Thomas Mann writes a letter to Jakob Wassermann in March 1913: ‘The encounter between negligence and obsessive devotion to duty in wartime is a profoundly poetic invention. And how greatly and severely war is felt as a crisis of moral cleansing, as a grandiose stride of life’s seriousness beyond all sentimental confusions!’ The war Thomas Mann is talking about is the one of 1870–71.
Now let us switch to Arnold Schönberg, that great charismatic figure who composed along the fault-line between late Romanticism and twelve-tone music. He had moved to Berlin because he felt misunderstood in Vienna. In the telephone directory it said: ‘Arnold Schönberg, composer and composition teacher, consultations 1–2 p.m.’ He had an apartment in Villa Lepcke in Zehlendorf, and he wrote to a friend in Vienna: ‘You wouldn’t believe how famous I am here.’
Then at the end of March he goes to Vienna. And becomes just as famous there as he was in Berlin. But not quite in the way he had imagined. On the evening of 31 April, in the great hall of the Musikverein, he is supposed to be conducting his own chamber symphony, Mahler and pieces by his pupils Alban Berg and Anton von Webern (who both had portraits of themselves painted by Schönberg hanging on their walls at home). And it is Alban Berg’s music that creates the greatest stir. ‘Songs with Orchestra on Picture Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg, op. 4’, he has called his piece in the best Pop Art style – performed by a huge orchestra and with great solemnity. It rouses the audience to a fury, there is hissing and laughter and rattling of keys, which everybody brought to Schönberg’s last performance in February but didn’t need. Then Anton von Webern leaps to his feet and shouts that the whole rabble should go home, to which the rabble replies that people who like such music belong in the Steinhof. The Steinhof is the mental asylum in which the poet Peter Altenberg currently resides. The diagnosis of the public: insane music to lyrics by a madman. (There is, it must be said, a photograph of Altenberg with his nurse Spatzek from the Steinhof in those days, Altenberg looking into the camera, cool and relaxed, creating the ery powerful impression that Spatzek, the nurse, is the one who is mad. Altenberg captions it: ‘The lunatic and the asylum attendant’, leaving it unclear which is which.)
Schönberg stops the orchestra and shouts into the audience that he will have any trouble-makers removed by force, whereupon pandemonium breaks out, the conductor is challenged to a duel and one man clambers over the rows of chairs from the back. When he has reached the front, Oscar Straus, composer of the operetta The Waltz Dream, boxes the ear of the president of the Academic Association of Literature and Music, Arnold Schönberg.
Next day in the Neue Freie Presse, the following report appears:
The fanatical devotees of Schönberg and the dedicated opponents of his often extremely alienating sound experiments have often clashed in the past. But hardly ever can we remember having witnessed, in any Viennese concert hall, such a scene as the one that occurred at this evening’s concert by the Academic Association. To separate the furiously arguing groups there was no option but to turn out the lights.
Four people were arrested by the police: a student of philosophy, a physician, an engineer and a lawyer. The evening went down in history as the ‘ear-boxing concert’.
But contemporaries, above all Dr Arthur Schnitzler, who attended the concert with his wife Olga, responded laconically:
Schönberg. Orchestral concert. Terrible scandal. Alban Berg’s silly songs. Interruptions. Laughter. Speech by the President. ‘At least listen to Mahler in peace!’ As if anyone objected to him! Intolerable – one voice in the auditorium: ‘Little scamp!’ The gentleman from the podium, amid breathless silence, smacks him one. All kinds of scuffling.
Life goes on. Schnitzler starts a new paragraph, and then writes: ‘Supper with Vicki, Fritz Zuckerkandl and his mother in the Imperial.’
The next day Arnold Schönberg travels back to Berlin, firmly convinced now that 1913 is an unlucky year and the Viennese are unfathomable philistines. As soon as he is back in Berlin, he receives the reporter from Die Zeit and explains to him in a wonderfully mean-spirited and self-righteous way:
A concert ticket only gives one the right to listen to the concert, but not to disturb the performance. The purchaser of a ticket is an invited guest who acquires the right to listen, nothing more. There is a great difference between an invitation to a salon and one to a concert. Contributing to the cost of an event does not grant one permission to behave improperly.
