Florian Illies's 1913: The Year Before the Storm is an astonishingly rich cultural portrait of Europe just before World War I. It animates the personal and creative lives of the era's avant-garde--from Picasso and Gertrude Stein to Freud, Jung and D.H. Lawrence--while untangling the intricate webs connecting them, all in the guise of a collection of miniatures.
Illies gives each month of the year a chapter consisting of vignettes, some only a sentence and others a few pages, offering glimpses of his subjects as they meet and couple and break from each other from one end of the continent to the other. He colors his portraits with diary entries, letters and excerpts from contemporary newspaper accounts. We are privy to Kafka's most intimate thoughts as, with agonized ambivalence, he vacillates about making one of history's most tortured marriage proposals. Oskar Kokoschka obsessively paints his self-portrait, in bed with his lover Alma Mahler; it must be his masterpiece, her condition for their marriage. Meanwhile, Hitler spends his days painting watercolors in his Vienna flat, and the Mona Lisa remains missing from the Louvre until November.
The most devastating war the world has yet known will soon erupt, the shadow underlining the hopes and neuroses of all these "pioneers of modernism," as Illies writes, who are each engaged in "the struggle against depression, drinking, senseless distraction and the advance of time."
This is an immensely enjoyable, imaginative, and textured history of one the most vibrant periods in Western culture. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer