Review: Florian Illies, 1913, the Year Before the Storm Author[s]: J.S. Crockett Source: MoveableType, Vol. 7, ‘Intersections’ (2014) DOI: 10.14324/111.1755-4527.062 MoveableType is a Graduate, Peer-Reviewed Journal based in the Department of English at UCL. © 2014 J.S. Crockett. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) 4.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. 1913, THE YEAR BEFORE THE STORM, by Florian Illies, translated by Shaun Whiteside and Jamie Lee Searle. The Clerkenwell Press – ISB 978 1 84668 951 2 In the rolling hills just south o+ the little village o+ Neu,ille St Vaast, in Northern Fran.e, is a War Cemetery. Here, tightly pa.ked, thousands o+ sim0le granite crosses stret.h as far as the eye can see. othing can pre0are the visitor for the s.ale o+ the pla.e, which is only in.reased by the realisation that ea.h cross carries two names, one on ea.h bran.h, and then another two on the other side. In total the small commune o+ Neu,ille St Vaast holds the remains o+ 44,833 German soldiers, four to a gra,e, as well as 12,210 Fren.h, and 1,567 British and Commonwealth soldiers – and that4s not .ounting the thousands whose bodies were ne,er found. Su.h pla.es are ines.a0able reminders o+ the cost o+ the Great War, the best possible e,iden.e o+ a tortured age. Like the con.entration .am0s, military cemeteries o+ the Western Front are among the rare relics o+ our recent past which seem utterly abhorrent, which beg the question6 how did it e,er come to this7 8s Christo0her Clark wrote in last month4s LRB, 'the debate o,er the origins o+ the First World War is older than the war itself:.$ It has been estimated that 25,000 books and articles ha,e been in written on the subject, in English alone. Three recent additions to the pile are worth mentionin)6 The War that Ended Peace by Margaret Ma.<illan, July 1914: C"untd"#n t" War by Sean M.<eekin, and Clark’s own widely-a..laimed The Slee$#alker& H"# Eur"$e went t" War 'n 1914, which ea.h a.hie,e the feat o+ bringing something new to the debate( o doubt more will 1 Christopher Clark, 'The First Calamity', London Review of Books, vol.35, No.16, p.5. 84 +ollow ne>t year and in years to come. Yet just as interesting, and currently receiving similar attention, is the period that immediately preceded the war, the last days o+ the decadent Belle E$")ue, sufused in literature and the public mind with images o+ long summer a+ternoons, garden 0arties, aristo.ratic balls. Perha0s sur0risingly, one o+ the most su..ess+ul o+ the works addressing this period is a slim ,olume by the German ‘man o+ style4 Florian Illies. La.king the political angle o+ Michael Portillo4s Radio 4 series 1913, The Year Be*"re, and the global s0an o+ Charles Emerson4s 1913, The W"rld +e*"re the Great War, 1913, the Year Be*"re the St"r- is a light-hearted rom0 through the year4s high .ultural s.ene by the German Art historian, dealer and journalist. Vienna, home to Freud, Klimt, S.hiele, Loos, and Kokos.hka, is at the heart o+ the book, with regular forays to Berlin, Munich, Paris, various seaside and s0a resorts, and, very o..asionally, that ba.kwater o+ H"chkultur, London. Through twelve cha0ters, one for ea.h month, anecdotes and meetings are told in the 0resent tense, as ironic comments fank diary entries and e>.er0ts from letters. Mu.h s0a.e is given to the insecure relationships between Rilke and, among others, Lou Andreas-SalomDE Gott+ried Benn and Else Lasker-S.hFlerE Oskar Kokos.hka and Alma Mahler. The tone is playful throughout, immediately likeable, and rendered with care and ability by the two translators. Early in the frst cha0ter comes the single-senten.e paragra0h “S0eaking o+ sickly: where is Rilke, by the way?J It embodies the book – well-turned, familiar, s0irited, gently mo.king o+ its subject. It is an a.hie,ement that amongst all the creative, egotistical voices belongin) to his subjects, the author4s still dominates. Among other idiosyn.rasies, Illies dis0lays a pleasin) obsession with addresses. Thomas Mann buys a plot o+ land at 1 Pos.hingerstrasse while his 85 brother Heinrich lives with his wife at 49 Leo0oldstrasse, both in MunichE Dr Sigmund Freud’s residen.e is at 19 Berggasse, in ViennaE Mar.el Proust4s