Hi I’m John Green and this is Crash Course European History.
So, the twentieth century opened with feminists smashing store windows.
The Irish were contesting British rule; Russians were challenging royal rule in the Revolution
of 1905.
The French were fighting within families and across society over the plight of Jewish colonel
Alfred Dreyfus, who’d been convicted of espionage on the basis of fabricated evidence.
And over the past few decades, anarchists had been assassinating heads of state and
members of powerful families, including the empress of Austria-Hungary.
And we’ll talk more about all these upheavals, and the ways they helped shape twentieth century
Europe, but today we want to turn to the arts, and sciences, and philosophical thought--all
of which both shaped and were shaped by the big political and social events of the day.
We often use terms like “art history” and “history of science” to separate out
scientific and artistic pursuits from political and social history, but if history is the
story of how our species got to now, the histories of art and philosophy and science are essential
to, and inseparable from, human history.
[Intro] Music, art, and dance had traditionally featured
hummable and moving tunes, realistic depictions of graceful women and noble men, and the fluttering
arms of waiflike ballerinas moving ethereally across the stage.
By 1900 all that had changed with what is now called modern classical music, modern
art, and modern dance.
The term “modernism” applies to the rejection or radical alteration of all that had come
before in the arts and in thought.
Some people see modernism as a rejection of the Enlightenment's rational approach to reality,
but others believe that aspects of modernism such as abstraction demand a higher level
of rationality.
That is, one has to use higher levels of thought in dealing with the abstract forms than concrete
ones--the idea of a number, for example, is more complicated and more interesting, than
counting.
But for contemporary audiences and critics, modern music sounded like screeching and scratching.
Song gave way, in critics’ views, to noise, even in modern dance.
The ballet dancers in “Rite of Spring” made jerking movements and pounded the floor
in so-called primitive rather than graceful ways.
Ballerinas removed their tutus and ballet-toe slippers and danced in bare feet and tunics.
Choreographers and performers claimed to create these new movements by imitating foreign dancers
seen at world fairs and in distant lands.
And similarly, composers copied instrumentation and musical forms from Japan, Bali, South
Asia, and other regions.
Audiences literally howled and walked out of these performances, but the world of dance
and music had changed forever.
As for visual art: By becoming “modern,” artists changed their style almost yearly,
or at least so it seemed to some observers.
“Make it new” was their motto, and the impressionists broke with realism in their
paintings first by having human figures appear to float, without a stable background and
without creating exact likenesses of faces, as you see in the paintings of Édouard Manet.
And then Claude Monet and his followers produced images of train stations and other urban buildings
that shimmered with flecks and dabs of color instead of clear lines and realistic shading.
They were trying to project the Japanese belief in mono non aware or the fleetingness of life.
Indistinct colors and lines gave the “impression” of nature’s constantly changing appearance
instead of stabilizing it in ]“realism,” which as the impressionists pointed out wasn’t
really real, because the real is always changing, while “realism” portrays static images.
But as with the changes in music, it appeared to outsiders that artists were losing their
grip on reality and their skill in minutely depicting the world.
Artists also increasingly focused on industrial, urban, and working-class life instead of presenting
aristocratic privilege.
Leisured patrons were replaced by workers in parks, women doing laundry and ironing,
fatigued day laborers, and the destitute.
German artist Kaethe Kollwitz angered the aristocratic upper classes by emphasizing
the frailty and suffering of the poor instead of showing the nobility of the prosperous
few.
The German Kaiser called her woodcuts “gutter art.”
But by this time, artists were earning their livelihoods from public commissions and a
new class of art dealers, not only from rich elites commissioning portraits of themselves
posing with pineapples.
another reminder that what artists end up painting has a lot to do with who ends up
buying their paint.
Many artists only scraped by--19th century artists like Vincent Van Gogh helped give
us our contemporary idea of the starving and tortured artist--but others prospered by working
in commercially advantageous styles like art nouveau, which featured curving lines of vines
and other plant life, as well as romanticized women’s bodies with long flowing hair.
