![]() ![]() His grander task here enfolds the entire decade before the Second. ![]() Ten years ago, Illies had a great success with 1913, which anatomised the year preceding the First World War. “This life seems like hell to me,” Nin’s much-cuckolded husband wrote in his diary. Many dabbled in polyamory, or at least sexual incontinence, from Picasso to Sartre, Gala Dalí to Anaïs Nin, the latter of whose paramours included her own father. Love in a Time of Hate, a new cultural history by the German author Florian Illies, captures an era in which hedonism made way for catastrophe. These were particular times, when a European generation traumatised by the trenches and the Treaty of Versailles sought freedom and solace in sex. ![]() He was soon sleeping with the wives of two other men. Lola in a permanent bad mood,” he wrote on July 30. Who was the worst German writer to be married to in the 1930s? Could it be Brecht, who gaslit his wife Helene Weigel while stringing together a daisy chain of girlfriends? Or Hermann Hesse, who went to the registry office “to have a ring put in my nose”, then vanished to a spa while his bride honeymooned alone? No, the worst was surely the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, who in 1933 joined other exiles in the south of France. ![]()
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