Original subtitles

(dramatic orchestral music)

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.

More and more people were living in cities

and what they experienced there had never been known before.

Where coaches had once set the pace,

there were now cars, trams and fast trains.

Life in the big city was a new phenomenon.

Wherever a person went,

he found himself next to countless others.

Everyone had become part of a crowd.

Huge stores offered every imaginable product.

Cinemas showed films from all over the world

and provided a glimpse of the most intimate situations.

Art broke down borders.

Holidays were becoming cheaper for everyone.

But the price of this luxury was paid in the colonies.

These are The Vertigo Years.

(dramatic orchestral music)

1900 to 2013 seems a very short period

considering the long time span.

(dramatic orchestral music)

It was the century of women.

(dramatic orchestral music)

The beginning of the century

promised so much.

(dramatic orchestral music)

One big transformation after 1900

was the change in everyday habits.

For the first time in history,

millions of people took public transport every day

to get to work.

In Berlin, in 1900 alone,

550 million people bought tramway tickets.

Underground trains, trams and elevated railways

were timed to the minute.

And in the weekends,

people streamed out to the sports stadiums

to watch events like football or horse racing.

(jazz music)

It was something new, exciting, fascinating

to be part of a huge anonymous crowd of people.

(jazz music)

A crowd that seemed to have a will of its own.

The years before 1914 were a time of the masses,

of spectators, of the public.

(footsteps thumping)

The mass had arrived in history

and the new industrialized world lived off it.

Hardly anyone realizes today

what a dawning that time was,

the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.

Everything was awakening.

People wanted everything, could do anything,

believed they could do anything.

There was everything.

There was cinema.

Everything.

(jazz music)

Cinematography was invented in Chicago

by Thomas Alva Edison.

But the real history of cinema begins in Paris,

with the Pathe brothers

and their competitors, the Lumiere brothers.

They shot their films in studios by daylight

and for the first time, with electric spotlights too.

Before 1914, cinema was almost always French.

By 1908, there were already 200 cinema theaters in France.

The Gaumont Palace cinema opened

on the Place de Clichy in 1911.

It had room for an entire orchestra,

sound effects and 3,400 spectators.

In 1,912 London's 500 cinemas sold 350 million tickets.

At first people were content to watch

moving images and fairgrounds

but soon they wanted more from their films.

They wanted more lavish sets, better plots and bigger stars.

The 20th century was acquiring its own art form, cinema.

(man laughing)

Ariane Mnouchkine staged her play,

"Les Naufrages du Fol Espoir"

in her Paris studio in the Cartoucherie.

It's set in the time of the cinema pioneers.

The stage metamorphoses into a silent movie set.

(speaking in foreign language)

In the cinema of that time

within 10 or 20 years, they'd invented everything.

The language of the image,

the whole potential of the art of film,

everything that strikes a chord with me.

The boldness, the imagination, the poetry they revealed

by lighting up those little roles of film

by turning the handle.

(speaking in foreign language)

In the cinema, people could see for themselves

things that until then

they'd only known from newspapers and books.

Important events, disasters, distant lands.

Never before had people been able

to have the same experience

at the same time in different places.

This technology changed the way people saw the world.

Cinemas turned people all over the world

into a single community of experience.

(wind gushing) (cinematic music)

I think it comes from my love of the cinema

and probably from affection for my father too.

When I was very small,

I saw the scene from Jean Cocteau's,

"The Eagle With Two Heads", being filmed.

You know the scene where he falls down the staircase.

And I remember how it felt, Cocteau's emotion,

my father's emotion at the camera.

(cinematic music)

I was very small when I saw that.

It created all sorts of feelings.

Danger, beauty.

It was all mixed up for me.

Stars were born.

Sarah Bernhardt, La Divine

when she turned to cinema she was already 60 years old

and had a wooden leg

but audiences worshiped her.

(speaking in foreign language)

This kind of celebrity had only just begun

but all the foundations were already there.

