The European Century · Newsletter · Issue No. 1
Hello, and welcome to the first dispatch from The European Century.
If you are reading this, you are one of the first people to subscribe to this publication — and I want you to know that means a great deal. Every publication begins somewhere, and this is where this one begins: with you, and with a city, and with one of the most extraordinary decades any city in Europe has ever lived through.
What’s live right now
The first Decade Portrait is published and waiting for you.
Berlin, 1920–1929: The City That Lived at the Edge is a 4,800-word journey through the most improbable decade in Berlin’s history. Jazz arriving like a grenade. Hyperinflation so severe that a wheelbarrow of banknotes might buy a loaf of bread — if you were quick about it, because the price would be different by afternoon. Five hundred dance venues. The Threepenny Opera. Die neue Frau walking the Kurfürstendamm unescorted for the first time. And underneath all of it, the bruise that would eventually be pressed hard enough to show.
If you read one thing on this site this week, make it that.
[Read the Berlin Decade Portrait →]Berlin in the 1920s
What’s coming
The pipeline is full and I am genuinely excited about what is on the way.
The Sound of the Streets: Music in 1920s Berlin is nearly ready — a deep dive into the musical scene that produced the Threepenny Opera, Claire Waldoff’s dagger-sharp cabaret songs, and the Comedian Harmonists, whose story is one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking in the history of European music.
The first Historical Table recipe post is coming soon — Bouletten mit Kartoffelsalat, the beloved Berlin street food that fed the city through its most improbable years. A working recipe for your kitchen and the history of the people who ate it.
And the second Decade Portrait is already in the outline stage: Paris in the 1940s — occupation, liberation, existentialism, and the complicated question of what it means to make music and art when the audience includes both the people who want you dead and the people who need you to play.
A note on what this publication is
The European Century is a cultural and social history of 20th century Europe told through the music, food, and everyday lives of the people who lived it. Not the politicians and the generals. The ordinary men and women who danced, cooked, argued, and made extraordinary things through one of the most turbulent centuries any continent has ever survived.
Every Monday morning this newsletter will arrive in your inbox — a short dispatch connecting a moment in European history to the music and food of its time. Sometimes it will preview what is coming. Sometimes it will go somewhere unexpected. Always it will be worth your time.
Thank you for being here at the beginning. Now — let’s go exploring.
Michelle
The European Century
europeancentury.substack.com
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