Original subtitles

(horns blaring)

The time before 1914 is usually seen

as the time before the first world war.

But of course,

people then did not know there would be a first world war.

The time before 1914 was much more than a prelude to war.

It was a time of tremendous changes.

Man and machine were melting together into a new being made

of steam and muscles, hurtling into an unknown future.

(suspenseful music)

Life was getting faster and faster.

Clocks had become commonplace,

factories introduced time punch machines and conveyor belts.

Efficiency was the watchword for urban dwellers

and even their personal lives sped up.

For the first time,

speed was a major factor in their leisure time,

and leisure time itself was a new phenomenon.

People were discovering for themselves

the intoxication of speed,

exhilarated by tenths of a second,

and the breaking of new records

whether actively or a spectators.

(train chugging) (majestic music)

These are The Vertigo Years.

(majestic music)

1900 to 2013 seems a very short period.

Considering the long time span.

(majestic music)

It was the century of women.

(music continues)

The beginning of the century promised so much.

(music continues)

(waves crashing)

The early 20th century was all about speed.

Sailing races were in vogue,

but what really counted were fast engines.

(upbeat music)

I think the invention

of the internal combustion engines brought on one

of the great changes in the history of civilization.

It really did.

It revolutionized things much more than even

a Marie Curie could in her laboratory,

because suddenly there was movement.

People encountered each other

and discover new horizons, new people, new ways of living.

(upbeat music)

No European country was more enthralled

by speed than Germany.

(engines revving)

The Kaiser insisted on presenting the trophy personally.

(crowd cheering)

(speaking in foreign language)

It's testosterone I'd say, I mean, that's how it was

in ancient Rome, the gladiators with their swords

and then it goes on and it takes different forms

on the battle field,

and through to the internal combustion engine.

And that brings about different kinds of challenge.

With an engine, you can break through a lot of constraints.

You can break through gravity, you invent the airplane.

(speaking in foreign language)

(upbeat music)

After land and water,

now humanity conquered the sky.

(engines puttering) (music continues)

Within a few decades

flying soapboxes had turned into complex aircraft.

Otto Lilienthal in Germany

and the Wright brothers were only three

of many inventors who had sought to defy gravity.

Only 60 years later, men would land on the moon.

(exploding) (music resumes)

In France where flying was the height of fashion,

Louis Bleriot set out to be the first pilot to fly

across the English channel.

Louis Bleriot was a once wealthy producer

of car parts who had all but ruined himself

with his flying experiments.

When he set off to cross the channel

in one of these type 11 planes, everything was at stake.

The problem was

that the other 10 types had been complete flops.

And he knew that if it wouldn't make it this time to

bag the huge prize money, his dream of flying would be over.

(somber music)

Bleriot had already flown considerable distances

over land, but as yet never over the open sea.

The challenge was more psychological than technical.

Bleriot wasn't the only pilot trying to

cross the channel that day.

To get a headstart on his competitors,

he set off in his plane at half past four in the morning.

(music continues) (engine whirring)

[Bleriot Voiceover] I am alone.

For about 10 minutes, I lose my bearings.

It's a peculiar situation to be in the air,

above the channel without a compass.

My hands and feet rest lightly on the leavers.

I let the flying machine find its own way.

And then 20 minutes after I left the French coast,

I see the cliffs of Dover.

At 13 minutes past five,

Bleriot landed on a golf course near Dover Castle.

The channel crossing was the sensation of the era.

Bleriot was richer by a thousand pounds,

and London prepared a triumphal reception for him.

Headlines on both sides of the channel

announced England is an island no longer,

but not everyone rejoiced at this.

The latent fear of invasion began to grow.

Counter measures were required.

Admiral John Fisher battled to rearm the Royal Navy.

(metal clanging)

In the end, his plans were set in motion.

A revolutionary new type of battleship was developed.

The Dreadnought.

The ship was christened by his majesty King Edward

in the uniform of an Admiral of the fleet.

The 20,000 ton 530 foot Colossus was the beginning

of a new era in the arms race.

