Introduction

Democracy, Depression, and Instability: The 1920s and 1930s

The two decades following World War I were marked by instability and uncertainty. Except in Russia, where the Bolsheviks had taken power, it appeared that liberal democracy had been established throughout Europe as a result of World War 1. But soon a trend toward authoritarianism appeared, with many nations suffering from political fluctuations. The economic problems left from World War I and the immediate postwar period did not disappear despite a brief period of fragile prosperity in the mid-1 920s. In 1929 the stock market crash in New York initiated the Great Depression in the United States, which quickly spread to Europe. Huge numbers of people suffered economically, and governments were pressured to effect radical solutions to the problems. Not surprisingly, there were great social strains through all of this. The difficulty of recovering from World War I was exacerbated by this political and economic instability. Swept by uncertainty about the present and the future, society seemed to polarize into opposing classes and around opposing ideologies.

A similar uncertainty characterized intellectual trends. The optimism and faith in rationality typical of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave way to movements such as relativism in the physical and social sciences, Freudianism in psychology, and seeming anarchy in the arts. The West was no longer so confident, and events of the 1920s and 1930s added to that lack of confidence.

The selections in this chapter exemplify these trends. Historians usually focus on Germany during the 1920s in describing the general unrest and the efforts made to respond to it. What was the nature of the political and economic disorder in Germany during the 1920s? In what ways was there a sense that things were out of hand and that the population was comprised of many opposing factions? The Great Depression dealt the worst blow to the industrial economy. How did the Depression make the future of capitalism uncertain? What policies were pursued by governments to deal with the Depression? How was the Depression related to political disorder during the 1930s? What was the long-term significance of the Depression? Finally, a general sense of disillusionment and uncertainty characterized intellectual life. How did Freudian psychoanalysis reflect this? In what ways was there a feeling that nineteenth-century ideals were gone and that twentieth-century people might be worse off than their predecessors? Why have the post-World War I decades been viewed as an age of unreason?

A gloomy picture of life during the 1920s and 1930s emerges from these materials. The growth of totalitarianism during this period, to be examined in the next chapter, will add to this negative image.

The Road Back

Erich Maria Remarque

and Restless Days

Lilo Linke

With the establishment of the Weimar Republic at the end of World War I, Germany had a government system much like those of the other Western democracies. But the German government was burdened with tremendous economic problems, continued social turmoil, and inexperienced politicians laboring with the legacy of World War I. This society and its mood are particularly well reflected in the cultural productions of the period, for example, in the following selections from Erich Maria Remarque and Lilo Linke. Remarque, whose All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and The Road Back (1931), were two of the most popular books of the period, was a German soldier during World War I. The first selection is from The Road Back, which focuses on the life in Germany faced by the returning soldier. The second selection is from Linke's autobiography, Restless Days.

Consider: Any connections between World War I and subsequent economic problems; the political problems facing the Weimar Republic; how such an environment might prove fertile for the rise of a political figure such as Hitler.

Demonstrations in the streets have been called for this afternoon. Prices have been soaring everywhere for months past, and the poverty is greater even than it was during the war. Wages are insufficient to buy the bare necessities of life, and even though one may have the money it is often impossible to buy anything with it. But ever more and more gin palaces and dance halls go up, and ever more and more blatant is the profiteering and swindling.

Scattered groups of workers on strike march through the streets. Now and again there is a disturbance. A rumour is going about that troops have been concentrated at the barracks. But there is no sign of it as yet.

Here and there one hears cries and counter-cries. Somebody is haranguing at a street corner. Then suddenly everywhere is silence.

A procession of men in the faded uniforms of the front-line trenches is moving slowly toward us.

It is formed up by sections, marching in fours. Big white placards are carried before: Where is the Fatherland's gratitude? - The War Cripples are starving.

The men with one arm are carrying the placards, and they look around continually to see if the procession is still coming along properly behind them, for they are the fastest.

