[0:00]Hi, I'm John Green, and this is Crash Course European History, so Europe has made it through World War I, and we have made it through World War I. We did it everybody. It was easier for us than it was for them. But now we have to ask the question, how does a society recover from catastrophe? Well, in some ways, Europe made it look easy. It was the roaring twenties and a more modern consumer economy arrived, featuring electricity and telephones in homes and night clubs. And all these revolutions in human connectivity and technology meant lots of economic growth and new opportunities, but also, of course, many people who were left out of that economic growth. And many others who were carp about how good things were in the old days, back when the Lord of the Manor House made all your decisions and you died of plague at 27.
[0:54]To be clear, all was certainly not well. Families tended to thousands of veterans who were shell shocked, a term coined to refer to the post-traumatic mental health crises caused by war. Millions more former soldiers were disabled, soldiers struggled to build families and find jobs, especially because parts of the economy had trouble converting from the massive production of weaponry to the less urgent provisioning of goods for civilian life. And former soldiers also had to deal with the fact that in many countries, the notable exceptions were France and Italy, women received the vote and entered the labor force and were now earning their own money. Let's go to the thought bubble. The ongoing growth of industrialization meant there were lots of jobs in new sectors, the production of small household goods for instance, like electric irons, or phonographs or radios. And larger items such as automobiles and civilian transport like subways and trains, construction of urban housing, which had been neglected during the war, also boomed. And some towns and entire cities like Warsaw, along with roads and rail lines, needed massive repair if not complete rebuilding. Nothing spurs the economy quite like rebuilding infrastructure that you'd just blew up. Meanwhile, technology was rapidly increasing industrial productivity. European industrialists were beginning to follow US innovation in practices like the assembly line. They also created early multinational corporations. Managers of businesses studied the bodily movements of workers performing industrial tasks in order to make the most efficient use of human energy in relationship to machines. One French assembly line worker reported in my dreams I was a machine. In multinational enterprises, business people set up branches of their companies in other parts of the world, for instance, in areas where raw material like cocoa or palm oil were plentiful, and where labor for processing or industrial production was cheaper. Many scholars see these new multinational corporations as a different, but also abusive, form of empire. Thanks, thought bubble. Technology increasingly affected farm work as well, providing expensive innovations like motorized machinery and chemical fertilizers, and in both industry and agriculture, technology was making lots of jobs obsolete, even while it was creating new ones, as it had before the war. And the benefits of that growth were distributed very unevenly, which continues to be the case with industrial and technological expansion. But there were also upsides, like for instance, dancing, young people went to dance halls and films, which then as now, was an art form with mass appeal, and people's lives were filled with lively music from phonographs and rollicking dances like the Charleston. Where possible, young people flocked to beaches in the summer and bicycled in groups of friends on weekends, now that many people's work weeks had been cut to six or even five and a half days per week. Oh, all that time for leisure, I wonder if in the future people will be like, y'all used to work five days a week, it's crazy. And there were so many other changes too, changes in women's fashion led to shorter skirts and silk stockings, manuals about birth control methods continued the trend of bringing down the birth rate, although there was a brief upturn just after the war. There was also a new emphasis on physical exercise for both men and women, as group fitness drills proliferated as did sports teams, which often now wore uniforms, in much the same way that armies did, because sports teams are basically armies. Did the center of the world just open? It's an AFC Wimbledon scarf. One thing you might not know about me is that I sponsor a third-tier English soccer team called AFC Wimbledon. So much about football and many other sports is very clearly a metaphor for military action. I mean, defending and attacking, for instance, but also ideas of holding and capturing territories and wearing certain colors to show which side you're on. And another commonality between sports and war is the belief that your team is right and good and just and the other team is evil, even if actually the other team is basically identical. But this isn't Crash Course History of Sports yet, so back to war. World War I lingered in many ways. Battlefield tourism arose for people to grieve where their loved ones had fallen. Inflation, which during the war had ruined so many, became an even more serious problem. I've said it before and I'll say it again, inflation is the most underrated historical force. In Germany, for instance, increasingly large quantities of money were being printed to pay their war reparations, as agreed to in the Treaty of Versailles, and also to pay workers. And that led to runaway hyperinflation beginning in 1921, so that by 1923, a single turnip or potato could cost trillions of German marks. The money that had been saved by many middle-class families over decades suddenly became worthless, and widespread bitterness in Germany intensified, fueled by the war guilt clause in the Treaty of Versailles. Outside of Europe, independence movements were growing against the Western powers, with Indian lawyer Mohandas Gandhi becoming an international celebrity for preaching civil disobedience. His message was that non-Western people should not try to emulate Britain or the United States, whose main values were greed and getting rich. Instead, they should restore their respect for the wisdom of the ancients as found in the Vedas and other sacred teachings. Despite widespread and ongoing protests, however, India would not gain its independence until 1947, showing how desperately Britain sought to hold on to its lucrative colony. In Italy, meanwhile, Mussolini was rising to power. Wow, that is a properly intense facial expression. I can't tell if he's about to hypnotize me or order my assassination. Right, so you'll recall that Britain and France had promised Italy territory in exchange for joining World War I, a promise that was only minimally kept. And then an economic downturn right after the war, as wartime industries shuttered, further crushed Italian hopes and household budgets. Enter Benito Mussolini. He was an Italian journalist who put himself at the head of an unofficial army of unemployed men and former veterans, with the promise of making Italy great again, as in the days of the ancient triumphant Roman legions. In 1922, Mussolini's black-shirted troops marched on Rome, although Mussolini himself hid out until the march was successful. The troops demanded