Social and Cultural Change

An influential view of the social effects of the Second World War argued by Arthur Marwick (1936–2006),29 is that total war had far-reaching effects, which went beyond the obvious negative effects of destruction, deaths and dislocation. They also tested the institutions of societies, and, due to the need to mobilise the entire economy and society for the war effort, led to "progressive" social changes. The impact of war upon societies has since become a major field of study and much work has concentrated upon the social and cultural as well as the political and economic impact of the Second World War. Central to this thesis is the argument that the war had a socially levelling impact and that significant indicators were a narrowing of the gap between rich and poor in terms of incomes and wealth due to income tax, death duties and an increase in state welfare; it did not erode class differences, but improved the position of the working classes. Marwick highlighted the growth of the British welfare state  and increased state welfare throughout Western Europe, the increase in working-class wages, and the concern of governments to maintain high levels of employment. Though this thesis has been much criticised, largely by left-wing historians who feel that post-war societies were insufficiently changed,30 it is clear that conservative and Christian Democratic parties in the post-war period largely accepted state welfare measures and the responsibility of governments for wages and employment to a far greater degree than before the war.

Marwick also argued that both world wars had seen more women employed in a wider range of occupations and that, after 1945, women were to enjoy greater opportunities and a more equal position in society.  Certainly, for many women the war was a liberating experience. They served in the armed forces and worked in government offices, in fields and factories, and in Hitler's bunker and Churchill's underground Cabinet War Rooms; Hitler's pilot, Hanna Reitsch (1912–1979)  flew the last plane in and out of Berlin, when Soviet troops were already in the German capital. Just as women received the vote in Britain and Germany after the First World War, so in France and Italy they gained it, along with general declarations of equal citizenship in 1945 and 1946 respectively. Whether the war experience resulted in a transformation of the position of women in post-war society and whether many women wanted such a change have been doubted by some historians. François Bedarida (1926–2001)  has for instance argued that, even in the French Resistance, "women were for most of the time confined within their traditional roles".31 The structure of economic life and the types of employment it provided meant that any major changes in women's position had to await the de-industrialisation that began in the 1960s, while, even then, many women had different priorities to those of men. Probably, again as with most social developments, it is more realistic to see the war as, at best, giving a push, and perhaps only a brief one, to change.

The major alterations to European society and culture did not emerge until the 1950s and are often seen as a process of "Americanisation", although it may well be that American society was simply the first to display the changes that are often gathered together in the unsatisfactory term, "modernisation". American popular culture had, of course, been influential in pre-war Europe. Even someone as anti-American as Hitler enjoyed watching Hollywood musicals, ironically, often made by American-Jewish film moguls. American films provided a glimpse of an individualistic consumer society and a lifestyle to which many came to aspire. The impact of American films was naturally, given the common language, more evident in Britain, and J.B. Priestley (1894–1984)  in his English Journey remarked on the "New England": "America I supposed was its real birthplace. This is the England of arterial and by-pass roads ... of giant cinemas and dance halls and cafes ... factory girls looking like actresses".32 Depictions of depression and unemployment as the salient characteristics of the Thirties too often obscure the fact that pockets of this world were to be found in continental Europe as well as England. Its advance was to be interrupted by the Second World War but was resumed in the 1950s in Britain after Labour's "New Jerusalem" had lost its popular support.

The war itself saw, with thousands of US troops crossing the Atlantic, a new wave of American influence, first in Britain and then in areas of Europe occupied by American forces. Jazz, the bandleader Glenn Miller (1904–1944) , US radio stations and GI brides  were ubiquitous manifestations of America and the increased popularity of cinema was a major channel of influence. During the war cinema had become ever more popular. Warring states used it as a major means of propaganda, though overtly propagandist films were less well-received than those, like the, just pre-war, Russian Alexander Nevsky and the British Henry V which brought past victories to the aid of the present. Nothing better illustrates the importance attached to film than that in 1944, as Allied armies approached Germany, the Wehrmacht provided several thousand troops as extras for the filming of Kolberg, a film depicting the resistance of a besieged German city on the Baltic following Prussia's defeat at the battle of Jena and Auerstedt in 1806. Such historic allegories were acceptable, but what audiences in all the combatant countries wanted was entertainment and, after the war came the period in which cinema dominated popular entertainment.

In the immediate post-war period, there was, understandably little demand for films that dealt with the war or with the problems of its aftermath. Neither the German Trümmer (rubble) films or those of the Italian neo-realists attracted mass audiences, though they were applauded by intellectuals throughout Europe who attended art-house cinemas. As James Chapman (born 1968)  has pointed out, the British film, The Wicked Lady (dir. Leslie Arliss, 1945), a costume melodrama, exemplified the sort of film people wanted to see and was popular in both East and West Germany.33 The British film industry, had, like those of continental Europe, to be subsidised and have government imposed quotas to protect it against the overwhelming appeal of the products of Hollywood. With Hollywood came the "American Dream" and it inspired modified versions in Europe. There were interesting reactions with both French and British cinemas presenting films that presented quintessentially native views of social life with the British Ealing Comedies championing the individual against state interference and Americanisation, but, for the most part, Hollywood produced the box-office hits. The French cinema achieved an interesting reversal of the usual trans-Atlantic cinematic traffic when the New Wave directors of the 1950s found hitherto unacknowledged merits in Hollywood directors like Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) , whom they hailed as formative auteurs.34

Hollywood can be seen as part of the cultural arm of the Marshall Plan and its message complemented the Plan's aim of raising the European standard of living and attaining economic stability by 1952. Fiercely opposed by intellectuals of the left and right, by the Marxist Frankfurt School  and by T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) , on both political and cultural grounds, much of Western Europe was indeed transformed in the 1950s into an increasingly prosperous society, which, consumed cultural products as avidly as motor cars and washing machines.35 European societies, it has been argued, became part of an "irresistible empire" in which American consumerism and popular culture were triumphant at the expense of native national cultures. Tourism accelerated the process as, perversely, local cultures adapted their needs, thus destroying what visitors had come to see. Vast tracts of rural Europe may have been untouched, but Priestley's New England became reality throughout Europe. In this sense the war was a long punctuation mark. It had changed frontiers and divided Europe along political and ideological lines, but social, economic and cultural changes move to a different timetable, though war and peace may accelerate or delay their development.

Salient characteristics of post-war European society were already evident in 1939 and even in 1914. That even half of Germany was the strongest European economic power by the 1960s would have surprised few who had known Imperial Germany with its large privately-owned industries and the great department stores of Berlin, nor its combination of prosperous capitalism with an advanced system of social security have astonished those who had benefited from the pre-1914 state insurance system. It seems apposite that the implosion of the Soviet Bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s is often seen as a "shopping revolution" in that, as windows were opened by the media, the attractions of Western Europe's consumer society became evident.