Praise for Love in a Time of Hate: “An enthralling and insightful cultural history—one that shows how, over the course of one pivotal decade, love, freedom and the freedom to love gave way to fear, madness and despair. . . . Each piece in the book’s mosaic-like structure glints brilliantly.” —Malcolm Forbes, Washington Post Book Review “ A high-speed panoramic tour of the romantic and creative lives of Europe’s celebrity artists over the prewar decade … [in] a hyper-mobile frieze of lovemaking and art-making against darkening skies. … The narrative picks up weight and urgency as fascism imperils [Illies’s]is luminaries, body and soul.” ―Financial Times “A kaleidoscopic romp through the decades that preceded World War II. … As the culture of Europe shifts away from experimentation and play toward large-scale social collapse, the author wrestles with how easily — and disconcertingly — hate can take over a population.” ―Vulture “A kaleidoscopic view of a fevered decade. . . . [that] creates a sense of immediacy and tension. . . . Illies vividly captures his subjects’ disorientation, dizziness, fear, and desperation. . . . A dramatic, richly detailed cultural history.” ―Kirkus Reviews “Florian Illies has pieced together the emotional history of a doomed generation. … Wickedly amusing until the Nazis first reprove the libertines and then set about exterminating them … which gives [this] book a disturbing relevance.” ―The Observer “Ten years ago, Illies had a great success with 1913 , which anatomised the year preceding the First World War. His grander task here enfolds the entire decade before the Second. It tells of how, as became clear to everyone from the blighted Fitzgeralds to any number of wandering Jewish intellectuals, ‘the Thirties are picking up the tab for the Twenties.’. … There’s the thrill of discovery on every page.” ―Telegraph “It takes a skilful hand to arrange these vignettes into a dramatic image of the world slipping into catastrophe. ... Intimate relationships make for great material, now blending into, now contrasting with, the storm clouds on the horizon. … Illies reads his protagonists’ feelings, love included, like a social barometer. … A crucial perspective on ‘those blazing years before everything goes dark’.” ―The Spectator “Love in a Time of Hate invites us to consider that history is as much an accretion of small gestures as it is a catalogue of battles and speeches. At once intimate and epic, this dazzling book illuminates the human desire to seek connection and coherence as the world descends into chaos. A brilliant and imaginative tour de force.” ―Rebecca Donner, author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler “This is candid, unsparing and gripping social history. A bravura performance.” ―Harald Jähner, author of Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich “Set against the relentless rise of Nazi terror, this ingenious narrative evokes the 1930s through the loves, foibles, and tragedies of the cultural elite. Strikingly original, utterly absorbing.” ―Julia Boyd, author of Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism 1919-1945 Praise for 1913: The Year before the Storm: “Utterly delicious … a sexy, comic and occasionally heartbreaking soap opera.”—The Washington Post “Illies is as astute a researcher as he is an observer of the zeitgeist” ―Guardian “A vivid, richly textured book that chronicles a world crackling with talent, energy and foreboding.”— Financial Times click here to register
2023-07-07 A kaleidoscopic view of a fevered decade.
In a narrative constructed as a collage of terse vignettes, German editor and art historian Illies, author of 1913: The Year Before the Storm , draws from memoirs, letters, biographies, and histories to create an intimate portrait of 10 turbulent years, from 1929 to 1939, when the hedonism of the Jazz Age gave way to the terror of fascism and war. The text, related in the present tense, creates a sense of immediacy and tension as it chronicles the love affairs, betrayals, madness, and inspiration that roiled the lives of artists, their models and muses, poets, novelists, philosophers, and performers who were living and working in Europe, particularly Germany and France. These include some of the 20th century’s most notable cultural figures: Thomas Mann, his wife, Katia, and their children; Vladimir Nabokov and the dazzling Véra; Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; Henry Miller, his wife, June, and his lover Anaïs Nin; Picasso, his wife, Olga, and his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, who had become his main model. Once Hitler became the German chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, an exodus began. Jews, communists, homosexuals, and men in love with the wrong women were forced into exile or sent to concentration camps. Threatened with persecution, many others fled. George Grosz became the first emigrant of 1933 when, on Jan. 12, he and his wife sailed for New York, where Grosz had been offered a job at the Art Students League. Erich Maria Remarque left Germany for Switzerland the day before Hitler seized power. Some headed for the south of France; Walter Benjamin chose to go to Ibiza. Hermann Hesse and his wife settled in Lugano; Brecht lived nearby. Illies vividly captures his subjects’ disorientation, dizziness, fear, and desperation. In December, Paul Klee and his wife, Lily, left Germany, never to return. “It was a bad year,” Lily wrote. “I look back on it with horror.”
A dramatic, richly detailed cultural history.
Actor Jacqui Bardelang is proficient at a wide range of accents, but for this multifaceted history of the 10 years leading up to WWII she wisely relies on her own very pleasing and engaging voice. Dozens of romantic alliances define that troubled decade, many familiar, such as those of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Marlene Deitrich and Eric Maria Remarque; some barely remembered today. The narrative--lively, witty, and rich in detail--moves at a speed that would be challenging for the listener were the narrator not so skilled and engaging. Though this is only her second audiobook credit, Bardelang is clearly a performer with style, energy, and range who will please listeners for years to come. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
SEPTEMBER 2023 - AudioFile