9.14 20th- and 21st-Century Culture, Arts, and Demographic Trends

Existentialism grew out of the experience of war and occupation. Its leading voice, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, argued that humans are not born with a fixed nature or purpose; we exist first and then define ourselves through our choices. That makes us radically free and fully responsible for what we do, even in a universe with no God to give life meaning. Albert Camus, in novels such as The Stranger (1942), explored the absurd, the clash between our search for meaning and a silent world. Simone de Beauvoir applied existentialist ideas to women (9.8).

From the 1960s and 1970s, postmodernism went further. Thinkers such as Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault were skeptical of grand narratives, big stories that claim to explain everything, such as steady progress or Marxist history, and argued that knowledge and truth are shaped by language and power. Postmodern art and architecture mixed styles, borrowed from popular culture and used irony.

Twentieth-century artists rejected realistic representation and traditional ideas of beauty, as Cubism (7.8) had begun to do before 1914. Dictators attacked this art: the Nazis mocked modern works in a 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition, and the Soviet Union required socialist realism, art that glorified workers and the state.

Composers broke the rules too. Arnold Schoenberg gave up traditional keys for atonal music, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913) shocked Paris with clashing rhythms (7.8), and Richard Strauss's operas, such as Salome (1905), pushed harmony to new extremes. Writers experimented with form and questioned Western values. Franz Kafka's The Trial (published 1925) shows a man crushed by a faceless system he cannot understand, while James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) follow characters' streams of thought.

Churches responded to dictatorship in mixed ways. The Catholic Church signed agreements with Mussolini (the Lateran Accords, 1929) and Hitler (the Concordat, 1933) to protect its institutions. Some Protestant pastors, such as Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer of the Confessing Church, resisted Nazi control; Bonhoeffer was executed in 1945. The Soviet state persecuted the Orthodox Church, though Stalin relaxed pressure during World War II to boost patriotism. In communist Poland, the Catholic Church became a center of national resistance, especially after a Pole became Pope John Paul II in 1978 (9.7).

At the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the Catholic Church modernized: Mass could be said in local languages instead of Latin, the Church reached out to other Christians and religions, and it rejected the old charge that Jews as a people were guilty for Jesus's death. Even so, church attendance in Western Europe declined steadily, and society became increasingly secular.

After 1945 birth rates rose sharply in a baby boom that lasted into the mid-1960s, encouraged in some countries by pronatalist policies, government measures to promote births such as France's family allowances and state child care. Then they fell, and by the late 20th century most European countries had fertility below the replacement level of about 2.1 children per woman. Combined with longer lives (9.12), this produced aging populations, which strained pension and health systems.

The boom generation grew up in prosperity, in homes that increasingly had electricity, indoor plumbing, plastics and synthetic fabrics, with more years in school and its own music, fashion and consumer culture. In 1968 student protests erupted across Europe against the Vietnam War, rigid universities, consumer society and established authority. In France, the protests of May 1968 spread to a general strike of millions of workers that seriously shook de Gaulle's government, although he won new elections that June. Students and workers also protested in West Germany, Italy and, in a different form, Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring (9.4).

The protest era fed new movements for civil rights, women's rights (9.8) and gay rights. England and Wales decriminalized sex between men in 1967, Denmark created registered partnerships for same-sex couples in 1989, and the Netherlands became the first country to allow same-sex marriage in 2001.