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  • Hi I'm John Green and this is Crash Course European History. So, Europe has made it through

  • World War I, we did it everybody! It was easier for us than it was for them.

  • But now we have to ask the question: how does a society recover from catastrophe? Well,

  • in some ways, Europe made it look easy. It was theRoaring Twentiesand a more

  • modern consumer economy arrived featuring electricity and telephones in homes and nightclubsAnd

  • all these revolutions in human connectivity and technology meant lots of economic growth

  • and new opportunities and also of course many people carping about how good it was in the

  • old days, back when the lord of the manor house made all your decisions and you died

  • of plague at 27.

  • [Intro] To be clear, all was certainly not well: families

  • tended to thousands of veterans who wereshell shocked,” a term coined to refer to the

  • post-traumatic mental health crises caused by war. Millions more former soldiers were

  • disabled. Soldiers struggled to build families and find

  • jobs, especially because parts of the economy had trouble converting from massive production

  • of weaponry to the less urgent provisioning of goods for civilian life.

  • And former soldiers also had to deal with the fact that in many countries (notable exceptions

  • were France and Italy), women received the vote and entered the labor force, and were

  • now earning their own money. Let's go to the Thought Bubble.

  • 1. The ongoing growth of industrialization meant there were jobs in new and revived sectors:

  • 2. the production of small household goods like electric irons, or phonographs, or radios,

  • 3. larger items such as automobiles, and civilian transport such as subways, trams, and trains.

  • 4. Construction of urban housing, which had been neglected during the war, also boomed.

  • 5. And some towns and entire cities like Warsaw, along with roads and rail lines, needed massive

  • repair if not complete rebuilding.

  • 6. Nothing spurs the economy quite like rebuilding infrastructure that you just blew up.

  • 7. Meanwhile, technology was rapidly increasing industrial productivity.

  • 8. European industrialists were beginning to follow U.S. innovation in practices like

  • the assembly line.

  • 9. They also created early multinational corporations.

  • 10. Managers of businesses studied the bodily movements of workers performing industrial

  • tasks

  • 11. in order to make the most efficient use of human energy in relationship to machines.

  • 12. One French assembly line worker reportedIn my dreams I was a machine.”

  • 13. In multinational enterprises, business people set up branches of their companies

  • in other parts of the world,

  • 14. for instance in areas where raw material such as cocoa or palm oil were plentiful

  • 15. and where labor for processing or industrial production was cheaper.

  • 16. Many scholars see these new multinational corporations as a different, but also abusive,

  • form of empire. Thanks Thought Bubble.

  • Technology increasingly affected farmwork as well, providing expensive innovations like

  • motorized machinery and chemical fertilizers. and in both industry and agriculture, technology

  • was making some jobs obsolete even while creating new ones, as it had before the war--and the

  • benefits were distributed very unevenly, which continues to be the case with industrial and

  • technological expansion. But there were also upsides. Like, for instance,

  • dancing. Young people went to dance halls and films, which then as now was an art form

  • with mass appeal. And people's lives were filled with lively

  • music, rollicking dances like the Charleston, and screwball comedies like those made by

  • Charlie Chaplin. Where possible young people flocked to beaches in the summer and bicycled

  • in groups of friends on weekends now that many people's work days had been cut to

  • six or even five and ½ days per week. Oh! All that time for leisure. I wonder if

  • in the future, people will be like, “y'all used to work five days a week?” That's

  • crazy! And there were so many other changes too.

  • Changes in women's fashion led to shorter skirts and silk stockings. Manuals about birth

  • control methods continued the trend of bringing down the birthrate, although there was a brief

  • upturn just after the war. There was also a new emphasis on physical exercise for both

  • men and women, as group fitness drills proliferated--as did sports teams, which often now wore uniforms

  • in much the same way that armies did. Because sports teams are basically armies. OPEN GLOBE

  • It's an AFC Wimbledon scarf! One thing you might not know about me is that I sponsor

  • a third-tier English soccer team called AFC Wimbledon.

  • So much about football and many other sports is very clearly a metaphor for military action.

  • I mean, defending and attacking, for instance. But also ideas of holding and capturing territory,

  • and wearing certain colors to show which side you're on.

  • And another commonality between sports and war is the belief that your team is right

  • and good and just, and the other team is evil, even if actually the other team is basically

  • identical.

  • But this isn't Crash Course history of sports...yet. So, back to war.

  • World War I lingered in many ways. Battlefield tourism arose for people to grieve where their

  • loved ones had fallen. Inflation, which during the war had ruined so many, became an even

  • more serious problem. I've said it before and I'll say it again, inflation is the

  • most underrated historical force. In Germany, for instance, increasingly large

  • quantities of money were being printed to pay their war reparations as agreed to in

  • the Treaty of Versailles(1918), and also to pay workers. And that led to runaway hyperinflation

  • beginning in 1921, so that by 1923 a single turnip or potato could cost trillions of German

  • marks.

  • The money saved by many middle-class people over decades became worthless, and widespread

  • bitterness in Germany intensified, fueled by the war guilt clause in the Treaty of Versailles.

  • Outside of Europe, independence movements were growing against the Western powers, with

  • Indian lawyer Mohandas Gandhi becoming an international celebrity for preaching civil

  • disobedience. His message was that non-Western people should not try to emulate Britain or

  • the United States, whose main values were greed and getting rich.

  • Instead they should restore their respect for the wisdom of the ancients as found in

  • the Vedas and other sacred teachings. Despite widespread and ongoing protests, however,

  • India would not gain its independence until 1947, however, showing how desperately Britain

  • sought to hold on to its lucrative colonies. In Italy meanwhile, Mussolini was rising to

  • power. WOW, that is a properlit intense facial expression.

