Hi I’m John Green and this is Crash Course
European History. So, the twentieth century opened with feminists
smashing store windows. The Irish were contesting British rule; Russians
were challenging royal rule in the Revolution of 1905. The French were fighting within families and
across society over the plight of Jewish colonel Alfred Dreyfus, who’d been convicted of
espionage on the basis of fabricated evidence. And over the past few decades, anarchists
had been assassinating heads of state and members of powerful families, including the
empress of Austria-Hungary. And we’ll talk more about all these upheavals,
and the ways they helped shape twentieth century Europe, but today we want to turn to the arts,
and sciences, and philosophical thought--all of which both shaped and were shaped by the
big political and social events of the day. We often use terms like “art history”
and “history of science” to separate out scientific and artistic pursuits from political
and social history, but if history is the story of how our species got to now, the histories
of art and philosophy and science are essential to, and inseparable from, human history. [Intro]
Music, art, and dance had traditionally featured hummable and moving tunes, realistic depictions
of graceful women and noble men, and the fluttering arms of waiflike ballerinas moving ethereally
across the stage. By 1900 all that had changed with what is
now called modern classical music, modern art, and modern dance. The term “modernism” applies to the rejection
or radical alteration of all that had come before in the arts and in thought. Some people see modernism as a rejection of
the Enlightenment's rational approach to reality, but others believe that aspects of modernism
such as abstraction demand a higher level of rationality. That is, one has to use higher levels of thought
in dealing with the abstract forms than concrete ones--the idea of a number, for example, is
more complicated and more interesting, than counting. But for contemporary audiences and critics,
modern music sounded like screeching and scratching. Song gave way, in critics’ views, to noise,
even in modern dance. The ballet dancers in “Rite of Spring”
made jerking movements and pounded the floor in so-called primitive rather than graceful
ways. Ballerinas removed their tutus and ballet-toe
slippers and danced in bare feet and tunics. Choreographers and performers claimed to create
these new movements by imitating foreign dancers seen at world fairs and in distant lands. And similarly, composers copied instrumentation
and musical forms from Japan, Bali, South Asia, and other regions. Audiences literally howled and walked out
of these performances, but the world of dance and music had changed forever. As for visual art: By becoming “modern,”
artists changed their style almost yearly, or at least so it seemed to some observers. “Make it new” was their motto, and the
impressionists broke with realism in their paintings first by having human figures appear
to float, without a stable background and without creating exact likenesses of faces,
as you see in the paintings of Édouard Manet. And then Claude Monet and his followers produced
images of train stations and other urban buildings that shimmered with flecks and dabs of color
instead of clear lines and realistic shading. They were trying to project the Japanese belief
in mono non aware or the fleetingness of life. Indistinct colors and lines gave the “impression”
of nature’s constantly changing appearance instead of stabilizing it in ]“realism,”
which as the impressionists pointed out wasn’t really real, because the real is always changing,
while “realism” portrays static images. But as with the changes in music, it appeared
to outsiders that artists were losing their grip on reality and their skill in minutely
depicting the world. Artists also increasingly focused on industrial,
urban, and working-class life instead of presenting aristocratic privilege. Leisured patrons were replaced by workers
in parks, women doing laundry and ironing, fatigued day laborers, and the destitute. German artist Kaethe Kollwitz angered the
aristocratic upper classes by emphasizing the frailty and suffering of the poor instead
of showing the nobility of the prosperous few. The German Kaiser called her woodcuts “gutter
art.” But by this time, artists were earning their
livelihoods from public commissions and a new class of art dealers, not only from rich
elites commissioning portraits of themselves posing with pineapples. another reminder that what artists end up
painting has a lot to do with who ends up buying their paint. Many artists only scraped by--19th century
artists like Vincent Van Gogh helped give us our contemporary idea of the starving and
tortured artist--but others prospered by working in commercially advantageous styles like art
nouveau, which featured curving lines of vines and other plant life, as well as romanticized