It had all begun quite harmlessly

with the visit of a German boy to his grandmother,

Queen Victoria.

Kaiser Wilhelm made no secret

of the fact that the motivation

behind his expansion of the German fleet was very personal.

[Kaiser Voiceover] As a little boy,

I was allowed to visit Portsmouth

and Plymouth to admire the marvelous ships.

That sparked in me the desire

to build ships like that myself one day

and to possess a Navy like the Royal Navy when I grew up.

In later years,

he became an enthusiastic sailor.

30 seconds!

The German Empire had been founded in 1871

and was in no way as self-confident as the British Empire.

Ten! Perhaps that was

part of the reason why William the Second was so

desperately keen to impress his uncle Edward the Seventh.

Four, three, two, one, time.

(canon booming)

The main theater of this war to impress was here at Cows.

The Cows Week Regatta became a battleground where German

and English yachts competed.

But year after year, the English yachts came home first.

(jazzy music)

In the end, the Emperor was exasperated

and simply declared the rules were unfair

and went home and founded his own regatta in Kiel.

But the logic of competing

and outdoing one another persisted.

(steady music)

Never before had such unbelievable sums

of money been spent on arms.

Military expenditure was soon swallowing up a third

of the entire national budget in France and Russia,

a little less in Great Britain,

and almost a quarter in Germany.

The smokestacks of croup and tussin were red hot.

The Germans built their own drag naughts,

which were ships which were technically just perhaps a year

or two behind in terms of armament.

But on the other hand they were very sturdy ships.

They had less range because the British were a country

with an empire and they wanted to have the option

of sending those ships elsewhere.

And for that you needed range.

The German ships

to the British perception appeared to be slanted

to one thing only.

And that was conflict

between two large battle fleets in the North Sea.

(steady music)

The Kaiser was driven

by a burning desire to break England's global predominance.

His plans fitted perfectly

with Germany's expanding heavy industries.

(waves crashing)

You know, you go from sort of toy boats to navies.

It's like a kind

of children's game that gets completely out of control.

A wave of national enthusiasm

for its own force gripped the German empire.

Even Christmas was decked

out with the trappings of future victories.

(gentle music)

(children singing in foreign language)

(exploding)

Within a few years,

Russia, Austria, Italy, Japan, Germany,

and Great Britain had built more

than a hundred battleships ever stronger and ever faster.

The arms race was a game for men,

but the factory work was increasingly done by women.

They were even forging the heavy ships chains.

(tamping metal)

Wages were on the increase,

but so was the pressure to deliver.

Industry needed cheap labor, women.

(metal tapping)

Women did the same work as men,

but they were paid not much more

than children who themselves started in the factories

at only 10 years of age.

Suffrage, the right to vote,

was a central demand of the women's movement

which began to organize in the industrial North of England.

(metal tapping)

In the chain forge of Cradley Heath protesting women put

down their tools.

Led by Mary MacArthur,

the women were demanding a minimum wage.

Today, Cradley Heath is an open-air museum where

actors retell this story

from the viewpoint of those striking workers.

My wife's on strike today.

Absolutely incredible that it should come to this.

This is the first time that I know of any way around here

that women have gone on strike.

I've got all these kids to feed and no money coming in.

So we've got Mary MacArthur, she's come to help us.

We may not make a child for a night, flog them off.

They have a good profit, and we get a pittance

at the end of the day for what our women have met.

Tay on, tay on.

This, this could have such far reaching consequences

for everybody around here.

I mean, it could be insurrection.

You don't know, do you?

Hyde Park Corner

in London is a legendary place for free speech.

And on the 21st of June, 1908, people came here

to demonstrate against the fact that half of all people

in this country were disenfranchised and couldn't vote.

These people of course were women.

And the organizations that had called

for this demonstration brought people here

in seven huge processions in uniforms

and with banners to demonstrate, men and women together

calling for parliament to change the law.

500,000 turned up to demonstrate at Hyde park.

It was the largest gathering of people ever known.

The women's movement had proved that it was a mass movement.

Success alluded them all the same.

