Since the beginning of the year the Carl Simon Verlag in Düsseldorf had been selling a new series of original transparencies featuring seventy-two original colour glass plates in cardboard boxes inside a wooden case, along with a thirty-five-page accompanying brochure. Subject: ‘The Sinking of the Titanic’. All over the country slide shows were held. First you see the captain, the ship, the cabins, then the approaching iceberg. The disaster, lifeboats. The sinking ship. It’s true: an ocean liner goes down more quickly than the West. Leonardo DiCaprio has not yet been born.
Franz Kafka, a man who is terrified when women take off their clothes, has a quite different concern. A white-hot idea has come to him. In the night of 22–3 January he writes roughly his 200th letter to Felice Bauer, and asks, ‘Can you actually read my handwriting?’
Can you read the world? That’s what Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque wonder, and keep coming up with new codes that viewers are supposed to decipher. They’ve just taught the world that you can paint shifting perspectives – it’s known as Cubism – and now, in January 1913, they’re taking it one step further. Later it will be called Synthetic Cubism, when they stick bits of wood fibre and all kinds of other things onto their paintings; the canvas now becomes an adventure playground. Braque had just moved into a new studio in Paris, right at the top of the Hotel Roma in Rue Caulaincourt, when he suddenly picked up a comb and ran it through his painting Fruit-Dish, Ace of Clubs and the lines looked like wood-grain. Picasso discovered the same thing the same day. And, as always, he was soon better at it than the inventor himself. So the artistic revolutionaries dashed ever onwards, impelled by their horror of being fully understood by the bourgeois public. Picasso might have been reassured had he known that Arthur Schnitzler wrote in his diary on 8 February: ‘Picasso: the early paintings outstanding; violent resistance to his current Cubism.’
He only just managed to survive. And now Lovis Corinth must pay dearly for his life’s work. On 19 January a spectacular exhibition of 228 paintings, entitled ‘Life’s Work’, is due to open in the Secession building at 208 Kurfürstendamm. Today, on the first day of the year, lying hungover and exhausted on a sofa at 49 Klopstockstrasse, he is rather dreading it. It’s barely four o’clock and already it’s dark again, and sleet is falling from the sky.
So now Weber’s, the framers, from 28 Derfflingerstrasse, want their money for the framing of the ‘Life’s Work’ – a hefty 1,632.50 Marks. And for the reception that he’s giving for the opening, the caterer, Adolf Kraft Nachfolger, 116 Kurfürstendamm, wants 200 Marks up front. For this he will deliver: ‘1 dish tongue. 1 dish Coburg ham with Cumberland sauce. 1 dish saddle of venison with Cumberland sauce. 1 dish roast beef with remoulade.’ Even reading about it makes Lovis Corinth feel ill. Life’s Work with Cumberland sauce. Last night’s Polish carp still lies heavy on his stomach. When his beloved Charlotte is away, he invariably eats too much: it’s yearning, he knows that. And so he writes a New Year’s letter to his wife, Charlotte, who is hiking through the snow, far away in the mountains: ‘Who knows how this New Year will go; the last one was awful. Forget it!’ Indeed. Corinth, a painter always bursting with vigour, who swept out of the High Baroque into the Berlin of the early twentieth century, had been felled by a stroke, and his wife had looked after him at great personal sacrifice. When the ‘Life’s Work’ exhibition was being planned, everyone was afraid that Corinth’s was in fact over. But he had fought his way back to life. And back to the easel. Now the posters for his big exhibition were hanging all over the city, 9 to 4 every day, admission 1 Mark, with a picture of Corinth, amazed at himself, while Charlotte recovered from him off in the Tyrol. She’s back in time for the reception. ‘You’re looking well, Madame’, Max Liebermann says to her at the reception on 19 January at the Secession, his saddle of venison with Cumberland sauce in his right hand. My life’s work is looking good, Lovis Corinth thinks to himself as he stomps and grumbles his way through the exhibition halls. So it goes on. But – please – no more of that awful Cubism.
