It has been a long time since an anniversary has been so intensively celebrated as the current centenary of the beginning of the First World War. From the local perspective, some may think that it is a jubilee that is so comprehensively present only on our sides, in Serbia and Bosnia. Such a thought would be a great delusion. Yes, there are many new editions on the Sarajevo assassination and the First World War in bookstore windows and kiosks, but this is only a drop in the ocean compared to, for example, the commitment of English publishers to the centenary of 1914. Visiting London bookstores three months ago, in almost every one of them I would come across central shelves and "gondolas" where only books related to the First World War in one way or another were displayed. It was there, in London, that I discovered the book by the German author Florian Ilyes, actually its English translation: 1913: The Year Before the Storm. In the translation of the title, the English translators and editors gave themselves a little artistic freedom. In the original, the book is called 1913. The Summer of the Century (S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2012). However, the Serbian publisher and translator respected the original, so our edition is called 1913. Summer of the century (AED studio, Belgrade, 2014; translated from German by Spomenka Krajčević).
LADY GIORGIO'S SMILE: Divided into twelve chapters, each dedicated to one month of 1913, titled after "their" months (the first is called January, second February etc. until the last one Decembra), 1913. presents a peculiar and original chronicle of the last year before the world wars. Concentrating on the key protagonists of modern history and the history of art, Ilijes paints a witty and suggestive fresco of a time. The introduction to each chapter is its telegraphic summary. Just for the sake of illustration, here is how the first chapter is summarized: "Hitler and Stalin meet while walking in the Chembrunn palace park, something is said that can be understood as the disclosure of Thomas Mann's homosexuality, Franz Kafka is almost mad with love." A cat crept onto Sigmund Freud's couch. It is very cold, the snow crunches underfoot. Elsa Lasker-Schiller, completely impoverished and in love with Gottfried Benn, receives a postcard from Franz Marc with a picture of a horse, and calls Gabriela Minter a zero. Ernst Ludwig Kichner draws cockatoos on Potsdamer Platz. The first looping was performed. All this, however, does not help. Oswald Spengler is already working on his The downfall of the West." In this summary, some of the "heroes" of not only the chapter on January but also the entire book are listed. Each of the chapters is again divided into dozens of short untitled and unnumbered fragments separated by asterisks. Not only for the sake of illustration, here is what the third paragraph looks like: "The search." She disappeared - Leonardo Mona Lisa. It was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, and there is still no reliable trace. The Paris police also interrogate Pablo Picasso, but since he has a solid alibi, he can go home. Mourning French people in the Louvre lean bouquets against an empty wall." Mona Lisa It gives Ilyes another convenient frame or leitmotif. In every month - until December - he can repeat in chorus how the search is still going on, but in vain, how there is still no trace of the picture. In December, however, Ilyes can tell in detail how the painting was found, how it was briefly exhibited in Rome and Milan, and how it was finally returned to France: "The journey Mona Lisa through Italy was a triumphal march without equal. At every stop the train passed, the assembled world cheered and waved. From Milan, the painting received a private carriage on the Milan-Paris express train. Mona Lisa was treated like a queen. Late in the evening, on December 31, she crossed the French border. She left the Louvre as a painting, now she returns to it as a mystery."
TITO AND KAFKA: In the center of Ilyes' interest is the area of the German language and culture, primarily the former Austria-Hungary. At the center of his book is Vienna. He mostly deals with the Viennese of that time and Viennese guests and tourists. Ilijes was not the first to notice that in February 1913 Stalin, Hitler and Tito were in Vienna at the same time. However, the way he comments on it is interesting: "In the first months of 1913, Stalin, Hitler and Tito - two of the greatest tyrants of the XNUMXth century and one of its worst dictators - were briefly in Vienna." One is studying the national question in the guest room of his hosts, another is painting watercolors in his single-family home, and the third is aimlessly circling the Ringstrasse to test the car's cornering behavior. For one to think: three extras without their own text in a large piece entitled Vienna 1913Although Ilyes is programmatically apolitical throughout the book, it is hard not to notice the tendency to put Hitler and Stalin on the same level and to call Tito "one of the worst dictators of the twentieth century." By the way, Tito is the only South Slavic hero of Iljes, somewhere along the way he will mention Serbia and the Second Balkan War, but none of us personally. And one of the most interesting line which he drags throughout the book concerns Franz Kafka. It is the time of his engagement with Felicia Bauer and their obsessive correspondence. Iljes wittily follows Kafka's daily life and comments on passages from Kafka's letters. Along with Kafka, there are also lines Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Franz Werfel, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, etc. It's especially interesting when some of those lines cross.
