Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
348 thomas j. saunders
films projected images of America and figured centrally in defining the language of
the medium. American movies also disseminated American values and lifestyles.
Automobiles, hair-styles, fashions of dress, and behavior were among the lifestyle
advertisements imported with American movies.
Hollywood’s numerical preponderance and influence generated responses as mixed
as those provoked by jazz music. From a purely quantitative perspective European
theaters needed American films. In terms of the variety and production values of
American movies, theater owners and viewers likewise welcomed them. Some artists
and writers found them a source of refreshment and fascination. However, depen-
dence on Hollywood was resented by some members of the film trade and by critics
alarmed at the perceived Americanization of European culture, especially where
American film companies created European affiliates or invested in existing compa-
nies. Some charged Hollywood with undermining domestic film industries by buying
up outstanding European film personnel for its own studios. Others went so far as
to allege that European audiences were fed up with a steady diet of American film
entertainment and were consequently abandoning the cinema in general. The first
charge, at least in the active recruiting of leading producers, directors, and performers
with lucrative dollar contracts, was undeniable. The second allegation was harder to
sustain and remains historically difficult to verify. Some types of American film under-
standably proved more attractive to European audiences than others. It is also
arguable that the postwar boom in movie-making and theater-building resulted in
overproduction and relative stagnation in the second half of the 1920s.
10
Hollywood’s omnipresence and recruiting of continental talent certainly did not
stifle European filmic activity. Indeed, it can be argued that the competition from
America was a necessary, if not sufficient, stimulus to the cultivation of national
cinemas, represented most notably in the works of Soviet and German filmmakers of
the 1920s and the French auteur in the 1930s. Although the “revolutionary” films
of Sergei Eisenstein, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, and Vsevolod Pudovkin could not gener-
ally rival American imports at the box office, they were internationally acclaimed and
plundered for filmic technique. In Germany and France the work of such directors
as Ernst Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, and René Clair was equally
influential in shaping the language of moving pictures. Historians have frequently
focused on cinematic milestones, particularly those which could broadly be termed
socially realistic, but European studios also manufactured a wide range of light enter-
tainment, even if they could scarcely compete with Hollywood in terms of volume
and variety. With the introduction of “talkies” they encountered the challenge faced
by Hollywood – how to market their product in other languages – but also enjoyed
a breathing space provided by the language barrier, behind which domestic sound
production could be nurtured.
Media and the Masses
Discussion of film underscores the second fundamental feature of interwar popular
culture, namely, its unprecedented media saturation. Whether new or previously
established, the media experienced remarkable growth. For serial publishing, the
interwar years represent a historic pinnacle. Leading cities boasted multiple daily
papers; in Berlin there were roughly a dozen major and many minor, local papers.
the jazz age 349
Inexpensive paperback fiction, aimed, like cinema, at a market whose contours and
tastes were closely calculated, became big business, led by the phenomenon of the
bestseller.
11
The range of periodical literature was unprecedented, as publishers
targeted specific audiences, among them women and youth, and as newer media such
as film and radio spawned related print material, from critical journals to fan maga-
zines. Sports magazines and dedicated sports sections in newspapers grew rapidly
with the sharp rise in popular appeal of the mass spectator sports. There were, of
course, variations in the extent of media coverage across the continent, but interwar
popular culture was largely media driven.
Several media stand out for their newness or modernity, prominent among them
cinema and the gramophone. In the decade before the war the former had begun to
find permanent accommodation in urban areas; the latter, from the uneven statistical
evidence available, was at home primarily among the growing middle classes. It was
after the war that each became accessible on a very wide front. A postwar boom
brought motion pictures to widening circles of the urban working class and smaller
towns. The movies also climbed the social ladder toward bourgeois respectability and
at least in the larger cities acquired palatial surroundings which rivaled or outdid
traditional theaters. Movie programs also adopted features of vaudeville, combining
live acts and music with short and feature films. The number of cinemas rose rapidly
in most parts of Europe. Beyond the towns and cities, especially as one traveled east,
coverage remained thin, but movies still qualify as the premier form of public enter-
tainment between the wars.