Back to Freud’s, at 19 Berggasse. He’s spending these January days in his study, finishing off his book on Totem and Taboo. And it’s quite natural that the unconscious should be forcing its way powerfully into this book about taboo-breaking and fetishisation. But there’s one thing he doesn’t seem to be aware of: at that moment, at any rate, when his pupils, above all the Zurich psychologist C. G. Jung (b. 1875), are challenging him and hurling violent accusations at him, Freud (b. 1856) is developing his theory of parricide. So in December 1912 Jung had written to Freud: ‘I would like to make you aware that your technique of treating your pupils as patients is a mistake.’ By so doing Freud is creating ‘impudent rogues’ and ‘slavish sons’, he writes. And he continues: ‘Meanwhile you always remain comfortably on top as the father. Out of pure subservience, no one dares to tug the prophet’s beard.’
Seldom in his life has anything hit Freud as hard as this act of parricide. During those few months, when his beard must have sprouted new grey hairs, he drafts a first reply which he doesn’t send, and which will only be found in his desk after his death. But on 3 January 1913 he summons all his strength and writes to Jung in Küsnacht: ‘Your assumptions that I am treating my pupils as patients are demonstrably inaccurate.’ And then:
Besides, your letter is unanswerable. It creates a situation that would cause difficulties in spoken communication, and is entirely insoluble through written channels. But anyone encountering abnormal behaviour who shouts that it is normal arouses suspicions that he lacks an understanding of illness. I therefore propose that we abandon our private relationship entirely. I will lose nothing, because I have long been joined to you only by the thin thread of the further development of past disappointments.
What a letter! A father, challenged by his son, stabs furiously back. Never has Freud lost his temper so badly as during these January days. Never has she seen him so depressed as in 1913, his beloved daughter Anna will later say.
Jung replies on 6 January: ‘I will comply with your wish to abandon the personal relationship. Besides, you will probably know better than anyone what this moment means for you.’ He writes that in ink. Then he adds by typewriter, and it looks like a tombstone for one of the great intellectual friendships of the twentieth century: ‘The rest is silence.’ It’s a fine irony that one of the most interpreted and most discussed break-ups of 1913 should begin with a vow of silence. From this moment on Jung will chafe at Freud’s methods, and Freud, conversely, at Jung’s. Before that he gives a precise definition of parricide among primitive people: they put on masks of the murdered father – then pray to their victim. You might almost call it the Dialectic of Enlightenment.
And speaking of Enlightenment, the ten-year-old Theodor W. Adorno, nicknamed ‘Teddie’, who will later come up with that phrase, is living at 12 Schöne Aussicht, Frankfurt am Main. The key person in his life, apart from his mother, is the chimpanzee Basso in Frankfurt Zoo. At the same time Frank Wedekind, author of Spring Awakening and Lulu, is friends with Missie, a chimpanzee from the Zoological Garden in Berlin.
Marcel Proust sits in his study at 102 Boulevard Haussmann in Paris, building his own cage. Neither sunlight nor dust nor noise must bother him while he’s working. It’s a special form of work/life balance. He has hung his study with three layers of curtains and papered his walls with cork panels. In this soundproofed room Proust sits by electric light, sending excessively polite New Year letters, as he does every year, with the urgent request that they henceforth spare him presents. He was constantly receiving invitations, but anyone who sent them knew how exhausting it was for him, because he sent letters and notes in advance about whether he was coming or not, and how he probably wouldn’t etc. – a great procrastinator, actually matched in this respect only by Kafka.
Here sits Marcel Proust, in this soundproofed room of the mind, trying his hand at his novel about memory and the search for lost time. The first part would be called ‘A Love of Swann’s’, and in fin
e ink he writes the final sentence down on paper: ‘The reality I once knew no longer exists. The memory of a particular image is the melancholy remembering of a particular moment; and houses, streets, avenues are fleeting, oh! the years.’
Must memory be melancholy remembering? Gertrude Stein, the great Parisian salon hostess and friend of the avant-garde, is shivering a few streets away from Proust. She is engaged in a terrible fight with her brother Leo; their decades-long flat-share is threatening to come apart at the seams. Is everything ephemeral? She dreams of the spring. She draws warmth from a thought. She looks at the Picassos and Cézannes on her wall. But does one thought make a spring? She writes a short poem including the phrase ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’. Just like Proust, she is trying to capture something that wants to be forgotten. So this is the world of poetry, the world of the imagination, in January 1913.
Max Beckmann finishes his painting The Sinking of the Titanic.
