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46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Vertigo Years from 1900 to the outbreak of World War I were a dizzying time in European culture, October 29, 2008
This review is from: The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 (Hardcover)
My dictionary defines "vertigo" as a state of dizzy disorientation. Think the film "Vertigo" directed by Alfred Hitchcok in 1958. In the excellent history book under review in this article we see Professor Philippe Blom of Vienna dissect European society during the last 15 years of the long "nineteenth century" world prior to the holocaust of World War I.
Blom devotes one chapter to each of the years. In this intellectually acute book he explores such subjects as:
1. The suffragete movement in several European countries focusing on the cause in Great Britain.
2. We see how the building of the huge Dreadnought ships led to an arms race which would plunge the world into war in the summer of 1915. Germany wished to become a mighty foe of England.
3. Eugenics and racial anti-semitism is discussed in depth. The trial of General Alfred Dreyfus made palpable the hatred of Jews in European life.
4. Russia was trapped under the feudal stupidity of Nicholas II but revolution in 1905 was a strong bellwether of the later Bolshevik revolution which succeeded in 1918. Russia was a land of peasants, poor education and unbelievable backwardness.
5. The concept of the Dynamo and the Virgin first enunciated by American scholar Henry Adams at the Paris World's Fair of 1900 emphasized the importance of dynamic machines changing daily life. The development of the telephone, motor cars, telegraph and the airplane changed daily life. Women were becoming more assertive due to the ability to obtain contraception devices and the anonymity of life in conurbation cultures.
Speed and virility were becoming important in the male chauvinistic culture of Europe.
6. Blom traces the rise of mass entertainment through the phonograph and motion picture screen. Caruso sold the first record to sell one million copies when he recorded "Pagliacci." Movies were the rage!
7. Blom traces the genocide of Leopold II King of Belgian who presided over the Belgian Congo. Over 10 million of his black subjects died there due to starvation, brutal mutilations and overwork on his rubber plantations. Blom uses this horror to discuss the evils of European colonialism. All the major European players participated in their greed for gold and land.
8, Avant-gardism was manifest in the arts through the works of such figures as Kandinsky, Mahler, Stravinsky,Braque, Picasso, Matisse and others. Traditional cultural values were,however, hotly and staunchly defended.
9. We see the rise of popular culture with the cultivation of mystery and detective fiction in such characters as Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
10. Modern psychiatry was born in the writings and research of Sigmund Freud. The subconscious was being explored and sexual desire in humans was being opely discussed. The subconscious motivations of humanity were explored. Nihilism and the disturbing philosophies of Nietzsche were popular.
Blom shows how the certainties and hypocricies of the Victorian age ending with that venerable queen's death in 1901 were being effaced by the speed and phobias of modern life.
Blom has presented a thoughtful and sage overview of this critical but often overlook time as the twentieth century began. It was a time of transition, contradiction and momentous change. It was, if you will, the birth of the modern age.
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Vertigo Years, October 31, 2008
This review is from: The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 (Hardcover)
`The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914` is Philipp Blom's third non-fiction book. I bought it on the strength of his former two, both of which are fantastic, and I'm happy I did - his ability to write engagingly on just about any time period is demonstrated here in what is probably his strongest book yet. Bloom's central thesis is that, traditionally told, the years leading up to WWI were overshadowed by the war - it was an idyllic "long summertime" of peace, an extension of the assuredly naive 19th century. However Blom reveals just about everything we think of as "modern" was happening before the war, it was a time not of coasting, but of "machines and women, speed and sex," a disintegration of the old world without a clear vision of a new. Like a teenager getting behind the wheel of a car for the first time, it was exciting and dangerous, a cocktail of fundamental social changes converging all at once. Technology of the car, movie, photo and electric light; class relations; women's roles, Freud; Eugenics; colonialism; modern art; cult of "manliness", etc.. all combined to create a fractured new world, where individuals don multiple identities no longer tied to tradition, and an endemic vertiginous exhaustion flourished. Bloom crisscrosses the continent from Russia to England, from the Balkans to Sweden, each page a small feast of ideas, people and events. As a native of Vienna, Bloom commands a deep understanding of central European history in a way I have never seen before, revealing insights and people entirely new to me - it's a true pan-European perspective told with compelling prose.
Like the subject it describes, the book is fractured, moving between ideas, people, events, places and times - but Blom is nothing but orderly in his exposition of how things were related. Freud's theories for instance were mirrored by the political realities of the Austrian culture he lived in. Each chapter has a human interest "frame story" providing a smooth flowing narrative and Ken Burns-like feel for the time. There are ample quotations and fascinating black and white pictures, including a color plate section of modern art. It is a social history not only about the wealthy and intellectual elite, but the attitudes of the general public and zeitgeist of the many. A very long and up to date bibliography and notes section provides a lot more reading.
It's one of the better history books I have read, enhancing my understanding not only of the early 20th century, but its inheritor the present.
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Dislocation and chaos, November 15, 2008
This review is from: The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 (Hardcover)
Imagine, suggests historian Philipp Blom, that an army of bookworms munched their way through every piece of information that we have available to us about the world after the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914. Only then, he insists, can we begin to understand the impact of the first 14 years of the twentieth century, a time of chaos when old, established truths vanished for good and were replaced only with speed, change and uncertainty.
Blom takes a novel approach to constructing his argument -- that the world being created was one where vertigo and fear dominated from the worlds of economics and politics to the arts and gender relations -- by devoting each chapter to a year and a theme. Thus, the chapter headlined 1901, the year of Queen Victoria's death, serves as Blom's vehicle for recounting the collapse of the old land-based aristocracies against Europe and the rise of new kinds of leaders. Chapters are devoted to scientific discoveries, which in turn give Blom a way to explore how fields as different as psychiatry (Sigmund Freud) and physics (Marie Curie) demolished the concept of time, space and identity. Women asserted their rights and along with visionaries and dreamers, occupied a new place of prominence in the public debate. Some tried to cling to old ways -- Blom explores the naval arms race of 1906 as a way to discuss how society's anxieties produced a new emphasis on military identity.
While the author almost never refers to the great event that looms on the horizon -- World War I and the killing fields of France and Flanders -- our own awareness of where this is leading adds a chill to to the year-by-year recitation. A chapter devoted to random violence (1913), those exploring the myriad new machines that came to dominate popular culture -- it's impossible to read those in ignorance of the ways that the machines would soon be used to maximize the murderous power of armies and the way in which violence would become an integral part of all the societies that Blom explores.
It is common to refer to those who came of age during the Great War and the 1920s as the 'Lost Generation' -- individuals who had to struggle in the wake of that carnage to find some sense of identity and purpose. What Blom has succeeded in doing is showing that crisis of identity began much earlier -- and the astute reader can find all too many reflections of the themes he explores in the early years of the 21st century. Replace the automobile with the Internet, and...
The only reason I haven't awarded Blom's opus five stars is an unfortunate tendency to repeat himself; retelling the same anecdote in the same context, hammering points into the reader's mind with far too heavy a hand. This reached its climax in the final chapter, which was a great disappointment, offering little more than a summary of themes which had already become more than clear and where I would have expected a historian and writer of his obvious talents to find a more thoughtful, provocative and perhaps even forward-looking manner of wrapping up his narrative.
Overall, however, this is a triumph. Given the author's ability to mix politics and culture on all levels, it will appeal to anyone who has enjoyed Paul Fussell's more focused "The Great War & Modern Memory" or Modris Ekstein's "Rites of Spring" (which begans at a later date and carries through to the 1920s.)
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