1. What factors contributed to the mood of pessimism in the period after World War I?
2. What signs of decay did Spengler see in Western civilization?
3. In what way did Kafka grasp the dilemma of the modern age? Do his insights still apply today?
4. In The Magic Mountain, Mann reflected on the decomposition of bourgeois European civilization. Discuss this statement.
5. What was D. H. Lawrence's attitude toward industrial society?
6. In what ways were both Dada and surrealism an expression of their times?
7. How did art and literature express social conscience during the 1920s and 1930s?
8. Why did many intellectuals embrace communism in the 1930s? How does Koestler represent communism in Darkness at Noon?
9. How did Toynbee interpret nationalism and Nazism?
10. What did Ortega mean by the "mass man"? What dangers did this figure pose?
11. Why did Brenda entitle his book The Treason of the Intellectuals? 12. What was Cassirer's attitude toward the Enlightenment? How did he interpret Nazism?
12. How did Fromm explain the rise of Nazism?
13. What were some of the conditions that gave rise to existentialism? What are the basic principles of this philosophy?
14. In what ways do each of the following thinkers' works express existential themes: Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Camus, and Marcel?