The mass media could spread pictures and stories

by the millions.

Sarah Bernhardt played the media for all it was worth.

She had countless affairs.

Her lovers included the writers,

Gabrielle D'Annunzio and Pierre Loti

as well as the inevitable Edward VII.

The scandals were outrageous and irresistible.

(jazz music)

The big city offered any number

of temptations and possibilities

of erotic discovery and conquest.

(jazz music)

By night, theaters and chorus lines

beckoned on boulevards lit by electric light.

(jazz music)

Cinemas showed the audiences as much nudity as they could.

There were brothels and prostitutes everywhere.

The flood of often completely impoverished women

from the countryside meant an inexhaustible

supply of prostitutes.

Unmarried men were discreetly expected

to soar their wild oats in this milieu.

The threat of infection with syphilis looked everywhere.

The very thought of the hideous progress

of this incurable disease guaranteed

that every man and every woman

was terrified half to death by the slightest symptoms of it.

Panic in the face of an unstoppable descent into madness

and a painful death.

Syphilis was sexually transmitted

and at the time was absolutely fatal.

The first symptoms were ulcers on the skin

and mucous membranes.

After three to five years,

the infection would have spread through the entire body

into the bones and vital organs.

Attempts to cure it with mercury failed.

Misguided open heart surgery

only increased the patients suffering.

Babies could be infected with syphilis even in the womb

coming into the world already diseased.

It was a German doctor, Paul Ehrlich

who finally made a cure possible.

After many lengthy attempts,

he discovered a powerful arsenic compound, Salvarsan.

His discovery gained Ehrlich the Nobel prize

but the Catholic church reacted with open hostility.

It regarded syphilis as God's punishment

for sexual excesses.

Sexual liberations, anarchism,

socialism, communism, lairscism.

Free life.

All that was modernity.

It's quite clear that the church

expressly rejected modernity.

(ominous music)

In Paris, the war between the traditional

and the modern reached a new climax,

the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's ballet,

"The Rite of Spring."

(ominous music)

He had a dream, a vision of a pagan ritual

in which a young girl dances herself to death.

The Russian composer, Stravinsky lived in Paris.

In the Theatre des Champs Elysees

he wanted to risk something quite new.

This kind of music had never been heard before.

The work was choreographed

by the famous ballet star, Vaslav Nijinsky.

(speaking in foreign language)

So Nijinsky was working almost more like a filmmaker,

you know, to give each person a gesture and a part.

It takes a long time to do that.

And I think one of the problems with the work

was how difficult it was to learn.

The complex rhythms, the anti classical movement

and this tremendous detail of gesture.

But it looks onstage

like it's all this sort of cosmic mechanism.

(dramatic music)

The whole pitiless ritual had a primeval power.

Stravinsky had abandoned every traditional structure.

His sounds were revolutionary, purely rhythmic

even the orchestra found them strange.

(audience booing)

There were no conventional themes,

motifs and fragments attacked the audience

with unexpected force.

(dramatic music)

(audience booing)

It was perhaps partly

that certain composers didn't want to be liked.

They took the attitude.

I write this because I must write it.

Because it's right and important for contemporary art now.

(dramatic music)

(indistinct)

It was so pure.

It was like the new dance,

like very like what came out of Central Europe

10 years later,

this expressionistic movement,

the emotion coming from the inside out.

And I think it shocked people

that it was so pure and so extreme.

(indistinct)

Jean Cocteau, who was to work as director

with Ariane Mnouchkine's father

recorded at the time,

the Russian troop taught me that you must burn yourself up

before you can be born again.

(people chattering)

Conservative circles were horrified

by this thruster to modernity.

Pope Pius X even went so far

as to have all priests swear an oath against modernity.

The Pope wrote,

"Modernism is the synthesis

"and the poison of all heresies.

"It attempts to undermine the basis of faith

"and destroy Christianity."

