The point for the moment is that if there were rumblings of revolution throughout Germany in the early years of the 20th century, both political and artistic, those rumblings would crescendo into a tumultuous roar when WWI made life in Germany much, much worse. When Germany was defeated and thrown into economic, political and social chaos, those artists and writers knew precisely where to lay the blame. Bourgeois values, cold logic and unattainable beauty were tossed out the window; their art would be as raw, violent and dark as the world they lived in, driven by furious emotion toward a set of aesthetic characteristics that would later roughly define what we talk about when we talk about "Expressionism."