A new beggining for Spain: The II Republic

In this article I will talk about the II Republic, this political instability that really marked Spain and that, although it was started not only with good intentions because some of them wanted only the power but although all of them wanted a change for good, and finally this led Spain to a terrible civil war.

Background
Spain after the First World War was in a political crisis. The King, Alfonso XIII, was forced to abdicate because people wasn´t happy with his government anymore. So the II Republic appeared for the happiness of the majority of Spanish people, with a promise of modernization and democracy. After the elections for a provisional government, Niceto Alcalá-Zamora was named the first prime minister. But Spain at that time was still a subdesarrollated country with unemployment and poorness. The provisional government was also having a problem with the education and analphabetism was really common at that moment. There was a strong anti-clerical feeling and the Catholic Church and the government didn’t have a good relationship because the socialist group have a strong power and influence in people and some integrants of the church start supporting the monarchy, population gets angry , people burn churches and other religious buildings. People wanted a fast change, they aspire for a better life and in my opinion they were very confused because at that time many groups of different parties appear and the real reason why they wanted a republic is that they didn’t want a monarchy anymore but neither a republic, they only wanted to impose their point of view and that people could know it was “the best” for them.

Elections of 1931

In this year the government decided to make elections and much different party all around Spain got reunited from constitutionals to communists, all spreading their ideas. But the Socialist party, the one that was in the power in the provisional government, had the victory. The second most popular was the Radical one, led by Alejandro Lerroux and the right wing was reduced in the minority. Manuel Azaña was now the president and the new constitution proclaimed, among other things, the equal right for women, the determinate separation of the state with the church and also rights for the worker class.

The relationship between the church and the government tightened more because of the separation of powers of the church-state. In this moment the church loses all their privileges. Government permitted the divorce, banned the church to teach or show some catholic symbols and send Jesuits to the exile.


1931-1933 first Biennium

Government started making military reforms looking for the extreme fidelity of the army. The Socialist group entered in the government with three ministers and started making reforms, helping the working class. They started to provide upper wages, gave them pay vacations, health insurance, eight-hour workday, establishment of a minimum salary. The Republican government didn’t finish consolidating because people wanted fast reforms and in my opinion it was difficult to solve problems that have many years without a solution, it was a weak government. People were angry with this and Azaña was forced to abdicate and enters Martinez Blanco.

1933-1936 second Biennium

This period was also known as the Black Biennium because there was a big opposition against the government and it couldn’t continue with the reforms that they were doing to improves the stability and happiness of the people. This stopped the education and military reforms and that’s why they permitted the Catholic Church to teach again and help them doing the reforms. In an ideological way, because Mussolini and Hitler´s ideas advanced in Italy and Germany, the right wing started to gain more power and popularity in the right parties of Spain. And this is what brings the end of the Republic and a catastrophic event that takes place in the worst moment for Spain. They were tired and have been just emerging from another war, but without even thinking about it, a civil war started.

Mariana Flores

Treaty of Versailles

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856, before the invention of telephones, radios, automobiles, airplanes, and many of the other material and cultural changes. Freud lived when the Great War unleashed, a war that destroyed the empire whose capital city was his home for most of his life and he also lived the beginning of the Second World War. He began his career as an ambitious but isolated neurologist; by the end of it, he described himself as someone who had had as great an impact on humanity's conception of itself as had Copernicus and Darwin, big science contributors. 

Freud displayed his brilliance at a young age and gained the favoritism of his parents. As a result, his poor parents sacrificed a lot of money to provide him with a proper education. Despite the family's economic struggles, Freud graduated from high school with honors. He then attended the University of Vienna where he studied medicine and was first introduced to psychodynamics, a theory used to determine the psychological forces of human behavior. Medical school ensured the way for the beginning of his career and he also worked in the fields of neurology, philosophy, psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, and literature. His most famous work, “The Interpretation of Dreams”, describes some of his most famous theories about the mind and the unconscious such as dream symbolism and interpretation, wish-fulfillment. It also mentions his famous theories of the Id, Ego, and Superego also called Chiriac. 

