一战前夜

晨枫

今年是第一次世界大战爆发100周年纪念。虽说二战离现在更近，二战的规模、伤亡和涉及范围也更大，但在某种意义上，二战是一战的延续。研究一战前夜的欧洲非常有意思，对现代世界的借鉴意义也更大。长话短说，BBC出了一个一战前夜系列，高度推荐。本人不大全文转载，怕BBC国内看起来不方便，破例转载一下。不过是英文的。全文翻译要等蚂蚱啦。

晨枫

维也纳篇。
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25576645

Dancing over the edge: Vienna in 1914                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 By Bethany Bell                                BBC News                                                      Vienna hosted a rich intellectual and artistic life at the beginning of the  20th Century   
        Continue reading the main story                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      In today's Magazine                                                            

•         A child's right to die?
•         The door to another age
•         Can horses survive in the city?
•         The rise of the young non-drinkers
  

                                                      
       
                     

One hundred years ago, Vienna was at the epicentre of a world on the brink of war. Bethany Bell reflects on a century of changes in the Austrian capital.

        On my first visit to Vienna in the early 1990s, I wanted, most of all, to see the paintings by Gustav Klimt. I didn't know much about them.
        My studies in England hadn't exposed me to the art of fin-de-siecle Vienna. But a postcard of The Kiss with its golden, geometric splendours fascinated me.
        The picture conjured up a vanished world of lavish beauty and daring experimentation that was both unfamiliar and exciting. 
        And so, once in Vienna, I went straight to see the collection at the Belvedere museum, a baroque palace on a hill, which, I was interested to discover, had been the home of the ill-fated Habsburg Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 sparked the First World War.
      
      The Klimts didn't disappoint. And neither did the paintings by Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka. After a couple of hours in the gallery, I wandered out into the garden and down to the street, my head full of Viennese Jugendstil - or, art nouveau.
        Across the road, a crowd had gathered outside a large, late 19th Century building. I walked over to have a look. It was the Embassy of what was then still Yugoslavia. An official had just pinned to the door two notices about the war that was, at that time, raging in Bosnia. Two men in front of me were talking about the siege of Sarajevo.
          Continue reading the main story                Artists in the city                                              Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) founded the school of painting known as the Vienna Secession - a group who revolted against academic art in favour of a highly decorative style similar to Art Nouveau.
        Early expressionist painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918) was a protege of Gustav Klimt, who studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and caused controversy with his nude portraits.
        Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) was a leading exponent of expressionism who studied in Vienna and also wrote dramas, poems, and prose. With the rise of the Nazis, Kokoschka moved to Prague in 1934 and England in 1938.
                 
      

I shivered. History suddenly seemed very close.

        A few months ago, a Viennese friend frowned as he stirred his coffee. We were sitting in Cafe Griensteidl, in the centre of town.
        I'd just told him that, even after 15 years of living here, I'm still haunted by Vienna as it was just before the outbreak of World War One, before the defeat that led to the collapse of the rotting Austro-Hungarian Empire.
        "But don't lots of periods of history feel close in Vienna?" he asked. "You've got Mozart and the Baroque, you've got the 19th Century and the Ringstrasse, you've even got the Flak towers of the World War Two… Why not focus on them?"
        I looked around at the cafe with its marble-topped tables and high white ceiling. Among the visitors and tourists, I recognised several senior Austrian civil servants, a couple of foreign diplomats and one of the country's most distinguished historians.
        "It's partly the idea of cafe society," I said lightly. "Just think who might have been sitting here back then!"
        At the end of the 19th Century, Cafe Griensteidl was at the heart of Vienna's dazzling intellectual life, patronised by people such as Arnold Schoenberg and Theodore Herzl. Sigmund Freud is thought to have preferred the nearby Cafe Landtmann.   
        Coffee-house culture played an important role in late 19th and early 20th Century Vienna   
      "Ah, you have bought into the romance of fin-de-siecle Vienna!" he exclaimed. "You know that it was encouraged by some of Austria's leaders after 1945. They wanted people to look back at a period of history they could be proud of - not like World War Two."
        He looked up at the Jugendstil mirror above our table.
        "Even this cafe isn't really genuine," he said. "The original Griensteidl shut down in 1897 - this place was re-opened in the 1990s."
          Continue reading the main story                Jugendstil                                       

• Artistic style born in Germany in mid-1890s, continued through first decade of 20th Century
• Took its name from magazine Die Jugend ("Youth"), which featured Art Nouveau designs
• Early Jugendstil mainly floral in character, rooted in English Art Nouveau and Japanese applied arts and prints
• A later, more abstract phase grew out of Viennese work of Belgian-born architect and designer Henry van de Velde
  

                       

• Jugendstil: Encyclopedia Britannica
  

       
      

"You know better than me that lots of traditions and places have survived," I replied. "It's not all fake - just look over there," and I pointed through the window at the bank opposite.  Built by the Modernist architect Adolf Loos, around 1910, the building had caused a scandal because of its severe lack of decoration.

        "I think what haunts me is something a bit different," I said.
        "It's the thought that this exquisite, civilised place didn't seem to be able to stop its own collapse - and that it unleashed so many destructive ideas and people that tore Europe - and the 20th Century apart."
        The writer Karl Kraus had a phrase for it. In his obituary for Franz Ferdinand, he called Austria the laboratory of the Apocalypse.
        My friend smiled wryly. "Ah, yes," he said, "the Viennese, dancing towards destruction."
        On the first of January 1914, the Neue Freie Presse, still one of Austria's leading newspapers, published an article about carnival season, or Fasching as it's called here. "The Vienna Fasching and its spirit are no bad way of measuring the Viennese mood in general," it wrote.
      
      That still applies today.  This city nurtures its old traditions, partly for its tourists but also because the Viennese themselves enjoy them. It is still quite normal for teenagers here to learn to waltz.  
        "The balls and parties are a great way of getting through the long winter nights," another friend told me. "You dance until three or four in the morning and then end up in a cafe eating goulash."  
        Both today and a century ago, the festivities have always been for everyone - not just for high society. There are police balls, firefighter balls  - even a ball for Vienna's rubbish collectors.
          Continue reading the main story                Find out more                                               Five BBC correspondents present personal perspectives on the major European capitals in 1914 as part of BBC Radio 3's Music on the Brink series.
        Music on the Brink: The Essay is broadcast Monday to Friday this week at 22:45 GMT on BBC Radio 3.
                         

• Listen afterwards on iPlayer
  

       
      

And while the monarchy is long gone, abolished after the defeat in World War One, the old royal Hofburg Palace provides a splendid setting for some of the more lavish balls.

        I once found myself interviewing a diplomat at a ball in the Hofburg. I wore an evening dress; he was in black tie.
        The strains of a waltz drifted through from the ballroom. A man with a large moustache walked past our table, his dinner jacket shining with medals and awards for his services to gastronomy.
        We were sitting in the Privy Council Chamber.
        It was the room where Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, was forced to swear an oath that his children would not succeed him as Emperor. His chosen wife, Sophie Chotek, who died with him at Sarajevo, was not blue-blooded enough for the old emperor, Franz Joseph.
      
      When the Kaiser heard of the assassinations in Sarajevo, he's said to have been relieved that the threat to the Habsburg line posed by Sophie's low birth had been removed.
        Europe's longest serving monarch could barely cope with his family's problems, let alone those of the multi-national Empire.  
        Outside the Volksoper theatre, home of Viennese operetta, a large blue street sign points to the roads to Budapest, Prague and Brno, all once part of the Habsburg realm.
          Continue reading the main story                World War One                            
               

• The descent into war
• The human face of war - nine very different experiences
  

      Source: BBC History
                         

• The World War One Centenary
  

       
      

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the Viennese have started to revive their historical connections with their neighbours. Austrian banks and companies have invested extensively in Eastern Europe. Sometimes, when talking to Viennese entrepreneurs and politicians about the region, I've been amused to detect a slightly proprietorial tone creeping into the conversation - in a way that's not always appreciated by their Czech or Hungarian colleagues.