SUMMER OF 39: Florian Ilijes (1971), the author of this book, is actually a journalist by profession. From 1997 to 1999, he edited the feuilleton column in the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and in the next two years he will edit the column Berlin sides in the same journal. After that, he was the editor-in-chief of the newly founded feuilleton Frankfurter Allgemeine SontagskeitungIn 2008, it became a newspaper. Cate in which he edits the feuilleton column and the literature section. His style is - in both a good and a bad sense - journalistic, feuilletonist, journalistic. Although publishing production in the German-speaking world is huge, it is hardly possible to think that in 2009 Ilyes could have missed Werner Biermann's book. summer 39 published by Rovolta. Although Birman (1945) is known both as a writer and as a film author, he also has a career as a journalist in Stern. As a filmmaker specializing in historical documentaries, Birman also wrote his own book Summer thirty-ninth (Laguna, Belgrade, 2010; translated from German by Milutin Stanisavac) based as a continuation of the same author's activity - by other means. Although it was much less noticed on the global market, Birman's book seems like a model for Ilyes, not in the sense that Ilyes plagiarized it, but in terms of inspiration and refinement of the formula. Ilyesova 1913. it was translated into many languages and became a bestseller. Birmanova 1939. has had a few foreign editions (in addition to the Serbian one, there is, for example, a Turkish one), but with much less fanfare. There are several reasons: Ilijes had better timing, and stylistically he wrote a more drinkable and witty book. Nevertheless, Werner Biermann obviously realized the idea of dealing with the "calm before the storm" period through short cuts from the biographies of famous historical figures, within a strictly limited time interval. (I don't have the space here, and it would be worthwhile to deal more extensively with the ways in which different writers and artists elaborate similar forms within a short period of two or three years. On the one hand, this type of witty and wobbly poetics fits well into the horizon of expectations of the modern reader, so on the other hand, somewhat more cynically, following the example of Flagus from Forcing the novel rivers Dubravka Ugrešić, one should not lightly dismiss the possibility of a very pragmatic and commercial exploitation of someone else's good fortune.)
PARALLELS: Bearing in mind that both books are translated from German, that both are available in our bookstores and that they talk about short intervals before the big (world) wars, it is most interesting to read them in parallel. Along with the similarities already listed, there are also differences, but there are also some additional similarities. First about the differences: Ilyes starts with the first of January and ends with the thirty-first of December, while Birner starts with the tenth of March and ends with the eleventh of November. (Ilijes is interested in the whole year, and Birner is interested in a period of eight months and one day, which means approximately two-thirds of the year.) Also, Ilijes gives a chapter to each month, while Birner has a prologue (entirely devoted to the tenth of March 1939, which fell that year on Friday) and six chapters, completely unrelated to individual months. (Here are the titles: Prologue: No Man Is an Island; 1. The Ides of March; 2. The Devil's Potion; 3. The Month of May is Far Away; 4. War of Nerves; 5. Marching to the Music; 6. It's War After All, Gentlemen!) And the frame is, of course, different: after Ilyes' last point, there is still half a year of peace, while Birner's chronicle, even though it is predominantly pre-war, includes more than two months of war. In a formal sense, Birner also writes in paragraphs, although on average longer than Ilyes's; also, his paragraphs are reminiscent of diary entries with their titles - they always have a specified date and place of action. Here is an example: "25. August, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles. The peak of the crisis, notes Klaus Mann. Much faster than most others, also faster than his father who indulges in unsustainable speculation, Klaus Mann grasped the meaning of the German-Russian treaty, his moral shock: political, from Stalin's point of view, perhaps very wisely. But ideologically, low blow. Unsolvable confusion. What is the platform from which we are fighting now? He sees that the former alliance of socialists and communists, the anti-fascist People's Front against Hitler, has disintegrated. It was broken because of the national interest of Russia. – Cablegram from Goll from Zurich: 'skeptically cheerful', Erika got on board., parents in Stockholm. "