These are followed by men with sheep dogs on short, leather leads. The animals have the red cross of the blind at their collars. . . .

Behind the blind come the men with one eye, the tattered faces of men with head wounds: wry, bulbous mouths, faces without noses and without lower jaws, entire faces one great red scar with a couple of holes where formerly were a mouth and a nose. But above this desolation, quiet, questioning, sad human eyes.

On these follow the long lines of men with legs amputated. Some already have artificial limbs that spring forward obliquely as they walk and strike clanking on the pavement, as if the whole man were artificial, made up of iron and hinges. Others have their trouser legs looped up and made fast with safety pins. These go on crutches or sticks with black rubber pads.

Then come the shakers, the shell-shocked. Their hands, their heads, their clothes, their bodies quake as though they still shudder with horror. They no longer have control of themselves; the will has been extinguished, the muscles and nerves have revolted against the brain, the eyes become void and impotent.

It was no good to go on assuming that a common basis for all the different groups and classes in Germany could be found. The break between them became daily wider and more irreparable. The plebiscite of the Right 11 against the Young Plan and the war-guilt lie" proved just as unsuccessful as those arranged in former years by the Left, but the poison of the defamatory agitation remained in the body of the community, and we watched its effects with anxiety.

In my own family the political antagonism was growing past endurance. In October Fritz had finished his apprenticeship in an old-established export house, at the precise moment when the firm went bankrupt -a minor incident compared with such events as the breakdown of the Frankfurt General Insurance Company and the Civil Servants' Bank or the enforced reorganization and amalgamation of the Deutsche Bank and the DiscontoGesellschaft, which all happened in the course of the year and dangerously damaged the whole economic life of Germany. Yet for my brother the bankruptcy of his firm overshadowed all other happenings, since it meant that he lost his job. His three years' training was in vain-there was not a single export firm which was not forced to dismiss as many of its employees as possible. . . .

"Yes, that's just it-millions! If it isn't my fault, whose fault is it? I tell you -your friends, the French, the English, tthe Americans, all those damnable nations who inflict on us one dishonorable penalty after the otherthey are to blame for all this. Before the war the whole world bought German goods. My firm exported to Africa, to the German colonies. Hundreds of thousands we turned over every year. But they have robbed us of our colonies, of all our foreign markets. They have stolen the coal-mines in the Saar and in Upper Silesia, they squeeze millions of marks out of our bleeding country. We'll never rise again unless we free ourselves by another war."

"Don't be foolish, Fritz. Things are bad in the whole world." "I don't care about the world, I care only about Germany, which you and your pacifists have delivered into the hands of our enemies. I despise you, you are not worthy to call yourself a German."

Civilization and Its Discontents

Sigmund Freud

Psychoanalysis became one of the most powerful intellectual influences in the twentieth century. In part, it was based on the older eighteenthand nineteenth-century optimism about the power of human rationality and scientific investigation: It assumed that human behavior could be even more deeply understood than before through scientific observation and that rational understanding could alleviate pain and problems. In other ways, however, it reflected the late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century attack on rationality: It argued that much of human behavior is irrational, unconscious, and instinctual. Finally, it echoed some of the pessimism fostered by the experience of World War I: Civilization was increasingly threat ened by deep, antisocial drives such as for sex or aggression. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the person most responsible for developing psychoanalysis, was a Viennese neurologist who became increasingly interested in psychoanalysis as a theory of human behavior, as a method of investigation, and as a treatment for certain illnesses. The following is a selection from Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), written in the aftermath of World War I and toward the end of Freud's life. In it Freud speaks of the fragility of civilization.

Consider: How this selection reflects the experience o World War I; the ways 

in which this document reflects and contributes to the sense of uncertainty common in this period; similarities between Ortega and Freud.

