1913

by Florian Illies

  On 8 June, the day when Kafka began writing his proposal, the German Stadium, built for the 1916 Olympic Games, is officially opened by Kaiser Wilhelm II. The German builders completed it three years ahead of schedule. Ah, the good old days.

  On the occasion of the twenty-fifth royal jubilee, fifteen-year old Bertolt Brecht writes the following verse in his diary:

  And if, in the evening, we set

  and die a hero’s death

  then the flag will wave consolingly

  black white and red.

  And then another verse:

  The wind shall sing within it

  Your duty you have done!

  You died in battle

  as a loyal German man.

  Interesting.

  In Wuppertal-Elberfeld there are already five paintings by Picasso hanging on the walls. Two still-lifes from 1907 at the home of the painter Adolf Erbslöh, a Mother and Child from 1901 at the home of Julius Schmits, as well as a Man in Coat from the same year and a watercolour from the Rose Period at the home of the banker August von der Heydt.

  The War of the Roses in two Viennese marriages. Fur is flying between Arthur and Olga Schnitzler, with Schnitzler confiding in his diary that he’s lying on the balcony as if paralysed. And on 10 June, Robert Musil writes the following after an argumentative walk with his wife: ‘Martha, in a foul mood, fired unnecessary accusations at me that left me cold. You’re going to leave me, and then I’ll have no one. I’ll kill myself. I’m going to leave you.’ But she didn’t.

  Someone left, though: Leo Stein. After months of arguments he walked out of 27 Rue des Fleurs, the Parisian apartment he shared with his sister Gertrude and which he had made into the salon of the avant-garde. Picasso and Matisse and Braque kept passing through, and the jour fixe on Saturday evenings was a central gathering point of Parisian creativity. But it was more than that: over the years the salon had become the first museum of modern art in the world. In the tightest of spaces masterpieces by Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Gauguin and all the other great French masters crowded together, collected by the Steins early on and with sound judgement. Gertrude, dressed as ever in brown sackcloth, sat in a dark Renaissance chair and stretched her feet out towards the fireplace. She always felt the cold. Next to her stood Leo, explaining his understanding of modern art to the dozens of guests. His captive audience included English aristocrats, German students, Hungarian painters, French intellectuals and, somewhere in the crowd, Picasso with his lover du jour.

  But then there’s an argument. Leo Stein can’t bear his sister’s preference for Cubism any longer – nor the fact that she quite clearly regards Alice Toklas, who lives there with them, to be not just a cook, teacher and secretary but also a lover. Leo Stein can’t understand any of it. He takes the most beautiful Renoirs, Cézannes and Gauguins and flees from Paris to art’s Promised Land, settling down near Florence. Gertrude Stein immediately fills the empty spaces on the walls with Cubist paintings by Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris from 1912 and 1913. From that moment on Alice Toklas takes Leo Stein’s place at the Saturday evening salons. The brother and sister whose combined energies created the most important collection of modern art ever assembled in such a short time never spoke another word to one another.

  Leo sends offers of reconciliation from Florence, one after the other. But Gertrude doesn’t answer. Later, she attempts to deal with their separation using the method most intellectuals favour in trying to deal with things that trouble them: she writes a book about it. She calls it Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother. She believes this will proclaim her independence in black and white. Instead, of course, the main thing it shows is that she never came to terms with the separation from her brother.

  In the June edition of the Neuer Rundschau a text is published by 25-year-old author and Mann disciple Bruno Frank. The topic is ‘Thomas Mann: A Study following Death in Venice’. It includes, alongside a beautiful, detailed interpretation of the novella, these extraordinary lines diagnosing the era:

  When metaphysics still existed, it meant comparatively little to be a hero. But now, with an inanimate floor of rock beneath us and an empty sky above, where we have no faith, only hunger for it, where we are so disconnected from one another, thrown back into ourselves, probably more than any preceding generation, it is at this very moment that Thomas Mann appears, wakefully and courageously placing this writer into a completely godless world.

  So there you have it. Gustav von Aschenbach, the last tragic hero of Modernity.

