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

How European Culture Changed After World War II

Europe’s older confidence in reason, progress, and shared authority had been shaken by World War I, then shattered more fully by World War II and the Holocaust. Modern science and bureaucracy had helped produce medicine and comfort, but they had also helped produce mechanized killing, genocide, and atomic bombs.

Existentialism

Existentialism asked what a person does when meaning is not already built into the world.

• Jean-Paul Sartre argued that “existence precedes essence.” You are not born with a fixed purpose. You become who you are through your choices.
• That made freedom central, but also heavy. If your choices define you, then you carry responsibility for them.
• Common themes included alienation, anxiety, absurdity, and authenticity.
• Albert Camus is often linked to this mood. His work explored the absurd, the clash between our search for meaning and a universe that does not hand it to us.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism pushed the crisis of certainty even further.

• It doubted universal truth and big “metanarratives,” meaning grand stories like inevitable progress, national destiny, or one rational explanation for history.
• It stressed fragmentation, perspective, and the way language and power shape what people call knowledge.
• The key difference is this. Existentialism asks how an individual lives responsibly without fixed meaning. Postmodernism questions whether stable universal meaning can even be established.

How Artists and Writers Rejected Old Standards

The same doubt that reshaped philosophy also reshaped the arts. Artists and writers experimented with form, explored the subconscious, and attacked the idea of one objective viewpoint.

Visual art movements

• Cubism with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque showed multiple perspectives at once. That broke with the old idea that art should copy one stable reality.
• Picasso’s Guernica, shown below, used fragmentation to convey the horror of war.
• Futurism celebrated speed, machines, youth, and violence. It loved modern energy, and that helps explain why some futurists later connected to fascism.
• Dadaism was anti-art. After World War I, artists like Marcel Duchamp treated absurdity as the only honest response to a broken civilization. His Fountain challenged the definition of art itself.
• Surrealism explored dreams and the subconscious. Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory used irrational images like melting clocks.
• Abstract Expressionism emphasized gesture, spontaneity, and abstraction. Jackson Pollock mattered here, and so did the fact that New York began to rival Paris, showing rising U.S. cultural influence.
• Pop Art used ads, celebrities, and consumer goods. Andy Warhol blurred elite art and mass culture.

Pablo Picasso, Guernica

Architecture and music

• Bauhaus and Modernism, linked to Walter Gropius, favored function, clean lines, and industrial materials.
• Postmodern architecture reacted against strict functionalism by bringing back ornament, irony, and mixed styles.
• In music, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss rejected conventional harmony through dissonance, atonality, and rhythmic shock.

Writers

• Franz Kafka showed people trapped in oppressive bureaucracy.
• James Joyce used stream of consciousness.
• Virginia Woolf explored inner life, memory, and gender.
• Erich Maria Remarque showed antiwar disillusionment in All Quiet on the Western Front.
• Sartre’s fiction and plays examined freedom and self-deception.

Religion, Secularization, and Reform

Europe became more secular, but religion still mattered in politics, family life, charity, and resistance.

• Christian responses to totalitarianism were mixed. Some resisted, some stayed silent, some accommodated regimes.
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer opposed Nazism and was executed.
• Martin Niemöller and the Confessing Church resisted Nazi control over the church.
• Under communism, Eastern European regimes restricted churches because they competed with the state for loyalty.
• Pope John Paul II became a symbol of resistance in Poland, and Solidarity, led by Lech Wałęsa, drew strength from Catholic networks.

Pope John Paul II in Poland

Second Vatican Council 1962-1965

Called by Pope John XXIII, Vatican II tried to adapt Catholicism to the modern world.

• Mass could be said in vernacular languages
• greater lay participation
• more ecumenism and dialogue with non-Christian religions
• support for religious liberty
• better Catholic-Jewish relations

Religion lost its monopoly over European life. It did not lose its importance.

Prosperity, Demographic Change, and New Social Movements

Postwar recovery brought mass production, higher wages, new food technologies, and more household comfort. Electricity, indoor plumbing, appliances, plastics, synthetic fibers, TVs, and cars became common. Consumer culture shaped identity through advertising, leisure, fashion, and private consumption, often with strong American influence from Hollywood, rock, TV, fast food, and ads.

Baby boom and rights movements

• The baby boom came from postwar recovery, delayed marriages and births, housing, welfare, and pronatalist policies like family allowances and childcare facilities.
• This created a large youth generation that later strained schools, universities, jobs, and pensions.
• Women’s movements challenged inequality in work, education, politics, family law, and reproductive life.
• Gay and lesbian movements fought criminalization, stigma, and discrimination.
• Other movements pushed peace, environmentalism, civil liberties, and anti-nuclear activism.

Revolts of 1968

That youth generation helped fuel the protests of 1968, especially in major university cities.

Paris protest during May 1968

Young people attacked bourgeois materialism, conformity, authoritarian universities, and old moral rules.

• In France, May 1968 joined student protests with worker strikes and seriously challenged de Gaulle.
• Similar unrest appeared in West Germany, Italy, and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia.

Prosperity created comfort, but it also created youth culture and rebellion against that same society.