1913

by Florian Illies

  The night is black. Ghostly blows the mountain wind

  The sleepwalking boy’s white nightshirt

  And quietly, reaching into his mouth the hands

  Of the dead. Sonja smiles, mild and lovely.

  Ludwig von Ficker, his fatherly friend and patron, in whose houses and castles Trakl finds shelter that year, immediately prints the poem in the June edition of his magazine Der Brenner. But not even that makes Trakl feel proud. He plunges ever lower.

  Edvard Munch paints his picture Jealousy.

  Meanwhile Thomas Mann is sitting in his country home in Bad Tölz, and wants to start writing. He has an idea for a new story, to be set in Davos, in the sanatorium he got to know while visiting Katia. A self-contained universe. The book is to be a counterpart to Death in Venice, currently on sale, but this time, as he writes in a letter, the story will be ‘easy-going and humorous (even though death will be a favourite once more)’. The working title is The Enchanted Mountain.

  He wants to get started. The children are playing catch outside in the meadow, watched over by the nanny. But he can’t start. He keeps glancing at the rug in his study, and each time he does so he’s overcome with rage at the rug trader, Schönnemann, who ripped him off. He asked another Munich dealer to take a look at it, and he valued the rug at a third of the price he paid. But Herr Schönnemann refuses to reimburse him, so Thomas Mann takes the matter to court. He looks out at the Alpine peaks, then lays his fountain pen aside. The enchanted mountain will have to wait. He writes to his lawyer, instructing him to pressurise the rug trader into paying up.

  Harry Graf Kessler, dressed, as always, in a white three-piece suit, travels by train from glittering Paris to turbulent Berlin, falling for Westphalia’s charms en route. ‘Journey through Westphalia’, he notes in his diary on 3 June.

  Fields of flowers, green rye and corn as far as the eye can see; softly swelling hills, a golden-blue summer haze over mountain and valley. There’s something voluptuous, heavy, expansive, maternal to the mood, a stark contrast to the intimate beauty of the French countryside. This Germanness of the German countryside will have to invent a style for itself, just like the French countryside made Impressionism its own.

  These were the words of Harry Graf Kessler – exactly a week after Die Brücke disbanded in Berlin, a group of artists who had spent eight years capturing the voluptuous, heavy, expansive and maternal qualities of the German landscape in German Expressionism. And a group to which Kessler paid no attention whatsoever.

  Franco-German relations in 1913 in the publication Simplicissimus, featuring an advert for Henkell Trocken sparkling wine: ‘From the grape to the cask in Rheims. From the cask to the bottle in Biebrich, where the preparation of our brands Henkell Trocken and Henkell Privat is complete. We are the only German sparkling wine maker which is at the absolute peak of organisation, both in the Champagne region and in Germany.’ You turn the page. On the next, you see a caricature of a completely Frenchified German in magnificent clothes, spending the afternoon reading the illustrated journals. The caption reads: ‘These relentless incidents on the border are horrendous enough already. But our men will be flabbergasted once they see the French approaching with all their elaborate fashions.’

  On 29 June the Reichstag passes a military bill (put forward by the government) at the third reading, approving the increase of peacetime troops by 117,267 men to 661,478.

  On a not very pleasant day in 1913 Franz Marc suddenly reaches for his paintbrush and paints a picture that contrasts wildly with the rest of his oeuvre. The painting in question doesn’t depict the usual paradise, where animals are as mild as angels and human beings are redundant. No. This time it’s all about hell. Franz Marc, horrified by the newspaper reports from southern Europe and the increasingly bloody carnage there, paints a sinister, snarling picture. He calls it The Wolves (Balkan War).

  On 20 June 1913, at midday, the unemployed thirty-year old teacher Ernst Friedrich Schmidt, from Bad Sülze, walks into the Sankt-Marien School in Bremen draped with weapons. Brandishing at least six loaded revolvers, he forces his way into the classrooms on a shooting rampage. When one revolver runs out of bullets, he reaches for the next. Five girls between the ages of seven and eight die, while eighteen children and five adults are severely injured. Eventually a passer-by manages to overpower him. He later claims he was protesting about not having found a teaching position.

