European society and culture since 1914

“If it works, it’s obsolete.” First reported in or about 1950, the saying neatly expressed that period’s sense of the headlong speed at which technology was changing. But equally rapid change is the hallmark of many aspects of life since 1914, and nowhere has it been more apparent than in Europe. Photographs from 1914 preserve a period appearance ever more archaic: statesmen in frock coats and top hats; early automobiles that fit their contemporary description as “horseless carriages”; biplane “flying machines” with open cockpits; long, voluminous bathing costumes. The young 20th century, its advent celebrated in such enterprises as The New Century Library—pocket editions of classics recently out of copyright—appears in such images more and more like a mere continuation of the century before.

The 19th century had itself seen the culmination of the Industrial Revolution that had begun in the 18th, but the transformation wrought by steam power, steel, machine-made textiles, and rail communications was only the beginning. Still more rapid and spectacular changes came with further advances in science and technology: electricity, telegraphy and telephony, radio and television, subatomic physics, oil and petrochemicals, plastics, jet engines, computers, telematics, and bioengineering.

The development of technology, in particular, would not have been possible without a more skilled and better educated work force. In most European countries during this period, education was extended both to more of the population and to a later age, and the numbers entering higher education greatly increased. Women began to gain access to more of the opportunities hitherto monopolized by men.

If this was a process of social leveling upward, the same process began to affect the social classes themselves. While European society remained more hierarchical than that in the United States, there began to be both greater social mobility and fewer blatant class differences as expressed in clothes, behaviour, and speech. A “mass society” began to share mass pleasures. Apparent homogeneity, both vertically within societies and horizontally between them, was accelerated by the cinema, radio, and television, each offering attractive role models to be imitated or, by older generations, deplored. Some referred to this process as “the Americanization of Europe.”

Alongside these changes, and in some instances spurring them, the period since 1914 in Europe has been marked by major economic and political upheavals. The most cataclysmic were the two world wars. The second of these resulted from the rise of dictatorship in Italy and Germany; but the period also saw dictatorships in Spain and Portugal, as well as in the U.S.S.R., where the 1917 revolution was followed by the totalitarian rule of Joseph Stalin.

The two wars, of 1914–18 and 1939–45, brought the old Europe of the balance of power to the brink of destruction. Europeans were thenceforth spectators at or minor actors in the global balance of terror between the United States and the U.S.S.R. This convinced a number of European statesmen that their peace, prosperity, and position in the world could be safeguarded only if Europeans united. For much of the period after 1945, Europe remained divided between East and West, and it was only in the West that unity began to be practicable. At length, however, political changes in central and eastern Europe gradually revived old hopes of “Paneuropa.”

This section describes—on a European rather than a national basis—the social, economic, intellectual, and cultural implications of these and other developments in Europe. For a complete discussion of the diplomatic events and military course of World Wars I and II, see World War I and World War II. Further treatment of the diplomatic history of 20th-century Europe may be found in international relations.

The Great War and its aftermath
The shock of World War I

The year 1914 witnessed not only the outbreak of World War I but also such very different events as the publication of James Joyce’s short stories Dubliners, André Gide’s novel Les Caves du Vatican, and D.H. Lawrence’s story The Prussian Officer. It was also the year of Pablo Picasso’s painting “The Small Table,” Igor Stravinsky’s Rossignol, Sergey Diaghilev’s ballet version of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’or, and the founding of the Vorticist movement in Britain by the painter and writer Percy Wyndham Lewis.

All these, in their various ways, were characteristically “modern” phenomena. The new century had already produced some fairly self-conscious attempts to criticize or repudiate the past. In 1901 the novelist Thomas Mann had chronicled in Buddenbrooks the decline of a Lübeck business family as it became more “refined,” while in Sweden the playwright August Strindberg had savagely dissected in The Dance of Death a love-hate relationship on the eve of a silver wedding anniversary.

In 1903 Samuel Butler’s bitter semi-autobiographical The Way of All Flesh had been posthumously published. In 1904 Frank Wedekind had fiercely attacked social and sexual hypocrisy in his play Pandora’s Box. In 1905, Thomas Mann’s brother Heinrich had shown a tyrannical schoolmaster ruined by an affair with a nightclub singer in Professor Unrat (better known in its 1928 film version as The Blue Angel). In 1907 the respectable writer and critic Edmund Gosse had anonymously published Father and Son, an autobiography recording what he called “a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs.”

In that same year (1907), Picasso and Georges Braque had founded the Cubist movement, with its slogan, “Paint not what you see but what you know is there.” In 1909 La Nouvelle Revue française had been inaugurated as a forum for younger writers. In 1910 Wassily Kandinsky had produced a Postimpressionist painting defiantly entitled First Abstract Work; the Russian authorities had banned Rimsky-Korsakov’s two-year-old Le Coq d’or because of its satire on government; and Sir Norman Angell had published The Great Illusion—an attempt to demonstrate the futility of war, even for the supposed victors. The year 1913, finally, had seen the publication of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poems Alcoöls and the beginning of Marcel Proust’s great novel Remembrance of Things Past.

