The long shadow of war

On a look at how the history of the west was shaped by one world war – and the looming clouds of another

JOANNA BOURKE Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918–1938 by Philipp Blom In 1928, a curvaceous and vivacious Helen Kane strode onto the stage during a production of Oscar Hammerstein’s Good Boy. She pouted her heavily painted lips and, with wide eyes winking at the audience, launched into ‘I Wanna Be Loved by You’. By the time she sang the lines “boop-boop-a-doop”, her audience was in raptures. Betty Boop, as she became known, came to represent a feminine ideal in postwar western society.

Five years later, the west could best be called prewar. Portents of another world war were everywhere. Young Nazis tossed ‘degenerate’ books into fires burning in squares and streets around Germany. The author Erich Kästner was loitering discreetly in the crowd when his books were denounced for contributing to German’s ‘moral decline’. He recalled that he saw “books flying into the roaring flames and heard the sentimental tirades of that slick little liar [Joseph Goebbels]… It was revolting.”

The cultural shift represented in the move from Betty Boop to Hitler Youth was reflected in much larger changes in interwar Europe and America. Yet Philipp Blom argues that the ‘ fracture’ in western culture was neither so simple nor so complete as these developments might suggest.

Blom’s book is structured chronologically, with chapters devoted to each year between 1918 and 1937 (1938 is there, but

“People, rather than abstractions, are at the heart of this story”