Monday, November 27, 2017

HUM 112 Week 9 Fall 2017

G. Mick Smith, PhD

The presentation may contain content that is deemed objectionable to a particular viewer because of the view expressed or the conduct depicted. The views expressed are provided for learning purposes only, and do not necessarily express the views, or opinions, of Strayer University, your professor, or those participating in videos or other media.

We will have one break: at 8:00. I will take roll early and we will do our in-class discussion--before you are dismissed.

Pre-Built Course Content

Click the image below to learn more about Fascism, The Great Depression, Post-War Europe, and Post-War America.

The Life We Make and the Life We Live: Poverty, Tyranny, Meaning, and Art.

This week's music clips relate to chapters 37 and 38.

The Bow Street Runners have been called London's first professional police force. The force, originally numbering six men, was founded in 1749 by the magistrate Henry Fielding, who was also well known as an author. Bow Street runners was the public's nickname for the officers, "although the officers never referred to themselves as runners, considering the term to be derogatory".^[2] The Bow Street group was disbanded in 1839.

Ian Hunter references the Bow Street Runners in an eponymous song from his Fingers Crossed album.

Bow Street Runners

(Ian Hunter)

"London Town is crumblin' down" said the 'Penny Post' reporter
"Something's gotta be done 'bout the murderin' scum, there ain't no law and order"

Woh-oh-oh

In the gas-lit alleys 'n' the gin-soaked bars, linin' the streets of the ghetto
In the whorehouses on the open roads, death lurks in the shadows

Stop thief, stop thief, half a million people are running scared
Stop thief, stop thief, and all we need's a hero
To stand up to the gangs, and I know such a man

Blind beak 'n' the bow street runners 
chasin' them scallywags offa the street
blind beak 'n' the bow street runners 
keepin' the peace
keepin' the peace
keepin' the peace
keepin' the peace
keepin' the peace
keepin' the peace
keepin' the peace
keepin' the peace

He can smell a rat a mile away, even if he can't see then
Sixty thieves roll in their graves, wrestling with their demons

(I said oh-oh-oh)
(I said oh-oh-oh)

Never force the hand of a highwayman, he'll put a bullet right through ya
Relieve you of your valuables, and sell them right back to ya

Stop thief, stop thief, stop in the name of the law
Stop thief, stop thief, it's just a matter of time
Before we see you hanging off the triple tree, courtesy of

Blind beak 'n' the bow street runners 
chasin' those neanderthals offa the street
Blind beak 'n' the bow street runners
keepin' the peace, 
keepin' the peace, 
keepin' the peace, 
keepin' the peace, 
keepin' the peace, 
keepin' the peace, 
keepin' the peace, 
feelin' the heat

There's a man outside with a horse and cart, the mob screams out for vengeance
A couple of pints at the Hare 'n' Hounds, then it's off to the neck extension

Stop thief, stop thief, they ain't gonna let ya get away
stop thief, stop thief, you shoulda known better
Than to tangle with the boys in blue, and the man they call

Blind beak 'n' the bow street runners 
chasin' those criminals offa the street
Blind beak 'n' the bow street runners 
keepin' the peace
keepin' the peace
keepin' the peace
keepin' the peace
keepin' the peace
keepin' the peace
keepin' the peace
keepin' the peace...

Ian Hunter - Bow Street Runners - Shepherd's Bush 11.11.16

https://youtu.be/0lC8oJsio10

Bertolt Brecht, Die Moritat von Mackie Messer (="The Death of Mack the Knife"; we know this song's English version as "Mack the Knife") from Three Penny Opera (chap. 37, pp. 1213-1214)

For the original German version by Brecht, see http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/bertolt_brecht_sings_mack_the_knife_from_ithe_threepenny_operai_1929.html; for a later better recording of the German by another artist, try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT98KVV356o.

Mack The Knife (original), 2:47

https://youtu.be/_QXJ3OXWaOY

Bertolt Brecht wasn’t much of a singer, but he could really roll his “r”s. This rare recording of the socialist playwright singing “Mack the Knife” was made in May of 1929, less than a year after the smash-hit premiere of The Threepenny Opera. The song, called in German “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” was written in a rush only a few days before the August 31, 1928 Berlin premiere, after the actor who played Macheath complained that his entrance wasn’t grand enough.

Brecht wrote the words overnight and asked his collaborator, the composer Kurt Weill, to set them to music. The song is modeled after the Moritat (from “mord” meaning murder and “tat” meaning deed), a kind of medieval ballad traditionally sung by traveling minstrels recounting the crimes of notorious murderers.

An English translation begins: See the shark with teeth like razors. All can read his open face. And Macheath has got a knife, but Not in such an obvious place. See the shark, how red his fins are As he slashes at his prey. Mack the Knife wears white kid gloves which Give the minimum away.

Brecht’s gritty 1929 recording of the song is consistent with the ragged aesthetic of the original production of The Threepenny Opera, with its intentionally threadbare sets and its cast of actors who were not accomplished singers. Although Weill was the one who wrote the score, Brecht personally enjoyed playing music. The actress Lotte Lenya, who played Jenny in the original production, remembered how Brecht would strum his guitar and sing ballads “amateurishly but with an odd magnetism.” Besides “Mack the Knife,” there is also a recording from the same 1929 session of Brecht singing a lesser-known piece from The Threepenny Opera, “Song of the Insufficiency of Human Endeavor.”

NYSF Threepenny Opera - 02 - Ballad of Mack the Knife (Moritat), 3:38

This is an LP transfer of the 1976 New York Shakespeare Festival's revival production of "The Threepenny Opera." This recording should not be confused with the original 1954 New York production recording, nor the 1994 Donmar Warehouse production recording in England. Unlike Marc Blitzstein's version which ran during the 1950's for six years and featured the incomparable Lotte Lenya, this translation is less sanitized and more in keeping with the seedy and sexual nature of the original german play. From the liner notes to the album - "the successful Blitzstein version was an adaptation rather than a translation, and in comparing it to the original, we were surprised at the extent to which his treatment vitiated the political and sexual thrust which gives the work its relentless power. Blitzstein sweetened and cleaned up Brecht's unsparing lyrics, partially in deference to stage censorship...but in doing so he in many instances changed Brecht's meanings around entirely, and throughout he softened the impact of Brecht's biting ferocity. He also attempted to make the lyrics more 'singable' by fitting them into conventional musical patterns, and in this he succeeded admirably."

The translation used for this revival was prepared by Ralph Maheim and John Willett; the full text can be found in their edition of Brecht's Collected Plays, Volume 2. A hardcover edition was also published in conjunction with the revival. This revival was directed by conceptual theater artist Richard Foreman, and starred Raul Julia and Ellen Greene, both of whom were nominated for Tony Awards. It was produced by Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center. Additional information regarding the production, including cast list, can be found at the Internet Broadway Database's listing for this revival at http://www.ibdb.com/production.asp?ID... ...

As of June 2007, this cast album has not been released or reissued on CD; it was originally made available in 1976 on LP, and this is an LP transfer. As such, the quality is not CD quality - there will occasionally be noise, popping, or hissing. Track Listing ------------------ 01 - Overture 02 - 03 - Peachum's Morning Anthem 04 - "No They Can't" Song 05 - Wedding Song for the Less Well Off 06 - Cannon Song 07 - Liebeslied (Look at the Moon over Soho) 08 - Barbara Song 09 - First Threepenny Finale 10 - Polly's Lied (Nice While It Lasted) 11 - Ballad of Sexual Obsession 12 - Pirate Jenny 13 - Ballad of Immoral Earnings 14 - Ballad of Gracious Living 15 - Jealousy Duet 16 - Second Threepenny Finale 17 - Song of the Insufficiency of Human Endeavor 18 - Solomon Song 19 - Call From the Grave 20 - Ballad in Which MacHeath Begs All Men for Forgiveness 21 - Third Threepenny Finale (The Mounted Messenger) 22 - Ballad of Mac the Knife (Moritat Reprise)

https://youtu.be/HT98KVV356o

For the famous English version by Bobby Darin, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Qrjtr_uFac.

The original German lyrics are at http://german.about.com/library/blmus_hknef04.htm. The English lyrics are at http://german.about.com/library/blmus_hknef04mb.htm.

"Mackie Messeer" Lyrics

Text: Bertolt Brecht
Musik: Kurt Weill
Bertolt Brecht's (1898-1956) lyrics are an adaptation of Elisabeth Hauptmann's German translation of John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera."

German Lyrics	Direct Translation by Hyde Flippo
Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne Und die trägt er im Gesicht Und MacHeath, der hat ein Messer Doch das Messer sieht man nicht	And the shark, he has teeth And he wears them in his face And MacHeath, he has a knife But the knife you don't see

An 'nem schönen blauen Sonntag Liegt ein toter Mann am Strand Und ein Mensch geht um die Ecke, Den man Mackie Messer nennt	On a beautiful blue Sunday Lies a dead man on the Strand* And a man goes around the corner Whom they call Mack the Knife
*Strand - Name of a street in London, not the German word for "beach."

Und Schmul Meier bleibt verschwunden Und so mancher reiche Mann Und sein Geld hat Mackie Messer Dem man nichts beweisen kann	And Schmul Meier is missing And many a rich man And his money has Mack the Knife, On whom they can't pin anything.

Jenny Towler ward gefunden Mit 'nem Messer in der Brust Und am Kai geht Mackie Messer, Der von allem nichts gewußt	Jenny Towler was found With a knife in her chest And on the wharf walks Mack the Knife, Who knows nothing about all this.

Und die minderjährige Witwe Deren Namen jeder weiß Wachte auf und war geschändet Mackie welches war dein Preis?	And the minor-aged widow, Whose name everyone knows, Woke up and was violated Mack, what was your price?

Refrain	Refrain
Und die einen sind im Dunkeln Und die anderen sind im Licht Doch man sieht nur die im Lichte Die im Dunklen sieht man nicht	And some are in the darkness And the others in the light But you only see those in the light Those in the darkness you don't see

Doch man sieht nur die im Lichte Die im Dunklen sieht man nicht	But you only see those in the light Those in the darkness you don't see

Bobby Darin sings "Mack the Knife" 3:33

https://youtu.be/4Qrjtr_uFac

\

The odd history of "Mack the Knife": The character of Mackie actually has roots in a real person of the 1720s in England, a lower class folk hero and thief named Jack Sheppard. Sheppard became the seeds of a character in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (p. 830).

See http://londonparticulars.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/mack-the-knife-the-true-story/ .

And the song has an odd history with the story going back to roots in England, becoming part of an English play, later becoming part of a German opera, and then in turn getting translated back into English in various versions. Despite the colorful history, the lyrics are dark and brooding and seem oddly to have been transmuted to a song sung with a happy, upbeat smile. Brecht, as a playwright, was a German Marxist in the 1920s and 1930s.

After checking out these links, review pp. 1213-1214 in chap. 37. Overall his Three Penny Opera was designed as a critique of capitalism. Even the audience was to be alienated (p. 1214).

The "Alabama Song" was written as a poem in idiosyncratic English for Bertolt Brecht by his close collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann in 1925^[1] and published in Brecht's 1927 Home Devotions (German: Hauspostille), a parody of Martin Luther's collection of sermons.

It was set to music by Kurt Weill for the 1927 play Little Mahagonny (Mahagonny-Songspiel) and reused for Brecht and Weill's 1930 opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny), where it is sung by Jenny and her fellow prostitutes in Act I.

Although the majority of all three works is in German, the "Alabama Song" retained Hauptmann's English lyrics throughout.

Brecht and Weill's version of the song was first performed by the Viennese actress and dancer Lotte Lenya, Weill's wife,^[2] in the role of Jessie at the 1927 Baden-Baden Festival's performance of Little Mahagonny.

The first recording of the song—by Lenya for the Homocord record label—came out in early 1930 under the title "Alabama-Song";^[3] it was rerecorded the same year for the Ultraphon record label for release with the 1930 Leipzig premiere of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, despite Lenya not being a member of that cast.^[4]

She continued to perform and record the song throughout her life, including for her 1955 album Lotte Lenya Sings Kurt Weill (Lotte Lenya singt Kurt Weill), released in the United States under the title Berlin Theater Songs.^[3]

The "Alabama Song"—also known as "Moon of Alabama", "Moon over Alabama", and "Whisky Bar"—is an English song written for Bertolt Brecht by his close collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann in 1925 and set to music by Kurt Weill for the 1927 play Little Mahagonny.

It was reused for the 1930 opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and has been notably covered by The Doors and David Bowie.

The song was recorded in 1966 by the rock group The Doors, listed as "Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)". The melody is changed and the verse beginning "Show me the way to the next little dollar..." is omitted. On the album version, lead singer Jim Morrison altered the second verse from "Show us the way to the next pretty boy" to "Show me the way to the next little girl"^[5] but, on the 1967 Live at the Matrix recording, he sings the original "... next pretty boy".

For The Doors' version, keyboardist Ray Manzarek plays the marxophone along with the organ and keyboard bass.

The Doors - Mack the Knife/Alabama Song Whiskey Bar (Whisky Bar) Live Stockholm, 3:07

-----------------------------------

Bowie, a Brecht fan, incorporated the song into Isolar II, his 1978 World Tour. He cut a version at Tony Visconti’s studio after the European leg of the tour, and in 1980 it was issued as a single to hasten the end of Bowie’s contract with RCA.

With unconventional key changes, the track "seemed calculated to disrupt any radio programme on which it was lucky enough to get played".[6] Nevertheless, backed with a stripped-down acoustic version of "Space Oddity" recorded in December 1979, the single reached #23 in the UK. Although Bowie also changed the "little boy" line like Morrison, he sang Weill's original melody.

Bowie would appear in a BBC version of Brecht’s Baal, and release an EP of songs from the play. He performed "Alabama Song" again on his 1990 Sound+Vision Tour and 2002 Heathen tours.
David Bowie Alabama Song, 3:52

https://youtu.be/Zc_9EpooJ2o

Bowie in particular has been profoundly influenced by Brecht and Berlin.

The Berlin Trilogy consists of three consecutively released studio albums by English singer and songwriter David Bowie: Low (1977), "Heroes" (1977) and Lodger (1979). The albums' collective name derives from Bowie's primary residence in Berlin during their recording, taken up following his 1976 departure from Los Angeles and an attempt to kick his cocaine addiction. They were produced by Bowie and producer Tony Visconti in collaboration with musician Brian Eno, and saw Bowie experiment heavily with elements of electronic and ambient music. Despite the trio's namesake, "Heroes" is in fact the only installment to have been recorded primarily in Berlin.

Each album reached the UK top five. By the early 1980s, Bowie would decamp to New York City.^[1] He later reflected on the trilogy (and the single ""Heroes""), calling them his "DNA".^[2] According to Rolling Stone, "'[the] 'Berlin Trilogy' stands as some of the most innovative music in the artist's influential canon".^[3] The albums are characterized by Consequence of Sound as an "art rock trifecta".^[4]

Background

Apartment building on Hauptstraße 155 in Berlin Schöneberg where Bowie lived with Iggy Pop from 1976 to 1978

Following Bowie's Thin White Duke-period and the commercial success of the singles "Fame" and "Golden Years" in 1976, he retreated to Berlin in order to escape the drug scene of Los Angeles,^[1] where he had developed a deleterious cocaine habit.^[5] He explained: "For many years Berlin had appealed to me as a sort of sanctuary-like situation. It was one of the few cities where I could move around in virtual anonymity. I was going broke; it was cheap to live. For some reason, Berliners just didn’t care. Well, not about an English rock singer, anyway."^[6] While sharing an apartment with Iggy Pop, Bowie began focusing on minimalist, ambient music in collaboration with Brian Eno and producer Tony Visconti,^[7] and also cowrote and produced Pop's solo album debut The Idiot (1976) and its follow-up Lust for Life (1977).^[8] In fact, only Low and "Heroes" were recorded at Hansa Studios in Berlin, nicknamed "Hansa by the Wall" for its proximity to the imposing structure that divided West from East Berlin.^[1]

After releasing Low and ""Heroes"" in 1977, Bowie spent much of 1978 on the Isolar II world tour, bringing the music of the first two Berlin Trilogy albums to almost a million people during 70 concerts in 12 countries. By now he had broken his drug addiction; biographer David Buckley writes that Isolar II was "Bowie's first tour for five years in which he had probably not anaesthetised himself with copious quantities of cocaine before taking the stage. ... Without the oblivion that drugs had brought, he was now in a healthy enough mental condition to want to make friends."^[9] Recordings from the tour made up the live album Stage, released the same year.^[10]

Albums

Low

The album Low (1977) was recorded as Bowie grappled with difficult personal issues, including a troubled marriage and drug dependence: "There's oodles of pain in the Low album. That was my first attempt to kick cocaine, so that was an awful lot of pain. And I moved to Berlin to do it. I moved out of the coke centre of the world [i.e., Los Angeles] into the smack centre of the world. Thankfully, I didn't have a feeling for smack, so it wasn't a threat".^[11] Visconti contended that the title was partly a reference to Bowie's "low" moods during the album's writing and recording.^[12] The album marked a movement for Bowie into electronic^[13] and ambient music.^[14] Side one of the album contained short, direct avant-pop song-fragments;^[15] side two comprised longer, mostly instrumental tracks.^[15] Partly influenced by the Krautrock sound of Kraftwerk and Neu!, evinced a move away from narration in Bowie's songwriting to a more abstract musical form in which lyrics were sporadic and optional.^[16]^[17] Although he completed the album in November 1976, it took his unsettled record company another three months to release it.^[18] It received considerable negative criticism upon its release—a release which RCA, anxious to maintain the established commercial momentum, did not welcome, and which Bowie's ex-manager, Tony Defries, who still maintained a significant financial interest in the singer's affairs, tried to prevent. Despite these forebodings, Low yielded the UK number three single "Sound and Vision", and its own performance surpassed that of Station to Station in the UK chart, where it reached number two.

"Heroes"

	"Heroes" Menu 0:00 Sample of "Heroes" (1977). One of the ambient rock songs to emerge from Bowie's Berlin Trilogy era, "Heroes" gained lasting popularity.^[]
Problems playing this file? See media help.

Echoing Low's minimalist, instrumental approach, the second of the trilogy, "Heroes" (1977), incorporated pop and rock to a greater extent, seeing Bowie joined by guitarist Robert Fripp. Like Low, "Heroes" evinced the zeitgeist of the Cold War, symbolised by the divided city of Berlin.^[19] Incorporating ambient sounds from a variety of sources including white noise generators, synthesisers and koto, the album was another hit, reaching number three in the UK. Its title track, though only reaching number 24 in the UK singles chart, gained lasting popularity, and within months had been released in both German and French.^[20] Referencing the burgeoning new wave music scene, RCA Records marketed "Heroes" with the slogan "There's Old Wave. There's New Wave. And there's David Bowie ..."^[16]

Heroes / Helden, 6:34

Scenes taken from Christiane F. Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo.

https://youtu.be/mG6sXLQwlJU

Lodger

The final piece in what Bowie called his "triptych", Lodger (1979), eschewed the minimalist, ambient nature of the other two, making a partial return to the drum- and guitar-based rock and pop of his pre-Berlin era. The result was a complex mixture of new wave and world music, in places incorporating Hijaz non-Western scales. Some tracks were composed using Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies cards: "Boys Keep Swinging" entailed band members swapping instruments, "Move On" used the chords from Bowie's early composition "All the Young Dudes" played backwards, and "Red Money" took backing tracks from "Sister Midnight", a piece previously composed with Iggy Pop.^[21] The album was recorded in Switzerland. Ahead of its release, RCA's Mel Ilberman stated, "It would be fair to call it Bowie's Sergeant Pepper ... a concept album that portrays the Lodger as a homeless wanderer, shunned and victimized by life's pressures and technology." As described by biographer Christopher Sandford, "The record dashed such high hopes with dubious choices, and production that spelt the end—for fifteen years—of Bowie's partnership with Eno." Lodger reached number 4 in the UK and number 20 in the US, and yielded the UK hit singles "Boys Keep Swinging" and "DJ".^[22]^[23]

Ian Hunter - Dandy, 4:42

https://youtu.be/0qSaPeVx3J4

Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5, 4th Movement (chap. 37, pp. 1222-1223)

- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogJFXqYEYd8

Read carefully pp. 1222-1223 (in chap. 37) about the background of this work, as the Soviet Union under Stalin took the arts under strict state control in the 1920s and 1930s. Composers like Shostakovich were forced to publically renege some things they had done and present works more supportive of the state and its agenda. This powerful work was ambiguous enough to seem very pro-state or possibly as mocking of the state. In his later years, Shostakovich would claim it was mocking, but he had to be careful to let it be interpreted the other way.

Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5,Bernstein, 10:38

https://youtu.be/ogJFXqYEYd8

------------------------

Aaron Copland, Variations on "Simple Gifts" from Appalachian Spring (chap. 37, p. 1230)

- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR8-p7AKHZ4
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtay0UwB7BM

Copland composed this for a ballet but it has become one of the great symphonic works in the American heritage. Read p. 1230 (in chap. 37) about its development.

Many think the magical part of the composition is the varied and frequent use of a traditional Shaker religious melody called "Simple Gifts".

For the lyrics of this song, see http://www.metrolyrics.com/simple-gifts-lyrics-judy-collins.html and a version by the singer Jewel at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amcGIfMu0bw .

"Simple Gifts"

'Tis the gift to be simple
'Tis the gift to be free
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be
And when we find ourselves in the place just right
It will be in the valley of love and delight

When true simplicity is gained
To bow and to bend, we will not be ashamed
To turn, turn, will be our delight
'Til by turning, turning, we come round right

Songwriters
TORNQUIST, CAROL / DP, .

Published by
Lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.