women’s bodies with long flowing hair. Artists designed many everyday objects in
the art nouveau style as well, from cutlery to combs. And commercial artists also produced full
color advertising posters for steamship lines, and dance halls, and cafés, and theater performances,
and brands of soap and coffee. These posters were displayed on kiosks and
in other public spaces, so art nouveau brightened everyday urban space and advanced modern phenomena
such as department stores and mass consumerism by being really effective advertising. And even today, posters of art nouveau advertisements
can be found in like one third of college dorm rooms. Stan says that in his experience, it’s closer
to 65%, but to be fair, neither of us has been in a dorm room in like, twenty years. By the turn of the century, changes in art
became even more radical. Like painter Paul Cezanne depicted items like
apples and oranges in geometric terms. Bodily shapes and those in nature like mountains
became planes and spheres. Immediately following, Pablo Picasso not only
used geometric splotches to portray women but also depicted their faces as African masks. In 1907 Swedish artist Hilma af Klint produced
the first entirely abstract painting with no relationship whatsoever to realistic forms. and most of these artists, like the earlier
impressionists, were deeply influenced by ideas and beliefs coming from the colonized
world and other distant lands. Many would argue they were also appropriating
those ideas and beliefs in much the same way colonizers were extracting other resources. But the impact of global ideas on European
art was profound. For example, af Klint and Norwegian Edvard
Munch aimed to capture spiritual truths as preached in theosophy—a mixture of beliefs
and practices taken from Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and other philosophical and religious
traditions. They used colors with meanings that were laid
out in theosophical teachings. And presenting these schemes correctly was
supposed to portray inner reality. Munch’s “The Scream” famously used line
and color in ways that people believe to be emblematic of turn-of-the-century modernism,
especially the internal distress that many felt amid the faster pace and tensions of
modern life. And there were similarly revolutionary ideas
coming out of the world of science that would upend our understanding of the world. Let’s go to the Thought Bubble. 1. In 1896, French physicist Antoine Becquerel
discovered radioactivity. 2. He also suggested that elements were changeable
or mutable through the rearrangement of their atoms. 3. And then, from the discoveries of Marie Curie
and her husband Pierre Curie, 4. who found the more radioactive elements
polonium and radium, 5. scientists determined that atoms are not solid. 6. In 1900, German physicist Max Planck’s quantum
theory changed people’s understanding of energy, 7. although like Galileo centuries earlier, his
theories were not accepted at the time. 8. And amid this revolutionary scientific universe,
physicist Albert Einstein announced his special theory of relativity in 1905. 9. According to this theory, space and time are
not absolute categories 10. but instead vary according to the vantage
point of the observer. 11. Only the speed of light is constant. 12. In 1915, Einstein published his general theory
of relativity, 13. which connected the force, or gravity,
of an object with its mass 14. and proposed a fourth mathematical dimension
to the universe. 15. And Einstein’s theories of energy became
critical to all kinds of technological innovation, from television to the nuclear bomb. 16. As discussed in detail in our History of Science
series, the findings of Planck, Einstein, and others really created a “paradigm shift”
away from the Newtonian science of the early modern period, 17. 18. And in many ways, we are still in the shadow
of the tremendous discoveries at the turn of the century. Thanks Thought Bubble. So, for a long time, scientists have made
discoveries and produced theories that do not fit with common sense, everyday interpretations
of the physical world. Right? Did the center of the world just open? Is there a compass in there? This is a great example of what I mean. We still say that the sun rises in the east
and sets in the west, right? Because practically, for us, it does. Even though, you know, it doesn’t. Slightly off topic, but when I close my eyes
and imagine the Earth from space, I always picture North being up, right? Like, Antarctica is at the bottom, the North
Pole is at the top. But no! Why? So, inevitably, the way we need to represent
the world in an everyday way, in order to know when to turn left and when to turn right,
is going to skew our understanding of the world. and during this revolutionary time, just as
thinkers were trying to understand the relationship between perceived reality and objective reality,
they were also trying to understand the mind, and the relationship between our interior
