Not everything goes according to plan in 1913, of course. Preparations have been under way for a touring exhibition, opening in Frankfurt, which is to unite the work of the Berlin Expressionist and Secessionist artists with that of the Blaue Reiter. But to their surprise, the Blaue Reiter in Upper Bavaria soon find their pictures sent back to them from Berlin. Aggrieved, Franz Marc writes a letter from Sindelsdorf, with the seal of the Blaue Reiter on the letterhead, to Georg Tappert, the Chairman of the New Secession in Berlin:
While unpacking my crate of paintings, I was greatly frustrated to see that the Deer was among them, despite the fact that I had stipulated it be included in the tour (Frankfurt in April). Then Kandinsky writes to me today saying that, to his immense surprise, his Berlin paintings have been returned to him in Munich. How should we respond to this? Logic would imply that the tour has come to nothing. But how can you simply send the pictures back to us out of the blue, without even speaking to us about it first?
It isn’t all over yet. In autumn the unique summit meeting of the two poles of German Expressionism will take place after all.
It’s too hot for Rainer Maria Rilke, even in early February. He has flown south in search of the sun. But now, lying on a garden lounger at the Hotel Reina Victoria in Ronda, in his white summer suit, he longs for the cool North. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be Rilke. His ability to understand women, to be at one with nature and connect with others is so strong that he even suffers along with the towns themselves when they are ‘worn out from the relentless summer’. That’s probably why only someone like Rilke would sense the destructive force to come in the year’s first warm beams of sunlight. And so he complains in letters to his mother and faraway soulmates that spring doesn’t suit him: ‘The sun is too strong; at seven in the morning it’s quite clearly February, but by eleven one could easily believe it to be August.’ She would surely understand, he writes to Sidonie Nádherný, that it is simply ‘unbearable’ when the sun beats down like that. On 19 February he hurriedly departs. At the end of the month he moves into his new apartment in Paris, in the Rue Champagne-Première. After eighteen months on the run from himself across half of Europe, he arrives in the metropolis as it shimmers with early spring. He is afraid of arriving. But he wants to try one more time, here, in this Paris, in this place. But he can’t remember how you do those things: sitting, working, staying calm. Living.
In the spring of 1913 Charles Fabry successfully concludes a series of experiments culminating in the discovery of the ozone layer. It is still fully intact.
Vienna is only a day’s train ride away from the Austrian Crown land of Galicia, and that’s why it has become the most popular political exile for refugee revolutionaries from Russia. In the Döblinger Rodlergasse, for example, the writer and journalist Leo Bronstein, better known as Leo Trotsky, is working in a humble yet bourgeois atmosphere with his wife, Natalia, and their children. At Christmas the Trotskys stretch to a tree, trying to act as if they belong and never want to leave. Trotsky earns very little from his journalism for various liberal and social-democratic pamphlets, and often spends entire days sitting in the Café Central playing chess. In 1913 ‘Herr Bronstein’ is regarded as the best chess player in the Viennese café scene, and that is saying something. Whenever he needs money, his only option is to bring some of his books to the pawnshop. He has no choice.
By the beginning of February, Stalin is back to working on Marxism and the National Question, which is to become his most famous work – and the mix of peoples in the Austro-Hungarian Empire provides him with a vivid learning exercise. In Vienna, Stalin develops the idea of a central empire behind feigned national autonomy – which, in the end, amounts to the aims and objectives of the Soviet Union. Stalin, ‘Sosso’ to his friends, talks about nothing else, even with the Troyanovskys’ children. He makes a brief attempt to flirt with the nanny, but nothing comes of it, so he flees back to his work. And quite rightly so; he has little time to waste on the practical application of the evils of capitalism. On one of his walks with the mother through Schönbrunn Park, he bets her that Galina, the temperamental daughter, will run to him if they both call out to her (based on the belief that she’ll be hoping he’s bought sweets for her again). He turns out to be right.