Herr Schönberg closes his interview with the following words for his future behaviour: ‘I have undertaken henceforth to take part in such concerts only when it is expressly stated on the tickets that disturbance of the performance is not permitted. It is obvious, after all, that the organiser of a concert is not only the moral but also the material holder of a right that is granted protection in any state based on private property.’ This interview is an unsettling document. The advocates of the new music are claiming an inalienable right to an undisturbed avant-garde. But even in this most unusual of years, that was asking a bit much.
At the end of the nineteenth century Camille Claudel had overwhelmed the great Auguste Rodin and created sculptures of singular beauty. She had dictated a contract to Rodin, forbidding him to have any other models but her, and obliged him to win her commissions and pay for her to have an Italian trip – and in return he could visit her four times a month in her studio. He complied. But then in 1893 she left him anyway.
From that moment things went steeply downhill for her. In 1913, twenty years later, she can think of nothing but him. She has grown fat and bloated in the meantime: unwashed, matted hair, confused expression. There is nothing now to recall the young sculptress for whom first Rodin and then Claude Debussy fell head over heels. She is living in a cluttered ground-floor flat at 19 Quai Bourbon, deludedly destroying with accurate blows of her hammer all the works she has created; she feels persecuted by her family and by Rodin and by the rest of the world. She is convinced that Rodin, whom she last saw sixteen years ago, is shamelessly plagiarising her works.
Since she is firmly convinced that everyone is trying to poison her, she eats nothing but potatoes and drinks boiled water, and the shutters are kept closed so no one can spy on her. Her brother Paul Claudel visits her and then notes concisely in his diary: ‘In Paris. Camille insane, wallpaper hanging in long strips from the walls, one broken armchair, terrible dirt. She herself is fat and dirty and talks uninterruptedly in a monotonous and metallic voice.’
On 5 March, Dr Michaux issues a medical certificate that authorises Paul Claudel to have his sister committed to a closed institution. On Monday 10 March two beefy nurses break down the heavily bolted door to Camille Claudel’s studio and drag the screaming woman outside. She is forty-eight. On the same day she is brought to the Ville-Évrard mental hospital, where the psychiatrist in charge, Dr Truelle, confirms the diagnosis of serious paranoia. Every day she talks about Rodin. Every day she is worried that he wants to poison her, and that the nurses are his accomplices. It will go on like this for another thirty years. As yet no doctoral thesis has been written on ‘The Psychiatric Assessment of Camille Claudel’.
In March 1913 Albert Schweitzer graduates as a doctor of medicine. His thesis, ‘The Psychiatric Assessment of Jesus’, was unsettling but satisfactory. The next day he sells all his goods and chattels. Then on 21 March 1913 he takes his wife, Helene, and travels to Africa. In French Equatorial Africa, he founds the jungle hospital of Lambaréné, on the Ogooué.
Ernst Jünger too dreams of Africa. Under his desk at school he is constantly reading travel tales of Africa. ‘I was increasingly filled with the deadly poison of boredom’ – so it is clear for him that he must seek out the mysteries of Africa, the ‘lost gardens’ somewhere in the Upper Nile Delta or the Congo. Africa represents the epitome of all that is savage and primitive. He had to go there. But how? Let’s wait and see.
It’s the end of March. Marcel Proust pulls his fur over his night-shirt and goes back into the street in th
e middle of the night. Then he stares for two whole hours at the Saint Anne portal of the cathedral of Notre-Dame. The next morning he writes to Madame Strauss: ‘For eight centuries on that portal a much more charming humanity has been assembled than the one with which we rub shoulders.’ This is what is known, logically enough, as being In Search of Lost Time.
