Reading: The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914 by Philipp Blom
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5182266
Modernity did not rise virgin-born from the trenches of the Somme.
The War acted not as a creator, but as a catalyst, forcing old structures to collapse more quickly and new identities to assert themselves more readily.
The Netherlands had never had a strong aristocracy, at least in part, and significantly, because it simply was not large enough in area to sustain a substantial landed class.
In Hungary and Poland, between 10 and 15 per cent of the population belonged to the nobility. (p29)
Klimt (p68, p207)
Secession poster
University of Vienna Ceiling Paintings; Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klimt_University_of_Vienna_Ceiling_Paintings
The dramatic effect was seen most clearly when Röntgen asked his wife to hold her hand in front of the screen. (p79)
More than ever before, science gave answers to ancient questions, possibilities to industry and new dreams to ordinary men and women.
The price for these exciting prospects was the solid, tangible nature of the old world. Certainties tumbled as possibility emerged.
(1903, p91)
Singers estimated that up to 1908 the Congo yielded a profit of some 60 million francs to Leopold, with a further 24 mln after the handover to Belgium
Administration, defence and transport, however, cost King and country some 210 million altogether, a net loss of 126 mln francs
If Leopold managed to make a killing -in both senses of the word- out of his colony it was simply because he pocketed the profis directly and passed on both his debts and the hulk of the administrative cost to his country
Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929), 'le tigre', prime minister from 1906 to 1909 and again from 1917 to 1920, fought twelve duels: seven with pistols, and five with swords.
(1906, p166)
When in 1914 he [Lytton Strachey] became a conscientious objector and had to appear before an army panel, he was asked by the officers what he would do if a German soldier raped his sister. ‘I would endeavour to come between them,' was his reply.
(p280)
Picasso: his magnificently Catholic full name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Rula y Picasso
at the turn of the century, twenty-five London newspapers were entirely devoted to sport. (p330)
Haeckel – Kunstformen der Natur (1904), in which he described the aesthetic beauty of different creatures and natural phenomena in 200 sumptuously drawn illustrations.
Plates are subtly stylized, more like Jugendstil fantasies than scientific work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur
In 1913, some criminals were sentenced to death in France by guillotine.
Made me search for last execution by guillotine: 1977
Previous guarantor of stability, Europe's old ruling caste, went into terminal decline, taking with it the traditional social order and its values
The descendants of the knights and princes of old had been defeated – not by invading armies but by refrigeration and steam turbines
As science expanded human possibilities and vastly increased human knowledge about nature, it also sapped any sense of direction, of purpose.
More knowledge went hand-in hand with less reliance on perception, with a weaker sense of which direction to head in.
More knowledge made the world a darker, less familiar place.
The very basics of life had been robbed of their solidity by the tide of change sweeping across the West, and as tribes of consumers replaced the estates of old, the loss of authenticity, of uniqueness and of unquestioned selfhood was keenly felt
As reason undermined the world, unreason – the timeless realm of instinct and inspiration, of impulse and irrationality – promised to remedy the widespread feeling of emotional and intellectual alienation.
The revolt of unreason was a revolt against modernity itself.
The cult of unreason was important to movements as seemingly incompatible as abstract modernism and fascism.
Change occurred too fast; rationality had outstripped experience
The acceleration without direction made them dizzy. Vertigo was everywhere
Übergangsmenschen, people in transition. Nothing was the same any more, and nothing had yet settled into a new fixed shape.
Oorspronkelijk getweet door Wilte Zijlstra (@wilte) op 14 maart 2021.
wilte 