The 20th century had begun, then, with what might be termed cultural parricide—an attack on the paternalistic, stuffily religious, and sexually repressive features of the century before. Younger writers and artists such as Joyce, Lawrence, Gide, Picasso, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot formed what the novelist Ford Madox Ford called “a proud and haughty generation,” determined, in Pound’s words, to “make it new.” Yet, looking back in 1937, Wyndham Lewis wrote ruefully:

We are not only “the last men of an epoch” (as Mr Edmund Wilson and others have said): we are more than that, or we are that in a different way to what is most often asserted. We are the first men of a Future that has not materialised.

What had blocked that future was war—“The Great War,” as its stunned contemporaries called it. Not for nothing did the poet and novelist Robert Graves call his 1929 war reminiscences Good-bye to All That. He was bidding farewell to his prewar schooldays and to his first marriage; but what stuck in the minds of his readers was the cause of the leave-taking—the horror of life and death in the trenches of the Western Front. Graves was by no means the only writer to experience and report that visceral shock. In 1914, despite Angell’s warnings, the idea of war had still borne vestiges of glamour. Idealistic young poets such as Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell had gone to war, initially, with eager innocence. After the slaughter on the Somme and the stalemate of trench warfare, the key word became Disenchantment, the apt title of C.E. Montague’s account of the process. It pervaded the work of Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen in Britain, of Henri Barbusse (author of Under Fire) in France, and of Erich Maria Remarque (author of All Quiet on the Western Front) in Germany.

Through conscription, and, to a lesser extent, through air raids, the war had involved and affected far more of the population than any previous international conflict. By the time of the Armistice, in November 1918, there was widespread weariness in Europe and a sense of disillusion that gave the years before the war a retrospective autumn radiance, as if a dream had died.

Real deaths, indeed, had been numbered in millions. In the whole of the previous century, from the Napoleonic Wars to the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, Europe had lost fewer than 4.5 million men. Now, at least 8 million had died in four years, while more than twice as many had been wounded, some of them crippled for life. Millions more had succumbed to the worldwide influenza epidemic that had ended in 1918. The outcome, in all countries, was imbalance between the sexes—a shortage of men that at the time was sometimes called “the problem of surplus women.” During the war, women had had to be recruited into the civilian work force—in factories “for the duration,” in offices sometimes for good. The net result was to encourage women’s emancipation. In 1918, British women over the age of 30 were given the vote—although women’s suffrage was delayed until 1944 in France and 1945 in Italy. The year 1921, moreover, saw the opening of the first birth control clinic in Britain.

Wartime comradeship helped to reduce not only barriers between the sexes but also rigidities of class. Government control of the war economy—known in Germany as Kriegssozialismus, or war socialism—was also a general phenomenon that left a permanent mark, in particular especially encouraging economic nationalism. Nowhere was this process more intense than in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, where it was known as “war communism.”

Nationalism had been a feature of Europe since at least the French Revolution. Napoleon had embodied its classic, democratic, or Gallic variety—the nation as a people bearing arms. Equally powerful, and more deeply rooted in history, was Romantic, cultural, or Germanic nationalism—the nation as an entity based on age-old racial and linguistic allegiance. Both forms of nationalism were encouraged by the war and its aftermath; and the latter was especially furthered by some of the provisions in the Treaty of Versailles.

The mood of Versailles

The peace conference that met in Paris from January 1919 to January 1920 and which produced, among other things, the Treaty of Versailles was both vengeful and idealistic.


The Versailles treaty, signed on June 28, 1919, met most of these demands. It also stripped Germany of its colonies and imposed severe restrictions on the rebuilding of its army and fleet. In these ways, the peace settlement could be seen as punishing the defeated enemy, as well as reducing its status and strength. Not unnaturally, this caused resentment among the Germans and helped to stimulate the quest for revenge.

At the same time, however, Versailles was imbued with more constructive aims and hopes. In January 1918 the U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, set out his peace proposals in the “Fourteen Points.” The general principles were open covenants openly arrived at, freedom of navigation, equality of trading conditions, the reduction of armaments, and the adjustment of colonial claims. Wilson also proposed “a general association,” which became the League of Nations, but his more specific suggestions were concerned less with unity among nations than with national self-determination. His aim, in effect, was to secure justice, peace, and democracy by making the countries of Europe more perfect nation-states.

Among other measures, this involved readjusting Germany’s borders. Alsace-Lorraine was duly returned to France and Eupen-Malmédy to Belgium, while Germany also lost territory to the east. But the Versailles and associated settlements went further still in dealing with central Europe. They broke up the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they created or re-created sovereign states, and they sought to make frontiers coincide with the boundaries between ethnic, linguistic, and cultural groups. This consecration of nationalism proved a highly equivocal legacy; for example, in Northern Ireland or in the German-speaking Sudetenland of Bohemia.

In succession to the Habsburg empire, Austria and Hungary became small, separate, landlocked states. Poland was restored and acquired new territory; so did Greece, Italy, and Romania, which doubled its former size. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia came into existence as composite states. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania won independence from Russia.