The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini 1upus.1 Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? As a rule this cruel aggressiveness waits for some provocation or puts itself at the service of some other purpose, whose goal might also have been reached by milder measures. In circumstances that are favourable to it, when the mental counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien. Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities committed during racial migrations or the invasions of the Huns, or by the people known as Mongols under Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane, or at the capture of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, or even, indeed, the horrors of the recent World War -anyone who calls these things to mind will have to bow humbly before the truth of this view.

The existence of this inclination to aggression, which we can detect in ourselves and justly assume to be present in others, is the factor which disturbs our relations with our neighbour and which forces civilization into such a high expenditure [of energy]. In consequence of this primary mutual hostility of human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration. The interest of work in common would not hold it together; instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests. Civilization has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man's aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of them in check by psychical reaction-formations.

Hence, therefore, the use of methods intended to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of love, hence the restriction upon sexual life, and hence too the ideal's commandment to love one's neighbour as oneself - a commandment which is really justified by the fact that nothing else runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man. In spite of every effort, these endeavours of civilization have not so far achieved very much. It hopes to prevent the crudest excesses of brutal violence by itself assuming the right to use violence against criminals, but the law is not able to lay hold of the more cautious and refined manifestations of human aggressiveness.

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and selfdestruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two 'Heavenly Powers,' eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?

Government and the Governed: The Interwar Years

R. H. S. Crossman

Many scholars saw the 1920s as a period of failure and missed opportunities. This was particularly true of liberal or left-wing scholars from Western democracies, for they looked for the origins of the disastrous rise of dictatorships and the Great

Depression in those years. Thefollowing selection by R. H. S. Crossman exemplifies this perspective. Educated at Oxford, Crossman became a leading figure in the

Labour Party's left wing and wrote numerous works on philosophy and politics. Here, in a work published in 1940, Crossman analyzes the period between 1918 and 1933.

Consider: Opportunities that were missed in 1918 and 1919; policies that the Western democracies might have initiated during this period that could have changed the course of events.

Seen in retrospect, the period from 1918-1933 is marked by a growing lethargy in the victor nations. Neither at home nor abroad did democracy undertake a single great constructive enterprise. Victory seemed to have deprived France and Britain of their dynamic: their Conservatives ceased to be ardent imperialists, and their Socialists lost their revolutionary fervour. A spirit of collective pacifism possessed them, and made the people content with the lazy approval of high ideals, the verbal condemnation of injustice, chicanery and oppression. Holding all the power, the Western democracies disdained to use it, so long as the status quo was in any way tolerable. The attitude of America was not dissimilar, except that here the League idea was rejected and the Monroe doctrine was still regarded as America"s contribution to world peace.

A myth is only justifiable if it stimulates to action. But "Collective Pacifism" was a sedative, not a stimulant. It intoxicated the democracies with a feeling of moral superiority and well-being, while it sapped their sense of responsibility. Gradually statesmen and peoples alike began to believe that the League of Nations was a force able to do the work which previously fell to the various nations. Instead of relying on themselves and on co-operation with their allies, they began to rely on the League to preserve peace. Since the League had no coercive power at its disposal, this trust was wholly unjustified.

No one Party or section of the population can be blamed for this collapse of democratic morale. The great opportunity had been missed in 1918-19: and it was difficult for the Western democracies to recover from that failure. They had encouraged nationalism as the basis of government; they had retained economic imperialism and permitted international finance to function independently of government policy. In brief, they had as far as possible returned to pre-war conditions. Having done so, they sought to humanize them. That they failed is an indication that good intentions and kindness, unbacked by resolution and knowledge, may disguise injustices but never eradicate them. Kindness and good-will no doubt console the patient suffering from cancer, but they will not cure the cancer; and the patient whose practitioner only displays these qualities, may, in his intolerable agonies, turn to a quack and curse the Christian humanity which his practitioner displays.