RADIO BELGRADE: Perhaps the most interesting coincidence of these two books concerns the fact that they often deal with the same characters; Hitler, Freud and Thomas Mann are just a few examples. In 1913, Hitler was an anonymous amateur painter, and in 1939 he was already the Führer. In 1913, Freud was shaken by the conflict with Jung, but he was already the patriarch of psychoanalysis, and in 1939 he died in London after leaving Vienna occupied by the Nazis. Thomas Mann is a great writer both in 1913 and 1939, but his feelings towards his homeland are diametrically different. However, these three are not the only figures present in both books. There is, of course, Stalin, and Albert Camus, who died In the summer of thirty-nine has an important place in the book 1913. is present in only one short and important paragraph: "On November 1913, XNUMX, Albert Camus was born." He would later write a play Obsessed." I will also quote the following two passages because they well illustrate Ilyes' chaining technique: "On the same day, what a coincidence, the first issue of the magazine is published in Vienna The Bezesenen (German: Obsednuti), which will become the leading magazine of the year. On the front page is a self-portrait of Egon Schiele. Subtitle of the magazine: List of passions."; "On November 7, Adolf Hitler painted a watercolor of the Munich Theatine Church of St. Kayetana and sells it to an antique dealer on the Viktualienmarkt." Compared to Iljes, Birman is much more involved in politics. That's why not only Hitler and Stalin, but also Mussolini, Goebbels, Churchill, Chamberlain, the Kennedy family, etc., have a greater "minuteage" with him. Also, unlike Ilyes, Birman occasionally gives space to personalities who are not generally known. One of the most moving scores of his book concerns the love between the young Jewish woman Ilse Frelich and the German soldier Rudy Marx, which ended in consensual mutual (suicide) - Marx, according to the agreement, killed Ilse, and immediately afterwards himself. After the last weekend they spent together, early in the morning, on Tuesday, June 13, 1939, Rudi and Ilze were found embracing on the beach in Uzedom. Tomorrow, Ilsa's father receives a letter from his daughter, in which it is stated that when he reads the letter, she and Rudy will already be dead (that's how it was) and asks him to bury her and Rudy together in the grave. The request was not answered: Ilze was buried at the Jewish cemetery in Sigburg, and Rudi at the Northern Cemetery in Bonn. Like Ilyes, Birman is primarily concentrated on Germany and Central Europe, but he still receives more attention from the rest of the world, for example France, the USSR and America. Yugoslav territories do not actually exist here either, that is, they exist for the sake of an exception that proverbially confirms the rule. In the paragraph entitled Saturday, 15. Jul, Berlin, Bierman writes about the thirty-four-year-old singer Lala Anderson, who on that very day was in the studio recording "a song about Lily Marlene and her longing for a soldier who is far away." Bierman continues: "The song, which no one in the studio liked that day, was hardly noticed on the record market either: in total, by 1941, only seven hundred copies were sold." It's a fiasco. During the war, the military transmitter of Radio Belgrade took the melody of the song as its recognition signal, and from 1941 Lily Marlen reached the ears of millions of men on all fronts, German, English, French, and struck at least one little sentimental corner of their hearts. And we will see each other again there./ and stand under the lamp again... Later, the song was sung by Marlene Dietrich, it was sung by military choirs, it was sung all over the world, during the war and after the war, in dozens of versions and in forty-eight languages." The passing mention of Radio Belgrade is the only "Yugoslav link" in the entire book.
THE WIZARD OF OZ: There's Paul Auster's novel. Brooklyn Madness Revue which ends forty-six minutes before the first plane crashes into the first tower of the World Trade Center in New York on that famous September 11, 2001. Until those last few sentences, this is Auster's most optimistic and cheerful novel. Unlike the private lives of fictional characters from books we read for the first time, we remember history from the perspective of a known outcome. In this sense, the tragedy of the world is about which 1913. and Summer thirty-ninth they speak all the time in front of their eyes. There is one detail from 1939 that Birman does not mention in his book, which is actually extremely characteristic. Two weeks before the start of World War II, by far the biggest mass media story in America was about a movie The Wizard of Oz (directed by Victor Fleming, starring Judy Garland) which premiered in theaters on August 15, 1939. It's the movie that Salman Rushdie claims made him a writer, the movie that ends with a catchphrase There's no place like home., one meaning of which can be translated as Jurestublić's cry Only one place in the world is called home. Different people have different homes, but all people have only one world. Biermann's sentence about Camus is beautiful: "He hates injustice and loves life.", as is Camus's sentence: "There are orders of history, but there is also sunshine." Florian Ilyes and Werner Biermann wrote books about the orders of history, not forgetting at no time that there is a sun; the same sun that still shines today, as it did three quarters of a century ago, in the eyes of some old people who, as children, in August 1939, were blinded by it coming out of the matinees where it was shown The Wizard of Oz.
FUN TIME: Enrico Caruso 1913…
…and Tulip Andersen in 1939.