Parallel to the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a further result of the war was the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Most of its eastern Mediterranean territory, together with Iraq, was placed under mandate to France and to Britain, which backed a ring of Arab sheikdoms around the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. Turkey was reduced to a mere 300,000 square miles. The peace terms initially agreed upon by the Treaty of Sèvres were rejected by the sultan until British troops occupied Istanbul, and even then the National Assembly in Ankara organized resistance. A war with Greece in 1921–22 ended in the Peace of Lausanne, giving Turkey better terms than those decided at Sèvres. Soon, however, the secular sultanate and the religious caliphate were abolished, and Kemal Atatürk became president of a new, secular republic, which, among other Westernizing measures, adopted the Latin alphabet in place of Arabic script.

The drawing of new frontiers could never definitively satisfy those who lived on either side of them, and the problem of minorities became an important factor in the instability that marked Europe after World War I. The new composite state of Czechoslovakia, for instance, included not only industrialized Bohemia, formerly Austrian, but also rustic Slovakia and Ruthenia, formerly Hungarian. Romania similarly comprised both Transylvania, formerly Hungarian, and Bessarabia, formerly Russian. Reconstituted Poland was equally an amalgam, and in 1921, after Józef Piłsudski’s campaign against the U.S.S.R., it moved its eastern frontier more than 100 miles beyond the so-called Curzon Line established in 1920. Yugoslavia, finally, was based mainly on Serbia; but it also included Westernized Croatia, formerly Austro-Hungarian, and part of Easternized Macedonia, formerly Turkish, as well as other territories. The rest of Macedonia was now Greek; but an exchange of minorities between Greece and Bulgaria put many Macedonians under Bulgarian rule, sparking off an armed rebellion. Similar turbulence agitated Albania. Altogether, the Balkans became a synonym for violent nationalistic unrest.

Two global developments, moreover, formed an ominous backdrop to Europe’s territorial disputes. One was the Russian Revolution of 1917, which inspired a few idealists but mainly aroused fear throughout the rest of Europe lest bolshevism spread westward. The other was the active intervention of the United States, which had entered the war—decisively—in 1917 and played a determinant role in shaping the peace.

The interwar years
Hopes in Geneva

Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a general association of nations took shape in the League of Nations, founded in 1920. Its basic constitution was the Covenant—Wilson’s word, chosen, as he said, “because I am an old Presbyterian.” The Covenant was embodied in the Versailles and other peace treaties. The League’s institutions, established in Geneva, consisted of an Assembly, in which each member country had a veto and an equal vote, and a smaller Council of four permanent members and four (later six, then nine) temporary members chosen by the Assembly.

The basic principle of the League was collective security, whereby its signatories were pledged both to seek peaceful solutions to disputes and to assist each other against aggression. As such, it was novel and potentially far-reaching; it could have developed into a powerful instrument for peace. It did indeed settle a number of practical disputes—between Finland and Sweden, Albania and Yugoslavia, Poland and Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. It also set up subordinate bodies to deal with particular problems, among them the status of Danzig and the Saar, narcotics, refugees, and leprosy. It was complemented by a Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague, Neth., and by the International Labor Organization.

Yet the League of Nations disappointed its founders’ hopes. From the start it lacked teeth, and most of its members were unwilling to see it develop. It thus became little more than a permanent version of the congresses (of Vienna, etc.) that had founded the old-style Concert of Europe.

Its first weakness was the veto: all its decisions had to be unanimous, or at least unopposed. Secondly, when in March 1920 the U.S. Congress failed to ratify the Versailles treaty by the necessary two-thirds majority, the United States was debarred from joining the League. Nor, at that time, were Germany and Russia among its members. Germany belonged from 1926 to 1933, and the U.S.S.R. from 1934 to 1939. Turkey joined in 1932, but Brazil withdrew in 1926, Japan in 1933, and Italy in 1937.

American suspicion of the League, reflecting general isolationism, centred on Article 10 of the Covenant. This called on member states

to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all the Members of the League. In case of any such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression the Council shall advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled.

The means envisaged were known as sanctions—an economic boycott authorized under Article 16 of the Covenant and invoked in October 1935 against Italy for invading Abyssinia. However, as a conciliatory gesture, the League excluded oil, iron, and steel from the boycott, making the sanctions ineffective. Within less than a year they were lifted, and they were not applied at all when Germany sent troops into the Rhineland in 1936.

Nevertheless, the League did witness one effort to go beyond mere cooperation between governments. It proved abortive, but in retrospect it was highly significant. This was the proposal for European unity made by the French statesman Aristide Briand.

When taking office as foreign minister in 1925 he had declared his ambition to establish “a United States of Europe,” and on Sept. 9, 1929, he made a speech to the then 27 European members of the League in which he proposed a federal union. Seven months later, on May 1, 1930, he laid before them a closely and cogently argued “Memorandum from the French Government on the Organization of a Regime of European Federal Union.” The text was elegantly worded; its actual author was the secretary-general of the French Foreign Ministry, Alexis Léger—better known to readers of poetry under his pen name Saint-John Perse and later a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Briand’s proposal evoked “the very real feeling of collective responsibility in the face of the danger that threatens the peace of Europe,” and the need to counter Europe’s “territorial fragmentation” by a “bond of solidarity which would enable European nations at last to take account of Europe’s geographical unity.” To this end, Briand proposed a pact establishing a European Conference within the League of Nations, with a permanent political committee and a small secretariat, putting politics before economics in this European community, but nevertheless working toward a “common market” in which “the movement of goods, capital, and people” would be gradually liberalized and simplified. The practical details, Briand suggested, should be worked out by the governments concerned.

