by Philipp Blom
Echoes of George’s swelteringly homoerotic circle of ephebes can be found in the aristocratic Liebenberg circle around Prince Eulenburg, a reflection throwing further light on Wilhelm II’s fear of becoming entangled in the scandal around his friend and adviser. The wrath shown by the persecutors of Eulenburg and von Moltke in the press, the judiciary and at court was also a reaction against the subversive culture of alternative, community-based visions of life which many upstanding burghers felt was threatening to undermine the foundations of Wilhelminian society. The tension between elective communities seeking to realize a particular vision of life and of society, and belief in an imposed community with a rigid morality, was a strong presence in German society and art. Already in 1887 it had been articulated by Ferdinand Tönnies in his book Community and Society, in which he contrasted two radically different modes of social organization and their implications, arguing that society is always prone to suppress the charismatic ferment of communal visions.
Troubling Visions
Trouble loomed wherever alternative visions collided with official institutions. As we have seen in chapter 3, the Vienna Secession movement of young artists itself contained a strong element of creating an alternative way of living and of seeing the world, and no one expressed this desire for difference more eloquently than Gustav Klimt. Habitually dressed in clothes of his own design and similar to Tolstoy’s peasant frocks, famously unkempt and unwashed and endowed with an apparently superhuman capacity for attending to the wishes of female admirers, as well as to his permanent mis-tress Emilie Flöge, Klimt was practically a one-man alternative universe. His was more than the bohemian attitude habitually cultivated by artists. Klimt’s anarchic, Eroscentred view of life translated directly into his work. This directness was to cause the greatest artistic scandal in pre-war Vienna.
Flowing robes: Gustav Klimt in
clothes of his own design.
It had all begun with a highly official pat on the back in 1894, when the young painter Klimt, already famous for his gorgeously writhing, grand historicist tableaux on the Ringstrasse, received a commission from the ministry of education for three panels to adorn the hall of ceremonies in the newly built neo-Renaissance university building. The three works were to be part of an ensemble showing the Triumph of Light Over Darkness and Klimt was to represent three of the four university faculties: Medicine, Philosophy and Law - classic nineteenth-century allegorical fare, to be executed in the most dignified and exotically charged manner possible. The painter took his time to tackle this prestigious assignment, a period that coincided with a complete artistic reorientation. He had made good money with his sumptuous processions and architectural fantasies, but he had lost confidence in this way of representing things. The true nature of things, he felt, was darker, more archaic and more sensual, and had to be represented in a radically different manner.
When Klimt finally delivered the panels to the university in 1902, the works bore witness to his evolution from the merely suggestive to the downright outrageous - stages of an artist’s vision of society. The first panel, depicting Philosophy, was disturbing in its dark voluptuousness. At the bottom of the surface, a mask-like Sphinx stared at the beholder, while above there was a whirl of obscure matter and a torrent of bodies, descending from early childhood via two pairs of lovers to the despair and loneliness of old age - an existential vision gravely at odds both with the rationalist optimism of the Enlightenment and with the analytical, positivist predictions of the Viennese school of philosophy. Medicine, the second panel, showed the stern figure of Hygiena in the foreground, an unapproachable, richly adorned female form holding a snake and a beaker. The remainder of the canvas, however, pursued the idea of hopeless entanglements and fundamental loneliness like a Schnitzler drama staged by a deranged orientalist. A cloud of nude figures to the right, each isolated in his or her own despair, clustered around a skeleton whose sightless eyes were turned towards a single female figure on the left, provocatively seen frontally and from below, an image of desire lost in space. The naked truth was staring the beholder in the face.