Song Discussions is protected by U.S. Patent 9401941. Other patents pending.

Appalachian Spring VII Doppio Movement, 2:43

https://youtu.be/rR8-p7AKHZ4

A. Copland - "Appalachian Spring" suite from the ballet, 3rd Movement, 8:31

A. Copland - Suita baletowa na orkiestrę "Appalachian Spring", cz. 3/ A. Copland - "Appalachian Spring" suite from the ballet, 3rd Movement. Opera i Filharmonia Podlaska Europejskie Centrum Sztuki/The Podlasie Opera and Philharmonic European Art Centre. Orkiestra Opery i Filharmonii Podlaskiej/The Podlasie Opera and Philharmonic Orchestra. Mariusz Smolij - dyrygent/conductor. www.oifp.pl lub/or http://217.17.47.78:8181/FX/2009-2010...

https://youtu.be/dtay0UwB7BM

Jewel - Simple gifts, 2:47

https://youtu.be/amcGIfMu0bw

Copland was a huge influence on the progressive rock band Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer were an English progressive rock supergroup formed in London in 1970.

The band consisted of keyboardist Keith Emerson, singer, bassist, and producer Greg Lake, and drummer and percussionist Carl Palmer.

They were one of the most popular and commercially successful progressive rock bands in the 1970s^[1]^[2] with a musical sound including adaptations of classical music with jazz and symphonic rock elements, dominated by Emerson's flamboyant use of the Hammond organ, Moog synthesizer, and piano (although Lake wrote several acoustic songs for the group).^[3]

After forming in early 1970, the band came to prominence following their performance at the Isle of Wight Festival in August 1970.

In their first year, the group signed with Atlantic Records and released Emerson, Lake & Palmer (1970) and Tarkus (1971), both of which reached the UK top five.

The band's success continued with Pictures at an Exhibition (1971), Trilogy (1972), and Brain Salad Surgery (1973). After a three-year break, Emerson, Lake & Palmer released Works Volume 1 (1977) and Works Volume 2 (1977) which began their decline in popularity. After Love Beach (1978), the group disbanded in 1979.

The band reformed partially in the 1980s with Emerson, Lake & Powell featuring Cozy Powell in place of Palmer, and 3, with Robert Berry in place of Lake. In 1991, the original trio reformed and released two more albums, Black Moon (1992) and In the Hot Seat (1994), and toured at various times between 1992 and 1998. Their final performance took place in 2010 at the High Voltage Festival in London to commemorate the band's fortieth anniversary, before Emerson's death in 2016 marked the end of the group.^[4]^[5]

The band regularly played contemporary classical pieces. From July to September 1970, the band recorded their debut album, Emerson Lake & Palmer, at Advision Studios in London. Lake produced the album himself with Eddy Offord as their engineer. Three of its six tracks are instrumentals, including "The Barbarian", an arrangement of the 1911 piano suite Allegro barbaro by Béla Bartók. "Knife-Edge" is based on the first movement of Sinfonietta by Leoš Janáček that features a passage from the Allemande of French Suite No. 1 in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach.

In November 1971, Emerson, Lake, & Palmer released Pictures at an Exhibition, a live performance of their 37-minute rock adaptation of the same-titled piano suite by Modest Mussorgsky at Newcastle City Hall on 26 March 1971.^[18] Emerson first got the idea to use the piece after seeing an orchestral performance at the Royal Festival Hall in London when he was in the Nice. After buying a copy of the score, Lake and Palmer agreed to adapt it.^[21] The suite includes "The Sage", a ballad written by Lake, and "Blues Variation" by Emerson, with the concert's encore, "Nutrocker". The album was not released until after Tarkus because the record company was reluctant to release a classical suite as an album and insisted it be released on their classical music label instead. The band decided to delay the release of the record as they thought this would lead to poor sales. Following the commercial success of Tarkus, their label agreed to release Pictures at an Exhibition as a low-priced record. The album peaked at No. 3 in the UK and No. 10 in the US following its release there in January 1972.^[22]

Trilogy, the band's third album, was recorded at Advision Studios with Offord between October 1971 and January 1972.^[23] Its cover art was designed by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis.^[24] "Hoedown" is an adaptation of Rodeo by Aaron Copland. Released in July 1972, Trilogy reached No. 2 in the UK and No. 5 in the US.

Hoedown - Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Milan, 1973

https://youtu.be/N0FuFfcCZiE

In June 1973, Emerson, Lake & Palmer began recording Brain Salad Surgery in London at Advision and Olympic Studios which lasted until September that year. Offord was not present for the recording sessions as he was working with Yes, leaving engineering and mixing duties to Chris Kimsey and Geoff Young. Lake wrote the album's lyrics with Peter Sinfield and its sleeve was designed by H. R. Giger and includes the band's new logo. Formed of five tracks, the album includes a rendition of "Jerusalem" which features the debut of the Moog Apollo, a prototype polyphonic synthesizer. "Toccata" is a cover of the fourth movement of Piano Concerto No. 1 by Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera and contains synthesised percussion in the form of an acoustic drum kit fitted with pick-ups that triggered electronic sounds. The 29-minute track "Karn Evil 9" is the longest song recorded by the group. Brain Salad Surgery was released in November 1973 and reached No. 2 in the UK and No. 11 in the US.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer took an extended break in 1974. They regrouped in 1976 to record Works Volume 1 at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland and EMI Studios in Paris, France. It is a double album with one side of an LP containing songs by each member and a fourth of group material. Much of the album was recorded with an orchestral accompaniment; Emerson's side consists of his 18-minute, three-movement "Piano Concerto No. 1". Lake contributes five songs he co-wrote with Sinfield, and Palmer's includes two covers of classical pieces by Sergei Prokofiev and Bach. One of the two group tracks, "Fanfare for the Common Man", is a cover of the same-titled orchestral piece by Aaron Copland, who gave permission to have the band release it. Works Volume 1 was released in March 1977 and peaked at No. 9 in the UK and No. 12 in the US. A single of "Fanfare for the Common Man" was released and reached No. 2 in the UK, the band's highest charting UK single.^[33]

ELP, Fanfare for the Common Man, 3:14

Promotional video of ELP doing "Fanfare for the Common Man," Olympic Stadium, Montreal.

https://youtu.be/we55QQcsvY4

In 1978, the band recorded Love Beach at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, The Bahamas. The album has been dismissed by the band, who explained it was produced to fulfil a contractual obligation.^[35] Sinfield is credited to the majority of the tracks as a lyricist except "Canario", an instrumental based on Fantasía para un gentilhombre by Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo.

----------------------------

Virgil Thomson, Prelude and Pastorale from The Plow that Broke the Plains (chap. 37, pp. 1230-1231)

- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2THARSCOA Listen to the first 2:40 (2 minutes and 40 seconds) to hear both the Prelude and Pastorale (Grass). Listen to it all if you wish.

Thomson 'The Plow That Broke the Plains' - Stokowski conducts, 13:56

'The Plow That Broke the Plains' was a 25-minute documentary film, produced in 1936, that detailed the terrible over-farming of the Great Plains region of the USA and Canada where there were no rivers, little rain, just constant sun and wind, and a drought that led to the dreadful Dust Bowls which ruined so many settlers' lives. Virgil Thomson composed a music score that is played continuously throughout the film and from it he selected a Suite of six short numbers for concert hall purposes. Leopold Stokowski made the Suite's first recording on 78s in 1946 with the Hollywood Bowl Symphony and re-recorded it in 1961 with the Symphony of the Air. It is that recording that is heard here, accompanied by 'stills' from the film itself. (From 'Vanguard Classics' OVC 8013.)

https://youtu.be/iV2THARSCOA

Read carefully pp. 1230-1231 (in chap. 37) and then listen to this at the link above.

This was the score for a documentary film when filmmaking was still in its infancy. Virgil Thomson (1895-1989) was a socially conscious composer who joined this effort to present on film the dust bowl problem that devastated middle America for a number of years.

Note the variety of music that he incorporates into this effort. The context is the Dust Bowl and the poverty of the Great Depression era. The film was made in 1936. Read the caption at the YouTube for more information.

------------------------

John Cage, Indeterminancy, Part Two (chap. 38, pp. 1266-1269)

At this Smithsonian website, scroll to the bottom and play the tracks of this piece. After reading the pages above and listening for a few minutes, you will get the idea:

http://www.folkways.si.edu/john-cage-and-david-tudor/indeterminacy-new-aspect-of-form-in-instrumental-and-electronic-music/classical-contemporary/album/smithsonian

You can also see visually this version, performed by Chen, Beresford, and Lee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xXFvpUckVA

John Cage is known as an avant garde music theorist of the mid-20th century. He championed the idea that all we do is music, so that his works often included chance sounds from everyday life and at uncertain intervals. Read carefully pp. 1267-1268 before listening to this, otherwise you will wonder what is going on. Then, also read the caption that goes with the YouTube. The other parts of this work can also be found at YouTube. It is "the music of chance".

John Cage - Indeterminacy - Tania Chen, Steve Beresford, Stewart Lee - fragment, 4:36

https://youtu.be/8xXFvpUckVA

5.b. John Cage, In A Landscape (not in book; Cage is on pp. 1266-1269)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHyTXlejiEE (a version played by Keiko Shichijo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rvhEkIYNgI) One of Cage's more "normal" works.
- Audience Reactions to 4'33"
German Expressionism
A few reactions to the performance by William Marx of John Cage's 4'33". Filmed immediately following the performance at the McCallum Theatre, Palm Desert, CA.
https://youtu.be/u8lXRusTpY4
John Cage: 4'33'' for piano (1952), 5:40
https://youtu.be/gN2zcLBr_VM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_1,_...

http://www.magnetmagazine.com/2012/04...

http://www.allmusic.com/album/june-1-...

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a 1981 album by Brian Eno and Talking Heads, David Byrne, titled after Amos Tutuola's 1954 novel of the same name. While it received mixed reviews upon its release, My Life is now widely regarded as a high point in the discographies of Eno and Byrne.^[4]^[5]

Recorded by Eno and Byrne in between their work on Talking Heads projects, the album integrates sampled vocals and found sounds, African and Middle Eastern rhythms, and electronic music techniques.^[3] It has been called a "pioneering work for countless styles connected to electronics, ambience, and Third World music".^[2] The extensive use of sampling on the album is widely considered ground-breaking and innovative, though its actual influence on the sample-based music genres that later emerged continues to be debated.^[6]^[7]
Pitchfork Media listed My Life in the Bush of Ghosts as the 21st best album of the 1980s. Slant Magazine listed the album at No. 83 on its list of the "Best Albums of 1980s".^[8]

Recording and production

Eno and Byrne first worked together while collaborating on More Songs About Buildings and Food, the 1978 album by Byrne's band Talking Heads. My Life was primarily recorded during a break between touring for Fear of Music (1979) and the recording of Remain in Light (1980), subsequent Talking Heads albums also produced by Eno, but the release was delayed while legal rights were sought for the large number of samples used throughout the album.^[9] Anthropologist Bob White calls the album experimental rock,^[1] while John Bush of AllMusic called it "45 minutes of worldbeat/funk-rock".^[2] Eno described the album as a "vision of a psychedelic Africa."^[10]

The "found objects" credited to Eno and Byrne were common objects used mostly as percussion. In the notes for the 2006 expanded edition of the album, Byrne writes that they would often use a normal drum kit, but with a cardboard box replacing the bass drum, or a frying pan replacing the snare drum; this would blend the familiar drum sound with unusual percussive noises.^{[full citation needed]} Rather than conventional pop or rock singing, most of the vocals are sampled from other sources, such as commercial recordings of Arabic singers, radio disc jockeys, and an exorcist. Musicians had previously used similar sampling techniques, but critic Dave Simpson declares it had never before been used "to such cataclysmic effect" as on My Life.^[11]

In 2001, Q magazine asked Eno whether he and Byrne had invented sampling. He replied:

“

No, there was already a history of it. People such as Holger Czukay had made experiments using IBM Dictaphones and short-wave radios and so on. The difference was, I suppose, that I decided to make it the lead vocal on the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts^[12]

”

The album was recorded entirely with analogue technology, before the advent of digital sequencing and MIDI. The sampled voices were synchronized with the instrumental tracks via trial and error, a practice that was often frustrating, but which also produced several happy accidents.

Also according to Byrne's 2006 notes, neither he nor Eno had read Tutuola's novel before the album was recorded. Both were familiar with Tutuola's earlier The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), but his My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was not easily obtained in the U.S. when the material was recorded. Even without reading the book, Eno and Byrne thought the title reflected their interest in African music, and also had an evocative, vaguely sinister quality that also referenced the voices sampled for the album: the vocalists were recorded sometimes several decades before being re-appropriated by Eno and Byrne, and the voices often seemed to take on unanticipated qualities when placed in the new context.

Samples

Notes below indicated the voices sampled, from the liner notes.

Side one

"America Is Waiting" – Unidentified indignant radio host (Ray Taliaferro of KGO NEWSTALK AM 810), San Francisco, April 1980.

"Mea Culpa" – Inflamed caller and smooth politician replying, both unidentified. Radio call-in show, New York, July 1979.

"Regiment" – Dunya Yunis [sic], Lebanese mountain singer, from The Human Voice in the World of Islam (Tangent Records TGS131)^[13]

"Help Me Somebody" – Reverend Paul Morton, broadcast sermon, New Orleans, June 1980.

"The Jezebel Spirit" – Unidentified exorcist, New York, September 1980.

Side two

"Qu'ran" – Algerian Muslims chanting the Qur'an. (same source as track 3)
"Moonlight in Glory" – The Moving Star Hall Singers, Sea Island, Georgia. (From The Moving Star Hall Singers, Folkways FS 3841), produced by Guy Carawan.
"The Carrier" – *Dunya Yunis. (same source as track 3)
"A Secret Life" – Samira Tewfik, Lebanese popular singer. (from Les Plus Grandes Artistes du Monde Arabe, EMI)
"Come with Us" – *Unidentified radio evangelist, San Francisco, April 1980

Packaging

Original package design was created by Peter Saville.

“

Having tried a few different directions for LP cover art, we decided to incorporate the video monitor as a painting tool, as Brian and others were doing here and there. By pointing the camera at the monitor and generating video feedback a few little cutout humanoid shapes pasted on the screen would be infinitely multiplied. And by fussing with the color setting on the backs of the TV sets one could saturate and skew the color quite a bit. I also took some pictures of just skewed vortexes and whorls of color, and then we did some images where we skewed the color on pictures that had been taken of ourselves and then took polaroids of the results. Somehow, despite it being very techie, these techniques also seemed analogous to what we were doing on the record. It was funky as well as being techie. Extremely lo tech actually, and not what you were supposed to do with a TV set^[14]

”

For the 2006 reissue, new artwork was designed by Peter Buchanan-Smith, with booklet cover images and studio photography by Hugh Brown.

Reception

In a 1985 interview, singer Kate Bush remarked that Bush of Ghosts "left a very big mark on popular music".^[24] The album enthused Rick Wright of Pink Floyd, "knocked me sideways when I first heard it – full of drum loops, samples and soundscapes. Stuff that we really take for granted now, but which was unheard of in all but the most progressive musical circles at the time… The way the sounds were mixed in was so fresh, it was amazing."^[25]

25th anniversary reissue

The album was reissued on March 27, 2006 in the UK and April 11, 2006 in the US, remastered and with seven extra tracks. To mark the reissue, two songs were made available to download online, consisting of the entire multitracks. Under the Creative Commons License, members of the public are able to download the multitracks, and use them for their own remixes.

The track "Qu'ran" was excluded from this release without comment. However, in an interview for Pitchfork Media about the 2006 reissue, Byrne said:

“

Way back when the record first came out, in 1981, it might have been '82, we got a request from an Islamic organization in London, and they said, 'We consider this blasphemy that you put grooves to the chanting of the Holy Book.' And we thought, 'Okay, in deference to somebody's religion, we'll take it off.' You could probably argue for and against monkeying with something like that. But I think we were certainly feeling very cautious about this whole thing. We made a big effort to try and clear all the voices, and make sure everybody was okay with everything. Because we thought, 'We're going to get accused of all kinds of things, and so we want to cover our asses as best we can.' So I think in that sense we reacted maybe with more caution than we had to. But that's the way it was.^[26]

”

While discussing the re-release in 2006, the two began collaborating again on a new project that became the album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, which was independently released in 2008. Byrne toured to promote his collaborations with Eno in 2008 and 2009, resulting in the release of the live EP Everything That Happens Will Happen on This Tour – David Byrne on Tour: Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno featuring a performance of "Help Me Somebody" in 2008.

Track listing

Original LP (1981)

All music composed by Brian Eno and David Byrne, except "Regiment" by Eno, Byrne, and Michael "Busta Cherry" Jones.

Side one
No.	Title	Length
1.	"America Is Waiting"	3:36
2.	"Mea Culpa"	3:35
3.	"Regiment"	3:56
4.	"Help Me Somebody"	4:18
5.	"The Jezebel Spirit"	4:55

Side two
No.	Title	Length
1.	"Qu'ran"	3:46
2.	"Moonlight in Glory"	4:19
3.	"The Carrier"	3:30
4.	"A Secret Life"	2:20
5.	"Come with Us"	2:38
6.	"Mountain of Needles"	2:35

In the 1982 second edition, the track "Qu'ran"—which features samples of Qur'anic recital—was removed at the request of the Islamic Council of Great Britain. In its place "Very, Very Hungry" (the B-side of "The Jezebel Spirit" 12" EP)^[27] was substituted. The first edition of the CD (1986) included both tracks, with "Very, Very Hungry" as a bonus track. Later editions (1990 and later) followed the revised LP track order without "Qu'ran."

Ghosts

A widely circulated bootleg of outtakes was released in 1992 as Klondyke Records KR 21. Sound quality is nearly equal to the original CD release.

"Interview" – 3:03 (excerpt from Brian's February 2, 1980 KPFA-FM interview, where he discusses recording the album)
"Mea Culpa" – 4:56
"Into the Spirit Womb" [sic](actual title as spoken on the track is "Into the Spirit World") – 6:07 ("The Jezebel Spirit" with the original Kathryn Kuhlman vocals, which her estate refused to license)
"Regiment" (Byrne, Eno, Jones) – 4:13
"The Friends of Amos Tutuola" – 2:01 ("Two Against Three" in the official 2006 re-release)
"America Is Waiting" (Byrne, Eno, Laswell, Wright, Van Tieghem) – 3:42
"The Carrier" – 4:22
"Very Very Hungry" – 3:25
"On the Way to Zagora" – 2:43 ("Pitch to Voltage" in the official 2006 re-release)
"Les Hommes Ne Le Sauront Jamais" – 3:33 ("Number 8 Mix" in the official 2006 re-release)
"A Secret Life" – 2:34
"Come with Us" – 2:42
"Mountain of Needles" – 2:31

Except as noted, the tracks are the same mix as originally released.

2006 expanded issue

Remastered, with bonus tracks. 2, 3, 7 and 8 are longer than on the original album.

"America Is Waiting" (Byrne, Eno, Laswell, Wright, Van Tieghem) – 3:38
"Mea Culpa" – 4:57
"Regiment" (Byrne, Eno, Jones) – 4:11
"Help Me Somebody" – 4:17
"The Jezebel Spirit" – 4:56
"Very, Very Hungry" – 3:21
"Moonlight in Glory" – 4:30
"The Carrier" – 4:19
"A Secret Life" – 2:31
"Come with Us" – 2:42
"Mountain of Needles" – 2:39
"Pitch to Voltage" – 2:38
"Two Against Three" – 1:55
"Vocal Outtakes" – 0:36
"New Feet" – 2:26
"Defiant" – 3:41
"Number 8 Mix" – 3:30
"Solo Guitar with Tin Foil" – 3:00

David Byrne & Brian Eno - Qu'ran, 3:47

https://youtu.be/T-U2nKMGTHY

My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts . The Jezebel Spirit, 4:54

https://youtu.be/FWQdKkk4Xr0

America is waiting - David Byrne & Brian Eno, 3:54

https://youtu.be/PTFIzLKaZj4

America is waiting for a message of some sort or another.
Takin' it again. Again! Again! Takin' it again.
Well now... no, no... now, we ought to be mad at the government not mad at the people.
Takin' it again. Again! Again! Takin' it again.
I mean, yeah, well... wha-what're ya gonna do?
America is waiting for a message of some sort or another.
No will whatsoever. No will whatsoever! Absolutely no honor.
No will whatsoever. No will whatsoever! Absolutely no integrity.
No will whatsoever. No will whatsoever! I haven't seen any any any citizen over there stand up and say "Hey, just a second."
No will whatsoever. No will whatsoever! I mean, yeah, so... wha-what're ya gonna do?
America is waiting for a message of some sort or another.