The whole premise of that was that

we're gonna reject this whole modern development

towards equality, towards Republic,

towards democracies, you know.

Pius IX is a high point of that.

And then the anti-modernist, you know,

oath the Pius X wanted his priests to swear.

And this turned out to be,

of course in the long run, catastrophic.

Because he was running so much against the whole,

you might say spirit of the age.

I mean the whole development that we've just been describing

towards greater equality and greater mobility.

And so they were running against that.

(indie music)

The new city temples where the department stores.

Where earlier church and schools

had projected images of noble self sacrifice

into the minds of people,

now, the cinema screens and the facades

of the big department stores

formed projection services

that were altogether more exciting.

This gospel did not ask you to do without.

It's promised you everything and now.

Even around 1900,

people shop themselves into their very own heaven.

(indie music)

The hour of consumerism had struck

and every city appeared gigantic engines of consumption.

Mule and Maryles and Moscow was sending goods

to every last corner of Czarist Empire.

In 1905, Harrods installed the first

24 hour telephone service for orders.

Enrico Caruso's recording of the Aria, Vesti La giubba

from Leoncavallo's opera, I Pagliacci

was the first record to sell over a million copies.

(opera music)

The palatial department store, Dufayel in Paris

was a temple to consumer's dreams.

Here, customers needed to pay only 20% down

with the balance in installments.

By 1900, Dufayel had 3 million customers and 400 branches.

Their installment plan wasn't designed to appeal

to the comfortable middle classes

but to people of modest means.

Even during the 19th century,

being well-dressed was the privilege of the happy few.

Bespoke tailoring is a costly business

but around 1900 all that changed

because tens of thousands of people were measured up

and average sizes were formulated,

clothes were pre-produced and sold off the rack

at a fraction of the price.

This was the age of the statistician

and people became a cipher first and an individual second.

City streets were covered in advertising.

The engine of this development

was mass produced industrial goods.

(upbeat instrumental music)

Consumption changed people's understanding of themselves.

When people came to cities and were working,

they began to form new associations.

You have trade unions or membership of various groups

that were trying to make their way

or depend themselves and so on.

So automatically, they had more complex identities.

They didn't lose their identity over, you know

the dangers became complex, more many sided.

In the modern big city,

a person wasn't really a single entity anymore.

People were fragmented then put together again

in various different ways.

Pablo Picasso captured this phenomenon of fragmentation

in painting, such as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

The painting shows naked prostitutes

posing in a brothel sallow.

Picasso reduced their bodies to geometric lines

and flesh colored surfaces.

A face shown from several perspectives simultaneously

destroyed the unity of time and space

as much as the imaginary unity of the subject.

Out of fragments, a new individual was formed.

This means people were making choices.

You see, when you have a many sided identity

you consider yourself,

well, this is really important for me

and that's less important, right?

So people begin to make choices.

(jazz music)

In the big city, identities became mixed.

A Protestant man from Southern France,

perhaps a socialist,

a fan of a particular football club could marry a woman

who might come from Catholic Brittany.

And what united them was the intoxication of consumption.

Fairs and major exhibitions were held

at the Gaumont Palace.

Constructed for the world exhibition of 1900.

Even at the turn of the century,

the fulfillment of millions of lives

was determined through consumption.

It's better to have than to be.

When you have, you are.

The more you own, the more you are.

Consumerism makes everyone think

he has a chance to make it big.

No one's going to attack capitalism

if he thinks that's what guarantees him the chance

of having things someday,

the chance of being forever.

(jazz music)

The Gaumont Palace,

a jewel in the middle of the capital.

It had up to 40,000 visitors in a single day.

One historian of the time thought...

The nature of the new luxury is banality.

We shouldn't complain so much about this.

They used to be nothing more banal than misery.

Regular hours of work

also brought planned leisure time.

Train connections became better and cheaper.

People wanted to travel, to be entertained,

to forget their ordinary everyday lives.

