The Postwar World
Psychological Effects of the War

If the war's economic consequences were narrower than contemporaries predicted, its psychological effects were profound and were quite different from what most people of the time foresaw. During the war politicians and publicists spoke of the great days to come, when there would be no more wars, no more armaments, no more clashes between nations, and no more want. The actuality of the harsh compromises in the treaties, coupled with continued violence in eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and Asia, mutual distrust among the victors, and a sharp recession following the immediate postwar boom, produced a widespread sense of disillusionment. Some felt that the peacemakers had not been sufficiently idealistic; others, that they had been impractical. Still others concluded that the outcome of the war had proved all governments incapable of acting in the interest of common men or had proved man's fate to be something altogether beyond man's own control. From these various moods emerged an increasingly strong pacifist movement, violent nihilist movements like that of the Nazis in Germany, an escapism that gave great popularity to esoteric poets, novelists, and painters, and a brooding fatalism that found reflection in such writings as those of Oswald Spengler and S¢ren Kierkegaard.

World War I had been modern civilization's most hideous experience. In some parts of western Europe it had taken the life of one young man out of four, and in the generations that matured in the 1920's and 1930's few could understand for what reason it had been fought. The experience formed a trauma in the consciousness of most of the peoples who had taken part in it, and this fact is of cardinal importance for the understanding of the events that took place in the decades after it.