Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany

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Europe Between the Wars, 1919 to 1939

The Transparent Simulacrum of the Feigned Image,

1938, by Salvador Dalí. World War I had a major impact on

European art and contributed to the emergence of several

new artistic movements, including surrealism. Painted

in 1938 by the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí, The

Transparent Simulacrum of the Feigned Image exemplifies

the art produced during the era between World Wars I

and II. Surrealism aims to unlock the imagination by

transforming ordinary objects into dreamlike images that

evoke emotion and transcend conventional thinking.

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CHAPTER 3Introduction

Introduction

The period between the two world wars has sometimes been termed Europe’s “age of the dictators,” reflecting the fact that so many regimes that began the period as democracies had become dictatorships by 1940. With the notable exception of Rus- sia, all of the new governments carved out of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires at the end of World War I were initially democratic, and many of the governments of Northwestern Europe expanded their suffrage (voting rights) in response to demands for reform from populations who felt they deserved compensation for their wartime suf- fering. By 1920, the map of Europe consisted almost entirely of democracies. However, by 1939, Eastern, Central and Southern Europe, with the sole exception of Czechoslovakia, had succumbed to dictatorships of one form or another.

This transformation came in two chronological clusters. The first was between 1919 and 1926, when dictatorial regimes assumed control of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Poland, and Lithuania. In these years, democracy suffered largely from internal divisions and crises resulting from World War I or unresolved issues dating from before the war. The second cluster of dictatorships came between 1929 and 1938, this time mostly a result of the economic crisis of the Great Depression. Germany, Austria, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia all ceased to be democracies in this period. So did Spain, which had thrown off its first dictatorship in 1931 and experienced a brief democratic republic before falling into dictatorship again in 1939. Virtually the only European country that never enjoyed any democratic rule after World War I was Russia. It had become a Com- munist dictatorship with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and it remained one through- out the period.

More than numbers marked the age of the dictators, however. Novel political movements, Fascism and National Socialism (Nazism), shaped the Italian and German regimes. They also produced the charismatic leaders Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler, who claimed to be carrying out revolutions in their countries and who loudly announced their goals of territorial expansion. Dictators of a new type, they disturbed international relations and simultaneously attracted great interest, admiration, and hatred.

Historians and political scientists have tried to categorize the nature of these regimes, frequently using terms like authoritarian, totalitarian, fascist, and communist. The term dic- tatorship itself suggests a regime that does not tolerate overt political opposition; does not allow free elections; and is ruled by the military, one political party, or one man. Authori- tarian describes dictatorships that are content so long as overt opposition is not expressed, while totalitarian regimes effectively require their citizens not only to refrain from dissent but to express their support actively. For example, in Nazi Germany it could be dangerous to fail to greet others with the Nazi salute.

While authoritarian and totalitarian rate the intensity of dictatorship, the terms “Fascist” and “Communist” describe the direction or orientation of policy. Fascist typically refers to regimes that, in addition to being dictatorial, are highly nationalistic, extremely anticom- munist, territorially expansionist, usually based on a highly developed leadership cult, and violent toward political enemies. A considerable degree of controversy exists among scholars as to which regimes qualify under this definition, but there is increasing consen- sus that during the interwar period, only Germany and Italy were Fascist. Most of the

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Economy and Society

other European dictatorships were what historians Michael Richards and Paul Waibel call essentially “garden variety dictatorships” whose primary goal was to maintain the status quo. They gave their subjects a fair amount of personal freedom in return for their obedi- ence and passive support (Richards & Waibel, 2005). As before 1914, traditional ruling class coalitions—the monarchy, Church, military, large landowners, big business, and the bureaucracy—dominated most of these regimes.

Russia, in contrast, adopted communism. The political system was officially known as the “dictatorship of the proletariat”; but, in fact, it was the dictatorship of a single party: the highly centralized Bolshevik, or Communist Party. In economic terms, the Communist regime abolished private property. Virtually all of the economy and its employees were directly owned or controlled by the state, which made all key economic decisions, such as how much of various commodities should be produced, how they should be priced, and how much employees would be paid. During the interwar period, with the exception of very short-lived regimes in Hungary and Bavaria (Germany) in 1919, only Russia devel- oped as a communist regime.

3.1 Economy and Society

The fragility of European democracy after 1918 was due in large part to the weakness of the European economy. The economic recovery that came after 1918, and that characterized the entire period between the wars, was painfully slow, with only modest rates of economic growth across Europe compared to those that prevailed before the war and those that would come after 1950 (Broadberry & O’Rourke, 2010). It took the countries that won the war—Britain, France, Greece, and Italy—a little over three years to return to the level of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita they had enjoyed in 1913. Neutrals such as Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden recovered in a year or two. In contrast, the 10 losers, including the states created after the disintegration of Austria- Hungary, took 10 years (Broadberry & O’Rourke, 2010).

Prosperity proved elusive because so much had changed in the world economy since August 1914; the war had done too much damage for things to return to the way they had been. Huge volumes of material resources went up in smoke during the conflict, and all European combatants were saddled with massive debts from financing the war. The losers, and especially Germany, had to pay reparations as well. The replacement of Austria-Hungary by a number of new states meant that a major economic system had been disrupted and multiple new ones had to be created. Governments had intervened in the economy to an unprecedented extent, a habit that would prove hard to break. Finally, developments in the United States, now the undisputed global economic giant, would have a major impact on what happened in Europe.

Inflation and Protectionism

Many countries endured levels of inflation so high that they were known as hyperin- flation. The situation was worst in Germany, which had been saddled with a massive reparations bill (see chapter 2). In 1923, the German government refused to make further

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Economy and Society

reparations payments. In response, French troops occupied the Ruhr valley, Germany’s principal center of heavy industry, leading German workers there to strike. The German government decided to provide financial support for the striking workers, which meant it had to print money to provide funds for German workers and to pay reparations to the allies. This decision touched off perhaps the greatest inflation in world history. The U.S. dollar, which was worth 4.2 German marks in 1914, was worth 1,800 marks by early

1923 and 4.2 trillion marks by the end of that year (Gilbert & Large, 2002). At the peak, thousands of printing presses operated around the clock to produce increasingly worthless currency (Berend, 2006). Money lost its value at such a rate that peo- ple resorted to bartering instead.

Economic isolationism also contributed to Europe’s woes. Free trade had driven much of the prewar prosperity. This ended with the war and never returned. The interwar years were a period of “deglobalization” (Broadberry & O’Rourke, 2010, p. 151) in which economic nationalism, the belief that countries should be as self-supporting as pos- sible, predominated. Concerned to ensure food supplies for their people, many governments pre- vented exports of foodstuffs by imposing tariffs and import quotas. The concern to return to “nor- malcy”—fixed exchange rates and adherence to the gold standard—had the effect of making exports more expensive and constituted another obstacle for trade. In 1929, on the eve of the Depression, Europe’s exports were still below the 1913 level.

The Depression

Investment from the United States drove the economic growth that did take place. But rather than U.S. government aid or loans, this was private capital from banks and other investors that could be withdrawn at any time if better alternatives or circumstances arose.

That is exactly what happened. The German economy did relatively well after 1925 thanks to foreign investment, primarily from the United States. But from 1928 to 1929 U.S. invest- ment in Germany fell by half, from $967 million to $482 million, as booming stock markets drew large sums back to the United States (Berend, 2006). The next year, disaster struck. On October 29, 1929, “Black Tuesday,” the New York Stock Exchange crashed. What was left of American investments in Europe dried up as investors scrambled to cover their losses. The Depression had begun.

Germany, which had attracted the most foreign capital, saw investment fall from more than $1 billion in 1927 to only $139 million in 1930 (Broadberry & O’Rourke, 2010; Berend, 2006). Unemployment rose from negligible levels in 1928 to 1.3 million in 1929, 4.3 million in 1931, and over 6 million, a rate of 43.8 percent, at its peak in 1932. The German situation

The hyperinflation of 1923 left the German mark almost worthless. In this photo, a woman uses paper money as fuel for her stove.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Economy and Society

had ominous political consequences: The upsurge in electoral support for Hitler’s Nazi Party mirrored the collapse of the economy.

The impact of the Depression was not uniform across Europe, but almost everywhere, it led to a significant decline in industrial production, even more tariffs, the collapse of trade, and mass unemployment (Figure 3.1). In most countries the response to the crisis was to adhere to the economic orthodoxy of the time: reduce public spending and wait for the storm to pass. There were no bailouts or stimulus packages. Governments did nothing to help the unemployed; if anything, welfare spending was reduced.

George Orwell captured the widespread despair in his memoir, Down and Out in London and Paris (1933). So too did a fourteen-year-old German girl in December 1932:

“Father used to joke a lot in those days. But after two years the picture changed. One day father came home looking downcast. Mother looked at him and knew what had happened. He had lost his job. . . . Now my father has been unemployed for over three years. We used to believe he would get a job again one day, but now even we children have given up all hope.” (Mazower, 1999, p. 104)

UNITED STATES

CANADA

USSR

SPAIN

PO R

TU G

A L

GREAT BRITAIN DENMARK

NORWAY SWEDEN

NETHERLANDS

BELGIUM

FINLAND

POLAND

ESTONIA

LATVIA

FRANCE

SWITZERLAND

GERMANY

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

AUSTRIA HUNGARY ROMANIA

ITALY

YUGOSLAVIA BULGARIA

Years of maximum levels of unemployment

1931 1932 1933

1934 1935 1936

Percentage of industrial work force unemployed at maximum point, by nation

Mediterranean Sea

Adriatic Sea

North Sea Baltic Sea

ATLANTIC OCEAN

37.6% 15.4%

21.3%

19%

26.6%

JAPAN

6.8%

32.7%

21.3%

43.8% 16.7%

17.4%

3636

36 36 36

36 36

3636

33 LITHUANIA

This map illustrates the extent of unemployment in Europe during the Depression.

Figure 3.1: Unemployment during the depression

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Economy and Society

The Swedish Exception Among the democracies, Sweden was an exception, proving that a democracy could take a different, more effective approach to the crisis. Elections in 1932 brought the Social Dem- ocratic Party to power, and they introduced active, interventionist policies. As Finance Minister Ernst Wigforss put it, “There will be no spontaneous recovery except to the extent that the policy of the state will help bring it about” (Mazower, 1999, p. 135). The government ran deficits to promote employment; after its peak in 1932, the ranks of the unemployed fell rapidly, from 139,000 to 10,000 by 1938. The government also imposed a major devaluation of the currency, making Swedish products easier to export. The Swed- ish economy grew by 7 percent in 1932 and by an average of 3 percent per year for the entire decade (Lundberg, 1996). As the graph demonstrates (Figure 3.2), Sweden avoided any major drop in industrial production at the start of the Depression and came to the end of the 1930s at a stronger point than the major European economies.

The Role of the United States

American isolationism, already evident in the refusal of the Senate to ratify the Convention of the League of Nations, also defined the U.S. government’s protectionist postwar eco- nomic policies. The Emergency Tariff Act (1921) and the Fordney-McCumber Tariff (1922) raised import duties significantly, and the government refused to reduce them despite repeated pleas from its trading partners in Latin America and Europe. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930) raised them even further, to the highest levels since early in the 19th century. The bill was introduced before the Depression began in order to protect U.S. agriculture from imports, but it eventually covered a vast number of products. The effect on trade

Year 1928 1932 1937/8

180 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0In

de x

of In

du st

ri al

P ro

du ct

io n

19 27

= 1

Germany France

Sweden Britain

Sweden avoided the worst of the Depression. Germany was hardest hit but recovered strongly after 1933.

Figure 3.2: Industrial recovery, 1927–1938

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Economy and Society

with Europe was drastic and immediate: Imports fell from $1.3 billion in 1929 to only $390 million in 1932 while exports fell from $2.3 billion to $784 million over the same period.

The United States changed its immigration laws in 1921 and 1924, imposing quotas on immigrants that greatly reduced the number of people from Southern and Eastern Euro- pean countries allowed in to the United States. Politics drove these changes, but they had significant economic consequences, especially in Europe. Immigration from Europe fell from 12.4 million between 1901 and 1921 to only 2.8 million between 1921 and 1940 (Broadberry & O’Rourke, 2010). This meant that emigration to the United States could no longer serve as a safety valve for European unemployment. It also severely reduced remit- tances, the money migrants sent back home to aid relatives, which had previously buoyed the economies of sending countries.

