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That endless, terrible year of '16. Francine Stock explores the struggle for meaning, freedom, sanity and possibility.

The supreme talent of Franz Marc is snuffed out in the first days of the battle of Verdun. In Berlin you can have a day out and knock a nail into a gigantic statue of war leader Hindenburg. On a street in Stepney they are knocking up a parody of him. In a Zurich night club strange sounds are conjured up by the weird magicians of a new movement - Dada. Shouting defiance of the madness of war. Britain's still disturbed by the losses at the Battle of Jutland are stunned by the death of Kitchener, icon, recruiting poster and war hero. An omen of terrible things to come in the months ahead? Sir Hubert Parry takes on a commission to put the words of Blake to music for The Fight to Right movement and Jerusalem sounds for the first time.

For the Jewish civilians of Eastern Europe there is no escape from war. Drafted into the armies of the Czar in disproportionate numbers, surrounded by anti-Semitism, displaced either by their own side or by invading German or Austro-Hungarian armies. The writings of Sholom Alecheim had brought the old world of the Shtetl to new, international audiences. His passing that year is marked by thousands in a grand funeral in New York. But back home all is disaster. Ethnologist S.Ansky travels from St Petersburg to the Pale of Settlement in a desperate attempt to document this disappearing world and bring aid and relief. Back in St Petersburg Maxim Gorky, Russia's senior literary figure, gathers together a host of writers in The Shield, to condemn the continued persecution of the Jews & celebrate their role in helping create the possibility of a new Russia to emerge from the chaos of the old.