Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945
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8 On the eve of the Ruhr occupation, Sir John Bradbury of the treasury, who was Britain’s
representative on the Reparations Commission, argued in a confidential memorandum to
Stanley Baldwin that only “a further fall in the franc” would bring the French to their
senses. See W. N. Medlicott and Douglas Dakin, eds, Documents on British Foreign Policy,
1919–1939, First Series, vol. 20 (London: HMSO, 1976), p. 286.
9 G. H. Bennett,
British Foreign Policy during the Curzon Period, 1919–24 (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 43. According to Keynes’s grim characterization in The Economic
Consequences of the Peace, p. 291, “Poland is to be strong, Catholic, militarist, and faithful,
the consort, or at least the favorite, of victorious France, prosperous and magnificent
between the ashes of Russia and the ruin of Germany. Roumania, if only she could be
persuaded to keep up appearances a little more, is a part of the same scatter-brained con-
ception. Yet, unless her great neighbors are prosperous and orderly, Poland is an economic
impossibility with no industry but Jew-baiting. And when Poland finds that the seductive
policy of France is pure rhodomontade and that there is no money in it whatever, nor
glory either, she will fall, as promptly as possible, into the arms of somebody else.”
10 Catherine Anne Cline, “British Historians and the Treaty of Versailles,”
Albion 20 (1988):
43–58.
11 Quoted in G. P. Gooch,
Recent Revelations in European Diplomacy (London: Longmans
Green, 1927), p. 3.
12 Ferris,
Men, Money and Diplomacy, p. 128.
13 See Ephraim Maisel,
The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1919–1926 (Brighton: Sussex
Academic Press, 1994), pp. 42–54.
14 Details in Marian Kent, ed.,
The Great Powers and the End of Ottoman Empire, 2nd edn
(London: Frank Cass, 1996); Richard Debo, Survival and Consolidation: The Foreign
Policy of Soviet Russia, 1918–1921 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992).
15 Details of Hungarian revisionism in Bela Király and László Vezprémy, eds,
Trianon
and East Central Europe: Antecedents and Repercussions (Boulder CO: Social Science
Monographs; Highland Lakes NJ: Atlantic Research Publications, 1995).
16 Johannes Lepsius, Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and Friedrich Thimme, eds,
Die
Grosse Politik der Europäische Kabinette, 1871–1914: Sammlung der Diplomatischen Akten
des Auswärtigem Amtes, 40 vols (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik und
Geschichte, 1922–7). For details of the propaganda campaign, see Herman J. Wittgens,
“War Guilt Propaganda Conducted by the German Foreign Ministry During the 1920s,”
Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers/Communications Historiques (Montreal,
1980), pp. 228–47; Stefan Berger, “William Harbutt Dawson: The Career and Politics
of an Historian of Germany,” English Historical Review 116 (2001): 76–113. On a parallel
enterprise, see Gregory T. Weeks, “Forcing the Colonial Issue: German Attempts to
Regain African Colonies in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich, 1918–1945” (MA
thesis, Purdue University, 1993).
17 See Elspeth Y. O’Riordan,
Britain and the Ruhr Crisis (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001),
p. 180.
18 See Stephen A. Schuker,
The End of French Predominance in Europe: The Financial Crisis
of 1924 and the Adoption of the Dawes Plan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1976).
19 The former position is held by A. J. P. Taylor,
The Origins of the Second World War
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964), p. 82; the latter by Ruth Henig, Versailles and After,
1919–1933, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 71–2, and Marks, Illusion of Peace,
pp. 78–80.
20 See Jonathan Wright, “Stresemann and Locarno,”
Contemporary European History 4/2
(1995): 109–31. See also Jon Jacobson, Locarno Diplomacy: Germany and the West,
1925–1929 (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972).
revisionism 339
21 Cited by Georges Castellan, L’Allemagne de Weimar, 1918–1933 (Paris: A. Colin, 1969),
p. 339.
22 In his speech to the British press on October 23, 1925, Chamberlain called the treaties
“the real dividing line between the years of war and the years of peace.” Quoted in
C. A. Macartney, ed., Survey of International Affairs, 1925, vol. 2 (London: Oxford
University Press, 1928), p. 56. See also Anne Orde, Great Britain and International
Security, 1920–26 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), p. 210; Paul Kennedy, The
Realities behind Diplomacy: Background Influences on British External Policy, 1865–1980
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), p. 269.