The Birth of Keynesian Economics The crisis of the 1930s provoked intellectual responses. The most famous of these was John Maynard Keynes’ book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), which is considered the foundation of modern macroeconomics. The General Theory cri- tiqued the established orthodoxy of economics, which had been so ineffective in dealing with the Depression. The first chapter, entitled “The General Theory,” contains only a single paragraph:

I have called this book the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, placing the emphasis on the prefix general. The object of such a title is to contrast the character of my arguments and conclusions with those of the classical theory of the subject, upon which I was brought up and which dominates the economic thought, both practical and theoretical, of the governing and academic classes of this generation, as it has for a hundred years past. I shall argue that the postulates of the classical theory are appli- cable to a special case only and not to the general case, the situation which it assumes being a limiting point of the possible positions of equilibrium. Moreover, the characteristics of the special case assumed by the classical theory happen not to be those of the economic society in which we actu- ally live, with the result that its teaching is misleading and disastrous if we attempt to apply it to the facts of experience. (Keynes, 1964, p. 3)

In sum, all previous capitalist economics were irrelevant to real life.

Keynes presented four major conclusions: First, an overall lack of demand afflicting an economy can lead to involuntary unemployment; second, economies automatically cor- rect such shortfalls in demand only slowly and painfully; third, government policies can increase demand and reduce unemployment quickly; and fourth, sometimes increasing the money supply will not be enough to encourage the private sector to increase spend- ing; in which case government spending must step into the breach. The book did not make any specific recommendations for government policy, but at a time of persistent, massive unemployment and reverence for limited government intervention in the market, its implications were unavoidable. At certain times, the government needed to become more involved in the economy and promote full employment, even if this meant running budget deficits.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.2 Italy: The Birth of Fascism

Understanding what Keynes did not propose is also important. He wrote The General Theory in the middle of the greatest crisis of the global capitalist economy, at a moment when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, both of which had abandoned the free market approach in favor of powerful government intervention in the economy, appeared to be faring exceptionally well. But Keynes was not drawn to solutions of this sort: “No obvious case is made out for a system of State Social- ism which would embrace most of the economic life of the commu- nity” (378). Nor did he advocate a Socialistic leveling of wealth. He accepted “significant inequalities of incomes and wealth” but felt that “such large disparities as exist today” could not be justified (84). His goal was to provide technical responses that would sustain capitalism through its time of troubles. Keynes’s ideas did not have much influence during the Depression, but after World War II, they became so influential that people talked about the “Keynesian consensus.”

3.2 Italy: The Birth of Fascism

Benito Mussolini, a former radical Socialist who had turned to a new political move-ment known as Fascism, became Prime Minister of Italy in October 1922. He came to power legally but soon began to establish a novel kind of dictatorship. The Rise of Fascism in Italy

The period from 1918 to 1920 in Italy is known as the biennio rosso (the two red years), due to the massive eruptions of working-class protest, factory sit-ins, and peasant discontent (Finaldi, 2008). During the 1919 elections, the Italian Socialist Party won more parliamen- tary seats than any of its rivals, as well as control of many local governments in North- ern Italy. However, both the Socialists (PSI) and an allied protest party, the new Catholic Popular Party, were internally divided and unwilling to form a governing coalition. Other parties were similarly unable to cope with the growing crisis, which to many frightened middle-class and other Italians threatened a Russian-style “Bolshevik” revolution.

This is when Mussolini emerged onto the stage. He had been a leading member of the PSI until 1914 but was expelled from the party for advocating Italian entry into World War I. In 1919, he organized a group known as the Fasci di Combattimento (combat groups), or Fascists, which soon became a paramilitary organization that physically terrorized strik- ers, socialists, and communists. These squadri, or squads, had their own leaders who rec- ognized Mussolini’s authority but had their own, autonomous power bases. By 1922 the

British economist John Maynard Keynes, pictured here with his wife, Lydia, developed the most innovative and influential response to the Depression.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.2 Italy: The Birth of Fascism

Fascists had succeeded in silenc- ing much of the unrest and were looked upon by many as having saved the country.

Mussolini also proved to be a skilled political operator in Rome. His party had only a tiny minor- ity of seats in parliament, but he was able to take advantage of the growing political paralysis to demand power. His threat to lead his armed Fascists in a “march on Rome” in October 1922 succeeded in convincing the king to name him prime minister. Rather than marching, Mussolini was installed as head of government after taking

a leisurely train ride from Milan, although Fascist paramilitary groups known as black- shirts were allowed to parade through Rome afterward.

Mussolini in Power

Mussolini’s ideology was a rather vague blend of anticommunism, Italian nationalism, promises of social reform, and appeals to the revival of Italy’s past role from the Roman Empire as the dominant power in the Mediterranean Sea. He did not immediately impose a dictatorship in Italy, and even after doing so he tolerated the persistence of some inde- pendent sources of power. Thus he signed an agreement with the Catholic Church in 1929 (the Lateran Accords) that gained the support of the Church for his regime but also recog- nized the Vatican as a sovereign state and made Catholicism the state religion. He made no effort to depose the monarchy or to put Fascist generals in control of the army. He even established a consultative group made up of the leading figures in the Fascist Party, the Fascist Grand Council, which eventually, with the support of the king, removed him from power in 1943.

Until 1925, Mussolini governed under the Italian constitution, but the 1924 elections were held under conditions of Fascist violence and under a new law that guaranteed the party with the most votes two-thirds of all parliamentary seats. Socialist deputy Giacomo Mat- teotti was murdered after making a widely publicized speech in which he called the elec- tions unfair. When people close to Mussolini were tied to the murder, Mussolini faced a crisis. The squad leaders, who were concerned about the possibility of Mussolini losing power, threatened to unleash another wave of violence unless he acted decisively, push- ing him to establish a dictatorship.

Mussolini outlawed opposition parties, suppressed anti-Fascist newspapers and forbade strikes. The regime kept an estimated 160,000 Italians under some form of surveillance and imprisoned or exiled some 17,000 political opponents, including the Communist leader Antonio Gramsci. Mussolini never resorted to mass murder, though. Only about 30 executions for political crimes took place between 1926 and 1943 (Pauley, 2009).

Mussolini leads the March on Rome (really a parade following his arrival by train). Italo Balbo, the leader of the Fascist squads in Ferrara, is second from the left. His independent power base meant he could stand up to Mussolini.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.2 Italy: The Birth of Fascism

Mussolini created a series of insti- tutions for children, youth, and students, and to provide after- work leisure activities for working people. All of these were intended to help create the Fascist “New Italian.” Meanwhile, the regime encouraged women to accept their traditional roles as wives and, especially, mothers.

Particularly after 1930, the regime created a cult of personality around “il Duce” (the leader). Mass rallies placed Mussolini at the center of attention. His image appeared everywhere, including on the cov- ers of the “national notebooks” given to students. The cult even extended into elementary school, where arithmetic classes included lessons such as “One Duce = One God.”

In economic policy, Mussolini’s primary initiative was the creation of a so-called “corporate state” in which representatives of labor and industry in various sectors supposedly coop- erated to form joint government councils to determine working conditions. This system protected private property rights, and the government made key industrial decisions that favored industrial interests over those of labor. This has led some scholars to label the entire program a “fraud” (Richards & Waibel, 2005).

A number of Fascism’s earliest supporters were Italian Jews drawn to its nationalism and anti-Socialism, but as Mussolini came more under the influence of Adolph Hitler in the late 1930s, he adopted the German leader ’s anti-Semitism. In January 1938, the regime issued a Manifesto of Fascist Racism, which was soon followed by laws expelling

Jews from certain jobs, preventing “mixed” marriages, and remov- ing books written by Jews from schools and libraries.

Mussolini’s Foreign Policy

Mussolini pursued an expansionist foreign policy. He frequently com- pared his regime to the splendors of ancient Rome, and he talked often of the need to convert the Mediterranean into a Roman sea. He devoted considerable resources to a brutal attack on Libya in 1928, and in 1935 he took horrific revenge upon Ethiopia for its 1896

The Fascist regime increasingly built a cult around the person of Mussolini. In this image, he addresses a large crowd in Genoa.

The mother of a soldier killed in Ethiopia gives Mussolini her son’s helmet, which was filled with rings and precious metals.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 German National Socialism

humiliation of Italy, after which he entitled himself “founder of the Empire” (Finaldi, 2008). As will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter, in 1936 Mussolini, along with Hitler, sent troops and planes to Spain to aid a right-wing authoritarian uprising against the democratically elected government of that country. This helped pave the way toward a formal alliance with Nazi Germany, the “Pact of Steel,” (May 1939), in which Italy promised to support Germany in any future war.

3.3 German National Socialism

More scholarly attention has probably been devoted to Nazi Germany and its unchallenged dictator (Führer) Adolph Hitler than any subject in modern Euro-pean history. Yet even the best scholarship is likely to leave readers coming away puzzled and mystified about some key questions: (a) How could an obscure demagogue such as Hitler rise to power in one of the great historical centers of European culture? (b) How could the Holocaust—the massive, deliberate, and brutal organized mass mur- der of about six million Jews (accompanied by the slaughter of an equal number of other “enemies” of the regime, such as Gypsies [Roma], Communists, Slavs, political prisoners, and homosexuals)—have occurred in the heart of 20th-century Europe?

The Rise of Nazism

Hitler’s rise to power can be attributed primarily to three factors: (1) a long tradition of authoritarianism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism in Germany; (2) the impact of the Depression in Germany and the failure of the existing regime to satisfactorily address the enormous problems that resulted from it; and (3) Hitler’s own extraordinary talents as a speaker, political organizer, and propagandist, which allowed him to convince many Ger- mans that he alone could solve Germany’s problems.

Authoritarianism, Nationalism, and Anti-Semitism Germany had a long tradition of authoritarianism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism to which Hitler successfully appealed, both at the common man’s level and in terms of the values of those who held the reins of power. The Weimar Republic created in the wake of World War I officially established Germany as a democratic republic, but there was no general purge of the military, the civil service, the judiciary, or the teaching profession, all of which continued to harbor fundamentally antidemocratic values. This was clearly apparent in the light punishment Hitler received in 1923 when, as the obscure leader of a small right-wing party in Bavaria, he led a failed attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic in the so-called Munich “beer hall putsch.” He received a jail term of only five years and was released after less than a year.

While in jail, Hitler wrote his autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). In this book, he developed three of the major ideas that would guide him throughout his life: (1) The German army had been “stabbed in the back” during World War I by Jews, Bolsheviks, and others who had turned victory into defeat, and thus the entire democratic structure of the Weimar Republic was a betrayal of German traditions; (2) Germany needed more Lebensraum (living space) for an expanded racially pure German population, requiring

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 German National Socialism

that Germany expand into neighboring lands to the east and above all into Russia; and (3) the Jews were a subhuman race who threatened to pollute the racial superiority of a pure Aryan (German) race, had been responsible for all of Germany’s ills (including the abuses of both capitalism and communism), and would have to be removed from German society.

Hitler’s view of the world was entirely racialized. He saw humanity as divided into a hierarchy of races, and he interpreted history and current affairs as a struggle among them. Views of this sort were not unique to Hitler; many people in Germany and else- where in the West believed that humanity could be organized by race, with the people of Northwestern Europe ranked at the top and the peoples of Eastern Europe, where most European Jews lived, ranked especially low. The U.S. immigration law of 1924 reflected this same kind of hierarchy. The same beliefs were reflected in the widespread acceptance of sterilization of the “feeble minded” and other supposedly “inferior” humans, which was common in the United States in the 1920s and would become established in Germany after the Nazis came to power in 1933.

Economic and Political Instability, 1919–1933 Hitler’s rise to power cannot be understood apart from the context of extraordinary politi- cal and economic instability in Germany between 1919 and 1933. In the immediate after- math of the war, German society was deeply divided politically among a centrist group, including the Socialist Party, which supported the new Weimar Republic, and authoritar- ian groups of the left (including the Communist Party) and right (including many elements of the military), which opposed it. Between 1919 and 1923, there were numerous attempts, including Hitler’s 1923 putsch, to overturn the Republic. And although all of them failed, they made it clear that many Germans did not view Weimar as a legitimate government. Hitler himself entered politics after being asked to spy for German army intelligence on the German Workers Party, one of the many right-wing authoritarian groups that prolifer- ated after World War I. He found himself attracted to the group and soon took command of it, renaming it the National Socialist Workers’ (or Nazi) Party and adopting the now- famous swastika as its symbol.

Germany’s political instability from 1919 to 1923 reflected serious economic problems. Some of these were related to the need to provide jobs for millions of returning soldiers and others to the Versailles Treaty’s requirement that Germany make massive reparations payments to the victorious allies in recognition of Germany’s “guilt” in provoking the war. The hyperinflation of 1923 destroyed the savings of the middle classes and further discredited the Weimar Republic in the eyes of many.

