A World on Edge reveals Europe in 1918, left in ruins by World War
I. With the end of hostilities, a radical new start seems not only
possible, but essential, even unavoidable. Unorthodox ideas light
up the age like the comets that have recently passed overhead: new
politics, new societies, new art and culture, new thinking. The
struggle to determine the future has begun. The sculptor Kathe
Kollwitz, whose son died in the war, was translating sorrow and
loss into art. Ho Chi Minh was working as a dishwasher in Paris and
dreaming of liberating Vietnam, his homeland. Captain Harry S.
Truman was running a men's haberdashery in Kansas City, hardly
expecting that he was about to go bankrupt - and later become
president of the United States. Professor Moina Michael was about
to invent the 'remembrance poppy', a symbol of sacrifice that will
stand for generations to come. Meanwhile Virginia Woolf had just
published her first book and was questioning whether that sacrifice
was worth it, while the artist George Grosz was so revolted by the
violence on the streets of Berlin that he decides everything is
meaningless. For rulers and revolutionaries, a world of power and
privilege was dying - while for others, a dream of overthrowing
democracy was being born. With novelistic virtuosity, historian
Daniel Schoenpflug describes this watershed year as it was
experienced on the ground - open ended, unfathomable, its outcome
unclear. Told from the vantage points of people, famous and
ordinary, good and evil, who lived through the turmoil and
combining a multitude of acutely observed details, Schoenpflug
composes a brilliantly conceived panorama of a world suspended
between enthusiasm and disappointment, and of a moment in which the
window of opportunity was suddenly open, only to quickly close shut
once again.
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