23 See Frank Magee, “Limited Liability? Britain and the Treaty of Locarno,”
Twentieth
Century British History 6/1 (1995): 1–22.
24 The first perspective in supported in Henry Ashby Turner, “Continuity in German
Foreign Policy? The Case of Stresemann,” International History Review 1/4 (1979):
509–21, the second in Marshall Lee and Wolfgang Michalka, German Foreign Policy,
1917–1933: Continuity or Break? (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987), p. 98.
25 E. H. Carr,
German–Soviet Relations between the Two World Wars, 1919–1939 (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), pp. 88–9.
26 Peter Neville,
Neville Chamberlain: A Study in Failure? (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1992), pp. 93, 68.
27 Antony Lentin, “Decline and Fall of the Versailles Settlement,”
Diplomacy and Statecraft
4/2 (1993): 374.
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
Edward Hallett Carr, International Relations Between the Two World Wars, 1919–1939 (London:
Macmillan, 1947). Still valuable survey by an insightful witness.
Keith Eubank, The Origins of World War II, 3rd edn (Wheeling IL: Harlan Davidson, 2004).
Standard, if dry, account of interwar diplomacy.
John Robert Ferris, Men, Money and Diplomacy: The Evolution of British Strategic Policy,
1919–26 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). Clear explication of the aims of, and
restraints on, British diplomacy.
Hans Gatzke, ed., European Diplomacy between Two Wars, 1919–1939 (Chicago: Quadrangle
Books, 1972). Although based almost entirely on German documentation, an important
selection of essays by notable scholars.
Richard S. Grayson, Austen Chamberlain and the Commitment to Europe: British Foreign Policy,
1924–29 (London: Frank Cass, 1997). Excellent study of a key figure’s aims and policies.
John Hiden, Germany and Europe, 1919–1939, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1993). Detailed
account of Weimar revisionism.
Julian Jackson, ed., Europe, 1900–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Part of the
Short Oxford History of Europe, containing useful essays on imperialism, and foreign and
economic relations.
Jon Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994). A balanced analysis of Moscow’s reintegration into international diplomacy.
Carolyn Kitching, Britain and the Problem of International Disarmament, 1919–1934 (London:
Routledge, 1999). Clarifies an important element of London’s diplomacy.
Marshall M. Lee and Wolfgang Michalka, German Foreign Policy, 1917–1933: Continuity or
Break? (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987). Balanced survey of Weimar’s leadership and policies.
Antony Lentin, Lloyd George and the Lost Peace: From Versailles to Hitler, 1919–1940
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Sound analysis of one of the leading contributors to interwar
revisionism.
340 carole nk
Brian J. C. McKercher, ed., Anglo-American Relations in the 1920s: The Struggle for Supremacy
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991). Covers various aspects of collaboration and rivalry.
Sally Marks, The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe, 1918–1933, 2nd edn
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Classic study of the divided victors and an unre-
pentant Germany.
Maarten L. Pereboom, Democracies at the Turning Point: Britain, France, and the End of the
Postwar Order, 1928–1933 (New York: Peter Lang, 1995). Provocative study of the post-
Locarno era.
Stephanie Salzmann, Great Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union: Rapallo and After, 1922–
1934 (London: Royal Historical Society; Rochester NY: Boydell Press, 2003). Inserts the
ideological factor into Britain’s revisionist policies.
Part V
The New Age
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Jazz Age
Thomas J. Saunders
“So, Vasia, what class do you consider yourself coming from?”
“Frankly speaking – the dance-class!”
1
Cultural history thrives on the discovery of upheavals, collisions, and maelstroms. Its
metaphors come frequently from nature and evoke the dramatic arts which constitute
one of its objects of study. The “jazz age”; the “roaring twenties”; the “golden twen-
ties”; the “crazy years” – each metaphor frames the era after World War I distinctively,
even as together they signify cultural effervescence and revolt. The “jazz age” con-
jures images of exuberance and transgression – fast cars, wailing saxophones, semi-
nude chorus girls, frenetic dancing, and celebrities from movies and sports. Beyond
these individual associations it highlights three broad features of European popular
culture after the war: first and foremost its newness, both in form and affront to tra-
ditional values; second, its indebtedness to (black) America; and third, its unprece-
dented shaping by music and dance. All three were refracted in the early Parisian
performances of the black American dancer, Josephine Baker. Clothed only in a
feather skirt, feather collar, and anklets, slithering off the back of a black man to
perform with him a dance sauvage; or, naked but for a skirt of bananas, climbing
monkey-like down a tree to dance provocatively for a white explorer in the jungle,
Josephine became the premier icon of the European jazz age. The power of her
appearance and her movements to subvert conventions of art, entertainment, and
propriety has been paralleled to the impact of the world war in shattering the assump-
tions that governed the age of progress and marking the advent of modernity.
