Marriage as a stroke of fate. Issue 21 of Die Gartenlaube has something to say on the matter:
In some regions of our Fatherland, there still exists a beautiful custom long forgotten elsewhere. The bride, when crossing the threshold of her parents’ house as a girl for the last time before setting off for her wedding, is handed a handkerchief made of new linen by her mother. The bride clasps this handkerchief in her hand during the ceremony, in order to dry her bridal tears. On the wedding night, the young woman then stashes away the little handkerchief in her linen closet, and there it stays – unused and unwashed – until the day when it will veil the face of its owner, its features now frozen by death, and follow her into the grave. This handkerchief is called the ‘Cloth of Tears’.
These are lines from Die Gartenlaube. They read like one of Kafka’s short stories.
Marcel Duchamp travels to England with his eighteen-year-old sister Yvonne, who wants to study English at a language school in Herne Bay, on the north Kent coast. Duchamp, on the other hand, is just on holiday, and writes: ‘Delightful weather. Playing as much tennis as I can. A few French people here, so I don’t even need to learn English.’ He still doesn’t feel like making art.
As he does every year, Max Liebermann sets off at the beginning of August for the Dutch coast, this time staying at the chic beach hotel Huis ter Duin in Noordwijk. But he doesn’t see any reason to relax. All he wants to do is paint. Among the dunes of the coastal resort he once again paints the huntsmen, the horse-riders in the water, the women playing tennis. The sky is always grey in these pictures from the summer of 1913, but Liebermann, unlike the other holiday-makers, isn’t bothered by that in the slightest, for it offers a beautiful contrast against the sandy beige and white of the clothing. On 18 August he writes to his friend and patron Alfred Lichtwark in Hamburg: ‘I’ve been here again for a week now, the place where I know every person, every house, almost every tree, where I’ve painted practically everything. My weeks here alone are like therapy for my inner self.’ Day after day he sets off with his paints and his easel, and on this particular day he and Paul Cassirer, his friend, art dealer and the former chairman of the Berlin Secession, plan to visit a tobacco magnate in his summer house in Noordwijk. Or, more specifically: his kennel. A huntsman opens the door, upon which eight rather small grey or white shaggy-haired spaniels appear, yapping wildly over one another as their droopy ears jiggle excitedly back and forth. The owner informs Liebermann that spaniels are excellent for hunting rabbits. They set off into the dunes together. Liebermann takes his easel with him in order to paint a picture of the hunter with his dogs in tow. Soon, the first shot rings out through the air. Every single report startles Liebermann, and it bothers him that his models have to make such a racket. He tries to paint the dogs as quickly as possible, their silhouettes standing out on the crest of the dunes against the rosy, setting sun. Then Liebermann starts to sketch the hunter placing the rifle over his shoulder and organising the dogs into pairs, but the sun is already sinking into the sea and Liebermann has to break off mid-sketch. He makes plans to return the following morning – and the hunter promises to just pose rather than shoot. And so A Hunter in the Dunes – Trainer with Dogs is born.
On 28 August, Kaiser Franz Joseph joins in the last Hochleiten hunt on Steinkogl, near Bad Ischl, and shoots a goat.
On 14 August 1913, Hugo von Hofmannsthal loses his cool in a letter to Leopold von Andrian:
This year taught me to see Austria the way that the thirty previous years had taught me not to see it. I’ve completely lost both the trust I had in the highest class of society, the high nobility, and the confidence that it had something to give in Austria, especially in Austria. Vienna has been left at the mercy of mob rule, the worst there is, that of the wicked, stupid, vile petty bourgeoisie.
