Fracture: Life and Culture in the West 1918-1938 by Philipp Blom (Atlantic Books, £25)
he 1920s, writes historian Philipp Blom, was a defiantly postwar period; the 1930s ominously prewar. In Europe and America, the years between the world wars heralded revolutions both cultural and political: “The old order, the old values, and the old elites had all failed and no valid new ones had yet been established.”
In America, the confusion spawned the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age, while the beautiful and damned defied Prohibition at lively speakeasies. In Paris, a “lost generation” of disillusioned bohemians made experimental art. But politically, unease manifested itself to horrendous effect; perhaps the most shocking of the many atrocities detailed here is Josef Stalin’s artificial famine of 1932, which killed an estimated 8m, including those executed for resorting to cannibalism.
Blom’s history takes a chapter for each of the 21 interwar years, zooming in on a person, place or event, then expanding focus to a wider theme—shellshock, astronomy, blues. Although much is inevitably excluded or skated over, he is a vivid storyteller, and his vignette-driven technique leads to intriguing juxtapositions. The year of 1933 ends with Stalin slamming down the phone on Boris Pasternak, while 1934 begins as PG Wodehouse publishes his first Bertie Wooster novel; when considering 1930, Blom is as interested in the work of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who carried out the first ever gender reassignment surgery, as he is in the rise of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party.
“It is the tragedy of the interwar period that it did not have an open future,” writes Blom; this is a rich survey of an era not so much of peace as “a continuation of war by other means.”
he 1920s, writes historian Philipp Blom, was a defiantly postwar period; the 1930s ominously prewar. In Europe and America, the years between the world wars heralded revolutions both cultural and political: “The old order, the old values, and the old elites had all failed and no valid new ones had yet been established.”
In America, the confusion spawned the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age, while the beautiful and damned defied Prohibition at lively speakeasies. In Paris, a “lost generation” of disillusioned bohemians made experimental art. But politically, unease manifested itself to horrendous effect; perhaps the most shocking of the many atrocities detailed here is Josef Stalin’s artificial famine of 1932, which killed an estimated 8m, including those executed for resorting to cannibalism.
Blom’s history takes a chapter for each of the 21 interwar years, zooming in on a person, place or event, then expanding focus to a wider theme—shellshock, astronomy, blues. Although much is inevitably excluded or skated over, he is a vivid storyteller, and his vignette-driven technique leads to intriguing juxtapositions. The year of 1933 ends with Stalin slamming down the phone on Boris Pasternak, while 1934 begins as PG Wodehouse publishes his first Bertie Wooster novel; when considering 1930, Blom is as interested in the work of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who carried out the first ever gender reassignment surgery, as he is in the rise of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party.
“It is the tragedy of the interwar period that it did not have an open future,” writes Blom; this is a rich survey of an era not so much of peace as “a continuation of war by other means.”