For decades, the so-called better classes

had spent their summers in the country.

Now, certainly hundreds of thousands of people

could leave the hectic pace of the city behind them

and take a holiday off their own.

The Germans went to the Baltic and North sea

to the Islands Rugen and Helgeland.

The French went to the Mediterranean or the Atlantic.

But the world champion holidaymakers were the British.

Blackpool and Brighton were two of the main destinations.

In 1900 alone, they were visited by 3 million people.

In 1914, by 4 million who came here,

went to the beach and lay there

or took their hard-earned cash to the piers,

where they went to the amusement arcades,

to the music halls or to the fairground attractions.

(indie music)

Blackpool had had electric lighting since 1879

and the lights had been switched on in Brighton

only a few years later.

The tourists came in droves.

By 1914, every 10th Briton

had been to one of the seaside resorts.

A large part of this general affluence

was financed by the colonies.

Their exploitation made Europe rich.

At the turn of the 20th century,

King Leopold II of the Belgians

expanded the little coastal town of Ostend

to a sophisticated bathing resort.

(upbeat music)

With horse racing and columned promenades along the beach.

The statue erected to his memory is missing a hand.

It was cut off by political activists

for the History of Leopold II

is one of Europe's darkest chapters.

The King was responsible for the greatest mass murder

committed up to that point,

with 10 million victims.

The Belgian Congo's past

is one of many open wounds in Belgium's endless troubles.

It cost us an enormous effort to accept

that one of our monarchs was a cruel tyrant in Africa.

This harrowing story began

with a harmless invention.

For his little son's tricycle,

the Irish veterinarian, John Dunlop

had taken a hose and made out of it three inflatable tires.

Inflatable rubber tires really took

bicycles to the masses

but these tires were stained with blood

because the Kauchuk used as a raw material

mainly came from the Congo,

the personal possession of Leopold, King of the Belgians.

Leopold had a virtual monopoly

on the natural rubber that was needed for production.

For a part of the Congo as big as Europe

was his own personal property.

He exploited the land by installing a regime of terror.

Women and children were taken as hostages

to force the men to tap as much natural rubber as possible.

Those not reaching the quota were murdered

or the hands of their wives and children cut off.

It was a regime that insisted

on a very thorough accountability.

The soldiers had to deliver the hands they'd cut off.

Watching the loading and unloading of ships

in Antwerp Harbor,

shipping employee, Edmund Morel became suspicious.

Instead of the trade goods listed on the bills of landing

only arms were being shipped to the Congo.

It was an indication of the systematic violence

occurring there.

To Morrel it was clear that the responsibility

lay with Leopold II.

He quit his job and began

an unparalleled press campaign against the King.

It was the first time in history

that a private individual attacked a ruler publicly.

The reports drove the British government

to send its Consul, Roger Casement to investigate.

What he saw in the Congo determined Casement

to begin his own campaign against the Belgian King.

King Leopold however, carried on murdering,

spending the profits on vastly expensive monstrosities.

The triumphal arch in Jubilee park,

the palace of justice.

Whenever I'm walking

through Brussels or Antwerp

or along the coast or pass the Royal palace,

I say to myself, I can still smell blood.

I smell clotted blood.

To justify himself,

King Leopold claimed that he was missionizing the Congo

but the Baptist missionary, John Harris

already working there saw through the plan

and began sending shocking reports back to Europe

and even more shocking, he sent photographs.

Finally, however, the pressure generated

by Morel and Casement became so intense that he saw himself

obliged to sell off his own colony to the Belgian state.

For the Congo,

Belgium paid about 500 million euros to Leopold.

His direct heirs are still ruling the country.

And after a hundred years,

the topic is still off limits in public.

The King himself retired to his castle at Larkin,

where he liked to peddle through the park on a tricycle

and married a woman he had met as an underage prostitute.

She was known derisively

as the queen of the Congo.

