The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  The tension between the alienation of urban life and the nostalgia for an idealized, simpler past was particularly acute for many assimilated Jews, who found themselves caught between a Western world in which they did their utmost to excel and be accepted, and the seemingly timeless way of living of the shtetl, which was still in the memory of older members of their family. For most Jews the memory of poverty in the ghettos was still too recent to be romanticized; the pull of full citizenship in Western society too strong. It is significant that many Jewish artists and intellectuals from this time had the heightened sensitivity of the outsider and were eager to seize on questions of custom, class and origin, but with exceptions such as Marc Chagall and Martin Buber they rarely ever did so by invoking the Jewish past their families had left behind. Gustav Mahler used Austrian folk tunes, military music and German folk poems in his symphonies and songs, not klezmer tunes. Sigmund Freud would later write about Moses, but he drew the mythological archetypes of his psychoanalytic work from Greek mythology, not from the Bible.

  The God of Ecstasy

  Freud was one of many intellectuals at the time who tried to draw refreshing water from the deep fountains of ancient Greece. What better remedy for a tired civilization clogged by a legacy of stifling Christian values than to resort to its pre-Christian founding myths? What impulse could be more natural for a generation educated in Latin and Greek at humanist schools, a generation who knew more about the Peloponnesian wars than about any other conflict in history? Nietzsche, that great prophet of renewal and an author every single self-respecting person of intelligence had read, had been a professor of classics, of course, and he had demanded that the ecstatic, often destructive Dionysian element be given a higher place in culture, as a counterweight to the cold crystal stare of Apollo and Athena.

  Among those who revisited the Greeks and cast them in their own image was the Austrian essayist and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Begged for a new challenge by the German star actress Gertrud Eysoldt, he had turned to Sophocles’ tragedy Electra as inspiration for a play by the same name. Work progressed well, and after only three weeks of writing, a delighted Hofmannsthal could dispatch a manuscript to the actress who was known for her daring roles, and for giving her all in every performance. Her reaction was immediate and intense, as she confessed in an appropriately dramatic letter to him:

  Tonight I have taken home your Electra and I have just finished reading it. I am lying here broken - I am suffering - I cry out oppressed by this violence - I am afraid of my own strength, of the torture that awaits me. I will suffer terribly [while playing Electra] ... You have written with my own burning life - you have formed from my blood the possibilities of wild dreams - and I have been living here suspecting nothing ... this infinitely inflamed will of my blood [all dies unendlich brünstige Willen meines Blutes].

  I recognize everything - I am terribly shocked [by my recognition] - I am horrified. I am struggling - I am afraid.

  What was the actress so afraid of? Hofmannsthal had indeed written a shocking drama, a ‘bloody furor with style’, as the famous critic Alfred Kerr put it after its first performance in 1904. Electra’s entire existence is centred on revenging the murder of her heroic father Agamemnon, killed by his own wife (Electra’s mother) and her lover. Like Hamlet, she wants to right a wrong, but unlike Hamlet she is entirely consumed by her own murderous feelings and has sacrificed her entire life’s hopes in her determination to slay her mother and her mother’s lover: The public was shocked to see a woman baying for blood, a woman torn by overwhelming emotions - not of hysteria, or loyalty or the defence of girlhood purity. From ancient myth, Hofmannsthal had created a new kind of woman: dangerous, forceful, and devastatingly passionate - everything, in fact, that women were not supposed to be; and he had gone further. In the Greek original, Electra had been the instrument of divine revenge and the real drama and the responsibility for human acts were thus played out on Olympus. In the new version, however, this reassuring dimension had been erased and all passion, all madness and all lust had been put into the minds and souls of the protagonists themselves. Electra is neither a tool of higher forces nor a woman on a righteous quest; she is a woman tortured by violent, bloody urges over which she has lost all control:

  I have sowed darkness

  and harvested lust over lust.

  I was a black corpse

  among the living, and this hour

  I am the fire of life and my flame

  burns up the darkness of the world.

  My face must be more white

  than the white-hot face of the moon.

  When one looks at me,

  he must receive death or must

  perish with lust.

  Do you see my face?

  Do you see the light I radiate?

  The real scandal was the rage and the lust: a woman as an agent and not one acted upon, a woman of strong, indomitable passion. The effect on the public was extraordinary, electrifying. Within four days of the first performance at the avant-garde Berlin Kleines Theater under Max Reinhardt’s direction, twenty-two other German theatres asked for permission to stage Elektra and three editions of the text were sold out within weeks.

  Hofmannsthal was adamant that his Greece was not the whitewashed utopia so dear to the nineteenth century, but a much darker place without ‘historicizing banalities’, as he made clear in the stage directions: ‘The character of the set is marked by narrowness, inevitablility, enclosedness. The stage painter will aim in the right direction ... if he lets himself be led by the atmosphere of a densely crowded city house…instead of conventional temples and palaces.’

