florian illies 1913 the year before the storm

'Sobre este título' puede pertenecer a otra edición de este libro. Told with Illies's characteristic mixture of poignant evocation and laconic irony, 1913 is the story of the year that shaped the last century.

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 Rite of Spring with industrial cacophony, in Munich an Austrian postcard painter by the name of Adolf Hitler sells his conventional cityscapes. 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. 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. His snapshot approach to the year, recorded month by month, is the most original historical account I’ve come across.

The stuffy conventions of the nineteenth century are receding into the past, and 1913 heralds a new age of unlimited possibility. Already an international bestseller, German author Florian Illies’s 1913: The Year Before the Storm is an absolute gem of a book. 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.

Florian illies 1913 the year before the storm