Serhat Can Response Paper

11895

In this response paper, I tried to explore the conditions and the mood during Interwar years across Europe and partly in USA. After studying the course materials, it was obvious for me to realize the depressive times people experienced in late 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. Nevertheless, I have observed something quite interesting in this period, aside from the depression. With the ending of the World War I, devastated citizens of the war countries were probably aware of the fact that despite the ending of the war, they had quite rough times ahead of them. So in order to get rid of this hopeless scene, they escaped from their towns and started to travel. Even during the WWI, many European citizens made transatlantic tours with huge steamships from England to USA, in which they were served with first class quality, and enjoying the trip, while they got away from their depressive lives. The movie "Titanic" is a great example of these tours. Of course transatlantic transportation was active way before the WWI, but as it is mentioned in the "Tourist Third Cabin: Steamship Travel Interwar Years" by Lorraine Coons, the birth of mass transatlantic tourism corresponds to this era. Another evidence of this escape is most probably the birth of "Jazz". Starting from America, this new type of music rapidly spread to Europe and became very popular during 1920s. In my opinion, jazz had more influence than sea tourism on people. In fact I'm not making too much of a mistake with this opinion. Jazz age directly affected the youth and made them rebellious against the old times, in which there was years full of war, pain and shock. This rebellious movement even created a new kind of fashion style called "flappers". We can directly see the impact of it in the picture, which is also the course materials, called "Gilded Age Image of the years 1920-1929" from the book "Pictorial History of the 20th Century".

Serhat Can

11895

Considering the collapsed mood of the people after WWI, it seems natural for people trying to distract themselves from the environment. In Europe, citizens faced with most kind of bad news from day to day. In 1918, the "Spanish Influenza" killed around 3 to 5 percent of population around the globe. Austrian painter Egon Schiele picturized a horrible scene of this influenza in his painting "The Family". In Germany the hyperinflation created a chaotic atmosphere as it is described in "The Black Obelisk" by Erich Maria Remarque. Also the foundation of "Weimar Republic" didn't help to fix this chaos and rather than being a uniting structure it brought more conflict due to not being able to establish the authority among extreme leftists and rightists. Painting named as "The Pillars of the Society" from George Grosz pictures those days of Germany perfectly, in my opinion. With the crash of "Wall Street" and upcoming "The Great Depression", life worsened among Europe. And finally with the rise of Nazism and Fascism, crisis reached its peak. As it can be seen, the interwar years seemed for European citizens as a finish to their pain and trouble. Considering this aspect, they tried to escape from it, by literally getting away from it or having new trends in life, in music and in fashion. However, things became worse than ever for them. People were simply not aware of what was waiting for them. They were just trying to take a break and forget about wars and etc and travelling blindly to not to see their ruined lives. Ironically, this was as if evident from the sinking of the Titanic, in early 1910s. In conclusion, it is evident to observe the hard times during interwar years, end of which one of the greatest tragedies of human history happened. However, it would be a huge mistake to miss out the fact that people from interwar years period were in good intentions and were just trying to heal themselves up. Only if there was no such strong nationalism and violence, maybe they would recover fully after WWI and our history would never record those tragedies.