that the king appoint Mussolini to head the government, which the king did. Mussolini was the head of the Fascist Party, which as political parties went, had a rather minimalist platform, but did have the electoral advantage of its own army. The party's platform consisted of the idea that the state was supreme, and a citizen's duty was to submit to the will of the state. Think Rousseau's general will. The party took its name from the fasces of Roman times: an axe with a handle made up of tied sticks representing the unity and boundedness of the individual to the core power of the state. Black shirts beat up and even murdered opponents in the Italian parliament. They also entrapped union members, torturing them and forcing castor oil down their throats, which causes violent diarrhea. And as for women, they were forbidden to have good jobs and eventually were limited to work only as household servants or agricultural workers. Assigning women a servile role in society was supposed to allow men to feel like men again, with their superior wages, and also to create a dependence upon men and their wages. As fascism thrived in Italy, the new Eastern and Central European nations, which had been carved out in the Peace of Paris, faced the challenge of creating governments. These governments would have to rebuild devastated areas, jumpstart economies, and deal with complicated issues of ethnicity. And the latter was the most difficult because after centuries of migration and intermarriage, ethnicity and nationality had become exceedingly complex. But President Wilson had called for nationality or ethnicity to be the determining factor in the formation of new nations in his 14 points. So, from Poland to Turkey, brutal expulsions of ethnic minorities occurred right after the war, an event one diplomat called the great unmixing of populations. And amid this ongoing chaos, new governments often confiscated massive landholdings, sometimes hundreds of thousands of acres from the nobility and distributed them to peasants. Those peasants then had to borrow funds for new machinery and chemical fertilizer if they were going to thrive in the modern agricultural marketplace, which in some cases worked out well, and in other cases ended up impoverishing those farmers. But Germany was the war's most wounded nation. The Weimar Republic, which replaced the monarchy in 1919, struggled against monarchists on the one hand and radical political parties, including communists, on the other hand. Forces from both right and left worked to undermine each other as well as the Weimar Republic itself. And complicating everything was the lingering culture of violence that was left over from the war. Uprisings and putsches, that is, an attempt to overthrow the government, abounded. In November 1923, World War I veteran Adolf Hitler attempted one from a beer hall in Munich with the help of wartime military hero General Erich Ludendorff. The national revolution has begun, Hitler yelled as he shot a pistol in the air and called up his ragged crew of followers. That push failed, like most big ideas born in bars, but it did help Hitler rise to national prominence. Hitler was the chief speaker for a militant party of veterans, unemployed men and discontents called the National Socialist Workers Party, or Nazis. Now, initially, many of these beleaguered supporters hated the rich for their wealth, thus the name socialist. But it's important to understand that they were not communists. By this time, communists were advocating for the confiscation of wealth, while socialists had become far less revolutionary and increasingly favored reform, whether in working conditions or economic help for poor families. But as times changed, Hitler shifted the party's emphasis away from those initial socialist ideas. He collected admission fees for the party with his central message of hatred for the Versailles Treaty and in particular, for the Jewish people. Jewish people, he claimed repeatedly, polluted the white German race and plotted globally against the German nation. Hitler carefully practiced his speaking, looking at himself in the mirror as he rehearsed and tried out various poses and gestures and facial expressions. And he shared his approach to propagandism in his bestseller Mein Kampf, written during his short stint in prison after the failed Beer Hall Putsch. In Mein Kampf, Hitler argued that people are generally stupid and easy to manipulate. Tell big lies in politics, he advised, because people will more readily believe them, since they themselves mostly tell small lies in their everyday lives. Sales of Mein Kampf, along with the general looting done after Nazi victories, made Hitler wealthy, in part through bookselling as official corruption. Businessmen who wanted to deal with the Nazis first had to buy many copies of Mein Kampf. In the 1920s, Hitler's male followers became an increasingly militarized force of stormtroopers or SA. They caused chaos in the streets and engaged in confrontations with communists. And one owner of a major newspaper, Alfred Hugenberg, fed to his readers false accounts that communists were responsible for every assassination of a political figure, of which there were several, plus every street fight and civil disturbance. In contrast, Hugenberg's paper credited the Nazis with restoring peace to the streets, a major comfort to people who were weary and on edge after years of war with other nations, and also in their very own neighborhoods. And financial backing from some business leaders and the party's own fundraising, which included extortion of people who needed peace to run shops, also supported the paramilitary activity of the Nazis. Hateful political movements are often dismissed as appealing to the least educated, poorest citizens. But while many lower-income people did join the Nazi Party, middle-class people were even more likely to join. Many middle-class Germans were angry. They'd lost jobs in the post-war downturn and their life savings in the Great Inflation. And so the Nazi Party had support. It didn't have universal support certainly. It was never a majority party in Parliament or anything, but it did have support. After 1925, Germany seemed to be on an economic upswing. It joined the League of Nations, and its diplomats achieved a drastic reduction in its reparation payments. But the Nazis, via Hugenberg's media empire, kept the pressure on, calling every diplomatic agreement a betrayal of Germany. Then the stock market crash of 1929 came, and it seemed like a Godsend to the Nazis as men were thrown out of work, allowing Hitler to promise to restore their masculinity and their military vitality. This appeal to disenfranchised insiders, combined with dehumanizing the most vulnerable outsiders, has shaped many of the great disasters of history. And so the next time you hear the demonization of the marginalized, remember what Melinda Gates has written, "Outsiders are not the problem. The urge to create outsiders is the problem." Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time. Thanks so much for watching Crash Course, which is filmed here in the Jaden Smith Studios in Indianapolis and made possible by all of these nice people, and also by our patrons at patreon.com/crashcourse. Thank you, we've got lots of other crash courses for you to watch. Thanks again, and as they say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome.