The political and economic situations in Germany stabilized considerably for five years after 1924, but the Great Depression brought new misery to Germany and paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power. Two extreme parties, the Nazis on the right and the Commu- nists on the left, made enormous gains in elections in 1930 and 1932. The Nazis, who had won only 3 percent of the vote in 1928, became the largest party in the Reichstag in 1932, obtaining almost 40 percent of the vote.

During their campaigns the Party stressed that only Hitler could “save Germany” from Bolshevism and other ills. Meanwhile, Nazi militia, called storm troopers, terrorized

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 German National Socialism

strikers, communists, and other forces on the left in repeated street battles. It was under these circumstances, in some ways quite similar to those under which Mussolini legally became prime minister of Italy in 1922, that German President and World War I hero Paul von Hindenberg asked Hitler to become German chancellor in March 1933. As with Mus- solini, the traditional ruling German elites believed that they would be able to control him, especially since the Nazis held only a minority of cabinet positions (Figure 3.3).

Year

P er

ce nt

ag e

of T

ot al

V ot

es R

ec ei

ve d

by th

e N

az is

19 24

–1 93

Ma y 1

92 4

Ma y 1

92 5

Ma y 1

92 6

Ma y 1

92 7

Ma y 1

92 8

Ma y 1

92 9

Ma y 1

93 0

Ma y 1

93 1

Ma y 1

93 2

Ja n 1

93 3

The Nazis were a marginal political force until the Depression. Their share of the vote exploded between the elections of 1928 and 1930.

Figure 3.3: Nazi election results, 1924–1933

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 German National Socialism

In Their Own Words: Why I Became a Nazi: The Soldier’s Story

In the evening when we sat around our father after he returned from work, we picked the hardened sprays of cement from his woolen jacket. Even then I formed the res- olution to do my part that one day in Germany the German man would be judged on his own merit; that the judgment would not be formed according to his suit, but it would be the man himself that counted. . . .

We sat in trenches and heard of lost prisoners and the decaying homeland. We heard the shirkers laugh. . . . We saw the horror approaching, but we were helpless against

it. We felt that the Frenchman and the Tommy were not our worst enemies, but that worse poisonous things were being brewed in the witches’ kitchens at home. And when in November 1918 we marched through Luttich . . . under the red flags—my heart seemed to break.

The inflation took my young wife’s heritage, honestly earned savings that had been worked for, inherited from the brother who had fallen in battle. The party mismanagement shot high; it disgusted me. I tried various ways of finding manliness and manly action. . . . I became a member of the Stahlhelm [anti-Socialist and anti-Communist veterans’ association], was soon a group leader . . . became district group leader.

It was my idea that a new party should be founded . . . in which soldiers set the pace and whose aim it should be to destroy the party order. . . . I wanted to make the suggestion to the leader of the Stahlhelm that he sit down with Hitler . . . for the bulwarks we had to storm would be the same.

I was definitely snubbed. This led me to seek membership in the Hitler movement. (Abel, 1986, 244)

This unnamed soldier was one of 600 members of the Nazi Party who responded to the announce- ment in June 1934 by Theodore Abel, a professor of Sociology at Columbia University, of a contest “for the best personal life history of an adherent of the Hitler movement.” Hitler had come to power the year before, and Abel wanted to find out why Germans had supported him. He published his findings, including the life history of the soldier and five others, in a book, Why Hitler Came into Power (1938).

The soldier was born in 1886; his father was a construction worker and his mother a laundress. He was clever and managed to get a white-collar job in a factory. But he was also restless and gave it up to join the army. He served throughout World War I and after his discharge, he married and went to work in a government office.

The soldier’s account makes clear the many motivations that could lead people to join the Nazi Party. There was the class prejudice that his father endured. There was the resentment at the political lead- ers who betrayed the army and brought on defeat and revolution. There was the postwar inflation that wiped out his wife’s inheritance. The one motivation he does not mention, although the other life sto- ries Abel published did, is anti-Semitism.

A Nazi march in Neubrandenburg.

The Role of Adolph Hitler No explanation of the rise of Nazism can be complete without discussing Adolph Hitler himself. Born in Austria in 1889, Hitler displayed no particular leadership talents for the first thirty years of his life. He failed in his ambitions to become an artist or architect and

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 German National Socialism

spent part of the period before World War I living in flophouses, spending most of his days in local coffee shops and making a pre- carious living selling mediocre watercolors. For a time he lived in Vienna, where, he later wrote, he was appalled by the mixture of races and impressed by the political appeal of anti-Semitism. But these attitudes do not appear to have been a significant factor in his life then, as he sold his watercolors to, among others, Jewish art dealers. When World War I broke out, Hitler volunteered for the Bavarian army and served honorably, on two occa- sions receiving medals for his service. But it was only after he took control of the German Workers’ Party that his leadership talents became apparent, though he remained a largely obscure figure until his 1923 imprisonment and the subsequent publication of Mein Kampf.

After getting out of jail, Hitler concentrated on building up his party. He abandoned the idea of a coup in favor of winning elections. He built a strong organization with himself as the unquestioned führer and expanded the Party beyond its initial base in Bavaria. The Party created a range of ancillary organizations for young people and various professional groups, as well as a uniformed militia, the SA (storm troopers), who joyfully engaged in street brawls with Socialists and Communists.

Even so, the Nazi Party remained relatively insignificant until the bankruptcy of the Ger- man government in the face of the Depression created new political opportunities. Dur- ing repeated political campaigns between 1930 and 1933, Hitler revealed his talents as a spellbinding orator, a superb propagandist, and an outstanding political organizer. Nazi

Party rallies far outshone those of other parties in both numbers and appeal, and the SA intimidated political opponents. During this period, Hitler downplayed the vague “socialist” aspects of the offi- cial Nazi Party platform as well as appeals to anti-Semitism. Instead, he stressed that he would create a society in which all Germans felt at home and part of a common com- munity. His primary targets were the Communists and big business, who, he argued, divided Germany. This appeal succeeded in trans- forming the Nazis from relative oblivion into Germany’s strongest political party between 1928 and

Hitler served less than a year in prison after his conviction for treason in 1923. After leaving prison, he devoted himself to building the Nazi Party.

Led by Horst Wessel, the SA marches through Nuremberg in 1929. Wessel was murdered in 1930. He wrote the lyrics to the “Horst Wessel Song,” which was the Nazi anthem and the conational anthem of Germany after 1933.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 German National Socialism

1933. In the end, Hitler’s success rested primarily on his ability to inspire ordinary Ger- mans to share his anger and his vision, however repulsive that vision appears in hindsight (McDonough, 2003).

Hitler in Power

Unlike Mussolini, Hitler did not wait to dismantle German democracy, nor did he need to be pushed to do so. As historian Giuseppe Finaldi writes, Hitler was influenced by Mus- solini, but his dictatorship was both more sweeping and much more brutal:

The Nazi dictatorship appeared to be free of all the compromises that Mus- solini’s regime tolerated: there was no monarchy and [after the 1934 death of President Hindenberg] Hitler was head of state, head of government and Führer; the Church had little influence, the army accepted Hitler as commander-in-chief; the SS [secret] police apparatus operated with ruth- less efficiency; and Germany’s network of detention camps made Italy’s repressive apparatus look amateurish. (Finaldi, 2008, p. 94)

Building the Dictatorship Hitler destroyed German democracy with lightning speed upon becoming chancellor. He called new elections and took advantage of the still-mysterious February 27, 1933, burn- ing of the Reichstag building (the legislature) to blame the Communists and warn voters of the threat they supposedly posed. The Reichstag burning led to emergency degrees approved by President von Hindenberg on February 28 that effectively suspended all civil liberties for Hitler’s opponents. An atmosphere of fear and violence pervaded the elections, and the Nazis won about 44 percent of the vote. When combined with those of their allies, this gave them enough seats that on March 23, 1933, the Reichstag passed the Law to Remove the Distress of the People and the State, known as the Enabling Act. This allowed Hitler to make laws without parliamentary approval.

Hitler outlawed virtually all independent sources of political opinion, including opposi- tion parties and trade unions. He controlled the press and other forms of media, purged the universities, and abolished the quasi-autonomy of the German federal states in favor of the central government. All of this was accompanied by a massive propaganda apparatus, which made effective use of the press, radio, and frequent mass meetings to put across the Nazi party line and develop a cult of adoration focused on Hitler. Political opponents were packed off without any legal process to concentration camps. The first one, at Dachau, opened on March 22, 1933. Some 100,000 Communist, socialists, trade unionists, and others were detained during that year alone, more than during Mussolini’s entire reign (Evans, 2005). Almost one-third of university professors were purged during the first two years of the Nazi regime, some because they were Jewish and the rest because they were deemed opponents of the regime. This attack on Jewish academics was only one of a series of restric- tions on Jews that culminated, during World War II, in the Holocaust (see chapter 4).

By 1934, the only significant potential threats to Hitler’s power were President von Hin- denberg, the army, and militant members of the Nazi SA (storm troopers) who wanted a vague social revolution to accompany the Nazi’s political one. Hitler, however, was

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 German National Socialism

careful throughout his reign not to threaten private property, including the landed aristoc- racy and big business concerns, although they were gradually directed toward fulfilling Nazi economic goals. The threat from the SA was brutally resolved on June 29, 1934, the so-called “night of the long knives,” when SA leader Ernst Rohm and several hundred of his followers were shot, a development that pleased the army leadership that had viewed the SA as a potential rival. After von Hindenberg died on August 2, 1934, Hitler assumed the presidency, which made him commander in chief of the armed forces. He had officers swear personal loyalty to him.

Rearmament A massive program of rearmament, which violated the Treaty of Versailles, further bolstered military support of the regime. At first, this was done under cover of a program to build trac- tors, but Hitler made his goals public in March 1935. Two months later, he announced the beginning of conscription, another violation of Versailles. In 1936, Hit- ler put Herman Göring in charge of the so-called Four Year Plan to pre- pare Germany for war.

Vanquishing Unemployment Hitler also undertook a major pro- gram of public works, including the building of the German autobahns (freeways). Together with the rear- mament program, this solved the unemployment crisis. In fact, by the late 1930s Germany suffered from a labor shortage. For those Germans deemed to be “racially pure” and not politically suspect, Hitler’s Germany was a good place to live. They enjoyed access to many government benefits such as free day care and paid vacations. As a result of these developments, as well as some important policy victories, Hitler was extremely popular in Germany, and there is little doubt that he could have won free elections had they been held.

Foreign Policy, 1933–1939 Hitler’s foreign policy between 1933 and 1939 had two main goals: to break the Versailles Treaty restrictions on Germany’s military strength; and to annex regions with large Ger- man populations, including Austria, the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, and portions of Poland. This required ever-increasing military appropriations. By 1938 the German bud- get was seven times larger than during the pre-Nazi era, with 74 percent of it dedicated to military purposes (Gilbert & Large, 2002).

The western allies did nothing to slow Hitler’s ambitions. They failed to act when he pub- licly repudiated the Versailles constraints on the German military. Instead, Britain signed a

The Nazis built many freeways like this one. Together with rearmament, these public works projects reduced unemployment to close to zero.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 German National Socialism

naval agreement with Germany in June 1935 that effectively allowed Germany to breach the naval provisions of the treaty as well. In March 1936, Hitler sent German troops into the Rhineland in flagrant violation of the Versailles ban, but again the western allies failed to act. Then German troops and planes were sent to Spain; once again the western allies watched but did not respond.

Appeasement A deep horror at the thought of another world war breaking out drove this western policy of appeasement. It also reflected a general feel- ing that Germany had been treated unfairly at Versailles and that Hitler’s goals were limited to undoing that unfairness. Some Conservative circles in Britain actually agreed with many of Hitler’s policies. Only once it became undeniably clear that Hitler’s goals were far more sweeping did Britain and France react.

In March 1938, claiming that its government was suppressing local Nazis, Hitler sent German troops into Austria and annexed it to Germany in a so-called Anschluss (union). Similar complaints about the mistreatment of the German minority

in Czechoslovakia led Hitler to claim the Sudetenland (Figure 3.4). At a conference in Munich in September 1938, Britain and France agreed to Hitler’s demand for the perma- nent annexation of that region on the condition that he cease further German expansion. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain proclaimed the Munich Agreement had laid the basis for “peace in our time,” but in March 1939, Hitler tore it up by invading Czecho- slovakia, annexing part of it and creating a Slovak puppet state in the rest.