  The year 1913 sees the publication not only of the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time but also of a work of revolutionary force for twentieth-century philosophy: Edmund Husserl’s Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Husserl’s great paradigm shift for philosophy was a turning away from the positivist realities of the surrounding world and a move towards the facts of consciousness. And 1913 was the year in which every aspect of the world within became a reality: as a picture, as a book, as a house, as an illusion.

  Or as a red book. During this year C. G. Jung starts noting down his dreams and experiences in a red leather-bound notebook – and begins to analyse himself with it. At the beginning of the year he, the President of the International Psychoanalytic Union, committed an act of parricide against Sigmund Freud. He not only rejected the libido theory as the central belief system of modern psychology but above all, as he said in his letter, ‘tugged the prophet’s beard’. Parricide, however, destroys not only the father but also the perpetrator. While Freud sinks into depression and suppressed rage, Jung descends into a severe crisis, because he no longer has the father figure he looked up to adoringly for so long. He relinquishes his teaching position at the University of Zurich and – just like Freud – becomes nervous about the encounter looming ever closer. The two enemy camps are due to meet in September at the Congress of Psychoanalysts in Munich.

  Jung’s sleep suffers, and he is tormented by nightmares. One of them is the catalyst for the ‘Red Book’. Bathed in sweat, he awakes after having a vision of Europe sinking beneath the waves of a massive flood. Murder and manslaughter and corpses and devastation everywhere. By day he lectures on schizophrenia, but by night, in his unsettled dreams, he fears that he himself is becoming schizophrenic. The nightmare with the apocalyptic vision, in particular, torments him for so long that he tries to overcome it by writing it down. His dreams have been fraught with confusion ever since he managed to establish a very unusual love triangle in his life: he successfully convinced both his wife, Emma, and his lover, Toni Wolf, to accept their ménage à trois. On Sunday evenings Toni even comes to dinner at the family villa in Küsnacht on Lake Zurich. There are no records, however, as to exactly how those evenings played out after dinner. All we know is that both Emma and Toni were analysts, and that the relationship between the three would endure for many decades. And that Jung himself rummaged through the events of the days and nights in his dreams, recording them hurriedly and feverishly in his ‘Red Book’. ‘Debate with the Unconscious’ was the name he gave to this experiment on himself. And, just like the masses of water flooding Europe in his dreams of 1913, Jung’s inner being unleashed a storm tide: ‘All of my later activities consisted of formulating what emerged from my unconscious, drowning me at first, during those years. It was the primary substance for a lifetime’s work.’

  Elias Canetti, at nearly eight years of age, moves with his mother from Galicia to Vienna and starts to learn German.

  And 1913 is the year when D. H. Lawrence becomes Lady Chatterley’s Lover. His Lady Chatterley is thirty-four years old, and he ran away from England with her after a brief, barely five-week-long affair. Her real name is Frieda von Richthofen – now Weekley, but her husband, a professor from the University of Nottingham and Lawrence’s lecturer, is unable to tame either her Prussian nobility or her temperament. The 27-year-old Lawrence, however, the miner’s son who has just submitted his manuscript for Sons and Lovers to his publisher, is impressed that she is ‘the daughter of a baron, from the ancient and famed lineage of von Ric
hthofen’. Frieda is green-eyed, intelligent, blonde and devoted to living life to the full. She believes that paradise on earth can only be realised through free love. Lawrence takes her at her word and flees England with her, heading for Europe. In the spring of 1913 they find shelter in a love nest belonging to Frieda’s sister Else, in Irschenhausen in Upper Bavaria. The small, cosy, wooden summer house had always been a retreat for Else, the wife of the Munich professor Jaffé, and her lover Alfred Weber, brother of Max Weber, with whom Else studied for her doctorate. When Frieda arrives there from England, Else gives her a stylish dirndl as a moving-in present, intended to show off her feminine charms to their best advantage. The sisters were always of one mind on these matters, even while they were both lovers of Otto Gross, a Freud disciple, cocaine addict and legendary seducer. Admittedly Else was the only one to have a child with him, named Peter, just like the son born in matrimony that very same year to Otto Gross and his wife, a woman called Frieda, just like his other lover. It seems the paradise of free love was a confusing place at times.

