The twentieth century witnessed the slaughter of millions of European soldiers and civilians, but it began with stability and progress: what Stefan Zweig called "the world of security." Standards of living were improving. A handful of European "great powers" dominated the world, regarding war as an accepted means of foreign policy, not an unimaginable catastrophe. Zweig observed, "paradoxically, in the same era when our world fell back morally a thousand years, I have seen that same mankind lift itself, in technical and intellectual matters, to unheard-of deeds, surpassing the achievements of a million years with a single beat of its wings....Not until our time has mankind as a whole behaved so infernally, and never before has it accomplished so much that is godlike." The more exuberant visions of the future now appear tragically naive, but we are still feeling the effects of revolutions in fields from culture to psychology to technology. Keywords:history culture politics