Two men visit him during his stay in the Troyanovsky residence. To Stalin’s delight Nikolai Bukharin helps him with translations, but, unlike Stalin, Bukharin proves to be successful with the nanny, for which the former will never forgive him (and for which Bukharin will one day have to pay with a bullet in the head). Even Trotsky drops by once: ‘I was sitting next to the samovar at the table in Skobelow’s apartment […] in the old Habsburg capital,’ writes Trotsky, ‘when, after a brief knock, the door suddenly opened and a stranger walked in. He was short […] thin […] pock marks covered his grey-brownish skin […] I couldn’t see even the slightest trace of friendliness in his eyes.’ It was Stalin. He fetched himself a cup of tea from the samovar and went out as quietly as he had come in. He didn’t recognise Trotsky – luckily, for in one of his articles he had already labelled him a ‘gimmicky athlete with fake muscles’.
In that same February of 1913, as Stalin and Trotsky see each other for the first time, a man is born in faraway Barcelona who will later murder Trotsky, on Stalin’s orders. His name is Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río Hernández.
On 23 February, Josef Stalin is arrested on the street in St Petersburg. Dressed in women’s clothes and a wig, he is running for his life. His attire has nothing to do with carnival fancy dress or any special predilection for women’s clothing. The revolutionary is in Russia illegally, and has stolen the clothes from the wardrobe of a musical benefit performance for Pravda which was raided by police. They apprehend the limping fugitive and rip the gaudy summer dress and wig from his person, revealing Stalin. He is recognised and exiled to Turukhansk in Siberia.
In turbulent Vienna there is an affair that stuns even the Viennese. Alma Mahler, the most beautiful girl in Vienna, with a legendary waist and a generous bosom, newly widowed after the death of the great composer and still dressed in mourning, falls for Oskar Kokoschka, the ugliest painter in Vienna, a brash provocateur who walks around with his trousers hanging low or his shirt unbuttoned, and whose most famous painting is entitled Murderer, Hope of Womankind – he means every word. But almost as soon as he captures the beautiful young widow’s heart, he gets scared. Not of her – but of his potential love rivals: ‘Almi, I don’t like it when other people can see your bare breasts, whether in night-dress or frock. Cover up the secrets, my secrets, of your beloved body.’ Hardly anything in the Vienna of 1913 was as unabashedly sexual as the letters and affair between Kokoschka and Alma Mahler – by day Alma was able to pursue her social life as the city’s First Widow, holding receptions and salons in her apartment. But by night Kokoschka asserted his rights. He could only work if he could sleep with her every night, he told her, and she becomes obsessed with his obsession. The day when she is supposed to sit for him, in the house belonging to the Mools, her parents-in-law, she drags him into the neighbouring room and sings a heartbreaking rendition of Isolde’s Liebestod. She throws herself into the affair with operatic totality. Kokoschka is no longer able to paint anything but her. Mostly naked, her hair cascading wantonly over her shoulders, blouse open, he paints her as wildly and violently as he loves her. Impatient that it’s taking too long, he throws away his paintbrush and paints with his fingers instead, using the palm of his left hand as a palette and scratching lines into the mounts of colour with his fingernails. Life, love, art: all one great battle.
When Kokoschka isn’t painting Alma alone, he is painting Alma and himself: for example, the Double Portrait of Oskar Kokoschka and Alma. He calls it the ‘Engagement Picture’. He wants to marry her, hoping to capture her for ever. But Alma is cunning. She can only marry him, she explains, once he creates an absolute masterpiece. Kokoschka hopes that this engagement picture will be his masterpiece. By the end of February he is alm
ost finished, and Alma is restless. He pleads with her: ‘Please write me a long letter, my love, so I don’t regress and lose time on the painting.’ But Alma has just aborted their child, and is angered by the bump on her belly in Kokoschka’s painting. The picture shows the two of them strangely entangled – Kokoschka’s gaze is full of suffering, Alma’s calm and composed. She travels with her mother to Semmering and looks for a plot of land on the estates Gustav Mahler once bought for the two of them. Now she is planning a love nest with his successor. Once the ‘Engagement Picture’ is ready, Kokoschka sends it to Berlin, to the Secession. It is, of course, what he hoped it would be: a public engagement notice. Upon seeing the picture in Berlin, Walter Gropius breaks down. The great architect, whose Fagus Factory was under construction at the time, had also hoped to marry Alma. The picture has achieved its desired impact. (But, between ourselves, it is he who will marry Alma in the end, not Kokoschka.)