--------------------------------

Government and the Arts

Chapter 37 (pp. 1228-1232), Federal support for the arts
Government helping the arts in hard times at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/1934-Picturing-Hard-Times.html and http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/powerprose/wpa/

Abstract Expressionism and Music

Chapter 38 (pp. 1255-1263, and 1268-9), Abstract Expressionism
Chapter 38 (pp. 1266-1269), Music of Chance; review the Week 9 “Music Folder”
John Cage, listen and see – "Dream" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fhc3Tbnhsc
John Cage, listen and see -- “4’33’" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY7UK-6aaNA&list=PL223147EC2385356B&index=3

Beatles and John Cage

Description of Revolution #9

Carnival of Light

Revolution #9

"My Kid Could Draw That" views: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/my-kid-could-draw-that/; and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/28/study-examines-difference_n_841268.html

37 The Age of Anxiety

FASCISM AND DEPRESSION, HOLOCAUST AND BOMB 1211

Fascism /ˈfæʃɪzəm/ is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism^[1]^[2] that came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe, influenced by national syndicalism. Fascism originated in Italy during World War I and spread to other European countries. Fascism opposes liberalism, Marxism and anarchism and is usually placed on the far-right within the traditional left–right spectrum.^[3]^[4]

Fascists saw World War I as a revolution that brought massive changes in the nature of war, society, the state, and technology. The advent of total war and total mass mobilization of society had broken down the distinction between civilian and combatant. A "military citizenship" arose in which all citizens were involved with the military in some manner during the war.^[5]^[6] The war had resulted in the rise of a powerful state capable of mobilizing millions of people to serve on the front lines and providing economic production and logistics to support them, as well as having unprecedented authority to intervene in the lives of citizens.^[5]^[6]
Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete, and they regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties.^[7] Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society.^[7] Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature, and views political violence, war, and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation.^[8]^[9]^[10]^[11] Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky through protectionist and interventionist economic policies.^[12]

Since the end of World War II in 1945, few parties have openly described themselves as fascist, and the term is instead now usually used pejoratively by political opponents. The descriptions neo-fascist or post-fascist are sometimes applied more formally to describe parties of the far right with ideologies similar to, or rooted in, 20th century fascist movements.^[13]

The Italian term fascismo is derived from fascio meaning a bundle of rods, ultimately from the Latin word fasces.^[14] This was the name given to political organizations in Italy known as fasci, groups similar to guilds or syndicates and at first applied mainly to organisations on the political Left. In 1919, Benito Mussolini founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in Milan, which became the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party) two years later. The Fascists came to associate the term with the ancient Roman fasces or fascio littorio^[15]—a bundle of rods tied around an axe,^[16] an ancient Roman symbol of the authority of the civic magistrate^[17] carried by his lictors, which could be used for corporal and capital punishment at his command.^[18]^[19]

The symbolism of the fasces suggested strength through unity: a single rod is easily broken, while the bundle is difficult to break.^[20] Similar symbols were developed by different fascist movements; for example, the Falange symbol is five arrows joined together by a yoke.^[21]

What Is Fascism? 4:12

Popular among certain regimes during World War 2, fascism's consequences had disastrous effects on the world. So, what is fascism?

Learn More: On Genocidal Dictators and Totalitarian States http://www.telospress.com/on-genocida... "The twentieth century was witness to no shortage of political violence and mass death perpetrated by the state."
Violence and Fascism: The Case of the Faisceau http://www.jstor.org/stable/260332?se... "Fascism, violence and storm troopers: in the popular mind the three are inseparable."

Nazism, Fascism and Social Darwinism http://ebooks.cambridge.org/chapter.j... "There is an enormous scholarly literature on Nazism and Fascism, one that is marked by controversy over how the two movements are to be defined, over their origins, sources of support, ideologies, and significance."

Darwinism and the Nazi Race Holocaust https://answersingenesis.org/charles-... "Leading Nazis, and early 1900 influential German biologists, revealed in their writings that Darwin's theory and publications had a major influence upon Nazi race policies."

https://youtu.be/aUcYU95kCAI

The Glitter and Angst of Berlin 1212

1920s Berlin

The Golden Twenties was a vibrant period in the history of Berlin, Germany, Europe and the world in general. After the Greater Berlin Act the city became the third largest municipality in the world.[1] and experienced its heyday as a major world city. It was known for its leadership roles in science, the humanities, music, film, higher education, government, diplomacy, industries and military affairs.

The Weimar Republic era began in the midst of several major movements in the fine arts. German Expressionism had begun before World War I and continued to have a strong influence throughout the 1920s, although artists were increasingly likely to position themselves in opposition to expressionist tendencies as the decade went on.

A sophisticated, innovative culture developed in and around Berlin, including highly developed architecture and design (Bauhaus, 1919–33), a variety of literature (Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1929), film (Lang, Metropolis, 1927, Dietrich, Der blaue Engel, 1930), painting (Grosz), and music (Brecht and Weill, The Threepenny Opera, 1928), criticism (Benjamin), philosophy/psychology (Jung), and fashion. This culture was often considered to be decadent and socially disruptive by rightists.[2]

Film was making huge technical and artistic strides during this period of time in Berlin, and gave rise to the influential movement called German Expressionism. "Talkies", the Sound films, were also becoming more popular with the general public across Europe, and Berlin was producing very many of them.

The so-called mystical arts also experienced a revival during this time-period in Berlin, with astrology, the occult, and esoteric religions and off-beat religious practices becoming more mainstream and acceptable to the masses as they entered popular culture.

Berlin in the 1920s also proved to be a haven for English writers such as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood, who wrote a series of 'Berlin novels', inspiring the play I Am a Camera, which was later adapted into a musical, Cabaret, and an Academy Award winning film of the same name. Spender's semi-autobiographical novel The Temple evokes the attitude and atmosphere of the time.

Science

The University of Berlin (today Humboldt University of Berlin) became a major intellectual centre in Germany, Europe, and the World. The sciences were especially favored — from 1914 to 1933.
Albert Einstein rose to public prominence during his years in Berlin, being awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. He served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin, only leaving after the anti-Semitic Nazi Party rose to power.

Physician

Magnus Hirschfeld established the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexology) in 1919, and it remained open until 1933. Hirschfeld believed that an understanding of homosexuality could be arrived at through science. Hirschfeld was a vocal advocate for homosexual, bisexual, and transgender legal rights for men and women, repeatedly petitioning parliament for legal changes. His Institute also included a museum.

Street fights

Politically, Berlin was seen as a left wing stronghold, with the Nazis calling it "the reddest city [in Europe] after Moscow."[3] Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels became his party's "Gauleiter" for Berlin in the autumn of 1926 and had only been in charge a week before organizing a march through a communist-sympathizing area that devolved into a street riot. The communists, who adopted the motto "Beat the fascists wherever you encounter them!" had their own paramilitary organization called the Roter Frontkämpferbund to battle the Nazis' Sturmabteilung (SA). In February 1927 the Nazis held a meeting in the "Red" stronghold of Wedding that turned into a violent brawl. "Beer glasses, chairs and tables flew through the hall, and severely injured people were left lying covered with blood on the floor. Despite the injuries, it was a triumph for Goebbels, whose followers beat up about 200 communists and drove them from the hall."[4]

Infrastructure and industrialization

The government began printing tremendous amounts of currency to pay reparations; this caused staggering inflation that destroyed middle-class savings. However, economic expansion resumed after mid-decade, aided by U.S. loans. It was then that culture blossomed especially.

The heyday of Berlin began in the mid-1920s when it was the most industrialized city of the continent. Tempelhof Airport was opened in 1923 and a start was made on S-Bahn electrification from 1924 onwards. Berlin was also the second biggest inland harbor of Germany; all of this infrastructure was needed to transport and feed the over 4 million Berliners throughout the 1920s.

Architecture and urban planning

During the interwar period high-quality architecture was built on a large scale in Berlin for broad sections of the population, including poorer people. In particular the Berlin Modernism housing estates built before the beginning of National Socialism set standards worldwide and therefore have been added to the UNESCO World-heritage list in 2008.[5]

As a result of the economically difficult situation during the Weimar Republic, housing construction, which up to that time had been mainly privately financed and profit-oriented, had found itself at a dead end. Inflation was on the up and for citizens on low incomes decent housing was becoming increasingly unaffordable.
Consequently, the search was on to find new models for state-initiated housing construction, which could then be implemented with a passion from 1920 on following the creation of Greater Berlin and the accompanying reform of local and regional government. The requirements for the type of flats to be built and the facilities they were to have were clearly defined, and the city was divided into different building zones. Following some basic ideas of the Garden city movement two- to three-storey housing estates that were well integrated into the landscape of the suburbs of the city were planned. The first large estate of this type with more than 2,000 residential units was the so-called Hufeisensiedlung (Horseshoe Estate) designed by Bruno Taut in Berlin, which introduced a new type of high quality housing and became a prominent example for the use of colors in architecture.

Reputation for decadence

Prostitution rose in Berlin and elsewhere in the areas of Europe left ravaged by World War I. This means of survival for desperate women, and sometimes men, became normalized to a degree in the 1920s. During the war, venereal diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea spread at a rate that warranted government attention.[6] Soldiers at the front contracted these diseases from prostitutes, so the German army responded by granting approval to certain brothels that were inspected by their own medical doctors, and soldiers were rationed coupon books for sexual services at these establishments.[7] Homosexual behaviour was also documented among soldiers at the front. Soldiers returning to Berlin at the end of the War had a different attitude towards their own sexual behaviour than they had a few years previously.[7] Prostitution was frowned on by respectable Berliners, but it continued to the point of becoming entrenched in the city's underground economy and culture. First women with no other means of support turned to the trade, then youths of both genders.

Crime in general developed in parallel with prostitution in the city, beginning as petty thefts and other crimes linked to the need to survive in the war's aftermath. Berlin eventually acquired a reputation as a hub of drug dealing (cocaine, heroin, tranquilizers) and the black market. The police identified 62 organized criminal gangs in Berlin, called Ringvereine.[8] The German public also became fascinated with reports of homicides, especially "lust murders" or Lustmord. Publishers met this demand with inexpensive criminal novels called Krimi, which like the film noir of the era (such as the classic M), explored methods of scientific detection and psychosexual analysis.[9]

Apart from the new tolerance for behaviour that was technically still illegal, and viewed by a large part of society as immoral, there were other developments in Berlin culture that shocked many visitors to the city. Thrill-seekers came to the city in search of adventure, and booksellers sold many editions of guide books to Berlin's erotic night entertainment venues. There were an estimated 500 such establishments, that included a large number of homosexual venues for men and for lesbians; sometimes transvestites of one or both genders were admitted, otherwise there were at least 5 known establishments that were exclusively for a transvestite clientele.[10] There were also several nudist venues. Berlin also had a museum of sexuality during the Weimar period, at Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexology.[11] These were nearly all closed when the Nazi regime became a dictatorship in 1933.

Artists in Berlin became fused with the city's underground culture as the borders between cabaret and legitimate theatre blurred. Anita Berber, a dancer and actress, became notorious throughout the city and beyond for her erotic performances (as well as her cocaine addiction and erratic behaviour). She was painted by Otto Dix, and socialized in the same circles as Klaus Mann.

Cabaret (1972) - Willkommen, 4:55

https://youtu.be/hBlB8RAJEEc

Cabaret- Money, 3:04

https://youtu.be/I8P80A8vy9I

Tango and Foxtrot in Decadent Weimar Berlin, 6:55

A much edited scene from the 1928 G.W. Pabst film "Abwege". In addition to a general sense of Weimar German decadence and excess, typical 1920s Foxtrot and Tango can be seen in considerable detail. As much as I appreciate the artistry of the film making, I am using it primarily for dance history Music: Tango: Eine Nacht in Monte Carlo: Marek Weber und unser Orchester Foxtrot: Arpaneetta Robert Gaden und unser Orchester Foxtrot: Ungaarwein: Barnabas von Geczy und unser Orchester Tango: Ich Weiss so Viel von dir Elizabeth: Fritz Weber und unser Orchester Foxtrot: Gruss und Kuss Veronika: Weintraubs

https://youtu.be/S9CZKQNJA24

Berlin, Paris, Decadence, 1920s, 1930s, Weimar Germany, Art deco, Scarlet Fantastic, 5:00

The agony of fear . The blush of hope's dawn. A nighttrain towards a genie. The dream trapped in a painting. A turbulent dance in the carnival of life. Bliss & the Magnolia tree. Lili is in Heaven now. Music: 'Plug Me In' By Scarlet Fantastic.

https://youtu.be/97CRboA5pRs

Cabaret is a musical based on a book written by Christopher Isherwood, music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb. The 1966 Broadway production became a hit, inspiring numerous subsequent productions in London and New York, as well as the 1972 film by the same name.

It is based on John Van Druten's 1951 play I Am a Camera, which was adapted from the short novel Goodbye to Berlin (1939) by Christopher Isherwood. Set in 1931 Berlin as the Nazis are rising to power, it is based in nightlife at the seedy Kit Kat Klub, and revolves around the 19-year-old English cabaret performer Sally Bowles and her relationship with the young American writer Cliff Bradshaw.
A sub-plot involves the doomed romance between German boarding house owner Fräulein Schneider and her elderly suitor Herr Schultz, a Jewish fruit vendor. Overseeing the action is the Master of Ceremonies at the Kit Kat Klub. The club serves as a metaphor for ominous political developments in late Weimar Germany.

Cabaret: Tomorrow belongs to me, 3:30

"You still think you can control them?"

Classic scene from the movie Cabaret, censored for many years, in wich a Boy sings the song "Tomorrow belongs to me", in a party, and at the end, all the crowd sing with the boy.

https://youtu.be/LNMVMNmrqJE

Kafka’s Nightmare Worlds 1213

Franz Kafka[a] (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a philosopher and German-language writer of novels and short stories who is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work, which fuses elements of realism and the fantastic,[3] typically features isolated protagonists faced by bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible social-bureaucratic powers, and has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity.[4] His best known works include "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis"), Der Process (The Trial), and Das Schloss (The Castle). The term Kafkaesque has entered the English language to describe situations like those in his writing.[5]

Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education he was employed with an insurance company, forcing him to relegate writing to his spare time. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship. He died in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis.
Few of Kafka's works were published during his lifetime: the story collections Betrachtung (Contemplation) and Ein Landarzt (A Country Doctor), and individual stories (such as "Die Verwandlung") were published in literary magazines but received little public attention. Kafka's unfinished works, including his novels Der Process, Das Schloss and Amerika (also known as Der Verschollene, The Man Who Disappeared), were ordered by Kafka to be destroyed by his friend Max Brod, who nonetheless ignored his friend's direction and published them after Kafka's death.

Franz Kafka Mini Documentary, 5:32

Franz Kafka Documentary project for German Literature in Translation class at FSU.

https://youtu.be/zpJ9r-BmvYY

        Brecht and the Berlin Stage 1213

Eugen Bertolt Friedrich Brecht (/brɛkt/;[1][2][3] German: [bʀɛçt]; 10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956[4]) was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director of the 20th century. He made contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter through the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble – the post-war theatre company operated by Brecht and his wife, long-time collaborator and actress Helene Weigel.[5]

An introduction to Brechtian theatre, 6:19

This film looks at the theoretical work of Brecht, featuring archive footage from the 2008 production and interviews with this production's creative team including translator Tony Kushner and director Deborah Warner.

https://youtu.be/l-828KqtTkA

        Kollwitz and the Expressionist Print 1214

Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.[1][2] Expressionist artists sought to express the meaning[3] of emotional experience rather than physical reality.[3][4]

Expressionism was developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic,[1] particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including expressionist architecture, painting, literature, theatre, dance, film and music.

The term is sometimes suggestive of angst. In a general sense, painters such as Matthias Grünewald and El Greco are sometimes termed expressionist, though in practice the term is applied mainly to 20th-century works. The Expressionist emphasis on individual perspective has been characterized as a reaction to positivism and other artistic styles such as Naturalism and Impressionism.[5]

Käthe (Schmidt) Kollwitz (German pronunciation: [kɛːtə kɔlvɪt͡s]), (8 July 1867 – 22 April 1945) was a German artist, who worked with drawing, etching, lithography, woodcuts, painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Her most famous art cycles, including The Weavers and The Peasant War, depict the effects of poverty, hunger, and war on the working class.[1][2] Despite the realism of her early works, her art is now more closely associated with Expressionism.[3] Kollwitz was the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts.

Käthe Kollwitz, 4:23

https://youtu.be/mQxmk1nc558

Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz (July 8, 1867 -- April 22, 1945) was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor. Music: Henry Purcell (1659 -1695), Dido's lament from Dido and Aeneas (1689), Anne Sophie von Otter

    The Rise of Fascism 1215

The German economy suffered severe setbacks after the end of World War I, partly because of reparations payments required under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. The government printed money to make the payments and to repay the country's war debt; the resulting hyperinflation led to inflated prices for consumer goods, economic chaos, and food riots.[4] When the government failed to make the reparations payments in January 1923, French troops occupied German industrial areas along the Ruhr. Widespread civil unrest followed.[5]

The National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP;[d] Nazi Party) was the renamed successor of the German Workers' Party founded in 1919, one of several far-right political parties active in Germany at the time.[6] The party platform included removal of the Weimar Republic, rejection of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, radical antisemitism, and anti-Bolshevism.[7] They promised a strong central government, increased Lebensraum (living space) for Germanic peoples, formation of a national community based on race, and racial cleansing via the active suppression of Jews, who would be stripped of their citizenship and civil rights.[8] The Nazis proposed national and cultural renewal based upon the Völkisch movement.[9]
When the stock market in the United States crashed on 24 October 1929, the impact in Germany was dire. Millions were thrown out of work, and several major banks collapsed. Hitler and the NSDAP prepared to take advantage of the emergency to gain support for their party. They promised to strengthen the economy and provide jobs.[10] Many voters decided the NSDAP was capable of restoring order, quelling civil unrest, and improving Germany's international reputation. After the federal election of 1932, the Nazis were the largest party in the Reichstag, holding 230 seats with 37.4 percent of the popular vote.[11]

Nazi seizure of power

Although the Nazis won the greatest share of the popular vote in the two Reichstag general elections of 1932, they did not have a majority, so Hitler led a short-lived coalition government formed by the NSDAP and the German National People's Party.[12] Under pressure from politicians, industrialists, and the business community, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. This event is known as the Machtergreifung (seizure of power).[13] In the following months, the NSDAP used a process termed Gleichschaltung (co-ordination) to rapidly bring all aspects of life under control of the party.[14] All civilian organisations, including agricultural groups, volunteer organisations, and sports clubs, had their leadership replaced with Nazi sympathisers or party members. By June 1933, virtually the only organisations not in the control of the NSDAP were the army and the churches.[15]

Hitler became Germany's head of state, with the title of Führer und Reichskanzler, in 1934.

On the night of 27 February 1933, the Reichstag building was set afire; Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch communist, was found guilty of starting the blaze. Hitler proclaimed that the arson marked the start of a communist uprising. Violent suppression of communists by the Sturmabteilung (SA) was undertaken all over the country, and four thousand members of the Communist Party of Germany were arrested. The Reichstag Fire Decree, imposed on 28 February 1933, rescinded most German civil liberties, including rights of assembly and freedom of the press. The decree also allowed the police to detain people indefinitely without charges or a court order. The legislation was accompanied by a propaganda blitz that led to public support for the measure.[16]

In March 1933, the Enabling Act, an amendment to the Weimar Constitution, passed in the Reichstag by a vote of 444 to 94.[17] This amendment allowed Hitler and his cabinet to pass laws—even laws that violated the constitution—without the consent of the president or the Reichstag.[18] As the bill required a two-thirds majority to pass, the Nazis used the provisions of the Reichstag Fire Decree to keep several Social Democratic deputies from attending; the Communists had already been banned.[19][20] On 10 May the government seized the assets of the Social Democrats; they were banned in June.[21] The remaining political parties were dissolved, and on 14 July 1933, Germany became a de facto one-party state when the founding of new parties was made illegal.[22] Further elections in November 1933, 1936, and 1938 were entirely Nazi-controlled and saw only the Nazis and a small number of independents elected.[23] The regional state parliaments and the Reichsrat (federal upper house) were abolished in January 1934.[24]

The Nazi regime abolished the symbols of the Weimar Republic, including the black, red, and gold tricolour flag, and adopted reworked imperial symbolism. The previous imperial black, white, and red tricolour was restored as one of Germany's two official flags; the second was the swastika flag of the NSDAP, which became the sole national flag in 1935. The NSDAP anthem "Horst-Wessel-Lied" ("Horst Wessel Song") became a second national anthem.[25]

In this period, Germany was still in a dire economic situation; millions were unemployed and the balance of trade deficit was daunting.[26] Hitler knew that reviving the economy was vital. In 1934, using deficit spending, public works projects were undertaken. A total of 1.7 million Germans were put to work on the projects in 1934 alone.[26] Average wages both per hour and per week began to rise.[27]
The demands of the SA for more political and military power caused anxiety among military, industrial, and political leaders. In response, Hitler purged the entire SA leadership in the Night of the Long Knives, which took place from 30 June to 2 July 1934.[28] Hitler targeted Ernst Röhm and other SA leaders who, along with a number of Hitler's political adversaries (such as Gregor Strasser and former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher), were rounded up, arrested, and shot.[29]

On 2 August 1934, President von Hindenburg died. The previous day, the cabinet had enacted the "Law Concerning the Highest State Office of the Reich", which stated that upon Hindenburg's death, the office of president would be abolished and its powers merged with those of the chancellor.[30] Hitler thus became head of state as well as head of government. He was formally named as Führer und Reichskanzler (leader and chancellor). Germany was now a totalitarian state with Hitler at its head.[31] As head of state, Hitler became Supreme Commander of the armed forces. The new law altered the traditional loyalty oath of servicemen so that they affirmed loyalty to Hitler personally rather than the office of supreme commander or the state.[32] On 19 August, the merger of the presidency with the chancellorship was approved by 90 percent of the electorate in a plebiscite.[33]

Most Germans were relieved that the conflicts and street fighting of the Weimar era had ended. They were deluged with propaganda orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels, who promised peace and plenty for all in a united, Marxist-free country without the constraints of the Versailles Treaty.[34] The first Nazi concentration camp, initially for political prisoners, was opened at Dachau in 1933.[35] Hundreds of camps of varying size and function were created by the end of the war.[36] Upon seizing power, the Nazis took repressive measures against their political opposition and rapidly began the comprehensive marginalisation of persons they considered socially undesirable. Under the guise of combating the Communist threat, the National Socialists secured immense power. Above all, their campaign against Jews living in Germany gained momentum.