  • I can't tell if he's about to hypnotize me or order my assassination.

  • Right, so you'll recall that Britain and France had promised Italy territory in exchange

  • for joining World War I, a promise that was only minimally kept. And then an economic

  • downturn right after the war as wartime industries shuttered further crushed Italian hopes and

  • household budgets. Enter Benito Mussolini. He was an Italian journalist who put himself

  • at the head of an unofficial army of unemployed men and former veterans with the promise of

  • making Italy great again as in the days of the ancient, triumphant Roman legions.

  • In 1922, Mussolini's black-shirted troops marched on Rome (although Mussolini himself

  • hid out until the march was successful). The troops demanded that the king appoint Mussolini

  • to head the government, which the King did. Mussolini headed the Fascist Party, which

  • had a minimalist platform but the electoral advantage of its own army.

  • The party's platform consisted of the idea that the state was supreme and that a citizen's

  • duty was to submit to the will of the state (think Rousseau's “general will”). The

  • party took its name from the fasces of Roman times: an axe with a handle made up of tied

  • sticks representing the unity and boundedness of the individual to the core power of the

  • state. Black shirts beat up and even murdered opponents

  • in the Italian Parliament; they also entrapped union members, torturing them and forcing

  • castor oil down their throats, which causes diarrhea. And as for women, they were forbidden

  • to have good jobs and eventually were limited to work only as household servants or agricultural

  • workers.

  • Assigning women a servile role in society was supposed to allow men to feel like men

  • again with their superior wages. And also to create a dependence upon men and their

  • wages. As fascism thrived in Italy, the new eastern

  • and central European nations, which had been carved out in the Peace of Paris, faced the

  • challenge of creating governments. These governments would have to rebuild devastated areas, jump-start

  • economies, and deal with complicated issues of ethnicity, and the latter was the most

  • difficult, because after centuries of migration and intermarriage, ethnicity and nationality

  • had become exceedingly complex. But President Wilson had called fornationality

  • or ethnicity to be the determining factor in the formation of new nations in his Fourteen

  • Points. So from Poland to Turkey, brutal expulsions of ethnic minorities occurred right after

  • the war, an event called by one diplomatthe great unmixing of populations.”

  • And amid this ongoing chaos, new governments often confiscated the massive landholdings

  • (sometimes hundreds of thousands of acres) from the nobility and distributed them to

  • peasants. Those peasants then had to borrow funds for new machinery and chemical fertilizer

  • if they were gonna thrive in the modern agricultural market place, which in some cases worked out

  • well and in other cases ended up impoverishing those farmers.

  • But Germany was the war's most wounded nation. The Weimar Republic, which replaced the monarchy

  • in 1919, struggled against monarchists on the one hand and radical political parties,

  • including Communists, on the other hand. Forces from both right and left worked to undermine

  • each other as well as the Weimar republic itself.

  • And complicating everything was the lingering culture of violence that was left over from

  • the war. Uprisings and putsches--that is, an attempt to overthrow the government--abounded.

  • In November 1923, World War I veteran Adolf Hitler attempted one from a beer hall in Munich

  • with the help of wartime military hero General Erich Ludendorff. “The national revolution

  • has begun,” Hitler yelled as he shot a pistol in the air and called up his ragged crew of

  • followers. That putsch failed, like most big ideas born in bars, but it did help Hitler

  • rise to national prominence. Hitler was the chief speaker for a militant

  • party of veterans, unemployed men, and discontents called the National Socialist Workers Party,

  • or Nazis. Now, initially many of these beleaguered supporters hated the rich for their wealth--thus

  • the namesocialist.” But it's important to understand they were not Communists. By

  • this time, Communists were advocating for confiscation of wealth, while socialists had

  • become far less revolutionary and increasingly favored reform whether in working conditions

  • or economic help for poor families. But as times changed, Hitler also shifted

  • the Party's emphasis away from those initial socialist ideals. He collected admission fees

  • for the Party with his central message of hatred for the Versailles treaty and in particular

  • for the Jewish people. Jewish people, he claimed repeatedly, polluted the white German race

  • and plotted globally against the German nation. Hitler carefully practiced his speaking, looking

  • at himself in the mirror as he rehearsed and tried out various poses, and gestures, and

  • facial expressions. And he shared his approach to propagandism in his best seller Mein Kampf,

  • written during his short stint in prison after the failed Beer Hall Putsch.

  • In Mein Kampf, Hitler argued that people are generally stupid and easy to manipulate. Tell

  • big lies in politics, he advised, because people will more readily believe them, since

  • they themselves mostly tell small lies in their everyday lives.

  • Sales of Mein Kampf (along with the general looting done after Nazi victories) made Hitler

  • wealthy, in part through bookseslling-as-official-corruption: Businessmen who wanted to deal with the Nazis

  • first had to buy many copies of Mein Kampf. In the 1920s, Hitler's male followers became

  • an increasingly militarized force of Stormtroopers or SA (Sturmabteilung). They caused chaos

  • in the streets and engaged in confrontations with Communists.

  • And one owner of a major newspaper, Alfred Hugenberg fed to his readers false accounts

  • that Communists were responsible for every assassination of a political figure (of which

  • there were several) plus every street fight and civil disturbance. In contrast, Hugenberg's

  • paper credited the Nazis with restoring peace to the streets—a major comfort to people

  • who were weary and on edge after years of war with other nations and also in their very

  • own neighborhoods. And financial backing from some business leaders