The men in parliament weren't interested in women's rights,

but the women had gained in self-confidence.

After nine weeks of strike

the chain forgers of Cradley Heath got the minimum wage

they had demanded.

Questions of social justice were in the air.

Dudley. Eighth richest man in the world.

You know what he does sometimes for these workers?

He's a really benevolent benefactor bloke, this chap.

Every once in a blue moon, he gives him a picnic.

A picnic.

The eighth richest man in the world

and all he gives is a bit of bread and butter

and a cake and a corporate tag.

And sometimes, I think this gets ya,

cause young is sweating away.

My mates are dying at the age of 36.

What for?

To make somebody else rich.

(ominous music)

Although Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader

of the suffragettes tried to conduct a moderate campaign,

activists became increasingly radical.

More and more of them were sent to jail,

where many went on hunger strike.

They were brutally force fed.

The suffragettes were treated with great cruelty

and violence and they were forced fed and, and imprisoned.

And when we all know that, that story, and then

on the other side, there are a great mixture

of people, working women, intellectuals, radicals,

activists, left wing people,

people from many different groups who

clearly thought that women should have the vote and

that there should be gender equality and

that things should change.

And that also that women should be able to

enter the professions because the struggle

for the vote is only part of the story.

At the Epsom races,

Emily Wilding Davison attempted to get in the way

of the Kings thundering horse and was fatally injured.

(suspenseful music) (people chattering)

Her funeral was the last mass rally

of the women's movement before the war.

While suffragettes in England were laying

their lives on the line,

the public position of women in France was very different.

There was Saha Bernal.

The great style of theater and cinema.

There were the novels of Collette

that created huge literary sensations.

Society Hostess is like the (speaking in foreign language)

Everybody in their salons who was anybody.

And in the studio of Auguste Rodin,

there was a young woman who wasn't only his lover

but also a great artist in her own right.

Her name was Camille Claudel.

(ominous music)

Claudel wasn't interested in politics, but in her own way

she protested against the domination of men.

She accused her lover and former mentor

Rodin of plagiarizing her work and

in protest destroyed her own sculptures.

This desperate act was Claudel's

last outburst on the path to madness.

She ended her life in a psychiatric clinic.

In his stage drama "Elektra" Hugo von Hofmannsthal

presented a picture of female rage to a horrified public.

(speaking in foreign language)

Strong women were not society's ideal.

And by the beginning of the 20th century, I think there was

already a much stronger debate about women making themselves

independent and their sexual drive was acknowledged.

(speaking in foreign language)

So naturally, women who were seen

as erratic who'd adopted masculine traits to

force their way through to combine their forces.

These women were not admired.

(singing in foreign language)

In Richard Strauss's opera

the already overwhelming effect of Hofmannsthal's Elektra

reached a new level of intensity.

(singing in foreign language) (dramatic music)

Many men felt threatened

by these ecstatic new women.

The fight for women's rights changed society, but no action

without reaction.

In his book on the Physiological Imbecility of Woman,

the German Dr. Paul Julius Möbius argued that

with their on average smaller brains, women weren't even

able to do anything else than look after

household and children.

Reactionaries all over Europe applauded him,

but history had already passed him by.

In summer, the wealthy Europeans

fled away from the big cities

like here in Austria on the Attersee.

On the opposite bank,

Gustav Marlow wrote his second and third symphonies.

And in the Villa behind us

Gustav Klimt spent many summers painting.

He lived there with his girlfriend

Emilia Pflueger who used these summers to

design beautiful flowing dresses for women,

dresses that no longer constrained them in corsets

but gave them a completely new feeling for the bodies.

(birds chirping)

Emilia Pflueger was not only Gustav Klimt's

model and companion.

She was a fashion designer too.

Her reformed clothes allowed women

to put aside their corsets

and discover their bodies as they were.

Sports and movement brought a completely new experience

to the lives of many women.

Bicycles allowed them to leave the narrowness

of bourgeois life quite literally behind them.

(upbeat music)

In his novel, "Here Are Wings"

Maurice leBlanc described two couples

going on a cycling tour.