Beginning in April 1933, scores of measures defining the status of Jews and their rights were instituted at the regional and national level.[37] Initiatives and legal mandates against the Jews reached their culmination with the establishment of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, stripping them of their basic rights.[38] The Nazis would take from the Jews their wealth, their right to intermarry with non-Jews, and their right to occupy many fields of labour (such as practising law, medicine, or working as educators). They eventually declared them undesirable to remain among German citizens and society, which over time dehumanised the Jews; arguably, these actions desensitised Germans to the extent that it resulted in the Holocaust. Ethnic Germans who refused to ostracise Jews or who showed any signs of resistance to Nazi propaganda were placed under surveillance by the Gestapo, had their rights removed, or were sent to concentration camps.[39] Everyone and everything was monitored in Nazi Germany. Inaugurating and legitimising power for the Nazis was thus accomplished by their initial revolutionary activities, then through the improvisation and manipulation of the legal mechanisms available, through the use of police powers by the Nazi Party (which allowed them to include and exclude from society whomever they chose), and finally by the expansion of authority for all state and federal institutions.[40]

Rise of the Nazis, 4:14

In August 1934 Hitler declared himself Fuhrer, absolute leader of Germany. Follow Hitler and his Nazi Party's rise to power in the lead up to the Second World War. Go to http://www.discoverychannel.co.uk/ww2 to watch more footage from World War II in Colour and HD

https://youtu.be/a2YEUhHFMHY

Fascism: Europe's Age of Anxiety, 2:53
The Great Depression: Somebody Help Us! 2:35
Post-War Europe: The Abstract and the Absurd, 2:29
Pre-Built Course Content
The BBC on Weimar:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/mwh/germany/weimaract.shtml
The BBC on Nazis
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/mwh/germany/nazisact.shtml
Quiz:
http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/lessons/riseofhitler/profile.htm
Test yourself on how Hitler came to power
With a partner, answer the following.
Why did people support Hitler?
Cf. http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/lessons/riseofhitler/whysupport.htm
Cf. http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/lessons/riseofhitler/index.htm
Hitler and Nazi Germany
Adolf Hitler, a failed student and artist, built up a small racist, anti-Semitic political party in Germany after World War I. Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch failed. In prison, he wrote Mein Kampf—an account of his movement and his views. As democracy broke down, right-wing elites looked to Hitler for leadership. In 1933 Hitler became chancellor. Amid constant chaos and conflict, Hitler used terror and repression to gain totalitarian control. Meanwhile, a massive rearmament program put Germans back to work. Mass demonstrations and spectacles rallied Germans around Hitler's policies. All major institutions were brought under Nazi control. Women's primary role was to bear Aryan children. Hitler's Nuremberg Laws established official persecution of Jews. A more violent anti-Semitic phase began in 1938 with a destructive rampage against Jews and the deportation of thousands to concentration camps. Increasingly drastic steps barred Jews from attending school, earning a living, or engaging in Nazi society.
Read a detailed account of the life of Hitler

Cf. http://library.thinkquest.org/19092/hitler.html

Test yourself on how Hitler came to power
With a partner, answer the following.
Why did people support Hitler?
Cf. http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/lessons/riseofhitler/whysupport.htm
Cf. http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/lessons/riseofhitler/index.htm

Propaganda

Cf. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/nazi_propaganda_gallery.shtml

Hitler and His Views Cf. http://www.pearsonsuccessnet.com/snpapp/iText/products/0-13-133374-7/audio.html?fname=audio/audio_WH07Y03252.mov
You can summarize Nazi Germany in a flowchart like the one below.

Hitler depicted with a member of a Nazi youth organization
In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party brought hope to Germans suffering from the Great Depression. On the dark side of Hitler’s promises was a message of hate, aimed particularly at Jews. A German Jewish woman recalls an attack on her family during Kristallnacht, a night in early November 1938 when Nazi mobs attacked Jewish homes and businesses.

“They broke our windowpanes, and the house became very cold. . . . We were standing there, outside in the cold, still in our night clothes, with only a coat thrown over. . . . Then they made everyone lie face down on the ground . . . ‘Now, they will shoot us,’ we thought. We were very afraid.”

In 1923, as you may have read, Hitler made a failed attempt to seize power in Munich. He was arrested and found guilty of treason. While in prison, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”). It would later become the basic book of Nazi goals and ideology.

Mein Kampf reflected Hitler’s obsessions—extreme nationalism, racism, and anti-Semitism. Germans, he said, belonged to a superior “master race” of Aryans, or light-skinned Europeans, whose greatest enemies were the Jews. Hitler’s ideas were rooted in a long tradition of anti-Semitism. In the Middle Ages, Christians persecuted Jews because of their different beliefs. The rise of nationalism in the 1800s caused people to identify Jews as ethnic outsiders. Hitler viewed Jews not as members of a religion but as a separate race. (He defined a Jew as anyone with one Jewish grandparent.) Echoing a familiar right-wing theme, he blamed Germany’s defeat in World War I on a conspiracy of Marxists, Jews, corrupt politicians, and business leaders.

In his recipe for revival, Hitler urged Germans everywhere to unite into one great nation. Germany must expand, he said, to gain Lebensraum (lay buns rowm), or living space, for its people. Slavs and other inferior races must bow to Aryan needs. To achieve its greatness, Germany needed a strong leader, or Führer (fyoo rur). Hitler was determined to become that leader.
What main ideas does Hitler express in his book Mein Kampf?

Rise of Nazism

Adolf Hitler was born in Austria in 1889. When he was 18, he went to Vienna, then the capital of the multinational Hapsburg empire. German Austrians made up just one of many ethnic groups in Vienna. Yet they felt superior to Jews, Serbs, Poles, and other groups. While living in Vienna, Hitler developed the fanatical anti-Semitism, or prejudice against Jewish people, that would later play a major role in his rise to power.

Hitler went to Germany and fought in the German army during World War I. In 1919, he joined a small group of right-wing extremists. Like many ex-soldiers, he despised the Weimar government, which he saw as weak. Within a year, he was the unquestioned leader of the National Socialist German Workers, or Nazi, party. Like Mussolini, Hitler organized his supporters into fighting squads. Nazi “storm troopers” fought in the streets against their political enemies.

As a boy, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) became obsessed with Germany’s 1871 victory in the Franco–Prussian War. “The great historic struggle would become my greatest spiritual experience,” he later wrote. “I became more and more enthusiastic about everything . . . connected with war.”

In school, young Hitler was known as a ringleader. One of his teachers recalled, “He demanded of his fellow pupils their unqualified obedience.” He failed to finish high school and was later crushed when he was rejected by art school.

After his attempt to overthrow the Bavarian government, for which he was in prison for less than a year, Hitler was released. He soon renewed his table-thumping speeches. The Great Depression played into Hitler’s hands. As unemployment rose, Nazi membership grew to almost a million. Hitler’s program appealed to veterans, workers, the lower middle classes, small-town Germans, and business people alike. He promised to end reparations, create jobs, and defy the Versailles treaty by rearming Germany.

Inflation Rocks Germany

A man uses German marks to paper his wall because it costs less than buying wallpaper. At the height of the inflation, it would have taken 84,000 fifty-million mark notes like the one below, to equal a single American dollar. Why would inflation hit middle class people with modest savings hard?

With the government paralyzed by divisions, both Nazis and Communists won more seats in the Reichstag, or lower house of the legislature. Fearing the growth of communist political power, conservative politicians turned to Hitler. Although they despised him, they believed they could control him. Thus, with conservative support, Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933 through legal means under the Weimar constitution.

Within a year, Hitler was dictator of Germany. He and his supporters suspended civil rights, destroyed the socialists and Communists, and disbanded other political parties. Germany became a one-party state. Like Stalin in Russia, Hitler purged his own party, brutally executing Nazis he felt were disloyal. Nazis learned that Hitler demanded unquestioning obedience.

After Hitler came to power, he used his elite guard of storm troopers to terrorize his opponents. But when he felt his power threatened, Hitler had leaders of the storm troopers murdered during the “Night of the Long Knives” on June 30, 1934.
What factors helped the Nazi Party to gain power in Germany?

After World War I, Hitler returned to Munich.^[72] With no formal education or career prospects, he remained in the army.^[73] In July 1919 he was appointed Verbindungsmann (intelligence agent) of an Aufklärungskommando (reconnaissance commando) of the Reichswehr, assigned to influence other soldiers and to infiltrate the German Workers' Party (DAP). While monitoring the activities of the DAP, Hitler was attracted to the founder Anton Drexler's anti-Semitic, nationalist, anti-capitalist, and anti-Marxist ideas.^[74] Drexler favoured a strong active government, a non-Jewish version of socialism, and solidarity among all members of society. Impressed with Hitler's oratorical skills, Drexler invited him to join the DAP. Hitler accepted on 12 September 1919,^[75] becoming party member 555 (the party began counting membership at 500 to give the impression they were a much larger party).^[76]

At the DAP, Hitler met Dietrich Eckart, one of the party's founders and a member of the occult Thule Society.^[77] Eckart became Hitler's mentor, exchanging ideas with him and introducing him to a wide range of Munich society.^[78] To increase its appeal, the DAP changed its name to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers Party; NSDAP).^[79] Hitler designed the party's banner of a swastika in a white circle on a red background.^[80]

Hitler was discharged from the army on 31 March 1920 and began working full-time for the NSDAP.^[81] The party headquarters was in Munich, a hotbed of anti-government German nationalists determined to crush Marxism and undermine the Weimar Republic.^[82] In February 1921—already highly effective at speaking to large audiences—he spoke to a crowd of over 6,000.^[83] To publicise the meeting, two truckloads of party supporters drove around Munich waving swastika flags and distributing leaflets. Hitler soon gained notoriety for his rowdy polemic speeches against the Treaty of Versailles, rival politicians, and especially against Marxists and Jews.^[84]

Hitler poses for the camera, 1930

In June 1921, while Hitler and Eckart were on a fundraising trip to Berlin, a mutiny broke out within the NSDAP in Munich. Members of its executive committee wanted to merge with the rival German Socialist Party (DSP).^[85] Hitler returned to Munich on 11 July and angrily tendered his resignation. The committee members realised that the resignation of their leading public figure and speaker would mean the end of the party.^[86] Hitler announced he would rejoin on the condition that he would replace Drexler as party chairman, and that the party headquarters would remain in Munich.^[87] The committee agreed, and he rejoined the party on 26 July as member 3,680. Hitler continued to face some opposition within the NSDAP: Opponents of Hitler in the leadership had Hermann Esser expelled from the party, and they printed 3,000 copies of a pamphlet attacking Hitler as a traitor to the party.^[87]^[b] In the following days, Hitler spoke to several packed houses and defended himself and Esser, to thunderous applause. His strategy proved successful, and at a special party congress on 29 July, he was granted absolute powers as party chairman, replacing Drexler, by a vote of 533 to 1.^[88]

Hitler's vitriolic beer hall speeches began attracting regular audiences. He became adept at using populist themes, including the use of scapegoats, who were blamed for his listeners' economic hardships.^[89]^[90]^[91] Hitler used personal magnetism and an understanding of crowd psychology to his advantage while engaged in public speaking.^[92]^[93] Historians have noted the hypnotic effect of his rhetoric on large audiences, and of his eyes in small groups.^[94] Alfons Heck, a former member of the Hitler Youth, later recalled:

We erupted into a frenzy of nationalistic pride that bordered on hysteria. For minutes on end, we shouted at the top of our lungs, with tears streaming down our faces: Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil! From that moment on, I belonged to Adolf Hitler body and soul.^[95]

Some visitors who met Hitler privately noted that his appearance and demeanour failed to make a lasting impression.^[96]^[97]

Early followers included Rudolf Hess, former air force ace Hermann Göring, and army captain Ernst Röhm. Röhm became head of the Nazis' paramilitary organisation, the Sturmabteilung (SA, "Stormtroopers"), which protected meetings and attacked political opponents. A critical influence on Hitler's thinking during this period was the Aufbau Vereinigung,^[98] a conspiratorial group of White Russian exiles and early National Socialists. The group, financed with funds channelled from wealthy industrialists, introduced Hitler to the idea of a Jewish conspiracy, linking international finance with Bolshevism.^[99]

Beer Hall Putsch

Defendants in the Beer Hall Putsch trial. From left to right: Pernet, Weber, Frick, Kiebel, Ludendorff, Hitler, Bruckner, Röhm, and Wagner.

In 1923 Hitler enlisted the help of World War I General Erich Ludendorff for an attempted coup known as the "Beer Hall Putsch". The NSDAP used Italian Fascism as a model for their appearance and policies. Hitler wanted to emulate Benito Mussolini's "March on Rome" of 1922 by staging his own coup in Bavaria, to be followed by a challenge to the government in Berlin. Hitler and Ludendorff sought the support of Staatskommissar (state commissioner) Gustav Ritter von Kahr, Bavaria's de facto ruler. However, Kahr, along with Police Chief Hans Ritter von Seisser and Reichswehr General Otto von Lossow, wanted to install a nationalist dictatorship without Hitler.^[100]

On 8 November 1923 Hitler and the SA stormed a public meeting of 3,000 people organised by Kahr in the Bürgerbräukeller, a beer hall in Munich. Interrupting Kahr's speech, he announced that the national revolution had begun and declared the formation of a new government with Ludendorff.^[101] Retiring to a back room, Hitler, with handgun drawn, demanded and got the support of Kahr, Seisser, and Lossow.^[101] Hitler's forces initially succeeded in occupying the local Reichswehr and police headquarters, but Kahr and his cohorts quickly withdrew their support. Neither the army nor the state police joined forces with Hitler.^[102] The next day, Hitler and his followers marched from the beer hall to the Bavarian War Ministry to overthrow the Bavarian government, but police dispersed them.^[103] Sixteen NSDAP members and four police officers were killed in the failed coup.^[104]

Dust jacket of Mein Kampf (1926–27)

Hitler fled to the home of Ernst Hanfstaengl and by some accounts contemplated suicide.^[105] He was depressed but calm when arrested on 11 November 1923 for high treason.^[106] His trial before the special People's Court in Munich began in February 1924,^[107] and Alfred Rosenberg became temporary leader of the NSDAP. On 1 April, Hitler was sentenced to five years' imprisonment at Landsberg Prison.^[108] There, he received friendly treatment from the guards, and he was allowed mail from supporters and regular visits by party comrades. Pardoned by the Bavarian Supreme Court, he was released from jail on 20 December 1924, against the state prosecutor's objections.^[109] Including time on remand, Hitler served just over one year in prison.^[110]

While at Landsberg, Hitler dictated most of the first volume of Mein Kampf (My Struggle; originally entitled Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice) to his deputy, Rudolf Hess.^[110] The book, dedicated to Thule Society member Dietrich Eckart, was an autobiography and exposition of his ideology. The book laid out Hitler's plans for transforming German society into one based on race. Some passages implied genocide.^[111] Published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926, it sold 228,000 copies between 1925 and 1932. One million copies were sold in 1933, Hitler's first year in office.^[112]
Shortly before Hitler was eligible for parole, the Bavarian government attempted to have him deported back to Austria.^[113] The Austrian federal chancellor rejected the request on the specious grounds that his service in the German Army made his Austrian citizenship void.^[114] In response, Hitler formally renounced his Austrian citizenship on 7 April 1925.^[114]

Rebuilding the NSDAP

At the time of Hitler's release from prison, politics in Germany had become less combative and the economy had improved, limiting Hitler's opportunities for political agitation. As a result of the failed Beer Hall Putsch, the NSDAP and its affiliated organisations were banned in Bavaria. In a meeting with Prime Minister of Bavaria Heinrich Held on 4 January 1925, Hitler agreed to respect the authority of the state and promised that he would seek political power only through the democratic process. The meeting paved the way for the ban on the NSDAP to be lifted on 16 February.^[115] Hitler was barred from public speaking by the Bavarian authorities, a ban that remained in place until 1927.^[116]^[117] To advance his political ambitions in spite of the ban, Hitler appointed Gregor Strasser, Otto Strasser, and Joseph Goebbels to organise and grow the NSDAP in northern Germany. A superb organiser, Gregor Strasser steered a more independent political course, emphasising the socialist elements of the party's programme.^[118]
The stock market in the United States crashed on 24 October 1929. The impact in Germany was dire: millions were thrown out of work and several major banks collapsed. Hitler and the NSDAP prepared to take advantage of the emergency to gain support for their party. They promised to repudiate the Versailles Treaty, strengthen the economy, and provide jobs.^[119]

Rise to power

Main article: Adolf Hitler's rise to power

NSDAP election results^[120]
Election	Total votes	% votes	Reichstag seats	Notes
May 1924	1,918,300	6.5	32	Hitler in prison
December 1924	907,300	3.0	14	Hitler released from prison
May 1928	810,100	2.6	12
September 1930	6,409,600	18.3	107	After the financial crisis
July 1932	13,745,000	37.3	230	After Hitler was candidate for presidency
November 1932	11,737,000	33.1	196
March 1933	17,277,180	43.9	288	Only partially free; During Hitler's term as chancellor of Germany

Brüning administration

The Great Depression provided a political opportunity for Hitler. Germans were ambivalent about the parliamentary republic, which faced challenges from right- and left-wing extremists. The moderate political parties were increasingly unable to stem the tide of extremism, and the German referendum of 1929 helped to elevate Nazi ideology.^[121] The elections of September 1930 resulted in the break-up of a grand coalition and its replacement with a minority cabinet. Its leader, chancellor Heinrich Brüning of the Centre Party, governed through emergency decrees from President Paul von Hindenburg. Governance by decree became the new norm and paved the way for authoritarian forms of government.^[122] The NSDAP rose from obscurity to win 18.3 per cent of the vote and 107 parliamentary seats in the 1930 election, becoming the second-largest party in parliament.^[123]

Hitler and NSDAP treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz at the dedication of the renovation of the Palais Barlow on Brienner Straße in Munich into the Brown House headquarters, December 1930

Hitler made a prominent appearance at the trial of two Reichswehr officers, Lieutenants Richard Scheringer and Hans Ludin, in late 1930. Both were charged with membership in the NSDAP, at that time illegal for Reichswehr personnel.^[124] The prosecution argued that the NSDAP was an extremist party, prompting defence lawyer Hans Frank to call on Hitler to testify.^[125] On 25 September 1930, Hitler testified that his party would pursue political power solely through democratic elections,^[126] which won him many supporters in the officer corps.^[127]

Brüning's austerity measures brought little economic improvement and were extremely unpopular.^[128] Hitler exploited this by targeting his political messages specifically at people who had been affected by the inflation of the 1920s and the Depression, such as farmers, war veterans, and the middle class.^[129]
Although Hitler had terminated his Austrian citizenship in 1925, he did not acquire German citizenship for almost seven years. This meant he was stateless, unable to run for public office, and still faced the risk of deportation.^[130] On 25 February 1932, the interior minister of Brunswick, Dietrich Klagges, who was a member of the NSDAP, appointed Hitler as administrator for the state's delegation to the Reichsrat in Berlin, making Hitler a citizen of Brunswick,^[131] and thus of Germany.^[132]

In 1932, Hitler ran against Hindenburg in the presidential elections. A 27 January 1932 speech to the Industry Club in Düsseldorf won him support from many of Germany's most powerful industrialists.^[133] Hindenburg had support from various nationalist, monarchist, Catholic, and republican parties, and some Social Democrats. Hitler used the campaign slogan "Hitler über Deutschland" ("Hitler over Germany"), a reference to his political ambitions and his campaigning by aircraft.^[134] He was one of the first politicians to use aircraft travel for political purposes, and utilised it effectively.^[135]^[136] Hitler came in second in both rounds of the election, garnering more than 35 per cent of the vote in the final election. Although he lost to Hindenburg, this election established Hitler as a strong force in German politics.^[137]

Appointment as chancellor

The absence of an effective government prompted two influential politicians, Franz von Papen and Alfred Hugenberg, along with several other industrialists and businessmen, to write a letter to Hindenburg. The signers urged Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as leader of a government "independent from parliamentary parties", which could turn into a movement that would "enrapture millions of people".^[138]^[139]

Hitler, at the window of the Reich Chancellery, receives an ovation on the evening of his inauguration as chancellor, 30 January 1933

Hindenburg reluctantly agreed to appoint Hitler as chancellor after two further parliamentary elections—in July and November 1932—had not resulted in the formation of a majority government. Hitler headed a short-lived coalition government formed by the NSDAP and Hugenberg's party, the German National People's Party (DNVP). On 30 January 1933, the new cabinet was sworn in during a brief ceremony in Hindenburg's office. The NSDAP gained three posts: Hitler was named chancellor, Wilhelm Frick Minister of the Interior, and Hermann Göring Minister of the Interior for Prussia.^[140] Hitler had insisted on the ministerial positions as a way to gain control over the police in much of Germany.^[141]

Reichstag fire and March elections

As chancellor, Hitler worked against attempts by the NSDAP's opponents to build a majority government. Because of the political stalemate, he asked Hindenburg to again dissolve the Reichstag, and elections were scheduled for early March. On 27 February 1933, the Reichstag building was set on fire. Göring blamed a communist plot, because Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe was found in incriminating circumstances inside the burning building.^[142] According to the British historian Sir Ian Kershaw, the consensus of nearly all historians is that van der Lubbe actually set the fire.^[143] Others, including William L. Shirer and Alan Bullock, are of the opinion that the NSDAP itself was responsible.^[144]^[145] At Hitler's urging, Hindenburg responded with the Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February, which suspended basic rights and allowed detention without trial. The decree was permitted under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which gave the president the power to take emergency measures to protect public safety and order.^[146] Activities of the German Communist Party (KPD) were suppressed, and some 4,000 communist party members were arrested.^[147]

In addition to political campaigning, the NSDAP engaged in paramilitary violence and the spread of anti-communist propaganda in the days preceding the election. On election day, 6 March 1933, the NSDAP's share of the vote increased to 43.9 per cent, and the party acquired the largest number of seats in parliament. Hitler's party failed to secure an absolute majority, necessitating another coalition with the DNVP.^[148]

Day of Potsdam and the Enabling Act

Paul von Hindenburg and Adolf Hitler on the Day of Potsdam, 21 March 1933

On 21 March 1933, the new Reichstag was constituted with an opening ceremony at the Garrison Church in Potsdam. This "Day of Potsdam" was held to demonstrate unity between the Nazi movement and the old Prussian elite and military. Hitler appeared in a morning coat and humbly greeted Hindenburg.^[149]^[150]
To achieve full political control despite not having an absolute majority in parliament, Hitler's government brought the Ermächtigungsgesetz (Enabling Act) to a vote in the newly elected Reichstag. The Act—officially titled the Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich ("Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich")—gave Hitler's cabinet the power to enact laws without the consent of the Reichstag for four years. These laws could (with certain exceptions) deviate from the constitution.^[151] Since it would affect the constitution, the Enabling Act required a two-thirds majority to pass. Leaving nothing to chance, the Nazis used the provisions of the Reichstag Fire Decree to arrest all 81 Communist deputies (in spite of their virulent campaign against the party, the Nazis had allowed the KPD to contest the election^[152]) and prevent several Social Democrats from attending.^[153]

On 23 March 1933, the Reichstag assembled at the Kroll Opera House under turbulent circumstances. Ranks of SA men served as guards inside the building, while large groups outside opposing the proposed legislation shouted slogans and threats towards the arriving members of parliament.^[154] The position of the Centre Party, the third largest party in the Reichstag, was decisive. After Hitler verbally promised party leader Ludwig Kaas that Hindenburg would retain his power of veto, Kaas announced the Centre Party would support the Enabling Act. The Act passed by a vote of 441–84, with all parties except the Social Democrats voting in favour. The Enabling Act, along with the Reichstag Fire Decree, transformed Hitler's government into a de facto legal dictatorship.^[155]

Removal of remaining limits

At the risk of appearing to talk nonsense I tell you that the National Socialist movement will go on for 1,000 years! ... Don't forget how people laughed at me 15 years ago when I declared that one day I would govern Germany. They laugh now, just as foolishly, when I declare that I shall remain in power!^[156]

— Adolf Hitler to a British correspondent in Berlin, June 1934

Having achieved full control over the legislative and executive branches of government, Hitler and his allies began to suppress the remaining opposition. The Social Democratic Party was banned and its assets seized.^[157] While many trade union delegates were in Berlin for May Day activities, SA stormtroopers demolished union offices around the country. On 2 May 1933 all trade unions were forced to dissolve and their leaders were arrested. Some were sent to concentration camps.^[158] The German Labour Front was formed as an umbrella organisation to represent all workers, administrators, and company owners, thus reflecting the concept of national socialism in the spirit of Hitler's Volksgemeinschaft ("people's community").^[159]

In 1934, Hitler became Germany's head of state with the title of Führer und Reichskanzler (leader and chancellor of the Reich).

