![]() Told with IlliesĀ“s characteristic mixture of poignant evocation and laconic irony, 1913 is the story of the year that shaped the last century. In a Munich hotel lobby, Rilke and Freud discuss beauty and transience Proust sets out in search of lost time and while Stravinsky celebrates the Rite of Spring with industrial cacophony, in Munich an Austrian postcard painter by the name of Adolf Hitler sells his conventional cityscapes. Yet everywhere there is the premonition of ruin - the number 13 is omnipresent, and in London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Trieste, artists take the omen and act as if there were no tomorrow, their brief coincidences of existence telling of a darker future. Kafka falls in love Louis Armstrong learns to play the trumpet a young seamstress called Coco Chanel opens her first boutique Charlie Chaplin signs his first movie contract and new drugs like cocaine usher in an age of decadence. ![]() The stuffy conventions of the nineteenth century are receding into the past, and 1913 heralds a new age of unlimited possibility. A witty yet moving narrative worked up from sketched documentary traces and biographical fragments, 1913 is an intimate cultural portrait of a world that is about to change forever. A bravura performance - Harald Jahner, author Aftermath Praise for Florian Illies: Illies is as astute a researcher as he is an observer of the zeitgeist Guardian A vivid, richly textured book that chronicles a world crackling with talent, energy and foreboding Financial Times An absolute gem of a book Observer Thorough and. ![]()
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