In addition to rapid expansion, the cinema underwent a revolution from silence
to sound. Strictly speaking, film had never been silent, since musical accompaniment
was an integral part of film screenings. The motion picture palaces of the 1920s
boasted their own house orchestras, while the modest suburban or provincial theaters
usually provided a small ensemble or at least piano accompaniment. Cinemas were
the leading employer of musicians in the 1920s – in Germany alone it is estimated
that 12,000–15,000 musicians found work in them. Strikingly and ironically, “silent
film” provided the experience of live musical entertainment for more people than
had ever frequented concert halls. It offered a wide range of music, including classics
and popular and original songs. All this being said, the introduction of sound at the
end of the 1920s represented a very significant break. The ability of film to synchro-
nize the visual and the aural made it a central forum for the music, dance, showman-
ship, and sensation which characterized the age.
The gramophone became increasingly accessible to the lower classes and fueled a
dramatic postwar growth in record sales. Although we know much less about their
cultural impact than we do about motion pictures, it is clear that by the early 1920s
recordings began to supplant sheet music as the primary vehicle for transmission of
popular music. For a brief period, before radio and sound movies assumed a fair share
of this role, they were the main link between musical artists and the public. On the
eve of the Depression, record sales in Germany were almost 30 million annually and
perhaps half that number in France, evidence that as many as half of all households
owned a gramophone. Even though this boom was less about jazz, strictly speaking,
than popular music in general, it was sustained by the dance fads of the decade. It
has been estimated that at least three-quarters of all records sold in the second half
of the 1920s were either popular songs or dance music.
12
350 thomas j. saunders
Among the leading media of interwar Europe one was entirely new. If we set
television aside as a novelty of the 1930s whose popular history belongs to the period
after the second war, radio was the lone medium to penetrate domestic space between
the wars. Its rapid ascent from curiosity to household item is a case study in media
dissemination and in the harnessing of that medium for the primary purpose of
entertainment. From its inception in the early 1920s, broadcasting became, within a
decade (again with considerable national variations as one traveled south and east),
a fixture in middle-class homes. Italy was an exception among the industrialized
nations of western Europe, lagging well behind, but otherwise by the end of the
1930s radio was also familiar in working-class households in western Europe. Germany
and England led the way: in the former case there were already a million radio licenses
in 1925, a figure which quadrupled by 1932 and then tripled again by 1939. France
showed a slower growth curve, but even there the number of radios rose from about
half a million in 1930 to 5.5 million in 1939.
Unlike cinema and the recording industry, broadcasting was largely, though not
exclusively, in public hands. Launched with a mandate to educate and cultivate, it
initially addressed the middle classes capable of affording the unwieldy and expensive
radio sets manufactured in the 1920s. Its mandate therefore ran somewhat at cross-
purposes with those of the other popular media. Indeed, a determination that radio
should not become just another medium of popular culture pervaded official opinion
about it. The commitment to elevation of the audience in the national interest was
almost universal. Programming ranged from live concerts to news, lectures, radio
plays, and sporting events, with emphasis on music and talk which would edify and
enlighten. By the early 1930s, with improvements in the technology of both broad-
casting and receiving, radios became increasingly attractive and accessible to the
working class. Radio stations responded to growing public demand to provide a
variety of light entertainment, including comedy and increased quotas of popular
dance music. A socially more diverse listenership, and transmitters capable of reaching
beyond towns and cities into rural areas, gave radio the ability to speak nationally,
connecting a disparate audience. It brought cultivation to the masses and popular
music to the elite.
13
Spectators and Participants
As the modern media claimed a growing share of discretionary spending, traditional
forms of culture were inevitably affected. Media competition represented a relentless
challenge to the café concert, music hall and, to a lesser extent, cabaret, which were
vibrant forms at the turn of the century. By the mid-1920s the music hall faced
decline with the surge in popularity of records. At the start of the next decade sound
movies and radio delivered an even more telling blow. Yet live entertainment did not
of course disappear. In some respects the radio served its interests by the exposure
it offered to otherwise little-known performers who toured concert halls and stages.