By the end of June, the other parties had been intimidated into disbanding. This included the Nazis' nominal coalition partner, the DNVP; with the SA's help, Hitler forced its leader, Hugenberg, to resign on 29 June. On 14 July 1933, the NSDAP was declared the only legal political party in Germany.^[159]^[157] The demands of the SA for more political and military power caused anxiety among military, industrial, and political leaders. In response, Hitler purged the entire SA leadership in the Night of the Long Knives, which took place from 30 June to 2 July 1934.^[160] Hitler targeted Ernst Röhm and other SA leaders who, along with a number of Hitler's political adversaries (such as Gregor Strasser and former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher), were rounded up, arrested, and shot.^[161] While the international community and some Germans were shocked by the murders, many in Germany believed Hitler was restoring order.^[162]

On 2 August 1934, Hindenburg died. The previous day, the cabinet had enacted the "Law Concerning the Highest State Office of the Reich".^[163] This law stated that upon Hindenburg's death, the office of president would be abolished and its powers merged with those of the chancellor. Hitler thus became head of state as well as head of government, and was formally named as Führer und Reichskanzler (leader and chancellor).^[164] With this action, Hitler eliminated the last legal remedy by which he could be removed from office.^[165]

As head of state, Hitler became supreme commander of the armed forces. The traditional loyalty oath of servicemen was altered to affirm loyalty to Hitler personally, by name, rather than to the office of supreme commander or the state.^[166] On 19 August, the merger of the presidency with the chancellorship was approved by 90 per cent of the electorate voting in a plebiscite.^[167]

Hitler's personal standard

In early 1938, Hitler used blackmail to consolidate his hold over the military by instigating the Blomberg–Fritsch Affair. Hitler forced his War Minister, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, to resign by using a police dossier that showed that Blomberg's new wife had a record for prostitution.^[168]^[169] Army commander Colonel-General Werner von Fritsch was removed after the Schutzstaffel (SS) produced allegations that he had engaged in a homosexual relationship.^[170] Both men had fallen into disfavour because they objected to Hitler's demand to make the Wehrmacht ready for war as early as 1938.^[171] Hitler assumed Blomberg's title of Commander-in-Chief, thus taking personal command of the armed forces. He replaced the Ministry of War with the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command: OKW), headed by General Wilhelm Keitel. On the same day, sixteen generals were stripped of their commands and 44 more were transferred; all were suspected of not being sufficiently pro-Nazi.^[172] By early February 1938, twelve more generals had been removed.^[173]

Hitler took care to give his dictatorship the appearance of legality. Many of his decrees were explicitly based on the Reichstag Fire Decree and hence on Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. The Reichstag renewed the Enabling Act twice, each time for a four-year period.^[174] While elections to the Reichstag were still held (in 1933, 1936, and 1938), voters were presented with a single list of Nazis and pro-Nazi "guests" which carried with well over 90 percent of the vote.^[175] These elections were held in far-from-secret conditions; the Nazis threatened severe reprisals against anyone who didn't vote or dared to vote no.^[176]

You can keep track of the sequence of events that led to the outbreak of World War II by completing a table like the one below.

Note Taking
Reading Skill: Recognize Sequence

Complete this timetable of German aggression as you read.

The German Path to War

Hitler pursued his goal of bringing all German-speaking people into the Third Reich. He also took steps to gain “living space” for Germans in Eastern Europe. Hitler, who believed in the superiority of the German people, or “Aryan race,” thought that Germany had a right to conquer the inferior Slavs to the east. “Nature is cruel,” he claimed, “therefore we, too, may be cruel. . . .I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin.”

Hitler on the History of the Aryan Race (Mein Kampf in English), 3:10

https://youtu.be/m4trUdPUO_8

Throughout the 1930s, challenges to peace followed a pattern. Dictators took aggressive action but met only verbal protests and pleas for peace from the democracies. Mussolini, Hitler, and the leaders of Japan viewed that desire for peace as weakness and responded with new acts of aggression. With hindsight, we can see the shortcomings of the democracies’ policies. These policies, however, were the product of long and careful deliberation. At the time, some people believed they would work.

The First Steps

Hitler, too, had tested the will of the Western democracies and found it weak. First, he built up the German military in defiance of the treaty that had ended World War I. Then, in 1936, he sent troops into the “demilitarized” Rhineland bordering France—another treaty violation.

Germans hated the Versailles treaty, and Hitler’s successful challenge made him more popular at home. The Western democracies denounced his moves but took no real action. Instead, they adopted a policy of appeasement, or giving in to the demands of an aggressor in order to to keep the peace.

The Western policy of appeasement developed for a number of reasons. France was demoralized, suffering from political divisions at home. It could not take on Hitler without British support. The British, however, had no desire to confront the German dictator. Some even thought that Hitler’s actions constituted a justifiable response to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which they believed had been too harsh on Germany.

In both Britain and France, many saw Hitler and fascism as a defense against a worse evil—the spread of Soviet communism. Additionally, the Great Depression sapped the energies of the Western democracies. Finally, widespread pacifism, or opposition to all war, and disgust with the destruction from the previous war pushed many governments to seek peace at any price.

As war clouds gathered in Europe in the mid-1930s, the United States Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts. One law forbade the sale of arms to any nation at war. Others outlawed loans to warring nations and prohibited Americans from traveling on ships of warring powers. The fundamental goal of American policy, however, was to avoid involvement in a European war, not to prevent such a conflict.

New Alliances

In the face of the apparent weakness of Britain, France, and the United States, Germany, Italy, and Japan formed what became known as the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis. Known as the Axis powers, the three nations agreed to fight Soviet communism. They also agreed not to interfere with one another’s plans for territorial expansion. The agreement cleared the way for these anti-democratic, aggressor powers to take even bolder steps.

In Italy, Mussolini decided to act on his own imperialist ambitions. Italy’s defeat by the Ethiopians at the battle of Adowa in 1896 still rankled. In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia, located in northeastern Africa. Although the Ethiopians resisted bravely, their outdated weapons were no match for Mussolini’s tanks, machine guns, poison gas, and airplanes. The Ethiopian king Haile Selassie (hy luh suh lah see) appealed to the League of Nations for help. The League voted sanctions against Italy for violating international law. But the League had no power to enforce the sanctions, and by early 1936, Italy had conquered Ethiopia.

Union with Austria

From the beginning, Nazi propaganda had found fertile ground in Austria. By 1938, Hitler was ready to engineer the Anschluss (ahn shloos), or union of Austria and Germany. Early that year, he forced the Austrian chancellor to appoint Nazis to key cabinet posts. When the Austrian leader balked at other demands in March, Hitler sent in the German army to “preserve order.” To indicate his new role as ruler of Austria, Hitler made a speech from the Hofburg Palace, the former residence of the Hapsburg emperors.

The Anschluss violated the Versailles treaty and created a brief war scare. Some Austrians favored annexation. Hitler quickly silenced any Austrians who opposed it. And since the Western democracies took no action, Hitler easily had his way.

Demands and Appeasement

Germany turned next to Czechoslovakia. At first, Hitler insisted that the three million Germans in the Sudetenland (soo day tun land)—a region of western Czechoslovakia—be given autonomy. Czechoslovakia was one of only two remaining democracies in Eastern Europe. (Finland was the other.) Still, Britain and France were not willing to go to war to save it. As British and French leaders searched for a peaceful solution, Hitler increased his demands. The Sudetenland, he said, must be annexed to Germany.

At the Munich Conference in September 1938, British and French leaders again chose appeasement. They caved in to Hitler’s demands and then persuaded the Czechs to surrender the Sudetenland without a fight. In exchange, Hitler assured Britain and France that he had no further plans to expand his territory.

After the horrors of World War I, Western democracies desperately tried to preserve peace during the 1930s while ignoring signs that the rulers of Germany, Italy, and Japan were preparing to build new empires. Despite the best efforts of Neville Chamberlain and other Western leaders, the world was headed to war again.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain spoke to a jubilant crowd upon returning to London from a conference with Adolf Hitler in Munich, Germany, in September 1938:

“For the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time . . . Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”

"Peace in our Time," Chamberlain, September 1938, 3:24

https://youtu.be/kmH5A6QsqRY

Great Britain and France React

Hitler and the Soviets

Just as Churchill predicted, Europe plunged rapidly toward war. In March 1939, Hitler broke his promises and gobbled up the rest of Czechoslovakia. The democracies finally accepted the fact that appeasement had failed. At last thoroughly alarmed, they promised to protect Poland, most likely the next target of Hitler’s expansion.

In August 1939, Hitler stunned the world by announcing a nonaggression pact with his great enemy—Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator. Publicly, the Nazi-Soviet Pact bound Hitler and Stalin to peaceful relations. Secretly, the two agreed not to fight if the other went to war and to divide up Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe between them.

Stalin-Hitler pact commemorated, 3:58

https://youtu.be/clBOxBUqEQI

The pact was based not on friendship or respect but on mutual need. Hitler feared communism as Stalin feared fascism. But Hitler wanted a free hand in Poland. Also, he did not want to fight a war with the Western democracies and the Soviet Union at the same time. For his part, Stalin had sought allies among the Western democracies against the Nazi menace. Mutual suspicions, however, kept them apart. By joining with Hitler, Stalin tried to protect the Soviet Union from the threat of war with Germany and grabbed a chance to gain land in Eastern Europe.

        Hitler in Germany 1216

Stalin in Russia 1221

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (/ˈstɑːlɪn/;^[1] birth surname: Jughashvili; 18 December 1878^[2] – 5 March 1953) was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Holding the post of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he was effectively the dictator of the state.

Stalin was one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 in order to manage the Bolshevik Revolution, alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Sokolnikov and Bubnov.^[3] Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917, Stalin was appointed General Secretary of the party's Central Committee in 1922. He subsequently managed to consolidate power following the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin by suppressing Lenin's criticisms (in the postscript of his testament) and expanding the functions of his role, all the while eliminating any opposition. He remained General Secretary until the post was abolished in 1952, concurrently serving as the Premier of the Soviet Union from 1941 onward.

Under Stalin's rule, the concept of "Socialism in One Country" became a central tenet of Soviet society, contrary to Leon Trotsky's view that socialism must be spread through continuous international revolutions. He replaced the New Economic Policy introduced by Lenin in the early 1920s with a highly centralised command economy, launching a period of industrialization and collectivization that resulted in the rapid transformation of the USSR from an agrarian society into an industrial power.^[4] However, the economic changes coincided with the imprisonment of millions of people in Gulag labour camps.^[5] The initial upheaval in agriculture disrupted food production and contributed to the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932–33, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor. Between 1934 and 1939 he organized and led a massive purge (known as "Great Purge") of the party, government, armed forces and intelligentsia, in which millions of so-called "enemies of the working class" were imprisoned, exiled or executed, often without due process. Major figures in the Communist Party and government, and many Red Army high commanders, were killed after being convicted of treason in show trials.^[6]

In August 1939, after failed attempts to conclude anti-Hitler pacts with other major European powers, Stalin entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that divided their influence and territory within Eastern Europe, resulting in their invasion of Poland in September of that year, but Germany later violated the agreement and launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Despite heavy human and territorial losses, Soviet forces managed to halt the Nazi incursion after the decisive Battles of Moscow and Stalingrad. After defeating the Axis powers on the Eastern Front, the Red Army captured Berlin in May 1945, effectively ending the war in Europe for the Allies.^[7]^[8] The Soviet Union subsequently emerged as one of two recognized world superpowers, the other being the United States.^[9] Communist governments loyal to the Soviet Union were established in most countries freed from German occupation by the Red Army, which later constituted the Eastern Bloc. Stalin also had close relations with Mao Zedong in China and Kim Il-sung in North Korea.

Stalin led the Soviet Union through its post-war reconstruction phase, which saw a significant rise in tension with the Western world that would later be known as the Cold War. During this period, the USSR became the second country in the world to successfully develop a nuclear weapon, as well as launching the Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature in response to another widespread famine and the Great Construction Projects of Communism. In the years following his death, Stalin and his regime have been condemned on numerous occasions, most notably in 1956 when his successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced his legacy and initiated a process of de-Stalinization and rehabilitation to victims of his regime. Stalin remains a controversial figure today, with many regarding him as a tyrant.^[10] However, popular opinion within the Russian Federation is mixed.^[11]^[12]^[13] The exact number of deaths caused by Stalin's regime is still a subject of debate, but it is widely agreed to be in the order of millions.
Mini BIO - Joseph Stalin, 4:05

Watch a short video biography on Stalin's life, including his rise to Soviet power, his part in the October Revolution, and his murderous reign. Learn more about Joseph Stalin: http://bit.ly/V4N7zi History's most ruthless leaders are exposed in our Dictators, Tyrants and Despots playlist: http://bit.ly/1go5LmL Find out the major players in the war that changed international relations in our World War II Leaders, Luminaries and Tyrants playlist: http://bit.ly/1stclYR Learn more about Famous Name Changers: http://bit.ly/V4Nh9O Joseph Stalin's rise to power began during the October Revolution, when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsar and created a Communist Society. His forced industrialization of the Soviet Union caused the worst man-made famine in history.

https://youtu.be/e_2of8pmHYU



Mussolini in Italy 1223

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (Italian pronunciation: [beˈniːto mussoˈliːni];[1] 29 July 1883 – 28 April 1945) was an Italian politician, journalist, and leader of the National Fascist Party, ruling the country as Prime Minister from 1922 until he was ousted in 1943. He ruled constitutionally until 1925, when he dropped all pretense of democracy and set up a legal dictatorship. Known as Il Duce ("the leader"), Mussolini was the founder of fascism.[2][3][4]

In 1912 Mussolini was the leading member of the National Directorate of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI).[5] Prior to 1914 he was a keen supporter of the Socialist International, starting the series of meetings in Switzerland[6] that organised the communist revolutions and insurrections that swept through Europe from 1917. Mussolini was expelled from the PSI due to his opposition to the party's stance on neutrality in World War I. Mussolini denounced the PSI, and later founded the fascist movement. Following the March on Rome in October 1922 he became the youngest Prime Minister in Italian history until the appointment of Matteo Renzi in February 2014. After destroying all political opposition through his secret police and outlawing labor strikes,[7] Mussolini and his fascist followers consolidated their power through a series of laws that transformed the nation into a one-party dictatorship. Within five years he had established dictatorial authority by both legal and extraordinary means, aspiring to create a totalitarian state. Mussolini remained in power until he was deposed by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1943. A few months later, he became the leader of the Italian Social Republic, a German client regime in northern Italy; he held this post until his death in 1945.[8]
Mussolini sought to delay a major war in Europe until at least 1942. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, starting World War II. On 10 June 1940, with the Fall of France imminent, Mussolini officially entered the war on the side of Germany, though he was aware that Italy did not have the military capacity to carry out a long war with the United Kingdom.[9] Mussolini believed that after the imminent French armistice, Italy could gain territorial concessions from France and then he could concentrate his forces on a major offensive in Egypt, where British and Commonwealth forces were outnumbered by Italian forces.[10] However the UK refused to accept German proposals for a peace that would involve accepting Germany's victories in Eastern and Western Europe, plans for an invasion of the UK did not proceed, and the war continued. In the summer of 1941 Mussolini sent Italian forces to participate in the invasion of the Soviet Union, and war with the United States followed in December.

On 24 July 1943, soon after the start of the Allied invasion of Italy, the Grand Council of Fascism voted against him, and the King had him arrested the following day. On 12 September 1943, Mussolini was rescued from prison in the Gran Sasso raid by German special forces. In late April 1945, with total defeat looming, Mussolini attempted to escape north,[11] only to be quickly captured and summarily executed near Lake Como by Italian Communists. His body was then taken to Milan where it was hung upside down at a service station for public viewing and to provide confirmation of his demise.[12]

Benito Mussolini: Biography of Fascist Italy's Dictator, 5:00

As leader of Fascist Italy, he was 'Il Duce.' http://www.WatchMojo.com learns more about the life, rule and death of Benito Mussolini.

https://youtu.be/8OetedJuu4k

        Franco in Spain 1224

Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo Franco Bahamonde (Spanish pronunciation: [fɾanˈθisko ˈfɾaŋko ba.aˈmonde]; 4 December 1892 – 20 November 1975), more commonly known as Francisco Franco, was a Spanish general and the Caudillo of Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975. Coming from a military family background, he became the youngest general in Spain and one of the youngest generals in Europe in the 1920s.[1]
As a conservative monarchist, he rejected the removal of the monarchy and its replacement with a republic in 1931. With the 1936 elections, the conservative Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-wing Groups lost by a narrow margin and the leftist Popular Front came to power. Looking to overthrow the republic, Franco and other generals staged a partially successful coup, which started the Spanish Civil War. With the death of the other generals, Franco quickly became his faction's only leader.
Franco's Nationalist faction received military support from several fascist groups, especially Nazi Germany and the Kingdom of Italy, while the Republican side was supported by Spanish communists and anarchists as well as help from the Soviet Union, Mexico, and the International Brigades. Leaving half a million dead, the war was eventually won by Franco in 1939. He established a military dictatorship, which he defined as a totalitarian state.[2] Franco proclaimed himself Head of State and Government under the title El Caudillo (the Chief), a term similar to Il Duce (Italian) and Der Führer (German). During the Francoist regime, only one political party was legal: a merger of the monarchist party and the fascist party that helped him during the war, FET y de las JONS.

Franco led a series of politically-motivated violent acts, including but not limited to concentration camps, forced labor and executions, mostly against political and ideological enemies,[3][4][5][6][7] causing an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 deaths,[8][9] depending on how death in the more than 190 concentration camps is considered. Franco's Spain maintained an official policy of neutrality during World War II, although the German and Italian navies were allowed to use Spanish harbors from 1940 to 1943, Axis agents gathered intelligence in Spain on Allied activity, and the Blue Division fought alongside the European Axis Powers against the Soviet Union. By the 1950s, the nature of his regime changed from an extreme form of dictatorship to a semi-pluralist authoritarian system.[10] During the Cold War Franco appeared as one of the world's foremost anticommunist figures; consequently his regime was assisted by the West, and was asked to join the United Nations and come under NATO's protection. By the 1960s Spain saw progressive economic development and some democratic improvements.[11]

After a 36-year rule, Franco died in 1975. He restored the monarchy before his death, which made King Juan Carlos I his successor, who led the Spanish transition to democracy. After a referendum, a new constitution was adopted, which transformed Spain into a parliamentary democracy under a constitutional monarchy.

Francisco Franco - Saviour of Spain, 2:02

One State! One Country! One Chief! Franco! Franco! Franco!

