Transcription
[Music] The time before 1914 is usually seen as the time before the First World War. But of course, people then did not know there would be a First World War.
Forget that a world war broke out in 1914. Forget all the stories of the good old days. For people living between 1900 and 1914, it was a time of terrific upheaval. Things they'd been sure of yesterday seemed to have changed overnight. And that was frightening.
Millions of urban dwellers were starting to see themselves in a completely new way. Women were demanding their rights. Men were becoming less sure of themselves and looking for a new masculinity. The old monarchies still clung to power. Art and science were shattering the old worldview. And like today, all Europe was in the throes of change. The traditional against the modern. The biggest challenge for people living then was to survive and manage this raging transformation.
Imagine you could see the years before 1914 with all their contradictions and with their open future. Imagine you could see them as people back then experienced them. These are the vertigo years.
[Music] 1900 to 2013 seems a very short period considering the long time span.
[Music] >> It was the century of women. [Applause] >> The beginning of the century promised so much. [Applause]
[Music] Paris 1900. The World's Fair reveals the new possibilities of electricity to millions of visitors. Machines from many countries are competing with one another and progress and technology explode into the world. The 20th century begins with a flick of a switch.
Paris provided the stately backdrop for the world exhibition. It was visited by more than 50 million people. The main entrance alone was designed to admit 60,000 people an hour. Behind the traditional style facades of the national pavilions, it was clear that a revolutionary new era had already begun. Every hall was filled with new machines and inventions gleaming, rotating, and vibrating. New technologies were beginning to change every aspect of life. Telephone operators were kept busy connecting cities and continents.
[Music] Ferdinand Porsche presented the first electric car at the exhibition. His patent fell into oblivion. Among the millions of tourists was a German schoolmaster, Jean Sovage. When the Berlin school teacher Jean Sovage bought a hat in a Paris hat shop, he didn't want to be recognized as a German in the streets. Not by the tour guides who would pursue him and ask him for money, and not by the Parisians who would see him as part of the nation that had won a war against France only 30 years before. Sovage wanted to go around unrecognized, discover the technological miracles of the Paris exhibition which he had come here to visit so that he could tell his students in Berlin all about it.
You gaze at this giant machine with admiration and a certain thrill of excitement. A shudder grips you when you see the huge wheels spinning on its axis in a terrific whirl, and you behold its unearthly strength. It would smash a puny human being to atoms if ever its bonds were loosened. Everything was overshadowed by those gigantic dynamos softly humming. Another victory for German technology. The softly humming dynamos were delivering electricity for 50,000 light bulbs in the palace of electricity and also for mechanical walkways going at three different speeds.
The old world was on the move. Stable structures were beginning to break down. Old certainties were beginning to waver. Artists and scientists were making this process clear. The German doctor William Conrad Röntgen even worked out how to look behind the facade of the human body. In 1901, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of X-rays.
Radioactive equipment used during those days is still being held in a basement underneath the Paris Technical University. Electrical apparatuses and X-rays changed the ways in which people saw the world. But in this room, which is really nothing more than a decent kitchen, someone changed the way in which matter itself was perceived. Marie Curie came from Poland and as a woman and as a foreigner, she was an outsider twice over in science. In a drafty little shed under life-threatening conditions, Marie Curie and her husband Pierre labored at discoveries that would change the world. The element uranium possessed an energy that was identified for the first time as radioactivity. Her immense persistence and her scientific intelligence allowed her not only to unravel the secrets of radium but also to enjoy a career that ended in two Nobel prizes.
But despite her great achievements, the French remained hostile to the brilliant foreigner among them. For many of them, the new century was a time of uncertainty and even threat. Their defeat in the war against Prussia in 1871 was still an open wound. Since then, industrialization and immigration had altered their once familiar cities. So much rapid change was frightening.