The Great Depression in Europe

James Laux

Most scholars agree that the Great Depression was very important, but they disagree over its precise significance. For Marxists, it was the greatest in a series of periodic economic crises inevitably flowing from the capitalist system and an indication that this system would soon collapse. For liberal economic historians, it was an indictment of conservative, nationalistic economic policies that would be forced to give way to modern Keynesian policies characterized by greater government activity and planning. For others, it was a crucial cause of the rise of nazism and World War II itself. In the following selection James Laux of the University of Cincinnati analyzes the impact of the Great Depression, emphasizing variou's changes in attitude that stemmed from it.

Consider: "ether, as some scholars argue, the Great Depression forced governments to modib laissez-faire just enough to save capitalism as a whole; why economic planning appeared more attractive after the experience of the Depression.

The Depression, perhaps, had the most serious impact in Europe on people's thinking about economic matters. Looking back on the experience, most Europeans agreed that the orthodoxy of laissez-faire no longer held. They would not again accept the view that a government must interfere as little as possible in the operation of the economic system. Governments must accept wider responsibilities than balancing their own budgets. The value of the currency in terms of gold must give way to economic expansion if the two appear to conflict. Laissez-faire already was wheezing and laboring in the 1920s; after the decade of the 1930s it was nearly prostrate. As so often happens, a philosophy came along to justify this changed attitude, a new approach to theoretical economics worked out by the Englishman John Maynard Keynes. The most influential economist of the twentieth century, Keynes published his classic work in 1936, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. He argued that governments can and should manipulate capitalist economies, by running surpluses or deficits, by investing heavily in public works, by changing the size of the money and credit supply, and by altering rates of interest. In his analysis he emphasized the total economy, the relations among savings, investment, production, and consumption, what is called macroeconomics, rather than an investigation of a single firm or sector. A critic of socialism, Keynes scorned the significance of government ownership of production facilities, but promoted government intervention in an economy to make capitalism work better.

Bolstering this view were the remarkable production achievements of many European industrial states during the two world wars. In these crises national economies expanded military production enormously under government direction. Many asked why such techniques could not be applied in peacetime also, but to make consumer products rather than tools of destruction.

The upshot was that by 1945 if not 1939 most Europeans abandoned the idea that they lived at the mercy of an impersonal economic system whose rules could not be changed and accepted the proposition that the economy could operate the way people wanted it to. From this it was a short step to the concept of planning the future development of the economy-both the whole and particular segments of it. Economic planning became an acceptable posture for capitalist societies and enjoyed a considerable reputation. Some of those who supported it perhaps under-estimated the possible merits of free markets as guiding production decisions and did seem to assume that planners somehow possess more wisdom than ordinary human beings.

Economic nationalism was a more immediate result of the Depressionthe policy that short-run national economic interests have highest priority and that international economic cooperation and trade must give way before narrowly conceived national interests. Economic nationalism showed its sharpest teeth in those European states where political nationalism reached a peak - Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. Its strength declined in western Europe after the Second World War as people saw once again that economic prosperity among one's neighbors could bring great benefits to oneself. In an expanding continental or world economy everyone can get richer. But one wonders if economic nationalism may not revive in western Europe, especially if it seems a popular policy in a crisis.

The Great Depression had important political repercussions too. In Germany, the Depression's tragic gloom made the dynamism of the Nazi movement seem more attractive. It is difficult to imagine the Nazis achieving power without the Depression and its pervasive unemployment in the background. In France, the Depression convinced many that the regime of the Third Republic had lost its 61an and relevance to twentieth-century problems, but the lack of a widely popular alternative meant that the Republic could limp along until a disastrous military defeat brought it down. In Britain, the Depression was less serious and no fundamental challenge to the political regime developed. The Conservatives held power for most of the interwar period and their failure to work actively to absorb the large unemployment that continued there until late in the 1930s brought widespread rancor and bitterness against them. Doubts as to the Conservatives' ability to manage a peacetime economy led to the first majority Labour government in the 1945 election. More profoundly, the years of heavy unemployment bred a very strong anticapitalist sentiment in much of British labor, a sentiment that led them after the war to demand moves toward socialism, such as nationalization of major industries.