APRIL
On 20 April, Hitler celebrates his twenty-fourth birthday in a men’s boarding house on Meldemannstrasse in Vienna. Thomas Mann is thinking about The Magic Mountain, and his wife has gone to take the cure yet again. Lyonel Feininger discovers a tiny village church in Gelmeroda and turns it into the cathedral of Expressionism. Franz Kafka reports for voluntary service with a group of vegetable farmers and spends his afternoons pulling up weeds as therapy for his ‘burn-out’. Bernhard Kellermann writes the best-seller of the year: The Tunnel, a science fiction novel about an underground link between America and Europe. Frank Wedekind’s Lulu is banned. Oskar Kokoschka buys a canvas as big as the bed of his lover, Alma Mahler, and begins to paint a portrait of them both. When it becomes a masterpiece, Alma will want to marry him. But not before.
(illustration credits 4.1)
How long will Die Brücke remain standing? Ever since the artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, Otto Mueller and Emil Nolde moved to Berlin from Dresden, arguments had been getting more and more frequent, Kirchner wrote about their ‘women issues and intrigues’, and by 1912 Max Pechstein had left the group. Each one of them is trying to make his own way, both artistically and financially. They all find lodgings in Berlin lofts, their styles grow apart, and so do they. The unsold paintings pile up in their studios, but they carry on bravely painting.
Like a pair of lovers on the brink, the Brücke painters try to remember the prelapsarian innocence and archaic force of their shared beginnings. They plan to release a chronicle of Die Brücke. It is to contain original wood-engravings and photographs of their paintings. Kirchner, their nimble, egocentric spokesman, is to write the accompanying text. In April 1913 he is working feverishly on it, this text that is to be a manifesto – or he would be if only his anxiety, his drugs, his women, his sketchpads and blasted Berlin would give him a few moments peace to do it in.
‘The old collapses, the times change.’ This quote from Schiller’s William Tell is printed in large type in the Chemists’ Pocket Diary for the Year 1913. Is a revolution looming? Have the German chemists had some kind of premonition of impending catastrophe?
No. They’re just announcing some pretty new labels for ointments and cough syrups. Or, as it says in the advert: ‘The new labels published by our company were all created by commissioned artists and, with regards to taste, are exemplary and unparalleled. They exceed all others in existence.’
Now that’s advertising without false modesty. Unfortunately, though, the name of the company is not quite as catchy and certainly doesn’t exceed all others in existence: ‘Label printer and publisher for the chemical, pharmaceutical and associated industries, Barmen.’
In 1913 Colonel Mervyn O’Gorman, leader of the British Royal Aircraft Company, is pursuing two technical developments which are also intended to exceed all others in existence. During the week the legendary aeronautical engineer works on the development of powerful fighter planes for use in conflicts. And on Sundays, if the sun is shining, he uses his camera and the autochrome procedure to produce needle-sharp colour images of his beautiful but dour daughter Christina. His aeroplanes go down in world history. And his photographs of the beach near Lulworth Cove in Dorset make art history. An innocent young girl pictured in colour, walking along the beach, leaning against a dinghy. Not a plane in the sky. Only red tones, blue tones, brown tones, waves lapping softly against the shore. Enchanting photographs, created in 1913, but the images look so close you could reach out and touch them.
Thomas Mann wakes up at eight. Not because he’s been woken by something or set an alarm. No, it’s just that he always wakes up at eight. Once, when he woke up at half-past seven, he lay there for half an hour, baffled as to how it could possibly have come about. It could not be permitted to happen again. His body obeyed him. We still know little about the cold front which was Thomas Mann and Katia Pringsheim’s marriage. But it’s striking that Katia, after her husband completed Death in Venice in 1912, spent almost a year and a half without a break in different health resorts in Switzerland trying to cure her pulmonary condition. What really took her breath away was her husband’s concealed homosexuality. She, of course, knew more than anyone else, that Gustav von Aschenbach was a self-portrait of her spouse – and that it was on their holiday together to Venice in 1911, in the Grand Hotel des Bains, that he couldn’t tear his gaze from the beautiful young boy Tadzio, whom he describes in the book as ‘utterly beautiful’, ‘pale and charmingly secretive’. Katia had been surprised by the way her husband gazed at the boy at the time, but then she read the novella about the ageing artist unrestrainedly pursuing his love for an adolescent boy, watching him while he was on the beach, while he ate, ‘pretty and harsh in a not-yet-manly way’. But Thomas Mann had Gustav von Aschenbach deputise for him in this respect, and ultimately meet his death. During that year of permanent sojourns in sanatoriums, Katia and Thomas must have painfully abandoned what Mann calls the ‘severe bliss of marriage’. But they stay together, maintain appearances and build a house.
