20th-Century Cultural, Intellectual, and Artistic Developments

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how the events of the first half of the twentieth century challenged existing social, cultural, and intellectual understandings (Skill 6.B; LO M).
• Account for KC-4.3.I.i: how the widely held belief in progress that characterized much nineteenth-century thought began to break down before the First World War.
• Account for KC-4.3.I.A: how Europeans on the eve of 1914 were generally confident in the capacity of science and technology to address human needs and problems despite the uncertainty produced by new scientific theories and the new psychology.
• Account for KC-4.3.II.A: how the challenge to the certainties of the Newtonian universe in physics opened the door to uncertainty in other fields and provided the foundation for nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
• Account for KC-4.4.I.A and KC-4.4.II.A: how the world wars produced a 'lost generation' and disillusionment, transformed women's lives, and produced more democratic societies, including women's increasing involvement in military and political mobilization and economic production.
• Build a Skill 6.B argument grounded in specific evidence from physics, philosophy, literature, painting, music, and the political-social transformation of women's lives.

Topic 8.10 covers the cultural, intellectual, and artistic developments of the first half of the twentieth century. KC-4.3.I.i captures the prewar foundation: the widely held nineteenth-century belief in progress began to break down before the First World War. KC-4.3.I.A qualifies the prewar picture: Europeans on the eve of 1914 were generally confident in science and technology despite the uncertainty produced by new scientific theories and the new psychology. KC-4.3.II.A captures the displacement of the Newtonian universe and the consequent intellectual reorientation. KC-4.4.I.A captures the postwar 'lost generation' and the broader transformation of women's lives and democratic life. KC-4.4.II.A captures the wartime mobilization of women into military and political life and economic production.

The breakdown of nineteenth-century progress (KC-4.3.I.i). The widely held belief in progress that characterized much nineteenth-century thought — the Enlightenment confidence in reason (Topic 4.3), the post-1789 confidence in liberal-democratic political reform, the post-1859 Darwinian confidence in evolutionary improvement, the late-nineteenth-century confidence in industrial-technological civilization — began to break down before the First World War. The principal currents of late-nineteenth-century intellectual life that prepared the ground include Friedrich Nietzsche's late-nineteenth-century writings (The Birth of Tragedy 1872, Thus Spoke Zarathustra 1883-1885, Beyond Good and Evil 1886, The Genealogy of Morals 1887, Twilight of the Idols 1888), with their attack on Christian and Enlightenment ethics and their declaration of "the death of God"; Henri Bergson's vitalist philosophy (Creative Evolution 1907); Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious (The Interpretation of Dreams 1900, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 1905); and the late-nineteenth-century irrationalist currents in literature and art (Symbolism, Decadence, the Vienna Secession, the early Expressionists).

The early-twentieth-century artistic revolutions intensified the challenge. Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and the subsequent Cubist work that he and Georges Braque produced together between 1908 and 1912 broke with the post-Renaissance tradition of perspectival representation. Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (premiered at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris on 29 May 1913, producing the famous near-riot in the audience) and Arnold Schoenberg's atonal compositions from 1908 onward (formalized as the twelve-tone technique by 1923) broke with the post-Bach tonal tradition. Wassily Kandinsky's first non-representational paintings (1910-1913) and the broader Expressionist movement (Die Bruecke, Der Blaue Reiter) broke with naturalist representation. The Italian Futurists (Filippo Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto 1909) celebrated speed, technology, and the dynamism of industrial civilization in a register that anticipated and unsettled the prewar bourgeois order.

The new physics (KC-4.3.I.A and KC-4.3.II.A). Europeans on the eve of 1914 were generally confident in the capacity of science and technology to address human needs and problems despite the uncertainty produced by new scientific theories and the new psychology. The new physics displaced the Newtonian universe in three principal moves. The first was Max Planck's quantum hypothesis of 14 December 1900 (the discrete quantization of electromagnetic energy in terms of h, the Planck constant). The second was Albert Einstein's annus mirabilis of 1905, which produced four foundational papers in the Annalen der Physik: the photoelectric-effect paper (which earned Einstein the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics); the Brownian-motion paper; the special-relativity paper ("On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies"); and the mass-energy equivalence paper (E = mc²). The third was the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s by Niels Bohr (Copenhagen interpretation), Werner Heisenberg (matrix mechanics, 1925; uncertainty principle, March 1927), Erwin Schroedinger (wave mechanics, 1926), Wolfgang Pauli (exclusion principle, 1925), and Paul Dirac (Dirac equation, 1928).