Moreover, the traditions of popular song and the music hall remained alive in other
guises, such as the dance hall and in the “silent” movie theaters.
The music hall tradition had already been enriched before the war with the emer-
gence of the revue. For a better-off clientele in large cities the 1920s became its
heyday. Borrowing from variety shows a mix of bands, skits, singers, and well-drilled
the jazz age 351
chorus lines, the revue added increasingly extravagant stage presentation, particularly
magnificent and exotic backdrops, and various stages of nudity (censored in film).
Its subject matter, like that of vaudeville or the music hall, cohered only in the loosest
sense, but the purpose was not to convince but to overwhelm the senses and provide
diversion. Revues became enormously popular. The leading producers vied with each
other in the opulence, exoticism, and sheer variety of their numbers. Until the begin-
ning of the depression and the release of the early musical films they offered an
unrivaled combination of titillation, sensation, and spectacle. For the metropolis of
the postwar years they acquired an iconic quality, short-lived though their popularity
proved to be.
14
As the example of the revue suggests, rather than draw a hard line between live
and media-based entertainment, roughly old and new, we should be attentive to their
intersection, indeed reciprocity. Radio and motion pictures were unique modes of
communication and entertainment and spawned their own audiences. Yet they also
appropriated the traditions of live musical and theatrical entertainment. Moreover,
they reproduced for millions, in the pre-television age, the life of their time. It was
in this period that sporting events became accessible via radio to remote “spectators.”
But this accompanied, rather than undermined, the attractions of live attendance.
Indeed, radio interest in sporting events catered to the growing fan base and is diffi-
cult to imagine without it. Across Europe new stadiums were built, in number and
size far exceeding the requirements of the prewar era, to accommodate football fans.
Film and broadcasting also captured the outstanding feats of the age, feats which
drew massive live audiences, such as Lindbergh’s triumphant reception in France after
the first transatlantic solo flight in 1927. Similarly, the gramophone brought music
to an enormous audience and, like film, crossed boundaries of geography and
tradition.
The importance of media should also not be understood to imply that popular
culture can be reduced to various forms of passive consumption or spectatorship. In
the first place, one should not assume that audiences in cinemas or football stadiums
were inert. It is simpler for us to imagine enthusiastic and vocal behavior at sports
events than in movie theaters, but there is ample evidence that interwar movie-goers
engaged motion pictures much as they would live entertainment, not only with
laughter and tears but also with cheers, boos, applause, catcalls, and whistling.
Second, some media directly fostered participation. The popular music of the 1920s,
available on gramophone and radio, fed a dance craze serviced by thousands of dance
halls and clubs. Indeed, it is arguable, as in the case of the emergence of jazz music
in America, that the causal sequence should be reversed: new dances and public
venues to engage them made the music and recordings popular.
At the burgeoning dance halls the mostly young and single could meet, mix, and
learn new steps. Restaurants, clubs, and beer gardens likewise employed live bands
to cater to a clientele enthusiastic about dancing. The most famous of the American
dances of the 1920s to land in Europe, the Charleston, was a rather short-lived craze
at mid-decade, and less widely adopted than often imagined. It nonetheless represents
a wider trend that went back to the arrival of the tango before the war. A series of
imported dance steps, such as the foxtrot, cakewalk, and shimmy, like the Charleston,
transformed the meaning of popular dance. Whether Europeans danced in order to
forget the war, to enjoy the relative freedom of relations between the sexes, or because
352 thomas j. saunders
the rhythms of jazz proved as irresistible as the blend of contortion, eroticism, and
celebration of the body performed by Josephine Baker, they danced publicly as never
before.
A similar observation can be made with regard to sports. Media coverage of the
three most popular sports of the age – football, boxing, and cycling (six-day races
and the Tour de France) – not only extended, rather than replaced, the experience
of live spectatorship. It also, in the case of football, reflected the widening popularity
of the sport as a pastime for millions of young males. The interwar years witnessed
a remarkable expansion of amateur football clubs on the continent. The English
game, introduced to the continent in the late nineteenth century among the better
classes, became a staple of working-class culture and the national sport of Europe.
