The Context: Germany in the 1920s
- national shame
- loss of 25 million square miles of territory (re-check)
- war reparations to France
- one-fifth of export profits were extracted (check exact figure)
- inflation, food scarcity, joblessness throughout the 1920s, not just in 1929 with the worldwide economic collapse [show "Money, money" clip from Cabaret, based on Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories and set in 1931)
Weimar Republic: a cacophony of special interest groups, unions, political parties
Both pride in and fear of technology: World War I had led to great advances in technology and the assembly line as the main industrial driver. Cultural commentators warned of the increasing atomisation of individuals (people became cogs in the wheel of industry) and thus many felt and feared the loss of meaning in life. The philosopher Karl Jaspers warned in Man in the Modern Age (1931) that "[there is an] increasing technicisation of daily life" (59); "It is as if the man thus . . . reduced to the level of a thing, had lost the essence of humanity . . he is still nothing more than the function of his daily task" (51); "Driven from pillar to post, then perhaps out-of-work for a lengthy period with nothing more than bare subsistence, they no longer have a definite place or status in the whole" (50). Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics
Some predicted the coming of a catastrophe: In ___, the depth psychologist Carl Jung noticed that many of his German patients were troubled by disturbing dreams and destructive psychic states. For Jung, these individual manifestations of distress were indications of a great social illness or mania that was taking over.
Rise of German nationalism and the Hitler youth, 1922-45 [show "Tomorrow belongs to me" clip] discuss the lack of solidarity with National Socialism, as evidenced in the older man's response to the song