Most stylistically advanced and most provocative was Jurisprudence, on which Klimt worked intermittently until 1907. In this panel, the frigid spectre of Justice had receded into the far distance, taking up no more than a quarter of the height of the composition, an insignificant and impossibly distant figure flanked by two dreamy companions, Law and Truth. The canvas was dominated, however, by Klimt’s own vision of hopelessness: trapped in a terrible, submarine realm and ensnared by a gigantic, pitiless octopus, a naked male figure - middle-aged, stooping, and with sagging, egregiously unheroic features - bowed its head in the expectation of an inevitable punishment. Surrounding him were three naked female furies, seductive but unreachable in their bloody-minded vindictiveness. This ‘erotic nightmare in a clammy hell’, in the words of Carl Schorske, promised no justice, but only suffering under the judgmental stares of the disembodied, pitiless faces surrounding the tiny trinity, like a parody of baroque putti in a country church. The bourgeois order of things, the young painter proclaimed, held no promise for him. Kafkaesque terror and existential isolation were all that was to be expected from the empire’s great institutions and their morality.
The professors of Vienna University were outraged. Eighty-seven of them signed a petition against the paintings, arguing that they represented ‘unclear ideas through unclear form’ and were nothing more than ‘gloomy phantasms’ illustrating the chaos and confusion in the mind of the artist. While the conservatives were livid about this attack on public morality and decency, more progressive critics found to their embarrassment that they agreed with people they would not have greeted on the street. The well-known liberal philosopher Friedrich Jodl, for example, grounded his own opposition to the paintings in the fact that, with so much obscurantism and occultism threatening the achievements of an enlightened, rational society, the last thing the chief university of the Habsburg empire needed was a group of paintings dramatizing the darkness of the soul and the impotence of reason.
Egged on by Klimt’s own martial stance (a friendly journalist relates that at the end of an interview he took a revolver out of a drawer and told her to go as he now had to wait for his enemies), the rejection of the Faculty paintings caused a furious public debate about the nature and purpose of art itself, and catapulted the painter into a position of prominence as artiste à scandale, provider of wickedly beautiful images and the best-paid artist in Austria-Hungary.
Isis Unveiled
Alternative visions of reality and of a better future could take many forms, none richer in personality and pungent detail than the most important movement to reject all apparent truth and to postulate, instead, a spirit world directing the earthly realm of illusion: the occult teachings of theosophy and anthroposophy. The ancestor and inspiration of this world-view was Helena Blavatsky (1831-91), a cousin of that arch pragmatist, the Russian prime minister Sergei Witte.
‘Madame Blavatsky’, as she became universally known, had lived through a rather turbulent early career that led her to flee an unhappy marriage to an uninspiring bureaucrat after only three months. She boarded a steamer bound for Constantinople and nothing certain can be said about her whereabouts for the next ten years, which she claimed to have spent travelling throughout the spiritual centres of the world and especially Tibet, where, according to her accounts, she had been inducted into ancient initiation mysteries by Buddhist monks. Almost by way of an afterthought, she had also worked as a circus rider, toured in Siberia as a concert pianist, opened and managed an ink factory in Odessa, worked as an importer of ostrich feathers in Paris, and been an intimate of the French Empress Eugénie. After a passionate affair with an opera singer and a stint in Cairo, Blavatsky materialized in 1873 in New York. There she had decided to settle, having returned, as she would later write, from a failed attempt at making a new life in the West, and after a dramatic spell that had included meetings with Egyptian cabbalists, a
shipwreck off the Greek coast, fighting for Garibaldi in Italy, and meetings with Indians at the inland frontiers of 1860s America.
Glowing eyes, prophetic beard: Madame Blavatsky
with her companion.
Blavatsky’s arresting appearance - her deep, mournful, knowing eyes, incessant smoking, her hair ‘crinkled like a negro or a Cotswold ewe’ and fantasy robes - made a deep impression on the people she met. Having worked in New York first as a seamstress and then as a medium and author of the occult magnum opus Isis Unveiled (1877) Blavatsky and her companion Henry Steel Olcott presided over a court of seekers after deeper truths. Their quest was directed by letters from the spirit world in gold ink on green paper, delivered to the followers by the medium herself and usually containing stipulations advantageous to her. Together with Olcott she founded the Theosophical Society, moved to India and from there to Würzburg in Germany and London, where she died in 1891.