The Great World exhibition was also a temporary distraction from a long and deep crisis in France itself. The country was split into monarchists and republicans, reactionaries and modernists. France was undergoing a transformation. It was a conservative society with a strong monarchical tradition, a tradition of aristocratic elites. And then there was a great change with the ideas of human rights and the rights of the citizen. But then this process came to a halt and nationalism began to take hold again. And why? Because it was a time of bitter rivalry with the Germans. Germany had beaten France in 1871. France had lost Alsace and Lorraine. She wanted to get them back and get her revenge. The view over the Rhine alarmed the French. While their own population was static, German families were having more children, more potential soldiers and workers. Germany had become their great rival in Europe.
[Music] Germany, an empire since 1871, was the fast beating heart of the continent.
[Music] [Applause]
In the Ruhr area, new towns sprang up faster than anywhere else. In little more than a generation, the region had become a gigantic industrial metropolis. Chemical works, machine tool factories, blast furnaces, car manufacturers, and arms factories formed the backbone of German success. Germany's official image was stamped by the pomp of the Prussian army. The victory against France had finally united the nation. Berlin burst on the scene as the capital of the new empire. Within just 30 years, more than a million people had moved to the city, making it the fifth largest metropolis in the world. Kaiser Wilhelm II had enlarged the city with splendid new buildings along the boulevard Unter den Linden and a new residence of his own, the Stadtschloss in Potsdam.
[Music] As head of the Protestant church, the Kaiser also brought about the construction of Berlin Cathedral, a solid world made of stone, at least mimicking stability. But in the Berlin suburb of Caputh, Einstein was shaking this apparent certainty. In his general theory of relativity, he showed that there was no fixed dimension to space and time. The so-called Einstein Tower was constructed to test the theory empirically. Physicist Max Planck had made a further astounding discovery. Depending on how it was observed, light could behave either as waves or as particles, the so-called quantum of action. A new branch of physics had emerged.
>> If we're talking about quantum physics, it has the most enormous consequences. Practically the whole of modern high technology depends on quantum physics. Modern computers, semiconductors work on principles of quantum physics. Lasers work on principles of quantum physics. So on and so forth.
[Music] >> Germany was being propelled by a breathtaking technical and scientific revolution. Universities, fundamental research, Nobel Prize winners. Germany was beating all its international competitors in every field.
[Music] The impulsive young Kaiser, constantly on the move and rushing from one meeting to the next, symbolized this new Germany.
[Music] The latecomer was running an unprecedented race of catch-up with the other European powers. Germany's neighbors were apprehensive. The impulsive young Kaiser was capable of anything. His most earnest wish was to impress his grandmother, Queen Victoria. During Wilhelm's birth, it appears that his body got caught. Uh it was a breech birth and um it was very hard to deliver him. And so uh an obstetrician arrived but very late and sort of had to force him out and his left arm seems to have become dislocated or something happened and so subsequently it never really developed properly and he couldn't use it and there was I think a very strong feeling uh in the royal family in in Prussia in Germany that um a man who wasn't sort of fully a man who who wasn't completely you know able to ride and shoot and be athletic could really be a good Kaiser for Germany.
[Music] >> The most absurd methods were used in an attempt to heal his crippled arm. The terrorized child was bathed in hair's blood and clamped in stretching machines.
The German army was incredibly important to Wilhelm. I mean it was very important in Germany anyway. Obviously it it was you know in a country that had only recently been unified. It became the sort of almost the sole symbol of the collective Germany. Wilhelm always wore military uniforms as if to kind of prove how incredibly tough and hard he was and he was sort of fascinated by that. I think partly perhaps because of the withered arm. The painter discreetly concealed little William's arm behind flounces, but his mother, the daughter of Queen Victoria, was appalled by her child's disability.
For the past two decades, the British Empire had been ruled not from London, but from Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Queen Victoria had had this country residence built in happier days with her German husband, Prince Albert. Now she returned to it to rest from official duties and the tiresome reverence of her subjects and to escape the pop-eyed vulgarity of her eldest son, Prince Edward. From a little writing desk surrounded by knick-knacks, she ruled a vast empire.
Great Britain was the richest and most powerful nation in the world.
