The Vertigo Years

Rather than nostalgically evoking Merchant-Ivory costumes, The Vertigo Years shows how industrialization and urbanization created new realities and transformed societies with its burgeoning urban centers and mass media and mass sports events, its feminism, nuclear physics, the theory of relativity, abstract art, consumer culture, mass travel and economic globalization. Within less than a generation the world had been changed for good. Throughout the series, particular attention will be paid (not always explicitly but also by narrative cutting) to similarities, parallels and differences between the period between 1900-1914 and our present (i.e. 2014).

The questions in the background are: In how far have globalization, mass culture, democratization, and the feeling of living through a period of huge acceleration of history changed the people of 1910? And in now far are we ourselves still in the grip of this feeling? If our situations are similar, can we be more intelligent now than our great-grandparents were?