1929, the before.

1933, the crisis.

1934, the after.

And the dozens of artists, writers, musicians, thinkers, and lovers who are caught in the tides of history.

Love in a Time of Hate took me on a nightmare journey from the free-wheeling 1920s and the birth of the modern age to the rise of Nazi Germany and the mass immigration fleeing the country to the sad aftermath for so many: concentration camps, exile, suicide, addiction, homelessness, love found and lost, careers and possessions and financial security lost.

The individual stories are chaotic, presented piecemeal, the book flitting from one couple to another, as episodic as their love affairs. More than their accomplishments, it is their sexual adventures that are the focus–the “passion.” The men insisting on sexual freedom, the fluid sexual identity, the women avoiding motherhood through abortions, the marriages of convenience, the bisexual and homosexual and fear of sex. Who can keep it all straight? Marlene Dietrich’s serpentine and convoluted love life alone makes the mind boggle.

The hate is also in forefront, for it is the impetus for the mass migration of Germans, the fear and the loss.

It’s not an approach for everyone, but the overall impact of the book is a big picture view of this historical period through the lives of the most famous people of the time.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book. ( )

Florian Illies’ new book is full of gossip. Did you know that Simone de Beauvoir stood Jean-Paul Sartre up on their first date, instructing her sister to go to the café and deliver her apologies to someone who was short, bespectacled, and ‘very ugly’? Or that Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger had a very open marriage? Or that F. Scott Fitzgerald showed his penis to Ernest Hemingway in a Paris bar because Zelda had said it was too small? These are the kinds of tidbits that readers are treated to in Love in a Time of Hate. A long-time columnist and editor in Germany, Illies is best known to anglophone readers for 1913: The Year Before the Storm, which interwove snapshots of life from various members of (Western) Europe’s intellectual scene in that final prewar year.

With Love in a Time of Hate, Illies applies that work’s fragmentary style – and the same bemused, quippy columnist’s tone – to a much longer timespan (1929-39) and a clearer thematic focus: sex and romance. Opening with Jean-Paul Sartre waiting, in vain, for Simone de Beauvoir to show up to their first date, the book presents a cleverly arranged series of prose miniatures, each of which is narrated in an immersive, novelistic style and occasionally accompanied by editorial commentary. Some of the book’s nearly 50 characters show up frequently – the Mann family, Anaïs Nin, Pablo Picasso – while others make a few appearances. In running through the private (and not so private) love lives of these figures, Illies quotes freely from diaries, letters and memoirs. He is otherwise light on citation, preferring instead to conjure scenes and anecdotes heavily laden with intrigue, pathos, or both. Some of these fragments succeed on literary grounds, as when Picasso paints his wife, who is furious at him for his infidelity:

And so, on 5 May 1929, Picasso agrees to paint Olga again. Whereas posing for a portrait was once a game between the two of them, a wrestling match, an erotic trial of strength, now it is a cold war. Neither of them says a word. Picasso stares at her and paints. In her nakedness she no longer feels admired but exposed. She sits on her chair, freezing.

Read the rest at HistoryToday.com.

Alexander Wells is a writer based in Berlin.