In the years of war, Freud had a few number of patients. He continued to treat those that he did have, but spent much of his time writing. In the winters of 1915 to 1916 and 1916 to 1917, he gave lectures on psychoanalysis at the University of Vienna which were later published as the “General Introduction to Psychoanalysis”. One of Freud's most important patients during the war years was a Hungarian named Anton von Freund. Freund was a wealthy Hungarian who was treated by Freud for a minor neurosis. Very enthusiastic about his treatment and excited by the congress in Budapest in 1918, Freund donated a large sum of money to the Association in order to found a psychoanalytic publishing house. The house was founded in January of 1919 and run by Otto Rank until 1924. For bad luck, Freund's generosity turned insignificant by postwar economic conditions in Austria. After this inauspicious beginning, the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, as the publishing house was called, was almost never solvent: it depended mostly on donations from supporters of psychoanalysis, dues from members of the Association, contributions from authors published by the Verlag, and sales of Freud's books. The Verlag was finally done by the annexation of Austria by Hitler in 1938. 

For concluding Sigmund Freud created a whole new outlook on the idea of psychology by considering the idea that personality is determined by childhood experiences and he was one of the first to consider the internal workings of the human brain. 

Lucia Valdivia

Birth of Modernism during the Interwar Period

As an aftermath of the Great War, a growing tension and depression in society with social order, manifested in artistic works in every source which strictly rejected the old practice. Young painters like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were causing a shock with their rejection of traditional perspective as the means of structuring paintings something that any of impressionists before had taken. In 1907, as Picasso was painting “Demoiselles d'Avignon”, Oskar Kokoschka was writing “Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen”, the first Expressionist play made in 1909, and Arnold Schoenberg was composing his “String Quartet No.2”, his first composition "without a tonal center". In 1911, Kandinsky painted “Bild mit Kreis" which he later called the first abstract painting. In 1913, a Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, working in Paris for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, composed “The Rite of Spring” for a ballet, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky that depicted human sacrifice. 

These developments, during the interwar years of 1914 to 1939, began to give a new meaning to what was termed "modernism": It embraced discontinuity, rejecting smooth change in everything from biology to fictional character development and filmmaking. It allowed disruption, rejecting or moving beyond simple realism in literature and art, and rejecting or dramatically altering tonality in music. 

It is considered to be the most significant architectural development in the interwar period. The designed world in which we live was largely created by Modernism, which is best identified as a loose collection of ideas that developed suddenly in different countries rather than as a single movement. The unadorned, geometric forms, abstracted shapes, and bold colors of Modernist art and design are notable, seen in everything that surround us and behind all this looks and forms of Modernism are set some radical ideas and conditions. 

Writers like Dickens and Tolstoy, painters like Turner, and musicians like Brahms were not radicals or "Bohemians", but were instead valued members of society who produced art that gave to society, even when critiquing its less desirable aspects. As a reaction for the unprecedented violence and destruction of World War I, these artists searched for ways to create a better world through art and design. 

The interwar period it’s not considered technologically as a great innovative period because the big inventions as the electric light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, the skyscraper, the radio, and the telephone appeared formerly World War I. It is greatly considered a time of development and dispersal giving rise to widespread use of modern technologies. Modernism includes remarkable art movements of the interwar period like Dadaism (1916 – 1924), Bauhaus (1919 – 1933), Art Deco (1920 – 1935) and Surrealism (1920 - 1935). The most paradigmatic movement during this time was Dada or Dadaism Dada, an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak of World War I. The movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests, which many Dadaists believed were the main cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity in art and in society that corresponded to the war. 

Many Dadaists believed that the reason' and logic of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and supports chaos and irrationality. George Grosz, a artist, recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest against this world of mutual destruction.

Lucia Valdivia

A new Republic, New hope for Germany?

After the World War I, Germany was in a very devastated situation. They had lost people and territory in the battle, unemployment, food problems, and had a strong feeling of revenge but also of despair, they wanted a change. Population didn’t want a small parliament that chooses Germany´s future, they wanted to participate. This led Kaiser Wilhelm II to abdicate and when a small social movement appears with the idea of democracy, a way that people could vote, citizens approve it immediately. Here is where the Weimar Republic appears.

