Der taumelnde Kontinent : Europa 1900 - 1914

by Philipp Blom

Hardcover, 2009

Status

Available

Call number

NP 3425 B653

Collection

Publication

München: Hanser

Description

The old order gives way to the new in a vast panoramic history of Europe on the brink of the Great War.

User reviews

LibraryThing member kant1066
"The Vertigo Years," much like Blom's earlier "Wicked Company," is a history for the general reader who wants to gain a feel for the general Zeitgeist of fin-de-siècle Western Europe coming up through the beginning of World War I. If you desire a history of something specifically with "the events
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leading up to WWI" in mind, keep looking, as this book has almost nothing to do with the complicated set of alliances and feuds that eventually resulted in the death of Archduke Ferdinand. It is, in the purest sense of the term, cultural history. Almost anything and anyone of significant (and many things of insignificant) amounts of cultural relevance are described in the book, but at 400 pages, Blom never grows ponderous. The chapters on Marie and Pierre Curie are just detailed enough to where almost everyone learns something new. And many of the chapters are wholly based around people or events with which I had little or no familiarity, like the political assassin and wife of the former French Prime Minister Henriette Caillaux, as well as the influence of Bertha von Suttner, the peace activist and first woman to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905.

There are fifteen chapters in the book, each covering one year beginning in 1900 and ending in 1914. Instead of trying to write the history of each individual year (which would probably read much more confusedly and frenetically), Blom introduces each year with one seminal person, event, or idea with a striking vignette and uses the rest of the chapter to both branch out and go into some of the finer details of what's really going on. Some of the most wonderful chapters include the ones on the 1900 World Fair in Paris, Freud's revolutionary idea of "culture as sublimated sexuality," and the journalists who broke the story about King Leopold's atrocities in the Congo. Interspersed through the text are wonderful black-and-white photographs, with quite a few color plate photographs in the middle for visual reference to the varied artists Blom alludes to, everyone from Schiele to Picasso to Derain.

For those who have read Blom's "Wicked Company," this book is much, much better. None of the characters here seem to incur the author's ire like Rousseau does. And while "Wicked Company" is almost a multiple biography of half a dozen characters or more covering a very wide swath of a century or more, this is book is a set of tightly controlled, engaging bits of history with which we should all be familiar. It comes highly recommended for anyone with an interest in turn-of-the-century science, art, literature, technology, and society, and politics.
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LibraryThing member Schmerguls
This is a book, by a German-born author, which discusses what happened in some aspects of European life during the years indicated. Much is intellectual history, some of which was of interest and some of which was not. The accounts of actual happenings, such as the 1905 revoluiton in Russia and of
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thefight for women's suffrage in Britain was of interest, but more time was spent analyzing what happened than telling what happened. The book explicitly does not consider events in the light of the First World War. Not without interest, but often not highly interesting.
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LibraryThing member MichaelHodges
One of the best background readings to the causation of WW1
LibraryThing member SusannainSC
Divided by year, but each year takes a thematic subject, usually provoked by an event of that year.

1900: France
1901: the aristocrats
1902: Austria-Hungary & Sigmund Freud
1903: science, especially physics
1904: Europeans in Africa; especially the Belgians in the Congo
1905: Russia
1906: the
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military
1907: the Bohemian fringe - pacifists, nudists, Mme. Blavatsky & friends
1908: "women with stones" - the Suffragettes
1909: machines and speed
1910: the arts
1911: popular culture
1912: eugenics
1913: crime and insanity
1914: summation

Due to its thematic nature, probably not the first book on the period I'd give someone - but possibly the second.
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LibraryThing member Shrike58
Attempting to write of Europe prior to World War I while adopting the pose that the Twentieth Century was an unwritten book, Blom's overarching response is that this was no "Belle Epoch" but a century that started out compromised. Compromised by its bewilderment that scientific rationality and
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economic development had produced incomprehensibility and social disorder. Compromised by how sexual relations previously constrained by convention and religion seemed to breaking down. Compromised by political leadership unable to recognize that there was a systemic crisis taking place and that even if there had been a general recognition it's unlikely that empty place holders such as the likes of Wilhelm of Germany, Franz Joseph of Austria or Nicholas of Russia could have been circumvented to provide answers. All of this leading to a flight to unreason as the avenue by which to relate to what could not be assimilated, which found a variety of expressions ranging from modern art to fascist politics to desperate throws of the geopolitical dice.

While I'm not really the person for whom this book was written, Blom writes with aplomb and wit and I greatly enjoyed his style. He also does nothing to assuage my own unease at the current state of things. As another generation of futurists noted (the "cyberpunk" writers such as William Gibson & Bruce Sterling) the future is unevenly distributed and the United States seems to be leaving the last time bubbles of 19th-century thinking with about as much grace as the European powers did. In my darkest moments I hope that we do not commemorate the centennial of 1914 with another Great Power war.
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Language

Original publication date

2008

ISBN

9783446232921
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