oh my goodness it is the last video of the entire AP Euro curriculum but I'll tell you goodbye and shed a single tier at the end of the video for now we need to talk about the 20th and the 21st century culture arts and demographic training so if you're ready to get them bring gals milked one last time let's get to now if you remember all the way back to unit eight I mentioned that before World War One everyone was like science but after World War One everyone was like science you see for centuries science was dominated by A Narrative of progress the world is getting better and better because of our scientific progress and at the turn of the 20th century Humanity was about to enter a perfect world thanks to science that has been discovered on the battlefields of both World War scientific progress could be used to destroy huge swaths of humanity so the result of both of those world wars was a decreased confidence that science could solve all our problems and so the philosophy of the age began to reflect this disillusionment of the world and engendered a strong reaction against Enlightenment rationalism the First Development came in the rise of existentialism this is a philosophy that assumed the world was absurd and that meaning had to be found in spite of that absurdity Friedrich Nietzsche was kind of the poster boy for this manner of thinking his Reckoning God was dead and Europeans had killed and thus now that God was dead life was inherently meaningful okay now the second development came along in the 1950s and it was called post-modernism it reacted against Enlightenment certainty by pointing out that all truth was relative in other words every different culture has unique ways of seeing the world and values by which it interacts with the world therefore post-modern philosophers would say that no one culture or one thinker has the corner on absolute truth because all truth claims are culturally conditioned so in both these philosophical developments you can see that the old Enlightenment rationalism was no longer reigning supreme but that shouldn't tempt you to believe that Europeans were throwing away their religion left right and Center it is true that Europe grew more secular over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries but it is also true that organized religion continued to play a significant role in European social and cultural life in spite of the many challenges it faced for example in the 20th century the church had to contend with totalitarian governments and their responses were mixed in Germany Dietrich Bonhoeffer founded the confessing Church which was exceedingly vocal in its criticism of Nazi policies especially their anti-jewish policy but for his suspected participation in an assassination attempt against Hitler Bonhoeffer was executed in the waning days of the war but it was a different story over in Italy when Mussolini Rose to power he understood that he needed the support of the Catholic church in Rome so he recognized the independence of Vatican City and proclaimed Catholicism as the official religion of the Italian in response the pope encouraged the times to support the fascist government over in Poland the church had to contend with Soviet communist repression in 1980 a group known as solidarity was founded which was essentially a Polish Trade union that existed outside the Warsaw the Soviets tried their hardest to crush this opposition but could not and in 1978 a Catholic Cardinal from Poland was elected pope of the Catholic Church taking the name John Paul II being sympathetic with the goals of solidarity the pope financially supported their efforts to undermine the Soviet Communist Regime in Poland so those are a couple examples of how the church responded to totalitarianism but since we're talking about religion I need to tell you that the Catholic Church underwent a massive Reform movement in the 1960s at the second Vatican Council you'll also hear this called Vatican II but you know it's the same thing don't get confused the purpose of this Council was essentially to update the church to respond to the modern world one of the most significant changes was the allowance of priests to say the mass and vernacular languages rather than in Latin Additionally the church made resolutions to live on friendlier terms with other sects of Christianity namely Protestants in Eastern Orthodox Christian ultimately these sweeping reforms led to a Revival of Catholicism in the various parts of Europe now I already mentioned how philosophy and science were leading the way in questioning and undermining objective knowledge during the 20th century the Arts followed that same path as well remember in unit 7 we talked about the rise of cubism around the turn of the 20th century in this movement the subject of the paintings became almost nonsensical it was a style that depicted three-dimensional objects in two dimensions and Pablo Picasso was probably the most famous of these artists and then came the Italian and Russian artistic movement known as futurism in which artists emphasized you know the future they emphasized the future of Italy and Russia in order to free them from their recently checkered path for example here's a painting from the Russian futurist Natalia gonkarova and you could see the finger pointing backwards while the cyclist defiantly peddles into the future then came dadaism which was a response to the felt purposelessness of life after two world wars had devastated the European continent if life was devored of purpose so too should art be devoid of purpose case in point Marcel duchamp's famous Dada piece called Fountain if you're thinking wait that's just a urinal that's not art exactly it is a satirical commentary on the meaninglessness