Briand’s Memorandum was careful to specify that agreement between the European nations must be reached on the basis of “absolute sovereignty and total political independence.”

Is it not the genius of each nation to be able to affirm itself still more consciously by co-operating in the collective effort within a federal union that fully respects the traditions and characteristics of each of its constituent peoples?

Despite these precautions, the other members of the League did little to implement the French initiative. Except for Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and (with some reservations) Czechoslovakia, Greece, and Norway, their general response was at best skeptical and at worst politely hostile. None save The Netherlands saw any need to limit or pool national sovereignty. Many—including Denmark, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom—expressed fears for the integrity of the League. Several saw no point in setting up new institutions. Some wanted to recruit other European nations such as the U.S.S.R. and Turkey, which were not then members of the League; others insisted on their own world responsibilities, as did the United Kingdom. A large number—understandably, after the Wall Street crash—thought that Europe’s really urgent tasks were economic, not political.

Briand defended his paper with vigour, but on Sept. 8, 1930, the European members of the League effectively buried it, with a few rhetorical flowers—“close collaboration,” “in full agreement with the League of Nations,” “respecting all the principles of the Pact”—by voting to put it on the agenda of the plenary Assembly. All that followed was a series of meetings, which ended with Briand’s death in 1932.

Earlier, Briand had worked closely with the German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann, with whom he had negotiated the Locarno Treaties of 1925, confirming, among other things, the new western frontiers of Germany. A fervent nationalist during the war, Stresemann had come to the conclusion that Germany must respect the Versailles treaty, however harsh its provisions, though initially he had hoped to revise it. As a champion of peace (for which he had won the Nobel Prize in 1926), he would surely have supported Briand’s federal union plan. But Stresemann died in 1929, and Chancellor Heinrich Brüning of the Catholic Centre Party proved no less negative than most of his colleagues elsewhere. By that time, too, Germany’s fragile postwar Weimar Republic was under growing threat of collapse.

The lottery in Weimar

Germany’s Weimar Republic was born of defeat, revolution, and civil war. It was plagued by political violence but distinguished by cosmopolitan culture that influenced both Europe and the wider world.

On Oct. 28, 1918, the sailors at the Kiel naval base mutinied, and on November 8 the Independent Socialist Kurt Eisner declared Bavaria a republic. On the following day the chancellor, Prince Maximilian von Baden, resigned in favour of the Social Democrat leader Friedrich Ebert and announced the abdication of the emperor William II. That same day, November 9, the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed all of Germany a republic. Two days later, on November 11, Germany concluded the armistice that ended World War I.

The new republic was soon under pressure from both left and right. Left-wing socialists and Marxist “Spartacists,” led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, fomented strikes and founded Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils like those in the U.S.S.R., but on Jan. 15, 1919, both revolutionaries were arrested and brutally killed. On the right, meanwhile, ex-officers and others formed the paramilitary Freikorps. In the event, it was from the right that the deadliest challenges came.

Elections to a constitutional convention, or assembly, were held on Jan. 19, 1919. They gave the Social Democrats 163 seats, the Catholic Centre Party 89, and the new and progressive Democratic Party 75; other parties won smaller numbers of seats. These three groups were like-minded enough to form a coalition and powerful enough—for the present—to dominate the new republic. Their rivals on the right were the old conservatives (now called the National People’s Party), with 42 seats, and the new People’s Party, with 21. On the left, the Independent Socialists had 22 seats.

The National Assembly met on Feb. 6, 1919, at Weimar on the Ilm River. The choice of venue was only partly a tribute to the city’s historic associations with Goethe, Schiller, and Herder; the main concern was to avoid the danger of violence in Berlin. Not until the spring of 1920 did the new republic’s Parliament (still called the Reichstag, or “Imperial Diet”) meet in the German capital. By then, the name Weimar Republic had stuck.

Its constitution, completed on July 31, 1919, was the most modern and democratic imaginable, based on universal suffrage, proportional representation, and referenda. But it was a flimsy cap over a political volcano.

The first sign of trouble, in March 1920, was an attempted monarchist coup d’état. It failed, but the elections that followed in June marked a defeat for the republicans. The centrist Democrats lost almost two-thirds of their strength and the Social Democrats almost half of theirs. The right-wing parties and the left-wing Independent Socialists, plus various splinter groups, made heavy gains. The Weimar coalition no longer had a majority. Within the Parliament, the extremists had triumphed. Outside it, violence was on the increase.