In 1918, the leader of The Social Democratic Party, Friedrich Ebert started a provisional government where he had to face twice against the Spartacists, a radical communist group, that revolt because they weren´t happy with the new government ideas. After defeating this group, Ebert called for elections in 1919. Members of the Reichstag, the parliament, got reunited in the small town of Weimar and write a constitution, naming Ebert as the new president. The government took place in Weimar because Berlin, the capital, was in chaos. This new constitution consists in having a real democratic system that gave the right to vote to all men and woman over the age of 21. Also the parliament was going to be elected every 4 years. Germany was divided in states and each of them had its own government that manages internal affairs. The head of these states was the president, that was elected every 7 years and under the article 48 of the constitution, the president could declare a state of emergency and rule by decree. 

The new government was established in August 11, 1919, recognized as the Weimar Republic. Since the beginning the republic started to have many problems. The Treaty of Versailles shocked the government with a huge amount of money that Germany has to pay, exactly £6.6 Billion, to the Allies for reparations. The Treaty was signed by Ebert and it was his worst decision, people lost faith in the republic, which was really weak and unstable. Germany already has lost a lot of money in the war and didn’t have enough to pay the big debt. Also, the country wasn’t used to a democracy and didn’t have the determination or the security to make decisions, government was a chaos. 

It seems that Germany was falling apart. In 1923, the man recognized as the one that “save” Germany was Gustav Stresemann. He rapidly became popular because he gave money to the unemployment, built houses and the most important and started paying reparations again, etc. But the most important, he was giving German people faith and hope that they could make it and they would have a better life. That is why he became the new Chancellor of the Republic. The problem was that he leave the German economic prosperity on the American loans, this was a terrible dilemma because United States, in 1929, suffered the Great Depression a big economical problem, Germany started to show vulnerability again. In 1930 people was tired of all the crisis and chaos where they were living. People that in all this time have opposed to the Weimar Republic, the radical groups, were angry and desperate; they wanted a new idea of government, something that would help Germany to acquire stability. These groups started to act and work rapidly looking for a new ideology, in this moment a new political movement appears with the name of the Nazi party with its popular leader Hitler. This party promised a new and better government, very strong. In my opinion people was really confused, and hopeless, they wanted a change rapidly and they were app to everything and when this strong party with concrete arguments and ideas of a stable state, it catches people’s attention and they let the Nazis party to propague all around Germany, while they were putting all their faith in them. The Weimar Republic was a mistake, but now people was sure that this time they´ll go through it… 

But probably Germany has a really bad luck and their leader wasn´t as good as they think, he was really going to help them leading them to a second war?

Mariana Flores

Equality Now

Interwar England witnessed the change of a new generation of socially and financially independent young working-class women who worked in offices, shops, and factories. These increasing earning opportunities, and rising economic importance to the household, enabled them to become important consumers, thus giving them the right to express their opinion in different matters. In 1918 the British parliament passed the Reform Act of 1918 where “important measures effecting large improvements in the status of women” were taken. These reforms allowed women to enter certain professions; to ask fathers to pay toward the maintenance of an illegitimate child, to improved health and welfare facilities for mothers and children and even allowed women to work in these newly established courts of arbitration. At least twenty-three laws were passed between 1918 and 1930 to promote gender equality. These included changes in marriage and family to equal the right to sue for divorce, equal guardianship rights over children and greater equalization of property rights. In 1929 the permissible age of marriage for both sexes was raised to sixteen.


Women voters also made an impact on British local government. In 1937 sixteen per cent of London borough councillors were female and women made up five per cent of the membership of other councils.

In the United States, during the beginning of the 20th century, the women suffrage movement, known as the National Women's Party led by suffragette Alice Paul became the first "cause" to picket outside the White House. Paul and Lucy Burns led a series of protests against the Wilson Administration in Washington. Wilson ignored the protests for six months, but on June 20, 1917, suffragettes showed a banner which stated; "We women of America tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are denied the right to vote. President Wilson is the chief opponent of their national enfranchisement". Another banner on August 14, 1917, referred to "Kaiser Wilson". With this manner of protest, the women were subject to arrests and many were jailed. On October 17, Alice Paul was sentenced to seven months and on October 30 began a hunger strike, but after a few days prison authorities began to force feed her. After years of opposition, Wilson changed his position in 1918 to advocate women's suffrage. The key vote came on June 4, 1919, when the Senate approved the amendment by 56 to 25 after four hours of debate.