  The piece’s shattering effect was intensified when the composer Richard Strauss (1864-1949) asked Hofmannsthal to adapt the text for an opera. When the resulting work was premiered in Dresden in 1909, the result was unparalleled scandal. Instead of softening the impact with the voluptuous texture of his late-Romantic tone poems, Strauss put his music entirely at the service of amplifying the emotional charge, thus making it all the more frightening. In the very first scene a cry rang out throughout the theatre as the orchestra worked like a hundred-armed machine designed to magnify murderous madness; there were no conventional arias, only a seething mass of soaring emotion, a music that dramatized a woman’s passion without condemning it (Electra’s meeting with her long-lost brother Orestes in the third act contains some of the most lyrical, most intimate operatic moments written in the twentieth century), only to tip once more into the frenzy of revenge. The public was not comforted by easy beauty. Electra’s emotional chaos filled the evening.

  Reviewers were outraged at the artists’ temerity. ‘The noble images of these women, which classical poets drew with eternal traits, have been distorted and perverted by these “modernizers”,’ complained one, while others predictably accused Hofmannsthal’s Electra of being ‘a sadistic megaera [one of the three Furies in Greek mythology], almost a lesbian’. The fears articulated in the face of this wild woman are obvious, particularly the accusation of lesbianism levelled, then as now, at female strength. It is man’s ultimate fear: his total sidelining, becoming superfluous. The Viennese essayist Hermann Bahr had understood this, and more: ‘The tragedy wants nothing different from those two doctors [Sigmund Freud and his mentor Josef Breuer]; it reminds a people diseased by its own culture of things the people does not want to be reminded of, of its evil effects which it hides, of earlier, savage man still lurking and grinding his teeth beneath the façade of the educated person.’

  The mythological monster threatening the orderly appearance of civilized humanity was often a topic for art. But while painters of the nineteenth century had often used motifs from mythology as a convenient excuse for exotic drapery and a little tantalizing flesh, the new generation wanted to expose not only the body, but also the hidden corners of the mind. Vienna’s fragile truce between dream and reality became an ideal stage for fantasies of this kind: Oskar Kokoschka’s illustrated poem Die träume
nden Knaben (The Dreaming Boys, 1908) created a dangerous reverie suspended between Arcadian innocence and sexual tension; Ferdinand Hodler’s canvases seemed to record ancient pagan rites; the poet and graphic artist Alfred Kubin showed Mars, the god of war, as a blind and savage giant with Greek helmet and shield, crushing armies under his monstrous, rock-like boots.

  Nobody went further in this reinterpretation of Greek mythology than Gustav Klimt, whose Greek goddesses radiated a dangerous erotic charge. No classic equilibrium, no Olympian calm here. ‘All art is erotic,’ Klimt had proclaimed, and the obvious sensualism vibrating in his forms and colours seems a fitting tribute to the sex-obsessed deities of Greek myth. Klimt’s panels for Vienna University’s great hall had caused outrage. Their iconography and composition flatly contradicted everything a public institution was seen to represent. His aim was not to use classical drapery for modern efficiency; on the contrary, even when faced with the most modern motif, he wanted to strip away the veneer of convention and emotional containment, to expose the primeval passion underneath.

  Suspended reverie: Kokoschka’s dreaming children are isolated

  and charged with tension.

  In its effort to expose the primeval in the everyday, Klimt’s impertinent gaze, at once that of a satyr and a philosopher, stopped at nothing. His portrait of nine-year-old Mäda Primavesi (1912) probes deeply into the observing mind itself (see plate section). The image shows a pretty child surrounded by her toys, but as the eye fastens on the detail, invisible cracks open all over the canvas and the spectator is drawn into a vortex of disturbing force. First there is the girl’s face. Is it not too old, too knowing for a nine-year-old? It is, rather, the face of a grown woman who has seen everything, who anticipates and invites everything. She challenges the spectator with her insolent stare, her right hand on her hip, and her feet set far apart. The onlooker becomes accomplice to the immoral artist. He is the observer who looks into his own outrageous soul, even as he views what is in front of him. Klimt sees the future woman in the child and his gaze is subtly salacious, scandalously probing her growing girlhood and his own response. Like Röntgen’s X-rays, his eyes undress the girl while the spectator looks on, and from her feet a line, barely visible, traces the outline of the thighs until it reaches the point, above the ruffles in the dress, where the sex is clearly visible through the white gauze. Nothing is innocent here. The dress of conventional morality is little more than a titillation to the senses of those who have learned to see through it, to see pink, naked flesh underneath the starched propriety.

  The god of death: Kubin’s visionary work shows the dangers

  of exaggerated manliness.

  Did human character change, after all, in or around December 1910?