  On 16 June the wakeful and courageous writer in question sets off on a three-week vacation to Viareggio, on the Tuscan coast, with his wife, who has just returned from another spa cure. There, in the Hotel Regina, he lays aside Felix Krull, having toiled away on it for a while, and begins work on The Magic Mountain, as he had unsuccessfully tried to do in Bad Tölz, but only by the sea does one have an uninterrupted view of the soul – and of the mountains before it.

  JULY

  Holiday! Egon Schiele ad Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian successor to the throne, play with the model railway. The Prussian officers swim naked in Lake Sacrow. Frank Wedekind goes to Rome, Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz go to the Tyrol (but stay in separate hotels). Alma Mahler escapes to Marienbad because Oskar Kokoschka has called the banns. He consoles himself by boozing with Georg Trakl. Constant rain. Everyone goes half-mad in their hotel rooms. But still: Matisse brings Picasso a bunch of flowers.

  (illustration credits 7.1)

  On 10 July the highest temperature ever recorded is measured in Death Valley: 56.7° C. On 10 July it rains in Germany. It’s barely 10°.

  This July, August Macke and Max Ernst, his young admirer, become closer friends. Macke even uses a notebook with a few lecture notes by Ernst as a sketchbook. Together they organise an exhibition called ‘Rheinland Expressionists’, which, for want of a suitable gallery, they open in Cohen’s bookshop in Bonn. Hanging from the shop’s first-floor window is a huge poster that the participating authors have inscribed together. Max Ernst also makes sure that news of the exhibition reaches the right audience: under a pseudonym he writes a review in the Bonn Volksmund, chiefly praising the art of his friend Macke, whose abstractions ‘provide expression for the spiritual through their form alone’. So in 1913 everybody is fighting over the unconscious.

  The psychological, the transcendental, is in the air. In 1913 the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico paints his first proper ‘metaphysical landscape’, in Guillaume Apollinaire’s phrase. It is called Piazza d’Italia and shows: nothingness.

  If you know that de Chirico studied in Munich for a long time, you can tell from the yellow of the buildings and the width of the streets that the metaphysics in the art of this strange, Greek-born Italian is all Munich. In this way Leo von Klenze’s classical architecture appeared between the Hofgarten and Wittelsbacherplatz in 1913. Böcklin and Klinger were de Chirico’s artistic forefathers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche his intellectual ancestors – and de Chirico no longer needs them for his studies in the loneliness of the lonely individual. Because that is the viewer himself, who is irrevocably drawn into the meaninglessness of the new century. Or, as de Chirico himself says: ‘Art was liberated by the modern philosophers and poets. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were the first to teach the deep significance of the non-meaning of life, and how that meaninglessness could be transformed into art. The good new artists are philosophers who have overcome philosophy.’ So de Chirico reduces perspective to a state of absurdity. And soon becomes a revered authority in Paris, Berlin and Milan, on increasingly shaky foundations.

  From 16 July, Egon Schiele spends his holidays with his patron and sponsor Arthur Roessler in Haus Gaigg in Altmünster on the Traunsee. He announces his arrival in a long letter – he’s coming either at three or four o’clock, or at five or six. But he doesn’t come. And his host walks the half-hour journey from the station back to his house, shivers, drinks tea with rum and then rum with tea. It’s bucketing down. Eventually Schiele
knocks on the terrace door – he has arrived at a different time and from a different direction. And not alone, either, but with Wally Neuzil, whom we know today from the great watercolour Wally with a Red Blouse – but who was nobody at the time.

  The next morning his luggage is to be picked up from the station. Roessler asks him what it comprises exactly. To which Schiele replies: only the bare necessities. Then they collect from the station: a few clothes, cracked clay jugs, colourfully glazed peasant bowls, thick tomes, art books, primitive wooden dolls, tree trunks, painting and drawing utensils, a crucifix. Schiele assembles all these things as inspiration in the guest room, to work. But he works for: not one minute. Instead he hikes through the wonderful landscape of the Salzkammergut. Enjoys being with his girlfriend and being looked after by Roessler’s staff. His host hoped that Schiele would paint, and that he could use one of the paintings for the living room of the summer house. But Schiele just doesn’t paint. One morning Roessler goes into Schiele’s room and sees Schiele sitting on the floor watching a little clockwork train set go around in a circle. Schiele switches tracks, couples and decouples while loudly imitating the noises. He can do perfect imitations of train whistles, coupling, shunting, squealing. He asks Roessler to join in. Someone has to do the announcements at the little station.

