Culture of a world where WW1 was averted

Marklin

Marklin

Sort of a sequel to my "Military tech in a no WW1 world thread," but this time talking about culture in a world without WW1?

What direction would culture, such as art and film go in? How would European film industries develop without WW1 to stunt them? What of Russian media and culture without the USSR? And so on.
 

James Ricker

The European film industry would progress and it would be a three-way competition between the British the Germans and the Americans, leading to a little more creativity
Culture would remain as it was and not as homogamist as it became because European and American cultures did not come into close contact on the fronts of the first World War
There would be a lot less social progress because women will not have had to have gone to work in the factories for World War I and there would be more men available to fill the jobs that had to be taken by minorities and women because they were not enough men to fill them
 

marktaha

Banned
Films infinitely better. Sport- can see Carpentier beating Johnson to win the heavyweight title in 1915. This is apart from all the talent lost in the war.
 

Catspoke

A world without socialist realism would be a sad place.
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Lalli

Hollywood wouldn't get such dominance outside of Americas. European movie industry would be dominated by Brits, Germans, French and Italians. Possibility Russians would are too important movie makers. At least them would have lot of potential there.

Movies probably too would remain quiet conservative. If in Hollywood Hays codes still occur, these probably remain longer. At least inter-racial relations would are even bigger taboo there.
 

YYJ

I heard somewhere that a bunch of early French celluloid film archives were melted down to make boot heels for World War One. So maybe a bunch of film now lost would still be with us.
 

Ijon Tichy

Joyce will still publish Ulysses in 1922: but will Eliot still publish The Waste Land in the same year?

That latter work could only have taken the form it did take because of the war ("I had not thought death had undone so many"), even if it's not explicit about the war.

Eliot's reactionary conservatism wouldn't be that much affected by the absence of war. And he would have remained an anti-semite, of course.

No WW1 means no WW2 (hopefully) and therefore no Shoah. So anti-semitism remains culturally acceptable?
 

bobbins

Donor
I think one of the largest changes would be religion maintaining a much more central place in the culture. Parts of the UK we’re going through a major nonconformist growth phase with mass conversions in areas such as the mining and industrial north prior to the war, and this was obviously cancelled by the deaths and war experiences of the combatants and families of casualties. Hence id also think it highly likely you wouldn’t see the historical rise of spiritualism , the occult etc post war.
you’d also have a huge number of authors, artists, musicians etc still alive and un affected.
 

Lalli

Ijon Tichy said:
Joyce will still publish Ulysses in 1922: but will Eliot still publish The Waste Land in the same year?

That latter work could only have taken the form it did take because of the war ("I had not thought death had undone so many"), even if it's not explicit about the war.

Eliot's reactionary conservatism wouldn't be that much affected by the absence of war. And he would have remained an anti-semite, of course.

No WW1 means no WW2 (hopefully) and therefore no Shoah. So anti-semitism remains culturally acceptable?
Click to expand...

J.R.R. Tolkien might not write LotR. Or it would be completely different.

If Hérge still begin draw adventures of Tintin, their antisemitism and racism wouldn't cause any controversy during Hérge's lifetime so he could continue giving using antisemtic things.
 

Captain Seafort

Lalli said:
J.R.R. Tolkien might not write LotR. Or it would be completely different.
Click to expand...

Middle-earth was created when the Battle of the Somme was rewritten as the Fall of Gondolin, and LotR is the story of a BEF subaltern and his batman. Without WW1, I suspect Tolkein would be well-regarded among specialist academics of Old English literature and unknown elsewhere.
 
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Godot

Godot

Ijon Tichy said:
Joyce will still publish Ulysses in 1922: but will Eliot still publish The Waste Land in the same year?

That latter work could only have taken the form it did take because of the war ("I had not thought death had undone so many"), even if it's not explicit about the war.

Eliot's reactionary conservatism wouldn't be that much affected by the absence of war. And he would have remained an anti-semite, of course.

No WW1 means no WW2 (hopefully) and therefore no Shoah. So anti-semitism remains culturally acceptable?
Click to expand...

I'd be fascinated to see the knock-on effects for Joyce, really. A lot of the political subtext (or just text, really, it's fairly overt) in Portrait of the Artist especially is grounded in a sense of futility and ennui towards Irish independence, particularly after Parnell. The Easter Rising was really a shock to the traditional nationalist leadership class - most (as reflected in Joyce's work) felt that Parnell was the last best shot. The Rising was lead, therefore, primarily by what amounted to no-names: schoolteachers, journalists, public sector accountants, trade unionists.

No WW1 likely means no Easter Rising. So where would that leave Joyce? And, for that matter, any of the noteworthy writers from around here?
 

The Ranger

Women would have to wait anything from 10 to 50 years longer to get the vote without WW1 and WW2. Anti-Semitism is more common in the West with no Holocaust in this timeline, and Colonialism lasts for at least 20 years longer and maybe much longer. Racism is more common.

On the plus side-Nazism and Fascism if it exists at all at the most has a few MPs on the fringes with no chance of getting into power, and Communism most likely can't get into power either. Eastern Europe still has vibrant Jewish communities, persecuted occasionally, but nothing like the Holocaust. America remains a largely sleeping giant. Tsarism whilst bad, is not as bad as Lenin and Stalin were. The UK and France are still superpowers.

So there is some bad and some good as well.
 

oberdada

The German film industry would look entirely different. The inflation was the reason that Germany dominated the film industry in the early and mid 20s making it highly competitive abroad. There was also a short time after the revolution without any censorship. All that goes away.
 
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