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Summary
Summary
Europe, 1900-1914: a world adrift, a pulsating era of creativity and contradictions. The major topics of the day: terrorism, globalization, immigration, consumerism, the collapse of moral values, and the rivalry of superpowers. The twentieth century was not born in the trenches of the Somme or Passchendaele--but rather in the fifteen vertiginous years preceding World War I.
In this short span of time, a new world order was emerging in ultimately tragic contradiction to the old. These were the years in which the political and personal repercussions of the Industrial Revolution were felt worldwide: Cities grew like never before as people fled the countryside and their traditional identities; science created new possibilities as well as nightmares; education changed the outlook of millions of people; mass-produced items transformed daily life; industrial laborers demanded a share of political power; and women sought to change their place in society--as well as the very fabric of sexual relations.
From the tremendous hope for a new century embodied in the 1900 World's Fair in Paris to the shattering assassination of a Habsburg archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, historian Philipp Blom chronicles this extraordinary epoch year by year. Prime Ministers and peasants, anarchists and actresses, scientists and psychopaths intermingle on the stage of a new century in this portrait of an opulent, unstable age on the brink of disaster.
Beautifully written and replete with deftly told anecdotes, The Vertigo Years brings the wonders, horrors, and fears of the early twentieth century vividly to life.
Author Notes
Philipp Blom holds a doctorate from Oxford University and is the author of To Have and To Hold and Enlightening the World . He frequently contributes articles to The Financial Times , The Independent , and The Guardian among others. He lives in Vienna.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Virginia Woolf famously declared that "human character changed" in the year 1910; this dizzying survey of European history and culture before WWI elaborates. Historian Blom (Enlightening the World) examines every innovation of the turbulent period that, in his estimate, gave birth to modernity and its discontents. Automobiles, airplanes and electricity gave humans unprecedented speed and power; the explosive growth of industry, cities and consumerism shattered and rebuilt communities; women, moving into schools and workplaces, demanded new rights; mass politics and mass media challenged traditional authority; psychoanalysis and the theory of relativity challenged ideas about humans and about time and space. The panorama is almost too much to take in, especially since Blom rightly complicates the picture by exploring the diverse ways in which different countries experienced these upheavals. His stab at a unifying theme--a perceived crisis of masculinity that panicked everyone from Proust to proto-Nazi racists as sex roles changed and a machine-driven, bureaucratic economy made muscle-power and martial virtues obsolete--is fruitful, but it only partially illuminates the times. This is a stylish, erudite guide to an age of exhilaration and anxiety that in many ways invented our own. Photos. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
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 ageand 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* With the benefit of a century of hindsight, the decade before the outbreak of the Great War presents an eerie aura of inevitability, as if we are watching a coming deadly auto crash unfold in slow motion. Those who lived through those years lacked our advantage and had to live their lives while coping with the confusion and violence of a tumultuous era, as the massive cultural, political, and economic changes of the previous century began to bear fruit. As Blom illustrates, all of the factors that would lead to the horror of the war were evident by 1900, but few contemporaries truly understood them or anticipated the ruinous consequences. The industrialization of Europe had spurred rapid urban growth, social conflict, and dangerous competition for imperial conquests, especially in Africa. New technologies facilitated the growth of fearsome weapons and a pervading sense of paranoia in various nations' military establishments. Long-repressed ethnic groups in central and southern Europe were infected with a particularly toxic form of nationalism. Blomis a superb writer who wisely unfolds his story year by year, so readers can gauge the growing intensity of these factors. We, of course, know how the story ends, but Blom succeeds in infusing this outstanding chronicle with drama, compassion, and poignancy.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2008 Booklist
Choice Review
Historian Blom synthesizes contemporaneous literary and intellectual sources to assess the cultural impact of the "vertigo years," 1900-14. Inviting readers to temporarily suspend their knowledge of the tumultuous post-1914 era, the author connects the earlier period to the rise of the machines, which wrought profound macro- and micro-level changes in international, social, and gender relations, giving rise to a dizzying sense of impermanence and simultaneously accentuating ideological and social divides as, for example, in the paradoxical emergence of feminism on the one hand and of incipient fascist movements like futurism on the other. This wide-ranging cultural and political survey of Europe before the Great War devotes little attention to the outside world, apart from the Congo Free State (the site of King Leopold's scandal in 1905) and Japan. With the incorporation of popular culture, the book complements H. Stuart Hughes's older intellectual history, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930 (1958). Most historians will not accept the broader definition of the 20th century (starting from 1900), but the blend of elegant writing and telling illustrations make this book engaging and rewarding reading. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. J. R. White University of Maryland University College
Library Journal Review
Author and journalist Blom (To Have and To Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting) skillfully evokes the profound changes that swept through Europe from 1900 until 1914. He emphasizes that it was a scientific revolution that provided the foundation for the major paradigm shift that took place during these early years of the 20th century. The groundbreaking work of Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, and Marie and Pierre Curie challenged previous theories of the physical world, while Freud, Durkheim, and Bergson delved into the more nebulous realms of human nature to challenge accepted perceptions of human behavior. The certainties of the Victorian age were shattered, and no supposed "truths" were left unchallenged. Europeans were left on shifting ground, with their confusion further exacerbated by rapid urbanization and industrialization. Blom's profiles of numerous artists, architects, writers, activists, politicians, and just ordinary Europeans gives the reader a sense of the magnitude of the transformation that took place in pre-World War I Europe. Noticeably absent from his biographical profiles are Socialists such as Rosa Luxemburg and Eduard Bernstein. In fact, Blom has little to say about the burgeoning Socialist movement, an oversight that will certainly draw criticism. Although his book is a good choice for all modern European history collections, Barbara Tuchman's evocative The Proud Tower remains the best account of fin de siEcle Europe.--Jim Doyle, Rome, GA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations | p. viii |
Acknowledgements | p. xi |
Introduction | p. 1 |
1 1900: The Dynamo and the Virgin | p. 5 |
2 1901: The Changing of the Guard | p. 23 |
3 1902: Oedipus Rex | p. 44 |
4 1903: A Strange Luminescence | p. 71 |
5 1904: His Majesty and Mister Morel | p. 92 |
6 1905: In All Fury | p. 122 |
7 1906: Dreadnought and Anxiety | p. 155 |
8 1907: Dreams and Visions | p. 189 |
9 1908: Ladies with Rocks | p. 219 |
10 1909: The Cult of the Fast Machine | p. 249 |
11 1910: Human Nature Changed | p. 277 |
12 1911: People's Palaces | p. 308 |
13 1912: Questions of Breeding | p. 334 |
14 1913: Wagner's Crime | p. 360 |
15 1914: Murder Most Foul | p. 388 |
Notes | p. 409 |
Bibliography | p. 426 |
Index | p. 453 |