Budapest Graz

Vienna

North Sea

Baltic Sea

GERMANY

FRANCE

SWITZERLAND ITALY

YUGOSLAVIA

HUNGARY

POLAND

Berlin

AUSTRIA

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

EAST PRUSSIA

LITHUANIASWEDEN

DENMARK

NETHERLANDS

BELGIUM

LUXEMBOURG

W eser

Da nu

O der

Vistula

Elbe

R hine

Territorial Changes, 1935–1939

Bratislava Augsburg

Munich

Stuttgart Karlsruhe

Mannheim Nuremberg

Frankfurt a.M. Prague Plzen

Cologne

Leipzig

Stettin

Frankfurt a.d.O.

Rostock

Copenhagen

Bremen

Kiel

Danzig

Memel

Warsaw

Königsberg

PoznanHanover

Hamburg Lübeck

Münster

Düsseldorf

Saarbrücken

Magdeburg Dortmund

KasselEssen

Amsterdam

Brussels

Germany Saarland, incorporated 1935 Rhineland, remilitarized 1936 Austria: the Anschluss 1938 Sudetenland, annexed September 1938 Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, March 1939 (dismemberment of Czechoslovakia) ‘Protective Zone,’ created March 1939 Memel district, annexed March 1939

0 100 200 Miles 0 100 200 Kms

Aachen Liège

Mainz

Nancy Strasbourg

Reims

Basle

Berne

Cracow

Dresden Breslau

(to Hungary 1938)

(to Poland 1938)

This map illustrates the territory acquired by Hitler’s Third Reich between 1935 and the beginning of World War II.

Figure 3.4: The expansion of the Reich, 1935–1939

The Treaty of Versailles demilitarized the Rhineland. By sending German troops into the region, Hitler challenged the treaty and defied France and Great Britain.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 German National Socialism

Budapest Graz

Vienna

North Sea

Baltic Sea

GERMANY

FRANCE

SWITZERLAND ITALY

YUGOSLAVIA

HUNGARY

POLAND

Berlin

AUSTRIA

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

EAST PRUSSIA

LITHUANIASWEDEN

DENMARK

NETHERLANDS

BELGIUM

LUXEMBOURG

W eser

Da nu

O der

Vistula

Elbe

R hine

Territorial Changes, 1935–1939

Bratislava Augsburg

Munich

Stuttgart Karlsruhe

Mannheim Nuremberg

Frankfurt a.M. Prague Plzen

Cologne

Leipzig

Stettin

Frankfurt a.d.O.

Rostock

Copenhagen

Bremen

Kiel

Danzig

Memel

Warsaw

Königsberg

PoznanHanover

Hamburg Lübeck

Münster

Düsseldorf

Saarbrücken

Magdeburg Dortmund

KasselEssen

Amsterdam

Brussels

0 100 200 Miles 0 100 200 Kms

Aachen Liège

Mainz

Nancy Strasbourg

Reims

Basle

Berne

Cracow

Dresden Breslau

(to Hungary 1938)

(to Poland 1938)

This map illustrates the territory acquired by Hitler’s Third Reich between 1935 and the beginning of World War II.

Figure 3.4: The expansion of the Reich, 1935–1939

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.4 Stalin and Stalinism in the Soviet Union

3.4 Stalin and Stalinism in the Soviet Union

While democracy was under siege in much of Europe, in Russia the ruling Com-munist Party sought ways to recover from a disastrous civil war and find secu-rity as the world’s only Communist state. Russia, which became the Soviet Union in 1922, was already a dictatorship, but following the death of Lenin in 1924, power became much more concentrated in the hands of the new leader, Joseph Stalin.

From War Communism to the New Economic Policy

As noted in the previous chapter, Russia experienced a full-fledged civil war between 1918 and the early 1920s. The Bolsheviks prevailed largely because of divisions among their opponents, but also because they were united and ruthlessly used their secret police force as well as the Red Army against their enemies. During this period, the Communist government adopted an economic policy known as “war communism,” which entailed the nationalization of all property, including individual homesteads, industry, and church lands. The Bolsheviks outlawed strikes and, in 1920, imposed compulsory labor.

War communism came under heavy resistance, particularly among peasants who declined to produce foodstuffs only to see them commandeered by the government. As a result, the policy was replaced by the “New Economic Policy” (NEP) in 1921, which involved the reintroduction of elements of capitalism into the economy. This resulted in a stabilization of the economy and an increase in living standards. Although major industries such as banks and transport remained nationalized, the NEP allowed small-scale ownership of land and businesses, as well as freedom of trade in agricultural goods. One outcome was the appearance of a class of medium-sized peasant landowners known as “kulaks.”

The Rise of Stalin

Stalin’s real name was Iosif Djugashvili; he took “Stalin” as his nom de guerre (war name) after he joined the Communist Party and became a full-time revolutionary. He was born into modest circumstances in a small town in Georgia in 1878. His father was a shoemaker and his mother came from a peasant family. The young Stalin learned Georgian before Russian and attended a religious school, where he showed himself to be an assiduous stu- dent and to have a fine singing voice. He also had a strong interest in Georgian folk music and Georgian literature. He later studied at the Georgian Orthodox seminary in Tiflis, fol- lowing his mother’s desire that he become a priest.

Stalin’s first exposure to advanced social thought and revolutionary ideas was in Tiflis. He abandoned the seminary to become a Social Democratic activist and organized strikes and robbed banks to help finance the party. The police were constantly on his trail, and they first arrested him in 1902. From then until 1917, he was arrested twice more and exiled twice.

Stalin was released from a three-year exile to a region north of the Arctic Circle just before the Russian Revolution began. He was close to Lenin and a number of other Communist leaders (with the major exception of Leon Trotsky, the man who had built the Red Army), and he was someone who they could rely on to get things done. During the Civil War,

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.4 Stalin and Stalinism in the Soviet Union

Stalin spent time at the front, and he commanded one front of the Red Army during the war with Poland in 1920–1921.

Beginning in mid-1922, a series of strokes gradu- ally incapacitated Lenin, setting off a power strug- gle for his replacement. Although in his final tes- tament Lenin recommended against him, Stalin used his wiles and position as General Secretary of the Communist Party to outwit his opponents and emerged relatively unchallenged as Lenin’s successor by the late 1920s.

The struggle was not simply about power; it was also about policy. Stalin championed what became known as “socialism in one country,” focusing on the development of the Soviet Union while some of his opponents, especially Trotsky, favored a policy of fostering revolutions in surrounding countries on the theory that only with successful uprisings elsewhere in Europe could Bolshevism in Russia be secure. Once Stalin consolidated his hold on power and marginalized his rivals, he was able to impose his policies. Trotsky, who had been pushed out of the Central Committee in 1927, was forced into exile in 1929. He was murdered by Stalin’s agents at his home in Mexico in 1940.

The Five-Year Plans In 1928, Stalin introduced the first of two “five-year plans,” which were designed to turn the Soviet Union from an agricultural state to an industrial power. These involved gov- ernment control of all aspects of the economy, and especially the collectivization of agri- culture. In theory, this would foster increased production, which would allow the transfer of more workers and resources to heavy industry. Thus, the five-year plans represented a reaction against the capitalist features of the NEP.

The first step was to squeeze resources out of the peasantry. The kulaks, seen as opponents of col- lectivization, were a particular tar- get. These small farmers furiously resisted attempts to seize their land and production by burning their crops and slaughtering their live- stock. Together with severe drought and massive repression, this unrest produced a catastrophic famine that killed millions of Soviets in the early to mid-1930s. Five to ten mil- lion peasants are estimated to have died, mostly in the Ukraine and northern Caucasus, and millions

After his death in 1924, Vladimir Lenin (left) was succeeded as the head of the Soviet government by Joseph Stalin (right).

This Soviet postcard paints a positive view of the collectivization of agriculture ordered by Stalin.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.4 Stalin and Stalinism in the Soviet Union

more were sent to labor camps in Siberia and elsewhere (Richards & Waibel, 2005). The government took other measures, such as forbidding starving peasants from moving to the cities where food was more plentiful, that worsened the situation in the Ukraine. Ukranians refer to the famine as the Holodomor; many people now consider it genocide.

Massive state-directed investment in heavy industry followed the collectivization of agri- culture. By neglecting other economic sectors, the Soviet Union generated industry and employment at precisely the moment that the capitalist countries were losing them. In 1928 the country had 11.3 million urban workers; in 1932 the number had more than doubled to 22.8 million; by 1939 it hit 39 million. In fact, so many jobs were created that there was a labor shortage, which gave women opportunities for industrial employment (Mazower, 1999).

In Their Own Words: Lev Kopelev: A Communist True Believer

In some cases [the team] would be merciful and leave some potatoes, peas, corn for feeding the family. But the stricter ones would make a clean sweep. They would take not only the food and livestock, but also “all valuables and surpluses of clothing,” including icons in their frames, samovars, painted carpets and even metal kitchen utensils which might be silver. And any money they found stashed away. . . .

How could all this have happened?

We were raised as the fanatical adepts of a new creed, the only true religion of scientific socialism. . . . The works of Marx, Engels and Lenin were accepted as holy writ and Stalin was the infallible high priest. . . . And we believed him unconditionally. And later we believed that uncondi-

tional collectivization was unavoidable if we were to . . . reeducate millions of peasants . . . to transform them into laborers with a social conscience, to liberate them from ‘the idiocy of country life,’ from ignorance and prejudice, and to accustom them to culture, to all the boons of socialism. (Kopelev, 1980)

Lev Kopelev (1912–1997) was born in Kiev, Ukraine, into a middle-class Jewish family. He became an ardent Communist as a teenager and participated in the forced collectivization of agriculture that Stalin had decided was essential to the industrial development of the Soviet Union. The preceding pas- sage, in which he describes his role in the collectivizations and then reflects on why he acted as he did, comes from his memoir, The Education of a True Believer, which was published in 1976.

The youthful faith in Communism and in Stalin he explains here survived a number of trials. He was kicked out of the Communist Youth on a number of occasions for holding unorthodox views, but he always admitted the error of his ways and was readmitted. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, he volunteered for the Red Army and because of his expert knowledge of Ger- man, he was made an officer in the propaganda section. In 1945 he was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in a Siberian prison camp for criticizing the atrocities being committed by Soviet soldiers in East Prussia. He was released from prison in 1954 and rehabilitated two years later.

Kopelev refused to blame Communism for this and joined the Communist Party once again in 1957. He remained a loyal Communist until 1968 when he criticized the invasion of Czechoslovakia and joined the nascent dissident movement around Andrei Sakharov. He lived in Germany from 1980 until his death.

A collective farm in Ukraine, 1947. Almost twenty years after collectivized agriculture was imposed, much labor was still done by hand, and female labor was prominent.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.4 Stalin and Stalinism in the Soviet Union

The Purges In the mid-1930s, Stalin began a massive purge of his alleged opponents within the Com- munist Party. There were some widely publicized show trials of leading Communists, who publicly admitted to having committed crimes such as spying for capitalist pow- ers or actively sabotaging the Soviet economy. Millions of others suffered less-publicized arrest, exile, or execution.

Despite the turmoil caused by the attack on the kulaks and the purges, Stalin’s policies largely succeeded in their key goal of transforming the Soviet Union into a major indus- trial power—as early as 1932, over 70 percent of the Soviet national production came from industry. The construction of new schools throughout the country also achieved major progress in reducing illiteracy. Female literacy increased from 42 percent to 82 percent between 1926 and 1939 (Gilbert & Large, 2002). But the price paid for such progress was the creation of a totalitarian police state.

Stalin’s Foreign Policy Stalin saw Hitler, who stressed the evils of Bolshevism, as an implacable foe that was likely to invade the Soviet Union sooner or later. Thus, after 1935, Soviet foreign policy stressed an attempt to form a “popular front” with the western democracies against Ger- many. However, the West distrusted Stalin, whose regime had earlier expounded on the evils of Western capitalism. British and French appeasement of Hitler led Stalin to give up on the Western democracies, and he began his own negotiations with Germany in the hopes of at least postponing what he viewed as an inevitable German invasion. Such an arrangement also suited Hitler because it meant that Germany would not face a two-front war as it had in World War I.

Given that Germany and Rus- sia had been the bitterest of ideo- logical enemies, the world was shocked when the Nazis and the Soviets signed a “non-aggression” pact on August 23, 1939. Named for the two foreign ministers who signed it, the Molotov-Ribben- trop Pact also contained a secret protocol that divided Poland and the Baltic states between the two countries. Nine days later, Hitler invaded Poland.

Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov (seated) signs the Nazi- Soviet Nonaggression Pact in the Kremlin on August 23, 1939. Von Ribbentrop is on the far left and Stalin is on his right.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.5 Cultural and Intellectual Life

3.5 Cultural and Intellectual Life

A collective catastrophe of the magnitude of World War I inevitably left a major mark on European thought and culture. The war had more than one single cul-tural consequence, however. The carnage of 1914–1918 drove many Europeans toward pacifism. Others, however, looked back on their wartime experiences with nos- talgia and hoped to be able to live them once again. For still others, the war undermined the belief in the superiority of European culture and civilization and left them pessimistic about the continent’s future.

Pacifism

A few antiwar books, such as Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire (1916) and Georges Duhamel’s Civilization (1918), appeared just after, or even during the war. Most, however, appeared only after a decade or so, as writers required time to digest the horrors they had seen. Taking the forms of memoirs and fiction, most described the war from the perspective of the front-line soldier—whether British, French, or German—for whom the war had been a barbaric and dehumanizing experience. The most influential of these was All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) by the German novelist Erich Maria Remarque. Within a year, it had sold one million copies in Germany and another million in its French and English translations. The movie version, made in the United States in 1930, won the Oscar for Best

Picture. It also became the target of nationalists in Germany: The Ger- man premiere in December trig- gered a riot, and the government very quickly banned the film.

There was also an anti-war novel of a very different sort, Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik (1923). Hasek was a Czech who served in the Austro-Hungarian army. Rather than portraying the horror of war, his novel makes fun of the con- flict, highlighting its absurdities. The protagonist, Schweik, does not want to be a soldier, and through a series of comic adventures, includ- ing being taken prisoner by his own side, he manages to undermine mil- itary authority and survive the war.

Nostalgia

Still other Europeans looked back on the war nostalgically as the time they were most fully alive. Many of these men had difficulty adjusting to civilian society, and they often found a place in one of the freelance military outfits that existed after the war, such as the German Freikorps. They were also drawn to the Fascists and Nazis, both of which

Lew Ayres and Ben Alexander in a scene from the 1930 movie based on Remarque’s novel. Nationalists considered the representation of German soldiers to be an insult, and the film was prohibited in Germany after a single showing.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.5 Cultural and Intellectual Life

used violence as a weapon. German war veteran and writer Ernst Junger expressed this war nostalgia the most effectively. His wartime memoir, Storm of Steel (1920), was a huge success in Germany. The book celebrated “the princes of the trenches, with their hard set faces, brave to madness, tough and agile to leap forward or back, with keen, bloodthirsty nerves.” For Junger, war was not destructive but creative: it made men; it made new val- ues and it drove civilization forward. As he put it, “We who experienced those days . . . possess an idea of what life means” (Wohl, 1979, p. 55).

The Italian Curzio Suckert, who was known by his pen-name Malaparte, held similar views. The war had taught him and his fellows “the value of . . . human life, of immortal- ity, of sacrifice and if individual egotism” and had made them better than “all genera- tions, including those which gave us our myths, our heroes, and our laws.” Much more than Junger, however, Suckert applied his views to a specific political movement, Fascism, which he described as the “legitimate tyranny” of war heroes (Wohl, 1979).

Cultural Pessimism

Many Europeans were not so optimistic, however, and instead expressed a sense of cri- sis even before the war was over. The German sociologist George Simmel wrote in 1917 that “the spiritual entity we call Europe has been destroyed and is unlikely to be rebuilt” (Spiering, 15). French poet Paul Valéry was also pessimistic. In his essay “The Euro- pean” (1922), he wrote, “We recognize that that pleasurable living and abundance are behind us but confusion and doubt are in us and with us. There is no thinking person . . . who can flatter himself that he is above this malaise, that he has escaped this sense of gloom.” The Irish poet William Butler Yeats put his fears into verse in his 1921 poem “The Second Coming”:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

By far the most influential work of cultural pessimism was Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, which was published in Germany in the summer of 1918, just months before the war ended. Spengler’s book found a large audience in Germany and was quickly trans- lated into many other languages.

Spengler presented a model for understanding world history. Humanity, he argued, has given rise to a number of “world cultures.” Each culture has a defining feature or “prime symbol”; for “West European-American” culture, which in Spengler’s view did not include Russia, this was the “Faustian soul,” the relentless search for discovery. Cultures are organ- isms that all share the same life cycle: birth and infancy, youth, maturity, and old age and decay; and each life cycle lasts approximately one thousand years. Western culture had entered its old age, a long, slow decay that could last a couple of centuries. It had, in Spen- gler’s terms, passed from culture to civilization—from its period of creativity to its period of stultification. Its eventual fate would be to succumb to the forces of barbarism: “the pow- ers of blood, the basic instincts of life, the unbroken physical force” (Spiering, 2002, p. 18).

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.5 Cultural and Intellectual Life

The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) was also pessimistic about Europe’s future, but unlike Spengler, he had no grand theory of historical development that put Europe in a stage of decline. In his book The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Ortega lamented the new dominance of what he called “mass man” over the “select man,” a distinction based not on social class but on intellectual outlook and achievement: “The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be common- place, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.” These newly dominant “commonplace” people lacked the knowledge and ability to sustain European civilization at its current stage, let alone drive it forward. The “average man who has learned to use much of the machinery of civilization, but who is characterized by root-ignorance of the very principles of that civilization” could only oversee its decline (Ortega y Gasset, 1929, p. 84).

The First Movement for European Unification For Spengler, the decline of the West was inevitable and unstoppable. But other European thinkers proposed cures that would allow Europe to regain its leading position in the world. These usually involved turning away from the modern world to return to the sup- posed core values of European culture. In many cases, such as Henri Massis’s “Defence of the West” (1925) and Nikolai Berdayev’s The New Middle Ages (1925), this meant a return to Christianity, which they saw as the basis of Europe’s greatness.

Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894–1972) had a different idea. In 1923 he published Pan- Europa, a manifesto advocating the creation of a European federation, the United States of Europe, as the cure for continental decline. Coudenhove-Kalergi was the son of an Austrian aristocrat and diplomat who had married a Japanese woman. This mixed racial heritage made him highly unusual among the European elite of the time and could have made him more open to unusual ideas.

Coudenhove-Kalergi was not immune to the prevailing pessimism. The war, he thought, had displaced Europe from its place at “the center of the world.” The world had “emanci- pated itself from Europe” and left it on the “periphery.” The division of Europe into a large number of states only furthered this process at a time when other regions were organizing themselves into “state groups” and establishing themselves as “World Powers.” If this situation did not change, then Europe was destined to be “swallowed up.” The United States represented an economic challenge, but the biggest threat facing Europe was Com- munist Russia. Coudenhove-Kalergi saw Communism as a rejection of European culture, but Russia was a menace whatever its political system, as if expansionism were part of the Russian DNA. Europe faced a clear choice “either to overcome all national hostilities and consolidate in a federal union, or sooner or later succumb to a Russian conquest. There is no third possibility” (Coudenhove-Kalergi, 1923, p. 55).

There was another danger facing the continent, according to Coudenhove-Kalergi. Europe had the most “primitive and barbarous international relations” in the world. Together with the “open wounds” left by the treaties that ended World War I and the “national megalomania” promoted by nationalist politicians, Europe was “rushing headlong toward another war” (Coudenhove-Kalergi, 1923, p.105–107). The “War of the Future” would be of such an apocalyptic nature that it would leave World War I in the shade. It

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.6 Art in the Interwar Years

would be “waged not with steel but with poison . . . its object will be not to defeat the enemy forces but to annihilate the enemy nation . . . No distinction will be made between combatants and non-combatants. Every city within reach will be destroyed, every enemy within reach will be slaughtered.” This “war of extermination” would be “the death war- rant of Europe” and leave it a “heap of ruins.” The only victor of such a war would be Russia (Coudenhove-Kalergi, 1923, p. 109–112).

Pan-Europe The only way to save Europe from this dismal future was to create Pan-Europe, “the political and economic consolidation of all the states from Portugal to Poland into a fed- eral union” (Coudenhove-Kalergi, 1923, p. 21). Such a federation would be built on the foundation of the common culture that all Europeans shared. This culture was “that of the White Race, which sprang from the soil of Antiquity and Christianity” (Coudenhove- Kalergi, 1923, p. 29).

Pan-Europa, the “political concept” of Europe, comprised 27 states and 4 territories. It also included the colonies controlled by European states, which expanded Pan-Europe from 5 million square kilometers and 300,000 million people to 26 million square kilometers and 431 million inhabitants. These empires were to be a permanent part of the European “power-complex”; decolonization was not on his agenda (Coudenhove-Kalergi, 1923, p. 32).

Coudenhove-Kalergi was not the first person to propose the creation of a united Europe. He was, however, the first person to take the idea from the printed page and turn it into a political movement. He founded a monthly magazine, Paneuropa, and a Pan-European Union with headquarters in Vienna and national committee across Europe. Many promi- nent intellectuals supported the movement, as did politicians like French President Edu- ard Herriot and German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann. The highpoint of Couden- hove-Kalergi’s influence came in May 1930, when French foreign minister Aristide Briand presented the League of Nations with a memorandum proposing the creation of a Euro- pean federation. The response from the European members of the League was noncom- mittal at best and completely hostile at worst. A moment of heightened nationalism was clearly the wrong time to propose anything that might limit the nation state.

Adolf Hitler detested Coudenhove-Kalergi and his movement, and he immediately tar- geted the thinker when he came to power. Coudenhove-Kalergi fled from Vienna when Germany took over Austria in 1934; and in 1940, when France fell to the Nazis, he went to the United States. He returned to Europe after World War II to promote his ideas once again, but when the process of European unification got underway in 1950, he had no direct role.

3.6 Art in the Interwar Years

The impact of the war registered on European art even before the armistice of Novem-ber 11, 1918, ended the fighting. Within only a few years of its conclusion, the war contributed to the emergence of several new artistic movements.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.6 Art in the Interwar Years

Dada

The first artistic movement to respond to the war arose in 1916 in a cabaret in Zurich, Swit- zerland, one of the few European countries that remained neutral. Called Dada, it quickly spread across Europe and even to the United States. Dada was a diverse movement that touched various art forms, but at its core was horror at the war and the restraints on free- dom that governments had imposed. Dadaists believed that the only possible response was to embrace the absurd.

Dada artists pioneered performance art, and they broadened the concept of art by using new materials, such as food wrappers. They reveled in provocation and shock. The Dada Mani- festo, written by the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara in 1918, conveys the movement’s flavor.

DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING . . .

If I shout: Ideal, Ideal, Ideal Knowledge, Knowledge, Knowledge Boomboom, Boomboom, Boomboom

I have recorded fairly accurately Progress, Law, Morals, and all the other magnificent qualities that various very intelligent people have discussed in so many books . . . (Tzara, 1918)

Surrealism

Dada was a short-lived phenomenon, disappearing by the mid-1920s, but it was a major source for a much more successful artistic and literary movement known as surrealism. French writer André Breton (1896–1966) founded sur- realism in 1924. As with so many artistic movements, this one announced itself with a mani- festo. In it, Breton gave this defi- nition of surrealism:

[Surrealism is] [p]sychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner— the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. (Breton, 1924, para 45).

Surrealist painters sought to reduce the role of the conscious mind and reproduce the experience of dreams. This painting captures the combination of the familiar and the strange that is so characteristic of dreams. Salvador Dalí called it one of his “hand-painted dream photographs.”

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.6 Art in the Interwar Years

Surrealists, among whom were painters such as Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), René Magritte (1898–1967), and Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), and filmmakers like Luís Buñuel (1900–1983), were heavily influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud, who continued the explorations of the subconscious that he had begun in the 1890s.

Painting the War

The war became a subject for artists of all coun- tries. Many saw military action themselves and had this first-hand experience on which to draw. There were few if any paintings that portrayed the new, industrialized warfare as glorious. Rather, the paintings they produced presented the hor- rors the war had revealed.

Such brutal honesty was not always well received. C.W.R. Nevinson’s ironically titled Paths of Glory (1917) was banned from an exhibition of his work in London in March 1918. When the artist protested by covering it with a piece of paper on which he had written “censored,” he was repri- manded by the War Office. Similarly, the cycle of 51 prints, The War (1924), by German artist Otto Dix (1891–1969) provided an unsparing portrayal of the maimed and the wounded, and earned Dix the special enmity of the Nazis, who denounced them as “sabotage” and “insults to German war veterans.”

