WORLD WAR 1

World War 1



World War 1

Introduction

The purpose of this research essay is to make an analysis on the after effects of World War 1 and to show that how World War 1 had led to an expansion of the quantity of cultural activates at the expense of their quality and diversity (Alden, 2000). This essay also examines that how cinemas, theatres and exhibitions were changed because of the WW1.

Discussion

The Great War lasted for four years and caused the deaths of eight million men. It saw the collapse of three empires - Germany, Austro-Hungary and Russia. It devastated the regions on both the eastern and western fronts. It was the first industrial war, with endless technological advances, mass production and the general mobilisation of all human, economic and mechanical resources (Soto, 2004). Its victims came from every nationality and from every background - from Europe and North America, from the Commonwealth nations and colonised peoples in India, Indochina and Africa. It happened everywhere, on the ground and underground, on the water and under water, and in the air (Soja, 2009). It was fought using every possible means, from cavalry charges to hand-to-hand trench warfare, from bombardments to assault tanks, using gas or phosphorus. In this war, the warrior was reduced to the dual role of servant and victim of the machine.

Europe emerged from the Great War completely changed - exhausted, horrified, and forcibly modernised. The war was a catalyst of revolution; daughter of the industrial and scientific revolution; mother to the political revolutions that gave rise to the Soviet Union and the Weimar Republic (Ransom, 2004). It changed the face of central Europe for two decades, until the Anschluss and the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland by the Third Reich. It shaped the world and for some, its after-effects are still with us to this day - the fields of Picardy and Champagne still yield a crop of unexploded shells ready to go off at any moment.

All this is recalled and commemorated by the monuments and cemeteries set up in the warring countries and on the battlefields. Every nation has written accounts, histories and memoirs published by those who survived the European theatres of war.

Supposing they were able to overcome their disgust, did the Great War remain elusive to painters in robbing them of their traditional military genre? Contemporary war meant an elusive, mechanised war which did not offer painters the charges, ambushes, symbolic episodes and other themes that had inspired the successful battle painter up until the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. What could a painter do faced with the trajectory of a shell or a bullet, a toxic cloud of chlorine gas, or dugouts only visible from their barbed wire entanglements and earth parapets? What good would it do depicting a smoke-covered desert which, for most of the time, was all there was to see on a battlefield? The essayist Robert de la Sizeranne wrote of his anxiety on this subject whilst the war was still on (Jordan, ...