[Music] But even the greatest power on earth couldn't stop the rush of modernity. Here too, centuries-old structures collapsed within the space of a few years. Until 1900, Great Britain had been the engine of the global economy. It was not the meek, but the British who had inherited the earth. The strands of power were woven together in the drawing rooms of a few London clubs. For Great Britain, the Victorian era had been a time of colossal achievement. God looked at this mighty empire and saw that it was good. No nation could compete with Great Britain with its possessions, with its navy, with its glory. But at the heart of this magnificent success lay a deceptive idol. For centuries, the British aristocracy had managed to defend their position of power. Now the revolution was coming not from the cannon's mouth or the savage swish of the guillotine but quite peacefully from overseas accompanied by a gentle drone. Refrigerator ships were bringing meat from Australia and wheat from Canada and these imports struck British agriculture with enormous force. By 1905, the island kingdom was importing 60% of its meat and 80% of its grain at much lower prices than local farmers could ask. Globalization had begun.
[Music] For the aristocrats and landed gentry, this was a disaster. Prices for agricultural products fell by as much as 60% and soon 14,000 country estates were mortgaged. Those who still had money speculated. The stock exchange boomed. From now on, real power was wielded in the City of London, where vast sums of money were moved about and trade deals turned around in empty space like a solar system. Nothing was solid anymore.
At the University of Cambridge, Ernest Rutherford discovered that even solid matter wasn't really solid at all. He had observed radioactive waves passing through gold leaf with only a few particles appearing to bounce off the surface. As a physicist, he knew that there was only one explanation. Atoms were not what they had been thought to be. An atom was not like a big cake with electrons scattered about like currants. Instead, it was like a solar system, mostly made up of empty space, with its mass concentrated in a kernel and the electrons circling the kernel like planets. The discovery spelled the end of matter in the conventional sense. Rutherford had demonstrated that matter was neither fixed nor static, but rather a state of energy, constantly in movement.
The new scientific discoveries and theories made a deep impression on artists. Hearing of Rutherford's results, the painter Wassily Kandinsky noted, "The discovery struck me with a terrific power, as if the end of the world had come. All things had become transparent without solidity or certainty." The hurtling emptiness of modernity had motivated the young Kandinsky to withdraw from what was going on around him and to turn instead to the old folk rituals of Russia's Komi people. He was fascinated by the animistic symbols on everyday objects he found. The path to modernity led Kandinsky and other artists back to a pre-Christian era, back to forms which spoke to an earlier collective memory and whispered of a world without electric light or cars or even cities.
With artists like Kandinsky seeking a new art and scientists shaking the foundations of matter and the cosmos, Great Britain symbolically reached the end of an era. When Queen Victoria died on the 22nd of January 1901, her grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II was at her side. The story is true that she died in his arms or rather his arm because he only had one that worked. But uh yes, it's certainly true that uh he was the one who was holding her when she died. And I think he felt it was a very important moment that in a way somehow her status as the sort of grandmother of Europe was going to pass directly to him. But of course that ignored the fact that he had his his uncle uh Edward who was actually Queen Victoria's heir to contend with.
>> Behind the gun carriage rode her son Edward and representatives of every kingdom in Europe. Europe wouldn't be the same without Victoria. And as at Windsor they bore the widow to her last resting place. There were many who wondered, fearful of change, unsure of the future, unsure of themselves. When Victoria had died at Osborne House, Henry James noted in his diary, "The wild waters are upon us now."
But what came upon the British Empire was Edward VII, Edward the Caresser. Short, fat, and vulgar, he was only interested in his own pleasure, and his first act of state, as it were, was to waddle through Windsor Castle, and to destroy the statues of his mother, her papers, her photographs, and to make crystal clear the Victorian era has ended. The Edwardian age has begun.
>> No one sees this. I'll show it to you today, but normally it's hidden in a storeroom and no one sees it, even if they ask to see it.