  Lawrence and Frieda Weekley, née von Richthofen, have to fight for their love even after they flee – they are united by, as Lawrence once wrote, ‘a bond of affection, knotted from pure hatred’. But this early summer in Irschenhausen is their happiest time together. Isolated from the rest of the world in the Isar Valley, with fir trees and mountains behind them and the great expanse in front of them, they recover from their flight and summon new energy. It’s not long before Lawrence is singing the praises of Frieda’s ‘genius for living’. He clearly enjoys her genius for love just as much, for when he later goes on to release his most famous book, the erotic tales of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the aristocratic seductress bears a strong similarity to Frieda von Richthofen. Irschenhausen, however, is not mentioned by name; it’s not romantic enough for a novel of that kind.

  But by June 1913 they are both growing restless. Lawrence wants to go back to England to enjoy the success following upon the publication of Sons and Lovers. And his lover wants to see her children again. She abandoned three offspring, aged thirteen, eleven and nine, to run off with the young author. And now it’s breaking her heart. At the end of June they set off for England, after which Lawrence barely manages to tear her away from her beloved children. They make plans to meet in Italy. She isn’t convinced, however, by his declaration of love, so he promises to walk all the way through Switzerland to Italy. And he does. She believes him, for the time being.

  The Innsbruck publication Der Brenner carries out a survey on Karl Kraus. In June, Arnold Schönberg writes these fine words in response: ‘In the dedication with which I sent my Theory of Harmony to Karl Kraus, I said something along these lines: “I have, it seems, learned more from you than one really should if one wishes to remain independent.” That sums up, not the extent, but certainly the level of the appreciation that I have for him.’ A very rare record of silent admiration, high regard and eloquence from this overheated year.

  In June the German Reich celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II. He is a strange emperor, fascinated above all else by ships and decorum. Early in his reign he personally saw to it that court ceremonies were extended and new dress codes introduced. As his jubilee approaches, he takes all the planning in hand – wanting to make decisions not just about the staging of the event but also about the selection of presents. It was even his idea that he should be referred to in the speeches as the ‘Emperor of Peace’ – despite the fact that, just two weeks later, the Reichstag passes a bill approving the expansion of the army. And even though the old seating arrangements were retained at the gala tables – for example, placing the Reich Chancellor behind the Imperial family and the Federal Prince, and other representatives even far behind insignificant court officials – power relationships within the Reich itself hadn’t been that clear for quite some time. If the hierarchy was not reflected in the table, Wilhelm needed to fight hard for his political position within the constitutional monarchy. He didn’t have a genuine instinct for power. Instead, he turned his attentions to his strong point: public appearances. He would behave in a down-to-earth way, as if he were one of the people, a friend of the military, of simple pleasures, and an enemy of modern French art. He loved ships, the North, the marines. For him the greatest thing about the colonies was that they were accessible only by ship. Even when he went hunting for wood grouse in the Hessian mountains with his lover, Countess Görtz, he spent the evenings, before the hunter’s horn sounded, etching little warships into the wood of the hunting lodge.

  There are over 200 cinemas in Berlin by 1913. Most of them show productions from the film studios founded in Babelsberg the previous year: for example, Asta Nielsen’s The Sins of the Fathers. It tells the story of a painter’s muse who, to her adored, paternal hero, is a model for allegories of beauty. Then he leaves her, and she becomes an alcoholic. The painter encounters her again later and is transfixed, but doesn’t recognise her. He invites her to his studio, intent on painting an allegory of alcoholism which he intends to be his masterpiece. And it is. But when the muse sees that she, her love and her beauty are to be sacrificed on the altar of art and career, she destroys the canvas in a sensational act of protest. Asta Nielsen’s outbreak of rage makes her face a much-admired icon.

