The Postwar Years: A Culture in Conflict

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The Postwar YearsA Culture in Conflict
By Christina Harker Jardine
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World War I disrupted peoples lives. Life
seemed uneasy, and traditional values were under
attack. A journalist writing in 1938 offered an
impression of the postwar period Spiritually
and morally, civilization collapsed on August 1,
1914 - the civilization... which with all its
short- comings did give more satisfaction to more
people than any other yet evolved. Young people
cannot realize how the world has been coarsened
and barbarized since 1914. They may feel the
loss of security... But they cannot appreciate
how much else has been lost.
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Currents of Thought
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
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Sigmund Freud

• Freud believed that the unconscious mind governed
  human
  behavior.

• If people believed believed that they could not
  rationally control their actions, then much that
  seemed bewildering could be explained (such as
  the devastation of WWI).

• Freud pioneered psychoanalysis, the study of the
  treatment of the human mind.

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Albert Einstein

• Einstein offered new and startling ideas on
  space, time, energy, and matter.

• The theory of relativity states that even such
  seemingly absolute and definite concepts as
  space, motion, and time had to be seen as
  relative, or dependent on one another.

• This concept gave comfort to those who denied
  that any standard, whether of morality or of
  artistic taste, was absolute.

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Modern Painting

• For artists, paintings were a way to express
  their emotions. Of course, their paintings
  reflect the time period in which they were
  living.
• Artists rejected traditional forms and styles.
• One of the first pioneers of this new style of
  art was Pablo Picasso.
• Along with Georges Braque, the two
• artists created cubism, which
• emphasized geometric shapes, and
• designs.

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The Three Dancers
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Popular Culture
Most people found escape from the disillusionment
of troubled times in other new forms of
entertainment.
Music
Film
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Louis Armstrong
The most innovative popular musicians played a
distinctive form of music known as jazz. Jazz
began in the southern United States in the late
1800s.
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Film

• The chief entertainment for popular audiences of
  the 1920s and 1930s came from film, or motion
  picture.
• Invented around the year 1900, motion pictures
  swept through Europe and the U.S. Thousands of
  movie houses, or theaters, opened in the 1920s
  and 1930s.
• Film reflected the pessimism of the postwar era.
  Early movies were often simple dramas or
  hilarious comedies. Movies offered viewers an
  escape from the problems of a difficult world.

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Charlie Chaplin