This was recommended by a fellow member of Henry Eliot's Dream Story readalong (post pending). It's by Florian Illies. It was published in German in 2012, and the original version is actually available on Internet Archive. But I didn't realize that until I'd borrowed the English version (translated by Shaun Whiteside and Jamie Lee Searle, and published in 2013) from Douglas Library.

I sometimes don't know why translations mess with things. The subtitle of the English version is The Year Before the Storm. The equivalent in the original is The Summer of the Century, which is much better, I think.

Illies gives us a rather different take on history, and I found it absolutely engrossing. Month by month, in small snippets, he takes us through the cultural hotspots and personalities of Europe (primarily, but not exclusively, the German-speaking bits) as they appeared in 1913.




The format

Some have criticized the account for being unbalanced (very little politics, for example, and very little from outside Europe), but I think that's a little unfair. Illies decided on his scope, and ran with it.

For me at least, it offered more insight into that fateful year than screeds of more formal history have done. And I found it particularly enjoyable because it revisited some of the interests of my youth. As a student of German, I was very into some of the artists and writers mentioned here, and it has been rewarding to renew my acquaintance all these decades later. Some, on the other hand, were completely unknown to me, so there was also a pleasant element of discovery about the whole thing.

True, there's a slight tendency to focus on the weird or the titillating. Then again, he's not going to choose the boring stuff, and it's not as though he's making it up -- some of these people were pretty out there.

Illies's tone is always slightly condescending, a touch dismissive, close to mocking. Of the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, for example: "So the artistic revolutionaries dashed ever onwards, impelled by their horror of being fully understood by the bourgeois public." I don't think we need tiptoe round these people, but perhaps this edge could have been filed down slightly.

And, of course, an overview like this can't give you everything you want to know. Inevitably, I found myself ferreting out additional information on many of these figures. What did they write? How did they paint? Where did they end up? But that's a good thing, no? It shows that Illies is great at exciting our curiosity. (And excellent at generating an extensive further reading list...)

If I have one quibble, it's that we're given a bibliography, acknowledgements, and illustration credits -- but no index. With all these different characters surfacing and resurfacing over the course of the year, an index would have been a really useful addition.


Each month has a characteristic photo. November's shows Krize, a men's outfitter's in Vienna, which is still going strong

***

Illies entertains us throughout with some running gags:

-- Franz Kafka's serial proposal to Felice (poor Felice...)
-- The missing Mona Lisa (not located until December)
-- The bust-up between Freud and Jung
-- Oskar Kokoschka's courtship of Alma Mahler
-- Robert Musil's "neurasthenia", which scores him repeated leave of absence from his library
-- And many more...


The Bride of the Wind, a 1913 painting by Oskar Kokoschka: "Kokoschka’s best known work, is an allegorical picture featuring a self-portrait by the artist, lying alongside his lover Alma Mahler"

And bit by bit, the author builds up character studies. Again, he's open to charges of unfair selectivity here, but again, I guess it's a question of being faithful to the scope of your design. So, regularly recurring, we have (inter alia):

-- Thomas Mann, always slightly prissy and bourgeois
-- Rainer Maria Rilke, a bit of a drifter, perennially discontented: "Rilke's restless and lavish lifestyle depended on permanent contributions from a circle of powerful women" (to whom he endlessly wrote letters)
-- Oswald Spengler, driven by fear, and possibly confusing his own depression with the decline of the West (or maybe not...)

***

So what happened in 1913? Well, so much, so much... But these are the things that particularly caught my eye:

-- Louis Armstrong starts to play the trumpet, and a few months later makes his first public appearance.
-- It's the year that sees the beginning of Vanity Fair and Aldi and Prada, the first loop-the-loop, and the first Lutz.
-- Stalin, Hitler, and Tito are all briefly present in Vienna early in the year.
-- The four capitals of modernism in 1913 are Berlin, Paris, Munich, and Vienna. Chicago and New York are still some way behind. And Paris is in a class of its own. "In the Paris of 1913," says Illies, "only Proust wanted to reminisce; everyone else wanted to keep moving forwards." The capital of the modern age, though, is Vienna: "Here the battles raged: about the unconscious, about dreams, the new music, the new way of seeing, the new architecture, the new logic, the new morality." Berlin, meanwhile, could boast 200 cinemas...


