His conversational, cross-referenced and anecdotal narrative shifts between Berlin, Paris, Munich and Vienna. No doubt about it, 1913 was quite a year.Ī former cultural pages editor for major German newspapers, Florian Illies is blessed with a lightness of touch and a lively mind with a feel for the colourful and the human, often at its silliest. There were no clues as to who had stolen the Mona Lisa from the Louvre two years earlier, although Picasso had been questioned. Thomas Mann was fretting about his closet homosexuality as well as the expensive house he was about to build. He wept proposing marriage, and feared being accepted. Franz Kafka was in love and suffering, writing bewildering love letters to his beloved Felice Bauer. Sigmund Freud had set up shop interpreting dreams Hitler was painting his pedestrian postcards, seething with fury over his rejection by Vienna's art academy. Discord had become the new norm there was energy and there was madness, in apparently equal measure. Meanwhile, modernism was challenging the traditional notions of art, music and literature. Nationalism became a rallying cry as disturbing and as violent as religion. It was the year before the Great War, so named because it was vast in its upheaval it marked the death of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and redrew the map of Europe.

1913 florian