of Western aesthetic values then came the artistic movement known as surrealism the idea here is that as Sigmund Freud had exposed the chaotic and unrefined interior worlds of human beings art ought to reflect those same reality for example the most famous of the surrealist was Salvador Dali and here you can see his painting called the Persistence of memory I mean this looks like something out of a Dreamscape and apparently he meant the melting clocks would be a kind of commentary on the disturbing relativity of time but it wasn't only the visual arts that changed over the course of the 20th century so too did architecture for example the Bauhaus School of Architecture emerged in Germany during the interwar years their goal was to design structures based on their function and to focus none on useless conventions of form and so you can see here that their buildings lacked ornamentation but instead looked like boxes of Steel and glass and literature also got caught up in the changes as well as you might expect by this point writers began challenging the forms that have been handed down the Irish novelist James Joyce made a popular new form of composition called stream of Consciousness the idea here was to reproduce on the page a character's actual thoughts which in the case of humans occur in Rapid succession without punctuation or conventions of composition the thoughts of the characters and choices Ulysses are presented in this fashion jumping from one idea to the next seemingly without any connection or take the German writer Franz Kafka Who challenged old conventions by combining elegant writing with elements of Fantastical imagination his most known work and probably one you've had to read in school was the metamorphosis in which the protagonist wakes up from his sleep only to realize that he's been mysteriously transformed into a giant cockroach okay now yet another significant change in the 20th and 21st centuries came in the forms of consumerism and a Baby Boom in terms of consumerism the disposable income of the average European significantly increased during this time thanks to World War II factories that have perfected their workflow with the production of Munitions began cranking out consumer products like math is this the middle class folks were enjoying the fruits of a growing economy they were able to spend money on things and make their lives more comfortable like you know electricity in cars and indoor plumbing and Plastics and clothing made from synthetic fiber simultaneously in the post-war years there was a massive Baby Boom which is to say the population exploded several European governments encouraged the baby boom by investing in neonatalist policies which is to say policies that encourage people to have babies these policies included paid maternity leave and tax credits for each child born now this increase occurred more sharply in Western countries than it did in say the Soviet Union and that had many different causes most of which went back to the massive deaths racked up as a result of the war now it's also going to be important for you to know that during this period several groups fought for an expansion of civil rights since I have a whole video outlining the women's rights movement of the 20th century here I'll just focus on gay and lesbian civil rights move now to be clear prior to these movements homosexuality was outlawed in almost all European States and while many groups fought to overturn these I just want to introduce you to the most famous of them known as the homosexual front for revolutionary action which occurred in France in 1971 they began their Movement by interrupting a radio broadcast in which a Catholic priest was arguing against the acceptance of homosexuality they broke in pounded his head on the desk and then shouted into the microphone so there was nothing wrong with them and that the policies against gays and lesbians to be overturned not surprisingly the radio station quickly cut the microphones and called the police but this and other movements across Europe like it fought for the equality of lgbtq people in the 20th and 21st century in some places like France they won many victories but in other places especially in Eastern Europe they face stiff opposition now not everybody was happy about the expansion of consumerism in the 20th century mainly composed of those who came of age during the 60s the counter-culture movement railed against the cultural conformity that consumerism created additionally they protested not only the Conformity caused by consumers and but the growing inequality between the rich and poor that it engendered and the high water mark of the counterculture movement was the revolts of 1968. all across Europe and actually all across the world students LED protests against inequality the war in Vietnam the abuses of capitalism and oppressive government one of the most notable examples occurred in France in May of 1968. in that case a group of students influenced by new left ideologies protested conservative policies in their University it led to Violent clashes with the police in which property was destroyed and many students were injured a couple days later a general strike of 10 million workers joined the protest and the French government looked as if it could fall to those protesters ultimately the government made some reforms as did the University and the movement fizzled out and that my friends is the end of the curriculum I cannot tell you how grateful I am that you have all come around and endured my goofy jokes I'm proud of you for getting this far and when you go to take that AP exam in may just know that there is a bald bearded gap tooth man cheering you on I'll see you next year heimler out