        Open a Vienna telephone book and you find the legacy of the nations and peoples of the old Empire: Sedlacek, Mueller, Horvath, Bogdan, Kaufmann, Nowak.
        Today, even without the Empire, Vienna is still a city of immigrants. Almost half of its population has a migrant background, although these days they're more likely to come from Turkey or Serbia than Bohemia or Galicia.
        Far-right parties still thrive here by tapping in to and exploiting resentments. But the situation isn't nearly as fraught as it was 100 years ago when bitter racial and ethnic conflicts raged.
        For years, my regular running route has been around central Vienna's magnificent boulevard, the Ringstrasse: past the neo-Gothic Town Hall, along the Danube Canal, past the great Jugendstil Postal Savings Bank and on towards the opera.
        But it was only fairly recently that I stopped to take a closer look at the bronze statue in front of Cafe Prueckl.
        Designed in 1913, it's an image of one of Vienna's most charismatic and controversial mayors, Karl Lueger - known as the Handsome Karl. From 1897 to 1910, he helped transform Vienna into a modern city.   
        Bas reliefs on the pedestal pay tribute to some of his achievements: his homes for the poor and elderly, the municipal gas works, the expansion of the pipeline network that still brings Alpine water to the city. One of the great luxuries of living here is having mountain spring water straight from the tap.
      
      But some Viennese want the statue taken down. And last year his name was removed from one section of the Ringstrasse.
        Karl Lueger is often described as the father of modern political anti-Semitism. His populist campaigns against the city's Jewish minority were so notorious, that when he was first elected mayor, the Emperor refused to endorse him. It took two years and a lot of pressure before he was eventually sworn in.
        And Lueger was a major influence on a young artist who was living in Vienna at the time: Adolf Hitler.
        Ten years ago, the Austrian papers reported that the men's hostel in Meldemannstrasse, in the working class district of Brigittenau, was finally closing down. I went to have a look.
        For almost a century, the place had provided shelter for the homeless of Vienna.
        Five years after it opened, Hitler moved in - and stayed until 1913, down and out and unnoticed.
        Financed by the Rothschilds and administered by the city, the institution, was, in its day, revolutionary.
        Instead of communal dormitories, each man was given his own room. There were plenty of bathrooms and a large bright reading room, looking out on the garden, where Hitler painted, read and talked politics.
        Once unwittingly part of the laboratory of the apocalypse, the building today is used as an old people's home, one of the most up-to-date in Vienna.
      
      "Vienna has gone through hell and back over the past century," one of my friends, a historian, told me. "But it's a gentler place now. Young people are learning lots of languages and looking outwards again."
        She's right.
        Vienna today's a gentler place, not as brilliant perhaps, and more than a touch complacent about its enviably high standards of living.
        The atmosphere of well-ordered, prosperous serenity can, for a moment, almost lull you into believing in an operetta world: a place where even the biggest problems can be solved by dancing and music - or, at the very least, soothed by a cup of coffee with whipped cream.
        By the time of the Armistice on the Western Front on 11 November 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had already disintegrated.
          Continue reading the main story                More from the Magazine                             
                      Trotsky and Stalin were just two of a number of men who lived in central Vienna in 1913 and whose lives were destined to mould, indeed to shatter, much of the 20th Century, writes Andy Walker.
                         

• 1913: When Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in the same place
  

       
      

Vienna was still a capital city - but of a tiny country.

        Today just a handful of people will remember 11 November as the day when the last Emperor Karl relinquished any share in Austria's government, the day when he moved out of Vienna's summer palace of Schoenbrunn, never to return.
        But most Viennese pay little attention.
        The 11 November is marked in a very different way.
        If you head down to, the elegant baroque shopping street in the heart of town, known as the Graben, at 11:11 that morning, you come across a scene that perhaps only Vienna could produce.
        A large military band in iron grey overcoats, red berets and golden tassles strikes up the Fledermaus Quadrille by Johann Strauss.
        Next to them on a platform stands the Tanzmeister, a teacher from one of Vienna's many ballroom dancing schools.
        Dressed in white tie and a flowing black cloak, he directs the assembled crowd in a huge quadrille, a square dance rather like a Scottish reel.  
        The women curtsey, the men bow, and for an hour or so the Graben is transformed into a ballroom as the Viennese once again celebrate the beginning of Carnival, Fasching.
        Empires may come and go, but the dance, it seems, goes on.
                        

Music on the Brink: The Essay series will be broadcast Monday to Friday this week at 22:45 GMT on BBC Radio 3. Tomorrow: Paris.

        Gustav Klimt The Kiss, 1908/1909, Oil on canvas, 180 x 180cm courtesy of Belvedere, Vienna.
        Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook
        Find out more about the centenary of the outbreak of World War One at BBC Online

晨枫

巴黎篇。
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25619822

La Belle Epoque: Paris 1914                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                By Hugh Schofield                                 BBC News, Paris                                                      Georges Boillot nearly reached 100mph in the 1914 Indianapolis 500, a year after Jules Goux won the race  
        Continue reading the main story                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      In today's Magazine                                                            

•         A child's right to die?
•         The door to another age
•         Can horses survive in the city?
•         The rise of the young non-drinkers
  

                                                      
       
                     

Paris in 1914 was a city giddy with the pace of industrial, scientific and cultural change, but deeply - and as it turned out, rightly - anxious about what the future would hold.

        Did Parisians ever have the feeling that they were living through the last days of an era - what we know of now as La Belle Epoque? I doubt it. For one thing, the expression "La Belle Epoque" - which, after all, doesn't mean much more than the good old days - wouldn't even have occurred to them. The phrase doesn't appear until much later in the century, when people who'd lived their gilded youths in the pre-war years started looking back and reminiscing.
        But more to the point, on the surface life in Paris… well, it went on. In summer 1913, a party of San Francisco boy scouts passed through the city, and Le Figaro newspaper ran a survey - what had struck them the most?
        Apart from the monuments and the gardens, they loved the trees lining the streets, and the general cleanliness. They thought the red trousers worn by soldiers most impressive, but it was odd how many young men wore moustaches and how many women smoked.
        They loved the way policemen still wore swords, the dog barbers by the Seine, the glorious outdoor cafes. At the opera, one young American stared at the women "pivoting on their high heels, offering a fine view of their resplendent gowns and jewels". This was Paris on the eve of war. Just doing what it did.
        The dome of Galeries Lafayette  
      On the Boulevard Haussmann, Galeries Lafayette had just unveiled its flagship department store, with a vast domed roof letting in shafts of multi-coloured light, and its teams of assistants - the famous midinettes - selling couture to the aspiring middle classes. This was the time when the flowing lines of the great designer Paul Poiret gave way to the stride-inhibiting hobble skirt.  
        Interior of the Theatre des Champs Elysees  
      Further west, the architect Auguste Perret - later celebrated for rebuilding the city of Le Havre after World War Two - had completed his concrete masterpiece, the Theatre des Champs-Elysees - the same theatre where, in May 1913, just a month after its opening, the flamboyant performance of The Rite of Spring by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes had created such a furore.
        Looking back from the France of a depressed 2014, it's extraordinary to contemplate the commercial and creative vitality of 100 years ago. The north and western suburbs of Paris were the motor city of the day. There were 600 car manufactories in France and 150 different makes - not just the emerging giants of Peugeot and Renault, but long-forgotten treasures like Berliet and Delaunay-Belleville. Delaunay-Belleville, which operated from what is now the high-immigration suburb of Saint-Denis, made limousines for Tsar Nicholas of Russia. France was the world's biggest exporter of cars, and there was pride, but no great surprise, when the racing driver Jules Goux won the 1913 Indianapolis 500 - in a Peugeot.
      