France, which had about a thousand local football associations in 1920, had four
thousand by 1925 and six thousand by the late 1930s. In Germany there were a half
million active members in 3,100 associations in 1920; a decade later total member-
ship had doubled. Active participants and a wide circle of mostly male spectators
constituted the fan base for the sport. Thus spectatorship followed the growth of
participation as much as it was fostered by media. With the enormous rise in the
number of participants and spectators went the commercialization and professional-
ization of football, just as the Tour de France had commercialized road cycling. The
leading clubs competed financially for the best players, whose names and pictures
were used in advertising: football cards helped sell cigarettes. The World Cup was
held for the first time in 1930, giving formal dimensions to national rivalries which
were already crucial for stimulating public interest in the sport.
15
Music and the Public Realm
Jazz music and dance, a rich and diverse film culture, the gramophone, sports, and
radio: these are the outstanding elements of interwar popular culture. Only the first
and last of these were unique to the era, yet enough has been said about the remain-
der to suggest how changes in scale and technology meant a significant departure
from the norms of prewar Europe. Taken together with Americanization, these ele-
ments point to two conspicuous features of interwar popular culture in addition to
its dependence on media and its ability to cross lines of class and nation. The first is
that in a manner never before experienced, music saturated the public (popular)
realm. Live on stage and in the dance hall, in “silent” movie theaters and then sound
films, via radio and recordings, someone’s song went continuously around the world
and was heard by unprecedented numbers of people, a condition that has since
become so normal as to be completely unremarkable. The second is the impressive
synergy of the various means by which music found its audience, notwithstanding
intervals of competition between them. Live performances were broadcast on the
airwaves and recorded for sale; studio recordings found outlets in radio; film com-
panies crafted motion pictures around singers and hit songs and then distributed the
latter as records and sheet music; radio picked up the popular movie tunes as well as
initially supporting its own live ensembles. All of these phenomena are now so familiar
as to be commonplace. But it was the interwar years that witnessed the convergence
of the media which made music as ubiquitous as print or still photography and the
moving picture.
the jazz age 353
What can be said about the nature of this music? First and foremost, it encom-
passed a range of styles both new and old. In addition to dance and jazz hits, waltzes,
folk songs, sentimental ballads, operetta, choral music, and symphonic and operatic
music were recorded, broadcast, and featured in films as well as at live performances.
The jazz age was not dominated by jazz in any strict sense. One of the popular
musical forms of the period was the operetta, and one that generated its own series
of hit songs. From the early days of sound movies it became accessible to audiences
of millions. Some operettas used modern styles of popular song and dance; others
drew on the musical traditions of the nineteenth century. Sometimes these were
juxtaposed. As noted earlier, the instrumentation of the jazz band was adopted widely
for other musical styles. If we add military music to the list above, especially the
patriotic and marching tunes without which Soviet socialism and German Nazism
are scarcely imaginable, and which were also heard on screen, radio, and records,
some idea of the richness of popular music can be gained. In variety as well as avail-
ability this was an age inundated by music.
16
While there are a number of illuminating studies of popular music in this period,
the phenomenon just outlined has not been comprehensively assessed. A convenient
and fascinating window on it is offered by early musical films, the entertainment form
that married music and moving image, thus uniting the leading attractions of the
age. More than photographs, which capture the fashions and settings of the time, or
recordings, which preserve many of its sounds, including those of some sporting
events and radio programming (including radio plays), musical films archive contem-
porary tastes, emotions, and illusions. As in other aspects of interwar cinema,
Hollywood’s leading role brings to mind such pictures as The Jazz Singer (1927) or
Broadway Melody (1929). Yet all the major film-producing nations in Europe made
musicals and operettas, many of which were enormously popular. René Clair’s Le
Million (1930), early German works such as Three from the Filling Station (1930) or
Congress Dances (1931) and the films of the Soviet song-writing/directing duo of
Isaak Dunaevsky and Grigori Alexandrov, especially Jolly Fellows (1934) and Volga,
Volga (1937), invented worlds in which song and dance overcame all obstacles. Light-
hearted, optimistic, irrepressible, these often chose “everyday” settings but tran-
scended socioeconomic circumstances which were anything but hopeful.
