A World on Edge: The Hope and the Promise After WWI

Daniel Schönpflug is an internationally recognized historian at the Free University in Berlin. He's written numerous docudramas and is a consultant on radio and television programs, and is credited with bringing history to a wider public. 

Unknown History: A World on Edge focuses on the years following World War I. What inspired you to write a book about this time period?

Daniel Schönpflug: My fascination with this period comes from the fact that I found the existing literature on the subject very one-sided. Historians write about 1918 in a mode that one could call the "rear-mirror-view" of history. They cannot forget that 1918 is not only the end of the first world war, but also the beginning of those tensions and conflicts that lead to the second. This perspective, in which 1918 looks very dark and gloomy, is quite different from the real experiences of the people of the time, who, of course, did not know what lay before them. Many lived the years after the terrible bloodshed ended, after four empires had crashed, as a huge relief, as an exciting moment in which hopes, dreams, and utopian visions could flourish. My aim in A World on Edge is to make these perceptions and experiences come alive and to put them together in a collage that contains a different vision of 1918—the vision of a pivotal moment, when new political regimes, a new world order, ideas of new man and new woman, of new societies emerged, when modern forms of music, of painting, of architecture sprang up. In one word: when the twentieth century actually started.

UH: What figures played key roles in the post-WWI era? How did you capture their voices and personalities while writing about them?

DS: My book introduces some of the protagonists of the time, such as Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, or Walter Gropius, but also many ordinary people who were just exposed to the fundamental changes that were happening after the end of the war without being able to shape the course of history. Interestingly, both groups have written about their experiences in diaries, letters, and memoirs. Their writings keenly express their hopes, dreams, and visions and gave me access to their experiences, but also to their voices and personalities. All I had to do was to sit and listen to what they had to tell me. I had to be attentive to the small , but often very telling details that they were revealing to me. Like the moment when the French journalist Louise Weiss stands before the rubble of her former family home in Arras, that was destroyed by German bombs, and finds a piece of shrapnel exactly where her cradle had once been. By listening to my protagonists, I also understood how many of these hopes and dreams...

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