>> London was preparing for Edward's coronation, the first in 65 years. This piece was made by Subritzky at the end of the 19th century for a famous establishment, a brothel called La Chabanais, a place for the upper echelons of the amusement seekers of Paris. It was the place to come to and this piece was made to Edward VII's specifications. At the time he was still Prince of Wales.
[Music] and you can see for yourself. I think it was made for several people at a time.
>> It's not for me to tell you how it was used, but the possibilities are endless. Edward was crowned in 1902 in a splendidly decked out Westminster Abbey and to the strains of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance watched by his present and former mistresses among Edward's set. There was a feeling that you could pretty much do whatever you wanted as long as you weren't found out. And the main thing was never to be found out because if you went public with anything, the rest of society could criticize you and also question why you had this exalted position in the first place.
[Music] In Vienna, the double moral standards prevailing in aristocratic and bourgeois circles were particularly strongly marked. Dr. Sigmund Freud made it his mission to analyze the effects of this double standard. It's no coincidence that psychoanalysis was developed in Vienna. The dangerous national feelings of different peoples were welling up in all the provinces and could be suffocated only under the mantle of the almighty House of Habsburg. The facades of the Ringstrasse in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, were escapism in stone, a petrified determination on the part of the Viennese to flee the problems of their own time. Politically stagnant and culturally torn, Vienna was a place of bitter controversy.
[Music] Sigmund Freud succeeded in looking behind the facades of this society. With a combination of medicine and psychology, Freud was able to fulfill his ambitions and realize a dream that would influence an entire century.
>> In 1900, he published The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud had finished the book before 1900.
>> It was already at the printers. But the publishers wanted to delay publication until they could stamp it with the historic date of 1900. That's how The Interpretation of Dreams became the book of the century. Freud's analysis of his patients' dreams was the raw material of his therapy. The poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal once said, "The two most important tasks that young Vienna set itself were to dissect its own soul and to dream."
>> Maurice Ravel's La Valse was originally supposed to be called Vienna. The piece captures the city's atmosphere and music. Ravel describes an imperial residence and dancing couple swirling around, but the piece ends in dissonance and chaos. [Applause]
The end of the dual monarchy was already in the air. The different nationalities within the empire had nothing in common but the figure of the emperor peering down upon them from hundreds of thousands of portrait photographs. In this way, every Habsburg subject became a little Oedipus trying to overcome and perhaps kill his almighty father. Since 1848, the emperor Franz Joseph had ruled over German-speaking Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Slovenes, Jews, Italians, Croats, Bosnians, Romanians, and other minorities living not so much with one another as against one another. On the whole, the imperial government seemed to think that it could triumph simply by surviving, by wielding a longer arm than history itself. The emperor himself was only happy going off in his later years on hunting trips to Bad Ischl or visiting his mistress, the actress Katharina Schratt. Like everything else in his empire, this affair lasted for decades without ever reaching a climax.
>> I think it was just the length of time. When you reign so long that people can even say their grandparents were born under the same emperor, then it's very hard to stay flexible, very hard to react to changing developments. And the emperor had come to the throne just after the 1848 revolution. It was a different world, and he'd continued on into these modern times that had taken off so rapidly. The empire borrowed itself in for good, extending the Hofburg Palace with a vast new wing. Behind the splendid facade with its columns and statues, the construction of the building itself revealed the reality of the new industrial age. Behind the scenes, steel and technology ruled.
[Music] Directly opposite the Hofburg's neo-baroque entrance, Adolf Loos showed what modern architecture could really look like. Commissioned by an exclusive gentleman's tailoring business, he designed a very new building indeed. In the immediate vicinity of the august presence of his majesty, Loos erected a building of aggressive functionality, a building without ornament, in fact without a facade at all. Loos believed that dishonesty and decoration were two sides of the same coin. Ornament, he wrote, is crime. The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from the object of utility. We have transcended ornament. We have brought ourselves to a state of being without ornament. The time is nigh. Fulfillment awaits us. Soon the city streets will gleam like white walls, like the holy city of Zion, the shining city of heaven. Then all will be fulfilled.
When the scaffolding came down from the house without eyebrows, there was a huge scandal because the building was a manifesto against historicism. The disgusted emperor ordered all curtains on this side of the Hofburg Palace to be closed. And with the falling of the curtains, the curtains also fell for the future of the House of Habsburg.
[Music] Max Oppenheimer. [Music] To find such another quarreling, unhinged family, you'd have to go into Greek mythology. The Habsburg's many tragedies provided raw material for films, books, and stage plays. Even before Romy Schneider's famous impersonation, a romantic aura hung about the Empress Elisabeth, known as Sisi. Her life wasn't much more than a succession of temper tantrums, attacks of anorexia, and long Mediterranean journeys in search for the elixir of eternal youth. But the reputation of this mostly absent and deeply unpopular empress was rescued for posterity by an assassin in Geneva in 1898. He thrust a file into her heart and turned her into a martyr. [Applause]
It was the second violent death in the family in less than a decade. The first tragedy had befallen Crown Prince Rudolph and his mistress Mary Vetsera.
[Music] The brilliant Crown Prince realized that he had no chance of succeeding to the throne. For one thing, his ideas were too liberal. For another, he was suffering from syphilis. The emperor knew that a dreadful end awaited his son. In 1889, Crown Prince Rudolph together with Mary Vetsera had shot himself in Mayerling.
>> If you look at Austria, you have, you know, enormous numbers of Habsburgs who turned out to be cross-dressers and, you know, all completely mad.
>> Franz Joseph's youngest brother, Ludwig Victor, had a palace built for himself on the Ring. From there, it was only a step to the Central Bath House, today's Kaiserbründl, where the prince was fondly known as Luty Footsie.
[Music] Ludwig Victor's escapades in women's clothes and gay clubs were legendary.
[Music] But when he approached an imperial officer in the Central Bath House, a brawl broke out.
[Music] Ludwig Victor got away with no more than a black eye, but it was too much for his stern brother, and Ludwig was exiled to Salzburg.
The emperor let none of this come to public attention. In the dual monarchy, concealing the obvious was a fundamental principle.
But one group of Vienna artists wasn't prepared to play this game. Gustav Klimt revealed the emotions beneath the surface.
[Music] In Klimt's hands, Nuda Veritas, the naked truth, the slogan of the Secession movement, unfolded its subversive power. His new goddesses confronted the observer with his own desires and worse, with the desires and fantasies of the women themselves. When Klimt received the commission to decorate the ceremonial hall of Vienna University with three large wall paintings, women were still forbidden to study there.
>> The fascinating thing about Klimt is the conflict with the soul, the unconscious, with the human libido, weakness, human infirmity. Everything is placed in a wider context.
>> Klimt presented his paintings in 1902. The professors were appalled. Today only reproductions survive. Philosophy with the enigmatic sphinx. Jurisprudence with the accused helpless before her. Medicine with her longing for eternal life and lust. Perhaps the Senate of Vienna University felt that Klimt's paintings had shown them too much about themselves. In any case, they rejected the works which enraged the artists so much that he withdrew them. Vienna was not ready for its own avant-garde and in the political world there were controversies everywhere. Vienna was, as Kautsky had said, an experimental station for the apocalypse.
In 1905, it looked as if the apocalypse of the old world would begin in Russia. Russia's cities, too, were on the path to the 20th century. But in the countryside, little had changed since the Middle Ages. In 1905, the Russian photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky built a camera that could capture images in color. People being photographed had only to keep perfectly still. The resulting 700 plates left us a wonderfully bright picture of the Tsarist Empire. But the reality on the land was much less colorful. In the villages, several generations lived under the same roof. Only one in every five children went to the village school. Justice was dispensed by village courts without the benefit of formal laws. Those condemned might be whipped, castrated, branded, or hacked to death with sickles. Everyday life too was marked by extreme violence, especially towards women who were unprotected by any law from the whim and will of their husbands.