  The London Times reports that the successor to the Austro-Hungarian throne has sulkily withdrawn to his Bohemian castle near Konopiště, and is lying on the floor in the nursery. He orders every guest who comes to visit to lie down on the floor and help him add on extra tracks. The Kaiser is supposed to have brought in psychiatrists in plain clothes a long time ago, to observe and treat Franz Ferdinand as inconspicuously as possible. Franz Ferdinand hides all summer in his castle; he wants to be far from Vienna, the strange old Kaiser and, above all, the General Chief of Staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf, who is constantly trying to carry out a preventive strike against Serbia.

  Franz Ferdinand can’t bear the abuse of the court any longer. Everyone there was against his friendship with Sophie Countess Chotek, because she was beneath his dignity and naturally his class. The court only agreed after wife and children had renounced all claims. So Sophie was condemned to a life in the shadows. She might have had three children by Franz Ferdinand, but she was shunned in Vienna; she was even forbidden to sit next to her husband in the imperial box at the Burgtheater or the Hofoper. She was not forbidden to go for walks with him around Konopiště Castle. That was why her husband had renamed it the ‘Upper Way of the Cross’ early in their relationship. But with his wife, Sophie, and three children, Franz Ferdinand is clearly what you would call happy. Because he isn’t actually needed in Vienna, the archduke, who is seen in the capital as a short-tempered, uncontrollable power-politician, is a loving husband and father. He spends hours playing with his children in the gardens of the Bohemian castle, and it is his purest joy when they know the names of all the flowers whose blossoms spill opulently over the box tree hedges. Next door, in Janovice Castle, Sidonie Nádherný is in mourning.

  Picasso was seriously ill. But on 22 July Eva Gouel writes to Gertrude Stein: ‘Pablo is almost well again. He gets up every day in the afternoon. Henri Matisse keeps dropping round to ask after him. He came today to bring Picasso flowers, and spent the whole afternoon with us.’ What a wonderful, consoling idea: one of the two most important artists of his time bringing a bunch of flowers to the other most important artist of his time. No wonder Picasso was completely recovered a few days later.

  Robert Musil is not seriously ill, but he is given sick leave so he doesn’t have to perform his duties as a librarian at the Technical College in Vienna but has time to write. On 28 July, Dr Pötzl writes a new sick note for Musil, whom he has been treating for ‘serious neurasthenia’ for six months (lest we forget). So Pötzl writes: ‘The high level of prevalent nervous exhaustion calls for a much longer period of recovery, and from today’s neurological standpoint it calls for a suspension of professional activity of at least six months.’ And so, referring to this document, Musil writes to request ‘six months’ leave’. The university sends him to the official doctor, and one Dr Blanka establishes: ‘He is suffering from a serious degree of general neurasthenia involving the heart (cardiac neurosis).’ Neurasthenia involving the heart – it is hard to think of a better summation of the malady of the modern age.

  At the end of June, Harry Graf Kessler had travelled to Berlin for large-scale military exercises with his old regiment. The great aesthete joined in without demur. He loved life in the officers’ mess and the aristocratic officer corps in Potsdam, he loved the soirées and suppers that accompanied manoeuvres. So in July he is staying with Princess Stolberg in Potsdam, although she confesses that she ‘grew up in a castle surrounded by woods’ and still can’t tell the different Prussian uniforms apart. ‘I said: Well, she could easily tell a hussar from a garde du corps. Yes, she said, but it was so terribly hard to tell a general from an NCO.’ Kessler leaves it like that, so that we understand how terrible it is that in Prussia in 1913 there’s actually still a princess who can’t distinguish a general from an NCO.

