I finished my previous blog on Baden Baden with these words.
"Even today, on warm sunny days, you can dance around the bandstand outside the casino - perhaps a waltz in memory of that last summer - the summer of 1914 - before WW1 broke out and changed everything for the next 75 years."
This sentence gives a misleading image - that of people blindly dancing their way into darkness while the lights go out all over Europe and will not be lit again in their lifetime.
It is likely that this image of a golden age was created by those who survived WW1, those who looked back with nostalgia to their childhoods across the carnage of the war. This image ignores the political instability, the Irish crisis, the labour unrest, the women's suffrage movement and constitutional struggles. And yet, appearance and reality is a favourite theme for writers. "The Great Gatsby" and "Lord of the Flies" are two novels that immediately spring to mind.
Look at this man. Know who it is?
Yes, it's uncle Joe with his pipe, an image presented to us when it was convenient to do so during WW2. It seems that this image is at odds with the reality, doesn't it? Was he a benign dictator or a monster? Appearance and reality - a great theme to work with. In "Lights over Bellano" I wrote a story of Italy in winter in order to contradict the popular illusion of a place forever coated in warm yellows and reds. My own experiences of the north of Italy have shown me how cold it can be - cold that I have rarely experienced and fogs that made driving impossible.
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