A World on Edge

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A World on Edge reveals Europe in 1918, left in ruins by World War I. But with the end of hostilities, a radical new start seemed not only possible, but essential, even unavoidable. Unorthodox ideas lit up the age: new politics, new societies, new art and culture, new thinking. The struggle to determine the future has begun.The sculptor Käthe Kollwitz, whose son died in the war, was translating sorrow and loss into art. Ho Chi Minh was working as a dishwasher in Paris and dreaming of liberating Vietnam, his homeland. Captain Harry S. Truman was running a men’s haberdashery in Kansas City, hardly expecting that he would later become president of the United States. Professor Moina Michael was about to invent the ‘remembrance poppy’, a symbol of sacrifice that would stand for generations to come, while the artist George Grosz was so revolted by the violence on the streets of Berlin that he politicised his art and became a Spartacist. For rulers and revolutionaries, a world of power and privilege was dying – while for others, a dream of overthrowing democracy was being born.With novelistic virtuosity, historian Daniel Schönpflug describes this watershed year as it was experienced on the ground – open-ended, unfathomable, its outcome unclear. Told from the vantage points of people, famous and ordinary, good and evil, who lived through the turmoil and combining a multitude of acutely observed details, Schönpflug composes a vivid panorama of a world suspended between enthusiasm and disappointment, and of a moment in which the window of opportunity was suddenly open, only to slam shut once again.