FEBRUARY
Things are livening up now. In New York the Armory Show is modern art’s Big Bang, with Marcel Duchamp showing his Nude Descending a Staircase. After that, his star is firmly in the ascendant. Nudes are everywhere, especially in Vienna: a naked Alma Mahler (by Oskar Kokoschka) and lots of other Viennese socialites in works by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Others bare their souls to Sigmund Freud for 100 Kronen an hour. Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler is painting quaint watercolours of St Stephen’s Cathedral in the common room of Vienna’s boarding-house for men. In Munich, Heinrich Mann is working on Man of Straw and celebrating his forty-second birthday at his brother’s house. The snow still lies thick on the ground. Thomas Mann buys a plot of land and builds himself a house. Rilke continues to suffer, and Kafka continues to hesitate. A small hat shop belonging to Coco Chanel expands. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, races around Vienna in his golden-wheeled car, plays with his model railway and worries about assassination attempts in Serbia. Stalin meets Trotsky for the first time – and in the very same month, in Barcelona, a man is born who will later murder Trotsky on Stalin’s orders. Is 1913 perhaps an unlucky year after all?
(illustration credits 2.1)
When will his time finally come? All the waiting around is driving Franz Ferdinand mad. The 83-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph has been on the throne for an incredible sixty-five years and has no intention of giving it up for his nephew, who is now next in line following the deaths of Sissi, Franz Joseph’s beloved wife, and Rudolf, his beloved son. The young heir’s only consolation is that his car has wheels with golden spokes, just like the ones on the Emperor’s carriage. But when it comes to the majestic title, well, the only man to have held that since 1848 is Emperor Franz Joseph. Or, to be more precise:
His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty, by God’s Grace Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary and Bohemia, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slovenia, Galicia, Lodomeria and Illyria; King of Jerusalem etc.; Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Kraków; Duke of Lorraine, Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and Bukowina; Grand Prince of Transylvania, Margrave of Moravia; Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, of Auschwitz and Zator, of Teschen, Friaul, Dubrovnik and Zadar; Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, of Kyburg, Gorizia and Gradisca; Prince of Trento and Brixen; Margrave of Upper and Lower Lusatia and Istria: Count of Hohenems, Feldkirch, Bregenz, Sonnenburg etc.; Lord of Hohenems, Kotor and the Windic March; Grand Voivod of the Voivodship of Serbia etc., etc.
The schoolchildren who had to learn this by heart always laughed hardest at the ‘etc., etc.’, for it sounded like the whole world belonged to him, and as if only a small portion of it had been mentioned. But for Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne, it’s the three words right before the ‘etc., etc.’ that really make him seethe: the ‘Voivodship of Serbia’. A battle is raging down in the Balkans, and he’s deeply unsettled by it. So he requests a meeting in Schönbrunn Palace with the ‘Grand Voivod of the Vovoidship of Serbia’ – the Emperor, whose white side-whiskers are as long as his title.
Arriving at Schönbrunn, Franz Ferdinand alights from – or rather, springs out of – his Gräf & Stift automobile in his general’s uniform, and bolts up the steps towards Franz Joseph’s study. He announces that urgent action needs to be taken in order to stop the Serbs. The Kingdom of Serbia is becoming too rebellious at the southeastern flank of the Empire, he says, destabilising things, playing with fire. But they will have to act with good judgement. Under no circumstances should they wage a pre-emptive war, such as the one the General Chief of Staff called for in his memorandum of 20 January, because that would be sure to alert Russia to the plan. The Emperor listens impassively to his blustering, clamouring, trembling nephew: ‘I’ll give it some thought.’ Then he utters a cool farewell. The rest is silence. Agitated, Franz Ferdinand rushes off to his enormous automobile. The liveried chauffeur turns on the engine and, spurred on by the heir, roars off down Schönbrunner Schlossstrasse at breakneck speed. If Franz Ferdinand must resign himself to spending his whole life waiting, then at least he shouldn’t do so stuck in traffic.
