The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  But there were also more profoundly subversive figures, whose vision it was not just to change the political order, but to alter people’s very mode of feeling and the way they lived their lives. The most famous of these was Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949), a brilliant classicist who had slipped out of the academy and into a world of his own devising. As with Bertha von Suttner’s, his story begins with an elopement - a significant fact, perhaps, for those wishing to flee bourgeois values. In his case it was a meeting, in 1893, with Lydia Dmitrievna Zinovieva-Annibal, a poet and translator who was, like Ivanov himself, married at the time. The couple settled first in Athens and then in Geneva, making numerous journeys to Palestine, Egypt and Italy, where the scholar became fascinated with the tragic, excessive and dark god, Dionysus. The result was a conversion to pagan mysticism which Ivanov documented in his first important book, The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God (1904).

  In 1905, the Ivanovs returned to St Petersburg, where they encased themselves inside a turreted building known to all and sundry as ‘the Tower’. Inside the Tower, the rigid rules of contemporary Russia no longer applied. The huge apartment had no walls at all, but was divided by low bookcases and adorned with oriental artefacts. Heavy carpets, lilies dispersing their thickly sensual scent and candles lighting the dusk of this strange kingdom completed the ensemble. There were no clocks, and no fixed times. Ivanov himself would often go to bed at eight in the morning and wake in the late afternoon, ready to receive his many guests, whom he would ply with large quantities of tea, wine and mysticism for as long as they cared to stay.

  Some of his young admirers took him at his word. Andrei Bely, author of the groundbreaking novel Petersburg, once remained in this sacred grove for a full five weeks; others, like his friend Emil K. Metner, did not manage longer than two days. As the guests arrived for evening sessions there would be endless discussions about philosophy, religion, literature, poetry and art. Ivanov expounded his vision of a religion of the future that would fuse Christ and Dionysus, redemption and ecstasy, the conquest of the next world and the enjoyment of the present one in one great cultic mysterium, complete with orgiastic rites: a rebirth of culture out of the hidden impulses of antiquity. Late in the night, when most visitors had left, remaining groups would continue their discussions, while others would discreetly pair off in couples and seek out one of the more private areas to continue their exchange without much talking.

  Dionysus and Christ appeared remarkably often in the visions of those preaching new forms of life. Nietzsche had brought the Greek god back from mythological death, and the ecstatic, irrational dimension that was his appealed strongly to a young generation whose childhoods had been dominated by rigid notions of discipline, control, reason and self-sacrifice. It is significant that the epicentre of this explosion of alternative ways of living lay in Germany and Austria-Hungary.

  Bohemians and Barefoot Prophets

  Prophets of all shades and flavours abounded particularly in Vienna and Munich, the two poles of this little universe. Some were simply eccentric socialists or Catholic missionaries who had got carried away by their sense of mission, but others had more radical, more individual visions. Home of the German Bohème and of an artists’ colony in the Schwabing district, among Munich’s denizens were luminaries like the writers Thomas Mann and Frank Wedekind, the satirical journal Simplicissimus, the painters Vassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Gabriele Münter. Schwabing was a laboratory for designs of living.

  One of the most emblematic figures of this set was Countess Fanny von Reventlow (1871-1918), whose short, difficult and rich life burned itself out in misery, but left us one of the funniest and most perceptive analyses of the Schwabing universe, Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen (Mr Dame’s Note Books, 1913). Born into an aristocratic family in northern Germany, the young Fanny had soon rebelled against the conservative values at home. Marriage appeared to be a way out (she was pregnant by another man as well), but the young woman found this too constraining. Not yet thirty and already divorced, the passionate bohémienne moved to Munich to study painting, only to find that she had no talent for it. During the following years, the rebel countess made a precarious living as a translator, journalist, cook, secretary, decorative glass painter and insurance agent while she pursued her dream of becoming an artist and was herself pursued by several of Schwabing’s literary lions. She responded enthusiastically and had liaisons with several of them, episodes that later found their way into her roman-à-clef about her Munich years.

