“1913: The Year before the Storm”, by Florian Illies

 

268 pages, Melville House, ISBN-13: 978-1612193519

Back on August 10^th, 2022, I reviewed 1913: In Search of the World before the Great War by Charles Emmerson, and said that “I wanted this lost world to be brought to life once again, even if briefly, but it wasn’t. There are facts and figures and allusions and discussions and so on and so forth, but this is just dry knowledge…While 1913 is an interesting global tour of the world of 1913, it in no way brought this world back to life, and it sadly remains hidden still”. And so it was with this in mind that I got 1913: The Year before the Storm by Florian Illies, a German writer and art historian – for free, for reasons too opaque to go through here. Ask me about it sometime.

1913: The Year before the Storm is divided in twelve chapters, each corresponding to a month in this last full year of peace; each chapter in turn is made up of a series of vignettes of something interesting that happened at that time, many in Germany and Europe (well, what did you expect from a German author?). No verse. No poetry. Just a chronology of stuff, much like the aforementioned and maligned 1913. And so I am seemingly right back to where I started, with a dry recording of facts in which this happened and then that happened with no magic occurring and no spirits lifted by a lost world brought back to life, even if only in our minds.

Only…this 1913 does what the other 1913 did not; brings this world, dead by mass suicide committed on a global-scale, to life once more. You wouldn’t think that this was so, seeing as all it is are accounts of mostly famous people doing their things: politicians politicking, artists painting, singers singing, musicians playing and on and on – but somehow Illies accomplishes that which Emmerson failed to do: breathe life once more into a world long dead. Perhaps it is because Illies allows his subjects to speak for themselves, as it were; he steps back and observes their goings-on while narrating what is happening, never interfering with his own input.

Or perhaps it is because Illies chose to go small scale rather than large: by focusing on the lives of persons – not ordinary persons, but all the same – rather than on places or policies or politicians, he made his book more intimate and relatable to you and I. As these folks go through their days with Armageddon mere months away, we see them as we would ourselves, with their concerns both sacred and profane dominating their lives and motivating their actions. Just like us, today. This, I think, is Illies’ secret: by focusing his tales on the small he in fact encompasses so much of this lost world and makes it breath again, if only in our imaginations.

1913: The Year before the Storm resurrected this lost year and made me yearn for a world long dead – and I don’t know why, seeing as there is little to recommend this dead place to a fella such as I. Perhaps on some level I am fascinated by an entire society that saw cultural seppuku as preferable to the way things were, all without knowing the blood and terror that would ensue when this (admittedly unjust and flawed, though stable) culture imploded. Or maybe it’s just that I miss all of that Edwardian fashion. Regardless, Illies has done us all an invaluable service in making 1913 live once more, if only briefly.