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80 Years Ago in Mediterranean

The World Exhibition of Paris in 1900 was one of the first major displays of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, showing the new art forms had gained recognition and acceptance. This was followed by memorial exhibitions for such painters as Seurat in 1900, Van Gogh in 1903 and Cezanne in 1907. But a new generation of artists had arrived on the scene. This was the cubist school led by Picasso and Braque, who took painting and sculpture another step away from the imitation of objects and images towards the abstract. "Cubist" refers to emphasis on shape, such as cubes, spheres and triangles. In this, they were influence by African art. Meanwhile, the "Fauvist" ("wild animals") school led by Matisse were pushing the principles of Van Gogh and Gaugin, the use of bold lines and bright colours, to the extreme.

Spanish influenza might be the worst pandemic (a world-wide epidemic) the world has yet seen. The disease began at the end of the First World War, when many people were vulnerable due to poverty, malnutrition and poor hygiene as a result of the war. By the time the disease ran its course, it had killed an estimated 20 million people around the world--more than had been killed during the whole of the First World War. While called influenza, it is not really known what the disease was and the deadly virus that caused it has never been identified.

Fascist movements sprung up in many areas of Europe, but most importantly in Italy and Germany. Benito Mussolini and his Fascist movement take control of Italy in 1922. The term "fascist" comes from fasces, a bundle of rods with an axe or arrow (symbols of power in ancient Rome). The Fascists were racist, nationalistic and anti-democratic, looking back to the supposed glory of the Roman empire when Italy was master of Europe, North Africa and West Asia. Adolf Hitler's Nationalist-Socialist party, the Nazis, only comes to power in Germany in 1933. The disappointment over the outcome of peace talks after 1918, a sense of lost national identity (usually blamed on international communism), and a tendency to glorify military power were common aspects of fascist movements throughout Europe. Feelings of resentment, partly as a result of the economic upheavals of the 1920s and '30s, were usually directed against vulnerable groups, like foreigners, or against political opponents, especially socialists and communists. In Nazi Germany, Jews were especially targeted.

In 1918-1919, Germany was wracked with civil war between extreme right groups, called the Freikorps (including many ex-army officers), and socialist-communists called the Spartacists (from the leader of a Roman slave revolt, Spartacus). The Freikorps allied with the more moderate republican party and won the civil war, murdering the socialists leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919. The Weimar Republic ( so called because the capital of the new German republic was in Weimar) lasted from 1919 to 1933, although a communist rising was put down again in 1923, and two major attempts to overthrow the government were made by the Freikorps and their fascist allies, one in 1920 and a second in 1923. The economic collapse of 1929 and the social unrest it caused was the last straw for Weimar Germany. Hitler and his Nazi party won the election of 1933, and shortly thereafter established a dictatorship with support by the German army.

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