When history is about to take an abrupt turn, is there something in people’s eyes or in their secret longings that pre-announces it somehow—and that minds of a particular cast (poets and visionaries or perhaps psychiatrists) can read clearly and even put into words? If the world were to end next year, who would know about it today, and how? When we look back on the past, we say sometimes that there were “clear signs” that this or that event would happen, that the “writing was on the wall.” But how many of these signs were really there, and how many are projected back by hindsight? The problem is of special importance to historians. How can the historian single out a past event, focus on it exclusively, and pretend not to know what came after? How can a scholar fake ignorance? 

Florian Illies doesn’t answer these difficult questions, but he does something even better: he takes them further, complicates and deepens them, and in so doing points to their unanswerability. In 1913: The Year before the Storm, he transports us to a point in time when history was about to make such a dramatic turn. We know that now, but those he writes about—artists, writers, politicians, philosophers—did not and could not. They lived their lives as innocently as we live ours and could not have cared less about the state of the world, dancing blindly on the edge of a volcano.

There were of course people like Oswald Spengler, who in 1913 was working on The Decline of the West, and who saw tragedies everywhere. But you cannot trust the foresight of a man who wrote in his diary: “I have never had a month without thoughts of suicide.” Spengler was not so much trying to understand the world as remaking it in his own dour likeness. The most important minds of the time, including those whose job it was to understand how the world worked, saw nothing out of the ordinary.

In 1909, the British economist (and future Nobel Peace Prize winner) Norman Angell had published an enormously influential book, The Great Illusion, in which he argued that a serious war between European powers had become a practical impossibility: in an age of highly interconnected economies, such a war wouldn’t make any economic sense. Everybody seemed immediately won over by this argument. At the end of a lecture Angell delivered at Stanford in 1913, in the wake of the book’s success, the university’s president remarked: “The Great War in Europe, that eternal threat, will never come. The bankers won’t come up with the money needed for such a war, and industry won’t support it, so the statesmen simply won’t be able to do it. There will be no Great War.” What a relief! The cruel beauty of Illies’s book comes precisely from the contrast between such innocent optimism and the knowledge we now have about what was just about to happen. 

In Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War, Illies uses the same technique he used so successfully in 1913, assembling historical snapshots and biographical vignettes that seem to put events, people, and places together almost haphazardly, but, in fact, create an intricate and compelling narrative structure. The book crisscrosses much of the world (though its focus is on German-speakers), and the number of protagonists it brings together is legion: writers and philosophers, artists and entertainers, dictators and diplomats. This time the chronological span is not one year but a whole decade, from 1929 to 1939. The book revolves around the fateful year 1933. It is divided into three large chapters: “Before,” “1933,” and “After.” 

As its title suggests, the volume’s thematic focus is limited to a single emotion—love (or the lack thereof). The relationship between love and the year of the Nazi takeover may not be clear at first, but the reader soon discovers the wisdom of Illies’s approach. To understand how people relate to their mortality, how they deal with their fear of impending danger, you sometimes need to know about their romantic lives, how they fall in love and out of it, what turns them on and off. 

Indeed, since most of Illies’s protagonists were highly educated, intelligent individuals, the deeper relationship between Eros and Thanatos must not have escaped them. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which Freud theorized the connection, caused a stir when it came out in 1920. And even if they hadn’t read Freud’s book, some of them acted as if they could have written it themselves. “Every time he senses a world war approaching,” Illies observes about Heinrich Mann, he “feels a strong desire to get married. But he always waits too long, until bureaucratic problems arise that result in strange shotgun weddings after the outbreak of hostilities.” Love and war can make excellent bedfellows.

“What people in the twenties desperately needed was love (or therapy at least); what they got were narcotics,” Illies observes with characteristic wit. Sometimes love and narcotics went together, as with Heinrich Mann’s nephew (Thomas Mann’s son), Klaus, of whom Illies writes: 

In the very few photos of Thomas and Klaus Mann together that do exist, Klaus, who usually loves to strike dandyish poses, is tense, his smile insecure. Life only gets more oppressive for Klaus Mann soon after, when his father is awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature. Within days of the announcement, Klaus begins to take morphine to numb his pain, in addition to his customary cocaine.

Others didn’t need narcotics to get high. The French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, for one, could become seriously intoxicated on antisemitic ideology alone. In June 1933, with Hitler firmly in power, Céline wrote to his German girlfriend: “Once the Jews have been chased out of Germany, there will be jobs for the other intellectuals there! Heil Hitler! Take advantage!” Céline’s love for Hitler, though, did not prevent him from pursuing his love affairs with Jewish ladies. After two weeks of intense passion with one of them in September 1933, he wrote to her, without any trace of shame: “The Jews are in some danger, but only a little bit, and I don’t think things will ever get bad.”