Weimar Germany and the Bauhaus

Despite the sense of repression, interwar artists forged some important new paths. The Weimar Republic had been in existence only fourteen years when Hitler ’s dictatorship brought it to an end, but even in this very brief time, Germany became a hothouse of cultural innovation. Weimar produced films such as The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920), Metropolis (1927), and The Blue Angel (1930), the work of directors like Josef von Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, and Fritz Lang, and such actors as Marlene Dietrich and Peter Lorre. After the Nazis came to power, many went to the United States and became major names in Hollywood. Weimar also saw major innovations in the theater associated with the names of director Erwin Piscator and playwright Bertolt Brecht. The Threepenny Opera (1928), which Brecht wrote with composer Kurt Weill, was a huge hit at the time, and the music, especially the Ballad of Mack the Knife, remains popular today. Both men fled Germany in 1933.

The most influential of the Weimar Republic’s innovations was the Bauhaus, a school of architecture and design founded by Walter Gropius in April 1919. The Bauhaus “look” was spare and lean, a contrast to the highly ornamented approach that was characteristic of most design at the time. Bauhaus also sought to make the modern world serve peo- ple, “to avert mankind’s enslavement by the machine by giving its products a content of

This is number 10 in Otto Dix’s cycle The War. Although the soldier’s physical injuries do not appear serious, the psychological scars are perfectly clear.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.6 Art in the Interwar Years

reality and significance, and so saving the home from mechanistic anarchy. . . . Our aim was to eliminate every drawback of the machine without sacrificing any of its real advantages” (Gropius, 2001, p. 100). Taught by some of the biggest artis- tic names of the time, such as Paul Klee and Was- sily Kandinsky, students at the Bauhaus designed everything from furniture to books to industrial design. The Nazis closed down the Bauhaus in April 1933, one of the first acts of their purge of the art world. The last director, the architect Lud- wig Mies van der Rohe, went into exile in the United States.

Art in the Soviet Union

For Russian artists who supported the regime, the Revolution was a time of optimism. The Com- munists believed that they were building a new society, that this society needed new men and women, and that art had a major role to play in creating them. Painters, sculptors, theater direc- tors, moviemakers and writers responded to the challenge, convinced they could use new art forms to train the people’s minds to understand the world in a more socialistic way (Figes, 2003). Communist Russia was no haven of artistic freedom, but Lenin, who himself was no lover of avant-garde art, was prepared to allow artists considerable lati- tude and autonomy. As a result, through the 1920s Russia saw the flourishing of several new artistic movements.

A Decade of Experimentation Proletkult (proletarian culture) emerged from a prerevolutionary movement intended to create conscious socialists and an authentic workers’ culture among the proletariat. One of its promoters, Anatoly Lunacharsky, became the regime’s Commissar for Enlightenment, and the proletkult organization came to have 400,000 members in assorted clubs, theaters, artists’ workshops, writing groups, and musical bands (Figes, 2003).

Constructivism, an approach to art that claimed art was valuable only when supporting a social objective and denied it any value in and of itself, also began before the Revolution, but Constructivists such as Aleksander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Vladimir Talin became the Revolution’s enthusiastic supporters. The Program of the First Working Group of Constructivists (1922) declared “an uncompromising war on art” as an isolated, purely aesthetic activity and assumed as its goal “the finding of the communistic expres- sion of material cultures.” This required giving artistic creation real-life applications, moving it “on to the rails of practical activity” (Harrison, 2002, p. 341–342). This emphasis on the practical led them to design posters, book covers, and furniture. Stepanova and Liubov Popova worked for the First State Cotton-Printing Factory in Moscow where they designed textiles and women’s clothing.

The tubular frame of the Wassily chair is an outstanding example of Bauhaus design. Inspired by the frame of a bicycle, it was intended to be mass-produced.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.6 Art in the Interwar Years

Sergei Eisenstein and the Cinema Lenin once said, “For us, cinema is the most important of the arts” (Figes, 2003, p. 451), and this certainly made sense in a country with massive illiteracy. Cinema produced the greatest artistic achievements of this period, achievements associated above all with Ser- gei Eisenstein. Trained as an engineer, Eisenstein served in the Red Army during the civil war. He then worked as a theater director before moving to filmmaking. Between 1924 and 1929, he made a series of movies about the Revolution: Strike, The Battleship Potemkin, October: Ten Days that Shook the World, and The General Line: The Old and the New. These films had clear political messages, but they employed novel stylistic techniques that made Eisenstein world famous as a filmmaker. Perhaps the most influential was the montage: In the editing stage, two different images were put together to produce a powerful effect. The most famous example is the “Odessa Steps” sequence from Battleship Potemkin: Shots of individuals were interspersed with shots of the crowd rushing down the steps, producing a scene that lasted much longer than it would have taken the crowd to descend in real time.

Socialist Realism This period of cultural experimentation and relative cultural freedom ended in 1928, when Stalin introduced his policy of crash industrialization in the first Five-Year Plan. The plan was also intended to carry through a cultural revolution, and it called on all the arts to help build a new society (Figes, 2003). Stalin’s description of the artist as “the engineer of human souls” summarized the new place of the arts. Art’s role was now to serve the Soviet state as propaganda.

In April 1932, the Central Committee issued a decree, “On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations,” which abolished all existing artistic organizations and replaced them with a single, national artists’ union. The regime believed that the continued existence of multiple organizations was dangerous; they were making the arts “too narrow” and “hampering the serious development of artistic creation.” They could very well direct art- ists away from “the tasks of Socialist construction” and make them “an instrument for cul- tivating elitist withdrawal and loss of contact with the political tasks of contemporaneity”

(Harrison, 2002, p. 418).

Getting all artists into a single orga- nization was not enough, though. Two years later, at its first Congress, the All Russian Writers’ Union defined the future style of Soviet art: Socialist Realism. This required “not only knowing reality as it is, but knowing where it is moving. It is moving towards socialism, it is moving towards the victory of the international proletariat” (Figes, 2003, p. 474). Artists were now required to present positive por- trayals of the lives of workers and

Festival in the Kolkhoz (1937) by Sergeij Gerasimov (1885– 1970) captures the optimism that was required in socialist realist paintings.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.6 Art in the Interwar Years

peasants or the glorious Communist future that lay ahead. From this point on, Soviet art- ists would be subject to ever-tighter official control. Even Eisenstein was criticized and refused permission to make more movies until he denounced himself in 1935. He was eventually allowed to work again, but when he was still unwilling to adhere strictly to the official line, the authorities stopped the filming of his new project and had all the nega- tives burned.

Fascism and Art

The Fascist regimes in Italy and Germany had very different ideas about art. Mussolini never proclaimed an official artistic style for the regime and remained open to a wide range of art. The Nazis, in contrast, had much more definite ideas; as a young man, Hitler had wanted to be an artist, and as a result he paid much more attention to the arts than most dictators. The Nazis rejected all modern art, which they labeled as “degenerate” and associated with Jews and Communists.

Art in Fascist Italy The most important avant-garde artistic movement in Italy was Futurism (see chapter 1). Many Futurists supported Fascism; Marinetti, the most influential Futurist, was an early member of the Fascist movement. Despite Marinetti’s efforts, however, Mussolini never made Futurism Fascism’s official artistic style, choosing instead to keep his regime neu- tral. At the opening of an exhibition in 1923 he said, “It is far from my idea to encourage anything like a state art. Art belongs to the domain of the individual. The state has only one duty: not to undermine art, to provide humane conditions for artists, to encourage them from the artistic and national point of view” (Braun, 2000, p. 1).

Art in Nazi Germany The Nazi assault on modern art began immediately after the party came to power. Offi- cials dismissed avant-garde artists such as Paul Klee and Otto Dix from teaching posi- tions at public institutions. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, established institutions known as Chambers to ensure that the arts were in line with Nazi ideas.

In 1937, The Reich Chamber of Visual Art executed a purge of German museums. They put 650 pieces, many of them by artists considered among the greatest of the 20th century, on display as part of the exhibition “Degenerate Art” that opened in Munich on July 19, 1937. The paintings, deliberately hung in a chaotic manner to increase their offensiveness, were accompanied by slogans painted on the walls such as “An insult to German wom- anhood”; “Nature as seen by sick minds”; and “The Jewish longing for the wilderness reveals itself—in Germany the Negro becomes the racial ideal of a degenerate art” (Bar- ron, 1991, p. 46). The exhibition drew two million visitors before being sent on tour across Germany and Austria. Most of the purged works of art were later burned, although those likely to bring a good price were auctioned abroad.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.6 Art in the Interwar Years

The Nazis knew what they disliked, and they also knew what they liked. The day before the “Degenerate Art” exhibition began, Hitler opened the “Great German Art Exhibition” in the newly constructed House of German Art. In his speech, he contrasted the “new human type . . . more healthy and thereby stronger and more beau- tiful” that the Nazis were creating with what appeared in the work of modern artists: “Deformed cripples and cretins, women who inspire only disgust, men who are more like wild beasts, children who, if they were alive, would be regarded as God’s curse.” Hitler wanted art to win “the ready inner agreement of the broad, healthy mass of the people” not “the support of small, partially indifferent cliques” as was cur- rently the case. “This exhibition,” he concluded, “is but a beginning. [ . . . ] But the opening of this exhibit is also the beginning of the end of the stultification of German art and the end of the cultural destruction of our people” (GHDI, Hitler ’s Speech, p.1).

The show consisted of 900 pieces, including “nudes, genre scenes, still lifes, idealized land- scapes, mythological scenes, images of work- ers and heroes, and above all portraits of ‘pure’ and ‘Aryan’ people” (GHDI, Hitler’s speech, p. 1). The Nazi ideal closely resembled the concept of beauty developed by the Greeks and Romans. This exhibit was much less successful than the one on “Degenerate Art,” drawing an average of only 3,200 visitors per day compared to more than 20,000 (GHDI, First “Great German art exhi- bition,” p. 1).

The Nazi concept of degeneracy extended to music as well. “Degenerate” music included pieces composed by Jews or Communists and, because it was created by African Americans, jazz. (The Nazis did allow a tame domestic ver- sion of jazz, but forbade musicians from stand- ing up and moving their bodies while playing.) On May 24, 1938, an exhibition entitled “Degen- erate Music” opened in Dusseldorf as part of the Reich Music Days. After closing in Dussel- dorf, it was sent on tour with the “Degenerate Art” show.

This poster by Arno Drescher (1892–1971) reflects the grandeur that the Nazis wanted in their art.

The family depicted in this painting exemplifies the Nazi ideal of the Aryan race. The parents and the children alike have porcelain skin and flaxen hair. This “ideal human form” closely resembles the concept of beauty developed by the Greeks and Romans.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.7 The League of Nations

3.7 The League of Nations

The creation of the League of Nations was the most revolutionary, and potentially the most important, achievement of the Paris Peace Conference. Never before had diplomacy had such a “multinational dimension” (Steiner, 2005). In practice, how- ever, the League was severely handicapped from the start, and it never came close to realizing its potential or the hopes and expectations invested in it. In March 1920, the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. As a result, the United States, the country that had given birth to the idea of the League and of collective security, would not be a member, embracing isolationism instead. Neither Germany nor the Soviet Union, two of the most important European states, was invited to join. Nor was the League provided with much in the way of resources by states who were members: The annual budget was only $5.5 million, the equivalent of $63 million in 2010.

Whatever the League would achieve depended on its members’ willingness to partici- pate. Nothing required them to conduct diplomacy through the League (Mazower, 1999). The attitudes of the most powerful states were particularly important. This became clear when first Japan (1933), then Germany (1935)—which had been admitted to the League in 1926—and then Italy (1937) quit the organization. As a result, the League, which had never been more than a supplement to traditional diplomacy, became increasingly irrel- evant (Steiner, 2005).

Early Successes Through the 1920s, the League became involved in seventeen international disputes that could have led to conflict, and the organization helped end actual hostilities on seven occasions. Almost all of these disputes were between smaller states, what historian Zara Steiner describes as the “small change” of international affairs. Even here, the ability of the League to act depended on the assent of the large powers on the League council, as well as the willingness of disputes’ parties to accept the League’s solutions (Steiner, 2005).

One example of the League’s success was a dispute between Bulgaria and Greece in 1925 known as the War of the Stray Dog. Bulgarian border guards fired on a Greek soldier who had wandered across the border to retrieve his pet dog. When Greece sent troops into Bulgarian territory in response, Bulgaria appealed to the League. The Coun- cil agreed to demand that both sides stand down and threatened to impose sanctions if they did not. The threat worked. The League then sent a committee to investigate the situation; the committee found in favor of Bulgaria and Greece was ordered to pay repa- rations of £45,000.

