Today: Headlines from 23 April 1925

A Century in a Day

Every dawn in 2025 arrives with the soft ping of news alerts on our smart-watches, but imagine waking up to front-page headlines inked onto broadsheets or barked out by paperboys. 23 April 1925 was one of those Thursdays when the world felt both thrillingly modern and terrifyingly fragile. Let’s leaf back through the papers and drop into three very different datelines.

1. SOS in the North Atlantic – The Raifuku Maru Disappears

[STORY_1_IMAGE]
"NOW VERY DANGER. COME QUICK." The cryptic Marconi spark shot across the North Atlantic waves shortly after dawn on 22 April. Within hours, the Japanese freighter Raifuku Maru slipped beneath a gale-whipped sea, taking all 38 crew members with her before help could arrive. The nearby White Star liner Homeric steamed valiantly through 40-knot winds but reached only floating cargo and an oil-slicked emptiness.

Newspapers raged: Should passenger liners carry better rescue gear? Did language barriers slow the response? Maritime unions demanded investigations; grieving families in Yokohama and Boston pleaded for answers.

🔎 2025 Lens: Today’s satellite-tracked distress beacons and autonomous rescue drones might have homed in within minutes. Yet the debate over corporate responsibility on the high seas—think of recent container-ship disasters—sounds painfully familiar.

2. Berlin Holds Its Breath – Run-off Countdown to Germany’s First Presidential Election

[STORY_2_IMAGE]
Posters flap on Unter den Linden this very morning in 1925: stern Field-Marshal Paul von Hindenburg versus centrist Catholic statesman Wilhelm Marx. With the run-off set for 26 April, rallies are peaking tonight, 23 April. Monarchists pin hopes on the war hero; republicans warn that electing a Kaiser-loyalist could unsteady the fragile Weimar experiment.

Journalists note the novelty: Germans will choose a head of state by popular vote for the first time. Police brace for scuffles between right-wing Stahlhelm veterans and left-wing paramilitaries outside beer halls.

🔎 2025 Lens: One hundred years on, Germany’s presidency is largely ceremonial and the republic durable—but the specter of populism hasn’t vanished. Watching today’s AI-micro-targeted campaign ads, it’s sobering to remember that 1925’s hand-bill politics still tilted a continent’s fate.

3. Paris Paints the Future – Last-Minute Hammering at the Art Deco Expo Grounds

[STORY_3_IMAGE]
Across the Seine on 23 April, 10,000 workers scramble under half-finished pavilions of glass and chrome. The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes is five days from opening. Designers from 15 nations jockey for space to show off streamlined locomotives, lacquered cocktail bars and skyscraper-shaped lamps—objects soon to give the world the very term “Art Deco.”

American buyers prowl for the next big thing, Soviet envoys sketch industrial layouts, and Parisian cafés buzz with talk that style itself is becoming an export commodity.

🔎 2025 Lens: Visit any 3-D-printed furniture studio or scroll minimalist TikTok feeds and you’ll still see 1925’s love affair with geometric elegance. The expo’s credo—marrying artistry to mass production—echoes today in everything from electric cars to modular smart homes.

Closing Reflections

Three datelines, one day: a tragic SOS, a democracy on edge, a design revolution under construction. They remind us that history is less a dusty archive than a living conversation—between risk and rescue, ballots and power, imagination and industry. As we swipe through 2025’s headlines, spare a thought for the voices crackling over Morse code, the crowds chanting on Berlin streets, and the apprentices lacquering a chair in a Paris warehouse exactly 100 years ago today.