Laughing into 1939 --Monochrome art nudes featuring model Dionysus.

New Year's Eve, 1938, was the last real party night of the Ancienne Regime in Europe and America. Silk dresses, diamonds, and fur provided a gilded backdrop to a river of champagne that ran through Paris, London, and New York as the promise of the New Year shone. The Great Depression had started to fade, and good times were returning. Worries about war earlier in the year had marred the summer when Hitler's Germany forcibly annexed an ethnically German part of Czechoslovakia, but Hitler had promised that he had no further ambitions and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberain proclaimed that an agreement allowing Germany to keep the disputed territory gave Europe "peace in our time." The Polish newspaper Kurier Warszawski reported a lavish array of New Year's balls throughout the city with President Ignacy Moscicki hosting a black-tie night of Jazz at the Belvedere Palace as the ice-cold vodka flowed and festive fireworks engulfed the city.

• In New York, thousands joyously packed Times Square to witness the 32nd time the famous ball would drop to mark the New Year, while a decidedly less proletarian crowd danced in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in their bejeweled and refined precision. Harlem's famed Cotton Club served a celebratory dinner that year of striped bass with butter sauce, jellied turkey leg, and all the trimmings until 9:30, when the music and show began.
• In London, people gathered for joyous celebrations in Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square while they enjoyed a rare Christmas snowfall. Others huddled around their home radios listening to a special "countdown" program of music from Grosvenor House as the BBC extended its broadcast hours to midnight for the first time. The mood was full of anxiety in London, and Winston Churchill only weeks before had warned Britons that the lights were slowly going out across Europe, with darkness settling in.
• Adolf Hitler hosted the cream of German society at his home in Berchesgarden; a photograph shows Hitler wearing an overly large tuxedo and tails, as if the suit was borrowed, and a photo taken of the group that night showed generally frumpy coterie of supporters surrounding him with dour expressions. After celebratory fireworks, Hitler performed a traditional "Bleigiessen" ceremony of dropping a piece of molten lead into water to devine the future. Hitler's 1938 celebration had a sinister undertone, however, because the event was also replete with a legion of smart black Nazi military uniforms; and few needed a piece of lead to predict Germany's future after the Nazi Party's November "Kristalnacht" (the night of broken glass) in which Jews were attacked countrywide in Germany.

Celebrated American burlesque star Josephine Baker spent New Year's Eve that year at her home in France, the Chateau Des Milandes in the Dordogne Valley 300 miles south of Paris, where a century earlier the Sun King Louis XIV had spent a night. Weeks earlier, she and her children had decorated their Christmas tree at the Chateau while her beloved garden slept through the winter. Little did she know that within months she would be recruited by French Intelligence to spy on the German military, and a year later her Chateau would become a resistance base of operations after the German Blitzkrieg attack on France in 1940. With the German panzers came a new level of danger and personal fear for Baker, as she repeatedly put her life at risk collecting intelligence against the Germans.

• Baker used her "star" status to socialize with senior Nazis and easily pass through border controls with intelligence reports written in invisible ink on her band's music sheets and important photographs destined to be passed to London sewn into her dresses and underwear. She was almost killed after being discovered by Berlin when poisoned at a dinner hosted by German Air Force Chief Hermann Goring, held in her own Paris townhouse that had been confiscated by the Nazis, but escaped through the laundry shute to get medical attention. "The people of France have given me my life," she once declared, "and I would gladly give my life to protect them."

The New Year was cruel to the millions of hopes and dreams of those new year celebrations, as the waves of war gathered to wash them away. By July, Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union had concluded negotiations on a pact that divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence; on September 1 the two attacked and dismembered Poland amid widespread killing and looting. A war that would engulf the world, upend the existing social order, kill millions, and usher in decades of a divided Europe had begun.

• The French, British, and German publics watched their slow drift towards war with dread; World War I, after all, had sacrificed an entire generation to the alter of dying dynasties. In the sum­mer of 1939, Parisians danced at extrav­a­gant balls (one fea­tur­ing ele­phants) and par­tied at art open­ings and more inti­mate soirees; it seemed, accord­ing to The New York­er’s Janet Flan­ner, that it had ​“tak­en the threat of war to make the French loosen up and have a real­ly swell civ­i­lized good time.”

Few of us thought about those New Year's Eve celebrations 87 years ago as we celebrated the coming new year in 2025, but perhaps we should have. The international security architecture set up after World War II that has kept Americans safe with institutions like the United Nations, the North Atlantic Alliance, Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and arms control treaties among major powers are all now being dismantled or cast into irrelevancy with nothing to replace them. US disengagement from our European allies--indeed, our active attempts to sour bilateral relations with them--have created an ambiguous international security environment in which the largest and most capable military force standing between Moscow and Portugal is the Ukrainian military. As the world has repeatedly discovered, ambiguity is the breeding ground of general war.

• An aggressive Russia is working covertly to weaken and divide Europe as well, with repeated military threats against Europe, provocations along its border with Western countries, the deployment of sabotage teams to disrupt the 2024 Paris Olympics, the disbursal of package bombs intended to bring down Western commercial cargo aircraft, and actions like the attempted 2024 assassination of the CEO of a major German arms firm. A victory in the Ukraine war that whets the Russian public's taste for conquest is all Moscow needs to justify further adventures in Europe.
• Moscow, meanwhile, is also spending billions of dollars each year to influence public opinion in Western Europe to deepen the fissures between America and Europe; American right-wing social media influencers just last year were caught accepting large covert payments from Russian intelligence.

We hope the pictorial below helps you to reflect on how quickly the lives of those who celebrated in 1938 changed, what they suffered, and what they lost forever. We hope that also help you reflect on what you might stand to lose as well.

Laughing into 1939, indeed.

Special thanks to Model Dionysus, a Pennsylvania-based art and figure model with an extraordinary talent for storytelling with her imaginative and subtle poses. Dionysus is an accomplished regional model based in the Philadelphia area and performance artist, as well as an IT specialist.

All photos and text by Archangel Images, Lancaster Pennsylvania. All rights reserved.