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Loading... Der taumelnde Kontinent: Europa 1900-1914 (original 2008; edition 2009)by Philipp Blom, Phillipp Blom (Translator)
Work InformationThe Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 by Philipp Blom (2008)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. We tend to look at our time as one of unparalled changes that have completely changed how we live. We also think this makes our time unique, but as this book makes clear, ours is not the first time progress and anexity have played such a heady part in the making of the times. This book covers the first 14 years of the 20th century, a time of great progress and inovation, but a time of great anexity as declining birth rates, changing sexual roles, and a world that felt to many as spining too fast created a time of promise and dread. The author seemes fixated on the sexual component, but overall manages to explain the period as it felt to the people who lived it without placing too much empthasis on how the events of the time affected the next 30 years. ( ) Attempting to write of Europe prior to World War I while adopting the pose that the Twentieth Century was an unwritten book, Blom's overarching response is that this was no "Belle Epoch" but a century that started out compromised. Compromised by its bewilderment that scientific rationality and economic development had produced incomprehensibility and social disorder. Compromised by how sexual relations previously constrained by convention and religion seemed to breaking down. Compromised by political leadership unable to recognize that there was a systemic crisis taking place and that even if there had been a general recognition it's unlikely that empty place holders such as the likes of Wilhelm of Germany, Franz Joseph of Austria or Nicholas of Russia could have been circumvented to provide answers. All of this leading to a flight to unreason as the avenue by which to relate to what could not be assimilated, which found a variety of expressions ranging from modern art to fascist politics to desperate throws of the geopolitical dice. While I'm not really the person for whom this book was written, Blom writes with aplomb and wit and I greatly enjoyed his style. He also does nothing to assuage my own unease at the current state of things. As another generation of futurists noted (the "cyberpunk" writers such as William Gibson & Bruce Sterling) the future is unevenly distributed and the United States seems to be leaving the last time bubbles of 19th-century thinking with about as much grace as the European powers did. In my darkest moments I hope that we do not commemorate the centennial of 1914 with another Great Power war. Divided by year, but each year takes a thematic subject, usually provoked by an event of that year. 1900: France 1901: the aristocrats 1902: Austria-Hungary & Sigmund Freud 1903: science, especially physics 1904: Europeans in Africa; especially the Belgians in the Congo 1905: Russia 1906: the military 1907: the Bohemian fringe - pacifists, nudists, Mme. Blavatsky & friends 1908: "women with stones" - the Suffragettes 1909: machines and speed 1910: the arts 1911: popular culture 1912: eugenics 1913: crime and insanity 1914: summation Due to its thematic nature, probably not the first book on the period I'd give someone - but possibly the second. "The Vertigo Years," much like Blom's earlier "Wicked Company," is a history for the general reader who wants to gain a feel for the general Zeitgeist of fin-de-siècle Western Europe coming up through the beginning of World War I. If you desire a history of something specifically with "the events leading up to WWI" in mind, keep looking, as this book has almost nothing to do with the complicated set of alliances and feuds that eventually resulted in the death of Archduke Ferdinand. It is, in the purest sense of the term, cultural history. Almost anything and anyone of significant (and many things of insignificant) amounts of cultural relevance are described in the book, but at 400 pages, Blom never grows ponderous. The chapters on Marie and Pierre Curie are just detailed enough to where almost everyone learns something new. And many of the chapters are wholly based around people or events with which I had little or no familiarity, like the political assassin and wife of the former French Prime Minister Henriette Caillaux, as well as the influence of Bertha von Suttner, the peace activist and first woman to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905. There are fifteen chapters in the book, each covering one year beginning in 1900 and ending in 1914. Instead of trying to write the history of each individual year (which would probably read much more confusedly and frenetically), Blom introduces each year with one seminal person, event, or idea with a striking vignette and uses the rest of the chapter to both branch out and go into some of the finer details of what's really going on. Some of the most wonderful chapters include the ones on the 1900 World Fair in Paris, Freud's revolutionary idea of "culture as sublimated sexuality," and the journalists who broke the story about King Leopold's atrocities in the Congo. Interspersed through the text are wonderful black-and-white photographs, with quite a few color plate photographs in the middle for visual reference to the varied artists Blom alludes to, everyone from Schiele to Picasso to Derain. For those who have read Blom's "Wicked Company," this book is much, much better. None of the characters here seem to incur the author's ire like Rousseau does. And while "Wicked Company" is almost a multiple biography of half a dozen characters or more covering a very wide swath of a century or more, this is book is a set of tightly controlled, engaging bits of history with which we should all be familiar. It comes highly recommended for anyone with an interest in turn-of-the-century science, art, literature, technology, and society, and politics. no reviews | add a review
The old order gives way to the new in a vast panoramic history of Europe on the brink of the Great War. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)940.288History and Geography Europe Europe Early Modern 1453-1914 19th century 1815-1914LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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