With the onset of industrialization, hundreds of thousands of peasants driven by hunger and poverty arrived in the factory slums of Moscow and St. Petersburg. In St. Petersburg ruled Tsar Nicholas II, isolated from the social and political realities of the empire. He did everything that lay in his almost unlimited power to crush every impulse towards democracy or freethinking. Tsar Nicholas saw himself as guardian of the mystical union between the Russian people and divine providence. His authority came directly from above and all those seeking social reforms couldn't hope for a sympathetic ear. To him, industrialization was only a means to the end of financing his medieval vision of Russia. One doctor described the living conditions in the urban underworld from his own observations.
>> These people aren't living, they're rotting. Down there, the people believe in nothing. They love no one. Nothing impresses them.
Through his competence as an engineer and through hard work, Sergei Witte had climbed the ladder from provincial official to prime minister. He described the Tsar from close proximity. Nicholas II is like an average guards officer from a good family. Amiable but totally ineffective and unrealistic. His wife, the German Alexandra Feodorovna, with her blunt, self-serving character has a strong influence on the effeminate monarch. She would be suitable for a Tsar with backbone. But unfortunately, this Tsar has no will of his own. Nicholas did see the death of his grandfather Alexander II. He he bled to death. uh after being uh hit by a bomb basically in front of his grandson and it was obviously the most tremendous traumatic event in his life and I think it did make him feel that the forces of uh revolt and change were obviously evil.
>> Even today it remains difficult to bring about democratic change in Russia.
[Music] In our country, there is a tradition of fundamental mistrust on the part of the citizens towards those in power. So to have a better claim to their own authority in the eyes of the people, they use the church as a kind of transcendental force from God the Father that confirms their own power. In Moscow's Red Square, government representatives together with the Orthodox Church celebrate the 125th anniversary of Russia's Christianization. They manipulate the national faith in the Orthodox Church so that the people don't just believe in God, but also in Putin. For example, in some Russian churches, there are Putin icons. Now,
>> at that time, the Tsar was worshiped like a god. The modern factory serfs gathered together in workers' unions. Their leader was the charismatic Orthodox priest, Father Gapon. When he began to campaign for workers, 140,000 people went on strike. A peaceful procession to the Tsar was organized to request his support against the exploiters. On the 9th of January 1905, Sergei Witte stepped out onto the balcony of his city palace. He'd heard noises. What he saw was a sea of heads. More than 100,000 workers with holy icons and flags on their way to present a petition to Nicholas II. Their little father knew nothing of their miserable living conditions. They were convinced. If only they could tell him, he would help them.
[Music] [Music] "Amid the hail of shots and saber thrusts, disillusion struck the demonstrators more bitterly than any bullet." There is no thou, there is no God," shouted Father Gapon as those around him fell to the snow-covered ground, wounded or dead. It's true that the Romanovs have been canonized. Yes. And there is now a church on the spot where they were uh murdered in Yekaterinburg and it's described as being on the blood and that's a sort of traditional phrase for you know a martyr basically. So yes, they are now saints.
>> In the year 2000, Nicholas II together with his wife became saints of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
[Music] That's why we performed in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior because it's an important place in our country. The Russian Orthodox Church meddles in national politics and dictates which laws are to be adopted and which are not, which the church shouldn't do in a secular state. That is absolutely not correct at all. That's why we went to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior because it's a central symbol for the Russian Orthodox Church and for its new power and also for the Putin regime.
>> The unrest continued in December 1905 in St. Petersburg alone, 418,000 workers went on strike. Interior Minister Bulygin tried to persuade the monarch that he must make concessions. Nicholas II answered, "One would think you were afraid of a revolution." "Majesty," said the minister, "the revolution has already begun."
From the electricity of the Universal Exhibition to the little Russian Revolution of 1905, gigantic tensions were being released. Nothing was as it had been before, and the course of history appeared to be accelerating by the day. People looked into their future with exhilaration, but also with fear. Max Weber wrote that it was like sitting in a speeding train and not knowing where the points were set.
[Music] [Music]