A new man takes to the stage of 1913: Heinrich Kühn. A middle-class intellectual from Dresden, born in the house ‘Nine Muses’. Thanks to his father’s financial support, he lives as a gentleman of independent means in Innsbruck, dedicating himself entirely to photography. Kühn is a deliberate eccentric, who wears either a Tyrolean costume or English suits, with a long, rumpled coat over them while he takes his photographs – this can be seen on his bookplate, in which it’s hard to tell which is more crumpled, his overcoat or his folding camera. He had an old-fashioned and naïve aura to him. And yet he managed to take photographs of the utmost modernity. His pictures from 1913 are fresh and full of innocence, grace and strength. This is partly down to their composition, the extreme low-angle shots. And then there’s his technique, for it was he who perfected the use of Autochrome in collaboration with the great American photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Even in those days he was able to use it to create excellent colour pictures, one after the other, of the Tyrol’s alpine pastures and meadows. After the death of his wife, who had always regarded his strange passion with great scepticism, he had only five models: his four children and their nanny, Mary Warner, who became his partner. The villa in Innsbruck became the ‘House of the Five Muses’.
In 1913 the family was slowly running out of money: the allowance from Dresden had dwindled to nothing, his brother-in-law had gambled away the family fortune and Heinrich Kühn was desperately searching for a way to earn a living. He had been trying to establish a state teaching position for art photography in Innsbruck – and the prospects were looking very good. But in August he discovered, after two years of negotiations, that the ministry responsible was withholding its signature for lack of funds; all the money had been spent on military matters, for the Balkan War: ‘You know how it is, Herr Kühn.’
But Kühn refuses to be discouraged and continues to take photograph after photograph of his private theatrical troupe – in other words, the children: Walter, Edeltrude, Lotte and Hans. And Mary. One photograph (used on the cover of the German edition of this book), shows Mary and his eldest daughter darting across the crest of a hill, the heavy August clouds pressing down from above. White is one of the few choices available to them for their clothing, along with blue, red and green – the father buys the children special ‘photography clothes’, which are suitable for the pure colour tones of the three layers of the Autochrome plate.
There’s the melancholic Walter, with his metal-rimmed glasses resting on his teenage nose, who began painting at a young age; then introvert Edeltrude, who looks like she’s suffering greatly from the world in general and her forename in particular; then Lotte, the liveliest and most radiant; and then Hans, the youngest, a patient lad. Heinrich Kühn is a loving father, but a radical artist. If one of the children accidentally hogs the painting, destroying the balance of the image, he rigorously airbrushes them out, even if it took him hours to get all the children in position in the first place. What Kühn wants to depict in his photographs is nothing less than paradise. Children at play, children resting, women in swirling clothes, the innocence of nature. ‘The Fall of Man’, he writes in a letter ‘takes two forms: Social democracy. And Cubism.’
Kaiser Franz Joseph appoints the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Franz Ferdinand, as ‘Inspector General of All the Armed Forces’, thus extending his authority. The heir subsequently refuses to approve the demand for a preventative war made by the Chief of the General Staff, Franz Count Conrad von Hötzendorf, his arch-nemesis.
In The Hague, the Palace of Freedom is inaugurated in September, built with the help of donations from all over the world, including around $1.25 million from the American multi-millionaire Andrew Carnegie. Preparations begin for a new Hague peace conference in 1915, which is intended to resolve all unresolved issues between nations.
