BETWEEN 2 WARS: ZEITGEIST is now LIVE!! (Patreon)

Goodday TimeGhost Army!

And what an exciting day it is!
It's finally time to launch the second season of Between 2 Wars, the Zeitgeist edition - and we couldn't be happier about sharing this new content with you!

I'll leave the word to Spartacus, and let him introduce it to you properly:


Season 1 of BETWEEN 2 WARS focused on events that contributed to the outbreak of WW2. We were preparing the WW2 series when we started working on it, and we knew that the reason for the war breaking out would be an issue we needed to handle somehow. As so many other issues in human history, it doesn’t have a simple straight forward answer. By the time we arrived at the Season Finale two things were clear to us:

1. Our approach of focusing on an exhaustive chronology of events and facts, rather than analysis and opinion had provided an answer to the question - as best as there can be one - so that the Season Finale came together naturally and organically as a summary of what we had covered.

2. On the way we had by force not covered many, many things that perhaps have deeper impact on our lives in 2020 than the geopolitical events of those two decades still have. The movement of society, that in discrete and diverse ways forged much of the times we live in now, in short the Zeitgeist of the time in relation to our time.

Now, you can choose any arbitrary two decades in human history and they will have had deep and lasting impact on humanity, that’s simply an aspect of the creativity and destructivity that is nature to our species.
However, there are times that are on the brink of great change, for better or for worse. The interwar years very much belong to that category - perhaps it is at the very top of that category. It is not only the twenty years between the geographically vastest wars in human history, it is also the time when hundreds of years of ideation came together in a clash of ideologies that surpassed the most revolutionary times hitherto.
When historians and philosophers attempt to classify this shift we argue about exactly when it happened, what to call it, when it reached global proportions, and what the most important aspects of change were - but we all agree that it happened.

Technologically it was the end of the industrial revolution and the beginning of the Atomic Age. This shift of the technological and scientific direction of the world is very similar to the reasons for the outbreak of WW2: it is the synthesis of many, many, many things that happened and are born witness in science, technology, art, literature, social structures, entertainment, and politics. The outbreak of war in 1939 is part of that development, even an instrumental path towards the Atomic Age, as witnessed by the cataclysms over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Therefore it is this path that we will follow in the second season of the chronology of BETWEEN 2 WARS. It begins with the aftermath of The Great War and the hope for a brave new world that new technology, new media, new art and new ideas present to a world in need of healing. Hope and forward motion that creates an explosion of creativity and development, but doesn’t bring immediate universal progress, and instead often brings hardship, loss and strife. All of that is visible in the Zeitgeist of the 1920s and 1930s.

Our final act begins in the autumn of 1938, when on December 17, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann realize nuclear fission. During the next months the experiment is repeated and theoretically understood, so that on 11 October 1939, a group of physicists headed by Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein propose to US President FDR the creation of an Atomic Bomb to preempt the German Nazis making one first. Thus, at the end of Season 2 the Atomic Age has officially begun, as a direct response to the six weeks old Second World War.

Thank you all for making this - and all our other work - possible.

We hope you enjoy the ride!
Spartacus