Case Study: The Roll of Dice
In 1930, the young physicist Werner Heisenberg explained his "principle of indeterminacy" to a scientific gathering that included that giant of the scientific world Albert Einstein, creator of the theory of relativity. Since the behavior of subatomic particles could not be precisely known, Heisenberg reasoned, it should be described in terms of statistical probability. Einstein found the notion of a merely probable universe intolerable; a moral world, he insisted, depended on a rational universe. "God" he barked, "does not roll dice."
But Heisenberg's indeterminacy more accurately describes the realities in the Western world in the years after World War I than does Einsteins' vision of order. To most artists and intellectuals - for whom God had long since died - the old certainties had vanished and the future was shadowy. Gender roles and social institutions were also in flux, as women sought personal freedom and citizenship, and as the traditional family lost many of its functions to social workers and state agencies. Western economies boomed and crashed, leaving millions without the savings that had promised security in old age, and millions more without work or without food. This catastrophe struck barely ten years after the close of a war that had left an unprecedented number mutilated and dead.
But Heisenberg's indeterminacy more accurately describes the realities in the Western world in the years after World War I than does Einsteins' vision of order. To most artists and intellectuals - for whom God had long since died - the old certainties had vanished and the future was shadowy. Gender roles and social institutions were also in flux, as women sought personal freedom and citizenship, and as the traditional family lost many of its functions to social workers and state agencies. Western economies boomed and crashed, leaving millions without the savings that had promised security in old age, and millions more without work or without food. This catastrophe struck barely ten years after the close of a war that had left an unprecedented number mutilated and dead.
Guiding Question:
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Topics for Discussion:
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Reading:
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For this case study you are to analyze Chapter 26 The Age of Anxiety and review the sources provided below. You are expected to be able to answer the guiding question in full depth with specific historical evidence and supporting details.
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Sources:
Source 1: The Annotated Mona Lisa, Carol Strickland - Dada and Surrealism Art Between the Wars
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DADA: A WORLD GONE GAGA. Founded in neutral Zurich in 1916 by a group of refugees from World War I, the Dada movement got its name from a nonsense word. Throughout its brief lifespan of six years, Dada often seemed nonsensical, but it had a no-nonsense aim. It protested the madness of war. In this first global conflict, billed as "the war to end all wars," tens of thousands died in trenches daily to gain a few scorched yards before being driven back by counterattacks. Ten million people were slaughtered or maimed. It's no wonder Dadaist artists felt they could no longer trust reason and the establishment. Their alternative was to overthrow all authority and cultivate absurdity.
Dada was an international attitude that spread from Zurich to France, Germany, and the United States. Its main strategy was to denounce and shock. A typical Dada evening included several poets declaiming nonsense verse simultaneously in different languages with others yapping like dogs. Orators hurled insults at the audience, while absurdly costumed dancers flapped about the stage and a young girl in communion dress recited obscene poetry. Dadaists had a more serious purpose than merely to shock. They hoped to awaken the imagination. "We spoke of Dada as a crusade that would win back the promised land of the Creative," said Alsatian painter Jean Arp, a founder of Dada. |
SURREALISM: POWER OF THE UNCONSCIOUS. Two years later a direct off-spring of Dada, Surrealism, was born. Surrealism, which flourished ,in Europe and America during the twenties and thirties, began as a literary movement, fostered by its godfather, poet Andre Breton. It grew out of Freudian free-association and dream analysis. Poets and, later, painters experimented with automatism — a form of creating without conscious control — to tap unconscious imagery. Surrealism, which implies going beyond realism, deliberately courted the bizarre and the irrational to express buried truths unreachable by logic.
Surrealism took two forms. Some artists, like Spanish painter Joan Mire and German artist Max Ernst, practiced improvised art, distancing themselves as much as possible from conscious control. Others, like the Spaniard Salvador Dali and Belgian painter Rene Magritte, used scrupulously realistic techniques to present hallucinatory scenes that defy common sense.
Surrealism took two forms. Some artists, like Spanish painter Joan Mire and German artist Max Ernst, practiced improvised art, distancing themselves as much as possible from conscious control. Others, like the Spaniard Salvador Dali and Belgian painter Rene Magritte, used scrupulously realistic techniques to present hallucinatory scenes that defy common sense.
