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The Cultural Milieu










Caligari Poster
Movie Poster for the German Expressionist film,
Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari.  Photo Credit
 
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Listen to some of the music of the Great War, including the hit songs It's a Long Way to Tipperary and George Cohan's Over There.  There are many collections of Ragtime music available on the web, including the West Coast Ragtime Society.  The Veterans Affairs Department in Canada maintains a site English Songs Popular during the First World War.
 
Other cultural phenomena from 1919 and 1920:
  • the movie Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari, 1920), directed by Robert Wiene.  Though not a box office success, it was the first horror film and signaled the onset of the cultural movement know as German expressionism.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus (aka Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, 1921) appeared and became one of the most important philosophical books of the twentieth centuryWhen Wittgenstein was a prisoner-of-war, captured by the Italians, John Maynard Keynes was able to have the book taken back to England where Bertrand Russell read it.
  • DADA cultural movement
  • The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918
  • Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus
  • John Maynard Keynes published The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)
  • Ballets Russes (under the directorship of Sergei Diaghilev) continued to perform
  • In 1919 President Woodrow Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize recipient

 
 

This page is copyright © 2005-09, C.T. Evans
For information contact cevans@nvcc.edu