      France led the way in the skies. Bleriot crossed the channel in 1908, and in 1913 the sportsman Roland Garros - later (after his death in combat in the last month of the war) to give his name to the tennis stadium in Paris - completed the first ever crossing of the Mediterranean. And in cinema, invented, of course, by the Lumiere brothers two decades before, France vied with the US for first place in number of films produced - more than 1,000 every year, made by names still familiar today like Gaumont and Pathe.
        Modernity was the moving spirit. It was the time of the machine. The city's last horse-drawn omnibus made its way from Saint-Sulpice to La Villette in January 1913. From the top of the Eiffel Tower, built 35 years earlier like a symbol of the coming age, a mast had recently been erected, beaming radio waves into the ether. Time and space and movement and energy - they all felt different now.  
        In art, Pablo Picasso and his friend Georges Braque tried (in Paris, of course) to capture this with their new idea - cubism. Instead of painting things as they appeared to a single pair of eyes at a single moment in time, they painted things from a variety of possible viewpoints, creating a shifting world of abstract space.  
        Arbres a la Estaque (Georges Braque 1908)  
      In the words of the late art historian Robert Hughes, the cubism of Picasso and Braque, created in the years running up to the war, was every bit as modern - and indeed part of the same destabilising intellectual movement - as the contemporary forays of Einstein into the secrets of relativity.  
        Destabilising, unsettling, changing, modern, new. I think beneath the veneer of carefree continuation - the eternal gay Paree - there was also at a deeper level a growing sense of anxiety. Most people wouldn't even have been aware of it. Many writers of the time, like Proust and Gide, betray no sense of foreboding. But the speed of change, the rise of technology over craftsmanship, the frenetic search for new modes of artistic expression, as one avant-garde was overtaken by the next (and let's not forget that 1913 was also the year in Paris that Marcel Duchamp presented his first "readymade" - a bicycle wheel on a stool - making the point that anything is art if you say it is), all this must have worked its way into the collective subconscious, creating a feeling that matters were accelerating out of control, that things were conceivable now that would have been inconceivable in their parents' time. Terrible things.  
          Continue reading the main story                Find out more                                               Five BBC correspondents present personal perspectives on the major European capitals in 1914 as part of BBC Radio 3's Music on the Brink series.
        Music on the Brink: The Essay is broadcast Monday to Friday this week at 22:45 GMT on BBC Radio 3.
                         

• Listen afterwards on iPlayer
  

       
      

The French writer Charles Peguy is much quoted on this. He said, at just this moment: "The world has changed more in the last 30 years than in all the time since Jesus Christ."

        Charles Peguy is forgotten now, outside France. So, too, is another contemporary figure, Jean Jaures. The two men knew each other. At one time they were friends and allies. They died violently, but in very different circumstances, in the summer of 1914. Their stories tell a lot about the anxieties of the age.
        Both men were Dreyfusards. That is, at the end of the 1890s they took the side of the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, who'd wrongly been convicted of spying for Germany and whose disgrace and later exoneration divided France into two hostile camps. Peguy and Jaures were also socialists. They looked at the state of France, and behind the surface brilliance - as epitomised in the dashing boulevards of the capital - they saw misery and division.
        The public image of Paris was the creation of romantic capitalists. The reality for many was much more wretched. In what is now the 13th arrondissement, below the Austerlitz station, there were entire families living on the street, and decrepit, overcrowded housing with non-existent sanitation. Further out there were bidonvilles - slums made of cardboard and tarpaulin, from where groups of chiffonniers would walk into town in search of junk, which they'd take home and refashion into objects they could sell.
        Charles Peguy (left) and Jean Jaures  
      Jean Jaures became head of the Socialist Party, or to give it its proper name, the French Section of the Workers' International. He himself was not a Marxist, but the party was - believing that the clash of classes would ultimately deliver working people from their yoke.  
        By 1913 Jaures was a troubled man. Even if others couldn't, he saw the signs of looming war. Two years before, there had been the infamous Agadir incident, when Germany sent a gunboat to Morocco to block French designs. Now the French National Assembly was being asked to vote through a measure that would increase the length of military service from two years to three.
        A plaque marks where Jaures was assassinated  
      Jaures was bitterly opposed. He thought that reinforcing the army would hasten war, not deter it. On 25 May 1913, just before the parliamentary debate, he held a monster meeting in a field in what is now the Paris suburb of Pre Saint-Gervais. More than 100,000 people watched him, in bowler hat and beard, as he railed against the capitalist military machine, and urged the proletariat of all the nations to stand together against war. He lost the vote. Military service was extended, and a year later Europe was preparing to fight.
        Jaures flung himself into the task of warding off the inevitable. He activated his contacts with socialists in Germany, desperately trying to arrange an international general strike. If workers refused to fire their guns, he argued, then war would simply stop. On the evening of 31 July he walked from the offices of the newspaper he edited, L'Humanite (still going today), to the Cafe Croissant on rue Montmartre (also still there). As he prepared to eat his dinner, an assassin called Raoul Villain shot him from behind in the head. Jean Jaures, the pacifist, died instantly. Four days later there was war.
        Villain, it turned out, was a young man who'd drifted into nationalist circles. He was a member of the League of Friends of Alsace-Lorraine, the eastern provinces that had been seized by Germany in the war of 1870, and he regarded Jean Jaures as a traitor.  
          Continue reading the main story                The Dreyfus affair                                       

• In 1894, a high-flying Jewish staff officer in the French Army, Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted of spying for the Prussians, and imprisoned on Devil's Island
• Scandal erupted after it emerged that Dreyfus was innocent, engulfing army, church and provoking fighting in streets
• In 1898, writer Emile Zola's letter J'Accuse was published on newspaper L'Aurore, addressed to France's president, Felix Faure, and accusing government of "shameful" anti-Semitism
• Dreyfus eventually pardoned and released in 1899 but not recognised as innocent until 1906
  

                       

• BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Dreyfus Affair
  

       
      

Villain wasn't put on trial till the end of the war, and then in the glow of victory he was actually acquitted. But he came to a sticky end. After moving to Ibiza, he was shot on the beach by Republicans at the start of the Spanish Civil War.

        Meanwhile Jaures's one-time student, Charles Peguy, was pursuing a different course. He too was incensed by injustice. He hated the anti-Semitic anti-Dreyfus camp, and for years he ran a socialist magazine. But around the year 1908 he had an emotional crisis, and he emerged a Christian and a patriot.  
        He became the antithesis of Jaures. It would be unfair to say he believed in war. But he certainly believed in the values of France, and he thought that war could be the crucible in which much that was lost could be regained - not just territory, though of course Alsace-Lorraine was also in his thoughts - but spiritually. Peguy was of a generation of middle-class intellectuals in France who were disappointed by the unfulfilled promise of the Republic.
        If you look back a little in history, you see how recent it was - on the eve of World War One - that the idea of the Republic had come to be accepted in France. As late as the 1880s, a monarchist restoration was perfectly conceivable. But then prosperity, stability, modernity - all these had brought with them a hope of progress which people associated with the new institutions - and meanwhile the conservative monarchist Catholic right emerged deeply discredited from the Dreyfus affair. All this meant that there was, at the turn of the century, a generalised faith in the Republic, and a hope that it would lead to richer, happier lives.
          Continue reading the main story                More from the series                            
               

• Bethany Bell paints a portrait of Vienna 1914 in Dancing on the edge
  

               
      

But by the 1910s much of that promise had vanished. There was material progress, to be sure, with the cars and the planes and the couture. But the French, brought up on ideas and theory, have always yearned for more. So it was that around this time - while some led by Jaures were turning to class politics and faith in revolution - others took refuge in anti-intellectual ideas such as vitality, panache, heroism, sacrifice.