It is easy to dismiss these musicals as vapid and inane, the ultimate form of
escapism in extremely difficult circumstances. When three snappy and good-looking
German males return to their flat to find its contents being repossessed because their
bank has collapsed (Three from the Filling Station), they break into a plaintive but
good-natured and ultimately playful song about their plight – this in 1930, as the
Depression in Germany moved from dire to catastrophic. Soviet performers cele-
brated the power of music to create individual happiness and national strength,
anticipating Stalin’s famous pronouncement in late 1935 that life had become more
joyous – this in the interval between the monstrosities of industrialization and
collectivization and the nightmare of the purges to come.
17
In France, René Clair’s
enchanted spoof, Le Million, again set during the Depression, revolved around a
winning lottery ticket. It is difficult to deny the opportunism of the culture industry
in this sugar-coating of the real world. Yet it is likewise difficult to deny the cleverness
with which these films enlisted contemporary song, dance, comedy, and romance,
their promotion of existing or creation of new musical talent, their boon to record
354 thomas j. saunders
sales in launching hit songs, and their enlistment of a mix of musical styles. Whether
produced in democratic or socialist or fascist societies, they testify to dreams and
aspirations that are as recognizable as they were remote from reality for their
audiences.
Reading Popular Culture in the Jazz Age
The musical film can be read as a type of popular culture in general, identifiable by
its ephemeral and inconsequential content as much by its stylistic features and broad
audience. By this account, superficiality and cliché characterize everything from
popular songs to movies. This reading renders popular culture a weak source for
understanding the world of those who produced and consumed it. However, it can
be argued with at least as much force that the motifs of popular culture recur precisely
because they engage fundamental human concerns, situated in concrete times and
places. Their dependence upon genre conventions such as comedy, romance, or
tragedy by no means undermines their significance. Moreover, the relationship
between motif and genre treatment is historically conditioned. Popular literature,
movies, and music inescapably treat contemporary issues, even if their treatments and
resolutions displace and distort. How they distinguish themselves stylistically and
engage contemporary issues can be highly revealing.
What then was characteristic of the content or main themes of interwar popular
culture? To respond to this question is to gloss the final query raised in the introduc-
tion to this chapter about the significance of popular culture for understanding
interwar Europe. At first glance the thematic trends yield a straightforward answer:
broken hearts and romantic fulfillment; satire and slapstick; heroism and adventure;
triumph and tragedy, spectacle and action: these formed the backbone of entertain-
ment on the stage and in film and popular literature. In this respect little appeared
to have changed. Yet the answer is not as simple as classifying genres and narrative
traditions. Even if we except jazz music and dance as outsiders – though they quickly
became insiders – popular culture appropriated new thematic territory after the war
by engaging the issues of its time. Shifts in modes of delivery went hand in hand
with changes that transcended one national or regional context, notwithstanding the
varieties of European experience.
One clue to these broad changes has already been noted: the extent to which
American music, dance, and movies found a home across Europe. America was clearly
the outstanding source of transnational popular culture, but it was not alone. Although
no European movie-making nation could compete seriously even on the continental
market, Swedish, German, Russian, and French films still circulated widely. While
identified with their respective places of origin, they were ingredients in a truly inter-
national film culture. Popular music, whether music hall songs or marches and
patriotic melodies, had specifically national provenance, but thanks to radio, record-
ings, and motion pictures, also circulated more widely. In short, internationalization
of popular culture did not only mean Americanization. It can be paralleled to the
nationalizing effects of motion pictures, recordings, and broadcasting in their tran-
scendence of regional and class boundaries.
Another clue can be found in examination of the authoritarian states of the
period – primarily Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, and Mussolini’s Italy – for
the jazz age 355
evidence that official ideologies and state control created distinct popular cultures.
Historians have devoted considerable energy to this search, particularly for evidence
that popular culture was ideologically contaminated. Sport history, for instance, has
been written largely from the perspective of the state, focusing on the role of physical
training in national health and militarization and on the politics of international
competition.