Artists designed many everyday objects in the art nouveau style as well, from cutlery
to combs.
And commercial artists also produced full color advertising posters for steamship lines,
and dance halls, and cafés, and theater performances, and brands of soap and coffee.
These posters were displayed on kiosks and in other public spaces, so art nouveau brightened
everyday urban space and advanced modern phenomena such as department stores and mass consumerism
by being really effective advertising.
And even today, posters of art nouveau advertisements can be found in like one third of college
dorm rooms.
Stan says that in his experience, it’s closer to 65%, but to be fair, neither of us has
been in a dorm room in like, twenty years.
By the turn of the century, changes in art became even more radical.
Like painter Paul Cezanne depicted items like apples and oranges in geometric terms.
Bodily shapes and those in nature like mountains became planes and spheres.
Immediately following, Pablo Picasso not only used geometric splotches to portray women
but also depicted their faces as African masks.
In 1907 Swedish artist Hilma af Klint produced the first entirely abstract painting with
no relationship whatsoever to realistic forms.
and most of these artists, like the earlier impressionists, were deeply influenced by
ideas and beliefs coming from the colonized world and other distant lands.
Many would argue they were also appropriating those ideas and beliefs in much the same way
colonizers were extracting other resources.
But the impact of global ideas on European art was profound.
For example, af Klint and Norwegian Edvard Munch aimed to capture spiritual truths as
preached in theosophy—a mixture of beliefs and practices taken from Buddhist, Hindu,
Islamic, and other philosophical and religious traditions.
They used colors with meanings that were laid out in theosophical teachings.
And presenting these schemes correctly was supposed to portray inner reality.
Munch’s “The Scream” famously used line and color in ways that people believe to be
emblematic of turn-of-the-century modernism, especially the internal distress that many
felt amid the faster pace and tensions of modern life.
And there were similarly revolutionary ideas coming out of the world of science that would
upend our understanding of the world.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
1.
In 1896, French physicist Antoine Becquerel discovered radioactivity.
2.
He also suggested that elements were changeable or mutable through the rearrangement of their
atoms.
3.
And then, from the discoveries of Marie Curie and her husband Pierre Curie,
4. who found the more radioactive elements polonium and radium,
5.
scientists determined that atoms are not solid.
6.
In 1900, German physicist Max Planck’s quantum theory changed people’s understanding of
energy,
7.
although like Galileo centuries earlier, his theories were not accepted at the time.
8.
And amid this revolutionary scientific universe, physicist Albert Einstein announced his special
theory of relativity in 1905.
9.
According to this theory, space and time are not absolute categories
10.
but instead vary according to the vantage point of the observer.
11.
Only the speed of light is constant.
12.
In 1915, Einstein published his general theory of relativity,
13. which connected the force, or gravity, of an object with its mass
14. and proposed a fourth mathematical dimension to the universe.
15.
And Einstein’s theories of energy became critical to all kinds of technological innovation,
from television to the nuclear bomb.
16.
As discussed in detail in our History of Science series, the findings of Planck, Einstein,
and others really created a “paradigm shift” away from the Newtonian science of the early
modern period,
17.
18.
And in many ways, we are still in the shadow of the tremendous discoveries at the turn
of the century.
Thanks Thought Bubble.
So, for a long time, scientists have made discoveries and produced theories that do
not fit with common sense, everyday interpretations of the physical world.
Right?
Did the center of the world just open?
Is there a compass in there?
This is a great example of what I mean.
We still say that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, right?
Because practically, for us, it does.
Even though, you know, it doesn’t.
Slightly off topic, but when I close my eyes and imagine the Earth from space, I always
picture North being up, right?
Like, Antarctica is at the bottom, the North Pole is at the top.
But no!
Why?
So, inevitably, the way we need to represent the world in an everyday way, in order to
know when to turn left and when to turn right, is going to skew our understanding of the
world.
and during this revolutionary time, just as thinkers were trying to understand the relationship
between perceived reality and objective reality, they were also trying to understand the mind,
and the relationship between our interior selves, and the selves we project.
