992 Ch. 24 • The Elusive Search for Stability in the 1920s

Max Ernst s Europe after the Rain (I) (1933).

Some of Freud s early ruminations about the role of the unconscious in art
were based on the haunting experience of seeing shell-shocked soldiers.
In 1928, Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970), who had fought in the
war, published All Quiet on the Western Fronty the powerful pacifist novel
about the trenches that quickly became a classic. In 1929, the British writer
Robert Graves published his memoirs, focused on his experiences in the
Great War. He called his book Goodbye to All That. The problem was that
Europe could not say “goodbye to all that” and put the war behind it. Amid
economic chaos and social and political turmoil in the two decades follow­
ing the end of the war, one European dictator after another ended parlia­
mentary democracy, imposed authoritarian rule, and suppressed political
opposition. Fascist states, particularly Nazi Germany, poisoned international
relations with nationalist bullying, making grandiose claims on the territo­
ries of other states. At the same time, in the Communist Soviet Union,
Joseph Stalin consolidated his power. In what has been called the “Europe
of Extremes,” Europe entered an even more dangerous period in which it
became increasingly clear that Woodrow Wilson s description of the Great
War as the “war to end all wars” was meaningless in the Europe of economic
Depression and dictatorship.