Spurred on by speed and excitement,

they take off their clothes and fall into an open air orgy.

(upbeat music)

Moralists were appalled at the potential effects

of this anarchic vehicle on public morals.

Women in particular pedaling along without corsets

and reform floats were viewed as a danger and dangerous.

It was claimed that their movements

on the leather saddle could produce an unbearable

erotic stimulation, making them hysterical

or even steer out.

Alice Guy, the first woman director

in the history of film parodied

the supposed new roles of the sexes.

Men were on their way to becoming the weaker sex.

(steady music)

The new perception of women's sexuality was not

only discussed in public.

It slipped into bed with the couples themselves.

With women already on the way

to a new understanding of themselves,

men had to come to terms with this new relationship.

(people chattering)

Men were not prepared for the sexual revolution.

Now it was their turn to follow.

In the new urban societies,

it was no longer important from which village you came,

who your parents were.

New tribes came into being with new rituals.

This was the high time of the socialist movement

of the workers association of the big political parties and

of football clubs.

The great clubs like Manchester United

like Barocio Dortmund or Byon Munich were all founded

in these years.

(crowd cheering) (whistle blowing)

In great Britain alone,

there were 12,000 football clubs with 300,000 players and

millions of male spectators.

For them, the stadium

was a place of retreat where the world's still functioned

according to fixed rules.

In her book, "A Survey of the Woman Problem,"

Austrian feminist Rosa Mayreder

analyzed the situation in which men now found themselves.

(dramatic music)

The machine operator is merely the turner

of a handle that could mostly be operated just

as well by women and children.

The strong arm, which in other social circumstances was

indispensable for a man and was the basis

of his authority has become completely superfluous.

So one reaches the paradoxical conclusion that

through civilization, which has been almost exclusively

the work of masculine intelligence, men themselves

are working to destroy masculinity.

The office, the branch, the registry.

Mere coffins of masculinity,

but they're monumental tomb is the modern city itself.

(sirens wailing)

(upbeat music)

The elite ignored these changes

and went hunting.

Emperor Franz Joseph

spent several weeks every year

at his hunting castle in the Salzkammergut.

In her analysis of masculinity,

Rosa Mayreder wrote,

(gun firing)

"Like an old image that's still worshiped,

although it's long since ceased to work miracles,

the idea of masculinity still ruled in modern culture."

Besides pretty actresses, King Edward

the Seventh loved gambling

horse racing and exclusive hunting parties.

(guns firing)

William the Second alone was said

to have bagged 250,000 kills.

(gun firing)

From the cult of masculinity spread medieval blooms.

Duels became modern again.

Real men reached for weapons to defend their honor.

(guns firing) (ominous music)

A positive epidemic of dueling broke

out and quickly gathered pace.

(guns firing)

(upbeat music)

Sportsmen became the public representatives

of the spectacular masculinity.

In 1903, the first Tour de France was run.

But muscle driven speed had had its day.

(engine whirring)

Sensational prototypes created new desires

but the triumphal procession

of the automobile began with mass production.

(music continues)

2013 is the time in which manual labor for many people

in Europe is disappearing being replaced by labor

that's done by technology rather than by people.

In 1913, there was always a calculation

between what it costs to produce a labor saving job

and to employ cheap human labor.

And that calculation usually resulted in driving down wages.

Abattoir's in Chicago gave Henry Ford the idea

of introducing assembly lines

where each worker had only one movement to perform.

The assembly line and the 20th century

are as inseparable as the 20th century and the car.

(steady music)

In 1908, the first model T rolled off the assembly line.

It cost $825.

Within eight years,

mass production techniques had driven the price

down to $360.

The buyer can have a car in any color he wants.

As long as it's black.

Henry Ford reputedly said time was money

and black paint dried fastest.

(speaking in foreign language)

According to our capitalist logic time means money.

Speed allows you to earn money.

The faster you are the better you use your time.

That's why there's such an excessive striving

for speed today.

You always want to be faster than you are.

