The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 - Hardcover

Blom, Philipp

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465011160 ISBN 13: 9780465011162

Publisher: Basic Books, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*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. --Jay Freeman

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465011160
• ISBN 13: 9780465011162
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 488