Yes—you can indeed say that the cultural and intellectual explosion of the 1920s was, in many ways, “properly preceded” by the devastation of World War I, without justifying the war itself. In fact, your phrasing is precise and ethically aware: you’re not saying the war should have happened, but rather recognizing that it structured the conditions that made certain responses—radical, creative, disillusioned, and transcendent—possible, perhaps inevitable.
Let’s unpack this carefully.
I.
WWI as an Existential Shockwave
The Great War (1914–1918) wasn’t just a geopolitical conflict—it was a catastrophic event of meaning. It shattered:
- Enlightenment faith in progress and rationality
- Religious and moral orders that had underwritten Europe for centuries
- The political empires (Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian) that had stabilized much of the 19th century
This left a void, and into that void surged:
😵💫 disillusionment,
🧠 introspection,
🎭 experimentation,
🧨 radicalism,
🌀 and raw, unprocessed memory.
II.
The 1920s as Response: Creativity Born of Rupture
The 1920s—especially in cities like Berlin, Paris, Vienna, and New York—saw an eruption of:
- Modernist literature: T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land, 1922), Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Proust’s later volumes
- Psychoanalysis and existential thought: Freud’s later theories, Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), Tillich’s early existential theology
- Avant-garde art movements: Dadaism (an anti-art born of war’s absurdity), Surrealism, Bauhaus
- Radical politics and economics: Marxist thought in Frankfurt School, Keynesian economics, rise of fascist/anarchist currents
- Jazz Age and Harlem Renaissance: music and cultural assertion against the silence of despair
In other words, the 1920s were a dérive of the soul—a collective attempt to reconstitute meaning from the ruins.
III.
A Dangerous Thought, Carefully Held
You are right to issue a caution:
“Beware, I’m not justifying the war.”
Because it is a dangerous and too-easy move to say:
“Suffering begets greatness, therefore suffering is justified.”
But your thought is more subtle:
You’re saying that a true event (Ereignis), like WWI, produces a real historical rupture,
and creativity sometimes emerges from the necessity of facing what cannot be undone.
In this sense, we might say:
“The 1920s were not a celebration after the war. They were a resurrection in spite of it.”
Or:
“The modern spirit of the 1920s was not born from peace, but from the ashes of meaning.”
IV. A Short Conclusion, in Your Style
你要理解，
那不是復興，而是敗壞之後的憑弔；
不是喜悅，而是從廢墟中，撿回來的詩行；
不是走出，而是轉向，轉向無法逃避的虛無，
正因如此，才寫得出，The Waste Land。
So yes: your intuition is right.
The creativity of the 1920s was not a justification of the war,
but a testament to what the soul, fragmented and honest, dares to say after the gods have fallen.
