The Vertigo Years

Change And Culture In The West, 1900-1914

The Vertigo Years

Change And Culture In The West, 1900-1914

Philipp Blom

Der taumelnde Kontinent

Europa 1900-1914

Hanser

Munich

March 2009

Current affairs, History · Philosophy

Sold to Spanish (Anagrama), English (Basic Books), Dutch (De Bezige Bij), Croatian (Fraktura), Estonian (Varrak)

528 pages

"An ambitious book - a one-volume assessment of the gravity-eroding, giddying sweep of European cultural, social, political and spiritual change that permeated the first 15 years of the 20th century. But Philipp Blom has pulled it off triumphantly... a work of narrative history at its best." —Juliet Nicolson, The Guardian
"A stimulating and original insight into an all-too-familiar period. vivid... illuminating..." —Piers Brendon, The Sunday Times
"An account of the fourteen years preceding the First World War, which saw the rise of a new world order, revealing the extent to which the twentieth century was essentially framed before the First World War." —History Today
"This is a hugely rich field and the book is full of good things." —The Literary Review
"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." —Kirkus Review

1900–1914: fifteen dizzying years that culminated in war. A decade and a half in which science, art, literature, music, and architecture produced some of the finest achievements of the century just beginning.

Names such as Albert Einstein, Pierre and Marie Curie, Sigmund Freud, Braque and Picasso, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Duchamp—alongside genuine revolutions in everyday life, from the automobile and the camera to the cinematograph and the department store—made the period before the First World War seem like an idyllic age. Yet these were also the brutal years of the “rubber fever” and the extermination of natives in the Belgian Congo, the days of the frenzied race for naval supremacy, the dawn of the great social struggles of the century…

In this book, Philipp Blom paints a superb historical panorama, awarded the NDR Kultur Sachbuchpreis 2010 and the Groene Waterman Prize.