Munich, 2023

-- Musil is not the only one with neurasthenia (an affliction involving weakness, fatigue, and stress). There's an epidemic of it.
-- The Rite of Spring, by Igor Stravinsky, "electrified Paris and sent shock waves as far as New York and Moscow".
-- Leo Stein moves out of 27 rue des Fleurs. He and Gertrude never speak again.


Near Gertrude Stein's grave in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, 2024

-- The temperature hits 56.7 C in Death Valley. That's still the record anywhere on Earth.
-- Musil's The Man Without Qualities -- which will end up being "the third classic of the modern era, saturated with the explosive power of 1913" (and which still makes it onto The Guardian's list of the 100 best novels of all time, as do the other two that Illies cites, In Search of Lost Time and Ulysses) -- starts with an account of the weather in August 1913. And indeed, it was the coldest August of the entire 20th century...
-- The first assembly line is installed at the Ford factory in Detroit.
-- The First German Autumn Salon takes place in Berlin. After the Armory Show in New York earlier in the year, it's the second art expo to set new standards, and it's "an aesthetic alliance across all boundaries, a demonstration of the solidarity of the avant-garde beyond all foreign political skirmishes". Present, inter alia, are Marc, Macke, Klee, Chagall, Kandinsky, Feininger, and Ernst. "The public reaction ranges from furious to outraged"; the newspaper crits are brutal; and it's a financial disaster...
-- Albert Camus is born.
-- Proust's Swann's Way is published. Anatole France: "Life is too short and Proust too long." And that's only the first volume... Illies argues that Proust's first sentence (about going to bed early) "touched the nerve of an exhausted avant-garde... Going to bed early -- to the ever weary pioneers of the modern age it seemed like the bravest struggle against depression, drinking, senseless distraction and the advance of time."

***

It was nice to encounter names from other books:

-- Gabriele d'Annunzio. Neither Jan Morris nor the people D.H. Lawrence quotes in Sea and Sardinia were complimentary about his "Fiume escapade". But what Illies points out is that D'Annunzio doesn't like the number 1913, and prefers to talk of 1912+1. (Arnold Schoenberg also doesn't believe in 13, to the extent that his opera Moses and Aaron was renamed Moses and Aron so that the title wouldn't contain 13 letters... This is the kind of glorious triviality that Illies excels in...)
-- Kaiser Franz Joseph, whom we met in Joseph Roth's The Radetsky March. It was his heir, Franz Ferdinand, who was assassinated in Sarajevo the following year, along with the morganatic wife (Duchess Sophie Chotek) whom the Kaiser had never approved of.
-- This was the year that Edmund Husserl published his foundational work on phenomenology, which paved the way for existentialism.
-- Picasso (extensively mentioned in Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) is here too.

***

But there were many people I knew little about, and who were fascinating:

-- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. A leading light in the art movement known as Die Bruecke, he came into his own on arriving in Berlin.


The Judgement of Paris, a major work by Kirchner from the pre-WWI period, shows sisters Erna and Gerda Schilling. They worked as nightclub dancers and artists' models, and Erna became the artist's partner in a relationship that lasted until his suicide in 1938


Berlin Street Scene, again by Kirchner. Illies: "This December he tries time and again to transfer the fascination and coldness of Potsdamer Platz into art"


Kirchner again: Self-portrait as a soldier, 1915


Self-Portrait With Cigar by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, another of the four founding members of Die Bruecke

-- Else Lasker-Schueler, says Illies, is "the embodiment of a society dashing into the modern age". She wrote, but she also inspired many others -- particularly, over the course of 1913, Gottfried Benn, who spent his day dissecting corpses, and the rest of his time writing poetry about it (the details of his first poetry reading, in March 1913, can be found here). The nine-month relationship between Lasker-Schueler and Benn (total opposites, it would seem) produced much poetry (to, for, and about each other).


