Chapter 25: Turmoil Between the Wars
Chapter Summary
In the aftermath of the Great War, Europe faced innumerable problems that created a wide range of responses. The interwar years saw some people argue for something like a "return to normalcy," while others believed there was now a need for a new type of authoritarian leadership. If democracy had somehow shown itself to be a spent force, then perhaps some other form of government would become necessary. Russia embarked on its own path of socialist development in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. But following the death of Lenin in 1924 and combined with Stalin's "revolution from above" in 1928, the path taken by the Soviet Union would be one not likely repeated anywhere else in Europe. Italy, although invited to the peace settlement following the Great War, was actually left in a far worse position. The sense of humiliation left the door open for a man like Benito Mussolini to proclaim the twentieth century as the century of Fascism.
Shackled with the infamous "war guilt" clause, Germany emerged from the Great War a beaten nation. A revolution swept the nation in November 1918 and a new government was set up at Weimar. But the Weimar Republic faced nearly insurmountable problems right from the start. Economic disorder and social unrest, as well as a feeling of humiliation and betrayal, produced an environment that made it possible for Adolf Hitler, the tramp from Vienna turned Führer, to capture Germany with the hope of creating a one thousand year Third Reich.
Across the rest of Europe, authoritarian leaders reared their heads. It seemed that no nation was immune from the authoritarian impulse. Democracy seemed to be in retreat -- and then there was the Great Depression that affected the world economy in profound ways.
In the interwar years, modernism seemed to come of age. In art, science, philosophy and architecture, new modes of thinking were developed while at the same time traditional values and systems of belief were called into question. Uncertainty and the anxiety that uncertainty breeds seemed to infect the "European mind" as a whole. As Paul Valéry remarked in 1919: "An extraordinary shudder ran through the marrow of Europe. She felt in every nucleus of her mind that she was no longer the same, that she was no longer herself, that she was about to lose consciousness, a consciousness acquired through centuries of bearable calamities, by thousands of men of the first rank, from innumerable geographical, ethnic, and historical coincidences."
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