As Queen Victoria passes, Vienna-based historian Blom (To Have and
to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting, 2003,
etc.) finds a Modern World breaking through the crust.In this
masterful presentation, the time in question is so richly laced
with scientific bedazzlement, social ferment and cultural churning
that a sense of giddying misadventure begins to feel strangely
familiar. The roots of tensions that alternately bind and threaten
to fracture today's Europe are all there, easily visible to us in
hindsight but not to most of those who lived through it and
experienced as a result, the author posits, mass vertigo. In
analytical chronicles of this kind, the little delights that leap
out serendipitously are a large part of the reward. The French,
supposed masters of the art of love who were unable to reproduce
sufficiently to maintain the population, still held sway as
cultural arbiters, anointed in 1870 by a historian who noted:
"Perhaps nothing is properly understood in Europe until the French
have explained it." Yet these explicating authorities initially
greeted groundbreaking painters van Gogh and Gauguin as insane and
animalistic. The Viennese specialized in elegant duplicity, with
their high airs and public manners masking a seamy nightlife whose
amateur prostitutes almost outhustled the pros. Best tidbit: Felix
Salten, the Austrian writer who invented precious little Bambi,
also produced outrageously pornographic works. Sigmund Freud gave
up researching the function of bone marrow in lower fishes just in
time to define the malaise of the age - and treat those who could
afford him. Parisians shrugged then cowered in fear as growing
masses of violent street gangs mocked law and order. Real men hated
the proto-feminists, and raving anti-Semites saw Jews behind every
ill. From Thomas Eakins's stroboscopic photos to Duchamp's
descending nude, everything was coming apart.Offers rewarding
insights into a period often obscured from view by the decades of
conflict that followed. (Kirkus Reviews)
Europe, early in the twentieth century: a world adrift, a pulsating
era of creativity and contradictions. But did this era vanish in
the trenches of the Somme, of Ypres, and of Passchendaele? Look
closer and the more this world seems like ours: feminism,
democratisation, commercial branding, genetics, consumerism and
racism, radioactivity and psychoanalysis are all terms first used
during this period. This was a time in which old certainties broke
down and many people lost their bearings. At the heart of this
vibrant Europe, was a contradiction that would cause its collapse:
the new, modern world of mass production, urban life, technological
warfare and a rapidly growing working class that was still ruled by
men who preferred the image of dashing cavalry officers to the
prosaic slaughter of the machine gun, and national mythology to
political cohesion and democracy. The eventual scope of the
catastrophe often obscures the fact that the great cultural divide
in Europe's history lies before 1914. This book brings to life the
immediacy of the lives and issues of this fascinating and flawed
period.
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