To conclude we can see that the role of women changed a lot during the interwar period. Especially in England, were it started. Women pressure to make changes started small like the demands to increase child support, and ended with more sustainable changes like the right to vote on the United States and other countries.

Arianne Velez

The Great depression: effect in German economy

The depression began with the Wall Street Crash. This was a collapse of confidence among American investors. After Wall Street, there was a dramatic slump in the USA and this had catastrophic results because the world economy depended on the USA. After the crash, there was a worldwide economic crisis. Governments turned to protectionism: they imposed high import taxes to protect their own industries. This resulted in a further decline in world trade and widespread unemployment.

Rampant hyperinflation, massive unemployment and a large drop in living standards were primary factors.

In Europe, the impact of the Depression was at its greatest in Germany. The democratic government set up at Weimar was already in trouble before the Depression started. This added a new sense of crisis to German politics which made the economy of Germany depend on American loans. As nearly as 1930 emergency powers were given to the president that limited the power of the Reichstag.

Unemployment soared, especially in larger cities, and the political system veered toward extremism(any ideology or political act far outside the perceived political center of a society; or otherwise claimed to violate common moral standards).The unemployment rate reached nearly 30% in 1932, bolstering support for the anti-capitalist Nazi and Communist parties, which both rose in the years following the crash to altogether possess a Reichstag majority following the general election in July 1932.

A scene from the Great Depression: an unemployed man seeking work.



After the Wall Street Crash, America gave Germany 90 days to start to re-pay money loaned to her. No other world power had the money to give Germany cash injections. Britain and France were still recovering from the First World War and the Wall Street Crash was to have an impact on industrial Britain. Stalin’s Russia was still in a desperate state and embarking on the 5 year plans. Therefore, an impoverished Weimar Germany could only call on America for help and she was effectively bankrupt by the end of 1929 and quite incapable of lending money.


Companies throughout Germany - though primarily in the industrial zones such as the Ruhr - went bankrupt and workers were laid off in their millions.

September 1928	650,000 unemployed
September 1929	1,320,000 unemployed
September 1930	3,000,000 unemployed
September 1931	4,350,000 unemployed
September 1932	5,102,000 unemployed
January 1933	6,100,000 unemployed

Unemployment affected nearly every German family just 6 years after the last major economic disaster - hyperinflation - had hit Weimar.

Most, though not all, of the unemployed were male. These men were almost certainly family men who could see no way ahead with regards to providing for their families. Money was required for food, heating a home, clothes etc. With no obvious end to their plight under the Weimar regime, it is not surprising that those who saw no end to their troubles turned to the more extreme political parties in Germany - the Nazi and Communist Parties.


Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in January 1933, establishing a totalitarian single-party state within months and initiating the path towards World War II, the most devastating conflict in world history.






Valeria Otarola

Sigmund Freud and his revolutionary theory

After WWI, an important psychologist, Sigmund Freud, revolutionized the perception of sexuality during that period. He changed sexuality forever. Many of the social and cultural changes of the interwar period centered around the sexual and psychological theories of Sigmund Freud.




Freud, the inventor and chief practitioner of psychoanalysis, developed the idea of the “unconscious,” a repository of sexual desires and dreams. Freud’s theories helped some American women break free from small-town, white, Protestant values in favor of increasingly permissive and tolerant attitudes toward the sexual freedoms and desires of women. Sigmund Freud human behavior was motivated by unconscious drives, primarily "Sexual Energy". He called his therapy Psychoanalysis. His work provoked a serious challenge to prudishness by saying that children emerged from the Oedipus complex, a sexual desire towards their parent of the opposite sex. According to Freud's theory, in the earliest stage in a child's psychosexual development, the oral stage, the mother's breast became the formative source of all later erotic sensation.