  A large part of the European avant-garde answered resoundingly that no, human character had not changed, nor could it. But it had been diverted from its true course temporarily by the emotional repression imposed by Christianity, by two thousand years of denial and combat against passion, against eros, against all that is authentic and unconstrained within the human mind. The result, wrote anthropologists and psychoanalysts, philosophers and poets, was the alienation of the human mind from its own emotions, of head from heart; the result as painted by Picasso and Klimt, Malevich and Braque, was the cowed life of the urban professional and the slaves of industry, castrated by the huge engines of capitalism; the result, said Stravinsky and Bartók, was the need to reacquaint the tired ears of modern audiences with the harsh vitality of archaic sounds from an imagined age of truth.

  Human character, then, had not changed. A new generation of artists and intellectuals was trying to recapture what they felt had always been there: the undying essence of humanity which had been obscured underneath the teachings of Christian morality and its legitimate, if secular, successor, the bourgeoisie, as described in 1904 by the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920). A man of immense intellectual power whose manic-depressive nature did not allow him to publish the opera magna he attempted to write, Weber was a perfect example of his class and age: hard-working and highly professional but constantly beset by sexual anxieties and ‘neurasthenic’ episodes which paralysed his capacity for work so badly that he had to abandon a brilliant university career. Living on the emotional knife edge of his time, Weber was sensitized to seeing and understanding the mechanism that kept society functioning. Weber’s most seminal work was somewhat uninspiringly entitled Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus (The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904-5). It created a framework for the understanding of modern society and the way in which human character had been changed by it. Having demonstrated the disproportionate success of Protestant and particularly Calvinist societies and individuals (and, we might add, of Jews) in economic life, Weber explained this fact with a stroke of analytic genius: whereas Catholicism forced the faithful into asceticism and the sublimation of their desire for salvation in the next world, the Calvinist doctrine of divine grace given to or withheld from the individual from the beginning conveniently interpreted success in this world as implying godliness. Success in business became proof of divine grace. At the same time, however, indulging human weakness by displaying wealth and living in luxury was seen as debauchery and decadence. Money, therefore, must be earned to be sure of God’s blessing, but it must not be spent. It is to be invested and grown; thus capitalism is born. Workers may be exploited; the very fact that they live in miserable poverty is a strong indication that divine grace has been withheld from them.

  A specifically ‘citizen’ economic ethic had grown up. With the consciousness of standing in the fullness of God’s grace and being visibly blessed by Him, the citizen business man, as long as he remained within the bounds of formal correctness, as long as his moral conduct was spotless and the use to which he put his wealth was not objectionable, could follow his pecuniary interests as he would and feel that he was fulfilling a duty in doing so. The power of religious asceticism provided him in addition with sober, conscientious, and unusually industrious workmen, who clung to their work as to a life purpose willed by God.

  Weber’s spirit of capitalism admirably describes the mind-set of the stereo-typical capitalist exploiter, of the striving middle classes, of money breeding money. It also, however, shows a system based on asceticism, on repression of emotions for the sake of a higher goal.

  It is easy to see how Freud’s analysis follows on from Weber’s: the suppression of natural urges is a necessary precondition for capitalist success, but while it is productive for the group and its wealth, such an approach will eventually exact its revenge on the individual. Emotions locked away since early childhood could not be exorcized according to the model of a Christian education (centred on beating the Devil and the legacy of original sin out of the child). The suppressed elements were still there, festering in the dark, and would eventually erupt in a series of dreams, psychoses and physical symptoms, making their way to the surface in the only way they could. Salvation, psychoanalysis taught, lay in becoming aware of these denied impulses and according them their place within the mental whole. This, too, was a return to the source, to a view of humanity before repression, man before the Fall.

  Have we moved too far from Virginia Woolf and her ruddy-cheeked cook bursting into the living room with a new hat? Not at all. Woolf had written that in Victorian times the cook ‘lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable’, and is this not the perfect image for a life force suppressed in the economic organism of the bourgeois house? If the new generation of cooks were creatures of ‘sunshine and fresh air’ they were also (Woolf’s irony aside) creatures of a new time in which life forces were let out, corsets fell from fashion, nature and light were worshipped as never before. What better image for psychological liberation (and its attendant perils) than Leviathan dragged out of the darkness and exposed to sunshine and fresh air? To Woolf, human character had changed simply because it w
as beginning to revert to a more natural, more ancient form of expression.

  What Virginia Woolf wrote about writers in the 1920s as heirs to 1910, ‘grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated’, was already true for painters and composers before 1914. If they wanted to depict both the reality of life in the nerve-racking metropolis and the possibility of a return to an earlier way of being, they needed to adapt their language to the challenge. The many-faceted, artificially composed, industrially clothed, ideological and politicized self of a modern city-dweller could be portrayed only by mirroring this fragmented state, by holding a shattered mirror up to personalities constantly on the verge of shattering themselves. To evoke what might have been and what might be possible again, artists needed to find an idiom radically unlike that of the Western tradition which had, after all, also been the tradition of repression, of Christianity and of capitalism. Raw and dissonant sounds, extreme passions, rough-hewn figures and rigid masks were needed to expose and then smash through the polite sophistication of the bourgeois self immured in its rules and prohibitions. Not so much changed as freed, human character would certainly never be quite the same again.