Madame Blavatsky’s brand of occult, Indian-inspired initiation teaching found a lively following, particularly in Britain, Germany and Russia. Science, she claimed, was simply too limited a way of seeing the world, as it excluded the reality of the spirit world. This had been the chief error of Darwin (while in New York, Blavatsky had kept a stuffed baboon with a copy of The Origin of Species under its arm in her rooms), who could have been a great scientist if only he had been more open-minded, and whose errors she had come to correct. Physical reality was a mere distraction from the spiritual truth, Blavatsky went on to write, and only through meditation and initiation was it possible to turn attention from the earthly body and towards the astral body, which mankind, the first species to inhabit planet earth, had possessed long before their physical bodies.
Blavatsky fascinated and intrigued intellectuals in London. The mystical quest of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats brought him to her doorstep, the Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw wrote an account of her life and developed mystical ideas closely related to her own, and the architect Edwin Lutyens was one of her movement’s most enthusiastic patrons and followers, as was the extravagantly duplicitous Charles Webster Leadbeater who, much like Madame Blavatsky, pretended to have lived through a multitude of exotic and occult adventures before turning to theosophy and eventual initiation.
Leadbeater’s undoubtedly real enthusiasm concerned the young boys he cultivated, allegedly to find a pure soul who would be the next Great Teacher. In India, he believed he had found this extraordinary individual in Jiddu Krishnamurti, a handsome but by all accounts intellectually backward youth who, together with his brother, soon came to live with Leadbeater to follow a rigorous programme of special tuition and teaching of universal mysteries, including close supervision of the boys’ meals and wash times. Eventually, Leadbeater (who had let it be known that in 40,000 BC he had been the wife of Annie Besant while their common child had been Krishnamurti) moved to England to pursue his educational plans for the boys. They followed him with a guarded blessing from their father, who may or may not have known that his sons’ guardian had already once, in 1906, been excluded from the Theosophical Society over accusations of pederasty involving two American boys to whom, he claimed, he had only mentioned the matter of masturbation as part of a healthy upbringing. This defence looked somewhat thin after the discovery of a coded letter to one of his many charges which read: ‘My own darling boy ... Twice a week is permissible, but you will soon discover what brings the best effect…If it comes without help he needs rubbing more often, but not too often, or he will not come well…Glad sensation is so pleasant. Thousand kisses, darling.’
By 1911 British theosophy had blossomed into a substantial movement. It had 16,000 members, was organized in local lodges and enjoyed the camp pleasure of elaborate rituals held in ceremonial robes, uniforms and special jewellery. At the heart of it all stood the semi-divine figure of the boy saint Krishnamurti, who was sullen and subdued in the unaccustomed lightless grey of his new English surroundings. He would stay true to his calling, remaining a spiritual teacher until his death in 1986.
Even outside their small circles there was a considerable interest in mythology in Britain. The Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer’s bestselling The Golden Bough (1890, republished and greatly enlarged 1905-16) was influential among the middle classes, but Frazer’s sober exposition did not lend itself to spiritualist fantasy. On the contrary, in putting Jesus next to Buddha and analysing the reasonances of diverse mythologies in Christian belief, the anthropologist and scholar did much to demystify religion.
The middle-class fashion for alternative beliefs also, as so often, went hand in hand with ideas of a change in sexual mores. The activist and former curate Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) embodied this all-purpose attitude with a very personal mélange of homosexual liberation, nudism, organic farming, Anglicanism, vegetarianism, socialism and poetry. One of the first men of his class to dare to live openly with his male partners, Carpenter published The Intermediate Sex in 1908, in which he also expounded on the subversive potential of sexual and spiritual liberation:
Eros is a great leveller. Perhaps the true Democracy rests ... on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society. It is noticeable how often Uranians [homosexuals] of good position and breeding are drawn to rougher types, as of manual workers, and frequently very permanent alliances grow up in this way, which although not publicly acknowledged have a decided influence on social institutions, customs and political tendencies.
