UHC Western European History II
The Age of Extremes

“Hitler couldn't have done what he did without the First World War. It isn't the Second World War that created images of piles of bodies being shoveled into trenches; it's the First World War. What was thinkable, what was imaginable about human brutality changed between 1914 and 1918, and without that shifting of perspective, in my view, the worst events of the Second World War would not have been possible.” Jay Winter

 

"If you were unlucky enough to have lived between 1914 and 1945, you may have had the following experience. You might have: watched the slaughter at Verdun or the Somme or the Marne

  • or perhaps you witnessed firsthand the Bolshevik terror in Russia

  • or observed the black-shirted and brown-shirted hysteria in Italy and Germany

  • you may have been one of the starving workers during the Depression of 1929-1935

  • or perhaps your family fell victim to Stalin's purges

  • or fought in the Spanish Civil War

  • you might have ended up in a Nazi concentration camp

  • or perhaps you helped destroy whole cities like Coventry or Dresden or Nagasaki

Regardless of where you were at the time, you could not help but notice that the world had become one of violence and uncertainty. It was a world of terror and inhumanity such that this poor globe has never seen. It seemed to many that western civilization, long in the throes of decline, had breathed its last gasp. The values of western civilization once again proved meaningless and all that seemed to matter was irrational impulse and the will to power. By the 1920s and 30s it seemed that Nietzsche's diagnosis of modern man was not that far from the truth (see Lecture 2)." - Steven Kreis

Week #13

November 18- The Russian Revolutions of 1917 -

For next Tuesday Read: 

November 20 -  We will examine the Nazi Consolidation of power and the "March to War." We will intersperse our discussion with excerpts from the films "Swing Kids" and "The Filth and the Fury."