(steady music)

Europeans frustrated

with the outdated conventions

of their own countries frequently headed for America.

The Austrian steel Baron Karl Wittgenstein,

the architect Adolf Loos,

and the Italian car manufacturer Giovanni Agnelli

all made this pilgrimage.

Inspired by what he'd seen

in the United States,

Agnelli designed a factory

which wasn't to be built until

after the first world war.

Lingotto in Turin.

Here, the production line went higher and higher,

with the finished car on the roof in the open air.

On a circuit more than half a mile long,

every car was tested

before being driven off down a long ramp.

(speaking in foreign language)

Within the automotive industry,

there was a kind of mania that you could compare

with the internet bubble at the end of the 20th century.

There was an incredible enthusiasm

for the automotive industry.

(funky music)

Italian futurism too was a child of speed.

Filippo Marinetti wrote futurism's manifesto.

[Filippo Voiceover] First, love of danger,

courage, daring, and revolt.

We want to praise the man at the controls.

We want to glorify the war.

The beauty of speed.

(music continues)

We want to destroy the museums

and fight morality, feminism, and cowardice.

(speaking in foreign language)

The futurists wanted to rejuvenate the country

by an enormous wave of force, a massive provocation.

They wanted to subvert academic conventions

and undermine tradition.

And in the end provide a new aesthetic

artistic literary model for Europe.

(somber music)

Unintentionally,

the futurists were helping to pave the road to fascism,

but for them it was all about speed.

[Female Voiceover] In his painting "Girl on the Balcony"

Jack Marbella says he was inspired by photography.

It's like the single exposures of a film.

You can see the different moments

as the light falls on his daughter on the balcony.

It was a car accident

that gave Marinette to the idea for futurism.

For him, a new era had dawned.

Space and time died yesterday.

We're already living

in the absolute because we've already created

eternal ubiquitous speed.

Seen at first distrustfully as dangerous horseless carts

cars quickly became the most exciting symbol

of the 20th century.

Cars made you mobile, cars were sexy.

Cars were dreams on four wheels from the simple model T Ford

to the legendary Rolls Royce.

(steady music)

Cars had become heavier and more powerful.

A race lasting several days over the highest passes

in the Alps was intended to demonstrate

man's victory over nature.

A hundred years later, the very same race was run again.

(music continues)

The underbelly of this life of luxury was the misery

of those at the bottom of the production chain.

Like these workers in Paris.

(ominous music)

Within a few decades, cities like Berlin and Vienna grew

into metropolises where they're working poor

lived lives of bitter hardship.

They had little share in the rising standards of living.

They lived in slums on the edge of the towns

or in tenement flats.

Dozens slept in a single room.

Shift workers shared the same bed, one using it by night,

the other by day.

Soup kitchens for the poor provided one small meal a day.

And at the beginning of the 20th century,

very fast transition.

People were moving, you see that there's masses

of people who used to live in the countryside, who lived

by subsistence economy.

They grew everything that they ate on farms moved to cities

and were part of a big capitalist economy.

So it's a huge change in the life of millions of people.

(ominous music)

I mean, you could see that the cities really

were transformed mode of life in relation to the countries.

So even politically the cities were governments were afraid

of cities

because cities were the place where revolution happened.

In Russia,

conditions were even harsher,

particularly for women who suffer doubly from urban poverty.

Many of them were forced into prostitution.

It was a desperate situation for countless women

but neither the Czar himself

nor the parliament had any interest

in seeing women as equal before the law.

In Russia, democracy can still not be taken for granted.

(speaking in foreign language)

Once people start thinking, we need to start fighting

for democracy and individual rights again

with renewed force, they'll want different people in power

and they'll take to the streets.

Putin is afraid of that.

Putin is afraid of those who get other people

out into the streets, who make other people think.

After Bloody Sunday,

unrest broke out all over Russia.

The Czar responded with force.

In Moscow a crowd of 200,000 insurgent workers

following the coffin of a murdered workman was attacked

by troops loyal to the Czar.

Some of the rebel workers barricaded themselves here

in the (speaking in foreign language) works and were shelled

by the army with heavy artillery.

