560Chapter 28
until the war. Such “miracle drugs” were first used ex-
perimentally in 1932; penicillin saved thousands of sol-
diers in World War II and became widely available after
the war.
European Culture after the Deluge
The Great War caused deep cultural despair in Europe.
It spawned pessimism in some people, cynical frivolity
in others; bitterness in many, spiritual barrenness in
most. In the imagery of the Irish poet William Butler
Yeats:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
This postwar mood produced the absurdities of
dadaism and surrealism, the alienated literature of mod-
ernism, and ubiquitous antiwar sentiments. Dada was
the response of iconoclastic intellectuals—an intention-
ally meaningless art, an anarchistic “anti-art.” According
to the Dadaist Manifesto of the Roumanian poet Tristan
Tzara, European culture should abandon everything
from logic to good manners and teach spontaneous liv-
ing. The more sophisticated doctrine of surrealism also
purged reason from art, replacing it with images from
the subconscious, as painters such as Rene Magritte and
Marcel Duchamp demonstrated.
The masterpieces of literary modernism showed
similar responses to the war. The poetry of T. S. Eliot,
such as The Wasteland(1922), stated a disillusioned
lament for European civilization and asked “what
branches grow out of this stony rubbish?” Another of
the great works of modernism, James Joyce’s Ulysses
(1922), broke down the logical structure of the novel
and fashioned a story about the commonplace events of
a single day, verbalized in an inventive but sometimes
incoherent form called stream of consciousness. Ulysses
focused on the postwar mood of Leopold Bloom who,
like Europe, had become bitter and dispirited.
The creative artist who best typified the postwar de-
spair of European culture was Franz Kafka, an Austrian-
Czech writer so powerful that his name became an ad-
jective. The kafkaesque world is incomprehensible yet
menacing; complex, bizarre, absurd, and ominous. Kafka
wrote of people so alienated that one of them awakens to
find himself transformed into a large insect; of people
held in a prison where preposterous commands are
tattooed onto their bodies; of a person brought to a
bizarre trial in which the charges are never specified; of
someone hired for a frustrating job that seems to have
neither instructions nor anyone to explain it.
One of the central themes of this postwar mood
was anger at war and the society that produced it or
profited from it. Erich Maria Remarque, a German
writer who later joined a flood of intellectual emigres to
America, penned one of the most famous antiwar nov-
els ever written, All Quiet on the Western Front(1929), de-
scribing the experiences of a group of schoolboys in
the dehumanizing life of the trenches. Jaroslav Hasek’s
Good Soldier Schweik(1923) made fun of armies and offi-
cers (Hasek used some of his own commanders’ names)
by showing how easily everyone is fooled by a soldier
acting stupid. Wilfred Owen’s posthumously published
poetry (he was killed in France one week before the
armistice) described the suffering of the common sol-
dier and burned with loathing for the war. Vera Brittain,
a British volunteer nurse during the war, used her expe-
riences to write of pacifism with such conviction that
she became an officer of the Women’s International
League of Peace and Freedom. George Grosz, a Ger-
man graphic artist embittered by the war, used savage
caricature to attack the government, the military, and
the classes that prospered while others suffered.
Ironically, the most important development in Eu-
ropean culture in the early twentieth century was not
linked to World War I and the postwar despair. A cul-
tural revolution had begun in the early years of the cen-
tury, and it triumphed dramatically in the 1920s and
1930s. The new technologies of radio and motion pic-
tures led to the democratization of culture, the creation
of mass culture. Two French chemists, Louis and Au-
guste Lumière, presented the first public showing of a
motion picture in 1895, a one-minute film of workers
leaving their factory. The first narrative film, the
American-made The Great Train Robbery,appeared in
1903, and the silent film industry was born in the
following decade. The commercial exploitation of the
Lumière brothers’ “cinematograph” was achieved by
Charles Pathé, the first movie mogul, who made Paris
the world center of the motion picture industry in the
years before 1914. Although the center of the industry
had shifted to Hollywood by the 1920s, booming film
industries developed in interwar Europe. The British,
French, and German industries each were producing
more than one hundred feature films per year by the
early 1930s.