The League was able to act effectively in this case because Britain and France agreed on the measures to be taken. Two years earlier, when Italy took the Greek island of Corfu and the Greek government appealed to Geneva, the two powers could not agree. Britain backed Greece and wanted the League to act; France backed Italy. As a result, the League remained on the sidelines while a conference of ambassadors decided the issue.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.7 The League of Nations

Humanitarian Issues The League also helped deal with various humanitarian issues, including the abuse of children, epidemics, drugs, the treatment of national minorities, and the plight of refu- gees. It was most successful in this last one, despite its extremely limited resources. Much of this success was due to the High Commissioner for Refugees, the Norwegian Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen. Originally appointed to deal with the refugees created by the Russian Civil War, a role for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Nansen worked for the League from 1920 until 1930. He created the so-called “Nansen passport,” which made it possible for refugees to travel to other countries.

The League of Nations and Disarmament Many Europeans believed that the main cause of World War I was the arms race that had taken place before 1914, and they concluded that the best way to prevent a future war was to avoid another weapons buildup. As a result, there was widespread popular support for disarmament, and the League of Nations devoted its greatest efforts to this issue. These efforts produced few results, however, as governments were much less keen than their citizens to reduce their military preparedness.

There was one early disarmament success, but it was the result of direct negotiations among the powers involved and had nothing to do with the League. The United States called the International Conference on Naval Limitation (November 1921–February 1922), commonly known as the Washington Naval Conference, to deal with rapid naval buildup, especially in the Pacific. The conference produced a number of agreements, the most important of which was the Five Power Naval Limitation Treaty, which the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan signed on February 6, 1922. The signatories agreed to a set ratio in the size of their capital fleets and to a 10-year “holiday” on the construction of new ships. Britain and the United States even scrapped some of their existing vessels. The agreement remained in effect for 10 years.

The Washington Agreements produced great optimism among the supporters of disar- mament, but future attempts at arms reduction proved to be failures, none more so than the League’s great World Disarmament Conference of 1932. This time, because the gov- ernments involved, especially Germany and France, were not prepared to agree to arms reductions, the conference concluded without an agreement.

Increasing Irrelevance This failure was a major blow to the League’s prestige, and it came just as it was faced with a number of major international crises that illustrated the extent of the League’s weakness and irrelevance by the mid-1930s. The first was the Japanese invasion of Man- churia in 1931 and the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo. The second was the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia, one of only two independent states in Africa. The third was the civil war that broke out in Spain in July 1936.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.7 The League of Nations

Manchuria In September 1931, Japan sent troops into the Chinese territory of Manchuria, where it planned to set up a puppet state called Manchukuo. The issue came to the League, and in December it sent a fact-finding commission to study the situation. (In a major break from its usual policy, the United States worked with the League on the Manchurian crisis, and a U.S. member served on the commission.) It was April 1932 before the Lytton Commission arrived in Manchuria, and it did not issue its report until January 1933. The report rejected Japan’s version of events, especially the legitimacy of the state of Manchukuo, but it did not condemn Japanese aggression outright.

In the end, the League approved a document based on the Lytton report criticizing Japa- nese actions in Manchuria, but it did not explicitly condemn Japan itself. Additionally, it did not employ any more vigorous responses, such as imposing sanctions. This weak response to open aggression was a serious blow to the League’s prestige. In a move that foreshadowed the reactions of other expansionist powers, Japan withdrew from the organization.

Ethiopia In October 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia, where it had long hoped to establish a colony. Within a few days, the League denounced Italy as the aggressor, and the next month it imposed sanctions. In theory, the imposition of sanctions was one of the most severe mea- sures the League could take, but in this case they proved ineffective. Attempts to add coal, oil, iron, and steel to the list of goods that could not be sold to Italy were rejected by the British and French governments, which sought to avoid alienating Mussolini. (Britain and France had even proposed an agreement that would have left Italy in control of much of Ethiopia’s territory while maintaining a small Ethiopian state.)

The Italians had overwhelming military superiority, and by May 1936 they occupied Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, and Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie fled the coun- try. The British began suggesting that sanctions be lifted, so in June, Selassie took the unprecedented step of addressing the League of Nations himself. In a powerful speech, he described the barbaric methods the Italians used against his people:

The deadly rain that fell from the aircraft made all those whom it touched fly shrieking with pain. All those who drank the poisoned water or ate the infected food also succumbed in dreadful suffering. In tens of thousands, the victims of the Italian mustard gas fell.

Then Selassie put forth the crucial question:

I ask the fifty-two nations, who have given the Ethiopian people a promise to help them in their resistance to the aggressor, what are they willing to do for Ethiopia? And the great Powers who have promised the guarantee of collective security to small States on whom weighs the threat that they may one day suffer the fate of Ethiopia, I ask what measures do you intend to take? (www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/selassie.htm)

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www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/selassie.htm

CHAPTER 3Section 3.7 The League of Nations

The answer was quick in coming. Britain and France were not pre- pared to take any further measures against Italy, and on July 15, the League voted to lift the sanctions.

The Spanish Civil War Three days after the lifting of sanc- tions against Italy, there was a revolt in Spain against the demo- cratically elected government by elements of the armed forces. Spain was a marginal country in terms of European power politics—it had even remained neutral during World War I—so an event such as

this should have been of little concern. However, the Spanish Civil War quickly became the center of European and even global attention, and how it played out on the international stage demonstrated the increased irrelevance of the League of Nations in the wake of the Ethiopian crisis.

The Second Republic, 1931–1936 A military dictatorship governed Spain between 1923 and 1930. When it fell because of growing unrest, the Second Republic replaced it. The republic was initially governed by a coalition of Republicans and Socialists. It undertook a sweeping program of reform aimed at reducing the influence of the Catholic Church, reducing the size and increasing the effectiveness of the army, providing regional autonomy for Catalonia, and providing land for the landless in the rural south.

This coalition was defeated in elections in November 1933 by the center-right Radical Party, which had the support of the newly created right-wing CEDA party. The CEDA adopted some trappings of Fascist parties, including having a uniformed youth wing. When three members of the CEDA entered the cabinet, the Socialists thought that Spain was on the verge of a Fascist takeover and launched a revolt, which failed. This led to the creation of the Popular Front, a new center-left coalition, including the small Communist Party. The Popular Front won the elections of February 1936 but had to deal with a seri- ously polarized situation: In the south, landless laborers staged land occupations while political violence in the cities, mostly provoked by the far right, spiraled.

This was the context for the military conspiracy that led to an attempted coup on July 18, 1936. The initial revolt was defeated in most of Spain’s major cities, including Madrid and Barcelona, by the combination of loyal elements of the army and police and armed workers’ groups. In most of Southern and Central Spain, the revolt succeeded and the Nationalists, as the rebels called themselves, took control. What was intended as a rapid coup turned into a protracted military conflict.

Haile Selassie’s dramatic speech to the League of Nations failed to prevent the League from lifting its sanctions on Italy.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.7 The League of Nations

The failed coup also triggered a social revolution among urban workers and agricultural laborers. Worker militias controlled the streets in many places. In the major cities, and especially Barcelona where the anarchists were strong, workers took over major economic enterprises. In the countryside, they created agricultural collectives. Perhaps the most famous description of revolutionary Spain comes from George Orwell’s account, Homage to Catalonia (1938):

[T]he aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. . . . And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically every- one wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. (Orwell, 1938, para 1)

The Republican government had to try and control—and, if possible, reverse—this revo- lutionary situation at the same time as it tried to defeat the military rebels.

Foreign Intervention The leaders of the military revolt quickly appealed to Hitler and Mussolini for support. Both provided it, although Hitler’s aid came at the price of privileged access to important Span- ish mineral resources for German industry. Italy sent some 78,000 troops as well as military equip- ment; in addition to military advi- sors, Germany sent 14,000 soldiers including the Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion, which would experiment with new techniques in aerial war- fare. The Nationalists also had 10,000 men sent by the Salazar dic- tatorship in Portugal.

The Spanish government appealed to Britain and France to sell it military equipment. The British

© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York This painting was Picasso’s response to the bombing of the town of Guernica by the Condor Legion of the German Air Force. Guernica was the first town destroyed by aerial bombardment, a foreshadowing of what would come in World War II.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.7 The League of Nations

government was afraid of antagonizing Hitler and saw the Republic as Communist, so it refused. The French government headed by the Socialist Léon Blum, initially agreed, but this provoked so much domestic controversy that it quickly changed its mind and closed its border with Spain. The U.S. government also banned arms sales to Spain, although U.S. companies such as Ford, General Motors, and Texas Oil sold their products to the rebels.

In the end, only Mexico and the Soviet Union provided military assistance to the Repub- lic. The Soviets also played a major role in organizing the International Brigades, 40,000 volunteers from 52 countries—many but not all of whom were Communists—who went to Spain to fight against Fascism. (Among them were the 2,800 Americans who made up the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The conflict killed 900 of them.) Soviet aid came at a steep price, including most of Spain’s vast reserves of gold and the increased influence of the Spanish Communist Party. Overall, the foreign assistance the Republic received was dwarfed by that sent to their Nationalist enemies.

Non-Intervention Instead of taking the Spanish situation to the League of Nations, Britain and France devel- oped a solution outside of it. In August 1936, they proposed the idea of a Non-Intervention Agreement, with a Non-Intervention Committee (NIC) based in London to monitor it. Twenty-seven countries, including all of the European powers signed, promising not to export or re-export war materiel to either side. The Spanish government was not invited to take part and was not even allowed to present evidence directly to the Committee.

The NIC accepted evidence of Soviet violations more readily than those by Italy and Ger- many, but having signed the agreement did not stop any of these countries from intervening

since they knew that France and Britain were not going to take the necessary actions to enforce non- intervention. For Britain and France, the appear- ance of non-intervention was the whole goal: They could say that had responded to the Spanish situation but did not have to worry about antago- nizing Hitler or Mussolini. Even the Republican government’s decision in September 1938 to send the International Brigades home failed to move the NIC to take action against Germany and Italy.

The Spanish Civil War mobilized intellectual and cultural figures around the world. The vast major- ity, including people such as Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and Arthur Koestler, supported the Republic, which they saw as carrying on the “good fight,” defending democracy against Fas- cist aggression. Many knew little about Spain, which was the accidental stage for what they saw as a much broader ideological conflict. And many were disillusioned by their experiences there, especially the infighting among the various groups on the Republican side, and above all the Communist Party.

This Republican poster portrays Franco as a Fascist monster supported by the army, the wealthy, and the Catholic Church.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.8 Europe in the World

The Republic made a valiant effort at defending itself, especially when the imbalance in foreign assistance so strongly favored its enemy. But in addition to superior resources, the Nationalists also benefitted from greater unity of purpose. General Francisco Franco, a traditional conservative who emerged as the uncontested Nationalist leader, joined the political groups that had supported the uprising into a single political movement over which he imposed strict discipline. The Nationalist side saw none of the factionalism that hindered the Republicans. Madrid and Valencia, the last major cities held by the Republic, fell at the end of March 1939. On April 1, Franco declared victory.

The End of the League of Nations

The League continued to exist legally until April 1946, but it was essentially inoperative once World War II began. Before the war was over, the Allies had decided to create a new organization, the United Nations. At its final session on April 19, 1946, the Assem- bly unanimously approved a resolution that “The League of Nations shall cease to exist except for the purpose of the liquidation of its affairs.” Some of the League’s specialized agencies, such as the International Labor Office, continued to exist and became affiliated with the UN.

3.8 Europe in the World

World War I had a complex effect on Europe’s place in the world. The war weak-ened Europe’s global economic position, but it affected European empires in contradictory ways. President Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” and his rhetoric of self-determination inspired hope in colonial territories around the world. These hopes were soon dashed, and the French and British empires grew even larger. On the other hand, the war led people outside Europe to become increasingly critical of colonial rule and the continent’s pretensions to cultural superiority.

Europe in the Global Economy

World War I weakened Europe’s position in the world economy. The United States replaced Great Britain as the world’s most important creditor nation; it also surpassed both Brit- ain and Germany to become the greatest industrial power. During the 19th century, the United States had been a major destination for European, and especially British, foreign investment. After 1918, the direction of capital flows was reversed: During the interwar period, the availability of U.S. investment was a major determinant of Europe’s economic health, as the Depression made abundantly clear.

Ever since Europe had begun to industrialize in the 18th century, it had accounted for a growing share of the world economy. This share stood at 47 percent of global GDP in 1913. The war reversed this trend. By 1940, Europe’s share had fallen to only a little more than 40 percent (Broadberry & O’Rourke, 2010).