On Aug. 26, 1921, two ex-officers shot and killed Matthias Erzberger, a Catholic Centre Party deputy who had negotiated the peace terms. On June 24, 1922, three right-wing students shot dead Walther Rathenau, the newly appointed foreign minister, who was Jewish. On Nov. 8–9, 1923, an extremist group staged an abortive putsch in Munich. The conspirators included Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler.

Racked by economic problems, shaken by internal crises and shifting alliances, reviled by the far left and the far right, successive centrist governments struggled ahead for another 10 years. Although politically precarious, the Weimar Republic nonetheless witnessed and helped to foster an extraordinary explosion of creative talent, notably in the arts.

Wassily Kandinsky and Max Ernst in painting, Bruno Walter in music, Bertolt Brecht and Max Reinhardt in the theatre, Walter Gropius in architecture, Albert Einstein in physics, Erwin Panofsky in art history, Ernst Cassirer in philosophy, Paul Tillich in theology, Wolfgang Köhler in psychology, Fritz Lang in films—all these became household names, partly because every one of them took refuge abroad after Hitler came to power in 1933.

All, in their various ways, were part of the cosmopolitan “Modern movement” that pervaded the whole of Europe. Kandinsky was a typical example. Born in Russia, he learned a great deal from French Fauves such as André Derain and Henri Matisse, then settled in Munich, where he developed his own characteristic style. German Expressionist theatre and cinema, likewise, drew inspiration from abroad, in particular from Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. Germany was equally influenced by Austrians: Sigmund Freud in psychiatry, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler in the theatre, and Karl Kraus in the press. In architecture the clean, functional lines of Gropius’ Bauhaus school found imitators throughout Europe.

Like all such phenomena, the Modern movement was not wholly novel. Many of its practitioners and their artifacts had predated or coincided with World War I. Even Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurism, so dominant in 1920s Italy, was a relic of the prewar past.

But the mood after 1918 was no longer so euphoric as at the beginning of the century. Before the war, the French novelist André Gide and the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke had exchanged letters in leisurely French like two survivors from the 18th century. After it, following a six-year silence, Rilke wrote of “the crumbling of a world,” and both complained of the complications caused by passports and frontier formalities, looking back nostalgically to the carefree “journeys of long ago.”

The postwar world, as seen by writers and other artists, had the fragmentary, disillusioned quality of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922. It was self-conscious and introspective, as in Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author. It was more open to the unconscious, as in Dada and Surrealism. It was more aware of man’s dark fears and instincts, as in Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926). It was more responsive to the appeal of “the primitive,” whether in African sculpture or in jazz—the quintessential art of the 1920s, which also influenced mainstream music, notably in the Austrian composer Ernst Krenek’s 1927 opera Jonny spielt auf (“Johnny Strikes up the Band”).

No less pervasive, however, was the brittle hedonism typified by the gossip-column antics of the “Bright Young Things.” They were not wholly isolated. Already in 1918 Thomas Mann had published his Reflections by an Unpolitical Man; this was a mental label thankfully worn by many who, after the rigours of war, were eager to pursue private happiness, whether in metropolitan society or in placid suburbia. The Europe of Weimar also was the Europe of the detective story and the crossword puzzle. Both were analgesics at a time of political uncertainty and economic disquiet.

The impact of the slump

Economically, Europe emerged from World War I much weakened, partly by the purchases that had had to be made in the United States. Even in 1914 the United States had been the world’s leading economic power. By 1918 profits had enabled it to invest more than $9 billion abroad, compared with $2.5 billion before the war. The Allies, meanwhile, had used up much of the capital they had invested in the United States and had accumulated large public debts, many of them to the U.S. Treasury.

American financial dominance and European debt overshadowed economic relations in the first decade after the war. The debts included those owed by the Allies to each other, especially to Britain, as well as those owed, especially by Britain, to the United States. A third baneful factor was reparations, the financial penalties imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles.

Keynes described reparations as morally detestable, politically foolish, and economically nonsensical. Winston Churchill called them “a sad story of complicated idiocy.” Essentially, they meant demanding from Germany either goods—which would have dislocated industry in the recipient countries—or money. This the Germans could obtain only by contracting vast and almost unrepayable loans in the United States—to whom the European recipients of reparations promptly returned much of the cash in an effort to settle their own transatlantic debts.

In April 1921 the Allied Reparations Committee set Germany’s reparations bill at 132 billion gold marks, to be increased later if the Germans proved able to pay more. The first installment of one billion gold marks was due by the end of May.

Understandably resentful, the Germans wavered between two possible responses: refusal to pay, as urged by ultra-nationalists and some industrialists, and the so-called Erfüllungspolitik, or “policy of fulfillment,” advocated by Rathenau and Stresemann. They proposed to meet initial demands for reparations so as to reestablish trust and then negotiate for better terms. This was the policy adopted by the Weimar Republic.

Even so, Germany paid the first tranche only in August 1921, in response to a threat to occupy the Ruhr, and the money had to come from a bank loan raised in London. Thereafter, it paid in kind but not in cash, until at the beginning of 1923 it announced that payments must cease. The French and the Belgians, backed by Italy but opposed by the United States and Britain, thereupon occupied the whole of the Ruhr.