The Depression helped convince Europeans that their governments must try to manage their economies. Most agreed that full employment and expanding output should be the goals. They did not agree on the means to achieve these ends.

Our Age of Unreason

Franz Alexander

Interpreters Of the interwar period often see it as a period of irrationality. They cite evidence from political affairs, cultural trends, and general attitudes to support this view. Moreover, the rise and spread of Freudian psychology seemed both to reflect and to prove the strength of irrational trends within our civilization. The following excerpt from Our Age of Unreason by Franz Alexander illustrates this perception. An early psychoanalyst, Alexander trained in Budapest and taught in Berlin during the 1920s. In the 1930s he moved to the United States, where he became director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. This selection, written in 1942, combines autobiographical and interpretive insights into the interwar period.

Consider: Why the interwar period seems more irrational than any other period; how Alexander connects political, cultural, and psychological events to support his argument.

I spent the eleven years following the Versailles and Trianon Peace Treaties in Europe, the next twelve years in the United States. In Europe I saw the world of my youth rapidly disintegrate and standards and ideals which had become second nature to me vanish. Like most European observers of these eventful years I saw that a cultural epoch was in process of dissolution. What would follow was not clear, but much clearer was what was specifically disappearing, the highest values I had known; science and artistic creation for their own sakes, the gradual improvement of human relations by the use of knowledge and reason were giving way to a chaotic sense of insecurity, fear, and distrust among mechanically minded men who had been corrupted by technical accomplishments. Everyone expected the worst, was worried, strained, and was concerned with himself, with his uncertain future, and with the pressing and practical problems of the present. The maxim Primum vivere deinde philsophare ("First live; then philosophize") became the ruling principle. . . .

Current events impress us with their irrationality. We are witnessing on an unprecedented scale the wholesale destruction of life and property. All this happens in an era of the utmost scientific enlightenment and of the greatest technical achievements which, if intelligently used, could render the life of all the inhabitants of the earth easier and more carefree than ever before. There is little doubt that a council of economists and political scientists could work out a peaceful social organization and a rational world order which could satisfy the vital needs of all. That such a rational world order is today, as in Plato's time, a utopia is due to the fact that human relationships are not governed primarily by reason but by essentially irrational emotional forces. The dominance of irrational forces in human nature has perhaps never been as complete as at the present moment. It is no wonder that in the face of current world events many turn for an explanation to the psychiatrist, the specialist in irrational behavior.

The Freudian Model of Human Nature

Erich Fromm

Sigmund Freud had many followers and many critics. The German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900-1980) falls into both categories: He was a neo-Freudian who nevertheless differed with Freud on a number of important points. In the following selection from The Crisis of Psychoanalysis, Fromm examines the social and historical bases of Freud's thoughts and presents a brief analysis of the Freudian model

of human nature.

Consider: The ways in which this interpretation is supported by the selections from Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents; how Freud's views reflect his times.

To appreciate the social basis of Freud's views, it is useful to recognize from the outset that he was a liberal critic of bourgeois society, in the sense in which liberal reformers in general were critical. He saw that society imposes unnecessary hardships on man, which are conducive to worse results rather than the expected better ones. He saw that this unnecessary harshness, as it operated in the field of sexual morality, led to the formation of neuroses that, in many cases, could have been avoided by a more tolerant attitude. (Political and educational reform are parallel phenomena.) But Freud was never a radical critic of capitalistic society. He never questioned its socio-economic bases, nor did he criticize its ideologies - with the exception of those concerning sexuality.

As for his concept of man, it is important to point out first that Freud, rooted in the philosophy of humanism and enlightenment, starts out with the assumption of the existence of man as such -a universal man, not only man as he manifests himself in various cultures, but someone about whose structure generally valid and empirical statements can be made. Freud, like Spinoza before him, constructed a "model of human nature" on the basis of which not only neuroses, but all fundamental aspects, possibilities, and necessities of man, can be explained and understood.