Albert Schweitzer is in Strasbourg, working on his third doctorate. He has already been a D.Phil. for some time, ever since completing his philosophical dissertation ‘The Religious Philosophy of Kant from the Critique of Pure Reason to Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason’. He’s a doctor of theology too: ‘The Problem of the Last Supper: A Study Based on the Scientific Research of the Nineteenth Century and the Historical Accounts’. After becoming a lecturer in theology in Strasbourg and even vicar of the Church of St Nikolai, he decided to become a doctor of medicine as well, receiving his licence to practice in 1912. But the Doctor and Vicar and Lecturer and D.Phil. and Lic.Theol. aren’t enough. His doctoral thesis ‘The Psychiatric Study of Jesus’ has yet to be completed. With the burden of threefold roles tiring him out, the secondary literature threatens to defeat him. To make sure he doesn’t fall asleep while reading, he develops the habit of putting a bucket of cold water under his desk. When he can’t follow the explanations in the books any more, he takes off his socks, puts his feet in cold water, then goes on reading. He’s almost finished now. And he has his next great goal in sight: Africa.
MARCH
In March, Kafka actually goes to Berlin to see Felice Bauer, and they try to go for a walk together, but it doesn’t work. Robert Musil consults a neurologist and is allowed to go home, Camille Claudel goes into a clinic for nervous diseases and has to stay there for thirty years. And in Vienna, on 31 March, the great ‘ear-boxing concert’ takes place: Arnold Schönberg receives a public box on the ear for making excessively shrill noises. Albert Schweitzer and Ernst Jünger dream of Africa. In Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein launches his coming-out process and his new logic. Virginia Woolf has finished her first book, and Rainer Maria Rilke has the sniffles. The big question on everybody’s lips: ‘Whither are we drifting?’
(illustration credits 3.1)
The parliament of the German Reich authorises Prussia to mint 12 million Marks as commemorative coins in 1913. They are to commemorate Prussia’s revolt against the French occupation in 1813 as well as the twenty-five-year Jubilee of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II on 15 June.
‘A war between Austria and Russia’, Lenin wrote to Maxim Gorky in 1913, ‘would be very useful to the revolution in Western Europe. But it is hard to imagine Franz-Joseph and Nicholas doing us this favour.’
Albert Einstein, the great theorist of relativity, reveals himself to have a keen practical sense. In 1913, living in Prague, he is becoming increasingly remote from his wife, Mileva. He stops telling her about his research, his discoveries, his concerns. And she says nothing and puts up with it. They are getting on just as badly as Hermann Hesse and his wife in Bern and Arthur Schnitzler and his wife in Vienna, to name but two other couples. Anyway, in the evening Einstein goes to coffee houses or bars all by himself and drinks a beer – Max Brod, Franz Werfel and Kafka might be sitting at the next table, but they don’t know each other. And then, in March 1913 – just like Kafka – Albert Einstein writes long letters to Berlin. On a visit to the city he has fallen in love with his recently divorced cousin Elsa. He writes her terrible things about his marriage: he and Mileva no longer sleep in the same room, he avoids being alone with her under all circumstances, she is an ‘unfriendly, humourless creature’, and he treats her like an employee whom regrettably he is unable to fire. Then he puts the letter in an envelope and off he goes to the post office – and so Einstein and Kafka’s epistolary laments travel, presumably in the same postbag from Prague to Berlin, to the far-off girls of their dreams, Felice and Elsa.
In New York the Federal Reserve, the ‘Fed’, is founded. The most important shareholders are the banking houses Rothschild, Lazard, Warburg, Lehmann, Rockefellers Chase Manhattan and Goldman Sachs. The introduction of the Fed ensures that American governments are no longer able to print new money. In 1913, on the other hand, income tax is introduced.