  Bohemian beauty:

  Fanny von

  Reventlow was a

  canny chronicler of

  the experiments in

  living in Munich.

  Reventlow’s novel not only caricatures the florid goings-on amid the Schwabing set, but also elaborates on the theme of male anxiety in a changing world. The hero is Herr Dame, ‘Mister Lady’, who continuously excuses himself for his ridiculous surname and is convinced that he will never be able to find a woman willing to be called Mrs Lady. Branded an outsider by his very name, Herr Dame observes the artists, prophets and imposters who make up the local pond life and notes down their absurd parties and conversations, dripping with mysticism, neologisms and dark murmurings. ‘I feel as if I had to take my brain apart and reassemble it anew,’ the hero complains. ‘The way it has been functioning till now and the trains of thought I know and am used to are no longer useful - I want to switch them off, take them out of service until I am able to move more securely amid all this novelty.’

  The group’s incessant talk about matriarchy, Dionysian rites, ancient religion and pagan rituals leads to the project of celebrating a Bacchanal, an episode that was modelled (like the rest of the novel) on a real party given at the house of one of Schwabing’s local philosophical demigods, Karl Wolfskehl. Half ritual, half orgy, the proposed celebration promises something exciting and new and members of the circle throw themselves into preparations for the grand occasion: ‘we went to buy tricot fabric [for suitable outfits] and went through countless shops until we found red vine leaves for wreaths and symbolic dewdrops made of glass.’ When the great occasion finally arrives, slightly marred by the fact that one of the revellers has misunderstood the idea and turns up dressed as Pierrot, the result is another comical challenge to upstanding manliness.

  Delius [a man] had arrived dressed in the black cloak of a Roman matron; on his head he wore a black veil, and in his hand was a metal triangle, which he struck melodiously with a little rod. And the professor, too, as Indian Dionysus in a purple tunic with vine wreath and long, golden staff. During the dance he hurtled about wildly and his eyes rolled and I remarked that he was quite a beautiful man with his mighty frame and dark beard. He appeared to please quite a few women, too, and he kept staring at them with ecstatic eyes and thought them all beautiful beyond words. There was no lack of enthusiasm and he lived his role to the full, if I can put it that way. Only during one scene he became annoyed - in an animated moment, Maria tried to climb his enormous golden staff - he looked at her gleefully and mindlessly offered his staff, and the staff snapped off in the middle.

  It was not easy for a man to be equal to the task the historical moment demanded of him. Mr Lady and the professional Dionysus with his staff broken in half by a female reveller were two examples of this quandary.

  While the Schwabing bohemians were having fun by talking grandly, smoking too much and dressing up, Munich also attracted more radical prophets. There was the imposing figure of Wilhelm Diefenbach, bearded, long-haired and shrouded, if dressed at all, in long, flowing robes, a painter who created a community of twenty-five devotees to nudism and a strict vegetarian diet. To the endless amusement of the local press, Diefenbach spent almost more time in court than anywhere else, as he and his followers insisted on walking naked at least within the confines of their property: ‘His pupil,’ recorded the Münchner Post with obvious delight, ‘the patissier’s son Hugo Höppeler from Lübeck, a splendid youth with purple cheeks
and luscious black locks ... is supposed to have committed the sin of having shown himself in Adam’s costume on the sunny lawn, his posterior pointed disrespectfully towards the heavens.’ The youth in question defended his action as ‘pleasing to God’ but his barefoot appearance in court earned him an additional two days in jail for gross indecency, the judges having found that the group’s behaviour was simply a Schweinerei. A skilful and prolific artist, Diefenbach was finally brought down by local politicians who made it almost impossible for him to exhibit his paintings and earn a living. He died, of pneumonia, in 1913.

  Barefoot prophet: on his wanderings through Italy Gusto Gräser

  was taken for Christ.