People at the head of the state,

the Kings, the powerful people, the Popes,

they say you have to act morally

but they don't act morally themselves.

You get the impression that morality was constructed

for ordinary people to keep them quiet.

But ordinary people too

were beginning to want more.

The consumer revolution was also a sexual revolution.

Journalist Hans Oswald in Berlin, reported.

"In front of a shop window,

"rows of books inside,

"several of them with a tape over them.

"Interesting.

"Forbidden.

"Confiscated.

"And looking in boys and old men

"and youths and young girls

"staring at this peculiar world with wide big eyes."

Women were still regarded

as second class people.

They had no vote

and in some places couldn't legally own property.

Prostitutes stood on the lowest row of society.

(speaks in foreign language)

In his play, La Ronde,

Arthur Schnitzler perfectly captured

the atmosphere of Viennese society at the time.

The work was automatically condemned as pornography.

In the play, couples from different social backgrounds

sleep with each other,

exchanging partners from one scene to the next.

La Ronde begins with the harlot and the soldier.

(speaking in foreign language)

Morality is of great significance

but at the same time it isn't consistent

because of the double moral standard.

So if anything you can say,

the stricter the morality,

the more frequent the moral lapses

because the law creates the transgression.

There's nothing so attractive as what's forbidden.

(speaking in foreign language)

Under the pressure of these relationships,

the psyche refused to cooperate.

(speaking in foreign language)

Women often responded with hysteria,

a new kind of social illness.

This Steinhof psychiatric hospital in Vienna

was built to a design by Otto Wagner.

60 pavilions, administrative buildings,

a theater and a church

formed a little city within the city

for psychiatric patients.

Professor Charcot in Paris had been using hypnosis

to research the puzzling illness of hysteria in women.

In Vienna, his pupil Sigmund Freud

recognized the connection between hysteria and sexuality.

The unheard message of hysteria

is we are people too,

work just as much as men

and we have our own wish for self fulfillment.

We don't want to be suppressed anymore.

We have our own sexuality too

and we want that acknowledged.

We have our own desires.

(speaking in foreign language)

At the same time, men felt threatened

by women's newer self-confidence.

Neurasthenia attacked especially men,

hysteria could be explained by the fact

that the fairer sex was also the weaker sex.

Now however, it was the men who became the weaker sex.

Neurasthenia was a kind

of exhaustion, depression.

Many patients reported their own sexual anxieties

as the cause of their symptoms.

Masturbation was regarded as a serious vice.

Visiting prostitutes however was socially acceptable

and morally problematic at the same time.

Neurasthenia was an urban phenomenon.

It mostly affected people working in big city offices.

(machine whirring)

Electrotherapy was supposed to help

but the problem was psychological.

Schnitzler, La Ronde is full of people

who repress their problems.

People whose own actions drive them crazy.

(speaking in foreign language) They are as unfree

as electrons circling around an empty center.

(speaking in foreign language)

Unable to control the course of their own lives

they are driven by invisible forces,

never sure whether they're waking or dreaming.

(protestors chanting)

The older generations ways were no longer

a useful guide for young people.

Parallel with the world of adults,

youth culture was becoming a mass phenomenon.

Young men and women were joining newly founded sports clubs.

(soft instrumental music)

Separated by political or religious affiliation.

Jews in Berlin founded that the Maccabi Union

and in Vienna, the Hakoah.

For the first time,

young people were organizing

themselves separately from adults.

In ramblers clubs, like the Wandervogel

they defined their own environment.

The new masses moved in sync.

Mass gymnastics was in fashion.

From this, a new being was supposed to emerge

but this was not only a matter of physical training,

genetic conditions mattered too.

Why not take a hand in creation

when everything else seemed possible?

Why not breed the new human being systematically?

This new science was called Eugenics.

It's first congress was held

at University College in London.

It seemed the entire intellectual establishment

was supporting the event.

The prophet of eugenics was Francis Galton.

