Love in the shadow of the Nazi threat

The 1930s saw Walter Benjamin write The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Marlene Dietrich rise to fame in The Blue Angel and Pablo Picasso paint ‘Guernica’. If history books mention these events, it’s usually as footnotes to the main European narrative of the pre-war decade. To shift the rise of Nazism, the Spanish Civil War, the Great Terror and other landmarks to the background, one could turn to the cultural history, or the micro-history.

In his new book, the German art historian Florian Illies combines both genres to reconstruct the 1930s. Snippets from period documents, including private letters and diaries of notable figures of European and American culture, are distilled into short (between a couple of lines and a few paragraphs) episodes. Illies previously used the technique in 1913:The Year Before the Storm. Here, the focus is less on news coverage and more on personal feelings and reflections. It takes a skilful hand to arrange these vignettes into a dramatic image of the world slipping into catastrophe.

At the turn of the decade, Berlin, Paris, Vienna and New York are hives of modernity. ‘Women don’t need men anymore’, neither sexually nor economically; yet when Gunta Stölzl finally manages to break through the glass ceiling at the Bauhaus, her appointment as the head of its textile workshop in Dessau doesn’t last. Germany (the main setting, for obvious reasons) has a vibrant gay culture, though not everyone is ready for it. Klaus Mann, for instance, knows that ‘his open homosexuality is a constant embarrassment to his father,’ Thomas Mann, who ‘has spent his whole life so artfully repressing his own’. The author of Death in Venice will soon be denounced as a ‘Marxist, pacifist, Jew-miscegenated thinker’. But for now at least some of the book’s protagonists are having the time of their lives.