The Edwardian era is traditionally regarded as the golden afternoon that preceded the iron nightmare of total war. God was in his heaven, the fleet was in the Channel, servants knew their place and the middle classes, basking in long hot summers, experienced an incomparable sweetness of life. According to Philipp Blom, however, this happy picture is a distortion produced by hindsight. He invites his readers first to imagine that a selective plague of bookworms has destroyed all knowledge of the 20th century after 1914, and then to examine its first years in isolation. What appears, especially viewed from a continental perspective (he lives in Vienna), is an age of debilitating anxiety and vertiginous creativity.

However fanciful Blom's conceit, he offers a stimulating and original insight into an all-too-familiar period. He gives a vivid account of the 1900 Paris Exhibition, where Henry Adams experienced the humming power of electric dynamos “as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross”. Blom describes how Japan defeated a Russia that relied on icons rather than machine guns - and on the London Times in lieu of military intelligence. He shows how countless elements of modernity, from quantum physics to consumerism, from female emancipation to the popular press, were developed before the great war. Even spiritualism, which boomed after 1918, was fashionable earlier - its high priestess, Madame Blavatsky, expressed her contempt for Darwinian materialism by keeping a stuffed baboon in her room with a copy of The Origin of Species under its arm.

Blom is particularly illuminating on Austrian contributions to the innovative ferment of the prewar years. Freud, who began his studies with research into the physiology of eel testicles, undermined conventional morality by exposing its roots in sexual repression. The novelist Robert Musil, equally sceptical about the capacity of human reason to govern conduct, anatomised the disintegration of contemporary culture. The painter Gustav Klimt mounted a sustained rebellion against bourgeois society, whose atavistic passions he tried to lay bare. “All art is erotic,” he proclaimed, scandalously illustrating the maxim with his portrait of nine-year-old Mada Primavesi, innocent yet seductive in her white diaphanous dress.

As the world was reshaped by electricity, telephones, cameras, cinemas, gramophones and wireless, Einstein and Rutherford revolutionised conceptions of the universe. Stravinsky echoed the dissonance in his Le Sacre du Printemps - one critic called it the “Massacre du Printemps”. Marinetti and the futurists glorified energy and velocity, revelled in machines of destruction and extolled war as “the world's only hygiene”. Some Europeans adhered to the cult of manliness, others recommended the sterilisation of the unfit and still others succumbed to the modish ailment of neurasthenia. Meanwhile the impetuous Kaiser was hailed as “the first virtuoso of the modern traffic age”.

How different, how very different from the life of our own dear king. Edward VII, to be sure, loved speeding as much as did his nephew, and he was proud of having exceeded 60mph along the Brighton Road as early as 1906 (when the limit was 20). But, unlike “William the Sudden”, he was discreet. So were the newspapers - Lord Northcliffe himself informed the king's private secretary that he would be “very glad to be told what to print and what to omit”. Blom does not realise this and, indeed, has Edward expiring at a Biarritz hotel whereas he actually died in Buckingham Palace.

As this suggests, Blom is weak on Britain, failing to appreciate how thoroughly it was still permeated by Victorianism. Suffragettes paid homage to Mrs Grundy, demanding both “Votes for Women” and “Chastity for Men”. Boy Scouts, nurtured on Barry's Peter Pan and Kipling's The Jungle Book, relished the delectable adventures and certainties of childhood. EDMorel, the Liverpool shipping-clerk turned scourge of Belgian wrongdoing in the Congo, praised the dutifulness of home-grown empire builders. Whatever the criminal perversions of foreigners, Britons played the game and kept a stiff upper lip.

Reflecting on a photograph of the “moustached archaic faces” of men lining up in August 1914 to volunteer for Armageddon, Philip Larkin memorably concluded: “Never such innocence again.” Pace Blom, the first world war created the modern world. It was the crucible of fascism, of communism and even of democracy, spreading the gospel of self-determination and getting British women the vote. Seen, as it must be, in the light of its aftermath, in the lurid glare of the Somme and Passchendaele, the Edwardian era cannot fail to resemble a prelapsarian idyll.

The Vertigo Years by Philipp Blom
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