        Peguy thought war was necessary to defend the values for which France stood, among which he would count freedom, compassion, Christianity. A lieutenant in the reserve, he was called up at war's outbreak, and on 5 September 1914 he was shot through the head at the start of the battle of the Marne, just east of Paris.
        A century has gone by, but one of the bizarre things is how the names of Jaures and Peguy live on in France. Everywhere there are schools, and streets, libraries and sports centres that bear their names. And in politics, it's as if modern-day British leaders were in the habit of quoting, say, Keir Hardie and Kipling.
        Jaures in particular is constantly evoked by the left. On the centenary of the Pre-Saint-Gervais meeting last May, they had a ceremony with an actor - in beard and bowler - reading his address from a town hall balcony.  At the presidential election, Francois Hollande made sure he spent time at Carmaux in the Tarn department, which was Jaures's political fief.
          Continue reading the main story                World War One                            
               

• The descent into war
• The human face of war - nine very different experiences
  

      Source: BBC History
                         

• The World War One Centenary
  

       
      

Jaures's pacifist policies may have been pie-in-the-sky - certainly his critics believed that, if he'd got his way, the army would have been gravely weakened and France overrun - but today, perhaps because of the passage of time, he's untouchable. Even Nicolas Sarkozy, the right-winger, used to tease the left by claiming for himself the Jaures heritage - arguing that at least back then the left believed in the values of hard work.

        Peguy has suffered by comparison. It was his great misfortune to be claimed as a hero by Vichy in World War Two, which meant, of course, that ever since he's been taboo. But gradually, today there's a rediscovery of his thought, and the caricature of the nationalist mystic is no longer widely held. Today, it's the patriot who's remembered - a man who saw the war as a clash of civilisations, and who gloried in the chance to defend the right side in European history. Freedom and reason against submission to the irrational. For Peguy, as one writer has put it, the war was Montesquieu against the Valkyries.
        In a way you can see them as representing two intellectual constants. For Jaures, the instinct to organise, to bring people together to hasten society's progress, to put faith in peace to the point of naivety. For Peguy, the personal, the intuitive, the yearning for faith - to trust in war, to the point of naivety.
        Both men found their beliefs in the ferment of belle epoque Paris - when the city's shine of self-assurance masked anxieties born of too-rapid change, and when history, facing two directions at this turning-point in time, called out for new ideas. In less than six weeks, over the summer of 1914, both men perished for theirs.
                        

Music on the Brink: The Essay series will be broadcast Monday to Friday this week at 22:45 GMT on BBC Radio 3. Yesterday: Vienna. Tomorrow: Berlin.

        Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook
        Find out more on the BBC World War One website

晨枫

柏林篇
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25635311

Berlin 1914: A city of ambition and self-doubt                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                By Stephen Evans                                BBC News, Berlin                                                    
        Continue reading the main story                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      In today's Magazine                                                            

•         A child's right to die?
•         The door to another age
•         Can horses survive in the city?
•         The rise of the young non-drinkers
  

                                                      
       
                     

One hundred years ago, Germany was an industrial powerhouse and its capital Berlin had hopes of becoming a great world city. Instead, decades of catastrophe followed.

        Let me state the obvious: Berlin today is utterly unlike Berlin on the eve of war a century ago. How could it not be? The disasters which emanated from this city returned and returned again with a punishing vengeance to destroy so much of the bricks and mortar of the past. I think the ghosts are all around but the buildings they might inhabit have often vanished, turned to rubble. Berlin reaped its own whirlwind.
        It's true, traces - the outlines - remain, albeit with a strip ripped right through the centre by the Berlin Wall. The Tiergarten is still the park at the heart of Berlin, still delightfully mysterious, uncultivated with dark nooks and glades. The Reichstag has risen again. Somehow the Brandenburg Gate survived. And so, too, the monolithic Protestant cathedral - the Berliner Dom - completed in 1905 on the orders of Kaiser Wilhelm II to rival even the grandeur of St Peter's in Rome.  It stands alone, a monument to his ambition, his royal palace across the road now nothing but grass.
        So much of Berlin a century ago has gone, destroyed in the wave of catastrophes that followed that first great war. Unter den Linden, the elegant boulevard of a century ago - now just a polluted traffic jam. Potsdamer Platz is a ghastly junction of five roads, negotiated by fearful tourists.   
        In 1913, it was the social hub of Berlin, where electric trams and people met and gossiped, perhaps taking coffee in the Hotel Esplanade or the Hotel Excelsior, both opened in 1908.  At the Excelsior, with 600 rooms, the largest hotel in Europe, you might have glimpsed Charlie Chaplin or the Kaiser who held "gentlemen's evenings" there. The Hotel Piccadilly was there, too, though renamed patriotically as Cafe Vaterland a mere two weeks into the war. Farewell Piccadilly in the ultra-nationalistic Berlin of a century ago.
        Berlin Street Scene, 1913, by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner  
      High above the buildings were the new electric advertising hoardings, tracing out the word "SCHOKOLADE" in the night sky. Ladies in grand hats walked arm in arm. Sometimes ladies of wealth, no doubt; sometimes, ladies selling a service. They were painted by the German expressionist painter, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, in his Berlin Street Scenes of 1913. They're glamorous in a way, like strutting birds with big feathers, but also, in his depiction, anxious and furtive and decadent.
        A city, then, in flux, a city of contradictions and contrasts and tensions. Berlin on the eve of war was a combination of ambition and self-doubt. The Berlin of today and the Berlin of 100 years ago share one thing - they both were and are "wannabe" cities. Berliners today crave acceptance. They like the idea that their Berlin is becoming a "world city". People come because it's "cool", and Berliners love that recognition.  
        Berlin before 1914 was also a city looking elsewhere - to London, the great imperial capital, or to Paris with its cultural elan. Berlin was a city craving greater status, to be a "Weltstadt" - a "World City".  It had only become the capital of the newly united Germany in 1871, but its population had grown from 835,000 then to two million on the eve of World War One.
        The growth had brought ambition. Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted a city which would be "recognised as the most beautiful in the world". For him, this would be a city of monuments and avenues and grand buildings, of fountains and statues, perhaps even of himself. He bemoaned its lack of these accoutrements of the greatest cities.  "There is nothing in Berlin that can captivate the foreigner," he said, "except a few museums, castles and soldiers."     
        Potsdamer Platz  
      It wasn't true. The statement just showed the Kaiser's limited vision. Actually, Berlin before WW1 was a dynamo of innovation and technological advance. It was doing much to make the modern scientific age, particularly in physics and medicine. Einstein was here, the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics from 1914, alongside a slew of other Nobel prize-winners.
        And it wasn't just theoretical advance. In 1896, a wander through the seemingly endless halls of the grand Industrial Exhibition at Treptow Park would have revealed a cavern of modern wonders - from the newest electric motors and engines, to new synthetic dyes, to Bechstein pianos, to literally a sausage machine which could process 4,000 pigs a year.  
        Unter Den Linden, 1900  
      The exhibition guide said "Berlin must not only present itself as the largest city in Germany but must give witness to its energy and progressive spirit in all dimensions of its restless productivity." Restless productivity - quite.
        An American restlessness. Mark Twain stayed in Berlin and likened it to Chicago in its dizzying growth and thirst for the new and modern. By the turn of the century, Berlin had 10 long-distance railway stations, including the cathedral which was and is Friedrichstrasse. In 1905, a bus line was started, integrating the public transport system - though the Kaiser had his own Daimler, complete with a horn which played the thunder theme from Das Rheingold. Dah-da-dah-de-dah. He needed that horn - in 1913, there were already so many private cars on the streets that policemen had to direct the traffic at junctions.
          Continue reading the main story                Find out more                                               Five BBC correspondents present personal perspectives on the major European capitals in 1914 as part of Radio 3's Music on the Brink series.
        Music on the Brink: The Essay is broadcast Monday to Friday this week at 22:45 GMT, Radio 3.
                         

• Listen afterwards on iPlayer
  

       
      

And people, people, everywhere. Officialdom, perhaps in a very German way, counts things and on 1 October 1900, it recorded 87,266 crossing Potsdamer Platz, the hub of pre-war Berlin. By 1908, the hourly traffic had risen to 174,000. Above all, Berlin before the war was a city of electricity and light - "Elektropolis", Berliners themselves called it. Searchlights picked out the new Zeppelin airship above, and picked out the adverts along its side.