Which brings us to Freud.
Sigmund Freud questioned the Enlightenment beliefs in a rational self wedded to reasonable
decision-making and self-interest.
Because, you know, we are not rational selves wedded to reasonable decision making and self-interest.
Instead of a unified, rational persona, Freud claimed that the human self or psyche contains
three parts struggling against one another for dominance: the ego, the part centered
on realistic activity to survive; the id (or libido), the part alive with sexual energies
pushing instinctual rather than rational behavior; and the superego, the part that acts as the
conscience.
Freud developed the practice of psychoanalysis to treat the person in whom these three elements
were out of balance enough to cause mental disturbances or neuroses.
Psychoanalysis involved a “talking cure” in which the patient tried to call forth repressed
fantasies, and fears, and desires so that they might be understood and cured.
An especially controversial part of Freud’s theories stated that sexual life should be
evaluated scientifically without religious or moral judgments.
According to him, from infancy on children had sexual drives. and in order for civilization
to exist, these drives—most notably in the case of Freudian psychology, the drive toward
incest--needed to be controlled.
He also insisted that gender identity was not a straightforward entity but instead complicated
and that women like men had strong sexual feelings; they weren’t passionless, as advocates
of domesticity maintained.
Although many of Freud’s ideas have been abandoned, the influence of psychoanalysis
extends to this day.
In fact, I am visiting my therapist later this afternoon.
It’s now more common to talk with counselors and therapists to bring our problems out in
the open instead of repressing them.
We also believe in the existence of neuroses and that our selves are not composed entirely
of rationality and intellectual activity.
Just like artists crushing traditional beliefs, Freud advanced modernism by claiming that
our old ideas about the mind itself were outdated.
Simultaneously other theorists rejected the idea that science and facts could be used
to uncover social laws.
The social sciences of sociology and economics—to name just two—had developed around the pursuit
of identifying enduring laws of society.
And the belief that you can discover social facts and basic social laws to guide public
policy is called positivism, and it was challenged by those who held that there were too many
facts to compute and that humans were complex and ever changing and at times somewhat irrational
both when it came to economic choices and when it came to social ones.
I mean, How else do you explain the strange early 21st century rise of the Croc?
Those theorists called relativists and pragmatists have been in constant debate with positivists
right up until now, and if you think we’re getting in the middle of that, you’re wrong.
Can we rationally and with confidence make infallible laws?
Is a question I’m sure you’ll be commenting upon.
Probably the most scandalous theinker of the time was the German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche, who denied the certainty of truth, insisting that all knowledge simply represents
what humans—from scientists to shopkeepers--have perceived.
The human mind, for example, filters what nature is and presents its own sense of nature’s
truth--a human representation of reality rather than reality itself.
Nietzsche believed that absolute truths including age-old tenets of religion were in decline.
“God is dead, we have killed him” he famously announced as the result of modern understandings
of the universe.
Humans could now embark on the happy search for new “poetries of life” free from religious
and other traditional rules.
Nietzsche eventually contracted syphilis and became mentally ill, and his sister converted
the philosopher’s disdain for traditional values into attacks on Jews and support for
nationalists, and anti-Semites, and militarists--a reminder that the ideas of modernism were
tools that could be wielded in a variety of ways.Which we will see, with tragic consequences,
throughout the twentieth century.
And so the turn of the century was alive with fresh ideas, upending concepts from painting
and dance to philosophy and physics.
And we are living today in a world wrought by modern ideas, but also one that is experiencing
its own period of profound disruptions in the ways we communicate and how we understand
truth.
And that makes me wonder how our revolutionary disruptions will seem a century from now.
Will this time be remembered as one in which people grew closer together through tools
of communication?
Or will it be remembered as one in which people grew increasingly further apart as polarization
worsened?
The answer to that is partly up to you, and the choices that you will make that will shape
our shared future.
Thanks for watching.
I’ll see you next time.