The young factory worker

Nicola Pavlovich Schmidt, even sided

with the rebels and was promptly arrested by police.

After days of interrogations, he was found

in his cell with knife wounds in his lower arms and neck.

The police recorded his death as suicide.

In Russia, once again, the Czar had succeeded

in beating down the rebelling masses.

So preventing a revolution.

(upbeat music)

But a different revolution was already well underway.

Women were on their way up.

(music continues)

Three years after Louis Bleriot's crossing,

Harriet Quimby became the first

woman pilot to fly across the channel.

Again and again,

women activists sought to formulate alternatives

to the structures of a man's world.

At a peace conference in the Hague,

delegates of the great powers issued statements

about the possibility of arms reduction

but no one was really interested in peace.

The Austrian writer Bertha von Suttner

was an observer at the conference.

Her passionate commitment to peace was the result

of her own personal experience.

Living in Georgia at the time of the Russo Turkish war

she had been horrified by the suffering she had witnessed.

I think you can compare the battle on the ship

could pass with Stalingrad.

The same futility.

Just dropping dead in the snow in the cold.

(ominous music)

Moved by this experience

Suttner wrote the novel, "Lay Down Your Arms,"

a passionate plea for peace that became a best seller.

(speaking in foreign language)

Bertha von Suttner had witnessed

this kind of war, had seen it rationally

and written about it, is really remarkable,

and important for the time. (canon booming)

For her commitment,

she was awarded the Nobel prize for peace in 1905,

but Europe's men were not much interested

in conducting politics through tolerance and peace.

Vienna's mayor Karl Lueger had built his entire career

by manipulating social hatred.

(speaking in foreign language)

(crowd exclaiming) (speaking in foreign language)

When Adolf Hitler was a young aspiring painter in Vienna

the mayor of the city was Karl Lueger.

Anti-semitism as a useful vehicle for making a career.

He once said.

But when you've made it,

you have to leave it aside

because it's a sport for the plebs.

This sport for the plebs was played

with great passion in Vienna,

and Lueger made it acceptable in high society.

(speaking in foreign language)

(crowd applauding)

One of the most fervent admirers

of Vienna's mayor was the young Adolf Hitler.

He was then living in one of the city's homeless shelters.

He applied to become a student at the Academy of Arts

but he wasn't accepted.

In 1910, Karl Lueger died and was given a state funeral.

(somber music)

It was to take more than a hundred years

before the Karl Lueger ring named

after him was renamed Universitatsring.

While male politicians were inciting social hatred

in his school, in the center of Vienna,

Eugenia Schwarzwald was educating the children in her school

in his spirit of tolerance and openness.

(speaking in foreign language)

Dr. Eugenia Schwarzwald didn't want that

dreadful system that she'd had in her childhood.

The way schools were then with punishments and beatings,

and the teacher's always right.

And you're nothing, nothing at all.

You just have to pay attention

and see that you get through.

She wanted to avoid that above all.

And she did.

(steady music)

The building's roof served as a sports ground.

Adolf Loos designed the interior space

and taught architecture.

Arnold Schoenberg taught music.

The only problem was the art teacher, Oscar Kokoschka.

(speaking in foreign language)

The ministry didn't want to allow it

because he had no teacher training.

And Dr. Schwarzwald apparently said,

"But minister, he's a genius."

And his reply was, "Geniuses aren't part of our curriculum."

The schools teaching goals

were self-confidence and tolerance.

(speaking in foreign language)

We did that at school too.

It didn't matter at all what religion you belong to.

You had separate religion classes, but that was all.

That's why for me, this upheaval in 1938

was like a bomb exploding because I had no idea.

(crowd cheering)

When Hitler invaded Austria in 1938,

the school was closed.

Eugenia Schwarzwald fled the country.

After 1900, the world accelerated so much

that the old answers were no longer helpful.

People like Eugenia Schwarzwald

sought for new answers beyond social convention,

militarism and machines, Catholicism, and communism,

which could show the path to a better tomorrow.

(triumphant music)