L'amore 💕 ai Tempi dell'odio by Florian Illies

Strange years the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1960s in Berlin. Years where, for the most known people, artists, scientists, actors, painters, was tremendously important living the moment. 

Francis Scott and Zelda, but also the entire family Mann, (I didn't imagine that that family was so complicated!) Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalì, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre with their romantic free love, the members of the Bahuaus, Marlene Dietrich and her complicated sexuality, Wittgenstein, (with a lot of sexual problems in his case) are symbols of an age where the menage a trois was the normality.

That ones, in Berlin, were weird years: they were the years of hate: why this word? Because new dangerous men approached the political scene: Hitler reached the power. Many started to follow his perverted ideas. So, love, sex, feelings, sentiments, became more important for all these people: because in the confusion love and sex could give back that normality. Or a normality that no one could realistically understand when it would be...over. 

1932 has been the last year of freedom for most of them: then most they emigrated, or better, escaped in different countries. We will discover that the Manns were devastated by this entire story of forced emigration: some fell in misery; other ones emigrating found great chances for new  beginnings in the USA, or in Europe, other ones will prefer to kill themselves. 

There are not just people of Germany in L' Amore ai Tempi dell'Odio:

Florian Illies portrays also the story of the sanguinary Stalin, who killed more than 20 million of people starting with his own family, under many ways. His wife killed herself like, later, his daughter; then, Stalin started an affair with the wife of a brother of his poor wife, and later in 1938, all the family of his ex wife, lover included were exterminated.

Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, if spent beautiful years in the USA, a golden couple for sure, in Europe discovered a lot of sadness and unhappiness. Zelda was frequently hallucinated and spent a lot of time in psichiatric hospitals; Francis Scott drunk too much... Although I think that their daughter spent some straining moments, she has been lucky in her existence, had four children! and lived a more tranquil existence if compared to the one of his parents. 

Magnus Hirschfeld studied sexuology. Gay, Jewish, the Nazis will destroy the Institute where he worked in, and Magnus, with two companions, understandood that he had lost everything...

Francis Scott will always love Zelda. In a moving letter to a friend he will write that he would want to share with her a grave as well. A comforting idea  because Zelda has been the person, the creature more close to him in that existence. It happened. 

Bertold Brecht was a man extremely active sexually; Hermann Hesse, reading this book a myth has been in part destroyed, had a particular character. I don't want to spoil too much.

It is not forgotten the life-story of Ernst Junger and the ones of many many other characters. 

Beautiful. It will let you think, it will be inspiration for reading still unread books, or for watching a good old movies. Florian Illies remains one of the most spectacular writers of our times. He created again another literary gem.

I thank Marsilio for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori