Love in a Time of Hate by Florian Illies

This is an interesting, but ultimately disappointing book. It concerns the last decade before Europe was thrown into the abyss of the Nazi regime in Germany and the Second World War. It concerns the intelligentsia of the time from the fields of science, politics, art and literature and the roll call of participants sounds like a “Who’s Who” of the period (including, for example, Thomas and Klaus Mann, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Picasso, Dali, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker, Otto Dix and many more).

It must be said that Mr Illies writes well and has a droll, and often witty, turn of phrase and there is some prurient interest to be gained from reading the snippets of the love lives of these luminaries. But there is very little about love. This is mainly about their affairs and peccadillos, their unusual sexual activities, and their copious use and abuse of alcohol and drugs. As a consequence, this is a story of the lives of desperately unhappy people; yearning for missed opportunities, lashing out in anger, spending times in the asylum or sanatorium, and often sadly ending in suicide. Love is something sadly lacking in all these tales.

At times snippets of poetry or songs are given to reveal the emotional states of the participants but these are alas far too small to be of value. They are so brief they reveal nothing of the work from which they are taken and seem simply a trite echo of already stated conclusion. Further, being so short, and also translated into English, they have lost any of the beauty and power the sound of their language may have carried.

However, the biggest failing of the book is the absence of any consideration of the hatred of the period and how it may relate to the participants. Were their frenzied love lives a recognition of the gathering storm and created by the growing hatred, a sort of last dance before we all die ? Or was the hatred a response to the apparent debauchery of the elite and their estrangement from the rest of society ? Looking at our present society, with the cultural battles raging between the progressive elites and the traditional herd, this could hold very valuable lessons for us to learn. Unfortunately, this is not explored, and we are left with a gossip magazine for the intellectuals – a missed opportunity.