Here I come, to my sixth AtoZ Theme Reveal. 

I can’t even believe it!

I’ve taken part – and survived – five challenges already. It’s a tradition that basically started with this blog. 

As usual, I don’t feel prepared for the AtoZ Challenge in the least. As usual, I will still attempt it. I mean, what kind of April would it be without the challenge?

What is the AtoZ Blogging Challenge

In 2010, Arlee Bird set forth a challenge to all bloggers for the month of April to blog every day but Sundays. 

Since most of the time, taking Sundays away from April will leave 26 days, which matches the number of the letters of the alphabet, Arlee also challenged his fellow bloggers to follow the alphabet. On 1st April they would blog about something starting with A. On 2nd April they would blog about something starting with B. And so on.

That first year, some 100 bloggers took part. But the idea proved to be successful. The number of participants grew every year, with a pick of some 1700 in 2012. 

Why most of us choose a theme

Through the first years chance reigned. Everyone bloged about whatever they wanted every single day. But after a few years, the organisers introduced the idea of a theme. Not only bloggers would blog about a different letter on every specific day, but every post would also be related to the same theme. 

This may seem to add a level of difficulty to the challenge, and in a way, it does. When we choose a theme, we are forsaking the opportunity to blog about anything that comes into our mind. Yet themes have proved to be very popular. It’s the sixth year I’m taking part, and I’ve seldom seen a blogger without a theme. 

After all, Arlee set the challenge forth as a way to become better bloggers. Blogging every day for a long period (it isn’t just a few days, it is a month) will force us to devise a plan. We can’t suspend our life for an entire month. We can’t postpone all other commitments as we might do if the challenge only lasted a week. Our blogging needs to find its place and organizasion inside our normal life. We’ll have to find a way to decide what to write in every single post, how to set the time for writing, preparing and posting it, and then find a way to set aside time for networking. 

It is a commitment. Not something that one just ‘tries out’ hoping that somehow it will turn out fine but a way to test whether blogging may work for us. I’ve learned a lot about blogging and about myself as a blogger from the challenge. Every year I learn something more.

Every blogger has a vision of their blog. Today, most of us blog about something specific. This is why, I think, the theme proved to be so popular. Linking the challenge to the overall theme of our blog will enhance the general experience of the reader.

It will allow us to offer our expertise, whatever it is, and it will allow readers to find us more easily. A reader may love my challenge, but if I usually don’t blog about the same subjects, that reader might never come back once the challenge is over. 

My AtoZ Challenge posts are my most visited all year round. 

Having a theme is also a great way to research the subjects we are passionate about and to enhance our own knowledge. Because we’re forced to come up with a subject for every single letter of the alphabet, we need to think outside the box. Very often, that’s how we learn the most interesting, unusual, weird things.

My 2020 AtoZ Challenge

I’ve taken part in this challenge for five consecutive years. 

2015 – The Roaring Twenties
2016 – Jazz Age Jazz: early jazz as a social phenomenon
2017 – 1940s Film Noir
2018 – Weimar Germany
2019 – Berliner Cabaret

I think you can see that my main interest is 1920s social history. And considering this year we enter the Twenties again, what could my theme be?

LIVING THE TWENTIES

LIVING THE TWENTIES (#AtoZChallenge 2020) THEME REVEAL – A time of wild change and insecurities and yet great hope for the future, the 1920s may each us how to bring our Twenties to a more comfortable place #History Click To Tweet

Although one hundred years now separate us from the 1920s, what originally made me fall in love with this decade was the fact that it sounds a lot like us. 

The 1920s were years of passage. WWI had destroyed the old world. In the 1920s (as well as in the 1930s), people desperately tried to understand what kind of world they were living in now. They experimented a lot. They tried out new languages, new outlooks on life. Society and what was acceptable change in a way that often young people embraced, but older people feared. Life changed dramatically. What at the beginning of the century might have been considered fantasy or science fiction, in the 1920s was real life. 

But the new world wasn’t all that easy to settle in. So many things were changing, and not least of all, the world was becoming more globalised. People moved a lot, also in response to the dramatic changes WWI had brought about. Coming in contact with different people and different cultures was one more challenge people had to face in a moment where there was no stability, no certainties anymore. 

It’s sad to think that the Western World lost that challenge. Fear, uncertainty and the unwillingness to face what was new with a mindset of finding whatever good was in it, slowly led us toward a terrible catastrophe. 

But in the 1920s, there was still that drive to find a new future. There was still the feeling that, hard as it might seem, in the end, all the new ways of life would be handled. 

That’s why I love the Twenties. They sound a lot like us, and they were a time of hope still. I think they can teach us a lot about ourselves. Maybe they can teach us how to bring our Twenties someplace different. 

NOTE: The Twenties was above all a phenomenon of the Western World, but it was influenced by events happening outside of it too, and in turn, it sometimes influenced other cultures. 
Therefore, I will focus on the Western World in particular, but wherever possible, I’ll try to give a more global view.

Living the Twenties

A – Avant Garde
B – Breakthrough
C – Consumerism
D – Deco
E – Expression
F – Fashion
G – Games
H – Home
I – Isolationism
J – Jazz
k – Kitchen Appliances
L – Lost Generation
M – Minorities
N – Nationalism
O – Orientalism
P – Prohibition
Q – Queer
R – Refugees
S – Sanitary Behaviours
T – Technology
U – Unveiled
V – Vote
W – Women
X – X-Factor
Y – Youth
Z – Zeppelin

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