florian illies 1913 the year before the storm

Three of the most evil dictators of the 20th century also call Vienna home: a 24-year-old Adolf Hitler is struggling to earn a living painting watercolours of local landmarks an exiled Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (later Stalin) is writing ‘Marxism and the National Question’ and meeting up with Trotsky Josip Broz (later Tito), a 21-year-old Croat mechanic, is being ‘kept’ as a lover and chauffeur by an upper-class lady.īut things are happening elsewhere, too. For the most part Illies, a journalist and art critic, focuses his attention on German-speaking central Europe and on Vienna in particular, that ‘capital of the modern age anno 1913’, which is home to an extraordinary array of thinkers, writers, artists and composers.Īmong the ‘star players’ on the Viennese scene are: Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus, Georg Trakl, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Arnold Schönberg. Originally published last year in Illies’ native Germany, where it quickly achieved bestseller status, it is a month-by-month account of the year that critic Jean-Michel Rabaté terms ‘the cradle of modernism’. Florian Illies' 1913 is a highly original cultural portrait of the West as it stood in the year before the Great War.

Florian illies 1913 the year before the storm