study, we learn, was at 102 Boule,ad Haussmann in Paris. A reader equip0ed with Google glasses would no doubt fnd her e>0erien.e greatly enhan.ed by calling u0 street=,iews as they went along. Indeed, the fa.t that 1913 is the 0er+ect antidote to British cultural and historical anglo=.entrism means that for those o+ us with a tenuous gras0 o+ early 20th century German and Austro-Hungarian culture, ha,ing a referen.e book or la0to0 at hand is in,aluable when reading. Se,eral chara.ters, unknown to the non= a.ademic reader at the start o+ the book, will be hardly more familiar by its end. Ernst Ludwig Kir.hner anyone? Lo,is Corinth7 Some paragra0hs are as short and, to me, as meaningless as ‘Gn 29 Mar.h Karl Kraus delivers a lecture in the VierjarhresLeiten-Saal in Munich. Among the audien.e is Heinrich Mann. Warm a00lause.4 Others are un+orgettable: the frst time a 12-year-old Louis Armstrong picked u0 a trum0etE the fa.t that ecstasy was de,elo0ed in January 1913, only to be forgotten. What would the world ha,e been like if 1913 had been the frst Summer o+ Lo,e? Perha0s it wouldn4t ha,e changed a thing, but there can be few more entertaining questions in the +ruitless feld on what-if history. Why this obsession with 19137 Our interest in the year is two=+old: frstly the abru0t ju>ta0osition between per.eived pea.eful pros0erity and total warE secondly the not-so-distant mirror 1913 ofers u0 to our own time. For the latter the geo0olitical and economic parallels are well-rehearsed, the so.ial and cultural ones maybe less so, in part precisely because o+ the distortin) efect o+ hindsight. The main tenet o+ Portillo4s 10-part radio series is that the natural em0hasis on the aw+ulness o+ the war has hidden from view the reality and com0le>ity o+ the preceding year, in 86 0articular sin.e the re-e,aluation o+ the war which took pla.e in the 1930s, with the realisation that 2ermany had only been tem0orarily subdued, the terror that War might return, the a00allin) thought that su.h un+athomable losses may, a+ter all, ha,e been in vain. The natural rea.tion then is to idealise the world that the War had ended and which would ne,er, it was now clear, return. Portillo argues, mostly su..ess+ully, that 1913, far from being a late fowering o+ the Edwardian Summer, had in a.tual fa.t been a time o+ turbulen.e and strife, and that the War slowed and held ba.k change, rather than a..elerating it. In com0arison, llies is ob,iously keen to kee0 his book an un.om0licated one; he doesn4t try to blo.k out hindsight, nor is he a sla,e to it. His is a sna0shot o+ a time and a pla.e, yet as the ;nglish subtitle suggests (the German is ‘The Summer o+ the Century’N, e,erything is considered with one eye on what is to follow - why else in.lude FranL Ferdinand in a dramat'& per&"nae otherwise flled with artists, poets, playwrights and com0osers7 Hitler and Stalin are also in.luded +or misdeeds to come. It has been said, by Philip Oltermann in the ,uard'an, that Illies is keen to let the First World War generation of the hook.( It is not clear to me that he is. Like Clark, though his subject is altogether a diferent one, Illies has no time for the blame game which preo..u0ies so many historians, but there is a per,ading sense o+ the sickness o+ the so.iety he des.ribes. The mo.king tone may be afectionate, but it is persistent and signifcant. FranL KaOa in particular is e>0osed with delicious cruelty as a self-destru.tive, faltering wreck; Brecht is a sickly teenage +antasistE Rilke fits about Euro0e at others4 e>0ense, feeling uniquely sorry for himself (a.tually no – Georg Trakl’s de0ression and self-loathing is e,en greaterNE Kokos.hka4s art can only be ins0ired 2 Phillip Oltermann, '1913: The Year Before the Storm by Florian Illies – review', The Guardian, 19/07/2013. 87 by his obsessional, se>-driven lo,e for Alma Mahler, Gusta,4s beautiful widowE Gott+ried Benn cuts u0 cada,ers and breaks heartsE Stefan George uses poetry to establish around himself a cir.le o+ se>ually submissive youths. Almost alone, Mar.el Du.ham0 endears himself to the reader, holidaying in Herne Bay, a,oiding work and playing chess – in short, enjoying himself. E,erythin) else seems mad, out o+ sorts, ner,ous and strained.