  Hugo Höppeler, who had appeared in court as a follower of the wayward artistic genius, was himself destined to become, as Fidus, one of Germany’s most famous painters. He maintained his interest in beautiful bodies, nudism, and alternative ways of living, as his interests turned to supposedly ancient Germanic rites, grand designs for sun temples and a series of hugely popular paintings and graphic works heaving with erotic charge.

  There were other ‘barefoot prophets’, as they were called: the disturbingly Christlike Gustav Nagel, who combined a well-groomed moustache with hair falling down to his bare shoulders and who lived in a cave, roaming the vicinity on foot to proclaim his gospel of Christian naturism; the itinerant prophet and life reformer Gusto Gräser, who threw away a secure bourgeois existence including all his clothes and walked to Italy, barefoot, bearded, and with hair down to his shoulders, a true hippie avant la lettre. On his way peasants bared their heads and cried ad venit Christus! Constantly arrested and thrown out of the cities he visited to give friendly talks, recite his poetry and distribute leaflets about the New Life, Gräser eventually founded the nature community Monte Verita in the name of universal love. Among his early devotees were Fanny von Reventlow, disillusioned by life in Munich, and the young Hermann Hesse, who would later win the Nobel Prize for Literature with novels strongly tinted by fantasies of escape into a world of delicate mysticism, a time before or beyond the bourgeois morality that had crushed his spirits growing up as the son of a sternly Calvinist pastor in Switzerland. There were many, many others setting up experimental communities and rebelling against the Wilhelminian morality and conventional decency of property arrangements.

  Hail the New Age: a seeker

  for truth at the Monte

  Verita colony in Italy, which

  also attracted the young

  Hermann Hesse.

  This rebellion and the search for a simpler, more natural life also came with a more acceptable façade. Founded in 1896, the Wandervogel movement in Germany attracted tens of thousands of young people. Unlike Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts in Britain, with their emphasis on discipline, survival and paramilitary education, the young ‘migratory birds’ had had enough of uniforms, drill and discipline. They wanted to roam free, to go for long cycle rides through the countryside, and generally to escape from the strictures of bourgeois anxiety into a world without constraints, happily singing around the camp fire. Predictably, this was a volatile mix. Boys and girls together, close and unsupervised in God’s open air after a long and exhilarating cycle ride - the idea was abhorrent to good Wilhelminian minds, and with some reason. The nights spent listening to a guitar being strummed by a camp fire probably did more to change German society in the long run than any number of debates in the Reichstag. The volatility, though, also proved to be intellectual. The movement split and fissured in spectacular fashion, parts of it absorbed into environmentalism and naturism, while others were to be subsumed into the Hitler Youth.

  Sharing the earthbound enthusiasm of the Wandervögel and the Nietzschean will to transform all values and create a New Man, were exponents of one group who had for long been on the outside looking in: the Zionists. Born out of the venomous nationalist debates of Austria-Hungary and the ruthless oppression in Tsarist Russia, Zionism was a largely political movement aiming for no more than normalizing the situation of the Jews by giving them a state, as every other people had. Some Zionists, however, went much further in their goal, hoping for nothing less than a spiritual rebirth of Jewish culture and of the heroic strength of Samson.

  The Voice of the Blood

  One of the most striking examples of spiritual Zionism was a student fraternity in Prague, a collection of young men from Jewish bourgeois homes who had called their group Bar Kochba after the legendary anti-Roman rebel in second-century Palestine. They were far from the only Jewish fraternity (excluded by their ‘Aryan’ fellow students, many Jewish academics founded their own fraternities; some of them even duelled with sabres), but their correspondence with each other and with well-known philosophers whom they invited to give talks is a valuable record of their ideas.