"Franco presided over a government that was basically a military dictatorship, but he realized that it needed a regular civil structure to broaden its support; this was to be derived mainly from the antileftist middle classes. On April 19, 1937, he fused the Falange (the Spanish fascist party) with the Carlists and created the rebel regime's official political movement. While expanding the Falange into a more pluralistic group, Franco made it clear that it was the government that used the party and not the other way around. Thus, his regime became an institutionalized authoritarian system, differing in this respect from the fascist party-states of the German and Italian models.

As commander in chief during the Civil War, Franco was a careful and systematic leader. He made no rash moves and suffered only a few temporary defeats as his forces advanced slowly but steadily; the only major criticism directed at him during the campaign was that his strategy was frequently unimaginative. Nevertheless, because of the relatively superior military quality of his army and the continuation of heavy German and Italian assistance, Franco won a complete and unconditional victory on April 1, 1939."
-- http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...

https://youtu.be/8J7MKnTKB3I

    Revolution in Mexico 1224 The Mexican Revolution (Spanish: Revolución mexicana) was a major armed struggle ca. 1910–20 that radically transformed Mexican culture and government. Although recent research has focused on local and regional aspects of the Revolution, it was a "genuinely national revolution."[2]
The failure of the 35-year long regime of Porfirio Díaz to find a managed solution to the presidential succession meant there was a political crisis among competing elites and the opportunity for agrarian insurrection.[3] Francisco I. Madero, having lost the 1910 presidential election, revolted under the Plan of San Luis Potosí. This Plan declared the Díaz presidency illegitimate, named Madero as provisional president, called for democracy, and demanded the return of lands unjustly taken from Mexican villages.[4]
The armed conflict lasted for the better part of a decade, until around 1920, and had several distinct phases.[5] The period 1920–1940 is often considered to be a phase of the Revolution, during which power was consolidated and the revolutionary constitution of 1917 was implemented.[6] Over time the Revolution changed from a revolt against the established order under Díaz to a multi-sided civil war in particular regions with frequently shifting power struggles among factions in the Mexican Revolution. The Constitutionalist region of northern Mexico, led by Venustiano Carranza, was the victor in the military phase of the conflict. Northerner Pancho Villa joined the fight against Díaz and came to be a major military figure in the Mexican Revolution until 1915. Peasant leader Emiliano Zapata opposed the Díaz regime and consistently led the fight for campesinos in the state of Morelos for land reform in Mexico until his assassination in 1919.
The origins of the conflict were broadly based in opposition to the Díaz regime, with the 1910 election becoming the sparking point for the outbreak of a political rebellion. Elements of the Mexican elite hostile to Díaz, led by Madero, expanded to the middle class, the peasantry in some regions, and organized labor.[7] In October 1911, Madero was overwhelmingly elected in a free and fair election. Opposition to the Madero regime increased from both the conservatives, who saw him as too weak and too liberal, and from former revolutionary fighters and the dispossessed, who saw him as too conservative. In February 1913 Madero was assassinated.
General Victoriano Huerta leading the conseratives went from February 1913 on, to use most of the old Porfirian order, but riots the regime ensued in the North, under the leadership of the governor of the state of Coahuila, Venustiano Carranza, and in Morelos by peasant leader Emiliano Zapata. Anti-Huerta forces were unified to oust the president. Huerta was forced to resign in July 1914 after 17 months. The Revolution had grown increasingly broad based, radical, and violent. Many revolutionaries sought far-reaching social and economic reforms, restricting foreign investment and empowering Mexican workers and peasants via the state, while weakening conservative forces represented by the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico, wealthy landowners, and foreign capitalists.
In 1914, when the winners of the anti-Huerta struggle attempted to sort out a new revolutionary order via the Convention of Aguascalientes, that solution failed. Former allies now fought each other in another round of bloody civil war. Carranza and the best general of the Constitutionalist Army fought against former Constitutionalist general Pancho Villa, who allied with Zapata. The outcome of that civil war between revolutionaries was not a foregone conclusion, but in 1915 Constitutionalist general Obregón defeated Villa and the Constitutionalists under Carranza consolidated power. Zapata withdrew to Morelos and his followers returned to guerrilla warfare; Zapata was assassinated in 1919.
Following the Constitutionalists' military victory, Carranza became the pre-constitutional president of Mexico. Then, with the writing and ratification of a new constitution in 1917, he was elected the constitutional president. In 1920 when elections were to be held, Carranza attempted to impose a civilian as the leading candidate for the presidency. Northern generals Obregón and Adolfo de la Huerta challenged the decision via the Plan of Agua Prieta. President Carranza attempted to leave the country, but was assassinated en route. General Adolfo de la Huerta assumed the interim presidency, with the election of 1920 bringing General Alvaro Obregón to the presidency.
Out of a population of 15 million, the losses were high but numerical estimates vary a great deal. Perhaps 1.5 million people died; nearly 200,000 refugees fled abroad, especially to the United States.[1][8]
This armed conflict is often categorized as the most important sociopolitical event in Mexico and one of the greatest upheavals of the 20th century;[9] it resulted in an important program of experimentation and reform in social organization.[10]
Foreign powers' important economic and strategic interests figured in the outcome of power struggles in Mexico, with United States involvement in the Mexican Revolution playing an especially significant role.[11]
Some scholars consider the promulgation of the Mexican Constitution of 1917 as its end point. “Economic and social conditions improved in accordance with revolutionary policies, so that the new society took shape within a framework of official revolutionary institutions,” with the constitution providing that framework.[12]
The constitution built on liberal principles of the Constitution of 1857, after which the Constitutionalist movement was named, but changes from that document recognized the importance of groups participating in the Revolution, particularly organized labor and the peasantry. Organized labor gained significant power, as seen in Article 123 of the Constitution of 1917. Land reform in Mexico was enabled by Article 27 of the Constitution. Economic nationalism was also enabled by Article 27, restricting ownership of enterprises by foreigners. Also in the Constitution were further restrictions on the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico, which, when implemented in the late 1920s, resulted in major violence in the Cristero War. No re-election of the president was enshrined in the Constitution and in practice.
One major result of the revolution was the disappearance of the Federal Army in 1914, defeated by revolutionary forces of the various factions in the Mexican Revolution.[13] In 1915, the revolutionary army of Pancho Villa, the Division del Norte, also disappeared. Former revolutionary generals turned presidents of Mexico, Alvaro Obregón, Plutarco Elías Calles, and Lázaro Cárdenas took on the task in the 1920s and 1930s of diminishing the power and independence of those armies and asserting effective civilian control.[14]
Managing political succession was achieved in 1929 with the creation of the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), the political party that has dominated Mexico, is now called the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
0:02 / 3:21 Mexican Revolution Overview
https://youtu.be/guexZgUXkLQ

        The Mexican Mural Movement 1224
Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez, known as Diego Rivera (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈdjeɣo riˈβeɾa]; December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957) was a prominent Mexican painter. His large frescoes helped establish the Mexican Mural Movement in Mexican art. Between 1922 and 1953, Rivera painted murals among others in Mexico City, Chapingo, Cuernavaca, San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City.[2] In 1931, a retrospective exhibition of his works was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Rivera had a volatile marriage with fellow Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.

Mexican Muralists, 3:19
https://youtu.be/ViLS2EWZjng

        The Private World of Frida Kahlo 1228
Frida Kahlo de Rivera (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈfɾiða ˈkalo]; July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954), born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón,[1][3] was a Mexican painter known for her self-portraits.[4]
Kahlo's life began and ended in Mexico City, in her home, which is known as "La Casa Azul," the Blue House. Her work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and indigenous traditions, and by feminists for its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form.[5]
Mexican culture and tradition are important in her work, which has been sometimes characterized as naïve art or folk art.[6] Her work has also been described as surrealist, and in 1938 André Breton, principal initiator of the surrealist movement, described Kahlo's art as a "ribbon around a bomb".[5] Frida rejected the "surrealist" label imposed by Breton, as she argued that her work reflected more of her reality than her dreams.[7]
Kahlo had a volatile marriage with the famous Mexican artist Diego Rivera. She suffered lifelong health problems, many of which were caused by a traffic accident she survived as a teenager. Recovering from her injuries isolated her from other people, and this isolation influenced her works, many of which are self-portraits. Kahlo suggested, "I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best."[8]
The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo | PBS America, 1:57
PBS America | Sky 534 | Virgin Media 243 | pbsamerica.co.uk
Almost 50 years after her death, Frida Kahlo is acclaimed as one of the great painters of the 20th century. Amy Stechler's intimate biography profiles a woman who balanced a private life of illness and pain with a flamboyant and irreverent public persona.
Born in Mexico in 1907, Frida became an international sensation in the world of modern art and radical politics. At times a socialist and revolutionary, she counted Leon Trotsky among her lovers but Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Ford among her friends. Living through political upheaval throughout her life in Mexico, she remained in her home country while her international fame grew -- she was the first modern Mexican artist to have her work exhibited at the Louvre in Paris. Although plagued by ill health since contracting polio at the age of six and later being involved in a horrific traffic accident as a teenager, Kahlo remained a vibrant force in art and political circles, a symbol of empowerment for women and for the disabled. The influence of traditional Latino culture on her work has led to her recognition as a figurehead for its revival.
This fascinating film features interviews with many of Kahlo's friends, including author and historian Carlos Fuentes, along with a broad visual archive of her life, including photographs, movie clips and paintings from collections across the US and Mexico.
https://youtu.be/jYWKoMFjnbs

    The Great Depression in America 1228

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression that took place during the 1930s. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations; however, in most countries it started in 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s.[1] It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century.[2] In the 21st century, the Great Depression is commonly used as an example of how far the world's economy can decline.[3]

The depression originated in the United States, after a fall in stock prices that began around September 4, 1929, and became worldwide news with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929 (known as Black Tuesday). Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide GDP fell by an estimated 15%. By comparison, worldwide GDP fell by less than 1% from 2008 to 2009 during the Great Recession.[4] Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s. However, in many countries, the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until the beginning of World War II.[5]

The Great Depression had devastating effects in countries both rich and poor. Personal income, tax revenue, profits and prices dropped, while international trade plunged by more than 50%.

Unemployment in the U.S. rose to 25% and in some countries rose as high as 33%.[6]

Cities all around the world were hit hard, especially those dependent on heavy industry. Construction was virtually halted in many countries. Farming communities and rural areas suffered as crop prices fell by approximately 60%.[7][8][9] Facing plummeting demand with few alternate sources of jobs, areas dependent on primary sector industries such as mining and logging suffered the most.[10]

0:02 / 4:32 Thomas Sowell explains the Great Depression
https://youtu.be/AQQon4tjlSA

        The Road to Recovery: The New Deal 1228

Economists dispute how much weight to give the stock market crash of October 1929. According to Milton Friedman, "the stock market in 1929 played a role in the initial depression." It clearly changed sentiment about and expectations of the future, shifting the outlook from very positive to negative, with a dampening effect on investment and entrepreneurship, but some feel that an increase in interest rates by the Federal government could have also caused the slow steps into the downturn towards the Great Depression.[9] Thomas Sowell, on the other hand, notes that the rise in unemployment had peaked at 9% two months after the crash, and had fallen to 6.3% by June – he blames the later unemployment rate on the tariffs that Hoover passed against the advice of economists in that same month, and says that six months after their implementation unemployment rose to the double digit figures that characterized that decade.[10] Recent research has pointed to the effects of capital taxation on property, capital stock, excess profits, undistributed profits, and dividends on the severity of the Great Depression, noting such taxation's role in significant declines in investment and equity values and nontrivial declines in gross domestic product and hours of work.[11]

    Cinema: The Talkies and Color 1233

In the 1920s, the development of electronic sound recording technologies made it practical to incorporate a soundtrack of speech, music and sound effects synchronized with the action on the screen. The resulting sound films were initially distinguished from the usual silent "moving pictures" or "movies" by calling them "talking pictures" or "talkies."[citation needed] The revolution they wrought was swift. By 1930, silent film was practically extinct in the US and already being referred to as "the old medium."
Colour

Another major technological development was the introduction of "natural color," which meant color that was photographically recorded from nature rather than added to black-and-white prints by hand-coloring, stencil-coloring or other arbitrary procedures, although the earliest processes typically yielded colors which were far from "natural" in appearance. While the advent of sound films quickly made silent films and theater musicians obsolete, color replaced black-and-white much more gradually. The pivotal innovation was the introduction of the three-strip version of the Technicolor process, first used for animated cartoons in 1932, then also for live-action short films and isolated sequences in a few feature films, then for an entire feature film, Becky Sharp, in 1935. The expense of the process was daunting, but favorable public response in the form of increased box office receipts usually justified the added cost. The number of films made in color slowly increased year after year.

From Silents to Talkies; a short silent film, 2:47

https://youtu.be/4sXlWoDoRXA

        Sound and Language 1234

        Disney’s Color Animation 1234

The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney, is an American diversified[2]:1 multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California. It is the world's second largest media conglomerate in terms of revenue, after Comcast.[3] Disney was founded on October 16, 1923, by Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, and established itself as a leader in the American animation industry before diversifying into live-action film production, television, and theme parks. The company also operated under the names The Walt Disney Studio, then Walt Disney Productions. Taking on its current name in 1986, it expanded its existing operations and also started divisions focused upon theater, radio, music, publishing, and online media.
In addition, Disney has since created corporate divisions in order to market more mature content than is typically associated with its flagship family-oriented brands. The company is best known for the products of its film studio, The Walt Disney Studios, which is today one of the largest and best-known studios in American cinema. Disney also owns and operates the ABC broadcast television network; cable television networks such as Disney Channel, ESPN, A+E Networks, and ABC Family; publishing, merchandising, music, and theatre divisions; and owns and licenses 14 theme parks around the world. The company has been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since May 6, 1991. An early and well-known cartoon creation of the company, Mickey Mouse, is a primary symbol of The Walt Disney Company.

1923–28: The silent era

In early 1923, Kansas City, Missouri, animator Walt Disney created a short film entitled Alice's Wonderland, which featured child actress Virginia Davis interacting with animated characters. After the bankruptcy in 1923 of his previous firm, Laugh-O-Gram Studios,^{[ChWDC 1]} Disney moved to Hollywood to join his brother, Roy O. Disney. Film distributor Margaret J. Winkler of M.J. Winkler Productions contacted Disney with plans to distribute a whole series of Alice Comedies purchased for $1,500 per reel with Disney as a production partner. Walt and Roy Disney formed Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio that same year. More animated films followed after Alice.^[5] In January 1926, with the completion of the Disney studio on Hyperion Street, the Disney Brothers Studio's name was changed to the Walt Disney Studio.^{[ChWDC 2]}
After the demise of the Alice comedies, Disney developed an all-cartoon series starring his first original character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit,^[5] which was distributed by Winkler Pictures through Universal Pictures.^{[ChWDC 2]} The distributor owned Oswald, so Disney only made a few hundred dollars.^[5] Disney completed 26 Oswald shorts before losing the contract in February 1928, due to a legal loophole, when Winkler's husband Charles Mintz took over their distribution company. After failing to take over the Disney Studio, Mintz hired away four of Disney's primary animators (the exception being Ub Iwerks) to start his own animation studio, Snappy Comedies.^{[ChWDC 3]}

1928–34: Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies

Original poster for Flowers and Trees (1932).

In 1928, to recover from the loss of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Disney came up with the idea of a mouse character named Mortimer while on a train headed to California, drawing up a few simple drawings. The mouse was later renamed Mickey Mouse (Disney's wife, Lillian, disliked the sound of 'Mortimer Mouse') and starred in several Disney produced films. Ub Iwerks refined Disney's initial design of Mickey Mouse.^[5] Disney's first sound film Steamboat Willie, a cartoon starring Mickey, was released on November 18, 1928^{[ChWDC 3]} through Pat Powers' distribution company.^[5] It was the first Mickey Mouse sound cartoon released, but the third to be created, behind Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho.^{[ChWDC 3]} Steamboat Willie was an immediate smash hit, and its initial success was attributed not just to Mickey's appeal as a character, but to the fact that it was the first cartoon to feature synchronized sound.^[5] Disney used Pat Powers' Cinephone system, created by Powers using Lee De Forest's Phonofilm system.^{[ChWDC 3]} Steamboat Willie premiered at B. S. Moss's Colony Theater in New York City, now The Broadway Theatre.^[6] Disney's Plane Crazy and The Galloping Gaucho were then retrofitted with synchronized sound tracks and re-released successfully in 1929.^{[ChWDC 3]}

Disney continued to produce cartoons with Mickey Mouse and other characters,^[5] and began the Silly Symphonies series with Columbia Pictures signing on as Symphonies distributor in August 1929. In September 1929, theater manager Harry Woodin requested permission to start a Mickey Mouse Club which Walt approved. In November, test comics strips were sent to King Features, who requested additional samples to show to the publisher, William Randolph Hearst. On December 16, the Walt Disney Studios partnership was reorganized as a corporation with the name of Walt Disney Productions, Limited with a merchandising division, Walt Disney Enterprises, and two subsidiaries, Disney Film Recording Company, Limited and Liled Realty and Investment Company for real estate holdings. Walt and his wife held 60% (6,000 shares) and Roy owned 40% of WD Productions. On December 30, King Features signed its first newspaper, New York Mirror, to publish the Mickey Mouse comic strip with Walt's permission.^{[ChWDC 4]}
In 1932, Disney signed an exclusive contract with Technicolor (through the end of 1935) to produce cartoons in color, beginning with Flowers and Trees (1932). Disney released cartoons through Powers' Celebrity Pictures (1928–1930), Columbia Pictures (1930–1932), and United Artists (1932–1937).^[7] The popularity of the Mickey Mouse series allowed Disney to plan for his first feature-length animation.^[5]
The feature film Walt Before Mickey based on the book by Diane Disney Miller featured these moments in the studio's history.^[8]

1934–45: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and World War II

Deciding to push the boundaries of animation even further, Disney began production of his first feature-length animated film in 1934. Taking three years to complete, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, premiered in December 1937 and became highest-grossing film of that time by 1939.^[9] Snow White was released through RKO Radio Pictures, which had assumed distribution of Disney's product in July 1937,^{[ChWDC 5]} after United Artists attempted to attain future television rights to the Disney shorts.^[10]
Using the profits from Snow White, Disney financed the construction of a new 51-acre (210,000 m²) studio complex in Burbank, California. The new Walt Disney Studios, in which the company is headquartered to this day, was completed and open for business by the end of 1939.^{[ChWDC 6]} The following year on April 2, Walt Disney Productions had its initial public offering.^{[ChWDC 7]}

The studio continued releasing animated shorts and features, such as Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942).^[5] After World War II began, box-office profits declined. When the United States entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, many of Disney's animators were drafted into the armed forces. The U.S. and Canadian governments commissioned the studio to produce training and propaganda films. By 1942, 90% of its 550 employees were working on war-related films.^[11] Films such as the feature Victory Through Air Power and the short Education for Death (both 1943) were meant to increase public support for the war effort. Even the studio's characters joined the effort, as Donald Duck appeared in a number of comical propaganda shorts, including the Academy Award-winning Der Fuehrer's Face (1943).

A Brief History Of Disney, 5:45

https://youtu.be/hGAHX1Mctps

1939: The Great Year 1235

War breaks out in Europe (1939–40)

Soldiers of the German Wehrmacht tearing down the border crossing between Poland and the Free City of Danzig, 1 September 1939

On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland under the false pretext that the Poles had carried out a series of sabotage operations against German targets near the border.^[60] Two days later, on 3 September, after a British ultimatum to Germany to cease military operations was ignored, Britain and France, followed by the fully independent Dominions^[61] of the British Commonwealth^[62]—Australia (3 September), Canada (10 September), New Zealand (3 September), and South Africa (6 September)—declared war on Germany. However, initially the alliance provided limited direct military support to Poland, consisting of a cautious, half-hearted French probe into the Saarland.^[63] The Western Allies also began a naval blockade of Germany, which aimed to damage the country's economy and war effort.^[64] Germany responded by ordering U-boat warfare against Allied merchant and warships, which was to later escalate into the Battle of the Atlantic.