        But this wasn't the real marvel of Berlin. For my money, Siemensstadt was the real symbol of the pre-war city. This was, and is, a whole district of Berlin devoted to one company. Siemensstadt means Siemens City, so-called because Siemens, the giant electrical company, occupied the whole district. The red-brick factories are still there, four and five storeys high, running along the straight roads for hundreds of metres. In 1913, a human inventory was done - 7,000 people in one factory, 3,000 toiling in the electric-motor works, 3,000 people in the cable works. This was clearly a city of the future, a city of modernity and power, electric power.  
        1881: Germany's first electric streetcar, manufactured by Siemens   
      Industry sucked in immigrants who lived cheek-by-jowl in new blocks which became known as "rental barracks". Fugitives from the poverty of the primitive countryside and the pogroms of the East jostled with those already here.  
        On the eve of the war, 63% of the four million people in Berlin worked for wages, that is in what you might call modern industry. One questionnaire in 1910 elicited replies from Berliners like: "making mass-produced articles repulses me" and "I feel like a machine".
        Women were becoming essential to the Berlin economy, in the factories for wages to some extent, but also as seamstresses working at home for a pittance in the proletarian districts on the outskirts. In 1906, the Christian Home Workers' Association drew attention to their conditions with an exhibition. The poster designed by the Berlin artist Kaethe Kollwitz - memorialised today in Kollwitzplatz - depicted a woman with sunken, exhausted eyes. The Kaiser's wife, Empress Augusta, declined to attend. The poster was too depressing, she said. Industrial Berlin was a place of deep class tensions.
        Workers in a Berlin factory, 1913  
      And gender tensions. One newspaper article of the time, entitled The Effect of Sewing Machine Work on the Female Genital Organs, concluded that long hours hunched over the Singer sewing machine could result in women not being able to conceive children.
          Continue reading the main story                More from the series                            
               

• Bethany Bell paints a portrait of Vienna 1914 in Dancing on the edge
• Paris 100 years ago was a city giddy with the pace of change, writes Hugh Schofield in La Belle Epoque
  

               
      

Others (invariably male) worried about women who increasingly worked in factories near men who were not their husbands. Where might this lead? An august committee of the Reichstag opined that a woman's proper place was "at the cradle of her child". Not that it mattered. The vibrant, pre-war economy needed hands and hands were what it got, male and female.

        Writing in 1910, the sociologist Max Weber described the city and captured the tensions and the excitement of what he called its "wild dance of impressions of sound and colour". There were tramways, underground railways, electric lights, display windows, concert halls and cafes, smokestacks, masses of stone.
        And above this city of strife and contrast and flux was the Kaiser, unsympathetic, to say the least, to any proletarian ambitions except those involving the wearing of uniforms and aggrandisement of Germany, at the time barely 40 years old as a nation. When tram-workers went on strike in 1910, the troops were called out and Kaiser said he hoped that "five hundred of the strikers might be gunned down".  
        It wasn't only economic grievances that brought workers out on strike. They struck, too, to widen the franchise. Again, the Kaiser was resistant. The Left was strong in Berlin. In the Reichstag elections of 1912, 75% of Berlin's votes went to the socialists - but the Kaiser wished them away, calling the Social Democrats a passing phase. He was wrong.
          Continue reading the main story                Kaiser Wilhelm II 1859-1941                            
               

• Grandson to Queen Victoria, and eldest son of Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia
• Became emperor or kaiser at age of 29; embarked on policy of colonial and military expansion bringing him into conflict with British relatives
• He abdicated in 1918 and sought exile in Netherlands; died in 1941
  

                       

• BBC History: Kaiser Wilhelm II
  

       
      

What he offered instead was national, imperial ambition and jingoism. He was a man of the grand statement and, occasionally, the grand gesture, sometimes with laughable effect. When Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show visited Berlin, one of the acts involved Annie Oakley asking a volunteer from the audience to smoke a cigar while she retreated the 40 paces to shoot the tip off with her Colt 45. Actually, it was her husband - but nobody knew that. But this time, the Kaiser jumped forward and - so the story went - drew a cigar from his golden case and lit up.  Annie, unable to back out, dutifully fired the shot and hit the cigar but missed the royal head. The story varies with each retelling, but Annie is said to have written to the Kaiser during the war and asked if she could take a second shot.

        The Kaiser imagined that war would unite his loyal subjects. On the very eve of war - the morning of 4 August 1914 - he announced that from that moment he recognised no political divisions, no political parties. "From this day on, I recognise only Germans," he said.
        It is true that the citizenry (or many of them) were ecstatic. Bands played patriotic tunes ceaselessly in the cafes. The actress Tilla Durieux wrote breathlessly, "Every face looks happy. We've got war! One's food gets cold, one's beer gets warm. No matter - we've got war!" The Association of German Jews proclaimed that every German Jew was "ready to sacrifice all the property and blood demanded by duty".
        That was the atmosphere on the eve of war, exactly 100 years ago. Berlin, this city, seemed like the ebullient capital of a confident nation growing into an imperial power. It was a false impression. Behind that facade were divisions that would crack very quickly.
        On 9 November 1911, August Bebel, the Marxist politician who was one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party, rose in the Reichstag and made this speech, warning about the route down which Germany was hurtling: "There will be a catastrophe. Sixteen to 18 million men, the flower of different nations, will march against each other, equipped with lethal weapons.  
          Continue reading the main story                World War One                            
               

• The descent into war
• The human face of war - nine very different experiences
  

      Source: BBC History
                         

• The World War One Centenary
  

       
      

"I am convinced," he went on, "that this great march will be followed by the great collapse."

        At which point, laughter broke out in the chamber. Bebel picked up: "All right, you have laughed about it, but it will come.  What will be the result? After this war, we will have mass bankruptcy, mass misery, mass unemployment and great famine."
        Some - a few - saw it. The tragedy is that they weren't the masses in this city nor those who ruled them.
                        

Music on the Brink: The Essay series will be broadcast Monday to Friday this week at 22:45 GMT on BBC Radio 3. Monday: ViennaTuesday: Paris. Thursday: St Petersburg. Friday: London.

        Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook
        Find out more on the BBC World War One website

晨枫

圣彼得堡篇
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25631272

St Petersburg 1914: The door to another age                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                By Steve Rosenberg                                BBC News, St Petersburg                                                    
        Continue reading the main story                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      In today's Magazine                                                            

•         A child's right to die?
•         Can horses survive in the city?
•         The rise of the young non-drinkers
•         The woman who tracked down a CIA mole
  

                                                                                              
       
                     

As war approached in 1914, the Russian capital St Petersburg was the scene of imperial splendour and abject poverty, utopian hopes and portents of impending doom.

        I have never met anyone who is more proud of her kitchen door than Firuza Seidova. In fact, Firuza is so proud of the door in her St Petersburg kitchen that she has invited me to her flat on Liteiny Prospekt to see it.
        I'm here very early in the morning - the night train from Moscow has whisked me to a St Petersburg which is still dark and sleepy and bitterly cold. But at home, Firuza is wide awake and welcoming. She's made me breakfast - black bread with thick slices of cheese and a cup of piping hot green tea.
        We're sitting at her kitchen table eating our buterbrody - and staring at the door. To be honest, it doesn't look very special. The old wooden panels have faded. They're blotchy - and scratched. I can't help thinking the whole thing could do with a fresh lick of paint.  
      