Einstein's general theory of relativity (formulated November 1915, presented to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin) extended the special theory to gravitation; the British solar-eclipse expedition of 29 May 1919 (Arthur Eddington's measurements of light-bending from Principe Island and Sobral, Brazil) confirmed the theory's prediction of starlight deflection by the sun and produced the first widely reported confirmation of Einstein's framework. The 17 December 1938 discovery of nuclear fission by Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, Lise Meitner, and Otto Frisch (working in Berlin and at the Physics Institute of the University of Stockholm respectively, after Meitner's 13 July 1938 flight from Nazi Germany) provided the physical basis of the postwar nuclear age that Topic 8.8 covered in its strategic dimension. The challenge to the certainties of the Newtonian universe in physics opened the door to uncertainty in other fields by undermining confidence in objective knowledge while also providing the foundation for nuclear weapons and nuclear power: KC-4.3.II.A's connection between the conceptual and the physical-strategic consequences captures the integrated character of the transformation.

Parallel developments in mathematics and the philosophy of science extended the new uncertainty. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's Principia Mathematica (1910-1913) attempted a logicist foundation of mathematics that Kurt Goedel's incompleteness theorems (1931) showed could not be completed. The Vienna Circle of logical positivists (Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and others, active from 1924 to 1936) attempted a strictly empiricist reconstruction of scientific knowledge; Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and his later Philosophical Investigations (posthumous, 1953) bracketed the Vienna Circle program. Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) introduced the falsifiability criterion that would organize subsequent twentieth-century philosophy of science.

The new psychology and existentialism. Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious, the Oedipus complex, the structural model of id-ego-superego (1923), and the broader cultural critique of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) reshaped the early-twentieth-century understanding of the autonomous rational subject. Carl Jung's analytical psychology (with its concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes, from his 1912 break with Freud), Alfred Adler's individual psychology, and the broader expansion of psychiatric and clinical-psychological practice across Western European cities in the interwar period extended the cultural reach of the new psychology. The interwar Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm) produced critical-theoretical work integrating Marx, Freud, and Weber; Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, published 1947) read the Holocaust as the catastrophic culmination of Enlightenment instrumental rationality.

Existentialism emerged in the 1930s and 1940s as the principal philosophical response to the catastrophe of the wars. Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), with its phenomenology of being-toward-death and authentic existence, anchored the German strand. Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943) and his postwar lecture-essay Existentialism Is a Humanism (1945) anchored the French strand; Albert Camus's The Stranger (L'Etranger 1942) and The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe 1942) developed the related theme of the absurd. Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and The Second Sex (Le Deuxieme Sexe 1949) extended existentialist analysis to gender and laid the foundation of postwar feminist theory.

The lost generation and modernist literature (KC-4.4.I.A). The First World War produced a 'lost generation' and fostered disillusionment and cynicism while also transforming the lives of women and producing more democratic societies. The phrase "lost generation" was attributed by Gertrude Stein (in conversation with the Parisian garage owner who used it of his apprentices) to Ernest Hemingway, who used it as the epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926). The literary lost generation included Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms 1929; The Old Man and the Sea 1952), F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby 1925; Tender Is the Night 1934), John Dos Passos (U.S.A. trilogy 1930-1936), and the British war poets Wilfred Owen (killed 4 November 1918, one week before the armistice; Poems published posthumously 1920), Siegfried Sassoon (Counter-Attack 1918), and Robert Graves (Goodbye to All That 1929). Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues 1929) translated the German front-soldier experience into the principal pacifist novel of the interwar period; the Nazi Party banned the book and burned it in the May 1933 book-burnings.

The wider modernist literary movement extended beyond the war-novel tradition. James Joyce's Ulysses (serialized in The Little Review 1918-1920; published in Paris by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company on 2 February 1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) reshaped twentieth-century prose with stream-of-consciousness narration. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) provided the principal modernist poem of the postwar disillusionment. Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), A Room of One's Own (1929), and The Waves (1931) developed modernist prose alongside a sustained essayistic engagement with women's intellectual life. Franz Kafka's posthumously published novels The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) anticipated the existentialist treatment of the absurd. The Bloomsbury Group, the Lost Generation in Paris, the Berlin Weimar circles, and the Vienna interwar literary scene constituted the principal modernist literary milieu.

