9.14 - 20th- and 21st-Century Culture, Arts, and Demographic Trends

20th and 21st Century European Culture, Arts, and Demographic Trends

• Cultural Shifts Post-World War I:
• Science and Disillusionment:
• Pre-War Optimism: Before World War I, there was widespread belief in scientific progress as a force for good.
• Post-War Realization: The destruction caused by scientific advancements in warfare led to a decreased confidence in science's ability to solve all problems, contributing to a philosophical shift.
• Philosophical Responses:
• Existentialism:
• Core Idea: The world is inherently absurd, and meaning must be found despite this absurdity.
• Notable Thinker: Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously declared "God is dead," reflecting the idea that traditional values were no longer sufficient to give life meaning.
• Jean-Paul Sartre: After World War II, French writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus made existentialism popular (Nietzsche, who died in 1900, was a forerunner). Sartre argued that "existence precedes essence": humans are not born with a set purpose, so each person is free, and responsible, for creating meaning through their choices.
• Why It Spread: Two world wars, the Depression, and the Holocaust made many Europeans doubt that reason, science, or religion could guarantee a meaningful or moral world, so a philosophy built on individual choice in a meaningless universe spoke to them.
• Postmodernism:
• Core Idea: All truth is relative; different cultures have their own unique perspectives and values.
• Impact: Postmodernism challenged Enlightenment rationalism by suggesting that no single culture or thinker possesses absolute truth.
• Notable Thinkers: French thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida (1960s to 1980s) argued that "grand narratives" like progress, Marxism, or Enlightenment reason were stories that served those in power, and that language and culture shape what people accept as truth.

• Role of Religion:
• Secularization vs. Religious Influence:
• While Europe became more secular over the 20th and 21st centuries, organized religion continued to play a significant role in social and cultural life.
• Church Responses to Totalitarianism:
• Germany: Pastor Martin Niemöller and other Protestant clergy, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, formed the Confessing Church in 1934 to resist Nazi control of the Protestant churches. Niemöller spent 1938 to 1945 in concentration camps, and Bonhoeffer was executed in 1945 for his links to the plot to assassinate Hitler. But most German Protestants went along with the regime, and some joined the pro-Nazi "German Christians."
• Italy: Mussolini gained the support of the Catholic Church by recognizing Vatican City's independence and making Catholicism the official religion of Italy.
• Mixed Catholic Responses: Mussolini's deal with the Church was the 1929 Lateran Accords. In 1933 the Vatican also signed a concordat with Hitler, though Pope Pius XI later condemned Nazi ideas (1937).
• Communist Eastern Europe: Communist governments closed churches, jailed clergy, and promoted atheism, while in the Soviet Union the Russian Orthodox Church's leaders mostly cooperated with the state. In Poland, the Catholic Church stayed strong and became a center of opposition. Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyła became Pope John Paul II in 1978, and his 1979 visit to Poland drew huge crowds and helped inspire the Solidarity movement, which the Church protected and supported (see 9.7). In East Germany, Lutheran churches hosted the peace prayers that grew into the 1989 Leipzig protests.

• Second Vatican Council (Vatican II):
• Purpose: To modernize the Catholic Church and respond to the changing world.
• When: Called by Pope John XXIII and held from 1962 to 1965.
• Significant Changes:
• Mass could be said in vernacular languages instead of Latin.
• The Church sought friendlier relations with other Christian churches, accepted religious freedom, and in 1965 rejected the old charge that Jews as a people were guilty of Jesus's death, condemning antisemitism. Laypeople were also given a larger role in the Church.