2
If Baker embodied the new and foreign, the jazz age can be represented as an epic
clash between everything she stood for and the values and traditions of prewar
Europe. This clash exhibits some convenient parallels with the political conflicts of
the age. The recognized hub of modern culture was Weimar Germany, a republic in
which all forms of censorship were initially abolished and whose capital led Europe’s
new entertainment industry and became a byword for Americanization and artistic
and sexual experimentation. National Socialists joined cultural conservatives in
344 thomas j. saunders
denouncing the fashions and values of the jazz age which they saw rampant in Berlin.
Right-wing movements in other countries adopted similar positions. In Stalinist
Russia, conservative social values and xenophobia likewise provoked resistance to
forms of popular culture associated with America.
There is no denying the importance of the war of values after World War I, but
on the field of popular culture battle lines were less neatly drawn. Here the context
and the positions adopted proved somewhat confusing. Conservatives decried the
frivolous, immoral, and foreign character of contemporary popular culture, but so
too did socialists and communists for whom the entertainments of the jazz age stupe-
fied the masses. Nazis denounced Weimar’s modern entertainment industry for its
alleged domination by Jews, but showed enormous interest in harnessing it for
national purposes. Their later purge of non-“Aryans” meant anything but dismantling
of the infrastructure and the ethos of the industry.
The initial question to ask about the jazz age is therefore not how it came under
siege by reactionary forces or authoritarian regimes. If we take the jazz age to signify
a sea-change in cultural sensibilities, the first task of the historian is to pinpoint the
most striking breaks with prewar popular culture. Part of that task, given that interwar
popular culture borrowed from America as never before, is to clarify the nature and
extent of America’s expanding presence after 1918. This permits reflections on the
wider question of how successfully the elements of popular culture crossed boundaries
of class, nation, and politics. These reflections reveal in turn the limitations of the
paradigm of cultural war for grasping developments in the 1920s and 1930s. The
final, brief task is therefore to suggest a substitute for a binary reading of interwar
popular culture.
Elements of Popular Culture
To address these issues in a chapter-length survey requires the exercise of several
kinds of historical shorthand. The first of these involves a working definition of
popular culture, a term which has been used in different ways. Some historians of
the twentieth century prefer the term “mass culture” in order to distinguish new and
media-driven entertainments from the traditional culture of the people or the sub-
culture of the proletariat. Mass culture also refers to the rapidly broadening reach of
the new media. It highlights the range of entertainment and attraction experienced
live by tens of thousands and consumed in mediated form by millions of both sexes
and various social backgrounds that is the focus of this chapter. In interwar Europe
this included everything from the most popular and burgeoning spectator sports –
football, boxing, cycling – to music, dance, and literature, and media such as the
gramophone, radio, and cinema.
The term mass culture is a useful marker of changes in audience, scale, and mode
of delivery. “Popular culture” has been retained here for two broad reasons. First,
the attractions of the interwar years were in some respects derivative rather than
original: they perpetuated or borrowed from the creative achievements and genre
conventions of the stage, music hall, pulp fiction, and fairground of nineteenth-
century popular culture. As they absorbed or displaced earlier forms, they became
the new popular culture. In the process they also borrowed personnel. Stage
performers had parallel careers in moving pictures; popular singers, such as Maurice
the jazz age 345
Chevalier in France or Leonid Utesov in Russia, used the music hall as a springboard
to fame in early film musicals, effectively bridging two eras.
In addition, although “mass culture” has been criticized for its populist connota-
tions, for masking the capitalist logic of the “culture industry,” it can also suggest
manipulation of the masses parallel to the political domination by Europe’s dictators.