The industrialist Walther Rathenau far-sightedly recognises the economic challenge represented by the USA. And in 1913, the year of the arms race, he sketches the picture of a peaceful European union with close European ties: ‘One last possibility remains: the emergence of a Central European Tariff Union. The task of creating the freedom of economic movement for the countries in our European zone is difficult but not insoluble.’
In the Cambridge Review, vol. 34, no. 853 (6 March 1913), p. 351, the first publication by the student Ludwig Wittgenstein appears: a critical review of Peter Coffey’s The Science of Logic, but in fact the first manifesto of Wittgenstein’s very own logic. He considers what Coffey says to be illogical. The Viennese industrialist’s son, about to turn twenty-four, is also spiky with his teacher at Trinity College, Cambridge, the legendary Bertrand Russell. During the holidays he travels with his lover, the maths student David Pinsent, to Norway, where they have bought a little cabin in Skjolden, and works on the foundations of his theory which, when published as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus will be among the most important texts of the century. (It is, incidentally, so complex that Russell, when he receives a letter asking him to copy-edit the book, asks to have his own questions sent back to him so that he can understand Wittgenstein’s answers.) Only Pinsent understands Wittgenstein completely. When Wittgenstein, two years his senior, was looking for a guinea pig for his psychological experiments into language and music, Pinsent had answered the advertisement. He soon became his guinea pig in matters of homosexuality and logic too. Wittgenstein will, logically enough, dedicate his Tractatus to Pinsent.
Spring Awakening: on 8 March, in Vienna’s Café Imperial, Frank Wedekind, Adolf Loos, Franz Werfel and Karl Kraus meet for an early coffee.
Kafka’s father is making him suffer like a dog, and he can’t bear it when someone coughs in the Prague flat next door or slams the door. He doesn’t write his ‘Letter to His Father’ quite yet. But in 1913 Egon Schiele, the 22-year-old Viennese painter, writes his ‘Letters to the Mother’. On 31 March, for example: ‘I will be the fruit which, once corrupted, will leave behind eternal living creatures, so how delighted must you be to have brought me into the world?’ His mother has a different view of things. She is furious that the grave of her husband, Schiele’s father, is becoming overgrown, and writes to him: ‘That wretched and neglected grave contains the bones of your father, who sweated blood for you. How much money are you squandering? You have time for everything and everyone, just not for your poor mother! God may forgive you, but I cannot.’
Schiele’s father, Adolf, had suffered from early dementia, and little Egon always had to set a place at the table for an unknown person. Just before his death, the father burned all his money and shares, and since then the family have lived in poverty. Egon’s relationship with his sisters Melanie and Gerti is unusually close: he repeatedly draws them naked, takes a gynaecological interest in their bodies as they awaken into puberty. As an adolescent he goes on trips with Gerti, without their mother, and the pictures from their relationship look like the illustrations of the fatal love of the poet Georg Trakl for his sister at the same time.
Gerti then steps out with Ego
n’s friend Anton Peschka, which makes Schiele furiously jealous, but he eventually gives the relationship his blessing when he himself meets Wally, the woman his drawings turned into one of the most familiar bodies of the twentieth century. Yet even though he drew himself and his family stark naked as if working not with a pen but a scalpel – unlike Gustav Klimt, Schiele clearly didn’t always go to bed with his models – he gained his glimpses of the depths of physicality only from passive observation. Hardly anyone understood that at the time. Even his dealer, the open-minded Hans Goltz from Munich, writes to him in March 1913, after yet another exhibition at which he hasn’t sold a single painting: ‘But Herr Schiele, while I am always delighted by your drawings, and while I am happy to go along with your weirdest moods, who is supposed to sell the paintings? I can see very little opportunity for that.’ This letter was the first that he received in his new apartment, the one that was to make everything better. No longer the 9th District, no longer 5 Schlagergasse, ground floor, door 4, but, at long last, the 13th District, 101 Hietzinger Hauptstrasse, 3rd floor.
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