Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Philipp Blom
Read between
July 5 - July 22, 2020
production of automobiles,
Around 1920, twenty-three out of every twenty-four cars built in the world were manufactured in the United States,
household appliances
The decisive weapon in this war for people’s dollars was the transformation of citizens into consumers and the usurpation of their attention by the sleek and sexy seduction of advertising.
branded goods became a staple, offering not only predictable quality but also extended marketing opportunities.
Movies,
were becoming seriously big business.
Clara Bow, the original It Girl.
Clara Bow was the perfect incarnation of the flapper, that mythical postwar creature consisting of equal parts fun, fashion, self-determination, and bootleg liquor.
George Gershwin.
Coco Chanel
her creations had a daring simplicity that made them de rigueur with the new urban elite.
FLAPPERS WERE A DISTINCTLY AMERICAN phenomenon,
Still, some very distinctive variations existed. In London,
the press was fascinated by a different craze: the Bright Young Things.
a privileged few fresh out of school or university simply giggled, put on silly costumes, and poured themselves another cocktail.
their exploits would have remained utterly conventional and would not have inspired so much brilliant writing had it not been for some less well-born hangers-on who compensated for their lack of pedigree with sheer talent and outrageousness.
The American actress Tallulah Bankhead
Evelyn Waugh,
Noël Coward,
John Betjeman,
Being a Bright Young Thing was all about cascading through doors in leopard skins, being outrageous and amusing. There was an endless succession of pajama parties, a swimming pool party with orchestra, endless weekends at the country houses of rich—and often outraged—parents, legendary costume balls, puckish practical jokes, and nocturnal car races through the streets of London. The pervading atmosphere of these amusements was reminiscent of Peter Pan with cocktails—in 1926 there had even been a party on this very theme.
the Gargoyle Club
The fun and games of this privileged set would have evaporated with the alcoholic haze surrounding them had it not been for the abiding fascination of the press, who saw that there was great copy to be had from their antics as well as from their blasé attitude.
Despite the fact that not all of the Bright Young Things were either young or bright, they stood for the generational divide between those who had lived through and often served in the war and those who had been too young to do so. While the difference in years was often slight, the contrast in outlook, could be enormous.
Eventually the cheerful nihilism and the occasionally forced indifference to everything political began to wear thin, the alcohol haze lifted, and the young party-goers began to cast around for answers, and for a faith. In the case of the Mitford sisters this search would famously lead in divergent directions.
The search for ideological certainty also infected other members of the seemingly charmed circle of Roaring Twenties indulgence as their heedless hedonism soured in an increasingly menacing political atmosphere. Evelyn Waugh, one of the sharpest observers of social mores among his hard-drinking friends, turned to Roman Catholicism;
in other, less stable countries, the values of a rebellious and inherently apolitical younger generation would themselves come under fire. This was never made clearer than during Josephine Baker’s dance engagement in Vienna in February 1928.
The reaction to Josephine Baker rehearsed many of the arguments conservative critics habitually trotted out against the hedonism of the Roaring Twenties and its emphasis on youth culture, which had never before been so assertively and so unapologetically present in public life.
As Vienna was shrinking into provincialism, Berlin had taken over as the German-speaking capital of cosmopolitan culture. For a precious few years it would become the place to be for the daring and the sophisticated,
The official face of the newly glamorous metropolis did not show the misery—“those in the dark remain unseen,” as the leftist poet Bertolt Brecht wrote.
in his most famous ballad, “Mack the Knife,”
Brecht’s Threepenny Opera,
its eminently quotable lyrics implied that the party would soon be over.
a vast project on a par with the building of the pyramids. They would build a huge socialist city where there had been nothing.
at the heart of the Party’s ambition to industrialize the Soviet Union in record time was the desire to demonstrate to the entire world the inherent superiority of socialism over capitalism. Only if they could achieve the impossible could the Bolsheviks prove that the future belonged to them.
The inspiration for Magnitogorsk
the steel town of Gary, Indiana.
the founder and master of this city
the United States Steel Corporation.
the motley crowds of former peasants, workers in other industries, and prisoners as nothing but raw material to be purified, forged, and shaped into new Soviet men, just like the metal would be processed in the blast furnaces they were erecting.
many leftists looked east with the keenest interest.
by 1932 the Dow Jones index had lost 89 percent of its value compared to the eve of the crash.
sapped the optimism that had fueled the great upward trend of the twenties.
socialists across the world regarded the crash as nothing less than the historic proof of the accuracy and scientific nature of Marxism.
the gravest crisis of the Western World with the initial phase of Russia’s Industrial Revolution. . . . The contrast . . . was so striking and so obvious that it led to the equally obvious conclusion: They are the future—we, the past.”
The Soviet authorities did their very best to foster this impression, particularly among intellectuals and artists,
This diffusion took two routes: through cultural activity (both open and covert) abroad and by inviting influential visitors to the USSR.
some of the most exciting and most innovative works of art came from the Soviet Union.
Of even more propagandistic value than the message carried by the works of Soviet artists were sympathetic eyewitness accounts published by Western intellectuals who had traveled throughout the USSR to form their own opinion. These visits, of course, were not unsupervised impromptu journeys.