German Panzer I tanks near the city of Bydgoszcz, during the Invasion of Poland, September 1939

On 17 September 1939, after signing a cease-fire with Japan, the Soviets invaded Poland from the east.^[65] The Polish army was defeated and Warsaw surrendered to the Germans on 27 September, with final pockets of resistance surrendering on 6 October. Poland's territory was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union, with Lithuania and Slovakia also receiving small shares. After the defeat of Poland's armed forces, the Polish resistance established an Underground State and a partisan Home Army.^[66] About 100,000 Polish military personnel were evacuated to Romania and the Baltic countries; many of these soldiers later fought against the Germans in other theatres of the war.^[67] Poland's Enigma codebreakers were also evacuated to France.^[68]

On 6 October Hitler made a public peace overture to Britain and France, but said that the future of Poland was to be determined exclusively by Germany and the Soviet Union. Chamberlain rejected this on 12 October, saying "Past experience has shown that no reliance can be placed upon the promises of the present German Government."^[59] After this rejection Hitler ordered an immediate offensive against France,^[69] but bad weather forced repeated postponements until the spring of 1940.^[70]^[71]^[72]

German and Soviet army officers pictured shaking hands—after Nazi Germany and Soviet Union annexed new territories in Eastern Europe, 1939

After signing the German–Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Demarcation, the Soviet Union forced the Baltic countries—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—to allow it to station Soviet troops in their countries under pacts of "mutual assistance".^[73]^[74]^[75] Finland rejected territorial demands, prompting a Soviet invasion in November 1939.^[76] The resulting Winter War ended in March 1940 with Finnish concessions.^[77] Britain and France, treating the Soviet attack on Finland as tantamount to its entering the war on the side of the Germans, responded to the Soviet invasion by supporting the USSR's expulsion from the League of Nations.^[75]

In June 1940, the Soviet Union forcibly annexed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania,^[74] and the disputed Romanian regions of Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and Hertza. Meanwhile, Nazi-Soviet political rapprochement and economic co-operation^[78]^[79] gradually stalled,^[80]^[81] and both states began preparations for war.^[82]

    Orson Welles and Citizen Kane 1237

George Orson Welles (/ˈwɛlz/; May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, writer, and producer who worked in theatre, radio, and film. He is remembered for his innovative work in all three: in theatre, most notably Caesar (1937), a Broadway adaptation of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar; in radio, the 1938 broadcast "The War of the Worlds", one of the most famous in the history of radio; and in film, Citizen Kane (1941), consistently ranked as one of the all-time greatest films.
Welles directed a number of high-profile stage productions for the Federal Theatre Project in his early twenties, including an innovative adaptation of Macbeth with an entirely African American cast, and the political musical The Cradle Will Rock. In 1937 he and John Houseman founded the Mercury Theatre, an independent repertory theatre company that presented an acclaimed series of productions on Broadway through 1941. Welles found national and international fame as the director and narrator of a 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds performed for his radio anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It reportedly caused widespread panic when listeners thought that an invasion by extraterrestrial beings was occurring. Although some contemporary sources claim these reports of panic were mostly false and overstated,[1] they rocketed Welles to notoriety.
His first film was Citizen Kane (1941), which he co-wrote, produced, directed, and starred in as Charles Foster Kane. Welles was an outsider to the studio system and directed only 13 full-length films in his career. He struggled for creative control on his projects early on with the major film studios and later in life with a variety of independent financiers, and his films were either heavily edited or remained unreleased. His distinctive directorial style featured layered and nonlinear narrative forms, innovative uses of lighting such as chiaroscuro, unusual camera angles, sound techniques borrowed from radio, deep focus shots, and long takes. He has been praised as a major creative force and as "the ultimate auteur".[2]:6
Welles followed up Citizen Kane with critically acclaimed films including The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942 and Touch of Evil in 1958. Although these three are his most acclaimed films, critics have argued other works of his, such as The Lady from Shanghai (1947)[3] and Chimes at Midnight (1966),[4] are underappreciated.
In 2002, Welles was voted the greatest film director of all time in two British Film Institute polls among directors and critics,[5][6] and a wide survey of critical consensus, best-of lists, and historical retrospectives calls him the most acclaimed director of all time.[7] Well known for his baritone voice,[8] Welles was a well-regarded actor in radio and film, a celebrated Shakespearean stage actor, and an accomplished magician noted for presenting troop variety shows in the war years.

Citizen Kane - The Theatrical Trailer, 3:52

https://youtu.be/zyv19bg0scg

World War II 1237
World War II (WWII or WW2), also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, although related conflicts began earlier. It involved the vast majority of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. In a state of "total war", the major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. Marked by mass deaths of civilians, including the Holocaust (in which approximately 11 million people were killed)[1][2] and the strategic bombing of industrial and population centres (in which approximately one million were killed, and which included the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki),[3] it resulted in an estimated 50 million to 85 million fatalities. These made World War II the deadliest conflict in human history.[4]
The Empire of Japan aimed to dominate Asia and the Pacific and was already at war with the Republic of China in 1937,[5] but the world war is generally said to have begun on 1 September 1939[6] with the invasion of Poland by Germany and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France and the United Kingdom. From late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, and formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Poland, Finland, Romania and the Baltic states. The war continued primarily between the European Axis powers and the coalition of the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth, with campaigns including the North Africa and East Africa campaigns, the aerial Battle of Britain, the Blitz bombing campaign, the Balkan Campaign as well as the long-running Battle of the Atlantic. In June 1941, the European Axis powers launched an invasion of the Soviet Union, opening the largest land theatre of war in history, which trapped the major part of the Axis' military forces into a war of attrition. In December 1941, Japan attacked the United States and European territories in the Pacific Ocean, and quickly conquered much of the Western Pacific.
The Axis advance halted in 1942 when Japan lost the critical Battle of Midway, near Hawaii, and Germany was defeated in North Africa and then, decisively, at Stalingrad in the Soviet Union. In 1943, with a series of German defeats on the Eastern Front, the Allied invasion of Sicily and the Allied invasion of Italy which brought about Italian surrender, and Allied victories in the Pacific, the Axis lost the initiative and undertook strategic retreat on all fronts. In 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained all of its territorial losses and invaded Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in South Central China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy and captured key Western Pacific islands.
The war in Europe concluded with an invasion of Germany by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, culminating in the capture of Berlin by Soviet and Polish troops and the subsequent German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945. Following the Potsdam Declaration by the Allies on 26 July 1945 and the refusal of Japan to surrender under its terms, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 August and 9 August respectively. With an invasion of the Japanese archipelago imminent, the possibility of additional atomic bombings, and the Soviet Union's declaration of war on Japan and invasion of Manchuria, Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945. Thus ended the war in Asia, cementing the total victory of the Allies.
World War II altered the political alignment and social structure of the world. The United Nations (UN) was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The victorious great powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, and France—became the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.[7] The Soviet Union and the United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the Cold War, which lasted for the next 46 years. Meanwhile, the influence of European great powers waned, while the decolonisation of Asia and Africa began. Most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic recovery. Political integration, especially in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities and to create a common identity.[8]

World War II : Intense Combat Footage, 5:46

Music 1. Dean Valentine - Now I Take Everything From You 2. Hi-Finesse - Spectra 3. Zack Hemsey - Mind Heist- Evolution

https://youtu.be/cPJFwkuAuNs

    The Holocaust 1238

The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλόκαυστος holókaustos: hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt"),[2] also known as the Shoah (Hebrew: השואה, HaShoah, "the catastrophe"), was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about six million Jews.[3] The victims included 1.5 million children[4] and represented about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe.[5] Some definitions of the Holocaust include the additional five million non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murders, bringing the total to about 11 million. Killings took place throughout Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories.[6]

From 1941 to 1945, Jews were systematically murdered in one of the deadliest genocides in history, which was part of a broader aggregate of acts of oppression and killings of various ethnic and political groups in Europe by the Nazi regime.[7] Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics and the carrying out of the genocide. Other victims of Nazi crimes included ethnic Poles, Soviet citizens and Soviet POWs, other Slavs, Romanis, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and the mentally and physically disabled.[8][9] A network of about 42,500 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territories was used to concentrate victims for slave labor, mass murder, and other human rights abuses.[10] Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators.[11]

The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages, culminating in what Nazis termed the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (die Endlösung der Judenfrage), an agenda to exterminate Jews in Europe. Initially the German government passed laws to exclude Jews from civil society, most prominently the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. Nazis established a network of concentration camps starting in 1933 and ghettos following the outbreak of World War II in 1939. In 1941, as Germany conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized paramilitary units called Einsatzgruppen murdered around two million Jews and "partisans",[clarification needed] often in mass shootings. By the end of 1942, victims were being regularly transported by freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, most were systematically killed in gas chambers. This continued until the end of World War II in Europe in April–May 1945.
Jewish armed resistance was limited. The most notable exception was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, when thousands of poorly-armed Jewish fighters held the Waffen-SS at bay for four weeks. An estimated 20–30,000 Jewish partisans actively fought against the Nazis and their collaborators in Eastern Europe.[12][13] French Jews took part in the French Resistance, which conducted a guerilla campaign against the Nazis and Vichy French authorities. Over a hundred armed Jewish uprisings took place.[14]

✔ Would You Survive The Holocaust? 5:05

Would you have survived in Nazi Germany as a Jew or Gypsy? Can you survive the gas chamber in Nazi concentration camps? Be my friend on Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/iqlol Like my Facebook Page ► https://www.facebook.com/iqlolcom Follow me on Twitter ► https://twitter.com/iqlol Find me on Google ► https://plus.google.com/+Iqlol Visit my awesome website ► http://www.iqlol.com Get in touch by email ► contact@iqlol.com Watch me on Youtube ► https://www.youtube.com/user/IQtests If you like my work, please join me on my social networks!

AUDIO: Deep Horrors - Kevin MacLeod (Cinematic - Dark)

https://youtu.be/mw2WsxAercg

    The War in the Pacific 1240

The Pacific War, sometimes called the Asia-Pacific War,[44] was the theatre of World War II that was fought in the Pacific and East Asia. It was fought over a vast area that included the Pacific Ocean and islands, the South West Pacific, South-East Asia, and in China (including the 1945 Soviet–Japanese conflict).

It is generally considered that the Pacific War began on 7/8 December 1941, on which date Japan invaded Thailand and attacked the British possessions of Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong as well as the United States military bases in Hawaii, Wake Island, Guam and the Philippines.[45][46][47] Some historians contend that the conflict in Asia can be dated back to 7 July 1937 with the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War between the Empire of Japan and the Republic of China, or possibly 19 September 1931, beginning with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.[48] However, it is more widely accepted that the Pacific War itself started in early December 1941, with the Sino-Japanese War then becoming part of it as a theater of the greater World War II.[nb 9][50]
The Pacific War saw the Allied powers pitted against the Empire of Japan, the latter briefly aided by Thailand and to a much lesser extent by its Axis allies, Germany and Italy. The war culminated in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and other large aerial bomb attacks by the United States Army Air Forces, accompanied by the Soviet invasion of Manchuria on 8 August 1945, resulting in the Japanese announcement of intent to surrender on 15 August 1945. The formal and official surrender of Japan took place aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. Following its defeat, Japan's Shinto Emperor[51] stepped down as the divine leader[52] through the Shinto Directive, because the Allied Powers believed this was the major political cause of Japan's military aggression and deconstruction process soon took place to install a new liberal-democratic constitution to the Japanese public as the current Constitution of Japan.

World War II in the Pacific: Every Day, 5:05

See the changing front lines of World War II in the Pacific Theater every single day from Pearl Harbor to the surrender of Japan. WW2 in Europe Every Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOVEy... WW2 in Europe and the Pacific Every Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e_AZ... DETAILED KEY: Maroon: Axis Power members, their dependencies/colonies, and annexed lands. Burgundy: Areas militarily occupied by the Axis Powers. Red: Axis puppet states. Pink: Axis gains during that day. Brown: Surrendered axis Governments (not armies) Blue: Allied powers and areas occupied by the allies. Light blue: Allied gains for that day. Grey-blue: Allied powers not at war with Japan. Dark Lime Green: China before joining the allies.

https://youtu.be/6_1rzp2YVxQ

    The Allied Victory 1240

Axis collapse, Allied victory (1944–45)

Yalta Conference held in February 1945, with Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin

On 16 December 1944, Germany made a last attempt on the Western Front by using most of its remaining reserves to launch a massive counter-offensive in the Ardennes to split the Western Allies, encircle large portions of Western Allied troops and capture their primary supply port at Antwerp to prompt a political settlement.^[256] By January, the offensive had been repulsed with no strategic objectives fulfilled.^[256] In Italy, the Western Allies remained stalemated at the German defensive line. In mid-January 1945, the Soviets and Poles attacked in Poland, pushing from the Vistula to the Oder river in Germany, and overran East Prussia.^[257] On 4 February, US, British, and Soviet leaders met for the Yalta Conference. They agreed on the occupation of post-war Germany, and on when the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan.^[258]

In February, the Soviets entered Silesia and Pomerania, while Western Allies entered western Germany and closed to the Rhine river. By March, the Western Allies crossed the Rhine north and south of the Ruhr, encircling the German Army Group B,^[259] while the Soviets advanced to Vienna. In early April, the Western Allies finally pushed forward in Italy and swept across western Germany, while Soviet and Polish forces stormed Berlin in late April. American and Soviet forces joined on Elbe river on 25 April. On 30 April 1945, the Reichstag was captured, signalling the military defeat of Nazi Germany.^[260]

Several changes in leadership occurred during this period. On 12 April, President Roosevelt died and was succeeded by Harry Truman. Benito Mussolini was killed by Italian partisans on 28 April.^[261] Two days later, Hitler committed suicide, and was succeeded by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz.^[262]

The German Reichstag after its capture by the Allies, 3 June 1945

German forces surrendered in Italy on 29 April. Total and unconditional surrender was signed on 7 May, to be effective by the end of 8 May.^[263] German Army Group Centre resisted in Prague until 11 May.^[264]
In the Pacific theatre, American forces accompanied by the forces of the Philippine Commonwealth advanced in the Philippines, clearing Leyte by the end of April 1945. They landed on Luzon in January 1945 and recaptured Manila in March following a battle which reduced the city to ruins. Fighting continued on Luzon, Mindanao, and other islands of the Philippines until the end of the war.^[265] On the night of 9–10 March, B-29 bombers of the US Army Air Forces struck Tokyo with incendiary bombs, which killed 100,000 people within a few hours. Over the next five months, American bombers firebombed 66 other Japanese cities, causing the destruction of untold numbers of buildings and the deaths of between 350,000–500,000 Japanese civilians.^[266]

Japanese foreign affairs minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signs the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on board the USS Missouri, 2 September 1945

In May 1945, Australian troops landed in Borneo, over-running the oilfields there. British, American, and Chinese forces defeated the Japanese in northern Burma in March, and the British pushed on to reach Rangoon by 3 May.^[267] Chinese forces started to counterattack in Battle of West Hunan that occurred between 6 April and 7 June 1945. American naval and amphibious forces also moved towards Japan, taking Iwo Jima by March, and Okinawa by the end of June.^[268] At the same time American bombers were destroying Japanese cities, American submarines cut off Japanese imports, drastically reducing Japan's ability to supply its overseas forces.^[269]

On 11 July, Allied leaders met in Potsdam, Germany. They confirmed earlier agreements about Germany,^[270] and reiterated the demand for unconditional surrender of all Japanese forces by Japan, specifically stating that "the alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction".^[271] During this conference, the United Kingdom held its general election, and Clement Attlee replaced Churchill as Prime Minister.^[272]
The Allies called for unconditional Japanese surrender in the Potsdam declaration of 27 July, but the Japanese government was internally divided on whether to make peace and did not respond. In early August, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like the Japanese cities previously bombed by American airmen, the US and its allies justified the atomic bombings as military necessity to avoid invading the Japanese home islands which would cost the lives of between 250,000–500,000 Allied troops and millions of Japanese troops and civilians.^[273] Between the two bombings, the Soviets, pursuant to the Yalta agreement, invaded Japanese-held Manchuria, and quickly defeated the Kwantung Army, which was the largest Japanese fighting force.^[274]^[275] The Red Army also captured Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands. On 15 August 1945, Japan surrendered, with the surrender documents finally signed aboard the deck of the American battleship USS Missouri on 2 September 1945, ending the war.^[276]

    Decolonization and Liberation 1240

    Bearing Witness: Reactions to the War 1242

READINGS

    37.1 from Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925) 1213

    37.2 from Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915) 1246

    37.3 from Bertolt Brecht, “Theater for Pleasure or Theater for Imagination” (ca. 1935) 1214

    37.4 from Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925) 1216

    37.5 from Elie Wiesel, Night (1958) 1242

FEATURES

    CLOSER LOOK Picasso’s Guernica 1226

    CONTINUITY & CHANGE The Bauhaus in America 1244

38 After the War

EXISTENTIAL DOUBT, ARTISTIC TRIUMPH, AND THE CULTURE OF CONSUMPTION 1249

    Europe after the War: The Existential Quest 1250

        Christian Existentialism: Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, and Tillich 1250

Christian existentialism is a theo-philosophical movement which takes an existentialist approach to Christian theology. The school of thought is often traced back to the work of the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), who is considered the father of existentialism.^[1]

Kierkegaardian themes

Søren Kierkegaard

Christian existentialism relies on Kierkegaard's understanding of Christianity. Kierkegaard argued that the universe is fundamentally paradoxical, and that its greatest paradox is the transcendent union of God and humans in the person of Jesus Christ.

He also posited having a personal relationship with God that supersedes all prescribed moralities, social structures and communal norms,^[2] since he asserted that following social conventions is essentially a personal aesthetic choice made by individuals.^{[citation needed]}

Kierkegaard proposed that each person must make independent choices, which then constitute his existence. Each person suffers from the anguish of indecision (whether knowingly or unknowingly) until he commits to a particular choice about the way to live. Kierkegaard also proposed three rubrics with which to understand the conditions that issue from distinct life choices: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.

Major premises

One of the major premises of Christian existentialism entails calling the masses back to a more genuine form of Christianity. This form is often identified with some notion of Early Christianity, which mostly existed during the first three centuries after Christ's crucifixion. Beginning with the Edict of Milan, which was issued by Roman Emperor Constantine I in AD 313, Christianity enjoyed a level of popularity among Romans and later among other Europeans. And yet Kierkegaard asserted that by the 19th century, the ultimate meaning of New Testament Christianity (love, cf. agape, mercy and loving-kindness) had become perverted, and Christianity had deviated considerably from its original threefold message of grace, humility, and love.
Another major premise of Christian existentialism involves Kierkegaard's conception of God and Love. For the most part, Kierkegaard equates God with Love.^[3] Thus, when a person engages in the act of loving, he is in effect achieving an aspect of the divine. Kierkegaard also viewed the individual as a necessary synthesis of both finite and infinite elements. Therefore, when an individual does not come to a full realization of his infinite side, he is said to be in despair. For many contemporary Christian theologians, the notion of despair can be viewed as sin. However, to Kierkegaard, a man sinned when he was exposed to this idea of despair and chose a path other than one in accordance with God's will.

A final major premise of Christian existentialism entails the systematic undoing of evil acts. Kierkegaard asserted that once an action had been completed, it should be evaluated in the face of God, for holding oneself up to divine scrutiny was the only way to judge one's actions. Because actions constitute the manner in which something is deemed good or bad, one must be constantly conscious of the potential consequences of his actions. Kierkegaard believed that the choice for goodness ultimately came down to each individual. Yet Kierkegaard also foresaw the potential limiting of choices for individuals who fell into despair.^[4]

The Bible

Christian Existentialism often refers to what it calls the indirect style of Christ's teachings, which it considers to be a distinctive and important aspect of his ministry. Christ's point, it says, is often left unsaid in any particular parable or saying, to permit each individual to confront the truth on his own.^[5] This is particularly evident in (but is certainly not limited to) his parables. For example, in the Gospel of Matthew (18:21-35), Jesus tells a story about a man who is heavily in debt (the parable of the unforgiving servant). The debtor and his family are about to be sold into slavery, but he pleads for their lives. His master accordingly cancels the debt and sets them free. Later the man who was in debt abuses some people who owe him money, and he has them thrown in jail. Upon being informed of what this man has done, the master brings him in and says, "Why are you doing this? Weren't your debts canceled?" Then the debtor is thrown into jail until the debt is paid. Jesus ends his story by saying, "This is how it will be for you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart."

Often Christ's parables are a response to a question he is asked. After he tells the parable, he returns the question to the individual who originally asked it. Often we see a person asking a speculative question involving one's duty before God, and Christ's response is more or less the same question—but as God would ask that individual. For example, in the Gospel of Luke (10:25), a teacher of the law asks Jesus what it means to love one's neighbor as oneself. Jesus replies by telling the story of the Good Samaritan. In the story a man is beaten by thieves. A priest and a Levite pass him by, but a Samaritan takes pity on him and generously sets him up at an inn—paying his tab in advance. Then Jesus returns the question, "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?". Jesus does not answer the question because he requires the individual to answer it, and thus to understand existence in the Bible, one must recognize who that passage is speaking to in particular. To Kierkegaard, it is the individual hearing the passage.

A good example of indirect communication in the Old Testament is the story of David and Nathan in 2 Samuel 12:1-14. David had committed adultery with a woman, Bathsheba, which resulted in her pregnancy. He then ordered her husband, Uriah, to come home from a war front so that he might sleep with his wife, thus making it appear as if Uriah had in fact conceived with Bathsheba. Instead, Uriah would not break faith with his fellow soldiers still on the battlefield and refused to sleep with her. David then ordered him back out to the battlefront where he would surely die, thus making Bathsheba a widow and available for marriage, which David soon arranged. David initially thought he had gotten away with murder, until Nathan arrived to tell him a story about two men, one rich and the other poor. The poor man was a shepherd with only one lamb, which he raised with his family. The lamb ate at his table and slept in his arms. One day a traveler came to visit the rich man; instead of taking one of his own sheep, the rich man seized the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for his guest. When Nathan finished his story, David burned with anger and said (among other things): "As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die!". Nathan responded by saying "You are the man!". Realizing his guilt, David becomes filled with terror and remorse, tearfully repented of his evil deed.

An existential reading of the Bible demands that the reader recognize that he is an existing subject, studying the words that God communicates to him personally. This is in contrast to looking at a collection of "truths" which are outside and unrelated to the reader.^[6] Such a reader is not obligated to follow the commandments as if an external agent is forcing them upon him, but as though they are inside him and guiding him internally. This is the task Kierkegaard takes up when he asks: "Who has the more difficult task: the teacher who lectures on earnest things a meteor's distance from everyday life, or the learner who should put it to use?"^[7] Existentially speaking, the Bible doesn't become an authority in a person's life until they permit the Bible to be their personal authority.

Notable Christian existentialists

Christian existentialists include German Protestant theologians Paul Tillich and Rudolph Bultmann, British Anglican theologian John Macquarrie, American theologian Lincoln Swain,^[8] American philosopher Clifford Williams, French Catholic philosophers Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Mounier, and Pierre Boutang, German philosopher Karl Jaspers, Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, and Russian philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov. Karl Barth added to Kierkegaard's ideas the notion that existential despair leads an individual to an awareness of God's infinite nature. Some ideas in the works of Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky could arguably be placed within the tradition of Christian existentialism.The roots of existentialism have been traced back as far as St Augustine.^[9]^[10]^[11] Some of the most striking passages in Pascal's Pensées, including the famous section on the Wager, deal with existentialist themes.^[12]^[13]^[14]^[15] Jacques Maritain, in Existence and the Existent: An Essay on Christian Existentialism,^[16] finds the core of true existentialism in the thought of Thomas Aquinas.

