A witty yet moving narrative worked up from sketched biographical fragments 1913 is an
intimate vision of a world that is about to change forever. The stuffy conventions of the
nineteenth century are receding into the past and 1913 heralds a new age of unlimited
possibility. Kafka falls in love Louis Armstrong learns to play the trumpet a young
seamstress called Coco Chanel opens her first boutique Charlie Chaplin signs his first movie
contract and new drugs like cocaine usher in an age of decadence. Yet everywhere there is the
premonition of ruin - the number 13 is omnipresent and in London Paris and Vienna artists
take the omen and act as if there were no tomorrow. In a Munich hotel lobby Rilke and Freud
discuss beauty and transience Proust sets out in search of lost time and while Stravinsky
celebrates the Rite of Spring with industrial cacophony an Austrian postcard painter by the
name of Adolf Hitler sells his conventional cityscapes.
