Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War, 1929-39

(Paperback, Main)

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'Strikingly original, utterly absorbing' Julia Boyd, author of Travellers in the Third Reich

A Financial Times 'Book to Read in 2023'

1930s Europe - as the Roaring Twenties wind down and the world rumbles towards war, the great minds of the time have other concerns.

Jean-Paul Sartre waits anxiously in a Parisian cafe for his first date with no-show Simone de Beauvoir. Marlene Dietrich slips from her loveless marriage into the dive bars of Berlin. Father and son Thomas and Klaus Mann clash over each other's homosexuality. And Vladimir Nabokov lovingly places a fresh-caught butterfly at the end of Vera's bed. Little do they all know, the book burning will soon begin.

Love in a Time of Hate skilfully interweaves some of the greatest love stories of the 1930s with the darkening backdrop of fascism in Europe, in an irresistible journey into the past that brings history and its actors to vivid life.

Reviews

'A brilliantly conceived and uniquely different cultural history of the 1930s, written with confident, alluring poise. Fascinating and revelatory' - William Boyd, author

'An enthralling and insightful cultural history - one that shows how, over the course of one pivotal decade, love, freedom and the freedom to love gave way to fear, madness and despair' - Washington Post

'Florian Illies's whirling cultural history, Love in a Time of Hate, captures an era of unmatched hedonism ... there's the thrill of discovery on every page' - Jasper Rees

'The experimental sex lives of the artists and thinkers of the roaring 20s are set against the burgeoning threat of fascism in this wickedly amusing and timely book' - Peter Conrad

'Partly as a result of the book's organising conceit, and Illies's often arch prose style, Love in a Time of Hate achieves something that is really rather impressive - turning the great moral dramas of the 20th century into breathless melodrama.' - John Maier

Author Bio

Florian Illies was born in 1971 and studied art history in Bonn and Oxford. He later worked in publishing at Rowohlt, headed up the Grisebach auction house, and was culture editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and Die Zeit. His international hit 1913: The Year Before the Storm topped the German bestseller list for months. He lives in Berlin.