Cultural Heritage II

Modernism, Fascism, the Holocaust, and the Atomic Age

Modernism (c. 1900-1950)

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

Dada(ism) and “Avant-Garde” Modernism(s)

Marcel Duchamp, “the Fountain”

Un Chien Andalou (1928), Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali

The Bauhaus Architects

Totalitarianism (Communist and Fascist)

“Degenerate Art” vs. Fascist and Socialist Realism (A Kulturkampf)

George Orwell, 1984 (1948)

Fascism

Fascist Politics

The Fascist Leader

Triumph of the Will (1935), Dir. Leni Riefenstahl

Eugenics

Anti-Semitism

The Eternal Jew (1940), dir. Fritz Hippler

The Holocaust

Night and Fog (1955), documentary

Discussion?: Could the United States become a fascist nation in time of war or national crisis, perhaps? What prevents this from happening?

Have you noticed anything like a Kulturkampf in our time (e.g., the “culture wars”)? Is the last few decades’ controversies over political correctness something that divides our literary and artistic culture today? What about the pro-Darwin, anti-Darwin factions? Or Red State vs. Blue State? Is our culture fragmenting?

The Great Depression

Dorothea Lange, Photographer

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

John Maynard Keynes (Keynesian Economics):

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, U.S. President, 1933-45

The New Deal and the WPA

Pearl Harbor

U.S. Internment Camps for Japanese

D-Day Landing, Invasion of Normandy

Robert Capa, Photographer

Firebombing (Dresden, Tokyo), also note the “Baedeker Raids”

The Manhattan Project

Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945)

The Atomic Age and the Cold War

Discussion?: Did the United States do the right thing when it bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki?