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After the global success of his book "1913. The Summer of the Century", Florian Illies brings the 1930s, full of political and cultural tensions, to life in his new work. He takes us back to the era of a singular political catastrophe to tell the story of the greatest lovers in cultural history. His journey into the past between 1929 and 1939 reads like a commentary on our uncertain present: while Jean-Paul Sartre eats cheesecake with Simone de Beauvoir in the Kranzler-Eck in Berlin, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin experience wild nights in Paris and "Quiet Days in Clichy", F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway plunge into passionate affairs in New York, Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, like Katia and Thomas Mann, flee into exile. In 1933, the Golden Twenties come to a sudden end: the National Socialists come to power in Germany. Book burnings and the persecution of Jewish people followed. Florian Illies, born in 1971, studied art history in Bonn and Oxford. Today he is co-editor of ZEIT and a freelance writer in Berlin. With his books he founded the successful new genre of narrative historiography. Moderation: Ellen Schweda, MDR-Kultur 0:00:00 Welcome 0:05:44 Author's talk 0:17:44 Reading I 0:26:30 Author's talk 0:49:11 Reading II 0:53:53 Author's talk 1:04:34 Reading III 1:09:41 Author's talk 1:28:53 Reading IV 1:32:22 Author's talk Photo: Matthias Bothor