  On 25 July, when it has finally stopped raining, some of those who are very aware of where those differences lie – intellectually, morally and as regards the uniform – drive out with Kessler to Lake Sacrow. More precisely: Major Friedrich Graf von Kliknowström, born in 1884, 3rd Uhlan Guard Regiment since 1905; Lieutenant Thilo von Trotha, born in 1882, also in the 3rd Uhlan Guard Regiment; and cavalry captain Eberhard Freiherr von Esebeck. ‘When we came to the bathing spot, a lonely meadow lined with forests, where we wanted to swim, Krosigk suddenly rose up right in front of us out of the lake and the reeds, stark naked.’ Afterwards, Graf Friedel von Krosigk organised a naked race on the meadow. ‘Diagonally opposite, on the other bank, a white figure, also swimming.’ The white figure: who might that have been? Princess Stolberg, perhaps, wanting to double-check the differences between generals and NCOs? Asta Nielsen taking a break from filming in Babelsberg?

  Male fantasies, Part II: two chimeras after a train journey: Oswald Spengler, the old sexist, doesn’t take a holiday, he’s thinking about the ‘Decline of the West’, and about all these women all over the place. ‘I can bear intellectual intercourse with women only in small doses. Even if a girl is as narrow-minded as a suffragette and as tasteless as an art-filly.’ He is back at home in his flat in Munich, and thinks it’s ugly, particularly the furniture: ‘Any piece of furniture must be able to bear comparison with a Manet or a Renaissance palace. Old furniture can do that. The design of new furniture makes it look like five-finger exercises.’ But then he remembers his train journey and adds: ‘The only good things are the ones in which these stylistic idiots haven’t stinted on their “ability”: locomotives etc.’ Gottfried Benn takes the train that summer as well. He too gets a testosterone boost from the women in his compartment. In his little notebook he writes these great lines about his experiences on the fast train between Berlin and the Baltic: ‘Meat that walked naked./Into the sea-tanned mouth.’ And later: ‘Men’s brown pounces on women’s brown:/A woman is a matter for a single night. And if it was fine, for the next one too!/Oh! And then alone again!’ So Benn too can bear the company of women only in small doses. Then he too descends happily back into the basement of his solitude.

  Kaiser Franz Joseph doesn’t want to be alone. Arm in arm with Frau Katharina Schratt he walks through the extensive parkland of Bad Ischl, for many years his resort of choice. And Frau Schratt has been his companion for many years too: they know each other from the days when Sissi was still alive. And yet – and this is the imperial wish – she will never become his lover, only ever his companion. So the two of them, separated by an age difference of thirty years, spend their days together. At night the Kaiser would like to be alone. However, at about seven o’clock in the morning he leaves his imperial villa and walks over to see Frau Schratt in her villa ‘Felicitas’, where they take tea together. Then he mingles with the spa guests.
He generally goes unrecognised, because he doesn’t wear his decorations on holiday, dispenses with his bodyguard and looks like any knobbly old retired officer. He wants to be entirely ordinary. But sadly he is the Kaiser. So he goes along with that. But he writes letters of wonderful ordinariness to Fau Schratt. Oh, he laments at one point how his bunions hurt when he has to stand up at the banquet and raise a toast to the king of Bulgaria.

  The king of Bulgaria himself has quite different concerns: the dispute between Serbia and Bulgaria about territories in Macedonia escalates on 3 July. Serbia declares war – and the Turks, Greeks and Romanians also stand up to Bulgaria. The Second Balkan War has arrived. New dispatches are constantly reaching the Kaiser in Bad Ischl. But he doesn’t want to be disturbed by those hotheads in the Balkans. He walks over to Frau Schratt and drinks some tea.

  On 13 July, Freud goes to Marienbad with his beloved daughter Anna to convalesce and gain inner strength for the great battle. The Fourth International Psychoanalytic Congress in Munich early in September, where he will meet up with Jung and the renegade Zurich analysts for the first time since their disagreement. And, of course, Marienbad doesn’t help Freud at all. Either with the rheumatism in his right arm or with his depression. He writes: ‘I can hardly write, we’ve had a bad time here, the weather cold and wet.’