As with horses and dogs,

he wanted to use selective breeding

to produce a highly gifted race of people.

Patterns of hair and eye color

helped to determine the ideal combinations.

Criminals and the mentally or physically weak

were to be prevented from breeding.

Even the young Winston Churchill was won over by eugenics.

Named home secretary who suggested off the record

that a hundred thousand British subjects

should be sterilized.

It was even more clear

if you looked at Germany

where it wasn't called eugenics but race hygiene.

Two self-declared barons,

Gwido from Leist and Yokelands from Liebenfels

were the leading theorists of this new religion,

the Germanic church.

They constructed a new mythology

complete with rules and rituals.

They invented the myth of the procreation of fire.

They approached their Lord with a prayer for light.

But there was also an evil counterpart

to the Nobel Nordic area grace.

This negative embodiment,

this dangerous hostile adversary

manifested itself to a high degree in antisemitism.

(bell dings) (speaking in foreign language)

Their ideas were publicized

in Liebenfels journal, Ostara.

(speaking in foreign language)

With Hitler, you find a lot

of pronouncements based on these ideas.

Before the First World War,

they were widespread among the people

who talked about race.

From their self invented heroic past,

they inferred an exclusive claim to the future.

It wasn't enough for them to invent a new ideology.

It had to be seen as a divine mission.

They were as it were

backward looking prophets.

In that they constructed their own past

and argued from that.

But that's also part of modernity.

A progressive step backwards.

Opposite this backward looking modernity

was the radical Avant-garde.

(speaking in foreign language)

The painter Egon Schiele

belonged to a new generation of artists.

He died at only 28

but what he produced in his short life was incomparable.

(speaking in foreign language)

Schiele pushed his exploration

of the human soul to the limit.

The existential nakedness of his figures

precludes any hint of voyeurism.

For Schiele the erotic

is not so much a means

of doing the viewer of favor or awakening his interest,

it's always about existence itself and sexuality.

The erotic is for him a means to an end,

the psychologizing this uncontrollable part

of human existence.

That's what Sheila revealed.

Everything that had been taboo,

everything that happened in secret but was publicly denied

was shown here in full view.

Sex, masturbation, impotence.

All presented starkly by the artist.

Schiele's works tore down the last facades,

destroyed the last hiding places of the human soul.

In music, the great revolution was the 12th turn technique.

Alban Berg wrote four songs,

to picture postcard texts by Peter Altenburg.

Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils abandoned tonality,

a provocation to the way music had been heard until then.

(opera music)

When Schoenberg conducted Berg's songs

in Vienna's music fine,

there was an uproar.

There was probably already

an aggressive undertone in many European countries.

And this had been pent up for years or even decades.

It was probably connected with a kind of melancholy

that the Viennas people had taken for granted

in the 19th century just didn't count anymore.

The violent reactions of the public

became a defining moment of modernity.

Stravinsky, Schiele, Alban Berg, the Avant-garde

had smooth the path into the 20th century.

(audience applauding)

The world in which we're still living

was born before 1,914

because the greatest intellectual, emotional

and scientific advances were made in these years.

Never before had there been so much reason to be optimistic

but never before had there been so many people

who looked into the future with skepticism.

Europe's rulers by the grace of God

insisted on their absolute right to power.

New masses and old countries

were creating a dangerous dynamic

and industry supplied them all

with consumer goods and weapons.

One provocation was enough

to set this monstrous machinery in motion.

When Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited Sarajevo

in June of 1914,

his visit was also an attempt to control

the centrifugal forces of history

but these developments were really too strong

to be mastered

and for the next 30 years Europe would sink

into a maelstrom of violence, nationalism and ideologies

only afterwards could the modernity

that had already begun to assert itself in 1914

be fully expressed.

For the time being however,

nobody was prepared for what would happen next

in the deepest provinces of the Habsburg empire.

(orchestral music)

(gun fires)