Gottfried Benn


Manuscript of My People, by Else Lasker-Schueler, which shows her "early approach to the situation of Jews in Germany during this period. The poet’s inward path leads over a 'wailing-stone' ('Klagegestein'), over fragments of the crumbling rock that are reminiscent of the destroyed temple in Jerusalem, and all flight proves to be hopeless"

-- Also a friend of Lasker-Schueler's was Franz Marc, one of the formative influences in Der Blaue Reiter (this was the other key German Expressionist movement, alongside Die Bruecke)

-- Lovis Corinth bridges impressionism and expressionism.


Christmas Decorations, by Lovis Corinth, 1913


Retrospective of the work of Lovis Corinth, 1913

-- Marcel Duchamp is another who is mentioned by Toklas/Stein. Comparing him to "a young norman crusader", she recalls that it was the Armory Show that offered the general public its first chance to see this kind of picture, and comments: "I was always perfectly able to understand the enthusiasm that Marcel Duchamp aroused in New York when he went there in the early years of the war."


Nude Descending a Staircase, by Duchamp

-- Harry Graf Kessler, or to give him his full handle, "Harry Clemens Ulrich Graf von Kessler", is "the man who knew everyone". (There's a graphic of his network here.) Illies describes how he "commutes between Paris, Weimar, Brussels, London and Munich as one of the great catalysts of modern art and Art Nouveau". His diary for 14 May: Gide, Stravinsky, Nijinsky, Diaghilev, Debussy, Cocteau...

-- Georg Trakl is another fascinating figure. Illies is impressed by his quest for perfection in his writing: "Trakl could only express himself through poetry; his corrections and rewritings are his autobiography. He saw the dark, he captured the fleeing, he interrogated the intangible... Trakl hones his words, battles with his language until he knows he can release it into the world. A world in which he himself cannot survive." (This is literally true. He dies tragically in November 1914.)


Salzburg, 2023. Trakl's home for the first 21 years of his life

-- I absolutely didn't know that Felix Salten, best known as the creator of Bambi, was also the creator of the red-hot Josefine, which was still "indexed" in Germany in the 1960s...

-- "Peter Altenberg ... took advantage of a medical diagnosis of 'over-excitation of the nervous system' [another one] and a consequent 'incapacity for gainful employment' to devote himself heart and soul to the life of the Bohemian poet... His long list of literary admirers included Karl Kraus, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Arthur Schnitzler and George Bernard Shaw."


Altenberg in Vienna's Café Central, 1907

-- People were buying into the "free spirit and clear vision" of Alfred Loos, says Illies, who quotes the architect on some principles that really shouldn't be forgotten: "The house has only to please. Unlike the work of art, which doesn't have to please anybody. The art work seeks to drag people from their comfort. The house has to serve comfort. The art work is revolutionary, the house conservative." Loos counsels: "Do not fear abuse for being unmodern. Changes in the old building style are only permitted when the represent an improvement; otherwise stay with the old things. Because the truth, even if it is hundreds of years old, has more of a connection with us than the lie that walks beside us."

Of course, I'm leaving out so many other names. But I guess this kind of book is always going to produce a subjective response.

***

A theme that came across particularly strongly was that of fathers and sons:

-- Asta Nielsen stars in The Sins of the Fathers (based on a novel by Hermann Sudermann).
-- Picasso, at 16: "In art you must kill your father."
-- In April everyone is talking about parricide: Otto Gross, in Overcoming Cultural Crisis, writes: "The revolutionary of today, who with the help of the psychology of the unconscious sees the relations between the sexes in a free and propitious future, fights against rape in its most primordial form, against the father and against patriarchy." And Gottfried Benn's second poetry collection was called Sons.
-- Freud is developing a new theory of civilization: "The primal moment in the history of its evolution, Freud thinks in the spring of 1913, is Oedipus's act of parricide."
-- Arnold Bronnen writes a novel called Parricide.
-- Trakl in Metamorphosis of Evil: "What compels you to stand silently on the derelict stair in the house of your fathers?"