      But when Firuza starts recounting the history of her apartment, I realise this is much more than just a battered old door - it's a gateway to a golden past, to the St Petersburg of 1914.
        "Back then, all sorts came through my kitchen," she says. "The Emperor Nicholas was here, Sergei Prokofiev, too, and some of the most famous names in the history of chess."
        Firuza shows me an old black and white photograph of two men engrossed in a game of chess. I instantly recognise the door at the back of the picture - it's the one in Firuza's kitchen!
        One hundred years ago, Firuza Seidova's flat was the headquarters of the St Petersburg Chess Society. The kitchen door is all that's left of the original rooms - the last surviving link to an intriguing story.
          Continue reading the main story                Find out more                                               Five BBC correspondents present personal perspectives on the major European capitals in 1914 as part of Radio 3's Music on the Brinkseries.
        Music on the Brink: The Essay is broadcast Monday to Friday this week at 22:45 GMT, Radio 3.
                         

• Listen afterwards on iPlayer
  

       
      

It was spring 1914. And to mark its 10th anniversary, the St Petersburg Chess Society organised a tournament for some of the greatest players on the planet. Not everyone could make it. Chess stars from Austria-Hungary had to decline their invitations, because of pre-war tension with Russia.

        Nevertheless, the list of competitors was impressive.
        The favourite was from Germany: the world champion for the last 20 years, Emanuel Lasker - such an elegant, inspirational player that the St Petersburg press dubbed him "the poet of the chess table". His main rival was the man soon to be hailed as "the human chess machine", the flamboyant Cuban diplomat Jose Raul Capablanca.
        From England came the heavy-drinking Mancunian Joseph Blackburne (nickname "The Black Death"). From America, top tactician Frank Marshall. Representing Russia, the attacking Alexander Alekhine. And there they all were, fighting it out in Firuza's flat.
        Jose Raul Capablanca (left) plays Emanuel Lasker in 1923  
      For one glorious month Europe seemed to forget it was on the precipice of war and was transfixed by battles on the chessboards of St Petersburg. Each move, every twist and turn in this grand tournament was transmitted back across the continent by an army of reporters. The venue wasn't nearly big enough for the crowds that came. One journalist complained that "the stuffiness and the heat were almost tropical".  
          Continue reading the main story                St Petersburg                            
               

• City founded by Tsar Peter the Great in early 18th Century as sea port and new Russian capital (replacing Moscow)
• Winter Palace (pictured) became official residence of  Russian monarchs from 1730s until it was stormed in 1917 revolution
• Known in Russian as Sankt Peterburg, the city's name changed to Petrograd in 1914, then to Leningrad after Lenin's death in 1924, and back to Sankt Peterburg/St Petersburg in 1991
  

               
      

And this is how newspaper Novoye Vremya described the atmosphere:

        "Spectators were packed in unceremoniously like sardines in a barrel. They craned their necks; they stood on tiptoes, even on chairs so they could see the play… and the room was so thick with tobacco smoke, it was like a mortuary where they're busy cutting up corpses."
        And yet, in this stifling, smoky hell of a chess club, there was a feeling that something very special was being forged from the intellectual tussles taking place here, something which transcended chess, something great that would change the world for the better. The newspaper Kopeika predicted that in St Petersburg "the noble game of chess" would "promote the idea of world peace".
        In the journal Rech, Emanuel Lasker went even further. He seemed to imply that the competitors would be thinking so hard about their chess moves that, somewhere along the way, they would think up a whole "new set of values" for mankind. A very lofty, rather ambitious thought.
        Nevsky Prospekt   
      But even "chess poets" and "human chess machines" need some down time. So one day the competitors were treated to a tour of St Petersburg. And what they would have seen that day would have made them feel very much at home. For St Petersburg was Russia's most cosmopolitan city, a capital created with one purpose - to make Russia look like Europe.
        The palaces were like those you'd find in France, Italy or Germany; the canals were like Amsterdam or Venice. Even the city's name, Sankt Peterburg, had been deliberately chosen by Peter the Great to sound more Dutch than Russian. Over the centuries, architects, engineers, shipbuilders and shopkeepers travelled here from across Europe, taking part in this unique project to westernise Russia. Many of the visitors put down roots and foreign communities became part of the fabric of St Petersburg. In 1914 the city boasted German butchers, Austrian bakeries, English sweet shops. At the city's grandest delicatessen, the Yeliseyev, goods were advertised in Russian, French and German.
          Continue reading the main story        “Start Quote

On 19 May, St Petersburg was invaded by dragonflies, a bizarre infestation of biblical proportions... Many in the city saw it as a terrifying omen ”

               
      

And then there were the cinemas, with their exotic, non-Slavic names. St Petersburg's main street, Nevsky Prospekt, was full of them - the Crystal Palace, the Majestic, Folies Bergere, foreign titles which conjured up images of European grandeur. In 1914 a new cinema opened up on Nevsky, the Parisiana. It was, by all accounts, a remarkable building. The auditorium was built in the style of Louis XVI of France, with stucco walls and a giant marble staircase. Some of the stalls and the balcony lodges even had their own telephones. And the cinema roof could be opened mechanically so you could relax, watch a film and gaze at the stars.

        The Parisiana symbolised everything Russia wanted to be in 1914 - a world leader, an innovator, an industrial, technological and cultural powerhouse. I try to find the Parisiana on Nevsky Prospekt. Sadly, it's no longer there. It's been replaced by a Swedish clothes store. Still, I suppose that even Swedish sweaters, socks and bras keep up that St Petersburg tradition of embracing Europe.
        I get chatting to a security guard in the clothes shop. He tells me about an old cinema that has survived, just down the road. A narrow archway leads me into a back yard and there it is - a hidden jewel of St Petersburg cinema history. Since communist times, this semi-circular structure with classical columns has been known as the Aurora - in honour of the naval cruiser which, legend has it, fired the first shot in the Russian Revolution.
        The foyer of the Aurora cinema (originally the Piccadilly)  
      But the cinema's original name was the Piccadilly. It, too, was new in 1914 and, like the Parisiana, was conceived as a sumptuous palace of film. Inside I discover the most stunning cinema foyer I've ever seen, with gigantic Chinese vases and exquisite frescoes.
        If the spectacular St Petersburg cinema halls of 1914 projected a brash confidence, a country oozing money and ambition, the films themselves told a different story. That year, Russian silent movies were obsessed with destruction and violence.
        In the film Life in Death, a doctor is so keen to preserve his wife's beauty that he kills her and embalms her body. And in Child of the Big City, director Yevgeny Bauer foretells the disintegration of Russian society. Desperate to escape her sweatshop existence, seamstress Mary seduces a wealthy gentleman called Viktor. She then drains him of all his money and throws him penniless onto the street. Viktor shoots himself. On seeing his lifeless body, the heartless Mary is quoted as saying, "Well, they do say that meeting a dead man brings you good luck." She steps over his corpse and never looks back.
          Continue reading the main story                More from the series                            
               

• Bethany Bell paints a portrait of Vienna 1914 in Dancing on the edge
• Paris a century ago was a city giddy with the pace of change, writes Hugh Schofield in La Belle Epoque
• Stephen Evans in Berlin describes A city of ambition and self-doubt
  

               
      

In many ways, the silver screen reflected the dark reality of St Petersburg 1914. True, this was a city of plenty, where you could buy anything from foreign maple syrup to coats made of kangaroo fur. But it was also a place of abject poverty for many of the workers, of poor housing, appalling sanitation and widespread disease.