Dada and Surrealist Art →
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Source 2: The Annotated Mona Lisa, Carol Strickland - Picasso: The King of Modern Art
& Anatomy of a Masterpiece, Picasso's Guernica |
"When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope," Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) told his mistress Francoise Gilot. "Instead," he added, "I became a painter and wound up as Picasso."
For half a century, Picasso led the forces of artistic innovation, shocking the world by introducing a new style and then moving on as soon as his unorthodoxy became accepted. His most significant contribution — aided by Braque — was inventing Cubism, the major revolution of twentieth-century art. Until the age of 91 Picasso remained vital and versatile. Probably the most prolific Western artist ever, Picasso pro-duced an estimated 50,000 works. Picasso could draw before he could talk. His first words at age two were "pencil, pencil," as he beggged for a drawing tool. Born in Spain the son of a mediocre painter, by his mid-teens Picasso had mastered the art of drawing with photographic accuracy. When he visited an exhibit of children's art in 1946, he remarked at that age he could draw like Raphael, but "it took me many years to learn how to draw like these children." Although Picasso worked in a number of distinctive styles, his art was always autobiographical. "The paintings," he said, "are the pages of my diary." Walking through the chronological sequence of work in Paris's Musee Picasso is like wandering the corridors of his love life. Women were his chief source of inspiration. |
Anatomy of a Masterpiece "Guernica"
During the Spanish Civil War, fascist dictator Francisco Franco hired the Nazi Luftwaffe to destroy the small Basque town of Guemica. For three hours warplanes dropped bombs, slaughtering 2,000 civilians, wounding thousands more, and razing the undefended form. The Spaniard Picasso, filled with patriotic rage, created the 25-foot-wide by l Hoot-high mural in one month. it is considered the most powerful indictment ever of the horrors of war. "Pointing is not done to decorate apartments," Picasso said. it is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.'
Picasso incorporated certain design elements to create a powerful effect of anguish. He used a black-white-gray palette to emphasize hopelessness and purposely distorted figures to evoke violence. The jagged lines and shattered planes of Cubism denote terror and confusion, while a pyramid format holds the composition together. Some of Picasso's symbols, like the slain fighter with a broken sword implying defeat, are not hard to decipher Picasso's only explanation of his symbols was: "The bull is not fascism, but it is brutality and darkness. . . . The horse represents the people."
During the Spanish Civil War, fascist dictator Francisco Franco hired the Nazi Luftwaffe to destroy the small Basque town of Guemica. For three hours warplanes dropped bombs, slaughtering 2,000 civilians, wounding thousands more, and razing the undefended form. The Spaniard Picasso, filled with patriotic rage, created the 25-foot-wide by l Hoot-high mural in one month. it is considered the most powerful indictment ever of the horrors of war. "Pointing is not done to decorate apartments," Picasso said. it is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.'
Picasso incorporated certain design elements to create a powerful effect of anguish. He used a black-white-gray palette to emphasize hopelessness and purposely distorted figures to evoke violence. The jagged lines and shattered planes of Cubism denote terror and confusion, while a pyramid format holds the composition together. Some of Picasso's symbols, like the slain fighter with a broken sword implying defeat, are not hard to decipher Picasso's only explanation of his symbols was: "The bull is not fascism, but it is brutality and darkness. . . . The horse represents the people."
Source 3: Sigmund Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams (1900)
The fast-paced and conflict ridden nature of life in industrial Europe undermined many people's optimism about their own and society's future. Austrian doctor Sigmund Freud developed the method of psychoanalysis to tap into and cure such anxieties. In his work The Interpretation of Dreams, he describes dreams as the windows into an individual's irrational desires and inner conflicts. Only by drawing out dreams' hidden meanings could a person expose the roots of his or her psychological problems. |
It is easy to show that the wish-fulfillment in dreams is often undisguised and easy to recognize, so that one may wonder why the language of dreams has not long since been understood. There is, for example, a dream which I can evoke as often as I please, experimentally, as it were. If, in the evening, I eat anchovies, olives, or other strongly salted foods, I am thirsty at night, and therefore I wake. The waking, however, is preceded by a dream, which has always the same content, namely, that I am drinking. I am drinking long droughts of water; it tastes as delicious as only a cool drink can taste when one's throat is parched; and then I wake, and find that I have an actual desire to drink. The cause of this dream is thirst, which I perceive when I wake. From this sensation arises the wish to drink and the dream shows me this wish fulfilled. It thereby serves a function, the nature of which I soon surmise. I sleep well, and am not accustomed to being waked by a bodily need. If I succeed in appeasing my thirst by means of the dream that I am drinking, I need not wake up in order to satisfy my thirst. It is thus a dream of convenience. The dreams takes the place of action, as elsewhere in life.
