8.10 20th-Century Cultural, Intellectual, and Artistic Developments

On the eve of World War I, most educated Europeans still believed that science, technology and reason would solve human problems. Electricity, medicine and rising living standards seemed to prove it. Yet the ideas of Nietzsche and Freud and the first discoveries of quantum theory and relativity (7.5) had already begun to undermine the nineteenth-century faith in steady progress and objective knowledge.

World War I shattered that confidence. Millions of young men died for a few miles of mud, and machines built by modern science, such as machine guns, poison gas and heavy artillery, did the killing. The phrase lost generation, popularized by the American writer Ernest Hemingway, came to describe the young people who survived the war feeling disillusioned, cynical and unable to believe in the old ideals of glory, patriotism and progress.

Writers captured this mood. The British soldier-poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon described the horror of the trenches and mocked the idea that dying for one's country was noble. Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) showed ordinary German soldiers destroyed by a war they did not understand. Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918–1922) predicted that Western civilization was in decline. (Art movements of this period, such as Dada and Surrealism, are covered in 9.14.)

Physics moved further away from Newton's predictable universe.

• Quantum mechanics suggested that at the smallest scale nature behaves according to probability, not certainty. Many people loosely took this as a sign that certainty in other fields, from morals to politics, was also impossible.
• The same physics made nuclear weapons and nuclear power possible. In 1938 German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann split uranium atoms, and Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch explained the process as nuclear fission. Fear that Germany would build a bomb helped launch the Manhattan Project.

In World War I, with millions of men at the front, women took jobs in munitions factories, transport, offices and farms, and served as nurses near the front. The war helped democratize societies: Britain gave the vote to women over 30 (and nearly all men) in 1918, and Germany's new republic gave women the vote in 1918–1919. Many women were pushed out of industrial jobs when men returned, and France did not grant women the vote until 1944.

World War II mobilized women even more fully. Britain began conscripting unmarried women for war work and the auxiliary services in December 1941. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet women served in the Red Army as snipers, pilots, medics and soldiers. Nazi Germany, whose ideology wanted women at home, was slower to mobilize them and relied heavily on forced foreign labor instead. Women also played key roles in resistance movements across occupied Europe.