It is perhaps to be expected that a book on what Kafka calls ‘the nervous age’, is replete with men and women on the verge of mental collapse. Elsewhere in Munich, the misanthropic unemployed maths teacher Oswald Spengler continues work - in between fighting off suicidal thoughts, that is - on his influential tract The Decline of the West, which prophecies the ruin and decay of Western ‘civilisation’. Meanwhile, DH Lawrence becomes Lady Chatterley’s lover (in a manner of speaking), Rilke is still working on his Duino Elegies Joyce is teaching English in Trieste, and Proust is in search of lost time.Īs Freud finishes Totem and Taboo, Carl Jung commits his own act of parricide by irrevocably breaking ties with the father ahead of the Fourth International Psychoanalytic Congress in Munich. 1913 is the year when Louis Armstrong, incarcerated in the New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs, first picks up the trumpet the drug that would come to be known as ecstasy is synthesised for the first time, then quickly forgotten about for several decades the first issue of Vanity Fair is published in New York and the first Aldi supermarket is opened in Essen, Germany. 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.
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