18
Until recently the same has been true of much research on film, radio,
and the press. The aim has been to pinpoint how the aspirations of the seemingly
omnipresent state remade national culture.
The results of the search have been equivocal. There is no doubt that the state
had ambitions to mold the culture of the people, or that substantial apparatuses were
constructed and that they functioned to this end. The range of controls was unprec-
edented and the visions for cultural renewal were boundless. There is also no doubt
that media were instrumentalized for specific propaganda purposes, especially news-
reels or radio talks. Nonetheless, what remains in great doubt is that the millions of
people who went to the movies and football matches, purchased records and visited
dance halls, had a particular interest in the politics of their entertainment. Thematically,
perhaps socialist realism in the Soviet Union of the 1930s came closest to attaining
a life of its own, though even it has been dubbed a “tortuous compromise.”
19
While each regime acknowledged the importance of sport or film or radio for
national life and appropriated popular culture wherever it could, it has yet to be
demonstrated that any of them knew how to create a popular culture in its own
image. Indeed, despite proclamations of national superiority and quotas to protect
it – a notable oxymoron, though one familiar as well in the democracies – they gen-
erally permitted circulation of foreign, especially American, films and jazz music. In
fact, the dictators often enjoyed Hollywood’s top productions, just as their people
adopted American-inspired dance music. To the extent that audiences showed prefer-
ence for domestic over foreign films or music, there is little to suggest that political
questions intruded. Notwithstanding significant attempts to draw firm lines between
political and non-political entertainment, to tease out hidden ideological content or
to credit popular culture for reconciling consumers to an otherwise oppressive social
and political system, historians have found that popular culture spoke to concerns
that could not be neatly bounded by race, nation, or class.
20
This is not to whitewash or suppress manifest evidence of manipulation in the
interests of an ideology. But in Europe as in America, popular culture generally
emphasized individual, private fates, rather than the collective so prized by fascism,
socialism, or National Socialism. This was consonant with a central impulse of the
modern age. Paradoxically, the authoritarian political movements defined and pre-
sented themselves according to the categories and values of genre entertainment at
least as much as they reshaped those images and values for ideological purposes. In
important regards their key personalities were stage managers and spin-doctors,
otherwise known as politicians.
If the case for reading popular culture according to political agendas is proble-
matic, a more convincing and intriguing argument has been made for the gendering
of interwar popular culture. A central motif for historians interested in the intersec-
tion of culture and society has been the emergence of the “new woman” as archetype
and consumer. While partly myth, spawned by male apprehensions in the postwar
world, the “new woman” was both enough of a reality and a large enough myth to
356 thomas j. saunders
generate impassioned discussion and to become a favorite figure of popular film and
literature. Male anxieties in the face of a cohort of young, single, working women
with little prospect of marriage, given the gender imbalance after the war, is one side
of the phenomenon. The other is the role of women as consumers of films, maga-
zines, novels, cosmetics, and clothing (i.e., as a majority of the “masses”). Women’s
choices acquired novel public, cultural, and commercial weight. These choices inter-
sected with changing images of feminine roles, dress, and ideals of beauty. Popular
culture therefore played a crucial role in the process of what has been called female
“subjectivity formation.”
21
Not the least intriguing aspect of this theme is the coding of popular culture itself
as feminine, that is, as a public realm that thematized private concerns traditionally
associated with the female sphere, that projected a novel role for women, and that
was open to females as much as to males. Feminization can thus be linked to mass
media in general and the inroads of American culture in particular, to the expanding
public space for consumption of popular culture and the invasion of the private
(female/family) sphere, not least by radio. The “new woman” featured in popular
novels, films, and songs became associated with contemporary media and forms of
marketing. (Sport alone remained broadly “male” in its ethos and following, although
here too the thrall of mass spectatorship suggested feminization parallel to that
witnessed in mass adoration of Mussolini and Hitler.) Women were targeted by
publishers, broadcasters, and film producers, becoming conspicuous consumers of
popular culture at the same moment that their social roles and identities were high-
lighted there and in broad public debate. American popular culture, foremost in
overriding national boundaries and the traditional divide between high and low
culture, represented a comparable challenge to gender boundaries, demonstrating
that inherited categories were unstable and subject to overthrow.
