The Nervous Age
Florian Illies, 1913: The Year Before the Storm
Clerkenwell Press, 304pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781846689512
reviewed by Matt Ellison
Florian Illies' 1913 is a highly original cultural portrait of the West as it stood in the year before the Great War. 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’. 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.
Among 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. 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.
But things are happening elsewhere, too. 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. 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.
As 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. 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’.
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. Written in the form of fragmentary snapshots and based largely on diaries, correspondence, as well as published writings, it recounts how Virginia Woolf complains of an ‘inability to feel’ to neurologists, and how Kafka and Robert Musil, two other great modernists, are both diagnosed with ‘neurasthenia’ (symptoms: fatigue, anxiety, hypochondria and depression; Illies speculates as to whether today we would simply call this condition ‘burn out’). This nervousness is also seen in political figures, like the heir presumptive to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand, who is hiding all summer in his Bohemian castle, worrying about assassination attempts in Serbia.
Tales of tortuous love affairs feature heavily in Illies’s chronicle, foremost among which is that between Kafka and Felice Bauer. The content of his letters to Bauer in Berlin, culminating in his catastrophic proposal of marriage, oscillates between tragedy and comedy - at one point, having written over 200 letters to her, he asks ‘Can you actually read my handwriting?’. That same year Kafka, who, like Spengler, suffers from an intense ‘fear of women - the minute they take their clothes off’, finishes his Metamorphosis and prepares to send it to his publisher.
One could be forgiven for thinking that a book which bears the subtitle The Year Before the Storm (in the English edition - the original German subtitle is der Sommer des Jahrhunderts, the summer of the century) ought to devote more attention to the historical prelude to the event which would see Europe collapse. Save for references to increasing military expenditure among the Central European powers, there is very little coverage of the geo-political prelude to the war. However, this is probably to be expected, given Illies’s profession as a journalist and art critic and given the book’s focus on cultural figures, not historical processes.
At times Illies also plays fast and loose with historical record. For example, he recounts how Kafka and Albert Einstein both write letters to their lovers in Berlin, which travel ‘presumably in the same postbag’. Elsewhere, he evokes the image of Hitler and Stalin encountering each other in a Vienna park, who ‘may have greeted one another politely and tipped their hats’. These speculations only add to the piece, and having the two tyrants meet was too good an opportunity to resist, especially given that Hitler and Stalin would never meet again, not even when their nations signed the non-aggression pact in 1939. ‘They were never closer than they were on one of those bitterly cold January afternoons in the park of Schönbrunn Palace,’ Illies writes.
These rather cute moments aside, 1913 tends to reinforce the standard narrative that we tell about the zeitgeist of the modern age. Publicly, the picture is one of optimism, confidence and technological progress with little inkling of what is to come: the first moving assembly line is installed at the Ford factory in Detroit, while the first radio-telegraphic message is sent across the Atlantic, and David Starr Jordan, President of Stanford University, is by no means the only person to declare that ‘The Great War in Europe, that eternal threat, will never come’.
Privately, however, modern man, experiencing the ‘disenchantment of the world’ - 1913 also happens to be the year in which Max Weber invents this famous formulation - is thrown back upon himself and dwells in a state of profound malaise. And in the minds of a select few Europeans this anxiety kindles remarkable prescience: Illies cites the German expressionist Ludwig Meidner, who, overcome by visions of horror, foresees ‘a thousand strong roundelay of skeletons prancing around in front of me ... numerous graves and burned-out cities with plains winding through them’, and Carl Jung, who has recurring nightmares of ‘Europe sinking beneath the waves of a massive flood’. Nonetheless, these near-clichés do very little to detract from the enjoyment of reading Illies’s book. Exceptionally witty, erudite and well written, 1913: The Year Before the Storm offers a wealth of insight into a civilisation that would soon tear itself apart.
Among 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. 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.
But things are happening elsewhere, too. 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. 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.
As 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. 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’.
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. Written in the form of fragmentary snapshots and based largely on diaries, correspondence, as well as published writings, it recounts how Virginia Woolf complains of an ‘inability to feel’ to neurologists, and how Kafka and Robert Musil, two other great modernists, are both diagnosed with ‘neurasthenia’ (symptoms: fatigue, anxiety, hypochondria and depression; Illies speculates as to whether today we would simply call this condition ‘burn out’). This nervousness is also seen in political figures, like the heir presumptive to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand, who is hiding all summer in his Bohemian castle, worrying about assassination attempts in Serbia.
Tales of tortuous love affairs feature heavily in Illies’s chronicle, foremost among which is that between Kafka and Felice Bauer. The content of his letters to Bauer in Berlin, culminating in his catastrophic proposal of marriage, oscillates between tragedy and comedy - at one point, having written over 200 letters to her, he asks ‘Can you actually read my handwriting?’. That same year Kafka, who, like Spengler, suffers from an intense ‘fear of women - the minute they take their clothes off’, finishes his Metamorphosis and prepares to send it to his publisher.
One could be forgiven for thinking that a book which bears the subtitle The Year Before the Storm (in the English edition - the original German subtitle is der Sommer des Jahrhunderts, the summer of the century) ought to devote more attention to the historical prelude to the event which would see Europe collapse. Save for references to increasing military expenditure among the Central European powers, there is very little coverage of the geo-political prelude to the war. However, this is probably to be expected, given Illies’s profession as a journalist and art critic and given the book’s focus on cultural figures, not historical processes.
At times Illies also plays fast and loose with historical record. For example, he recounts how Kafka and Albert Einstein both write letters to their lovers in Berlin, which travel ‘presumably in the same postbag’. Elsewhere, he evokes the image of Hitler and Stalin encountering each other in a Vienna park, who ‘may have greeted one another politely and tipped their hats’. These speculations only add to the piece, and having the two tyrants meet was too good an opportunity to resist, especially given that Hitler and Stalin would never meet again, not even when their nations signed the non-aggression pact in 1939. ‘They were never closer than they were on one of those bitterly cold January afternoons in the park of Schönbrunn Palace,’ Illies writes.
These rather cute moments aside, 1913 tends to reinforce the standard narrative that we tell about the zeitgeist of the modern age. Publicly, the picture is one of optimism, confidence and technological progress with little inkling of what is to come: the first moving assembly line is installed at the Ford factory in Detroit, while the first radio-telegraphic message is sent across the Atlantic, and David Starr Jordan, President of Stanford University, is by no means the only person to declare that ‘The Great War in Europe, that eternal threat, will never come’.
Privately, however, modern man, experiencing the ‘disenchantment of the world’ - 1913 also happens to be the year in which Max Weber invents this famous formulation - is thrown back upon himself and dwells in a state of profound malaise. And in the minds of a select few Europeans this anxiety kindles remarkable prescience: Illies cites the German expressionist Ludwig Meidner, who, overcome by visions of horror, foresees ‘a thousand strong roundelay of skeletons prancing around in front of me ... numerous graves and burned-out cities with plains winding through them’, and Carl Jung, who has recurring nightmares of ‘Europe sinking beneath the waves of a massive flood’. Nonetheless, these near-clichés do very little to detract from the enjoyment of reading Illies’s book. Exceptionally witty, erudite and well written, 1913: The Year Before the Storm offers a wealth of insight into a civilisation that would soon tear itself apart.