Mike Sansbury, of The Grove Bookshop reviews 1913; The Year Before The Storm by Florian Illies Hindsight is a fascinating thing; it can be illuminating and instructive or frivolous and futile, and perhaps more retrospective musing has been applied to the period leading up to the First World War than to any other historical era.

The golden summers, the oblivious gaiety, the inevitability of conflict are all painful to behold from our distant viewpoint as we succumb to the various facts and myths which have become part of history.

I approached Florian Illies’ new book with trepidation, expecting more fuel for wistful romantics longing for lost innocence, but I was pleasantly surprised by his approach.

Rather than wallowing in what might have been, Illies simply presents a chronological picture of the year 1913 through glimpses into the everyday lives of the principal artistic, literary, cultural and political figures of the day.

He lays out the facts and possibilities, then leaves it to us to draw conclusions. Thus, as the Emperor Franz Joseph passes through Schonbrunn Park in his carriage, it is entirely possible that both Stalin and Hitler, who were residing in Vienna at the time, might have been out strolling. If so, this was as close as the two dictators would ever come to meeting.

Meanwhile, Franz Kafka is attempting to conduct a love affair while writing Metamorphosis, and Louis Armstrong is discovering the infinite possibilities of the trumpet.

Although the book covers much of Europe and beyond, it is clearly written from a German point of view, so not all readers will be entirely familiar with Georg Trakl, Harry Kessler or the various artists of the Die Brucke and Blaue Reiter schools of German Expressionist painting, but this helps to highlight the rich cultural life enjoyed by Austrians and Germans at the beginning of the last century as well as avoiding the over-familiarity experienced when we encounter figures from our own literary and artistic canon.

More familiar figures, such as Klimt, Freud and Proust, balance things out a little, and Gustav Mahler’s widow, Alma, plays a central role as she flits between lovers. Despite the factual nature of the book, Illies is far from dispassionate, so there are still heroes, like Kafka, villains like Stalin, and characters like Hitler who, as an itinerant painter, comes across almost sympathetically during this lost period of his life.

When Kafka eventually finds love of sorts, we rejoice, and there is an excellent running joke about the Mona Lisa which reaches a joyful conclusion as the book nears its end.

The book is strongest when Illies juxtaposes simple facts, so that the births of Eva Braun and Burt Lancaster stand out for very different reasons, while a school massacre in Bremen strikes a sickeningly modern note. Perhaps he is assuming a certain depth of knowledge in his readers, but I would have liked to see some brief biographies of the principal characters at the end.

That way, we would be told of Trakl’s depression and suicide after serving as a medical officer on the Western Front, or Ernst Junger’s later meetings with Picasso and his century-long life.

Despite this omission, this is rich illustration of life a hundred years ago, written with warmth, humour and observation, and it might be well to read about the year before the war before we are engulfed by the storm of 1914-18 books which lurks ominously in the background.