Writing in a hectic, almost impromptu present tense while darting to and fro between dozens of parallel stories, Florian Illies has pieced together the emotional history of a doomed generation. His cast of European artists and intellectuals spend the 1920s experimenting erotically, then succumb to anxiety and outright panic during the 1930s; by the 1940s, they are either in exile or on their way to concentration camps.
The structure of Illies’s book, apparently haphazard in its quick cuts between people and places, matches the creed of its characters. Sartre declares existence to be precariously contingent, which serves as a justification for living from moment to moment. Brecht leaves notes for the women he juggles telling them that he cannot be relied on, and Picasso stows a variety of simultaneous mistresses and muses in scattered lodgings and busily commutes between them. Others triangulate in troilist arrangements that never quite exclude the old-fashioned vice of jealousy. Anaïs Nin has an affair with her father, documented in a journal entitled Incest. The novelist Erich Kästner sends his dirty linen home to his mother in Dresden to be laundered, and keeps her informed about his genital woes as he undergoes treatment for gonorrhoea. Flagrant in a different way, Josephine Baker dances in a skirt of tumescent bananas that look like phallic trophies she has collected.