The effects of Freud’s ideology were many, some of them we can still see today: Freud said, and many Freudians still believe that many mental illnesses, particularly hysteria, can be traced back to unresolved conflicts experienced during childhood, or to events which otherwise disrupt the normal pattern of infantile development. He also changed and explained homosexuality. Before Freud homosexuals were persecuted, imprisoned or killed. Freud explained that homosexuality is a failure to resolve the conflicts of the Oedipus complex, particularly a failure to identify with the parent of the same sex.


Freud also allowed for sexual freedom, especially in women. Before Freud women were seen as objects. They had to fulfill their spouse’s wishes. They couldn’t feel desire because it was frowned upon. Women who were sexually active were seen as neurotic and sent to mental hospitals. Women couldn’t express sexual desire. Freud postulated that when a person experiences an instinctual impulse to behave in a manner which the super-ego deems to be reprehensible, then it is possible for the mind to push this impulse away, to repress it into the unconscious. However, the repressed instinctual drive, as an energy-form, is not and cannot be destroyed when it is repressed–it continues to exist intact in the unconscious.


To conclude, Freud´s ideas, even though discussed and challenged by the men in his time, were so strong that psychoanalysts to this day treat people´s minds following his philosophy. Freudians explain behaviors and desires as impulses that one can control if we understood our psyche. This is how some of the most important criminals in our times have been freed, because lawyers following Freud’s ideas explained their behavior after childhood traumas.

Arianne Velez

The USSR under Stalin’s dictatorship

Stalin ruled the Soviet Union from 1929 until 1953, when he died. He was a dictator, which is he personally had complete control of the government. Lenin announced the New Economic Policy, (NEP) which re-established limited economic freedom. His plan was to rebuild both agriculture and industry.


In 1927, the party which had ratified Stalin’s consolidation of power adopted the first Five Year Plan. The Plan called for industrial production to be increased within five years by 250 per cent, with heavy industry to grow even faster. Agricultural production was to increase by 150 percent, and one fifth of Soviet peasants were to give up their private plots and join "collective" farms


Industries and Agriculture

Compared with other main European countries, Soviet industries were very backwards. Also the years of war and civil war had causes much damage and disorganization. Stalin decided that a huge effort must be made to develop the main heavy industries like steel. He was afraid that the USSR may be attacked again by countries who wanted to destroy Communism


Many more mines, factories, oil-refineries and generating stations had to be developed during the ten years 1928-38. Millions more workers were needed. In fact, during those ten years the proportion of the whole population living in towns increased from one-fifth to one-third.


Stalin organized a great publicity campaign to persuade peasants to move to the towns and encourage the workers to work extra hard.

A propaganda poster of 1934.   It is titled: 'Peasants can live like a Human Being'.  

                                              Study the poster - can you see how it is promising people the following:

                 •enough to eat,

                 •   adequate clothing,

                 •   the latest consumer goods,

                 •   electricity,

                 •   education,

                 •   happiness.

The problem

Soviet farming was very backward. Most of the peasants were extremely poor and used the most primitive methods to cultivate the land. Flails for threshing and even wooden ploughs were still widely used.


Yet Stalin urgently needed to increase the production of food. The first five-year plan needed a huge increase in the number of industrial workers. Food had to be available in the towns for them.


Stalin’s solution

Stalin produced a scheme to solve all this problems. The small peasant plots would be joined together to form big collective farms. This would have the following advantages:


1. They will be big enough to use modern methods of farming, including tractors.


2. A very large farm would need fewer peasants than the smaller plots separately. The surplus people could go to the towns to work in the factories.


3. Communist Party officials could control the collectives through their organizing committees.


The changes were introduced very quickly and the result was anger and chaos. The peasants were forced to give up their land, their animals, even their tools to the collective. Many peasants burned their crops or slaughtered their animals in protest, such that by 1933, the number of horses, cattle, sheep and goats fell by at least half. Man also slaughtered their animal rather than give them up to the collective.

And the state took the grain- a picture referring to collectivization.

Collectivization, often called the "second serfdom," was an unmitigated disaster. While the communist economists had expected collective farms to generate enough income to pay for factories, heavy investment was needed in tractors to replace draft horses that had been slaughtered. There was no efficient infrastructure or means of getting crops delivered to processors; tons of wheat rotted in the fields while people starved for lack of bread.

Valeria Otarola

1919-1939

International Relations 1918-1939