D'Annunzio, Lenin and Hitler: Charles Emmerson (1920)
In this panoramic episode of Travels Through Time, the historian Charles Emmerson guides us from Italy to Moscow to and the boisterous beer halls of Munich. He shows us a world of volatile post-war politics and three unforgettable characters: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Vladimir Lenin and Adolf Hitler
In the neat and tidy chronology of the classroom, 1920 is often seen as the end of a period of conflict and the start of an entirely new era. But that, argues the historian Charles Emmerson, is both an oversimplification and a misreading of history.
The Great War might have ended. The Treaty of Versailles might have been signed. But right across Europe and into Russia the old conflicts continued. In 1920 there was a gorilla war in Ireland, civil war in Russia, a Putsch in Germany and there were combat troops on the Rhineland.
‘The war was not over,’ Emmerson says, ‘it had only fragmented into a million different conflicts and upheavals, cultural and political.’
Emmerson begins his travels with a visit to the Free State of Fiume, a strange and short-lived experiment in anarchism led by Gabriele D’Annunzio, the ‘decadent poet, artist, musician, aesthete, womanizer, pioneer daredevil aeronautics, black magician, genius and cad.’ From there the conversation continues with a diversion to Bolshevik Moscow and a trip to a Munich beer hall, to catch an early glimpse of a coming man: Adolf Hitler.
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Show notes:
Scene One: The Golden Platypus restaurant (in fact The Golden Stag) in Fiume. Gabriele D'Annunzio and the Fiume adventure.
Scene Two: The Second Congress of The Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow in the summer of 1920, shortly after the war against Warsaw had begun.
Scene Three: The first floor of Hofbräuhaus beer hall in Munich, which the German Workers Party have hired out for the launch of their new manifesto and where a young Adolf Hitler gives a speech.
Memento: Lenin’s hunting rifle wrapped in a tablecloth once owned by Gabriele D'Annunzio
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