Between the World Wars – Unit 17
General Events:
1900-1905 Einstein researches the theory of relativity 1910 Death of Edward VII of England 1914 World War I begins…”The Great War” 1917 Bolshevik Revolution ends tsarist rule in Russia 1918 World War I begins / women given the right to vote in England 1920 Women given the right to vote in the United States 1922 Fascists come to power in Italy after Mussolini’s march on Rome 1927 Lindberg’s solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean First feature-length sound movie produced: The Jazz Singer 1929 Great Depression begins in Europe and America 1933 Nazis come to power in Germany under Hitler / first refugees leave the country 1936-1939 Spanish Vicil War / Guernica bombed 1939 German invades Poland / World War II begins First commercial TV 1941 United States enters war 1945 World War II ends
Literature and Philosophy:
1900-1905 Sigmund Freud formulates basic ideas of psychoanalysis / The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) 1908-15 Filippo Marinetti publishes his Futurist Manifesto 1910 Death of Tolstoy 1910-1941 British Bloomsbury Group around Virginia and Leonard Woolf rejects Edwardian mentality 1913 Carl Jung breaks with Freude 1915-1916 The cultural movement Dada is founded…a prelude to post modernism 1917 Wilfred Owen “Dulce et Decorum Est” 1922 Alienation and cultural despair themes appear in post war literature: T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland / James Joyce, Ulysses / Sinclair Lewis satirizes American middle class in Babbitt 1924 Freudian theory and Dadism foster surrealism / First Surrealist anifesto / Freudian themes appear in American drama / Eugene O’Neill, Desire Under the Elms c. 1925 Black cultural regeneration known as the “Harlem Renaissance:” in New York and other northern U.S. cities Late 1920’s Many novelists and poets exploit cultural upheavals …Kafka, Woolf, Eliot 1932 Huxley warns against unrestrained growth of technology in Brave New World 1939 Death of Freud / W. H. Auden, In Memory of Sigmund Freud 1945 George Orwell, Animal Farm 1949 Orwell, 1984
Art:
1907 African sculpture fascinates artists in Paris; Picasso, Les Damoiselles d’Avignon; Picasso and Braque begin cubists experiments c.1911 German expressionism flourishes 1915-1916 Dada artists begin assault on traditional concepts of art; Duchamp L.H.O.O.Q. 1921-1931 Klee teaches at Bauhaus; Kandinski appointed professor in 1922 1925 Eisenstein completes influential film, Potemkin 1931 Dali, Persistence of Memory 1935-40 WPA photographers active 1936 Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will film glorifying the Nazis 1937 Pablo Picasso paints Guernica in protest against war / Salvador Dali uses Freudian symbolism 1938 Eisenstein film, Alexander Nevsky Riefenstahl, Olympia 1942-1943 Mondrian, Broadway Boogie
Architecture:
1909 Frank Lloyd Wright, “Robie House” Chicago 1919 Bauhaus design school founded in Weimar; Bauhaus ideas find wide acclaim in architecture and many industrial fields Late 1930’s Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe flee Nazi Germany for the US
Music: c. 1900 Jazz originates among black musicians in New Orleans 1908 Arnold Schonberg departs from tonalityin favor of atonality in his 2nd string quartet c. 1910 Peak and decline of ragtime music; jazz becomes fully developed 1911 Piano rag composer Scott Joplin completes opera Treemonisha 1913 Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring first performed in Paris at the Paris Ballet 1917 onward Avant-garde composers come under influence of jazz and ragtime c. 1920 Chicago becomes the jazz center / New York’s Harlem and Cotton Club provide showcase for jazz performers 1920’s Josephine Baker and other American performers bring jazz and blues to Paris 1923 Arnold Schonberg perfects 12 tone technique (serialism) 1924 George Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue 1930 Kurt Weill The Threepenny Opera text by Berthold Brecht 1935 Gershwin’s folk opera, Porgy and Bess first widely successful American opera 1943 Duke Ellington’s symphonic suite, Black, Brown and Beige premiers in Carnegie Hall