History has speeded up so giddily since 1900 that decades now seem like self-contained eras, abbreviated and accelerated centuries. Though ours, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm claimed, is a "short century", it has reeled through enough changes for an entire millennium, and this hurtling tempo was established in a decade devoted to mobility and the frenetic pursuit of modern excitements - the 1920s.
Centuries neither start nor stop punctually, and modernity had a delayed birth. Virginia Woolf whimsically declared that human character changed "in or about December 1910"; Hobsbawn more plausibly argued that the 20th century began with the outbreak of war in 1914. (In his view it ended in 1989, when the collapse of Communism gave the dialectic a rest for a while.) No matter when you start counting, it's undeniable that by 1920 the world knew itself to be a different place, populated by a revved-up, renovated species known as "new human beings" - flappers and fliers, saxophonists and soda jerks, inventors of new dances and imbibers of cocktails: personifications of a decade which F. Scott Fitzgerald called the "most expensive orgy in history".
Fitzgerald thought that the 1920s officially began six months early, when the New York police charged a band of radical demonstrators in Union Square on May Day in 1919 and set off a drunken rampage. The end also came prematurely, with the stock-market crash of October 1929. Midway between those dates, Fitzgerald published the novel which summarises the mood of the time, The Great Gatsby. Its hero makes his money from bootlegging, yet despite this quaintly out-of-date occupation, he remains a contemporary figure.
To commemorate the millennium, the Metropolitan Opera in New York has commissioned a new work from the composer John Harbison, which will be performed during December and January. The subject, almost inevitably, is The Great Gatsby.
The spendthrift ways of Fitzgerald's hero proclaimed the new economic motives of people living in a modernised world. Gatsby the extravagant consumer owns more shirts than he will ever wear, and lavishes funds on the purchase of a factitious dream. In the 1920s, you had to be a millionaire to behave like this. Nowadays we are all inglorious Gatsbys, our appetites titillated by an economy which goads us to buy multiple pairs of trainers or to upgrade our cars and computers every year, energetically pursuing a happiness which forever eludes us. Money, in our affluent society, makes visionaries of us all; shopping is an exercise in what the psychiatrists call "wish-fulfilment fantasy".
Here, ushered in by Gatsby, is one of our century's most jolting novelties. Our ancestors made do with scarcity, or were grateful for sufficiency. We take excess for granted, and the volatility of our desires creates that chronic over-excitement which first began to unsettle the world during the 1920s.
In Germany, this was the period of hyper-inflation. A dollar was worth four marks in 1914 and 75 in 1919; by October 1923 it was worth 440 million marks, and a month later fetched four trillion. Cups of coffee in the Weimar Republic had a tendency to treble in price while you were drinking them. What more urgent incitement could there be to "enjoy the moment", which was the motto of the decade?
Life had been dynamised. Only weaklings, who lacked the stamina to be modern, needed to rest. In 1927 the Bauhaus designer Marcel Breuer installed climbing rungs, a punching bag and a basket-ball hoop in the bedroom of a Berlin apartment he designed for the theatre director Erwin Piscator. The cult of sport, a defining characteristic of 20th-century life, began during this decade. The journalist Marieluise Fleisser, a colleague of Brecht's, analysed this "athletic spirit" in 1929 and welcomed it as a respite from Europe's chronic world-weariness.
The athlete took on superhuman powers, as if energised by "the flash of lighting attracted by a god". Fleisser might have been describing the female automaton in Fritz Lang's film Metropolis, made three years before she wrote her essay. "To push oneself towards the flash," she concluded, "is the passion that makes up the driving nerve of the modern human type." She sounds, long in advance, like an aerobics instructor in the 1990s, urging her sweaty followers to go for the burn.
After the euphemistic concealments of the 19th century, the body bared itself. Hair styles are an infallible guide to the Zeitgeist, and during the 1920s the way to modernise yourself - if you were a woman - was to get a bob, which exposed your neck and shoulders and curled up around the ears. Fitzgerald describes the ritual in a story published in 1920, which follows a timid provincial girl called Berenice as she goes to a men's barbershop to have her maidenly cocoon of curls and tresses shorn off. The androgynous outcome announces that she is briskly up-to-date and sexually available. The bobbed hair of the actress Louise Brooks, who in 1928 played the fatally alluring Lulu in G.W. Pabst's film Pandora's Box, made her an icon of the decade.
Fashion operates cyclically, since there is a limited number of things you can do with a human body, so it's no wonder that in the 1960s, when Vidal Sassoon wanted to modernise hair all over again, he revived the bob, citing as his inspiration the sleek and simplified ethic of Breur and his Bauhaus colleagues.
The athletic spirit examined by Marieluise Fleisser overtook bodies whose business was to remain inanimate. The Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, held in Paris in 1925, lent its nickname to the style known as Art Deco, recognisable by its sleek streamlining. Obstructive edges and corners were smoothed away to make objects look speedier, more aeronautical - even if the objects in question were chairs and tables, which ought to have their feet firmly planted on the ground. One trinket symbolises the style: a cocktail shaker in the form of a Zeppelin, complete with metal fins to help it navigate the gusts when it reached the upper air. It's an absurd toy, yet the decorative metaphor makes sense. Cocktail shakers are no strangers to turbulence, since the mixing is done by violently jolting the container in the air; and cocktails themselves, if they are strong enough, ought to supply you with the sensation of take-off.