Venice is a magnet. To be found there in August were Georg Trakl, the Looses, Peter Altenberg, the Schnitzlers, and the Fischers (of publishing fame)

-- That was the year Kafka wrote Letter to His Father.
-- And Jung, having "killed" the "father" that Freud represented, is in crisis. He dreams of "Europe sinking beneath the waves of a massive flood". Devastation everywhere.

***

Which brings us to... a section I'll call foreshadowings. There's nothing like hindsight, of course, and -- as Philip Oltermann puts it, "Illies... tries to write the teleology out of early 20th-century history". I hate determinism, and it was nice to read an account that suggests that really anything could have happened. It was not pre-ordained that we should have that abominable slaughter the following year. All kinds of ideas could have pushed things in a different direction.

However... Because we have the benefit of hindsight, some of what happened that year takes on additional layers of meaning. For example:

-- Lenin to Gorky: "A war between Austria and Russia would be very useful to the revolution in Western Europe. But it is hard to imagine Franz-Joseph and Nicholas doing us that favour."
-- Walter Rathenau advocates a peaceful European Union to counterbalance the US, and warns of the "dangers of technology and mechanisation to purity and the 'Empire of the Soul'". Scarily re-relevant in our age...
-- Trakl: Golden flicker the flames / Around the peoples / Over deep black cliffs / Death-drunken plunges / The glowing bride of the wind
-- The Palace of Freedom is inaugurated in The Hague. A big peace conference is set to be held there in 1915...
-- Ludwig Meidner's Apocalyptic Vision "shows a landscape breaking apart, with earth rising up, dead vegetation and distorted limbs of the three naked victims. Behind are the ominous signs of powers uncontrolled by man, the smoking volcano, blackened sun and flaring comet."


Composition VII, by Wassily Kandinsky, 1913: "Kandinsky's push for abstraction was predicated upon a belief that mankind lived in the end of times and required spiritual rebirth. The widespread destruction of World War I (1914-18) struck many artists and intellectuals as a literal apocalypse, and Kandinsky would later respond by removing all recognizable imagery -- especially representations of violent conflict -- from his painting"

-- Georg Buechner's Woyzeck, originally written in 1836, premieres. Despite its age, it's still quite contemporary, says Illies. It parallels Heinrich Mann's Der Untertan, but is much more violent and archaic, a "play of revolt and rebellion". It closes with a very dark fairy tale about a lonely child -- "very much in line with the taste of 1913. Unconsoling, beyond any utopian thoughts but full of poetry."
-- Kaiser Wilhelm's November hunting party takes out 560 animals. He requests a monument to his marksmanship. That same month, Franz Ferdinand is invited to shoot by King George V. He's very happy about this, his first official trip abroad with his wife. Thousands of birds are shot. "A bloodbath."
-- Spengler's diary: "Life in this century oppresses me today. Everything redolent of comfort, of beauty, of colour, is being plundered."
-- And Ernst Troeltsch in "The Year 1913": "It is the old story that we all know, which for a while we called progress, and then decadence, and in which people now like to see the preparation of a new idealism... But it is not yet here.."
-- This is Illies's final entry: "It is 31 December 1913. Arthur Schnitzler records a few words in his diary: 'In the morning, dictated my madness novella [Escape into Darkness] to the end for the time being.' In the afternoon he reads Ricarda Huch's book The Great War in Germany. Otherwise: 'Very nervous during the day.' Then a soiree. 'Roulette was played.' At midnight they clink glasses to the year 1914."

I know... We'd have made little of all this, had 1914 not developed in the way it did. But many of these words and scenes have a shudderingly prophetic ring to them.


Sarajevo, 2023. Where it all kicked off the year after...

***

Oltermann notes in his review: "Far from teetering on the edge of the abyss, the generation of 1913 looks surprisingly carefree." This is absolutely NOT the impression I got. True, we don't have artists marching in the streets to head off the worrying signals emanating from various parts of the continent. But they don't seem carefree to me. They seem fraught, confused, angst-ridden, exhausted. Very few of them are at peace for any length of time.

And Illies's book makes what happened the following year seem even more unbearable. There was such a flowering under way. Such a moving and a shaking; such a cauldron of creativity. Who knows what all that would have come to without four vicious years of war...?