World Wars I and II tore the heart out of the 20th century. However, the twenty years between them saw the rise of jazz, prohibition, the talkies, radio, and the motor car. Amid the rapid progress, historians describe the inter-war years as an age of anxiety. This richly detailed series explores the looming reality of the period that the terms of peace merely set the stage for another world war. The First World War claimed a life every twenty-five seconds – for four years. What had been the point of it all? Surely it was that out of all the grief and loss would come a new world order, one in which peace and prosperity would replace inequality, injustice and dynastic swagger. But twenty years after the guns fell silent, they were again about their business – louder and more lethal than ever. Why? Why did the peace that people prayed and paid for last little more than twenty years? Why did tyrants rise to control the fate of continents? Why did a world that had survived a war collapse into an unprecedented depression? Two world wars tore the heart out of the twentieth century. Between these two tragedies was an age that nostalgia views enthusiastically – a time of jazz, prohibition, the talkies, radio and the motor car. A time that was in reality an age of anxiety. Our story, told through archive and the insights of international historians, is of twenty years of peace that produced war. A peace that failed. Impossible Peace. The First World War seemed to end all further hostilities forever. So why was it only followed by a 20-year period of peace? By the end of 1919 – when our story starts – it was all done and dusted. The terms had been hammered out at Versailles, the great and powerful had signed the papers, the echoes of war were fading and the new age, the age of a hard-won peace, was beginning. It would last just twenty years. The twenty years that occupy our series. Twenty years is not a long time. This is the story of what went wrong. The series investigates what was the fatal mistake in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which led to another war just two decades later. It turns out that there is much more to the background than “Hitler's rise”, and the road to World War II actually shows a much more colorful and varied picture. From the Great Depression to the Jazz Age and the rise of Soviet power, from Gandhi to Picasso and Cole Porter, we can learn about the key events and people involved in the outbreak of war.

2_just_like_the_arabian_nights_1922-1925 Part 2 Just Like the Arabian Nights 1922-1925

In effort to keep peace, treaties were proposed to keep the vanquished aggressors of World War 1 under-armed. This might have successfully kept peace, if it was only given a chance. The ratio of military power was drastically in favor of the US and Great Britain and they began to increase their military holdings, but it was at the expense of a humiliated Germany. The peacemakers have gone home. America has rejected its president's peace settlement and withdrawn into its previous isolationist position. Europe wrestles with its debt, inflation destabilizes Germany. The first of the dictators - Benito Mussolini in Italy - rises to power and, in Soviet Russia, Lenin dies to be succeeded by Josef Stalin. This episode focuses on the period from 1922 to 1925, when the entire northern hemisphere seems to be in chaos. Syria is rising up against France, which has occupied part of Germany, which is racked by political murders and hyperinflation that at one point sees the value of the German mark fall from 630,000 to the US dollar to 630 billion to the dollar in just three months.

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