Publisher's Synopsis
1900-1914: fifteen vertiginous years that led to a war. A decade and a half in which science, art, literature, music and achieved some of their finest moments in the century that had just begun. Names like Albert Einstein, Pierre and Marie Curie, Sigmund Freud, Braque and Picasso, Klimt, Kokoschka and Duchamp, alongside significant revolutions in the daily habits of people the automobile, the camera, cinema, department stores, made the period before the outbreak of war seem like an idyllic time. But they were also years of cruelty, the rubber boom the extermination of natives in the Belgium Congo, the frenetic race for naval supremacy, the dawn of the big social struggles of the century ... Philipp Blompaints a superb historic retrospective, winner of the NDR KulturSachbuchpreis 2010 and the Groene Waterman Prize.
