NEW WORLD ORDERS 1930-1944
MAJESTIC 350
349 cc, 1930, France
Collection of Alian Petitjean
The free-spirited character of innovation and experimentation that flourished during the 1920s underwent a sea change in the next decade. Whereas the machine aesthetic of the '20s was realized through a prevailing tendency toward abstraction, based on a reductive, geometric vocabulary and a utopian political agenda, the ethos of machine culture in the 1930s assumed an altogether different scale and demeanor. |
BMW World Land-Speed Record 493 cc, 1937, Germany Courtesy of BMW AG, Munich |
Ushered in by a wave of conservative, even totalitarian, political ideology that overswept Europe, the cultural landscape shifted toward social realism, a state-controlled ideology of popular, classically inspired art and architecture that celebrated national identity through grandiose themes in works on a commensurate scale.
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Ironically, social realism incarnated many of the principles and ideals of the prior decade: a belief in technology's potential to transform society and a desire to communicate through a universal form of visual expression. In Germany, the Weimar Republic's short-lived experiment in parliamentary democracy was buried under the weight of high inflation and unemployment. Demoralized by the loss of World War I, Germany had been further humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles, which exacted a high price from the country in the form of reparations, demobilization of its armed forces, and concessions on territorial claims. Thus, by the time Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Germany was ripe for transformation. |
The irony of
this era is that communism, the archenemy of fascism,
embraced many of its ideals. Steeped in the same
cults of personality and celebrations of national
identity, Stalin launched Soviet Russia into a new
era of bold industrialization that was to be achieved
through a series of harshly ambitious Five Year
Plans. As in Italy and Germany, the ideology of
modernization was propagated through large-scale
planning and classical ideals of physical strength,
continuity, order, and stability. Monuments were an
inevitable outgrowth of these ideologies, and were
constructed with fervor.
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Triumph Speed Twin 498 cc, 1938, United Kingdom The Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum Birmingham, AL |
Indian Sport Scout "Bob-Job" 57 ci, 1940, United States Collection of David Edwards |
The legacy of
these ideological dictatorships is now a matter of
history. Having placed their own houses in order, or
in some cases due to an inability to do so, they set
out to change the rest of the world, each seeking to
establish a new paradigm based on its own political
philosophy. Technologies developed for social
transformation became weapons of destruction. Indian,
Zuendapp and Harley-Davidson were amongst the many
motorcycle manufacturers that saw service during the
war; and many more, particularly British
manufacturers, fell victim to the postwar financial
crisis in Europe, with its reverberations reaching
into the 1950s.
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