LOVE IN A TIME OF HATE

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.