The art (and letters) of bed-hopping

Europe’s avant-garde spent the 1930s on a sensual bender. This breathless book pulls back the covers

LOVE IN A TIME OF HATE: ART AND PASSION IN THE SHADOW OF WAR, 1929–39 by Florian Illies

336pp, Profile, T £20 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £14.99

Who was the worst German writer to be married to in the 1930s? Could it be Brecht, who gaslit his wife Helene Weigel while stringing together a daisy chain of girlfriends? Or Hermann Hesse, who went to the register office “to have a ring put in my nose”, then vanished to a spa while his bride honeymooned alone? No, the worst was surely the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, who in 1933 joined other exiles in the south of France. “F---ed Marta. Lola in a permanent bad mood,” he wrote on July 30. Lola was his secretary, Marta his wife. He was soon sleeping with the wives of two other men.

These were particular times, when a European generation traumatised by the trenches and the Treaty of Versailles sought freedom and solace in sex. Then came the Third Reich. Love in a Time of Hate, a new cultural history by the German author Florian Illies, captures an era in which hedonism made way for catastrophe. Many dabbled in polyamory, or at least sexual incontinence, from Picasso to Sartre, Gala Dalí to Anaïs Nin, the latter of whose paramours included her own father. “This life seems like hell to me,” Nin’s much-cuckolded husband wrote in his diary.

Ten years ago, Illies had a great success with 1913, which anatomised the year preceding the First World War. His grander task here enfolds the entire decade before the Second. It tells of how, as became clear to everyone from the blighted Fitzgeralds to any number of wandering Jewish intellectuals, “the Thirties are picking up the tab for the Twenties”.

There’s so much material to vacuum-pack into its pages, such a vast dramatis personae, that it reads as a three-volume magnum opus shrunk into a pocket miscellany. In a centrifugal narrative, the making of the 1930 Marlene Dietrich film The Blue Angel and the travails of Thomas Mann and his family form a pair of focal points. But such is the speed of transitions, there’s a risk to of whiplash. On one page, Lee Miller is thrusting herself at Man Ray, or Henry Miller is describing his debut novel to his wife: “First person, uncensored, formless – f--- everything!” On another, the anti-Semitic French novelist Céline blithely tells his Jewish lover that “humanity will be saved by its love of thighs”.

However toxic some of these people now seem – none more so than the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl – being spirited back into peak bohemianism makes for a wild ride. Female emancipation is everywhere. “They simply don’t need men anymore,” moans Erich Kästner, author of Emil and the Detectives, as women take up jobs, drive cars and entertain themselves and one another in the bedroom. (Not that misogyny is dead when the painter Otto Dix can claim “the root cause of every war is the vulva”.)

Then the hammer blow falls. Divided into three sections – Before, 1933, After – the book captures the impact of the Nazis’ accession to power. While Brecht shags on unimpeded – “Men’s lust is not to suffer,” he writes in one love sonnet – elsewhere there is rupture: emigration, penury, arrest and, finally, death. Even Dietrich, who flits back and forth across the Atlantic, wisely advises her estranged husband to buy big suitcases and escape. “You know there’s always a shortage of suitcases at the last minute.”

Illies has a conversational, querying style. “Does Simone de Beauvoir really want to know all this?” he wonders as Jean-Paul Sartre describes to her the hairy back of an actress he has bedded. The need to compress can promote glibness. Josephine Baker seduces Le Corbusier “with a fleetness of foot that redefines space, just as his architecture does”. It also introduces error: Sybille Bedford was not, as Illies designates her, a writer in 1933 – her first book wasn’t published for another 20 years. And Friderike Zweig may have insisted on describing herself as Stefan Zweig’s wife in 1939, but they had divorced the previous year. Yet the useful bibliography is a portal for further rummaging, and in the meantime, there’s the thrill of discovery on every page. Take Jutta Zambona, “a quarter German, a quarter Italian, a quarter eccentric and a quarter melancholic”. She married Erich Maria Remarque twice. It’s a long story, and a good one.

Female emancipation was everywhere. ‘They don’t need us,’ moaned a male writer