1913: The Year Before the Storm (Hardcover) by Florian Illies, Shaun Whiteside, Jamie Lee Searle

from stephengoldenberg

A fascinating idea - to take the year before the 1st world war and create this portrait of it. There's some fascinating stuff but it helps if you are interested in middle Eurpean art and literature at the time. It's not exactly very wide ranging but follows a relatively small artistic circle, som...

from vguy

"Read" as an audiobook auf Deutsch. Intriguing and often witty, if bitty. Snapshots of the famous, mainly creative artists, mainly in the German-speaking world. Here and there other nations get a look-in but that makes them seem arbitrary, e.g. why DH Lawrence, not Somerset Maugham or Henry James...

from jcbrunner

An amusing month by month chronicle of what happened to the German literati, artists and politicians in the year 1913, as if the world was solely composed of famous or soon-to-be famous people, a mix of Wikipedia snippets and tweets. At the beginning of the year, we find Hitler, Stalin and Tito a...

from Schmerguls

This is a kind of weird and unusual book, published in Germany in 2012. Month by month it tells of things going on in 1913, concentrating on artists and writers such as Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, and the like.. Occasionally it tells of Hitler and his time in Vienna, but only fleeting...

from VGAHarris

Broken down in a month by month chronology it features a number of the main figures from that era along with a number of more obscure ones. The Kafka and Mann vignettes are interesting, some of the others are more esoteric and may be more appealing to specialists in that setting. Written with one...