Visual art continued the prewar revolutions. Dada (founded at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich on 5 February 1916 by Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and others) produced an anti-bourgeois, anti-rationalist response to the war. Surrealism (Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifesto 1924) extended Dada through engagement with Freudian unconscious imagery; the principal Surrealists include Salvador Dali (The Persistence of Memory 1931), Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, and Frida Kahlo. The Bauhaus (founded at Weimar in 1919 by Walter Gropius; relocated to Dessau in 1925; closed by the Nazi regime in April 1933) integrated architecture, applied art, and fine art and produced an internationally influential modernist design language; the closure of the Bauhaus and the transfer of its principal figures (Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers) to American institutions in the 1930s produced the postwar International Style. Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937, painted in response to the German bombing of the Basque town on 26 April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War) provided the principal anti-war painting of the interwar period.

Women's transformation in the world wars (KC-4.4.II.A). During the world wars, women became increasingly involved in military and political mobilization and in economic production. The First World War mobilization drew European women into munitions, transport, agriculture, clerical work, and (in non-combatant roles) military auxiliary service. By 1918 approximately 1.6 million British women worked in munitions; the British Army's Auxiliary Territorial Service and Women's Royal Naval Service had drawn approximately 100,000 women into uniformed service; comparable wartime employment patterns appeared in France, Germany, and Russia. The wartime mobilization accelerated the political extension of women's suffrage that nineteenth-century feminist movements (Emmeline Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union from 1903; the German Social Democratic women's movement; the French and American suffrage organizations) had been pressing.

The postwar suffrage extensions followed the war effort. The British Representation of the People Act of 6 February 1918 enfranchised women over thirty who met a property qualification (approximately 8.5 million women; the parallel-sex 1918 Act enfranchised approximately 5.6 million additional men); the Equal Franchise Act of 2 July 1928 lowered the qualifying age for women to 21 and removed the property requirement. The Weimar Constitution of 11 August 1919 granted German women full political equality and the vote. The United States Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on 18 August 1920. France did not extend the vote to women until the post-Liberation provisional government of Charles de Gaulle on 21 April 1944; Italian women voted for the first time in the constitutional referendum of 2 June 1946. The Second World War repeated the pattern at higher industrial scale: approximately 8 million Soviet women in war-related production; approximately 6 million American women added to the workforce between 1941 and 1945 (the iconic "Rosie the Riveter" figure of the J. Howard Miller "We Can Do It!" poster of 1943); approximately 80,000 British women in the Auxiliary Territorial Service and the Women's Auxiliary Air Force; approximately 800,000 Soviet women in Red Army uniformed service, including the all-female 588th Night Bomber Regiment ("Night Witches"). The postwar return-to-domesticity in much of Western Europe and the United States from the late 1940s onward produced a partial reversal of the wartime gains; the postwar feminist movement that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) anchored began the recovery and extension that Topic 9.13 will examine.

The Skill 6.B argument. Topic 8.10's suggested skill is 6.B (Argumentation: back an argument with relevant, specific evidence). The skill applies in two principal ways. First, students should construct an argument about cultural and intellectual continuity and change across the first half of the twentieth century by anchoring claims in specific named figures, works, and dates rather than in abstractions. The breakdown of the nineteenth-century belief in progress is not an abstract proposition but a constellation of specific events: Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols (1888), Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913), Owen's war poetry (1917-1918), Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). Second, students should argue using continuity-and-change reasoning rather than treating the postwar disillusionment as a complete rupture with prewar thought. The prewar foundations (Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson, the new physics, the early modernist movements) prepared the cultural ground that the war then radicalized; the wartime experience did not produce the new cultural register from nothing.

Three modernist sources framing the cultural arc: war disillusionment, the new science and women's place in it, and the modernist case for women's intellectual autonomy.

1. (Continuity and Change, Skill 6.B) Build a Skill 6.B argument with at least four specific pieces of evidence (named figure, named work, date) for KC-4.3.I.i: how did the nineteenth-century belief in progress begin to break down before the First World War?
2. (Continuity and Change) Account for KC-4.3.II.A: how did the new physics displace the Newtonian universe between roughly 1900 and 1938? Cite specific figures, papers, and discoveries.
3. (Continuity and Change, Skill 6.B) Build a Skill 6.B argument with at least four specific pieces of evidence for KC-4.4.I.A: how did the First World War produce a 'lost generation' and foster disillusionment and cynicism while also transforming the lives of women and producing more democratic societies?
4. (Continuity and Change) Account for KC-4.4.II.A: how did women's wartime mobilization in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 connect to the postwar political extension of women's suffrage? Cite the British, German, American, French, and Italian timelines.
5. (Continuity and Change, Skill 6.B) Examine the relationship between the prewar foundations (Nietzsche, Freud, the new physics, early modernism) and the postwar radicalization (the lost generation, existentialism, the women's-suffrage extensions, the Frankfurt School). What does continuity-and-change reasoning add to a pure rupture-with-the-past account?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.