The Twilight Years

Review by Edward B. Segel

The interwar years, marked by economic depression, the rise of totalitarian regimes in Russia, Italy and Germany, and the seemingly unstoppable slide into another war, continue to exert a somber fascination.

Richard Overy, a distinguished historian of 20th-century Europe, especially World War II and its background, here investigates the “paradox” of the mindset of interwar Britain, where so many engaged in predictions of impending decline, if not catastrophe, despite objective evidence that their circumstances were not nearly so dire. Even with the Depression, living standards rose for those with jobs. “This book is an exploration of British society in the 1920s and 1930s while it wrestled sometimes fatalistically, sometimes with undisguised relish, with this idea of crisis…an unexpected and unusual window on to the social, cultural and intellectual world of interwar Britain…whose political and social system had proved almost impervious to the savage violence and upheavals that scarred the history of the rest of Europe…not just a time of crisis, but indeed a morbid age.”

This interwar mindset was not confined to an ill-tempered avant-garde, but affected wide areas of public discourse, including medicine and the sciences, all contributing to the period’s “morbid culture.” Indeed “the consciousness of fin-de-siècle in Britain before 1939” helps to explain British readiness to go to war. Even more strikingly, Overy sees in our present period “a popular belief that the Western world faces a profound crisis,” as “doom-mongers…generate a language of anxiety and sentiments of uncertainty”—in the face of evidence of Western wealth, security and strength.

Overy’s sweeping analysis ranges from opinion-making intellectuals like Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee and Sigmund Freud to a broad perspective of how ideas of decline were spread by advances in education and publishing in the new age of mass communication—like the BBC or the cheap editions of the Left Book Club. This sense of civilization in decline was conveyed and exaggerated by popular-scientific eugenicist fears of racial degeneration, economic despair over capitalism and pessimism generated by the new science of psychoanalysis. The all-too-fresh memories of the Great War especially nourished fears of another and more destructive conflict, as well as a kind of idealization of pre-war Europe—though in fact, as Overy points out, many of these pessimistic views first appeared before 1914.

Through all this Overy recognizes the problem of tracking down “mentalités”: “Dissecting mentalities is a little like cutting mist with a knife.” But in this absorbing and persuasive study the historian’s scalpel reveals the irrational, exaggerated fears of decline and dissolution characterizing the interwar period—and perhaps our own?