        The death rate in St Petersburg was higher than in any capital in Europe. Suicide was on the rise, too. And it was a violent city. A sharp increase in street crime pointed to growing hostility between the social classes.
        The local press lamented the disturbing new phenomenon of "hooliganism". Little did they know that in Vladimir Putin's Russia, female punk bands and Greenpeace activists would be charged with the same crime.
        There were strikes at factories, arrests of suspected revolutionaries. More than anything, there was a sense of impending doom. On 19 May, St Petersburg was invaded by dragonflies, a bizarre infestation of biblical proportions - the skies, the streets and the River Neva were teeming with insects. Many people in the city saw it as a terrifying omen.
        This was a very different St Petersburg from the city experienced by the stars of the 1914 chess tournament - they were treated to concerts, lavish banquets and presented with gilded wine glasses specially made by Faberge. Locked in their intellectual bubble, the players could think grand thoughts about changing the world. But outside, the world was changing anyway, and it wasn't the masters of chess who would shape the future.  
        One week before the dragonflies descended, Lasker was declared chess champion of St Petersburg. That summer, there was another international chess competition, in Mannheim, Germany. It featured 11 players from the Russian empire.
        St Petersburg reservists assemble for military duty at the outbreak of WW1  
      By this time, though, few people believed in the power of chess to change the world. After round 11 of the Mannheim tournament, Germany declared war on Russia. All the Russian players were arrested and imprisoned, including the future world champion, Alekhine. Later he'd be put in solitary confinement for smiling at a guard.
        In response to the declaration of war, Tsar Nicholas II renamed his capital. Suddenly "Sankt Peterburg" sounded too German and the city became Petrograd - far more Russian. Of course, Russia's 20th Century nightmare was only just beginning. World war would lead to revolution and brutal civil war.
          Continue reading the main story                World War One                            
               

• The descent into war
• The human face of war - nine very different experiences
  

      Source: BBC History
                         

• The World War One Centenary
  

       
      

But what I find most remarkable about the St Petersburg of 1914 is that it was this moment in history - the eve of cataclysmic change - when Russia reached her creative peak. When artists and composers decided that anything goes, experimenting like never before with words and sound and colour.

        Many of Russia's most creative writers and poets gravitated towards the Stray Dog Cafe in St Petersburg - an artistic salon in a cellar where they could stay up all night reciting their works, and arguing about art and politics. The Russian Revolution would destroy many of them. Mandelstam died in a Soviet prison camp. Tsvetaeva and Mayakovsky committed suicide.
        Sitting at her kitchen table, in what was once the St Petersburg Chess Society, Firuza Seidova has a simple explanation for this explosion of creativity, which preceded Russia's catastrophe.
        "It's the same with my house plants, when I don't look after them properly," she says, pointing to flowerpots on the windowsill.
        "You see, when flowers feel that they're dying, they try to blossom one last time."
                        

Music on the Brink: The Essay series will be broadcast Monday to Friday this week at 22:45 GMT on BBC Radio 3. Monday: Vienna. Tuesday: Paris. Wednesday: Berlin. Tomorrow: London.

        Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook
        Find out more on the BBC World War One website

晨枫

伦敦篇
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25551751

The map that saved the London Underground                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                By Emma Jane Kirby                                BBC News                                                Continue reading the main story           


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Explore the 1914 Wonderground Underground map

      
                     

Europe was about to tear itself apart, but Londoners in 1914 were more preoccupied with the overcrowding on the Tube and a profanity uttered in a new West End play.

        Just outside St Paul's, the Tube train hiccoughs twice, then stops. The bearded man in painter's overalls squashed beside me asks rhetorically why we should pay such ludicrous ticket prices for such a geriatric transport network? A flood of complaints echoes him: "London's going to the dogs!"
        Suddenly, there's a bellow of laughter and the bearded man points at the priority seat for the elderly and disabled. In the round typeface, synonymous with the London Underground, someone has replaced the sticker with one of his own.
        "Priority seat for persons with gonorrhoea and genital herpes," it reads.
        A raucous cheer breaks out and a round of applause. "You gotta laugh," winks the bearded man.  "I mean, at least we can still laugh, eh?"
        Liverpool Street Station - a less inviting place in 1914  
      Let's ease the train backwards… While everyone is still chortling together in a newfound spirit of camaraderie, let's glide the carriage back through the tunnel, back 100 years or so.
          Continue reading the main story                Europe in 1914                            
               

• Bethany Bell paints a portrait of Vienna 1914 in Dancing on the edge
• Paris a century ago was a city giddy with the pace of change, writes Hugh Schofield in La Belle Epoque
• Stephen Evans in Berlin describes A city of ambition and self-doubt
• St Petersburg was a mix of imperial splendour, abject poverty and utopian hopes, writes Steve Rosenberg in The door to another age
  

               
      

Can you feel the carriage air getting even tighter in and closer? I'm sorry there's no seat for you, but it's rush hour and at least 70 grumbling commuters are squashed in what's commonly termed the "padded cell". You can only tell you've arrived at the station because the guard is shouting the station's name. "Post Office! Post Office!"  Almost a quarter of a century will have to pass before you can get off at the station we know as St Paul's again.

        Two-and-a-half miles to the west, at the London Underground's Electric Railway headquarters in Victoria, the network's newly appointed commercial director, Frank Pick, is perhaps leafing through the complaints letters on his desk. Passengers are moaning about unpunctuality, about overcrowding, about confusion and dirt. The Tube, crammed on workdays (some 400,000 people now work in the heart of the city) is virtually empty at weekends and holidays and the company is fast losing money and public support.  What we need, thinks Pick, is stronger branding.  
        He's already commissioned a calligrapher, Edward Johnston, to create an iconic typeface for the Tube―the Johnston Sans lettering still spells out London's Tube stations today.  But now Pick wants some eye-catching posters, distinct from general advertisement bills, that will make Londoners of all social classes proud to journey around their city and visit its attractions.  An Eric Gill who helped Johnston develop the typeface has a younger brother Macdonald, known as Max, who's an architect and designer.  Pick visits him and explains his vision.
        Edward Johnston's original design for the London Underground symbol   
      "And Max," he adds, "We've got to make those commuters laugh!"
        Macdonald Gill's primary coloured Wonderground map was published early in 1914 and was hung at every station.  A mixture of cartoon, fantasy, and topological accuracy, it was an instant hit with the travelling public.  
        He silences critics by writing disdainfully in one corner, "Scale of six inches to one mile―can't you read?"  It became the first London Underground poster to be sold commercially for homes and offices.  
        1914 London, with its population of seven million, was the capital of the largest empire the world had ever seen.  Gill reminds commuters of its grandeur with a sign pointing off the eastern edge of the map boasting: "This is the way to Victoria Park, Wanstead Flats, Harwich, Russia and other villages."  
      
Continue reading the main story      

Listen to the story behind the Wonderground map, as told by Macdonald Gill's nephew Andrew Johnston. (Not available on mobiles)

      
      London is presented as a medieval walled town, with a curved horizon like the medieval world map's enclosing circle, all bound by a decorative border in which heraldic coats of arms give a sense of London's great history and heritage.  Yet, drawn in the vibrant colours of the Fauvists, it captured the mood of a busy, bustling contemporary London going about its business.  Just as today's smartphone users are distracted by the presence of wi-fi at Tube stations, so the passengers of 1914 were absorbed by the Lilliputian minutiae of the map―they repeatedly missed trains as they gawped at the figurines' quips and guffawed at the contemporary jokes.  
        Jibes such as the one aimed at the French pilot depicted hovering in an upside down plane over London asking passing birds whether they'd looped the loop yet. In the autumn of 1913, Le Roi du Ciel, Adolphe Pegoud, had performed that first aerial stunt at Brooklands airfield on London's outskirts before a crowd of 50,000 people. Upon landing safely, the moustachioed little Frenchman had brushed away awe-struck British reporters with a nonchalant Gallic wave of his hand saying, "Head up, head down―it's all the same to me!"  
        Use the zoomable map at the top of the page to explore the Wonderground Underground (not on mobiles)  
      Down at the Kennington Oval, a proud cricketer swings his bat and asks, "How's this for a six?" - a patriotic in-joke as England was celebrating winning an away series against South Africa, with the great Jack Hobbs being the talk of the town. There were visual jokes too for London's youth - at Regent's Park Zoo a prehistoric-looking bird eats a child through the bars of its cage as the child laments, "And I promised mother I'd be home for tea by five!"  
        Most of Max's characters' speech bubbles are written in 1914 Cockney - "Are you sure them gas tubs is full, Bernard?" calls one worker to another. "Nothink like wortur for a chainge Bill," says a man as he dives into a reservoir.
        Accent, class and social mobility were major preoccupations of 1914 London. The new poet laureate, Robert Bridges, had temporarily ceased to pen poetry and was instead concentrating on writing A Tract on the Present State of English Pronunciation. His pamphlet attacked what he called "the corrupted vowels….of London vulgarity".  He feared the "clipped and slovenly London jargon" would overwhelm the "older tradition"―and founded The Society for Pure English.
      
