http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/12/before-the-lights-went-out/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=e30d6942bb-Mosaic_2013_12_9&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-e30d6942bb-41165129
“The first second of 1913. A gunshot rings out through the dark night. There’s a brief click, fingers tense on the trigger, then comes a second, dull report. The alarm is raised, the police dash to the scene and arrest the gunman straight away. His name is Louis Armstrong.” Armstrong is 12 years old. At the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys, where he is later dumped, he is so unruly that the home’s director thrusts a cornet into his hands to help the boy blow off steam. He never puts it down. A star is born.
With this shot in the night, the German art historian Florian Illies opens this entertaining romp through the mind-boggling year 1913.
Among historians, who stare mesmerized into the vortex of insanity that produced the Big Bang of August 1914, the precursor year is a bit of an orphan. World politics are in a holding pattern; the players of the future lounge about, biding their time. Hitler is painting postcards, Stalin is writing nationalist essays, Trotsky is playing chess. All three are in Vienna. Hitler and Stalin enjoy morning walks in the park of Schönbrunn, as does the old emperor Franz Josef, who is contemptuous of the Erzherzog (Archduke Franz Ferdinand) racing through Vienna in a car that has golden spokes like the emperor’s coach.
Stalin beats Lenin seven times in a row at chess before leaving Krakow for Vienna. But it is Leon Bronstein (Trotsky) who becomes known as the best player in the Café Central. That year, the man who will kill him in Mexico is born in Barcelona. That’s the sort of thing one learns from Illies.
This marvelous book is like a box of rich cultural chocolates, each wrapped in the brightly glittering foil of its own significance. They are tightly packed, one next to the other in chronological tiers called months. The result is a stunning kaleidoscope of High Modernism: Artistically, 1913 was exploding in fulfillment. Best known is the pandemonium that erupted on May 29 at the premiere in Paris of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, choreographed and danced by the scandalous Nijinski and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Although Maurice Ravel, from his cheap seat, yelled “genius” above the outraged audience, the next morning Le Figaro surmised that the Russians weren’t prepared for the French proclivity to protest “once stupidity has reached its nadir.”
The enjoyment of Illies’s spirited depiction is a bit marred by the translation. It was originally done for a British readership. Hence, one has to get used to Briticisms, such as “interval” for “intermission.” Fair enough, if we acknowledge the seniority of British over American English. But there is no excuse for telling us that Gabriele d’Annunzio, who sat in the audience on May 29, had run away from his disciples (Gläubigen) in Italy, when he had really escaped from his creditors (Gläubigern).
