When Jean-Paul Sartre eats cheesecake with Simone de Beauvoir at the Kranzler-Eck in Berlin, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin experience wild nights in Paris and “Silent Days in Clichy,” F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway engage in passionate affairs in New York, Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel flee into exile like Katia and Thomas Mann. This is exactly the time when the Nazis seize power in Germany, burn books, and violence against Jews begins. In 1933, the “Golden Twenties” ended with a full stop. Florian Illies takes us back to the era of a singular political catastrophe to tell of the greatest lovers in cultural history: In Berlin, Paris, in Ticino and on the Riviera, the great heroes of the time brace themselves against the impending doom.