That was the Year that Was

Anecdotal histories are all the rage. Last year Kevin Jackson skipped through 1922 in his Constellation of Genius, charting social, cultural and technological advances in bite-sized chunks. Florian Illies had already pipped him to the stylistic post, wowing the German press with his sprint through 1913, know as Der Sommer des Jahrhunderts. Now the book, called The Year before the Storm in an English translation by Shaun Whiteside and Jamie Lee Searle, is climbing up the reading lists here. It is an infinitely more interesting, more imaginative affair than Jackson's oddly lame duck, but you can't help feeling that both authors have offered telegrams where really a proper letter is required.

According to the dust jacket Florian Illies 'studied the history of taste at Oxford', though his book is oddly Germanocentric. Hitler and Stalin walk the gardens of the Schönbrunn in Vienna, the 15-year-old Brecht writes in his diaries, while Thomas Mann fears, post-publication of Death in Venice, that he's going to be outed. There are, of course, references to other important centres and cultures, but unlike Philipp Blom's The Vertigo Years, which surveys a vast amount of information with remarkable ease, Illies is stuck on a more or less permanent loop between Vienna, Berlin and Munich.

What he reports from these centres is, of course, interesting, in a style that is immediately winning. Too often narrative history lacks imagination; that is not the case here. Illies really allows us to picture Thomas Mann returning to Munich on the train or Kafka deep in thought in Prague. He's amusing, touching and personal. Teasing open seams of history, making the mundane seem magical, Illies slowly builds a picture of the year before bullets were exchanged.

He creates motivic links between the month-by-month, chapter-by-chapter structure of his book, replete with historical aphorisms and mini-essays on his various characters. Yet by the time you reach the mid-point of the year, Illies is risking information overload. The consistently pithy, witty tone, the brevity of the anecdotes... it all leaves you wanting sentences and paragraphs of a more Proustian scope. There is no doubt that The Year before the Storm is a treasure trove about a hugely redolent year, but Illies is a better and broader writer than he's currently allowing us to realise. Maybe for his next book he'll pick one character, imagine as deeply as he has here and thereby offer a truly impressive full-blooded history. Click here to order a copy.

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