The Expansion of Mass Culture and Mass Leisure

• Roaring Twenties- decade of 1920s where there was a surge of pop culture with Berlin being the center of entertainment. It was known especially for dance crazes where lively women would be called “flappers”.1920s was also the Jazz Age for the Americans.

Radio & Movies

• Marconi – the person that discovered wireless radio waves.
• June 16, 1920 was the first mass radio broadcast of a soprano which later led to broadcasting stations to be built in the U.S. Europe and Japan. Also accompanying this movement was the mass production of radio receivers.
• When the BBC became a public corp. 2.2 million radios were in GB and by the end of 1930s, 9 million.
• Foundation for motion pics were developed in the 1890s with short moving pictures. Longer productions were shown after WWI such as Birth of a Nation or Quo Vadis. These showed that the cinema was going to be prominent part of entertainment for the masses.
• 40 percent of adults went to movies before WWII and 60 percent after WWII.
• Increased sizes in audience gave a new dimension to mass culture.
• Movie stars were the center of attention such as Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel.
• Radio and movies were also ways to deliver propaganda where Hitler said that the national socialists could not work if they had no radio or other form of communication. Nazis encouraged purchases of the radio by making the manufacturers produce it cheaply and even allowed them to be paid off by installments.They also built loudspeaker pillars to allow for communal listening.
• Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister to Nazis knew that film had potential in propaganda. He encouraged production of films that projected Nazi ideals. The Triumph of the Will was a documentary of the Nuremberg party conveyed the power of National socialism to viewers.

Mass Leisure

• New work patterns after WWI gave people more leisure time. The 8-hr day was the norm.
• Pro sportn events were especially prominent. Soccer game attendance in Europe increased dramatically and the World Cup was intro. in 1940 allowing for mass sporting events. Increased attendance also meant that stadiums were to be built. 1936 Olympics in Germany allowed for a 140k seat stadium to be built.
• Travel was also a major leisure activity now that the aircraft was more developed because of WWI military use of aircraft. Airmail began in 1919 and passenger service soon followed. Air travel was for the elite but trains, busses, and private cars became more affordable and made trips to the beach able for all social classes.
• Mussolini created Dopolavoro, a recreational agency, responsible for clubhouses. This allowed for introduction of many facets of mass leisure to the people although this allowed for supervision by government. This then led to imposing of new rules on spontaneous activities.
• The Nazi’s adopted a similar program called Kraft durch Freude allowing for coordination of free time of the working class.
• Mass leisure seemed to blend the class lines.

CULTURAL AND INTELLECTULAL TRENDS IN INTERWAR YEARS

• Devastating war led to disillusionment and despair.
• Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler depicted the potential future collapse of the western civilization.
• The war seemed to confirm the ideals of Thomas Hobbes, that people were animalistic and violent.
• Growth of Fascism made people even more uneasy.
• More emphasis in sexual activities. Women began to use cosmetics, wear short skirts, and have shorter hair.
• Marie Stopes published Married Love emph. sexual pleasure.
• Dutch physician Theodore van de Velde published Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique. This described the male/female anatomy and glorified sexual pleasure. Family planning clinics were also developed by Margert Sanger and Marie Stopes.

Nightmares: Art/Music

• Abstract painting was popular, absurd, unconcious genres such as Dadaism gave rise to nightmarish landscapes of WWI. Dadaism stressed the purposelessness of life. Tristian Tzara was the founder of Dadaism.
• Berlin Dada Manifesto = data is the international expression of times, great rebellion of artistic movements
• Hannah Hoch was the only female member of the Berlin Dada Club. Dada Dance was a painting insulting the new woman’s movement.
• Surrealism was a more important movement where people employed logic to portray illogic. Salvador Dali painted the Persistence of Memory which placing recogniziable objects in unrecognizable circumstances.
• Modern architecture simplified by removal of unnecessary ornaments.
• U.S most prominent in movement of arch. Chicago School of 1890s used concrete steel frames and elevators. Architecture was led by Louis H. Sullivan.
• Frank Lloyd Wright was the most successful pupil of Sullivan. He built houses of longs lines, overhanging roofs, and severe planes of brick and stone.
• This Functionalism was spread by the Bauhaus School of Art founded in Weimar, Germany by Berlin architect Walter Gropius. Gropius’s own buildings were unornamented steel boxes with rows of windows.
• Artists began their blending in with the new mass culture. German Kurt Weill struggled with classical music but found jazz to be quite successful in his Threepenny Opera. Erwin Piscator offered drama to workers on picket lines.
• Traditionalists denounced the new arts as degeneracy. Hitler called it “Jewish” art.
• Great German Art Exhibition in the House of German Art was where Hitler said that the new art was a lack of skill and arrogant.New German art was realistic and supposed to stress how “good” the Aryans were. Stalin created a “social realism” form of art.
• Music revolution was begun with Stravinsky and continued with Schonberg’s atonal music which resulted in completely different composition . Modern music was resisted until after WWII.

Search for the Unconcious

• New literary techiniques.
• Report of innermost thoughts of characters.
• James Joyce’s Ulysses followed flow of inner dialogue.
• “stream of conciousness” – interior monologue
• Grp of intellectuals Bloomsbury Circle – Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dollaway and Jacob’s Room involved inner monologues of the thoughs of people.
• Hermann Hesse dealt with spiritual loneliness.
• Sigmund Freud’s influence became greater with his vocab added to the main vocab: id, ego, unconcious, repression, and Oedipus complex
• Misconception that uninhbited sex life was vital
• Freud’s own pupil, Carl Jung, challenged his ideas. he believed them to be too narrow
• Freud believed unconscious was seat of repressed desires but Jung said it was an opening ot deep spiritual needs and ever-greater vistas for humans.
• Collective conscious- repository of memories all human beings hared, archetypes
• two types of conscious, personal and collective

Heroic Age of Physics

• Ernest Rutherford demostrated atom splitting, “heroic age of physics”. Subatomic led to development of A-bomb.
• New physics had new belief that not everything was predictable as said by Werner Heisenburg.