Love itself can be an effective narcotic. People sometimes fall in love, have affairs, or even marry in order to shut themselves off from what is going on in the outside world. As Klaus Mann said in 1930, “Getting married is like an epidemic among us. Marriage is our pathetic attempt to overcome what we realize is permanent loneliness.” Loneliness comes in countless shades. The specific shade of loneliness produced by mass politics strikes with undisguised irony: the larger and noisier the crowd, the more painful the individual’s feeling of isolation. One joins the crowd not because one wants to be with others, but only because one no longer wants to be with oneself. 

By February 1933, history had taken a sharp turn. In a matter of weeks, Germany switched dramatically from the rule of law to a dictatorship. Uwe Wittstock’s February 1933: The Winter of Literature shows, with increasing drama, how exactly this turn happened, and how the German literary world responded. In both its style and method, Wittstock’s book resembles Illies’s. Wittstock also tells his story through a carefully woven montage of news items, police reports, accounts of street incidents, and brief biographies of writers and artists directly affected by the Nazi takeover. Indeed, the two books even share some protagonists (the Mann family, for example). 

But Wittstock covers a much narrower timespan, from January 28 to March 15. “For the destruction of democracy,” he writes, “the antidemocrats did not require any more time than the length of an ample annual vacation. Those who left a state under the rule of law at the end of January returned four weeks later to a dictatorship.” While the narrative of Illies’s book advances in a sporadic, leisurely way, Wittstock’s February 1933 shows how, from one day to the next, German democracy was dismantled in a planned, methodical fashion, until there was nothing left of it. 

The Nazi regime’s worst crimes—the deportation of Jews, the extermination camps, the Holocaust—still lay ahead, yet what happened in Germany during this one month was decisive for all that was to happen later. This short period established the parameters of the Nazis’ novel style of governance and set the totalitarian tone. From the start, they meant business and wanted everyone to know it. On March 3, Hermann Göring (then the Prussian minister of the interior) made the message abundantly clear: “The measures I take will not be enfeebled by any sort of legal scruples. The measures I take will not be enfeebled by any sort of bureaucracy. I need not exercise justice here; here I need only obliterate and exterminate, and nothing else.” 

During this one long month, it became clear “who would fear for her life and be forced to flee and who would step forward to launch his career in the slipstream of the perpetrators.” Wittstock’s book is largely a story about who fled and who stayed. The Mann family, Alfred Döblin, Mascha Kaléko, Erich Maria Remarque, George Grosz, Lion Feuchtwanger, and many others left. “Never before have so many writers and artists fled their homeland in such a short time.” Many of them would die in exile—some by their own hands. 

The poet and playwright Hanns Johst was among those who stayed. He had good reasons to. Johst had been planting a völkisch and antisemitic message in his work for a while. Now it was time to reap what he had sown: he promptly put himself at the service of the new regime. On February 15, he wrote in a Nazi-sponsored publication: “Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Werfel, Kellermann, Fulda, Döblin, Unruh, etc. are liberal-reactionary writers who have no business whatsoever coming into contact with the German notion of literature in an official capacity ever again.” Within ten days, Johst’s play Schlageter, in which he glorified “the first soldier of the Third Reich,” was broadcast on national radio. Its Berlin premiere would be held on April 20, Hitler’s birthday. Johst dedicated the play to him, “in loving adoration and unwavering loyalty.” 

Göring is sometimes credited with a one-liner that originally came from Johst’s play: “When I hear the word culture…I release the safety on my Browning!” As often happens, the most ferocious attacks on literature, culture, and education came not from the illiterate, but from the educated. The massive book burnings that would soon light up German cities were organized by Nazi-affiliated student organizations. Books burn best when thrown into the fire by those who’ve read them. 

Given all that Germany had already gone through in the past decade and a half, maybe it was not that difficult to foresee February 1933. The Weimar Republic was an odd thing—as politically precarious as it was intellectually and culturally fascinating. Today we tend to blame those people for seeing the danger and not doing enough to avert it. And yet how fair is that? At least they saw the danger when many didn’t. And what about those of us who see the danger now? What exactly are we doing to avert it? Then again, what do we really know about the dangers of our own time? Their true scale will become clear only in retrospect, as both of these books remind us. 

Love in a Time of Hate
Art and Passion in the Shadow of War
Florian Illies
Translated by Simon Pare
Riverhead Books
$29 | 368 pp.

February 1933
The Winter of Literature
Uwe Wittstock
Translated by Daniel Bowles
Polity
$24 | 288 pp.