0:02 / 2:37 Soren Kierkegaard: Christian Existentialism

https://youtu.be/9NdOBALEvZo

        The Philosophy of Sartre: Atheistic Existentialism 1251

        De Beauvoir and Existential Feminism 1252

        The Art of Existentialism 1252

        The Literature of Existentialism 1253

    America after the War: Triumph and Doubt 1254

        The Triumph of American Art: Abstract Expressionism 1255

    The Beat Generation and the Art of Inclusiveness 1265

        Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac 1265

The Beat Generation was a group of authors whose literature explored and influenced American culture in the post-World War II era.

The bulk of their work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s. Central elements of Beat culture are rejection of standard narrative values, the spiritual quest, exploration of American and Eastern religions, rejection of materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.[1][2]

Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature.[3] Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States.[4][5] The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.

The core group of Beat Generation authors – Herbert Huncke, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Jack Kerouac – met in 1944 in and around the Columbia University campus in New York City. Later, in the mid-1950s, the central figures (with the exception of Burroughs and Carr) ended up together in San Francisco where they met and became friends of figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance.
In the 1960s, elements of the expanding Beat movement were incorporated into the hippie and larger counterculture movements. Neal Cassady, as the driver for Ken Kesey's bus, Further, was the primary bridge between these two generations. Allen Ginsberg's work also became an integral element of early 1960s hippie culture.

Jack Kerouac / The Beat Generation

https://youtu.be/Jej5d2kYjuQ

The Influence of the Beat Generation on Modern Music, 2:43

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg are two of the best known authors of the Beat Generation. Together with other beats they have had a great influence on modern music. A compilation. Songs featured: Röyksopp - Röyksopp Forever The Beatles - Help John Lennon - Stand by me Bob Dylan - Tangled Up In Blue The Doors - Riders on the Storm Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit U2 - Beautiful Day

https://youtu.be/uKRBQG6zUWo

        Ginsberg and “Howl” 1266

"Howl" is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1955, published as part of his 1956 collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems, and dedicated to Carl Solomon.

Ginsberg began work on "Howl" as early as 1954. In the Paul Blackburn Tape Archive at the University of California, San Diego, Ginsberg can be heard reading early drafts of his poem to his fellow writing associates. "Howl" is considered to be one of the great works of American literature.^[1]^[2] It came to be associated with the group of writers known as the Beat Generation.^[1]

There is no foundation to the myth that "Howl" was written as a performance piece and later published by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books. This myth was perpetrated by Ferlinghetti as part of the defense's case during the poem's obscenity trial. Upon the poem's release, Ferlinghetti and the bookstore's manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and both were arrested. On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene.^[3]

        John Cage: The Aesthetics of Chance and the Art of Inclusiveness 1266

        Architecture in the 1950s 1269

Many architects resisted modernism, finding it devoid of the decorative richness of historical styles. As the first generation of modernists began to die after WWII, a second generation of architects including Paul Rudolph, Marcel Breuer, and Eero Saarinen tried to expand the aesthetics of modernism with Brutalism, buildings with expressive sculptural façades made of unfinished concrete. But an even new younger postwar generation critiqued modernism and Brutalism for being too austere, standardized, monotone, and not taking into account the richness of human experience offered in historical buildings across time and in different places and cultures.

One such reaction to the cold aesthetic of modernism and Brutalism is the school of metaphoric architecture, which includes such things as biomorphism and zoomorphic architecture, both using nature as the primary source of inspiration and design. While it is considered by some to be merely an aspect of postmodernism, others consider it to be a school in its own right and a later development of expressionist architecture.^[14]

Beginning in the late 1950s and 1960s, architectural phenomenology emerged as an important movement in the early reaction against modernism, with architects like Charles Moore in the USA, Christian Norberg-Schulz in Norway, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Vittorio Gregotti in Italy, who collectively popularized an interest in a new contemporary architecture aimed at expanding human experience using historical buildings as models and precedents.^[15] Postmodernism produced a style that combined contemporary building technology and cheap materials, with the aesthetics of older pre-modern and non-modern styles, from high classical architecture to popular or vernacular regional building styles. Robert Venturi famously defined postmodern architecture as a "decorated shed" (an ordinary building which is functionally designed inside and embellished on the outside), and upheld it against modernist and brutalist "ducks" (buildings with unnecessarily expressive tectonic forms).^[16]

    Pop Art 1270

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid-1950s in Britain and the late 1950s in the United States.^[1] Among the early artists that shaped the pop art movement were Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton in Britain, and Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in the United States. Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising and news. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material.^[1]^[2]

Pop art employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects. One of its aims is to use images of popular (as opposed to elitist) culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any culture, most often through the use of irony.^[2] It is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques.

Pop art is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion of those ideas.^[3] Due to its utilization of found objects and images, it is similar to Dada. Pop art and minimalism are considered to be art movements that precede postmodern art, or are some of the earliest examples of postmodern art themselves.^[4]

Pop art often takes imagery that is currently in use in advertising. Product labeling and logos figure prominently in the imagery chosen by pop artists, seen in the labels of Campbell's Soup Cans, by Andy Warhol. Even the labeling on the outside of a shipping box containing food items for retail has been used as subject matter in pop art, as demonstrated by Warhol's Campbell's Tomato Juice Box, 1964 (pictured).

a guide to POP ART, 2:33

Popular, witty, sexy, glamorous – pop art exploded onto the cultural scene in the early 1960s. A new generation of artists rebelled against ‘high art’ to embrace the world of advertising, television, film stars, pop music and consumerism. Pop art shocked many but inspired even more.
https://youtu.be/LsY4ihZCJL8



Minimalism in Art 1274

    READINGS

        38.1 from Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit (1944) 1251
No Exit (French: Huis Clos, pronounced: [ɥi klo]) is a 1944 existentialist French play by Jean-Paul Sartre. The original title is the French equivalent of the legal term in camera, referring to a private discussion behind closed doors; English translations have also been performed under the titles In Camera, No Way Out, Vicious Circle, Behind Closed Doors, and Dead End. The play was first performed at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in May 1944.[1]

The play is a depiction of the afterlife in which three deceased characters are punished by being locked into a room together for eternity. It is the source of Sartre's especially famous and often misinterpreted quotation "L'enfer, c'est les autres" or "Hell is other people",[2] a reference to Sartre's ideas about the look and the perpetual ontological struggle of being caused to see oneself as an object in the world of another consciousness.[3]

NO EXIT (Estelle), 3:23

OSU Theatre Department presents No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre. Directed by Liz Tabish Starring Tim Mixon as the Bellboy Cameron Bergeron as Vincent Cradeau Sally Sparks as Inez Serrano Chelsea Shores as Estelle Delauny Costumes by Lyndsay Yates Set and Lighting by Daniel Archibald "Hell is other people," or so Jean-Paul Sartre suggests in No Exit, his famous existential play which depicts an after-life where three deceased characters are confined to one room for eternity.

https://youtu.be/g5eDUjn7F2U

    38.2 from Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949) 1252

The Second Sex (French: Le Deuxième Sexe) is a 1949 book by the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir. One of her best-known books, it deals with the treatment of women throughout history and is often regarded as a major work of feminist philosophy and the starting point of second-wave feminism. Beauvoir researched and wrote the book in about 14 months when she was 38 years old.[1][2] She published it in two volumes and some chapters first appeared in Les Temps modernes.[3][4] The Vatican placed it on its List of Prohibited Books.[1]

An Introduction to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex- A Macat Literature Analysis, 3:18
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Male-dominated society deliberately constructs the idea of femininity to keep men in control. Watch Macat's short video for a great introduction to Simone de Beauvoirís The Second Sex, one of the most important feminist books ever written.
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https://youtu.be/Dgc0-Cn4AAs

    38.3 from Albert Camus, Preface to The Stranger (1955) 1254

The Stranger or The Outsider (French: L’Étranger) is a novel by Albert Camus published in 1942. Its theme and outlook are often cited as examples of Camus's philosophy of the absurd and existentialism, though Camus personally rejected the latter label.
The title character is Meursault, an indifferent French Algerian ("a citizen of France domiciled in North Africa, a man of the Mediterranean, an homme du midi yet one who hardly partakes of the traditional Mediterranean culture"[1]), who, after attending his mother's funeral, apathetically kills an Arab man whom he recognizes in French Algiers. The story is divided into two parts, presenting Meursault's first-person narrative view before and after the murder, respectively.
In January 1955, Camus wrote: "I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: 'In our society any man who does not weep at his mother's funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.' I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game."[2]

    38.4 from Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953) 1278

Waiting for Godot (/ˈɡɒdoʊ/ GOD-oh[1]) is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for the arrival of someone named Godot.[2] Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects of the play, have led to many interpretations since the play's 1953 premiere. It was voted "the most significant English language play of the 20th century".[3] Waiting for Godot is Beckett's translation of his own original French version, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled (in English only) "a tragicomedy in two acts".[4] The original French text was composed between 9 October 1948 and 29 January 1949.[5] The première was on 5 January 1953 in the Théâtre de Babylone, Paris. The production was directed by Roger Blin, who also played the role of Pozzo.

Robin Williams and Steve Martin in Waiting for Godot, 3:40

https://youtu.be/TazBIiAJtb0

    38.4a–b from Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Act I, II (1953) 1254

    38.5 from Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” (1956) 1266

HOWL Official Theatrical Trailer, 1:42

James Franco stars as the young Allen Ginsberg - poet, counter-culture adventurer and chronicler of the Beat Generation. In his famously confessional, leave-nothing-out style, Ginsberg recounts the road trips, love affairs and search for personal liberation that led to the most timeless and electrifying work of his career, the poem HOWL. Meanwhile, in a San Francisco courtroom, HOWL is on trial. Prosecutor Ralph McIntosh (Strathairn) sets out to prove that the book should be banned, while suave defense attorney Jake Ehrlich (Hamm) argues fervently for freedom of speech and creative expression. The proceedings veer from the comically absurd to the passionate as a host of unusual witnesses (Jeff Daniels, Mary-Louise Parker, Treat Williams, Alesssandro Nivola) pit generation against generation and art against fear in front of conservative Judge Clayton Horn (Bob Balaban). HOWL is simultaneously a portrait of a renegade artist breaking down barriers to find love and redemption and an imaginative ride through a prophetic masterpiece that rocked a generation and was heard around the world.

https://youtu.be/C4h4ZY8whbg

    38.6 from Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958) 1269

Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956), known professionally as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was well known for his unique style of drip painting.

During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety; he was a major artist of his generation. Regarded as reclusive, he had a volatile personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy.[4]

Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related single-car accident when he was driving. In December 1956, four months after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. A larger, more comprehensive exhibition of his work was held there in 1967. In 1998 and 1999, his work was honored with large-scale retrospective exhibitions at MoMA and at The Tate in London.[5][6]

Jackson Pollock - Ed Harris

FEATURES

    CLOSER LOOK Hamilton’s Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? 1256

    CONTINUITY & CHANGE The Civil Rights Movement 1276

REVIEW

LECTURE
Fascism: Europe's Age of Anxiety, 2:53
The Great Depression: Somebody Help Us! 2:35
Post-War Europe: The Abstract and the Absurd, 2:29
Pre-Built Course Content
The BBC on Weimar:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/mwh/germany/weimaract.shtml
The BBC on Nazis
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/mwh/germany/nazisact.shtml
Quiz:
http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/lessons/riseofhitler/profile.htm
Test yourself on how Hitler came to power
With a partner, answer the following.
Why did people support Hitler?
Cf. http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/lessons/riseofhitler/whysupport.htm
Cf. http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/lessons/riseofhitler/index.htm
Hitler and Nazi Germany
Adolf Hitler, a failed student and artist, built up a small racist, anti-Semitic political party in Germany after World War I. Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch failed. In prison, he wrote Mein Kampf—an account of his movement and his views. As democracy broke down, right-wing elites looked to Hitler for leadership. In 1933 Hitler became chancellor. Amid constant chaos and conflict, Hitler used terror and repression to gain totalitarian control. Meanwhile, a massive rearmament program put Germans back to work. Mass demonstrations and spectacles rallied Germans around Hitler's policies. All major institutions were brought under Nazi control. Women's primary role was to bear Aryan children. Hitler's Nuremberg Laws established official persecution of Jews. A more violent anti-Semitic phase began in 1938 with a destructive rampage against Jews and the deportation of thousands to concentration camps. Increasingly drastic steps barred Jews from attending school, earning a living, or engaging in Nazi society.
Read a detailed account of the life of Hitler

Cf. http://library.thinkquest.org/19092/hitler.html

Test yourself on how Hitler came to power
With a partner, answer the following.
Why did people support Hitler?
Cf. http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/lessons/riseofhitler/whysupport.htm
Cf. http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/lessons/riseofhitler/index.htm

Propaganda

Cf. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/nazi_propaganda_gallery.shtml

Hitler and His Views Cf. http://www.pearsonsuccessnet.com/snpapp/iText/products/0-13-133374-7/audio.html?fname=audio/audio_WH07Y03252.mov
You can summarize Nazi Germany in a flowchart like the one below.

With
You can keep track of the sequence of events that led to the outbreak of World War II by completing a table like the one below.

Note Taking
Reading Skill: Recognize Sequence

Complete this timetable of German aggression as you read.

EXPLORE ACTIVITY
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.
Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is sometimes assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance. The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. The best known of these is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).
His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage's major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951. The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text on changing events, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living".

John Cage: 4'33'' for piano (1952)

https://youtu.be/gN2zcLBr_VM

Dream, 8:26
For the paintings, which one was drawn by a child? On the left or the right?
week 9 explore.html
MUSIC FOLDER
Pre-Built Course Content
This week's music clips relate to chapters 37 and 38.
Bertolt Brecht, Die Moritat von Mackie Messer (="The Death of Mack the Knife"; we know this song's English version as "Mack the Knife")from Three Penny Opera (chap. 37, pp. 1213-1214)
For the original German version by Brecht, see http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/bertolt_brecht_sings_mack_the_knife_from_ithe_threepenny_operai_1929.html.

Mack The Knife (original), 2:47

https://youtu.be/_QXJ3OXWaOY

For a later better recording of the German by another artist, try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT98KVV356o.
For the famous English version by Bobby Darin, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Qrjtr_uFac.

Bobby Darin sings "Mack the Knife" 3:34

https://youtu.be/4Qrjtr_uFac

The original German lyrics are at http://german.about.com/library/blmus_hknef04.htm. The English lyrics are at http://german.about.com/library/blmus_hknef04mb.htm.
The odd history of "Mack the Knife": The character of Mackie actually has roots in a real person of the 1720s in England, a lower class folk hero and thief named Jack Sheppard. Sheppard became the seeds of a character in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (p. 830). See http://londonparticulars.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/mack-the-knife-the-true-story/ . And the song has an odd history with the story going back to roots in England, becoming part of an English play, later becoming part of a German opera, and then in turn getting translated back into English in various versions. Despite the colorful history, the lyrics are dark and brooding and seem oddly to have been transmuted to a song sung with a happy, upbeat smile. Brecht, as a playwright, was a German Marxist in the 1920s and 1930s. After checking out these links, review pp. 1213-1214 in chap. 37. Overall his Three Penny Opera was designed as a critique of capitalism. Even the audience was to be alienated (p. 1214).
----------------------------------- Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5, 4th Movement (chap. 37, pp. 1222-1223)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogJFXqYEYd8
Read carefully pp. 1222-1223 (in chap. 37) about the background of this work, as the Soviet Union under Stalin took the arts under strict state control in the 1920s and 1930s. Composers like Shostakovich were forced to publically renege some things they had done and present works more supportive of the state and its agenda. This powerful work was ambiguous enough to seem very pro-state or possibly as mocking of the state. In his later years, Shostakovich would claim it was mocking, but he had to be careful to let it be interpreted the other way.
------------------------ Aaron Copland, Variations on "Simple Gifts" from Appalachian Spring (chap. 37, p. 1230)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR8-p7AKHZ4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtay0UwB7BM
Copland composed this for a ballet but it has become one of the great symphonic works in the American heritage. Read p. 1230 (in chap. 37) about its development. Many think the magical part of the composition is the varied and frequent use of a traditional Shaker religious melody called "Simple Gifts". For the lyrics of this song, see http://www.metrolyrics.com/simple-gifts-lyrics-judy-collins.html and a version by the singer Jewel at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amcGIfMu0bw .
---------------------------- Virgil Thomson, Prelude and Pastorale from The Plow that Broke the Plains (chap. 37, pp. 1230-1231)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2THARSCOA Listen to the first 2:40 (2 minutes and 40 seconds) to hear both the Prelude and Pastorale (Grass). Listen to it all if you wish.
Read carefully pp. 1230-1231 (in chap. 37) and then listen to this at the link above. This was the score for a documentary film when filmmaking was still in its infancy. Virgil Thomson (1895-1989) was a socially conscious composer who joined this effort to present on film the dust bowl problem that devastated middle America for a number of years. Note the variety of music that he incorporates into this effort. The context is the Dust Bowl and the poverty of the Great Depression era. The film was made in 1936. Read the caption at the YouTube for more information.
------------------------ John Cage, Indeterminancy, Part Two (chap. 38, pp. 1266-1269)
At this Smithsonian website, scroll to the bottom and play the tracks of this piece. After reading the pages above and listening for a few minutes, you will get the idea:
http://www.folkways.si.edu/john-cage-and-david-tudor/indeterminacy-new-aspect-of-form-in-instrumental-and-electronic-music/classical-contemporary/album/smithsonian
You can also see visually this version, performed by Chen, Beresford, and Lee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xXFvpUckVA
John Cage is known as an avant garde music theorist of the mid-20th century. He championed the idea that all we do is music, so that his works often included chance sounds from everyday life and at uncertain intervals. Read carefully pp. 1267-1268 before listening to this, otherwise you will wonder what is going on. Then, also read the caption that goes with the YouTube. The other parts of this work can also be found at YouTube. It is "the music of chance".
5.b. John Cage, In A Landscape (not in book; Cage is on pp. 1266-1269)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHyTXlejiEE (a version played by Keiko Shichijo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rvhEkIYNgI) One of Cage's more "normal" works.
"Government and the Arts; Abstract Expressionism and Music" Please respond to one (1) of the following, using sources under the Explore heading as the basis of your response:
Examine the U.S. Government's support during the Great Depression for programs, such as the Federal Arts Project, the Federal Writers' Project, and other such efforts. Determine whether or not such projects were good government investments during those hard times, and provide two (2) examples that support your viewpoint. Determine in what ways the U.S. government currently tries to support the arts.
State whether you agree or disagree with the perception of Abstract Expressionism as exemplifying individualism and freedom. Explain the reasons for your views. Compare and contrast one (1) example of Abstract Expressionist visual art to John Cage’s musical compositions. After reviewing the pages and Websites below, explain how an abstract expressionist artist might respond to the assertion "my kid could paint that". Explain your position on that assertion.
Explore:
Government and the Arts
Chapter 37 (pp. 1228-1232), Federal support for the arts
Government helping the arts in hard times at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/1934-Picturing-Hard-Times.html and http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/powerprose/wpa/
Abstract Expressionism and Music
Chapter 38 (pp. 1255-1263, and 1268-9), Abstract Expressionism
Chapter 38 (pp. 1266-1269), Music of Chance; review the Week 9 “Music Folder”
John Cage, listen and see – "Dream" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fhc3Tbnhsc 8:26
John Cage, listen and see -- “4’33’" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY7UK-6aaNA&list=PL223147EC2385356B&index=3
"My Kid Could Draw That" views: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/my-kid-could-draw-that/; and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/28/study-examines-difference_n_841268.html

Question 1: Multiple Choice

Why did the Nazis dislike the Bauhaus style?

Given Answer:

Rejected traditional German values

Correct Answer:

Rejected traditional German values

out of 4 points

Question 2: Multiple Choice

How many Jews are estimated to have been exterminated at Auschwitz-Birkenau?

Given Answer:

1-2.5 million

Correct Answer:

1-2.5 million

out of 4 points

Question 3: Multiple Choice

Why did the bourgeois German youth flock to the Wandervogel movement?

Given Answer:	To recapture a premodern past
Correct Answer:	To recapture a premodern past

out of 4 points

Question 4: Multiple Choice

What 1927 film was the first feature-length talkie?

Given Answer:

The Jazz Singer

Correct Answer:

The Jazz Singer

out of 4 points

Question 5: Multiple Choice

On what condition would Picasso allow Guernica to be on permanent display in a museum in his native Spain?

Given Answer:	Spanish people regain civil liberties
Correct Answer:	Spanish people regain civil liberties

out of 4 points

Question 6: Multiple Choice

Why was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of San Francisco's City Lights bookstore, charged with obscenity?

Given Answer:	For publishing Ginsberg's "Howl"
Correct Answer:	For publishing Ginsberg's "Howl"

out of 4 points

Question 7: Multiple Choice

What work best characterizes the Beat generation?

Given Answer:

Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"

Correct Answer:

Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"

out of 4 points

Question 8: Multiple Choice

As discussed in the chapter's "Continuity and Change" section, in 1954 why did the U.S. Supreme Court rule that "separate but equal" schools for whites and blacks were unacceptable?

Given Answer:	Separate by definition means inherently unequal
Correct Answer:	Separate by definition means inherently unequal

out of 4 points

Question 9: Multiple Choice

How did Jackson Pollock create his Abstract Expressionist mental landscapes?

Given Answer:

Hard-edge painting

Correct Answer:

Action painting

out of 4 points