Name: The Vertigo Years
Rating: 4.5 (3 reviews)

Philipp Blom

Examines how changes from the Industrial Revolution prior to World War I brought about radical transformation in society, changes in education, and massive migration in population that led to one of the bloodiest events in history.

Europe, 1900-1914

The Vertigo Years

Tim Pendry

As a work of history, this is, frankly, an intelligent entertainment rather than anything more analytically stimulating but it is good at what it does. Each chapter is a year but this is a little misleading because the year is just an excuse to delve into two or three thematic stories. The overall thesis is perhaps overstretched - that 1900-1914 was particularly 'vertiginous' and contained all the seeds of modernity. In fact, all periods can be presented as vertiginous in their own way and all periods contain the seeds of the period that follows - that is how history works. It is best read as the recovery of a period often neglected, that between the Victorian era and the Great 1914-1945 European Civil War. It was published six years before the widespread cultural interest (at least in the UK) in the centenary dates of the First World War. Once you decide not to expect too much, you can settle down to enjoy some very well written and insightful extended short essays covering a very wide range of subjects, from the horrors of the Congo under the Belgians through the life and achievement of Marie Curie to the Sezession. The high point for me was an account of the 1905 Russian Revolution and the state of the Tsarist Empire but others may find accounts of eugenics, early feminism, Kaiser Wilhelm and the dreadnoughts, Viennese (and European) neurosis and criminology equally interesting. Some sort of major theme emerges near the end centred on gender relationships and sexuality in which the swaggering militarised male is presented as derivative from deep anxieties about masculinity partly created by the rise of more independent women but also by change itself. I am afraid I am not wholly convinced. It is all too pat and, rather like the increasingly dreadful BBC historical dramas, an attempt to shoehorn many of the anxieties and interpretations of modern liberals into the past, reading them back as a benighted weakness on which we have improved. Blom is not the worst of modern intellectuals at trying to interpret history along these lines (and it has got worse since he wrote the book) but he does cross the line from telling useful truths about Curie, the Kaiser and Klimt to the ideologisation of the past. Still, he does it lightly and he cannot be blamed for living, any more than any other writer, in a particular atmosphere of publisher and reader expectations. if the market needs to interpret the past in a certain way, it will be interpreted in that way until the market mood changes again. Blom is certainly well read to the point where one can enjoy his prose as a rather old-fashioned but still worthy narrative even if it is more anecdotal than 'grand' history. Sometimes he gets tired and repeats himself but not too often. Overall, recommended to get a better feel for an often neglected era with some important insights, useful in interpreting the subsequent period of war and fascism as well as offering us the seeds of much of our own cultural norms, not only feminism but mechanisation and managerialism.

The Vertigo Years Europe, 1900-1914

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