• Artistic Movements:
• Cubism: Emerged around 1907 to 1908, when Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque broke objects and people into geometric shapes and showed them from several viewpoints at once, rejecting the single point of view artists had used since the Renaissance. Picasso's Guernica (1937) used this style to protest the bombing of a Basque town in the Spanish Civil War.
• Futurism: An Italian and Russian movement that emphasized the future and sought to break free from the past.
• Dadaism: Began in Zurich in 1916, during World War I, as a protest against the senseless slaughter and the society that caused it. Dada artists made deliberately absurd "anti-art," like Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917), a store-bought urinal signed with a fake name, which challenged traditional aesthetic values and satirized Western society.
• Surrealism: Influenced by Freud, this movement aimed to depict the chaotic and unrefined interior worlds of humans. Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" is a famous example, reflecting the disturbing relativity of time.
• Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art: After World War II, the center of the art world moved from Paris to New York. American Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock (known for dripping paint onto huge canvases) expressed raw emotion without showing objects, and Pop Art in the late 1950s and 1960s (Britain's Richard Hamilton, America's Andy Warhol) used ads, comics, and soup cans to comment on consumer culture. This showed the growing U.S. influence on elite as well as popular culture.
• Architecture: The Bauhaus School in Germany focused on designing structures based on function rather than decorative form, leading to minimalist, box-like buildings.
• Modernism and Postmodernism: The Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in Germany in 1919 and forced to close by the Nazis in 1933, taught that form should follow function. Its plain buildings of steel, glass, and concrete shaped Modernism (the International Style) around the world. From the 1970s, Postmodern architects rebelled against these plain boxes, bringing back color, decoration, and playful references to older styles.
• Music: Composers broke the old rules of harmony. Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring (1913, see 7.8) used pounding rhythms and clashing chords, and Arnold Schoenberg abandoned traditional keys altogether (atonality) and later invented the twelve-tone method.
• Literature:
• Stream of Consciousness: James Joyce pioneered this style in "Ulysses," where a character's thoughts are presented in a rapid, unstructured flow.
• Kafkaesque Themes: Franz Kafka combined elegant writing with elements of fantasy, as seen in "The Metamorphosis," where the protagonist wakes up as a giant insect.
• Questioning War and Society: Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929, see 8.10) questioned the patriotic ideals behind World War I, and Virginia Woolf used stream of consciousness and questioned women's place in society (A Room of One's Own, 1929). After World War II, Sartre and Camus wrote novels and plays about freedom and the absurd.

• Demographic and Social Changes:
• Consumerism:
• Post-War Economic Boom: Increased disposable income led to a rise in consumer products, making life more comfortable with innovations like electricity, cars, and synthetic clothing.
• Causes and Examples: Mass production, more efficient industry, and rising wages increased disposable income. Electricity and indoor plumbing reached most homes, and more families owned cars, televisions, and refrigerators. New food technologies (refrigeration, frozen and packaged foods, supermarkets) changed how people ate, and plastics and synthetic fibers like nylon and polyester made goods and clothing cheaper.
• Baby Boom:
• Post-War Population Growth: Encouraged by government policies like paid maternity leave and tax credits for children, leading to a sharp increase in population, especially in Western Europe.
• Pronatalism: Policies that encourage births are called pronatalist. France, for example, paid monthly family allowances for each child, and many countries also built public childcare. The baby boom lasted into the mid-1960s.
• Baby Bust: From the mid-1960s, birth rates fell fast, helped by the pill, more women working, and later marriage. By the 1990s, most European countries were below 2.1 children per woman, the level needed to keep a population stable, so populations aged, putting more pressure on pensions and welfare (see 9.6).
• Civil Rights Movements:
• LGBTQ+ Rights:
• Challenges: Homosexuality was outlawed in many European states.
• Examples: The Nazis sent thousands of gay men to concentration camps. England and Wales did not decriminalize sex between men until 1967, and West Germany until 1969.
• Notable Movements: The Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action in France (1971) challenged anti-LGBTQ+ policies and fought for equality, with varying success across Europe.
• Results: Many goals were won in Western Europe, like the end of anti-gay laws and, starting with the Netherlands in 2001, same-sex marriage. The movement also met strong opposition, like Britain's Section 28 (1988 to 2003), which banned local governments (which ran most schools) from "promoting" homosexuality, and Russia's 2013 law against "gay propaganda."
• Counter-Culture and Protests:
• Counter-Culture Movement: Emerged in the 1960s, opposing consumerism and cultural conformity.
• 1968 Protests: Students across Europe, particularly in France, led protests against inequality, war, and government oppression. Although the movement ultimately fizzled out, it led to some reforms.
• Against Materialism: Many young people and intellectuals rejected what they saw as the materialism and conformity of their parents' generation and of consumer society, along with crowded universities and the Vietnam War.
• May 1968 in France: Student protests in Paris led to street battles with police and a general strike by millions of workers that shook President de Gaulle's government. The movement fizzled out (de Gaulle's party won elections that June), but it led to university reforms, higher wages, and a looser, more liberal culture. In the East, the Prague Spring was crushed the same year (see 9.4).