It is undeniable that the popular arts have been increasingly dependent upon and
identified with media since the early twentieth century, and that these media have
been largely profit driven. To disguise this reality would fundamentally distort the
history of the crucial years between the wars when the media became widely institu-
tionalized – a prominent theme in what follows. However, the film industry or the
recording companies or the radio stations that proliferated in the 1920s did not
invent the popular. Nor could they dictate it. Consumers still made choices, so that
popular culture was a “negotiated” as much as a “managed” realm.
3
A second historical shorthand is implicit in the title. Borrowed from America, it
refers not only to notable cultural contributions of New World to Old, such as music
and dance, but also to a broader ethos. It represents the mood and mores associated
with jazz. In the United States, jazz signified revolt against the traditional constraints
of fashion, morality, and gender roles, set within the context of prohibition and
embryonic consumerism. These were all epitomized by the syncopation, insouciance,
and improvisational nature of jazz music and the dances accompanying it. The flapper
– bobbed-haired, short-skirted, cigarette-smoking, flirtatious, and independent –
symbolized the style and attitude. Self-indulgence and self-assertion were the rage.
4
It was clear already in the 1920s that this rage was primarily about the lifestyles
of self-appointed and wealthy trend-setters. Nonetheless, the challenge to convention
was not confined to the columns of fashion magazines and the lives of world-travelers
and the literati. Nor was it confined to the United States. Europe too witnessed a
break, mourned by some and embraced by many, with traditional values. The wide
granting of female suffrage and the presence of women in new areas of employment
and public life; the coming of age of the generation whose fathers, brothers, and
uncles died or were maimed at the front and whose ties to the prewar world were
attenuated; the extremely unsettled economic conditions and the search for meaning
after the war to end all wars – these were essential components of change for which
America could not be made responsible, even if America offered some of the forms
by which that change was expressed. Fashions of dress and conduct changed, with
shorter skirts and hair signaling a shift, if not revolution, in sexual behavior and
gender relations; leisure and pursuit of pleasure occupied a growing share of human
activity as trade unions negotiated shorter work weeks and holidays became wide-
spread; the “culture industry” expanded rapidly to engage public interest, feeding
the fads, crazes, and celebrity worship which marked the age.
One could elaborate on this rupture in values and styles in the aftermath of World
War I. The “jazz age” refers to this discontinuity, those features of postwar European
culture that distinguished it from the prewar era, not least its borrowing from
America. It tends, of course, to prejudge the case for newness and threatens to
Americanize doubly – once through original indebtedness and a second time through
foreshortening of perspective and the screening out of what did not mirror American
trends. It treats the war as the principal watershed and ignores the appearance already
before the war of styles that won broad acceptance in the 1920s. Yet it underscores
346 thomas j. saunders
the fact that there was no going back to the belle époque and that America was part
of European modernity. American culture did not sweep away a rich heritage of
European popular music, dance, literature, and stage entertainment, or national
forms of the newer entertainments, such as cinema. Nonetheless, it was increasingly
difficult to imagine European culture in America’s absence.
The third and somewhat more arbitrary shorthand concerns the focus on popular
culture over the arts as conventionally understood. This emphasis is not motivated
by a judgment that what is somewhat awkwardly labeled “high culture” – architec-
ture, painting, literature, theater, and classical music – is less deserving of attention.
The 1920s are remembered as the apogee of cultural modernism. The cult of newness
and experimentation, associated with names from Jean Cocteau to Wassily Kandinsky
and movements from surrealism to the Bauhaus, has been a central theme of interwar
cultural history. The period also witnessed noteworthy appropriations of popular
culture by prominent artists, writers, and composers. Fascination with specific enter-
tainments, boxing in particular, but also the music hall and motion picture, inspired
poems, paintings, and literary reflections. Celebration of primitive cultures and
peoples, familiar among modernist artists and intellectuals before the war, provided
the foundation for postwar appreciation of jazz music and dance by sections of the
European avant-garde. Igor Stravinsky’s Ragtime dates from 1918; in 1923 Darius
Milhaud published a jazz ballet; Ernst Krenek’s well-known jazz opera, Jonny spielt
auf, was first staged in 1927.
5
Yet the writers, artists, and composers who frequented
the cafés and studios of Montparnasse or Berlin borrowed more than they gave back.
Focus here remains fixed on the culture they appropriated.