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.8 Europe in the World

The “Wilsonian Moment”

Colonial peoples around the world embraced Woodrow Wilson’s wartime rhetoric of self- determination. The end of World War I and the Paris Peace Conference marked what his- torian Erez Manela has called “the Wilsonian moment,” a brief period when the American president became an icon for millions worldwide (Manela, 2007). Among those inspired by Wilson’s vision were the Egyptian nationalist leader Sa’d Zaghlul and the future Viet- namese Communist Ho Chi Minh.

These hopes were quickly dashed after the war, as the Paris Peace Conference did not give colonial peoples the self-determination they demanded. But the genie was out of the bottle; as the Chinese leader Sun Yat-sen commented, “Wilson’s proposals, once set forth, could not be recalled” (Manela, 2007, p. 216). Before 1919 was over, there were major anti- colonial movements in Egypt, China, Korea, and India.

The Growth of Empire

World War I and the Paris Peace Conference enlarged the British and French empires. This expansion came at the expense of Germany, which was stripped of its colonies in Africa and the Pacific, and the Ottoman Empire, whose domains in the Middle East were given to France and Britain as League of Nations mandates. The total amount of land under colonial rule remained unchanged between 1913 and 1938, but the number of people liv- ing under European imperial rule increased from 526 million to 626 million, in both cases nearly 29 percent of the total world population.

For Great Britain and France, the Depression made empire more economically important than ever before. As international trade diminished in the face of protectionism, the Brit- ish established a system known as Imperial Preference. In 1932, Britain signed a series of bilateral agreements with its self-governing dominions in which it promised not to impose tariffs on their agricultural products or on some manufactured goods while increasing the duty or quotas imposed on agricultural products from outside the Empire. In the French case, the empire was a market of last resort as other foreign markets shrank; by 1939 it accounted for more than 40 percent of France’s exports.

Colonial Criticism

Europeans justified imperialism on the basis of their “superior” civilization. Before World War I, many of those people in Europe’s colonies who had received a Western education accepted European superiority, especially in science and technology, and demanded even greater access to it. The war wrought a fundamental change to these attitudes among colo- nial elites, some of whom had seen the carnage firsthand and were no longer prepared to accept European claims of supremacy.

One of these was Mohandas Gandhi. He had been an ambulance driver for part of the war, and that experience strengthened his view that India should refuse to become an indus- trial society on the European model. “India’s destiny,” he wrote in 1926, “lies not along

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.8 Europe in the World

the bloody way of the West . . . but along the bloodless way of peace that comes from a simple and godly life. India is in danger of losing her soul. She cannot lose it and live. She must not, therefore, lazily and helplessly say, ‘I cannot escape the onrush from the West’” (Adas, 2004, p. 55).

The writers from French colonies in Africa and the Caribbean who made up the Négri- tude movement of the 1930s shared the loss of faith in Europe. Poets such as Léopold Sen- ghor (1906–2001), later president of independent Senegal, Léon Damas (1912–1978) from French Guyana, and Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) from Martinique expressed pride in their indigenous cultures and in their color: The name of the movement rescued the French word negre from its use as an insult. They also rejected, and even mocked, the European culture that they had been taught was so superior. These ideas would later prove to be influential in fostering movements for independence.

In Their Own Words: Aimé Césaire: Discovering Pride

It was simply that in Paris at the time there were a few dozen Negroes of diverse origins. . . . We had come from different parts of the world. It was our first meeting. We were discovering ourselves. . . . [the concept of Negritude] was somewhat of a collective creation. . . . It was really a resistance to the politics of cultural assimilation. . . . In France people spoke of a civilized world and a barbarian world. The barbarian world was Africa and the civilized world was Europe. The best thing one could do with an African was to assimilate him: the ideal was to turn him into a Frenchman with black skin. . . .

Our struggle was a struggle against alienation. That struggle gave birth to Negritude. Because Antilleans were ashamed of being Negroes, they searched for all sorts of euphemism for Negro; they would say a man of color, a dark-complexioned man, and other idio-

cies like that. That’s when we adopted the word nègre as a term of defiance. It was a defiant name. To some extent it was a reaction of enraged youth. (Cesaire, 1972, p. 88)

These words come from an interview that the poet Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) gave to a writer from Haiti in 1967. Césaire was born on the Caribbean island and French colony of Martinique. In 1931 he went to study in Paris, where he remained until 1939. After his years in France, Césaire returned to Martinique where he was a prominent figure in the island’s cultural and political life.

In Paris, Césaire got to know black intellectuals from other parts of the world, including from Africa itself. He also was subjected to the dismissive and denigrating views that Europeans held of Africa and African culture. The combination of those encounters in that context led to the creation of Negritude, a new pride in being Africans and part of the African diaspora. Reflecting on this develop- ment thirty years later, Césaire highlighted the irony that it was only in Paris, the center of European culture, that he and his colleagues had been able to develop a consciousness of—and pride in—their shared African origins.

Aimé Césaire, 1982

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CHAPTER 3Chapter Summary

Japan

Something similar occurred in Japan, which was emerging as the great power in Asia. Until the war, Japanese intellectuals had looked to Europe as the global leader in cultural, political, and economic matters. What Japanese called “the Great European War” diminished Europe in the eyes of its former admirers. Some briefly turned to the United States, but it was tar- nished by its exclusion of Japanese immigrants and its imperial pres- ence in the Philippines. Others looked to China. Eventually, Japan would embark on an aggressive imperialist adventure of its own, one that would begin with an inva- sion of China.

Conclusion

The interwar years threw up major challenges to Europe’s democratic politics, its economies, and its position in the world. The tensions that emerged during this period would explode into full-scale war in August 1939, when Hitler felt it was time to launch his campaign to create an empire. This new conflict would far surpass World War I in its scale and its lethalness, and would produce horrors that even the most pessimistic interwar writer could not have imagined. When it ended, Europe would be less powerful and its place in the world more reduced than at any time since the begin- ning of the 19th century.

Chapter Summary

Economy and Society • Europe’s postwar economic recovery was slow and featured only modest rates of

economic growth. • The impact of the Depression was not uniform across Europe, but almost every-

where, it led to a significant decline in industrial production, even more tariffs, the collapse of trade, and mass unemployment.

An Egyptian woman addresses a crowd in Cairo, May 24, 1919. The original caption said, “The speaker is urging greater patriotism and loyalty to their land. During her speech she cried for cheers for her land, for liberty and President Wilson.”

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CHAPTER 3Chapter Summary

Italy: The Birth of Fascism • Fascism was a new kind of right-wing mass movement that was born in Italy in

1919. It was led by Benito Mussolini. • Mussolini came to power through legal means and moved to establish a dictator-

ship after three years. • Mussolini pursued an expansionist foreign policy.

German National Socialism • National Socialism drew on Germany’s long tradition of authoritarianism,

nationalism, and anti-Semitism. • The severe impact of the Depression was a major reason for the growth and elec-

toral success of National Socialism. • Hitler came to power through legal means, but he moved to create a dictatorship

immediately. • Between 1933 and 1939, Hitler rearmed Germany and successfully carried out an

aggressive foreign policy.

Stalin and Stalinism in the Soviet Union • Stalin sought to turn the Soviet Union from an agricultural state to an industrial

power. This involved the forced collectivization of agriculture. • Stalin’s main foreign policy goal was to prevent another German invasion of Russia.

Cultural and Intellectual Life • The experience of World War I strongly marked European cultural and intellec-

tual life, although there was not one single, shared reaction.

Art in the Interwar Years • World War I had a major impact on European art and contributed to the emer-

gence of several new artistic movements. • The Soviet Union under Stalin and Nazi Germany both had strong and clear

ideas about the type of art they wanted and imposed policies to achieve this.

The League of Nations • The creation of the League of Nations was a major innovation in international

relations, but its ability to realize its potential depended on the willingness of the member states to authorize it to act.

• Despite some initial successes, the League became more and more irrelevant as international tensions increased during the 1930s.

Europe in the World • World War I weakened Europe’s position in the world economy. • Overall, Europe’s empires remained as large in the interwar period as they had

been before 1914. • People outside Europe became increasingly critical of colonial rule and of

Europe’s pretensions to cultural superiority.

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CHAPTER 3Thought Questions

End-of-Chapter Review

1. Which term indicates the most all-encompassing kind of nondemocratic regime?

a. totalitarian b. dictatorship c. authoritarian d. bicameral

2. The greatest inflation in world history occurred in which European country between the world wars?

a. Austria b. Canada c. Italy d. Germany

3. Which is accurate?

a. Hitler came to power legally and then ruled democratically b. Hitler came to power legally but quickly instituted a dictatorship c. Hitler came to power legally and then gradually imposed a dictatorship d. Hitler came to power illegally and ruled as a dictator from the start

4. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi was associated with the movement for

a. united Europe b. pacifism c. feminism d. Nazism

5. The response of the European powers to the Spanish Civil War was

a. to have the League of Nations impose sanctions on the Republic b. to have the League of Nations impose sanctions on Franco c. to sign a Non-Intervention Agreement d. to have the League of Nations send in a peacekeeping force

Answers: 1) a, 2) d, 3) b, 4) a, 5) c

Thought Questions

• Why was the economic recovery after World War I so weak? • What were the causes of the Depression? • How were Italian Fascism and German National Socialism similar as movements

and as regimes? How were they different? • What were the major features of Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union? • What was the impact of World War I on postwar European culture? • Did the League of Nations live up to its potential? Why or why not? • In what ways was Europe’s place in the world different after World War I than

before?

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CHAPTER 3Key Terms

Web Links

“On European Civilization and the European Mind” French poet Paul Valéry (1871–1945) expresses concern over the effects of World War I on European culture. www.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/valery.asp

“The Hour of Chewing Gum” (1926) German journalist Ernst Lorsy illustrates the fear of Americanization felt by many Euro- pean intellectuals. http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=3857

Industrialization of the Country, 1928 Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) sets the Soviet Union on the road to rapid industrialization. www.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/1928stalin.asp

What is Fascism? In this entry in the 1932 edition of the Italian Encyclopedia, Fascist dictator Benito Musso- lini (1883–1945) provided his definition of the movement he had created in 1919. www.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/mussolini-fascism.asp

The Nazi Boycott of Jewish Businesses Victor Klemperer’s diary entry for March 31, 1933, describes the atmosphere the day before the first major Nazi initiative against German Jews. http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1519

Homage to Catalonia In the opening chapter of his account of his experiences as a volunteer fighter during the Spanish Civil War, British author George Orwell describes the situation he found when he arrived in Barcelona. http://www.george-orwell.org/Homage_to_Catalonia/index.html

Key Terms

Authoritarian A dictatorship that is content so long as no overt opposition is expressed.

Concentration camps Camps created by the Nazi government of Germany beginning in 1933 to intern political enemies and members of social groups it deemed “undesirable.”

Constructivism An approach to art in the Soviet Union claiming that art was valu- able only when supporting a social objec- tive, denying it any value in and of itself.

Dada An artistic movement that emerged in 1916 in response to the horrors of World War I. It was based on the belief that the only possible response was to embrace the absurd.

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www.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/valery.asp

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=3857

www.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/1928stalin.asp

www.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/mussolini-fascism.asp

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1519

http://www.george-orwell.org/Homage_to_Catalonia/index.html

CHAPTER 3Key Terms

Economic nationalism A set of policies, involving high tariffs and controls on imports and exports, based on the belief that a country should be as self-supporting as possible.

Fascism New type of mass, right-wing political movement created by Benito Mus- solini in 1919, who ruled Italy between 1922 and 1943.

Five-Year Plans Economic policy involv- ing government control of all aspects of the economy, and especially the collectivization of agriculture introduced by Stalin in 1928 designed to turn the Soviet Union from an agricultural state to an industrial power.

Isolationism Policy approach adopted by the U.S. government for most of the period between the two World Wars in which the United States remained as uninvolved as possible in events in Europe.

Manchukuo Puppet state in Manchuria established by Japan in 1931.

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Non-aggres- sion treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union signed on August 23, 1939.

National Socialism (Nazism) A German political party led by Adolf Hitler, which ruled Germany between 1933 and 1945.

Négritude A cultural movement created in Paris in the 1930s by a group of writ- ers from Africa and the Caribbean. It was based on rejecting the idea of European superiority and taking pride in their indig- enous cultures and in their color.

Socialist Realism An approach to art imposed by the Soviet government in 1934. Artists were required to present positive portrayals of the lives of workers and peasants or the glorious Communist future that lay ahead.

Surrealism An artistic and literary move- ment started in 1924 that tried to express the subconscious functioning of the mind.

Totalitarian A dictatorship that requires its citizens not only to refrain from dissent but to express their support actively.

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