After the dissolution of Die Brücke, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner leaves Berlin, heading for the island of Fehmarn. So eager is he to leave the city, its noise and motifs behind him, that he travels all the way to the south-east tip of the island, to the isolated home of the lighthouse keeper, Lüthmann – and then right to the top, to the ‘Gable Room’, where he spent some time last year. The
lighthouse, the isolated beach, the lighthouse keeper’s eight children – these become his motifs for the summer. The bad weather is clearly visible in the paintings, dark clouds moving across the horizon again and again. Down on the beach, the trees stoop over into the water, almost reminiscent of the South Pacific. Above, the golden rainbow blooms, and Kirchner paints it for days on end, its blazing gold splendour. This time Kirchner brought not just Erna, who is called ‘Frau Kirchner’ here – even though she’s always running around practically naked – but Otto Mueller and his wife, Maschka, too. They take turns painting one another swimming; they relish the freedom, their steadily increasing fame. The Lüthmanns’ children and the lighthouse keeper himself welcome the Kirchners into their family circle with warmth and trust. Those summer weeks on Fehmarn may be the happiest days of Kirchner’s entire life. ‘Oh, Staberhuk, how wonderful you are, a little corner of happiness, so peaceful and beautiful!’ he cries out into the wind, again and again. Even Kirchner’s style ascends to new heights. The women are no longer broadly sprawled out but reach towards the skies; his brushstrokes are more nervous, slender, lengthy figures, his sketches and paintings dominated by Erna and Maschka naked on the beach. He is addicted to the body’s form, he complains jovially, utterly addicted to it. Whenever he is dissatisfied with a picture, he throws it into the sea in a fit of rage – only to plunge in after it, rescue it from the waves and put it back on his easel, to paint it all over again, but better. The most wonderful driftwood keeps washing up on the beach; a year before, at the same time as the Titanic, a ship capsized off Fehmarn. The schooner Marie. Its wood has become part of art history, for Kirchner swam repeatedly out to the sandbank where the wreck lay in order to pick out especially fine pieces of wood which were suitable for carving. On 12 August he writes to his Hamburg collector and patron Gustav Schiefler: ‘The head I sent you is a wood carving (oak), I’ve made several like it out here.’ And in September, in a letter to his student Hans Gewecke, he writes:
Unfortunately we have to leave soon. You won’t believe how difficult this is for us. I can’t decide whether the sea is more beautiful in summer or in autumn. I am painting as much as I can, so that I can take at least some of the thousand things I would like to paint back with me. On top of that, the oak wood from the stranded ship is becoming more and more appealing for statues. I’ll have to take a few unhewn pieces with me, for time is limited now, and the days are getting shorter and shorter.
As fascinated as Kirchner was by the wreck, and as much as he plundered it for his work, it doesn’t appear in a single one of his sketches, art works or paintings from Fehmarn, even though he created hundreds of works there in 1913 alone. The ship stranded in the Baltic Sea – he had the classic motif of Romanticism embodied in front of his very eyes, the ultimate Caspar David Friedrich scenario. But Ernst Ludwig Kirchner impudently denied the wreck a place in his oeuvre. There can hardly be a more conclusive sign that German Romanticism is definitively over.
The Mona Lisa is still nowhere to be found. In the Louvre a Corot has been hung on the orphaned nail.
Felice Bauer, shocked by Kafka’s letters, spends August in Sylt. Innumerable letters go back and forth between her and Prague, about whether Kafka is going to join her there or not, about whether or not the bracing climate will do him good. In the end, of course, he doesn’t come. Such a shame, it would have made for such wonderful journal entries: Kafka in Kampen. But it wasn’t to be.
SEPTEMBER
A death in Venice shakes Berlin. Virginia Woolf and Carl Schmitt want to kill themselves. The stars look bad on 9 September. Duel in Munich: Freud and Jung cross swords. Rilke has to go to the dentist for amalgam fillings, Karl Kraus falls head over heels in love with Sidonie. Kafka goes to Venice, doesn’t die, but falls in love with Riva. The ‘First German Autumn Salon’ begins, and Rudolf Steiner lays the foundation stone in Dornach. Louis Armstrong makes his first public appearance. Charlie Chaplin signs his first film contract. The rest is silence.
(illustration credits 9.1)
On 9 September, Gerhart, son of the publisher Samuel Fischer, whose birthday had just been celebrated in Venice, and who was already sickly and pale and feverish, dies the titular ‘death in Venice’ of his father’s great 1913 publishing success. He is brought back to Berlin hotfoot by ambulance, but there he succumbs to the disease – the ‘Italian disease’, as one might call it, because the story of his illness is so similar to that of Gustav von Aschenbach, Thomas Mann’s hero, who is carried off by cholera in Venice. And so it is only appropriate that Hugo von Hofmannsthal should learn of the publisher’s son’s death in Venice and sends condolences from there to Samuel Fischer and his wife on 17 September: ‘There, where lies the most grievous of pains, at the very summit of pain, there consolation seems to me to dwell – only there and not somewhere off to the side.’