  When the survivors of the Terra Nova expedition return to their homeland in June 1913, the brigade’s scientific achievements attract a great deal of attention. This is intended to distract from the fact that Scott, exalted as a national hero, was in fact the second to reach the South Pole. For when the last members of the expedition finally arrived at the South Pole in 1912, the freshly erected Norwegian flag was already standing proud. Roald Amundsen was a few days ahead in this ruthless race against ice and time. The morale of the British expedition members was broken. Scott was not the only one to lose his life in the endless ice on his way back. Even today Captain Lawrence Oates is revered as a martyr in Great Britain, for committing suicide so as not to be a burden to his four comrades. His last words as he left the tent are legendary: ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ A sentence like that makes a man immortal in England. The title of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s legendary report on the catastrophic expedition is just as fitting: The Worst Journey in the World. So the Brits may not have discovered the South Pole, but at least they didn’t lose their sense of humour.

  ‘The Worst Marriage Proposal in the World’: on 8 June, in Prague, Franz Kafka has finally begun to ask for Felice’s hand in marriage. But he breaks off mid-sentence, and it’s not until 16 June that he is able to bring himself to finish the letter. It ends up being over twenty pages long. Kafka begins with a detailed account of how he needs to look for a doctor – what exactly he wants him to certify, perhaps fertility or sanity, is unclear. Or maybe it’s all just a laboured pretext to delay the inevitable marriage and its consummation: ‘Between you and me there stands, apart from everyone else, the doctor. It is doubtful what he will say, because medicinal diagnoses are not really the crucial factor in such decisions, and if they were, then it wouldn’t be worth taking them into account. I was, as I said, not really ill, but I am.’ Hmm. Then follows a passage in which Kafka, that wonderful, sensitive stylist, establishes a form of written stuttering:

  Now bear in mind, Felice, that in the face of this uncertainty it is hard to say the words, and it must sound peculiar. It’s simply too soon to say it. But afterwards it will be too late, and then there won’t be any time for discussing such things as you mentioned in your last letter. But there isn’t any time to hesitate for too long, at least that’s how I feel about it, and so that’s why I’m asking: in view of the above premise, which is sadly ineradicable, do you want to consider whether you want to become my wife? Do you want that?

  In fact, what he probably wanted to write was: ‘Do you really want that?????’

  Then, in a rare moment of clarity, he presents Felice with the cost-benefit calculation of a potential marriag
e:

  Now give some thought, Felice, to how marriage would change us, what each of us would gain and lose. I would lose my – for the most part, terrible– solitude and gain you, whom I love more than anyone else in the world. But you would lose your former life, with which you were almost entirely content. You would lose Berlin, the office you love, your friends, little pleasures, the prospect of marrying a healthy, cheerful, good man, and of having beautiful, healthy children, which you, if you stop to think about it, really long for. And on top of this inestimable loss, you would gain a sick, weak, unsociable, taciturn, sad, stiff, pretty much hopeless human being.

  Who could turn down an offer like that? A proposal of marriage disguised as a confession.

  Kafka is still uneasy, for he suspects he has stuck his neck out on this occasion, even though he tried, with hundreds and hundreds of words, to cover up and mask his question. But he knows that, somewhere in the middle of the letter, he did ask her to marry him. He hems and haws before putting the letter in an envelope, then goes on a laborious search for a bigger envelope, because the letter is now so thick. Then he goes out on to the street, but dawdles, waiting so long that all of the post offices have closed for the evening. Then he is suddenly overwhelmed by the desire for Felice to have the letter on her desk first thing in the morning, so he runs to the station, where urgent post can be put on the fast train to Berlin. On the way, sweating and in a panic, he meets an old acquaintance. Kafka tries to excuse himself, saying he’s in a hurry and has to get the letter to the station. What kind of letter is so urgent, asks the acquaintance in amusement. ‘A proposal of marriage’, says Kafka, amid laughter.