  The prophet to whom these enthusiastic young men addressed their high hopes was the appropriately bearded Martin Buber (1878-1965), the grandson of a great Talmudic scholar. Having made his career first as a poet (treating Jewish as well as non-Jewish themes), the young scholar had become interested in resurrecting Jewish culture out of the living traditions of the Hasidic Jews, whose emphasis on irrationality and mysticism strongly complemented his own interest in the mystical traditions of Asia and the West. His publication in 1908 of the Legends of the Baalshem and Rabbi Nachman’s Stories had brought him to the attention of a wide Jewish reading public. The young Prague students had grown up in an entirely assimilated environment. They would never have exchanged a word with an orthodox Jew on the street and would have had no language in which to communicate with him, one knowing only Yiddish and Hebrew and perhaps a little Russian; the other German and possibly French, Latin and Greek. In Buber’s writings, they saw the possibility of breaking out of their double ghetto of antisemitism and ‘foreign’ culture and of rediscovering the inner voice of their Jewish selves, which Buber encouraged them to do in a series of speeches:

  the hour in which one discovers the succession of generations, of fathers and mothers which had led to the presence ... the confluence of blood … will make one feel the immortality of the generations and the community of the blood ... In addition ... he will find in the discovery of his blood the rooted, nourishing force in each individual, the discovery that the deepest layers of our being are determined by blood, that our thought and will are coloured by it.

  Ideas like these situate Buber in an unexpected context: that of German neo-Romantic nationalists such as Paul de Lagarde and the publisher Eugen Diederichs, who published Buber’s books, as well as others proclaiming the spiritual revival of the German Volk out of the nobility of their ancient blood such as Julius Langbehn’s hugely popular tome, Rembrandt as Educator (1890), which portrayed the Dutch genius as a living embodiment of the German ideals of inwardness, creativity and honesty. Other books on his list carried titles like The New Mysticism, The Germanicization of Christianity, and Elective Affinities of the German Blood.

  The Jewish students of the Prague Bar Kochba listened eagerly to the voice of blood and augmented its message with reading of their own. They enthusiastically read and swapped books by Nietzsche, the virulently antisemitic Paul de Lagarde, the arch-racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the conservative French Catholic writer Paul Claudel and the French philosopher and apostle of the unthinking élan vital, life force, Henri Bergson. Paradoxically, the emphasis on the community of the Volk, of blood, soil and irrational life forces, did not free the Jewish students from the bondage of assimilation but assimilated a European and particularly German intellectual world of racial thought that was to be a direct ancestor of National Socialism. The seductive power of this rhetoric seemed inescapable.

  The cult of life and the idea of a true community, of free spirits not subjected to the rules of society, and the vision of a rebirth of truths long lost, fascinated German artists too. In the case of the thoroughly bourgeois Richard Strauss, this fascination expressed itself in his choice of topics for his orchestral pieces, ranging
from the heroic hermit Zarathustra to the leg-endary medieval mischief-maker and radical outsider Till Eulenspiegel (who is hanged by a court not sharing his sense of humour) to the protean passions of Don Juan. Texts chosen by Gustav Mahler conjure up a love of nature and naiveté whose burning intensity illustrate the artist’s longing for a full communion with nature and a return to life in a primitive community.

  Dangerous subversion: young Wandervogel activists of both sexes

  enjoying nature.

  No other artist went quite as far in the cult of community as the conservative poet and aesthete Stefan George (1868-1933), whose disdain for the humdrum lives of ordinary people was matched only by his twin loves of beautiful texts and beautiful young men. A despotic and idealist adorer of the German soul who liked to be referred to as ‘master’, George acquired a considerable following during the many years he travelled through the country, moving his court from city to city, careful never to be polluted by the banality of having to earn a living. His poems were highly thought of at the time, but his real influence was exercised by the group of intelligent and good-looking youths he attracted wherever he went. One of these, a boy by the name of Max Kommerell, died young, and his memory became a veritable cult to the poet, who resurrected the handsome memory in his poems as ‘Maximin’.