While Blom situates ideas succinctly into context, he segues sometimes too smoothly from one event to the next. He is certainly right to point to the re-emergence of irrationalism as a response to the war, but one wonders just how useful this is as the key to both Franz Kafka's The Trial (1925) and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. By 1935, apocalyptic dust storms had devastated the American mid-western cornbelt, creating streams of internal refugees ('Oakies') and poisoning social relations even further in a country racked by racial strife and economic depression. But I am not sure what is gained by using the metaphor of the storm to move to Hitler's Germany, where 'another gigantic choking cloud had risen up from what once was good fertile soil'. The German storms were of a very different order. For the past half century, historians have asked just how contaminated the German 'soil' was, with its deeper layers of Prussian militarism, Protestant Innerlichkeit (inwardness), and the uncontested remnants of a feudal-absolutist state modernised and controlled from above by industrial and aristocratic cliques. Few historians today would claim that the Nazi 'storm' blew over a natural or healthy political landscape.

In 1930 Marlene Dietrich got her first big break as the prostitute with legs to die for in the film The Blue Angel, based on Heinrich Mann's book Professor Unrat (1905). The professor's fall from martinet schoolmaster to abject slave to his demanding mistress satirised the brutal discipline and rigid pedagogy of Wilhelminian schooling. But the film stressed something else: the decadence of Weimar culture. At its height by 1930, and about to fall, Weimar appeared to mean anything and everything. For Christopher Isherwood, 'Berlin meant boys'. There is certainly much truth in this. But at the same time, things were not quite as Blom portrays. The openness was of a particularly dangerous kind. You could be gay, transvestite, a sexual fetishist of any sort – but it was still kept behind closed doors. For all his laconic distance, even Christopher Isherwood was very careful with his published statements. Paragraph 184 of the German legal code continued to censor, and Paragraph 175 to criminalise homosexuality. By 1930, too, the heyday of Weimar permissiveness was over and Nazi gangs were routinely bashing gay men in the streets. In the rush to link sometimes only superficially similar events across Europe and America, Blom falls into the trap of oversimplifying. Several pages later, he lays blame on the Weimar Republic for having failed to win the battle of images. But that would only have been possible if Weimar was not what it was, namely a mosaic of fragmented and mutually suspicious and antagonistic splinter groups. The Nazis would supply the clean new unified image promising a future to a country reeling from the effects of the Versailles Treaty. Weimar Germany didn't.

The occasional misattribution or misusage brings out the worst of the pedant in me. Many might consider the philosophy of Heidegger abstruse, but few even of his fiercest critics would consider the German magus 'obtuse'. The Italian and British Blackshirts, and the German Schutzstaffel (SS), wore black uniforms; Hitler's Sturmabteilung (SA) famously were called 'Brownshirts'. They did not wear black. Socialist realism had been around as an idea and potential basis for the new art of the Soviet Union for some time since the early 1920s, but in 1931 it was not yet state policy. It was only adopted as official Soviet literary and artistic policy in April 1932 by the Party Central Committee and the literary doctrine laid out in detail only after the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934.

Blom's surprised account of German war hero and writer Ernst Jünger's diagnosis of modern technology's 'celebration of its bloody triumph' betrays a certain lack of understanding of the nature of the reactionary modernism that often made figures on the right look like those of the left. No lesser thinker than Walter Benjamin recognised in Jünger's Storms of Steel (1920) a modernistic celebration of the mechanised body. Klaus Theweleit put this figure of the man-machine at the centre of his controversial study of fascist psychology, and left-wing/anarchist writer William Burroughs wrote a fascinating short story on the same theme. It has become a staple of popular culture at least since The Terminator (1984).

Ernst Jünger in 1922 (Wikimedia Commons)Nevertheless, Blom writes well and has a wonderful eye for vivid quotes, telling anecdotes, and succinct summations of the players in his history: the outrageous performances of black American dancer Josephine Baker; the image of ageing Italian womaniser, flying ace, and poet-turned politician Gabriele D'Annunzio; the anarchy of Barcelona's civil war.

In his previous bestseller, The Vertigo Years: Change and culture in the West 1900–1914 (2008) Blom asked his readers to look back at that time 'without the long shadows of the future darkening their historical present'. Vertigo is the unifying theme of modernity in these early years of the twentieth century, as accelerated change brought a sense of uncertainty and crisis to Europeans. However this sort of intellectual history has its dangers: one might well contend that these years were stable. Empires were still strong, admittedly some more than others, and there were signs of increasing wealth and prosperity even in late tsarist Russia. Germany and Italy were newly unified after centuries of fragmentation.

And yet Blom has a point. An awareness of impending crisis, of increased competition for declining resources among European powers, and of tension between the forces of social stability and social change seemed to dominate the first decade of the new century. Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1912), perhaps the greatest literary index of the state of the European soul at this point begins with a sense of crisis and foreboding that explodes into dreams of rampant bestiality during the course of Gustav von Aschenbach's flight from a life of repression. By 1914 the discontents of civilisation were preoccupying intellectuals and artists alike. Meanwhile, revolution was brewing in Russia, the Morocco affair presaged an increasingly bellicose Germany, and Ottoman power had waned to the point where south-east Europe was aflame.

Blom's model of moving chronologically through the years and taking significant events as his guiding theme in each chapter worked marvellously in The Vertigo Years. Perhaps that period supported such a potentially fragmented approach. In Fracture he repeats the formula, but, for me at least, with less success. The passing years certainly marked important events: revolutions in Germany and Russia in 1918; the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919; the influenza epidemic of 1921; the burning of the Justice Palace in Vienna in 1927; the slaughter of the Kulaks from 1928; the 1936 Olympic Games. But the historical narrative of this period needs to explain how that which seemed so disconnected earlier was now linked by major dynamic forces – economic political, social, and cultural – that had revealed themselves in the intervening war.

The final paragraphs draw parallels with the present, but beyond a sense of impending crisis, there is little substance to Blom's warnings. Together, Vertigo and Fracture present the scenarios of the years 1900 to 1938 in vivid colours, but like the abstract art that this era bore, there is not much depth of field.