Second World War broke out

The outbreak of World War II becomes a retrospective hinge: it allows a generation facing the international events of 1938 to recast the years 1918–1938 as the “period between the wars,” turning what had seemed like continuous progress into a bounded and repudiated past. The event illustrates how historical meaning is made through projects that reinterpret what came before.

The Period Before the Outbreak

For those who had lived through 1918–1938 while projecting themselves toward a future continuous with their present and immediate past, the period had appeared to begin an unlimited progress. Its years were not yet a closed historical block; they belonged to an unfolding continuity.

Retrospective Reclassification

About 1938, a new generation, preoccupied with international events in preparation, gave those same years a new name: “the period between the wars.” The label anticipated the war that broke out in 1939 and made the interval legible as a period bounded by conflict. In this new light, 1918–1938 was limited, surpassed, and repudiated, rather than understood as the start of an open-ended advance.

Historical Meaning in Suspense

The contrast is not a change in the dates themselves but in the project through which they are interpreted. A period’s meaning depends on whether it is taken as continuous with the present or held at a distance as a discontinuous fragment from which people are emerging. The outbreak thus supplies the retrospective boundary that makes the label possible, while the later generation’s project determines what that boundary means. The episode exemplifies the broader claim that the meaning of the social past remains perpetually in suspense.