Standing by an upstairs window in the Troyanovsky household, Stalin is taking one of his short breaks from his work. He pulls the curtain aside and peers curiously but distractedly down at the heir’s automobile, which is racing along at great speed beneath his gaze. Lenin too had once stood in that very spot, always staying with the Troyanovskys when he was in Vienna. Elsewhere in the city in that February of 1913, a young Croat casts an expert eye over the car with the golden wheels as it races past. As a car mechanic and, as of recently, a test driver for Mercedes in Wiener Neustadt, he’s intimately acquainted with the qualities of the heir’s automobile. His name is Josip Broz, a 21-year-old daredevil and lady’s man who is currently being ‘kept’ as a lover by the upper-class Liza Spuner, an arrangement that includes having his fencing lessons paid for. (He also uses her financial aid to send child support back to his homeland for his newborn son Leopard, whose mother he has recently left.) Liza has him drive her all over Austria in his test car on trips to buy her new clothes. When she falls pregnant, he leaves her too. And so it goes on. At some point he will return to his homeland, which will by then be called Yugoslavia, and assume control of it. Josip Broz will then call himself Tito.
So, in the first months of the year 1913, Stalin, Hitler and Tito, two of the twentieth century’s greatest tyrants and one of its most evil dictators, were, for a brief moment, all in Vienna at the same time. One was studying the question of nationality in a guest room, the second was painting watercolours in a men’s boarding house, and the third was circling aimlessly around the Ringstrasse to test how well various automobiles handled the corners. Three extras, or non-speaking parts, one might think, in the great play that was ‘Vienna in 1913’.
It was icy cold that February, but the sun was shining, which was and is rare for the Viennese winter, but it made the new Ringstrasse gleam all the more in its snow-white splendour. Vienna was bubbling over with vitality; it had become a world city, and this could be seen and felt all over the world – everywhere except in Vienna itself, where, through sheer joy in self-destruction, people hadn’t realised that they had unexpectedly moved to the apex of the movement which called itself Modernism. Because self-doubt and self-destruction had become a central component of the new way of thinking, and what Kafka called the ‘Nervous Era’ had dawned. And in Vienna nerves – virtually, metaphorically, artistically and psychologically – were laid bare like nowhere else.
Berlin, Paris, Munich, Vienna. These were the four capitals of Modernism in 1913. Chicago was flexing its muscles, New York was blossoming gradually but didn’t definitively take the baton from Paris until 1948. And yet 1913 saw the completion of the Woolworth Building, the first one in the world to rise above the Eiffel Tower, and of Grand Central Station, making it the biggest railway station in the world, and the Armory Show made sure that the sparks of the avant-garde ignited in America too. But Paris was still in a league of its own
that year, and the French press saw neither the Woolworth Building nor the Armory Show as cause for excitement. Why should they be? After all, the French had Rodin, Matisse, Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust, Chagall ‘etc., etc.’ – all of whom were working on their next great masterpieces. And the city itself, at the peak of its affectation and decadence, embodied in the dance experiments of the Ballets Russes and Sergei Diaghilev, had a magnetic attraction for every cultivated European, in particular four über-cultivated individuals in white suits: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Julius Meier-Graefe, Rainer Maria Rilke and Harry Graf Kessler. In the Paris of 1913 only Proust wanted to reminisce; everyone else wanted to keep moving forwards, but, unlike in Berlin at the time, preferably with a glass of champagne.
Over in the German-speaking world, Berlin’s population was exploding, but culturally speaking its golden age was still to come. It forged ahead rather impetuously – but word that ‘Berlin’s nightlife was its speciality’ had already reached Paris and the artistic circle surrounding Marcel Duchamp. Munich, by contrast, was stylish and yet had taken a kind of well-earned rest – most evidently in the fact that self-glorification was becoming all the rage there (and no one in Berlin had any time for that). One other indicator is, of course, that the bohemians are becoming completely bourgeois: Thomas Mann is seeking – for the sake of his children – a house in the suburbs, in a peaceful location with a large garden. On 25 February 1913 he buys a plot of land at 1 Poschingstrasse and has a magnificent villa built there. His brother Heinrich has sought out Munich as an excellent location from which to write about Berlin, the city hurling itself into the future that is the setting for Man of Straw, the epic novel that he is completing. If one were to read Munich’s satirical magazine Simplicissimus, one would find him mocking the fact that the policemen worry about falling asleep out of boredom after eight o’clock in the evening; the great magazine of the fin de siècle can’t even provoke its own city any more and seems, in the most pleasant of ways, to be fatigued, as if it were stretched out on a chaise longue with a cigarette in its left hand. The magazine’s counterparts in other cities are Die Fackel in Vienna, and Der Sturm, Die Tat and Die Aktion in Berlin, their breathless names alone revealing that the true battles of the modern era are being fought there.
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