Chapter 35

Interwar Years 1918 - WW II

Europe on Eve of War

Territorial Changes after WWI

• First remember Germany accepts sole responsibility for War

• No navy or air force & army 100,000• Indemnity• Austria-Hungary Empire - split into separate

nations made much smaller• Ottoman Empire also ended. However,

Mustafa Kemal defies terms of treaty, drives out Allied occupation forces & starts 1923 Republic of Turkey

Turkey - Mustafa Kemal

• Government intervenes in key industries

• Secular Republic

• Emancipation of women including vote

Other Changes

• Changes were supposed to honor concept of self-determination. This held up to varying degrees in Europe. Note that Germany loses:

• Alsace and Lorraine and the Polish Corridor• Serbia & Montenegro become Yugoslavia• Poland recreated along with Lithuania. Latvia,

Estonia and Finland

Colonies can no longer be called colonies. Now they are mandates. Of course, the Allies get to

administer the mandates

• Made Germans cynical and outraged Arabs• Former Ottoman Empire territories were

victims.• Where Arabs hoped to form independent

states French in Lebanon and Syria and British in Iraq and Palestine. Jewish nationalists promised state by Brits (Balfour Declaration)

Jot down observations

Results of WW I - You write

• Sets stage for decolonization movements by spreading nationalism much the same way Napoleon did. People in colonies feel cheated by lack of self-determination and start serious movements in Vietnam, India and elsewhere

• Diminished economic status of Europe. US now a creditor nation

• Emergence of SU• Isolationism in US• Territorial desires of Italy, Germany and Japan not

met

Age of Anxiety

• Shocked by Great War and Great Depression Russia, Germany, Italy (and Japan) embrace “totalitarianism”

• Communism and Fascism

Postwar Pessimism

• Idea of progress and democracy wounded

• Freud

• Physics

• Painting no longer show recognizable objects

Depression

• By mid 1920s some return to normalcy• Depression starts in US for a variety of

reasons - please list them.• Capitalism supposedly self correcting seems

near death - misery spreads around globe.• Keynesian Economics and New Deal works

to a degree in the US. (WW II actually ends the Depression.

1920s False Prosperity Hide Weakness

Not Good

Voices Promising Utopia - Russia

• Lenin’s Dictatorship of the Proletariat met Civil War 1918 - 1920.

• War Communism Nationalization of banks, industry and estates.

• Before Red Army under Leon Trotsky wins 10 M dead - production 1/10th prewar

Lenin decides on NEP (New Economic Policy

• Small scale business back to capitalism

• Peasants can sell surplus

• Electrification

Power struggle Stalin v Trotsky - Stalin wins

• Socialism in one country. NEP replaced by Five Year Plans

• Attempt to transform agricultural nation to industrial one by taking surplus from agriculture and not putting resources into consumer goods

• GOSPLAN sets targets in industry buy maximum centralization of economy

• Collectivization of agriculture - millions of deaths

Stalin’s Purges 1935 - 1938

• All enemies or imagined enemies liquidated or sent to Gulags.

• By 1939 8 million in labor camps and 3 million dead

Classic Social Realism - art must serve the Revolution

Memorial to War Dead

The Fascist Alternative

• Attractive esp.. among lower middle and middle classes and rural areas. Appeals to those fearing modernity esp.. class war and leftist threats

• Under fascism idea of a new national community where the state is supreme.

• Devotion of a charismatic leader along with belligerent ultra nationalism, militarism

Italian Fascism - Benito Mussolini

• Comes to power in 1922

• Crushes labor unions

• Creates “corporatism”

• Not anti Semitic until 1938 when Jews excluded from government, intermarriage etc. May be result of 1936 Rome-Berlin Axis agreement

German “National Socialism”

• Starts in 1923 when Hitler tries to overthrow Weimar Republic in Bavaria“Beer Hall Putsch”. Hitler writes, Mein Kampf

Electoral gains especially after 1929

• Stress racial doctrines• Blame Weimar Republic for Depression• Never gains a majority, but offered

chancellorship.• Under guise of national emergency eliminates

all opposition• All constitutional and civil rights including

trade unions also go• National Socialists only legal party

Third Reich Racial State -creation of race based national community

• Eugenics to get rid of inferior biological outsiders

• 1933 sterilization for inferior types.

• Euthanasia precursor for mass extermination of peoples classified as racially inferior such as Jews and gypsies

1935 Nuremberg Race Laws

• Jews deprived of citizenship

• No intermarriage

• Civil Servants lose job

• Property and businesses confiscated

• Jewish exodus accelerated by Kristallnacht 1938 reaches 250,000.

Kristallnacht

Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin

Interwar culture

• Bauhaus Architecture

Abstract Art - Dada in Germany

German Expressionism - George Grosz, Otto Dix and many others