1913 : the year before the storm / Florian Illies ; translated by Shaun Whiteside and Jamie Searle. Nineteen thirteen

Collection type Library
Author Illies, Florian, 1971-, author.; Whiteside, Shaun, translator.; searle, Jamie,, translator.;
Call Number 940.288 I29n
Document type Monograph
Pagination 270 pages ; black & white illustrations, portraits ; 22 cm.
Note Translated from the German. Includes bibliography. This is a moving true account of European society on the brink of war. A witty yet moving narrative worked up from sketched documentary traces and biographical fragments, 1913 is an intimate cultural portrait of a world that is about to change forever. The stuffy conventions of the nineteenth century are receding into the past, and 1913 heralds a new age of unlimited possibility. Kafka falls in love; Louis Armstrong learns to play the trumpet; a young seamstress called Coco Chanel opens her first boutique ; Charlie Chaplin signs his first movie contract; and new drugs like cocaine usher in an age of decadence. Yet everywhere there is the premonition of ruin - the number 13 is omnipresent, and in London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Trieste, artists take the omen and act as if there were no tomorrow, their brief coincidences of existence telling of a darker future. In a Munich hotel lobby, Rilke and Freud discuss beauty and transience; Proust sets out in search of lost time; and while Stravinsky celebrates the Ri te of Spring with industrial cacophony, in Munich an Austrian postcard painter by the name of Adolf Hitler sells his conventional cityscapes. Told with Illies' characteristic mixture of poignant evocation and laconic irony, 1913 is the story of the year t hat shaped the last century.

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