selves, and the selves we project. Which brings us to Freud. Sigmund Freud questioned the Enlightenment
beliefs in a rational self wedded to reasonable decision-making and self-interest. Because, you know, we are not rational selves
wedded to reasonable decision making and self-interest. Instead of a unified, rational persona, Freud
claimed that the human self or psyche contains three parts struggling against one another
for dominance: the ego, the part centered on realistic activity to survive; the id (or
libido), the part alive with sexual energies pushing instinctual rather than rational behavior;
and the superego, the part that acts as the conscience. Freud developed the practice of psychoanalysis
to treat the person in whom these three elements were out of balance enough to cause mental
disturbances or neuroses. Psychoanalysis involved a “talking cure”
in which the patient tried to call forth repressed fantasies, and fears, and desires so that
they might be understood and cured. An especially controversial part of Freud’s
theories stated that sexual life should be evaluated scientifically without religious
or moral judgments. According to him, from infancy on children
had sexual drives. and in order for civilization to exist, these drives—most notably in the
case of Freudian psychology, the drive toward incest--needed to be controlled. He also insisted that gender identity was
not a straightforward entity but instead complicated and that women like men had strong sexual
feelings; they weren’t passionless, as advocates of domesticity maintained. Although many of Freud’s ideas have been
abandoned, the influence of psychoanalysis extends to this day. In fact, I am visiting my therapist later
this afternoon. It’s now more common to talk with counselors
and therapists to bring our problems out in the open instead of repressing them. We also believe in the existence of neuroses
and that our selves are not composed entirely of rationality and intellectual activity. Just like artists crushing traditional beliefs,
Freud advanced modernism by claiming that our old ideas about the mind itself were outdated. Simultaneously other theorists rejected the
idea that science and facts could be used to uncover social laws. The social sciences of sociology and economics—to
name just two—had developed around the pursuit of identifying enduring laws of society. And the belief that you can discover social
facts and basic social laws to guide public policy is called positivism, and it was challenged
by those who held that there were too many facts to compute and that humans were complex
and ever changing and at times somewhat irrational both when it came to economic choices and
when it came to social ones. I mean, How else do you explain the strange
early 21st century rise of the Croc? Those theorists called relativists and pragmatists
have been in constant debate with positivists right up until now, and if you think we’re
getting in the middle of that, you’re wrong. Can we rationally and with confidence make
infallible laws? Is a question I’m sure you’ll be commenting
upon. Probably the most scandalous theinker of the
time was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who denied the certainty of truth,
insisting that all knowledge simply represents what humans—from scientists to shopkeepers--have
perceived. The human mind, for example, filters what
nature is and presents its own sense of nature’s truth--a human representation of reality rather
than reality itself. Nietzsche believed that absolute truths including
age-old tenets of religion were in decline. “God is dead, we have killed him” he famously
announced as the result of modern understandings of the universe. Humans could now embark on the happy search
for new “poetries of life” free from religious and other traditional rules. Nietzsche eventually contracted syphilis and
became mentally ill, and his sister converted the philosopher’s disdain for traditional
values into attacks on Jews and support for nationalists, and anti-Semites, and militarists--a
reminder that the ideas of modernism were tools that could be wielded in a variety of
ways.Which we will see, with tragic consequences, throughout the twentieth century. And so the turn of the century was alive with
fresh ideas, upending concepts from painting and dance to philosophy and physics. And we are living today in a world wrought
by modern ideas, but also one that is experiencing its own period of profound disruptions in
the ways we communicate and how we understand truth. And that makes me wonder how our revolutionary
disruptions will seem a century from now. Will this time be remembered as one in which
people grew closer together through tools of communication? Or will it be remembered as one in which people
grew increasingly further apart as polarization worsened? The answer to that is partly up to you, and
the choices that you will make that will shape our shared future. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next time.
