Lecture 25: Interwar: A Broken World
History 5 - Spring 2008: The Making of Modern Europe, 1453 to the Present
Intro: The Weimar Republic. Crises in 1923: Ruhr Occupation, Communist Uprising, hyper-inflation, and Hitler’s November beerhall putsch. Why was Germany able to withstand the threat from extremism in the early 1920s, when Italy succumbed? The 1929 turning point: referendum against the Young Plan, depression, and massive unemployment. Hitler’s take-over not inevitable; what enabled it? The Italian Fascist and German Nazi regimes compared. Fascism as seen in Cal’s 1936 Yearbook. Why did Europe go to war again? Pre-condition: the breakup of the multinational Romanov and Habsburg empires at the end of World War I and ensuing territorial settlements produce a multitude of “successor states” (e.g., Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia), each aspiring to become a (homogenous) nation-state. Yet the concept of the nation-state incompatible with Europe’s entanglement of nationalities, as every boundary creates new minorities, necessitating “minority treaties” and producing grievances and potential allies for any state desiring to overturn the system.
