James Shockley
I recently saw an old rerun of Doc Martin on PBS. The setting was a preliminary sanity hearing for a woman thought to have dementia.
She was asked, “When did World War II start?”
Her reply: “June 28, 1919.”
She went on to explain that that was the day Germany was forced to sign the disastrous treaty that ended World War I, setting the stage for the rise of Hitler.
Wars end when treaties are signed, but their consequences last for decades. Many historians think that World War I was the major cultural event of the Twentieth Century, causing serious changes that last to this day.
It changed the geo-political landscape worldwide, changed the culture for the arts and for society, gave rise to both political and cultural movements for independence, and set the stage for World War II.
At the beginning of the Great War there were three major empires that reached into Europe: the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, The Russian Empire, and The Ottoman Empire.
The war started from a minor incident between the first two. The Ottoman Empire was drawn in. Germany came in on the side of Austria to fight France and England, which were allied with Russia.
Russia was weak in spite of its size and got out of the war by signing a treaty with Austria-Hungary.
Soon, much of the conflict was reduced to bitter trench-warfare between Germany and the combined forces of England and France, fought mainly in France and Belgium.
Eventually, the United States declared war on Germany, and the Great War ended a few months later.
Treaties reduced the Ottoman Empire to Turkey. Turkey gave up the Middle East (current-day Syria, Iraq, and Israel), mainly to England.
The Arabian Desert later became the independent nation, Saudi Arabia. After a few years, Ataturk took charge of Turkey and moved it towards being a secular nation more closely aligned with Europe.
The Austrian-Hungarian Empire was forced to split into several independent countries, including Austria, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.
Technically Russia was on the winning side of the war, but it had become weak and signed an early treaty. Later a rebellion turned into a civil war.
To the surprise of most people, the Communists won the war and established the world’s first Communist government, turning a political fringe movement into an important player on the world stage.
France, the scene of most of the fighting, was the most severely damaged country. One-quarter of its young men aged 17 to 27 were dead, and even more were severely wounded.
It held Germany responsible for its plight because the two countries were traditional enemies. To rebuild, France insisted on a disastrous settlement from Germany, and the other victors agreed.
England also had major losses in men and materials, but not as severe as France. Brittan had another problem, however. It had mobilized native forces in its empire, especially in Africa and India, to be able fight Germany.
Native leaders soon realized that they might be able to fight their way free of England. Consequently, the British Empire was wracked by years of minor rebellions.
Germany was severely weakened by the war. It lost its territories in Africa as well as almost half of its country to Poland.
Much of a generation of young men were dead or wounded. During the war a British blockade had been put in place to starve the general population, and it continued for several months after the war causing mass starvation.
The treaty forced on Germany made everything worse. France wanted to make sure that Germany paid reparations for rebuilding and would be weakened to the point that it could not wage war again.
The other victors agreed with France and demanded disastrous payments.
Germany could have made the payments if life had returned to normal. In addition to the blockade, however, the victors put large tariffs on goods imported from Germany which wrecked the German export trade.
The German government could not raise enough money to function, so as a temporary measure, it started to print paper money without backing it up with gold or silver. This got out of hand as more and more paper money was printed.
Soon major inflation resulted which wiped out the complete savings of most families. The inflation got so bad that some people had to draw their life savings out of the bank to buy a loaf of bread.
Eventually the paper money became so worthless that it was cheaper to burn it than use it to buy a small amount of coal. The combination of these effects led to large-scale unemployment with people starving to death on the streets.
Hitler came on the scene and presented himself as a savior. He had a simple message: Jews and foreign governments were to blame for the war, not the German people.
The treaty forced on Germany was not valid, and the nation did not have to abide by it. Germany could rebuild its army and take its rightful place in the community of nations. It must have a strong leader to restore Germany to its greatness.
The typical German citizen who voted for Hitler never saw much benefit from his regime. The beneficiaries were the German army, the industrialists, and the wealthy.
Soon the rebuilt German army moved into the weaker neighboring countries and conquered them. Slave labor camps helped to build up both the German military and the German economy, and soon Europe was on the way to World War II.
The decades surrounding the Great War were periods of cultural change. This was the Jazz Age, a time for experimenting in music, art, and living.
Women started to smoke and drink in public. They demanded the right to vote. Prohibition became the law in the United States but was widely ignored. Automobiles allowed dating couples to get away from both home and chaperones. Artists broke away from established norms and experimented with collages and extreme forms of painting and sculpture. These forms are common to us today but caused a sensation at the time.
Many German artists had served in the trenches, and after the war some were anxious to acquaint the rest of the world about its reality.
They built on the work of the cubists and Dadaists and painted extreme pictures showing the horrors and brutality of the war – the wounded, the dying, the mutilated.
During the war such pictures could cause an artist to be jailed for sedition, but after the war they could be displayed.
My favorite of these, if such a word is appropriate, is one by Otto Dix with the title (English translation) Memory of a Glorious Time. It shows two mutilated veterans thinking back on the war.
Such mutilations were common, but the disfigured veterans usually hid from public view.
Dix brought them out of hiding to help the general population understand the hidden reality of the war it had supported.
James Shockley writes a monthly history column. He lives in Blacksburg.
