Århundradets sommar

In 1913, exactly 100 years ago, several well-established thinkers agreed that the world had seen the last major war. There was simply nothing to be gained from a war at this point; all countries were so dependent on trading with each other, while at the same time not trusting each other enough to go to war for each others' sakes. The big stars of the age were artists, musicians and philosophers, and we all know that culture inevitably promotes peace and understanding. Sure, there was something brewing in the balkans, and in the colonies, and in the former colonies, but the bits of the world that counted - contintental Western Europe and Great Britain - were far too comfortable, cultured and, well, advanced to ever want to go to war with each other. Eternal peace loomed, and there was only up, up, UP!

If only the damned artists and poets and musicians would just understand this and stop ruining things. What the hell is up with Picasso and Stravinsky and Duchamp and that lot essentially declaring the old art forms dead? Now that Freud has discovered what makes mankind tick, why is he arguing with his followers? Can't they all just be like that nice Austrian fellow and paint simple pictures of things you recognise?

1913 is, if nothing else, a quite entertaining book. Illies tracks the year 1913 (or at least what people saw of it from a mostly German-Austrian horizon) by chronicling the lives of a few dozen then-current and future artists, writers, thinkers, musicians and politicians as they paint, fuck, fight, write, angst (a lot of that), starve, strive, fall out, create, destroy, etc. Kafka, Stravinsky, Hitler, Picasso, Freud, Armstrong, Joyce, Duchamp, Franz Ferdinand, Musil, Stalin, Proust, Rilke, Mann, Brecht, Camus and lots of others who may have just been born or are at the height of their career all pass through on their way to... well, whatever great new thing 1914 will bring. It's all very well researched, and often quite funny (note from a Vienna hospital upon admission of a man who's been bitten in the nether regions by a horse; "Patient referred to emergency ward, horse to Professor Freud")...

...and also, for the most part, a bit superficial. A little too often Illies writes about artists' lives rather than the art itself - it doesn't come close to sharpness of, say, Andrei Codrescu's similar examination of post-war art, The Post-Human Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess. The book silently challenges us to draw parallels to the situation 100 years later but gives us nothing but an impending sense of doom to draw parallels from; the coming disaster is hinted at, but none of the reasons for it. If the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - the world of 2013 being, perhaps, the most peaceful it's ever been, at least in terms of outright war - then Illies appears to add to it rather than offer any way forward; "In 1913 they couldn't conceive of a world war even as they marched into it..." and he lets us fill in the "Therefore we're clearly doing the same thing now." Uh, logic, dude.

It's still a really enjoyable read, and you'll come away with a lot of little tidbits of information you can use to impress people. You'll either cringe or laugh at Kafka's marriage proposals, the rock star-like behaviour of Kokoschka and Rilke, the casual antisemitism that pops up everywhere, chuckle at Brecht's early attempts at patriotic poetry... It's all packed with irony, while never turning itself into a joke. That's quite good enough, if no more than that.