Illies, Florian "1913: The Year before the Storm"

Illies, Florian "1913: The Year before the Storm" (German: 1913: Der Sommer des Jahrhunderts) - 2012

How did the First World War come about? This question is asked frequently and attempts are made to answer it just as frequently. But that is not the purpose of this book. The author brings a contemporary testimony here. How was life the year before? When people still lived peacefully and thought of no evil. We hear about writers like Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Marcel Proust and others, painters like Ernst Macke, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Marcel Duchamp, musicians like Igor Stravinsky, psychologists Sigmund Freud and C.G. Young, that Stalin and Hitler were in Vienna at the same time (if only they had met and smashed each other's heads!), how the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I and his heir to the throne Franz-Ferdinand were doing.

Many, many people are portrayed here, month after month we follow their lives and society in general and know that everyone's lives will be completely different in the next, never quite the same.

A good history book.

From the back cover:

"The year 1913 heralds a new age of unlimited possibility. Louis Armstrong learns to play the trumpet. Kafka is in love and writes endlessly long, endlessly beautiful letters to Felice Bauer. Charlie Chaplin signs his first movie contract.

Yet everywhere there is the premonition of ruin - the number thirteen is omnipresent, and in London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Trieste, artists begin to act as if there were no tomorrow. In a hotel lobby, Rilke and Freud discuss beauty and transience; Proust sets out in search of lost time; and while Stravinsky celebrates The Rite of Spring with industrial cacophony, in Munich an Austrian postcard painter by the name of Adolf Hitler sells his conventional cityscapes.