22
The gendering of popular culture frames the final question starkly: have we aban-
doned one binary reading of the subject – the war between tradition and modernity
– only to be enmeshed in a second – the gender divide? If so, is the latter the key to
popular song, film, and literature after the Great War? The short answer to both
questions is a simple negative. The slightly longer answer is that issues not new to
the 1920s – from expanding leisure time and disposable income to female suffrage
and widening employment, urbanization and its attendant social opportunities and
stresses, and a generation of youth in search of meaning – were transformed by the
war into matters of central interest and received both overt and coded airing in the
popular culture of the postwar decade. Gender roles and images were prominent,
but questions of class, morality, or national identity were also prevalent. In addition,
America’s presence was pervasive and much debated. Moreover, as a model and as
competitor in music, dance, film, and marketing, America helped shift the terms of
debate not only on a wide range of social issues but also on the nature and significance
of popular culture itself.
The tug-of-war, new to this era but still with us, was no longer between tradition
and modernity. Thanks largely to the supraregional and supranational reach of new
media, the challenge was how to engage ever wider audiences without imitating or
surrendering to America. The challenge rested on a simple discovery: resistance to,
or outright rejection of, the American political and social model generally proved no
bar to adoption of its popular culture. With that culture came the panoply of values
the jazz age 357
that can be broadly termed individualistic and consumerist, rooted in self-realization
and self-fulfillment. This is a world we have not yet lost.
NOTES
1 Soviet satire of 1927, cited in Anne E. Gorsuch,
Youth in Revolutionary Russia
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 116.
2 See Phyllis Rose,
Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1989), pp. 18–28, 97: her performance was of course stage-managed by
Europeans to conform to their notions of the primitive.
3 Cf. Richard Stites,
Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 1–6; Regina M. Sweeney, Singing
Our Way to Victory: French Cultural Politics and Music during the Great War (Middletown
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), pp. 7–8.
4 See Kathy J. Ogren,
The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
5 See Jody Blake,
Le Tumulte noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age
Paris, 1900–1930 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); Nancy L.
Perloff, Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991).
6 See Chris Goddard,
Jazz Away from Home (New York: Paddington Press, 1979); Gorsuch,
Youth in Revolutionary Russia, pp. 116–38.
7 See Ronald Pearsall,
Popular Music of the Twenties (London: David and Charles, 1976),
pp. 55–62.
8 See Michael Kater,
Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992); S. Frederick Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the
Soviet Union, 1917–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
9 See Victoria de Grazia, “Mass Culture and Sovereignty: The American Challenge to
European Cinemas, 1920–1960,” Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 53–87.
10 See Tom Saunders,
Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
11 See Lynda J. King,
Best-Sellers by Design: Vicki Baum and the House of Ullstein (Detroit
MI: Wayne State University Press, 1988).
12 See Pekka Gronow, “The Record Industry: The Growth of a Mass Medium,”
Popular
Music 3 (1983): 62; see also P. Gronow and Ilpo Saunio, An International History of the
Recording Industry, Christopher Moseley, trans. (London: Cassell, 1998), p. 41.
13 Cf. Karl C. Führer, “A Medium of Modernity? Broadcasting in Weimar Germany, 1923–
32,” Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 722–53; Cécile Méadel, “Programmes en
masse, programmes de masse?” in Masses et culture de masse dans les années 30, Régine
Robin, ed. (Paris: Editions ouvrières, 1991), pp. 51–68.
14 See Peter Jelavich,
Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp.
165–86.
15 See Geoff Hare,
Football in France: A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 2003), pp. 15–21.
On cycling, see Richard Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (London: Macmillan,
1981), pp. 81–102; Christopher Thompson, “The Tour in the Inter-War Years: Political
Ideology, Athletic Excess and Industrial Modernity,” in Tour de France, 1903–2003, Hugh
Dauncey and Geoff Hare, eds (London: Cass, 2003), pp. 79–102.
16 See James J. Nott,
Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); David MacFadyen, Songs for Fat People: Affect,