in 1919 at Weimar, Germany, by the Berlin architect Walter Gropius (1883- 1969).

9. The postwar acceptance of modern art forms was by no means universal. • Many traditionalists denounced what they considered degeneracy and decadence in the arts. • Nowhere was this more evident than in the totalitarian states of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

10. In the 1920s, Weimar Germany was one of the chief European centers for modern arts and sciences. • Hitler and the Nazis rejected modern art as “degenerate” or Jewish” art.

11. The Search for the unconscious • The growing concern with the unconscious also led to greater popular interest in psychology. • The full impact of Sigmund Freud’s thought was not felt until after World War I.

12. A disciple of Freud, Carl Jung (1856-1961) came to believe that Freud’s theories were too narrow and reflected Freud’s own personal biases. • Jung viewed the unconscious as twofold: a personal unconscious and, at a deeper level, a collective unconsciousness.

13. The heroic age of physics • Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), one of the physicists responsible for demonstrating that the atom could be split, dubbed the 1920s the heroic age of physics.