With the German government’s connivance, Ruhr industrialists and workers brought production to a virtual halt, and the Treasury printed a reckless flood of paper money. By 1924 the mark was almost worthless, enriching speculators and owners of real property but ruining rentier savers and others on fixed incomes. This removed an important stabilizer from German society, making it all the easier for extremism to triumph in the Nazi victory 10 years later.

For the moment, however, the Allies formed a committee of financial experts, chaired by the American Charles G. Dawes, to find a lasting solution to the reparations problem. It proposed, and the governments accepted, a two-year moratorium, the return of the Ruhr to Germany, a foreign loan of 800 million marks, and a new rate for reparation payments: 1–2.5 billion gold marks annually, which continued for five years. In 1929 a further committee, chaired by Owen D. Young, revised the Dawes Plan. Germany was to have a new loan of 1.2 billion marks and to spread reparations over the next 59 years. Although the German Parliament and people (by referendum) reluctantly agreed to the Young Plan, reparations finally ceased in 1932.

Germany’s was an extreme case, but it was not the only European country to suffer after World War I. The Allies also experienced inflation and were saddled with debts. While the United States was willing in the long run to write off the political debts of reparations, it would not do the same with the commercial debts contracted by Britain, Italy, and France: one by one, they had to sign agreements to pay.

Despite these obligations, Europe in the 1920s enjoyed a modicum of the economic growth that was so rapid and spectacular in the United States. In 1913, Britain’s income had been £2.021 billion. By 1921, it had fallen to £1.804 billion; but by 1929 it had risen again, this time to £2.319 billion. The corresponding figures for France (in 1938 francs) were 328 billion, 250 billion, and 453 billion. Even Germany, whose 1914 income had been 45.7 billion gold marks, had recovered enough by 1931 to be earning 57.5 billion.

Yet postwar prosperity was precarious. The American boom was a speculative affair. Fueled by optimism, production was soaring. To shift the accumulating goods, customers were urged to buy on credit or to borrow from the banks, which thereby earned large profits. The stock market was riding high. But at any sign of a credit squeeze or a loss of confidence, everything was likely to collapse. Demand would fall, goods would pile up, and prices would plummet. This was precisely what happened on “Black Tuesday,” Oct. 24, 1929, the day of the Wall Street crash.

Its first foreign victims were in Latin America, which was dependent on the American market for selling raw materials. Europe was not affected immediately; American loans and investments there dwindled only slowly. By 1931, however, the flow of capital had virtually ceased, and direct investment dried up in the following year. Worse still, to pay their own debts, Americans repatriated huge sums of money. Germany, Austria, and Britain were the hardest hit. Between the end of May and the middle of July in 1931, the German central bank, the Reichsbank, lost $2 billion in gold and foreign currency. To compound Europe’s problems, on June 17, 1930, the United States had imposed enacted the protective Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, replacing increasing the average import duties of 26 percent with the prohibitive average level of duty level to about 50 percent.

The combined results were catastrophic. Highly respected banks failed, first among them the great Kreditanstalt of Vienna, which collapsed in May 1931. The Bank of England, at that time, was losing gold at the rate of £2.5 million a day. Everywhere, industrial production fell: by 40 percent in Germany, 14 percent in Britain, and 29 percent in France.

On June 20, 1931, U.S. President Herbert Hoover announced a year’s moratorium on all government debts. When it expired in June 1932, the secretary of state, Henry Stimson, proposed a year’s extension, but Hoover refused. The Europeans had meanwhile agreed to cancel their claims on German reparations but not to ratify this decision unless the United States wrote off their war debts. The Americans, seeing this as a European conspiracy, demanded continued payment. At this, all the European nations except Finland dug their heels in, exacerbating U.S. isolationism and making a global solution of the crisis still more unlikely.

In June 1933, nevertheless, a World Economic Conference met in London. Hoover’s successor as president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, made his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, the head of the U.S. delegation. Hull was a free-trader, but in July 1933 Roosevelt sent a message to the conference insisting that its main concern must be monetary exchanges, and in January 1934 the United States passed the Johnson Act, forbidding even private loans to countries that had not paid their war debts.

So there was no global solution: it was every man for himself. Some European countries—Germany in 1930–32, France until 1936—responded by deflation; they maintained the external value of their currencies but reduced their export prices by cutting wages and costs. The result was social unrest. In Germany, Chancellor Brüning’s 1930 decrees of the dissolution of the Reichstag and government by presidential order led to 107 Nazis and 77 Communists being elected to Parliament that September. In France, Pierre Laval’s decrees led to the 1936 success of the left-wing Popular Front.

Other countries took to devaluation, leaving the gold standard to which Belgium, France, Italy, The Netherlands, and Switzerland still clung from 1931 to 1935. Britain devalued in September 1931, the United States in April 1933, and France in September 1936. This had the effect of making exports cheaper, but since it made imports more expensive it worked only if they could be discouraged by high tariffs (as in the United States) or if the country in question had access to cheap raw materials (as in Britain’s system of imperial preference).

