The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914

This is one of the best books I've read in recent years and I am sure I will come back to it for reference many times. History books are often dull and loaded with dry fact. This one is engaging and inspiring. It reveals many little known events that were a sensation in their time, but we know little about them today. Starting from an intimate story, Blom moves to analyze a whole period and shows how the story fits into it or even symbolizes it. His style is engaging, witty and full of surprises. For example, I first read one of the latter chapters, titled Wagner's Crime, because I thought it was about the composer whose music I like. Instead, the chapter centers around an insane serial murderer, a provincial Austrian teacher. The last chapter, about year 1914 is titled Murder Most Foul. I had no doubt it was about the assassination of the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo. Wrong! The chapter derives its title from the sensational murder committed by the wife of a French politician. I disagree with the reviewer who said the last chapter is repetitive. I am glad Blom summarized the points from his previous chapters, rounding his image of the era. The book was hard to put down. And more importantly, it inspired me to reach for other history books, Internet, or whatever, to find out more about the topics Blom tackles. For example, I played my Stravinsky CD while I read passages about the Paris premiere of the Rites of Spring. I have always been interested in the early 19-hundreds and fin-de-siecle, but this book really gave me the flavor of the era, as if I were living through it. In addition, I found in it a lot of parallel with our times, 100 years later. We are going through similar anxieties and insecurities at the beginning of a new century. People suffer from similar mental and other diseases. I found, for example, similarities between neurasthenia and fibromyalgia. Serial killings such as Wagner's also take place, including those committed by deranged teenagers. The battle between the sexes is far from over. And while some of us are "futurists," others would like to stop the clock from ticking and hold on to the 20-th century beliefs and practices. I cannot think of a better book to read at this time.

I was delightfully surprised and excepetionally informed by this book. I was amazed at what I had not understood about the fascinating happenings in the period before WW1. What furment and turmoil was going on in art, music, poltics, and women efforts to receive equal treatment. You will miss a lot if you do not read this book.

Too often we are tempted to see the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a kind of utopian "belle epoque", a long lazy Edwardian summer afternoon that was rudely shattered by 1914. Philipp Blom, in the introduction to his fascinating history of Europe from 1900 to 1914, suggests that imagine that all of our knowledge of what occurred from 1914 on has been destroyed, so that we can examine those years without grim foreshadowings. Its a good idea, because Blom has provided an excellent history of the first few years of the twentieth century in Europe that lets the reader recognize that the belle epoque wasn't such a golden afternoon after all. Taking each year chapter by chapter, Blom moves from one interrelated topic to another. I was fascinated by his many short histories of various topics like anti-Semitism, eugenics, the suffragette movement, the Congo atrocities, and the armaments race. He covers social, artistic, and cultural history as well as, if not better, the standard political/military narratives. Not since Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower have I read such fascinating history of that period. Like Tuchman, Blom excells in selecting intriguing but not well known people as exemplars of particular trends or movements. I will reread and enjoy The Vertigo Years many times, and if I occasionally experience some nostalgic regret for that now lost golden afternoon, I will find the rich stories and vignettes provided by Blom an excellent substitute.

`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.

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