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Source 4: Anthony Storr, Theory as Therapy
Makers of the Western Tradition, Portraits from History Vol. 2 - St. Martin's Press, 1994 |
Before World War I our grandfathers would have considered themselves as being governed chiefly by reason, although subject to deplorable spells of irrationality. Freud reversed the picture, claiming that reason's voice, though persistent, had but a very small influence upon human conduct. Freud also made us regard both virtue and conventional morality with suspicion. In 1900 the man who displayed altruism and self-sacrifice would have been congratulated upon his self-control ans spirituality. It would not have occurred to the Victorians to suspect that unselfishness might be self-punishment; that kindness might conceal a patronizing superiority; that altruism could be a mask for self-centeredness, or celibacy an ignominious flight from woman.
Darwin shook man's self-esteem by demonstrating his humble origins and his kinship with other animals. Freud shattered it by showing that man's proudest spiritual achievements were rooted in primitive instinct. Not even children were allowed their "innocence," and the cozy, comfortable love of the Victorian family was shown to be based upon violent sensuality. Freud tore down many facades, leaving us naked and ashamed, but more realistic. Since his revelations, Western man has become incapable of taking any form of human behavior at face value. It is impossible to think of any other individual who has so affected the way we look at our ordinary daily pursuits. |
Source 5: Franz Kafka, The Trial
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“One must lie low, no matter how much it went against the grain, and try to understand that this great organization remained, so to speak, in a state of delicate balance, and that if someone took it upon himself to alter the dispositions of things around him, he ran the risk of losing his footing and falling to destruction, while the organization would simply right itself by some compensating reaction in another part of its machinery – since everything interlocked – and remain unchanged, unless, indeed, which was very probable, it became still more rigid, more vigilant, severer, and more ruthless.”
... “it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.' 'A melancholy conclusion,' said K. 'It turns lying into a universal principle.” ... “But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We’re all human beings here, one like the other.” “That is true” said the priest “but that is how the guilty speak” |
Source 6: William Butler Yeats, Irish poet, lines from “The Second Coming,” composed 1919, published 1920.
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Turning and turning in the widening gyre [spiral]
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. |
Source 7: Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West (1918)
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"The last century [the nineteenth] was the winter of the West, the victory of materialism and skepticism, of socialism, parliamentarianism, and money. But in this century [the twentieth] blood and instinct will regain their rights against the power of money and intellect. The era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them. Life will descend to a level of general uniformity, a new kind of primitivism, and the world will be better for it…"
... “The decline of the West, which at first sight may appear, like the corresponding decline of the Classical Culture, a phenomenon limited in time and space, we now perceive to be a philosophical problem that, when comprehended in all its gravity, includes within itself every great question of Being.” ... “One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.” ... “We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.” |
Source 8: Sir Arthur S. Eddington, British physicist and philosopher, referencing The Nature of the Physical World, Ernest Rutherford’s work on the structure of the atom, 1928.
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When we compare the universe as it is now supposed to be with the universe as we had ordinarily preconceived it, the most arresting change is not the rearrangement of space and time by Einstein but the dissolution of all that we regard as most solid into tiny specks floating in void. That gives an abrupt jar to those who think that things are more or less what they seem. The revelation by modern physics of the void within the [chemical element ] atom is more disturbing than the revelation by astronomy of the immense void of interstellar space.
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Source 9: Government Responses to the Great Depression
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THE POSTWAR ECONOMIC SITUATION IN GERMANY WAS AT ITS BLEAKEST IN 1923. STARTING IN LATE 1923, AND REALLY IN 1924, THE SITUATION BEGAN TO IMPROVE. 1924- 1929 WERE PRETTY GOOD YEARS FOR EUROPE – ECONOMICALLY AND POLITICALLY. [BUT IN 1929 EVERYTHING FALLS APART AGAIN….DUE TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION]
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