People began to see the world from the air during the 1920s, and noticed how different it was. Ernest Hemingway, on his first flight from an aerodrome outside in Paris in 1922, looked down as the fields arranged themselves into regularity and commented that he now understood the truth of Cubism, that dislocatingly modern mode of vision. Scott Fitzgerald's characters enjoy similar revelations without leaving Manhattan, thanks to the hydraulic technology built into the city's skyscrapers. Two drunks in a Fitzgerald story lurch into the Biltmore Hotel and are sped skyward by the lift. When they arrive at the top floor, they order the operator to have another storey added on. "Higher," yells one of them. "Heaven," insists the other.
A modern body, like the alcoholic dirigible described above, became a machine whose well-greased gears propelled the driver towards pleasure. Hence the dances which, during the 1920s, replaced the sedate, circling waltz - the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Lindy Hop, or the "danse sauvage" performed by Josephine Baker in the Revue negre, which scandalised Paris and Berlin in 1925.
Wearing sprigs of feathers or a belt of bananas, Baker coupled onstage with a male colleague, also in tribal undress, while jungle drums thundered. Her gyrations established a self-evident physiological truth, hitherto overlooked. As she succinctly put it, "The rear end exists." Where would the manufacturers of jeans be if she had not eroticised that prudishly neglected zone?
Baker's flagrancy cast off the Christian inflictions of shame and guilt. In 1928 the Surrealist Andre Breton published Nadja, his memoir of an affair with a demented girl of the streets. His erotic confession entitled him to announce that he lived in "a house of glass, where at night I sleep on a glass bed surrounded by glass curtains". He may not have meant it literally, but architects resolved to build just such a place. Between 1928 and 1932 Pierre Chareau constructed the Maison de Verre in Paris - a candid cubicle for modern people who had nothing to hide.
Though Baker came from industrialised America, her European fans welcomed her as a primitive creature whose "rhythmic orgies" (as the critic Andre Levinson called them) revived the delirious religions of our superstitious past. Levinson acclaimed this savagery as a rejuvenating force, and in doing so he established another of our century's grand and conflict-ridden narratives: the confrontation of tired Europe with ferociously juvenile America, the country which had patented modernity. The popularity of jazz bands and troupes of dancers like the one to which Baker belonged instigated a cultural war between old and new, high and low, which is still being fought.
In Ernest Krenek's opera, Jonny Spielt Auf, first performed in 1927, a cheeky black jazz musician steals the violin belonging to a lofty European virtuoso and uses the instrument to bewitch the world; at the end he leads a galloping exodus to America. For the Nazis, Krenek's Jonny with his "Nigger music" stood for everything they found obnoxious about this modernised, Americanised world, and they vowed to exterminate him. Their protest was unavailing. In 1928 Emmerich Kalman's operetta Die Herzogin von Chicago happily admitted European defeat: a brash and jaunty billionairess from the midwest buys herself a bankrupt European kingdom, whose citizens spend all their time dancing the Charleston.
It was during the 1920s that America, the home of newness and of perpetual self-renovation, staked its exclusive claim to the 20th century. The unseen continent, which could no longer be snobbishly patronised, entranced the European imagination. In 1922 the poet Blaise Cendrars disparaged the neurotic gloom of Robert Wiene's film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and yearned for a breezier, more optimistic realm: "Hurrah for the cowboys!" he cried. In 1926 Herman Hesse wrote a poem lamenting the social exclusion of the European intellectual, and dreamed of a transatlantic reincarnation for himself, strumming a banjo or blowing a saxophone in a Harlem speakeasy.
New York was the future. The fantastical architecture of Fritz Lang's Me- tropolis, built in a Potsdam studio in 1926, was a recreation of the Manhattan skyline at night, which the director had seen from a ship docked at a West Side pier a few years earlier. The architect Le Corbusier arrived in New York in 1931, just after the new decade had begun, but confirmed the yearning hopes of countless Europeans. The skyscrapers, he reported, were white cathedrals, unblemished by history. As for the people - who swaggered down the avenues or moved with a syncopated strut, chewing gum as they went or flashing their formidable teeth - Le Corbusier said breathlessly "They are gods".
On closer inspection, the cliche turns out to be warranted. The 1920s did a good deal of roaring. They represented in the first half of the century what the 1960s have come to do for those of us born after 1945. You need to change the soundtrack, substituting jazz for rock or Ravi Shankar, and of course the bath-tub gin has to be replaced by the sweet reek of marijuana, but the plot is the same. The rallying cry in both cases was liberation, a call to free the body from inhibitions. Yet these were periods of riot, not of revolution. In both cases, the rebels left the world with a wrecked, remorseful hang-over.
Still, whatever our belated misgivings, the orgy was fun while it lasted.
Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the Twentieth Century by Peter Conrad is published in paperback by Thames and Hudson (£12.95 in UK)