What is this Freudian model?

Freud saw man as a closed system driven by two forces: the self-preservative and the sexual drives. The latter are rooted in chemophysiological processes moving in a phased pattern. The first phase increases tension and unpleasure; the second reduces the built-up tension and in so doing creates that which subjectively is felt as "pleasure." Man is primarily an isolated being, whose primary interest is the optimal satisfaction of both his ego and his libidinous interest. Freud's man is the physiologically driven and motivated homme machine. But, secondarily, man is also a social being, because he needs other people for the satisfaction of his libidinous drives as well as those of self-preservation. The child is in need of mother (and here, according to Freud, libidinous desires follow the path of the physiological needs); the adult needs a sexual partner. Feelings like tenderness or love are looked upon as phenomena that accompany, and result from, libidinous interests. Individuals need each other as means for the satisfaction of their physiologically rooted drives. Man is primarily unrelated to others, and is only secondarily forced-or seduced-into relationships with others.

Freud's homo sexualis is a variant of the classic homo economicus. It is the isolated, self-sufficient man who has to enter into relations with others in order that they may mutually fulfill their needs. Homo economicus has simply economic needs that find their mutual satisfaction in the exchange of goods on the commodity market. The needs of homo sexualis are physiological and libidinous, and normally are mutually satisfied by the relations between the sexes. In both variants the persons essentially remain strangers to each other, being related only by the common aim of drive satisfaction. This social determination of Freud's theory by the spirit of the market economy does not mean that the theory is wrong, except in its claim of describing the situation of man as such; as a description of interpersonal relations in bourgeois society, it is valid for the majority of people.

More important, however, is Freud's new appreciation of the role of human destructiveness. Not that he had omitted aggression in his first theoretical model. He had considered aggression to be an important factor, but it was subordinated to the libidinous drives and those for selfpreservation. In the new theory destructiveness becomes the rival of, and eventually the victor over the libido and the ego drives. Man cannot help wanting to destroy, for the destructive tendency is rooted in his biological constitution. Although he can mitigate this tendency to a certain point, he can never deprive it of its strength. His alternatives are to direct his destructiveness either against himself or against the world outside, but he has no chance of liberating himself from this tragic dilemma.

There are good reasons for the hypothesis that Freud's new appreciation of destructiveness has its roots in the experience of the first World War. This war shook the foundations of the liberal optimism that had filled the first period of Freud's life. Until 1914 the members of the middle class had believed that the world was rapidly approaching a state of greater security, harmony and peace. The "darkness" of the middle ages seemed to lift from generation to generation; in a few more steps, so it seemed, the world - or at least Europe - would resemble the streets of a well-lighted, protected capital. In the bourgeois euphoria of the belle ~poque it was easily forgotten that this picture was not true for the majority of the workers and peasants of Europe, and even less so for the populations of Asia and Africa. The war of 1914 destroyed this illusion; not so much the beginning of the war, as its duration and the inhumanity of its practices. Freud, who during the war still believed in the justice and victory of the German cause, was hit at a deeper psychic level than the average, less sensitive person. He probably sensed that the optimistic hopes of enlightenment thought were illusions, and concluded that man, by nature, was destined to be destructive. Precisely because he was a reformer, the war must have hit him all the more forcefully. Since he was no radical critic of society and no revolutionary, it was impossible for him to hope for essential social changes, and he was forced to look for the causes of the tragedy in the nature of man.

Chapter Questions the Years between the World Wars

1.    Which developments focused on in this chapter are most closely related to the experience and results of World War I?

2.    In what ways do the trends of the 1920s and 1930s support the argument that Western civilization reached its apogee between 1789 and 1914, and that starting with World War I it was clearly on the decline? What factors might be pointed out to mitigate or counter this interpretation?