      But even that couldn't keep out Eliza Doolittle.  
        On 11 April 1914, at His Majesty's Theatre - which Max would draw the following year in his subsequent Tube map Theatreland - Mrs Patrick Campbell waited in the wings for the curtain to go up on George Bernard Shaw's new play, Pygmalion. She would play the common little flower girl who's taught by a pompous professor of phonetics to "talk proper", like a duchess. Rehearsals had been stormy, as Higgins - played by the flamboyant, practical joker Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree - didn't get along with the serious Shaw.  
        London audiences swarmed into the theatre out of prurient interest - the play had already been staged in Vienna and America and everyone knew it contained the profane and forbidden line: "Not bloody likely!" Would Mrs Campbell dare pronounce it or would the censors silence her? She did dare - and the delighted audience laughed for over a minute at the decadence of it all.
        Shaw of course had regarded his work as a serious social satire on modern manners, and was so appalled that Londoners seemed only to thrill at his use of a swear word that he walked out.
        Emmeline Pankhurst is arrested at a protest outside Buckingham Palace   
      If Eliza Doolittle had walked into Max Gill's map, she would have joined the long-skirted, bonneted beings who do nothing more than push prams or hold children's hands.  Yet by the publication date, Emily Davison had already died under the King's horse on Derby day and Emmeline Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union had long been orchestrating a very public programme of heckling politicians, setting fire to post boxes, disrupting courtrooms and chaining themselves to railings.  
          Continue reading the main story                Find out more                                               Five BBC correspondents present personal perspectives on the major European capitals in 1914 as part of Radio 3's Music on the Brink series.
        Music on the Brink: The Essay is broadcast Monday to Friday this week at 22:45 GMT, Radio 3.
                         

• Listen afterwards on iPlayer
  

       
      

By May, five paintings in the National Gallery had been attacked - Velasquez's Venus received seven slashes across her beautiful back from Canadian suffragette Mary Richardson. And at the Royal Academy, Mary Wood, screaming, "Votes for Women!' took a meat cleaver to Sargent's portrait of Henry James. When the suffragettes smashed a glass case in the British Museum containing an Egyptian mummy, London's other museums temporarily closed. And the British Museum announced that, in future, women would only be admitted with a ticket issued on receipt of a letter from a person "willing to be responsible for their behaviour".

        Max's map, restrained by its commercial purpose, preserved London in a fairytale 1914 where anything unpleasant could simply be laughed off or indeed missed out. But among the puns and japes, he gives just a couple of subtle hints at underlying social problems such as the massive and growing gap between the rich and poor.  
        Breakfast from the Salvation Army  
      In 1913, the Fabian activist Maud Pember Reeves had published the shocking Round about a Pound a Week.  Her four-year study among the working poor in Lambeth revealed the extent of food poverty families were suffering and the high mortality rate of their children.
        Photo: Lordprice Collection / Alamy  
      Soup kitchens had opened up along the Embankment and in the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, the new vicar Dick Shepherd, offered the church crypt as a night shelter for the homeless, declaring St Martin's should be "the church of the ever-open door".  Its doors have been open ever since to London's down-and-outs.
        Meanwhile, the City had become all-powerful - described by the Economist as "the banker and financier of the universe" - and the Stock Exchange was making traders an awesome amount of cash. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, worried this new money would create an arrogant class of "self seekers… and footballers".
        Industrialists feared London was in danger of losing her manufacturing competitiveness by focusing on finance. In the Wonderground map, a labourer straining to pull a plough uphill calls out, "Harrowing work this!" to a disdainful, cravat-sporting gentleman who sneers back with a flick of his umbrella: "What is work?  Is it a herb?" 
        By the end of July, the jokes were over. Within days, Germany would invade Luxembourg and Belgium and would head for France. From the War Office - an insignificant tiny black square on Gill's map - Lord Kitchener appealed for volunteers for his Army. Hundreds of thousands of new recruits flooded the Underground on their way to training camps. Doing its bit, the Underground authorities allowed all uniformed men to travel free until October 1914.
        As they waited on the station platforms, the young soldiers would have seen the whimsical Wonderground posters. For many of them it would be their very last look at the old Town, resplendent in fairytale, primary colours, before the black tunnels swallowed them up.
        Waving goodbye to loved ones and to London at Victoria station, 1915  
      At the bottom of the map, Macdonald had drawn his big brother, Eric Gill. As Max delighted in his splashes of garish colours and cartoons for the Wonderground, Eric had been silently working on his own stark commission for Westminster Cathedral - the first of 14 carved stone panels of the Stations of the Cross, the representation of Christ's last, bleak journey on the road to crucifixion.
        Let's move forward again and get back on our packed tube that continues to be stuck outside St Paul's. Everyone's still laughing at the gonorrhoea sticker and the anger has dissipated.  The bearded man in painter's overalls asks if anyone's seen that great poster the Underground's just done with the FA, renaming all the stations after football stars…  St Paul's had been transformed into the Scottish striker Denis Law…
        I want to tell everyone that it's all because of a comical map drawn in 1914, a map designed to cheer up angry commuters like us when the trains were late.  It's because of that 1914 map and its commercial success that there's still Art on the Underground and that Frank Pick went on to commission so many other artists to design posters for the Tube.  It's partly because of that map that Tube posters have become a respected art medium.  
        But the train jolts and starts to grind forwards again and the Wonderground's ghost stations - Down Street, Dover Street, Mark Street and Post Office - fade away as we pull into the bright, electric lights of St Paul's.
        Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook
        Find out more about the centenary of the outbreak of World War One at BBC Online
                        

Music on the Brink: The Essay series is broadcast Monday to Friday this week at 22:45 GMT on BBC Radio 3. Monday: Vienna. Tuesday: Paris. Wednesday: Berlin. Thursday: St Petersburg. Friday: London. You can listen to the whole series on BBC iPlayer.

        Slideshow production by Paul Kerley. Music by KPM Music. All images subject to copyright. Images courtesy London Transport Museum (TFL), Caroline Walker and Andrew Johnston.
        London Transport Museum's World War One exhibition Goodbye Piccadilly, from the home front to the Western Front, opens on 16 May 2014

martian

晨枫 发表于 2014-1-11 09:12
伦敦篇
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25551751

太长了，慢慢看

猫元帅

一战前，欧洲人的信心空前爆棚。很多汽车拉力赛、自行车赛、轮船竞赛都是那时候搞出来的。政治上的危机对于普通民众并没有什么影响。而美国人最美好的时代是二三十年代。

兜胖胖

猫元帅 发表于 2014-1-11 02:31
一战前，欧洲人的信心空前爆棚。很多汽车拉力赛、自行车赛、轮船竞赛都是那时候搞出来的。政治上的危机对于 ...

二十年代初吧，29年就大萧条资本家跳楼了

常挨揍

猫元帅 发表于 2014-1-11 10:31
一战前，欧洲人的信心空前爆棚。很多汽车拉力赛、自行车赛、轮船竞赛都是那时候搞出来的。政治上的危机对于 ...

奥运会也是吧

cadgn

一战，好像比二战还惨烈。刚读了《西线无战事》，真是写的很绝望（德国士兵角度）。

猫元帅

常挨揍 发表于 2014-1-11 11:29
奥运会也是吧

奥运会不算吧，那个时候的奥运会恐怕还不如大学的体育联合会出名呢。

大卫

日俄战争作为一战模式的预演，会否不经意间重新在霸主哪个控制薄弱的区域揭幕？