Katia and Thomas Mann unite in holy matrimony each morning at exactly half-past eight to have breakfast together. Regardless of where they happen to be: Mauerkircherstrasse, their country house in Bad Tölz or, later, in Poschingerstrasse. On the stroke of nine the great writer begins his work. For the rest of their lives his four children will remember their father closing his door at nine precisely – whether they were in their apartment in Mauerkircherstrasse, the country house in Bad Tölz or, later, in the Poschingerstrasse.
It was a very definite, very final closing of the door. The world was to remain outside.
Then he would pick up his writing pad and get started. Like a machine. ‘Give us today our daily sheet of paper,’ he once said to his friend Bertram.
I need white, smooth paper, fluid ink and a new, softly gliding pen nib. To prevent myself making a mess of it, I put a sheet of lined paper underneath. I can work anywhere; all I need is a roof over my head. The open sky is good for unbridled dreams and outlines, but precise work requires the shelter of a roof.
Exactly three hours later, on the stroke of twelve, he lays down his pen. Then he goes off to shave. He has tried this one out. If he shaves first thing in the morning, the first signs of stubble will have returned by dinnertime. But if he shaves at midday instead, his cheeks are still smooth even at dinner. After shaving and a few splashes of aftershave, Thomas Mann sets off for his walk. Then he has lunch with the children, treats himself to a cigar on the couch, reads a little, talks a little. Sometimes he even plays with the children. Erika is seven, Klaus six, Golo four and Monika three. Afterwards they are promptly handed back to the nanny, because Thomas Mann wants to have a lie-down. He always sleeps from four to five. And of course, he doesn’t need an alarm clock then either. Tea is served at five, then he dedicates himself to what he calls ‘incidental tasks’; those who so desire can call him and even visit (‘come at around half-past five’, he writes to Bertram), and he will be there to receive them. Dinner is at seven. So there we have it: world literature is merely a question of precise planning. This spring he tells his children for the first time about the new book he wants to write, called Der Zauberberg – The Magic Mountain. And it is to be a funny one. Erika comes up with a pet name for her father: ‘Zauberer’ – ‘Magician’. And it sticks, for the rest of his life. He always signs letters to his children with this nickname, and sometimes, affectionately, just with a ‘Z’.
And so it seemed he had everything under control with his magic wand: his fountain pen. From A for Aschenbach to Z for Zauberer.
Librarian Descending a Staircase. In April 19
13, after successfully completing a course in Library Studies, Marcel Duchamp takes on the role of Library Assistant at the Sainte-Geneviève library in Paris. Despite his tremendous success at the New York Armory Show, he is done with the art world. He begins by staying silent, but the value of Marcel Duchamp’s silence hasn’t yet been over-inflated. No one actually notices. He spends all his time playing chess. Is this the end, perhaps, not just of his art but of art in general? Duchamp, the highly intelligent, highly sensitive lawyer’s son who, to his great surprise, found himself celebrated in Apollinaire’s book The Painters of Cubism in March, thinks he has reached a dead end. The previous year he was in Munich, far away from Paris, where he passed the time being silent, reading and thinking. He also saw the Cranachs in the Alte Pinakothek. He combined the angularity of the naked Eves and the Futurist depictions of the female form in his picture Nude Descending a Staircase. In the stagnant medium of oil paint he had found an image of movement. But now his thoughts and his art are stuck in a rut. So perhaps he should just dedicate himself to chess instead? Later he will become a member of the French national chess team and participate in four Olympic Games.
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