A third option was to impose exchange controls to cut the economy off from world markets. This was the solution adopted by Germany in 1932 and by most of central Europe and the Balkans. It had the effect of creating German hegemony, since those central European and Balkan countries that needed to sell to the large German market were unable to repatriate their earnings and had to buy German goods. In 1932 Germany saw exchange controls and their effects as a temporary expedient. For Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, however, they became part of a settled and sinister policy.

The trappings of dictatorship

Totalitarian dictatorship was a phenomenon first localized in 20th-century Europe. A number of developments made it possible. Since the 19th century the machine gun had greatly facilitated drastic crowd control. Public address systems, radio, and, later, television made it easy for an individual orator to move a multitude. Films offered new scope for propaganda. Psychology and pharmaceuticals lent themselves to brainwashing. Miniature cameras and electronic listening devices simplified surveillance. Heavy artillery, aircraft, and fast armoured vehicles provided the means for waging a Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war.” Bullies and brutality, of course, there had always been.

The European dictatorships were far from identical. They differed in their historical roots, their social contexts, their ideologies, and their trappings. But they bore a family resemblance. Political analysis may underplay it; to their victims, it was all too obvious.

Europe’s first practical dictatorship was established in Russia by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Its emblem, the hammer and sickle, represented physical labour in factory or field; there was no symbol for the scientist, the statesman, or the scholar. The aims of the revolution—liquidating the capitalist economic system, increasing public wealth, raising the material and cultural standard of working people—had wide appeal. But in its concern to industrialize and modernize a huge, backward union of republics with a long cultural legacy of tsarist domination that had been replaced by a centralizing socialist ideology, it relied on a one-party state, heavy censorship, the suppression of individual liberty, and the murder of awkward opponents. Theoretically, it foresaw “the withering away of the state.” For the time being, it embodied “the dictatorship of the proletariat”—or rather of a single leader, first Vladimir Ilich Lenin, then Joseph Stalin.

Two years after the Russian Revolution, in 1919, Benito Mussolini founded the fascist party in Italy. Its emblem, the fasces (a bundle of rods with an axe in the centre), was a symbol of state power adopted from ancient Rome. Explicitly anticommunist, it was as opposed to the withering away of the state as it was to individualistic liberalism. “For the Fascist,” wrote Mussolini, “everything is the State.” His own regime, partially established in 1924 and completed in 1928–29, had its bullyboys and castor-oil torture, its murders and aggressive wars. But, for sociological and cultural, as well as political, reasons, it was both less systematic and less brutal than some other European dictatorships. Italy had a long tradition of regional diversity that resisted uniformity, and Italian society was permeated—in complex, sometimes contradictory ways—by the ubiquitous influence of the Roman Catholic church.

Forms of fascism took root in other Latin countries. In Spain in 1923 General Miguel Primo de Rivera seized power with the approval of the king. He dissolved Parliament, imprisoned democratic leaders, suspended trial by jury, censored the press, and placed the country under martial law. He tried to establish a fully fascist regime based on “Country, Religion, and the Monarchy,” but he met resistance from students and workers and abandoned the attempt in 1925, although he remained prime minister until 1930. In 1931 a republic was proclaimed, headed by a provisional government of republicans and socialists.

Meanwhile, in neighbouring Portugal, António de Oliveira Salazar, a professor of economics, had been made finance minister after a military coup d’état in 1926; and, although he had resigned soon afterward, he had been recalled in 1928. After reorganizing the Portuguese budget, in 1932 he was offered the premiership. His conception of what he called the “Estado Novo,” or “New State,” was corporatist and fascist. Its authoritarian constitution, endorsed by plebiscite in 1933, allowed only one political party, the National Union (União Nacional).

In 1936 a general election in Spain gave a clear majority to the left. On May 10, Manuel Azaña, the Popular Front leader, was elected president, but two months later a group of army officers led by General Francisco Franco staged a fascist revolt. Supplied with arms, air power, and “volunteers” by Mussolini and Hitler, Franco’s forces won the ensuing Spanish Civil War—although it dragged on until 1939, when the U.S.S.R. finally cut off the aid it had given to the Republican government. The French and British governments pursued a policy of nonintervention, although an International Brigade of private volunteers fought alongside the Republicans. One significant feature of the Spanish Civil War was its use by Nazi pilots as a training ground for the dive-bombing tactics they later employed in World War II.

Nazi Germany, in fact, was Europe’s most elaborately developed dictatorship. Characteristically, Hitler took great care with the design of its emblem, a black swastika in a white circle on a red background; as iconography, it has long survived its regime. The swastika, originally the obverse of the Nazi version, was an Eastern mystic symbol brought into Europe in the 6th century—and Nazi ideology was no less mystical. It differed from fascism in at least two respects. It regarded the state as a means, rather than an end in itself; and the end it envisaged was the supremacy of what Hitler believed to be “the Aryan master race.” The final result—Hitler’s so-called Final Solution—was the systematic slaughter of at least six million Jews and millions of others whom the Nazis referred to as inferior peoples.