The fourth shorthand is largely prescribed by the existing historiography. Some
aspects of interwar popular culture have received extensive attention. There is, for
instance, a wide literature on interwar cinema, more than enough to justify a mono-
graph integrating its findings. Recent work on radio and literature has begun to fill
gaps in understanding. Yet we know much less about other important areas, such as
the gramophone and the recording industry or popular dance and sport. To this
unevenness must be added a more fundamental kind of fragmentation. Whereas for
the United States the jazz age provides a conceptual umbrella under which to syn-
thesize the elements of popular culture, historians of Europe face a dual challenge.
Research tends, first, to divide along national lines and, second, to focus on one
aspect of popular culture, such as music or sport or film. Consequently, there is very
little to which one can turn bearing on the topic as a whole.
“Americanization”: Music and the Movies
Where then does one begin? A useful jumping-off point is provided by jazz itself. As
a musical idiom, it came to Europe late in the war with black soldiers in the American
Expeditionary Force. When the soldiers, having played a crucial role in ending the
European civil war, went home, their music and dance stayed behind. In their wake
American jazz bands and soloists toured Europe, while recordings gradually widened
the circle of jazz enthusiasts. The performances (and recordings) in Europe of
premier American jazz dancers and musicians, among them Josephine Baker, Sidney
Bechet, Sam Wooding, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington, were at once revela-
tion and provocation, proof of possibilities for intonation, rhythm, movement, and
the jazz age 347
showmanship that exploded Old World boundaries. The conflicting passions these
stirred give some measure of the jolt they administered. Significantly, Afro-American
music and dance were denigrated and embraced on remarkably similar grounds.
Detractors took its sensual, primitive, and foreign qualities as evidence that it was
degenerate and uncivilized; enthusiasts welcomed these same features as liberation
from the dead weight of European civilization.
6
Even as music, however, jazz was an elastic term. Europe primarily encountered
the “symphonic” jazz created by white musicians in America and championed most
famously by Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. The distinctiveness of so-called “hot
jazz” was only belatedly appreciated, and then mainly by specialists. Moreover, jazz
was initially identified with gimmickry and showmanship. Novelty percussion instru-
ments and vocal sounds, unusual performing techniques (playing the slide on the
trombone with the feet or juggling with the sticks while playing drums), and cacoph-
ony were taken as its trademarks. Finally, jazz instrumentation became enormously
popular for European bands whether or not they played jazz music.
7
In Europe as in America the term “jazz” came to be used quite loosely – to the
dismay of purists ever since – as a synonym for popular dance music or even popular
music in general. Only in these terms can it be said that jazz became widely popular.
With the emergence of “swing” in the early 1930s, the domestication of jazz was
essentially complete. Yet the association of race, instrumentation, and rhythm that
identified jazz as Afro-American remained, even when the music itself adopted
smoother rhythms and intonations and lost much of its improvisational nature. It is
in this context that one can comprehend the ambivalence toward jazz that character-
ized the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. In origins and nature it was perceived as
alien and subversive, but as a form of dance music, its smoother variants became such
a part of domestic culture that intermittent attempts to ban it foundered.
8
Jazz was the spearhead of a series of American contributions to interwar European
popular culture. The European jazz age was one in which America served as a source
of entertainment, creative inspiration, and cultural debate. American popular culture
showed little respect for boundaries of nation, politics, or class; it steamrolled its way
into virtually all parts of Europe. Apart from jazz music and dance, America’s con-
tributions had perhaps less shock value but more pervasive public and commercial
impact. Motion pictures stand out. Already during the war Hollywood had sup-
planted French studios as the major supplier of global film entertainment. British and
French cinemas came to rely on American shorts and feature films. After the war
Hollywood’s reach extended eastward to encompass central Europe and the Soviet
Union. By the mid-1920s it attained a position of dominance everywhere but in
Germany, where domestic production roughly matched the volume of American
imports. The jazz age was, therefore, the era in which Hollywood’s enduring pres-
ence in European cinemas was established.
9
Apart from the sheer volume and variety of celluloid produced by the Hollywood
assembly line, and the promotional juggernaut that sustained it, the glamor and
polish of American movies and their wealth of human types earned them a leading
place in cinemas from France to Russia. Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad,
Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik, Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms, and Charlie Chaplin
in numerous shorts and The Gold Rush were early representatives of a pool of creative
talent that appeared almost limitless. Westerns, society dramas, slapstick, and gangster