Overview
The "End of History" theory of 1920 treated the postwar world as ontologically changed. The war had not merely ended one era and begun another; it had exhausted history itself. People still moved, worked, traded, legislated, and loved, but all within a kind of moral and temporal afterlife.
Historical basis
The First World War profoundly altered political, religious, and cultural life. Historians and literary scholars have repeatedly described the postwar world in terms of disenchantment, exhaustion, fragmentation, and the emergence of modernist disillusionment. The “Lost Generation” became one shorthand for this condition.
The purgatory form of the theory takes these broad reactions and literalizes them. Instead of saying the world felt deadened, it says the world had already ended and what followed was a suspended moral residue.
Core claim
In its strongest version, time stopped in 1920. Human beings remained animate, but genuine history had ceased. War had stripped the world of providential direction, and what remained was punishment, waiting, purification, or repetition. The language of purgatory gave a religious name to a secularized atmosphere of suspension.
Why the theory emerged
This theory became thinkable because older narratives of progress, empire, honor, and divine order had been badly damaged by the war. The resulting sense of living “after” history rather than “in” it appears in multiple cultural registers—literary, philosophical, and spiritual.
Evidence and assessment
The historical record strongly supports postwar disenchantment, the rise of modernist fragmentation, and widespread language of rupture after World War I. It also supports that purgatory and afterlife imagery remained available ways of understanding catastrophe. What it does not support is a coherent organized doctrine that literal historical time stopped in 1920. The theory is best understood as a metaphysical radicalization of a widely documented postwar mood.
Legacy
The theory remains historically important because it captures the extremity of interwar disillusionment. It is one of the clearest cases in which the psychological aftermath of war was converted into a theory about the structure of time itself.