Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938

I must admit that, the more of Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938, that I read, the better I began to feel about the world which I inhabit presently. At a time when nary a day passes without headlines proclaiming a bombing or a blast somewhere in the world, it's easy to forget how much worse things could be - how much worse, in fact, they have been.

As Philipp Blom illustrates, for 20 years Europe (and to a somewhat lesser extent, the United States) staggered from one disaster to another. A rough list includes: revolution and civil war (Austria and Spain); Lenin and Stalin and artificial famine and unknowable millions killed in any given year (USSR and Ukraine); genocide (Armenia); the rise of fascism (Italy, most notably), communism (USSR), and Nazism (Germany). That is only Europe. The U.S. saw unprecedented race wars throughout the country; labor wars, particularly in mining; Prohibition, and with it the rise of lawlessness and the likes of Al Capone; and the environmental disaster now popularly known as the Dust Bowl. Also, there was, you know, the Great Depression. Unemployment reached 40 percent in Germany; it was lower in France only because such a large proportion of working age men had been killed in World War I.

So the world was a depressing place. Of course, there were also jazz and flappers and Bright Young Things; Dadaism, surrealism, and Bauhaus architecture; standard physics vs. quantum physics; advances in cinematography and music and women's rights.

Fracture frequently reads more like an academic text than a popular press one. Blom's writing is at its best when he is mining the social issues of the time, whether that is the Great Migration or the 1936 Olympics. I found the discourses on art styles, musical influences, and scientific arguments to drone on a bit, and must admit to skimming more than a few of the sections. Still, this book packs a serious punch, and history junkies in particular should enjoy Blom's thorough overview of the years between the world wars, but which were themselves packed full of conflicts and great and small, collectively setting the stage for not only World War II, but much of the world's strife today.