Carpenter’s ‘uranian’ proclivities and political activism made him many enemies, and when he founded the Independent Labour Party together with George Bernard Shaw, he and his followers drew the bile of George Orwell, who was to complain that ‘every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer [and] sex maniac’ now thought that he had a political message. While serious socialists like Orwell were appalled at Carpenter’s apparent frivolity, others were encouraged by his example. The novelist E. M. Forster took Carpenter as inspiration for his novel The Longest Journey, and the young poet Rupert Brooke, just out of Cambridge, merrily formed a ‘neo-pagan’ circle whose rituals consisted mainly in nude river bathing by moonlight with equally adventurous friends such as Virginia Stephen.
These experiments by Britain’s incipient artistic and intellectual Bohème were only the beginning. The assortment of visions, experimental schools, artistic movements and avant-garde publications that shook up British culture were to flower after the War. After all, the most important focus for this counter-culture, the Bloomsbury Group which developed around the sisters Virginia and Vanessa Stephen (later Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell), was only just coming into existence. There was the prolific and blazingly promiscuous Augustus John, a painter resplendent in gypsy clothes and endowed with truly titanic libido and decidedly unconventional morals, but he spent a great deal of his time in Paris during these years, where he found more congenial spirits among the Paris Bohème.
In Germany, meanwhile, one member of the Theosophical Society had begun to go his own way. Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the son of a station-master in rural Styria, in Austria-Hungary, was a curiously charismatic prophet of Spiritual Truth whose legacy endures to this day. A brilliant literary scholar with a thorough knowledge of philosophy, history and natural science, Steiner had studied in Vienna and Rostock. At the age of twenty-seven, he had been invited to edit Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s scientific writings. This project was based in Weimar, where the researcher remained for eight years, fascinated not only by Goethe’s poetry but also his scientific ideas which, though discredited by natural scientists, seemed to him to herald a higher knowledge of nature.
Having lectured to the Theosophical Society chapter in Berlin, Steiner was appointed leader of the German and Austro-Hungarian chapter in 1904, but he soon found the Buddhist emphasis of the Blavatsky school too limited and so founded a rival organization, the Anthroposophical Society, whose teacher and pivotal figure he wou
ld remain through years of manically productive work. A true polymath, Steiner was much more than just the founder of a ‘spiritual science’ designed to develop hidden organs of perception to perceive the spiritual world. His literary output was gigantic, compromising 6,000 lectures and dozens of books. On top of his writing and his constant travelling and lecturing across Europe, he found time within the twenty-one years remaining to him to found schools and design their entire curriculum, and to work with farmers on a system of husbandry in tune with the cosmos which was to become known as biodynamic agriculture. He also managed to sculpt, paint and write occult mystery plays; to inspire forms of expressionist dance, plus a school of architecture based on his own designs for seventeen buildings; to develop a medical method akin to homeopathy, as well as a new school of economic thought and a kind of cooperative bank and, after the First World War, to found a religious community based on a mixture of Catholicism and expressionist aesthetic.
Steiner appeared indefatigable, a fact his many followers ascribed to mystic powers. In 1913 he decided to build a spiritual centre for the movement: the Goetheanum in Dornach near Basel, Switzerland, a building devoted to the cult of spiritual truth and its apostle Goethe, constructed entirely of wood and designed down to the smallest detail by ‘the doctor’, as his followers called him (and still do to this day). With his monastic bearing, his darkly glowing eyes and his mysterious utterances, Steiner was successful in attracting a better kind of crowd than did the theosophists. His seeming intellectual rigour and wide reading were impressive, and his system had the twin advantages of sophistication and coherence, especially as he always impressed on his pupils the importance not just of believing what he told them, but of using his teachings as a way of discovering the truths of the spiritual world themselves, according to an elaborate and ‘scientific’ system of spiritual sensibilization and mediation.