Born in Austria, Hitler had fought in World War I in the Bavarian infantry, twice winning the Iron Cross. In September 1919, six months after Mussolini founded the Italian fascist party, Hitler joined a German nationalist group that took the name of National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), derisively nicknamed “Nazi,” a truncation of Nationalsozialistische. Its policies included anti-Semitism and fierce opposition to the Treaty of Versailles. After his abortive Munich coup in 1923, Hitler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, of which he served nine months. While in prison, he wrote his autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf.

In 1930, with 107 seats, the Nazis became the second largest party in Parliament. On Jan. 30, 1933, after three ineffectual chancellors, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler to the post, believing that the vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, would counterbalance any Nazi excess.

Four weeks later the Reichstag building in Berlin was gutted by a fire probably started by a foolish young DutchmanDutch communist, but certainly exploited by the Nazis as evidence of an alleged communist plot. Hitler used the excuse to enact decrees that gave his party totalitarian powers. In the following June he eliminated most potential rivals, and when Hindenburg died on Aug. 2, 1934, Hitler was proclaimed Führer, or leader of the German Reich.

Hitler’s foreign policy triumphs followed: the reoccupation of the Rhineland and the alliance with Mussolini in 1936; the Anschluss (“union”) with Austria and the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938–39; and in 1939 the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. Until Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September of that year, it sometimes seemed as if Europe’s democracies could only look on, prevaricate, and tremble.

The phony peace

The early months of World War II, marked by no major hostilities, came to be known as “the Phony War.” The 1930s, marked by war in Spain and the fear of war throughout Europe, might as aptly be called “the Phony Peace.”

Economically, that decade saw a gradual revival of prosperity in most of Europe. For the middle classes in some countries, indeed, it was a slightly hollow golden age. Many could still afford servants, often drawn from the ranks of unmarried girls from poor families with few skills to sell. “Ribbon development” of suburbs was providing new houses on the cleaner outskirts of cities, served by expanding urban transport systems. Every suburb had one or more palatial cinemas showing talking pictures, some of them even in colour. Gramophones and records were improving their quality, radio sets were growing more compact and versatile, and, toward the end of the decade, television began. Cheaper automobiles were appearing on the market, telephones and refrigerators were becoming general, and some homes began to boast washing machines. Air travel was still a rarity but was no longer unheard of. The cheap franc made France a playground for tourists from countries with harder currencies.

For those less privileged, daily life was far less benign. Deference was still deeply ingrained in European society. The humbler classes dressed differently, ate differently, and spoke differently; they even walked and stood differently. They certainly had different homes, often lacking a bathroom or an indoor lavatory. Unemployment was still widespread. In Britain, in the Tyneside town of Jarrow, starting point of the 1936 protest march to Westminster, almost 70 percent of the work force was out of a job. Those in work still faced long hours; dirty, noisy, and dangerous conditions; and monotonous, repetitive assembly-line tasks. Some of the workers were women, but, despite their “liberation” during World War I, many had returned to domesticity, which to some seemed drudgery. Young people had yet to acquire the affluence that later gave them such independence and self-assurance as an economic and cultural group.

Beneath the placid surface, moreover, there were undercurrents of unease. On the right, especially in France and Germany, there was still much fear of bolshevism. Some, for this reason, saw merits in Mussolini, while a few were attracted by Hitler. On the left, conversely, many admired the U.S.S.R.—although some, such as the French writer André Gide, changed their minds when they had seen it. But left, right, and centre in most of the democracies had one thing in common, though they differed radically about how to deal with it. What they shared was a growing fear of war. Having fought and won, with American help, “the war to end war,” were they now to face the same peril all over again?

This fear became acute toward the end of the decade, as Hitler’s ambitions grew more and more plain. But underlying it was a broader, deeper, and less specific disquiet, especially in continental Europe.

In 1918 the German philosopher of history Oswald Spengler published Der Untergang des Abendlandes, translated in 1926–28 as The Decline of the West. In 1920 the French geographer Albert Demangeon produced The Decline of Europe. In 1927 Julien Benda published his classic study The Great Betrayal, and in 1930 José Ortega y Gasset produced The Revolt of the Masses. All these works—and many others—evoked what the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga called, in the title of a book published in 1928, The Crisis of Civilisation. That same year, coincidentally, saw René Guenon’s The Crisis of the Modern World. Similar concerns were voiced in Britain almost a decade later, when the French-born Roman Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc published The Crisis of our CivilisationOur Civilization.

Many such writers were pessimistic. Paul Valéry, in Glimpses of the Modern World (1931), warned Europeans against abandoning intellectual discipline and embracing chauvinism, fanaticism, and war. Thomas Mann, in Warning Europe (1938), asked: “Has European humanism become incapable of resurrection?” “For the moment,” wrote Carl J. Burckhardt, “it . . . seems that the world will be destroyed before one of the great nations of Europe gives up its demand for supremacy.”

At Munich in September 1938 the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and his French counterpart Édouard Daladier bought time with “appeasement”—betraying Czechoslovakia and handing the Sudetenland to Hitler. Millions cheered the empty pledge they brought back with them: “Peace for our time.” Within 11 months Hitler had invaded Poland and World War II had begun.