Just Finished Reading: 1913 – The Year Before the Storm by Florian Illies (FP: 2012)

This has to be one of the strangest books I’ve read in quite a few years. It was also very much not what I had expected it to be. What I had expected was a month by month build up to the outbreak of WW1 with an attempt to understand why Europe fell apart in one of the most destructive conflicts to date. What I got was nothing of the sort!

What the author instead presented us with was a series of snapshots (some of which were eccentric to say the least) of events and personalities in Europe - in particular France and Germany - in the last year before everything went wrong. These events and personalities were, in the main, authors, artists, poets and dreamers many of whom had no connection at all with war, politics or the events of 1914. Among them where Franz Kafka (trying and failing in his long running romantic attachment), Sigmund Freud (and his feud with Jung) and Picasso (with his many lovers and dramatic artistic statements). Central amongst them was the various strands of modernism which competed with each other and universally shocked, outraged or confused everyone not ‘in the know’.

What has any of this to do with the coming war – nothing as far as I could tell…. And yet, there is something that exists between the stories of the various adventures and misadventures of these prominent European citizens (many now long forgotten – indeed many of which I had no knowledge whatsoever). It’s almost as if the story the author wanted to tell couldn’t possibly be told directly. What he wanted to get across was a feeling, something basically indefinable and, he certainly managed part of that. Initially rather confusing this book built, layer on layer, incident by incident and month by month to create a living breathing picture of what it must have been like just before the hammer fell. 1913 was, in all honesty, a very strange place. Massive cultural shifts where taking place that, even without WW1, would still have probably changed everything. Modernism, in all of its myriad forms, was just starting to burst out of the studios and the publishing houses and was starting to have a real impact on people’s lives. The sheer weirdness of this time comes across on every page. It’s almost as if Europe itself was in the throes of a cultural nervous breakdown and had no idea how to resolve things – despite the Freudian and Jungian best attempts to offer a cure (of sorts).

Of course it quickly became apparent that the author had no intention of addressing the question of why Europe tore itself apart for 5 years just 100 years ago. What we are instead presented with is a world that ceased to exist with the assassination and the shot the rang around the world and led to tens of millions of deaths in the mud and blood of battlefields across Europe and the far flung places of long lost Empires. What that world might have become if the fatal bullet had never been fired is a very interesting one but not one that the author even hints at. The world of 1913 is a deeply fascinating one and one that we should weep at its loss. 1914 and what followed on from those tragic years was a human disaster of staggering proportions. The world would never be the same again. There was no going back to the way things had been. The world of 1913 was gone forever and, despite its many faults, we should morn its passing. If nothing else this book has given me a brief glimpse through a dirty window at a very different age. To begin with I really wondered why this quirky volume has become an international best seller. By the time I had read ¼ of the book I began to see why. By the end I was hooked and mesmerised. Magical, wonderful, strange and highly recommended.