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  • A New Century Begins
  • Stanley Weintraub
Philipp Blom. The Vertigo Years. Europe, 1900–1914. New York: Basic Books, 2008. xi + 466 pp. $29.95

Cultural Histories require handles. A convenient one has been the “long century” from Waterloo to the Great War. ELT claims the short half-century from the deaths of George Eliot and Disraeli (and, with them, high Victorianism) to the failed Treaty of Versailles and the collapse of high modernism. Philipp Blom explores the dizzying span from 1900 (a convenient number although actually the last year of the old century) to 1914, and the outbreak of the Great War. What his strategy requires are handy symbols about which to spin a narrative of what he calls the vertigo years, which begin here in optimism and close in anxiety. The problem with symbols, however, is that each may hark back distantly while expanding well past the intended time frame. The vertigo becomes the reader’s.

Blom opens with the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, with its iconic statue of La Parisienne atop the entrance arch, modeled vaguely on Sarah Bernhardt. The “Divine Sarah,” however, an international star then fifty-six, was the heroine of 1880s and 1890s melodramas giving way to a new theater. She epitomized the fading nineteenth century. The gaudy fair intended to illuminate national cultures in representative structures. Britain erected a building by Edward Lutyens “modelled on the town hall of Bradford-upon-Avon,” one of Blom’s plethora of geographical and historical errors, many of them a result of piling too much unchecked anecdotal detail, back and forth, upon his chapter symbols. Thus Bismarck, deposed by Wilhelm II in 1890 and dead in 1898, becomes “the then chancellor of Germany” in the 1910 chapter, where Edward VII dies “in a hotel in Biarritz” rather than in his royal bed at Buckingham Palace. In the same chapter, Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West is an “American emigrant opera,” Virginia Woolf comments upon T. S. Eliot’s yet-unwritten poetry and upon Lytton Strachey’s future Eminent Victorians—and Strachey himself is described as a conscientious objector in 1914 to a draft not instituted until 1916. Further, a “Paris reviewer” is quoted as concluding of Matisse that he had “thrown a pot of paint in the public’s face”—a libel on Whistler by Ruskin in 1877. Readers are herewith cautioned about pages replete with square pegs and round holes.

A more successful icon of 1900 is Henry Adams’s dynamo, a reality which Blom will revisit. In Paris, Adams sampled the hall of roaring dynamos and as a prophet of decline would later recall the array of [End Page 333] powerful machines. Blom’s central event of 1901 is the funeral of Queen Victoria, sovereign of the world’s undisputed superpower, unaware in her lifetime that her domains were already in decline, thanks to the distant Boer War and the uncalculated costs of empire. Aristocracy, everywhere, was also in unrecognized erosion, for taxed land, its power base, was becoming more burden than boon. Seeping democratization was weakening hierarchical authority, even in Hohenzollern Germany and Romanov Russia, while in the patchwork Hapsburg monarchy its temporizing bureaucrats thought that they had put off the future by what Blom calls “the noble art of controlled inertia and spasmodic improvisation.”

The only unifying idea in the Austro-Hungarian empire, Blom’s iconic image for 1902, was the doddering Franz Josef I, offstage yet central in Robert Musil’s gargantuan yet unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities. Written a generation later, and referred to again and again, it evokes for Blom the formalized emptiness of the fraying old order. The emperor as trompe l’oeil father figure offers Blom, an Austrian historian, the opportunity to insert more influential Viennese—Sigmund Freud, the subverter of parental authority, and a cohort of other lively contemporaries in the arts and sciences undermining the rigid fictions of behavior. For 1903 Blom evokes Marie Curie and the dangerous luminescence of radium, leading him into prophetic fictions of dystopian outcomes by H. G. Wells, Maurice Leblanc and Hans Dominik.

For 1904, Blom cites further bleak outcomes from exploited colonies like Belgian Congo and the former Boer...

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