Gerhart’s death is a shock for S. Fischer Verlag and the whole of cultural Berlin – Gerhart was a much-loved, delicate person, now following his own path as a music student after lengthy arguments with his parents. There is a large funeral in the Jewish cemetery in Weissensee, the sun sits ill with the shattered grief on the faces of the attendees. Samuel Fischer, numb with pain, loses his hearing in one ear from shock. Gerhart Hauptmann, after whom Fischer’s son was named, just fifty-one and at the peak of his fame, hurries to the funeral, before laconically observing in his diary: ‘3 o’clock Gerhart Fischer funeral. 5 o’clock big dress rehearsal for William Tell: that’s Berlin, that’s life.’
Rainer Maria Rilke has to be treated at Berlin’s Western Hospital, 4 Marburger Strasse, for severe toothache. From there he writes to Eva Cassirer, his confidante and the patron of his wife, Cara, that he has just read Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice: ‘Very surprised by much in the first part and found it wonderfully formed; but the second part rather contradicted this impression, so that I couldn’t work out the whole thing, even though it lifted me somewhere within.’ Then Rilke has to go back to continue his dental treatment. He is placed in the hands of Dr Charlie Bödecker, a German-American expert in metal inlays, who attempts to combat Rilke’s considerable dental decay with amalgam fillings.
Galerie Hermes sends Lovis Corinth a painting at his home in Klein Niendorf on the Baltic. He had painted it in the Tyrol in July, when his son was feeling better again and he was being bathed. Naked Child in Wash Tub it is called – and on his way back Corinth had then left it in Munich with the art dealer Oscar Hermes. But Hermes didn’t like the nursemaid’s nose. So on 2 September he sent the painting to the Baltic for cosmetic surgery. Corinth looks at the painting, looks at the nose, asks the nursemaid in, looks at her nose – and changes the nose in the painting. Then it is sent back to Munich. These are the advantages of being a dealer in contemporary art. Complaints can be dealt with straight away.
In September the first edition of the school magazine Die Ernte (40 hectographed copies, 15 Pfennigs) is published at the Königliches Realgymnasium in Augsburg. Most of the contributions are written by a pupil in class 6A called Bertolt Brecht. The rest is by Berthold Eugen. Eugen is Brecht’s third Christian name after Friedrich and Bertolt and the pseudonym of Bertolt Brecht. Under this name he also sends poems to the newspaper Augsburger Neuste Nachrichten. There they lay beneath a big pile on the arts editor’s desk. Brecht is fifteen. Marie Rose Amann is twelve. Unfortunately they haven’t yet met; he hasn’t yet held her in his arms like a lovely dream, as he will later write in ‘Memory of Marie A.’.
That day in September 1913, the only things Brecht is holding in his arms like a lovely dream are the first copies of his new school magazine, which he takes to the headmaster’s office.
On 10 September, while on a tour of South America, the dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky – who had a long relationship with Diaghilev, the director of the Ballets Russes, and celebrated the success of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring with him – marries the dancer Romola de Pulszky out of the blue. Diaghilev suffers a shock and fires them both, with i
mmediate effect.
Marcel Duchamp, who still doesn’t feel like making art, takes a piece of paper and writes down his thoughts on the question of what is still possible:
Possible.
The figuration of a Possible.
(not as the opposite to impossible
nor as relating to credible
nor as subordinate to probable.)
The Possible is only
a physical caustic
that burns up all aesthetics or callistics.
On 20 September Rudolf Steiner lays the foundation stone for the new Centre of Anthroposophy, the Goetheanum, in Dornach, near Basel. He writes a short text that is buried along with the stone: ‘Laid by the J. B. V. [Johannes Building Association] for anthroposophical work, on the 20th day of the month of September 1880 a.t.M.G. (after the Mystery of Golgotha), i.e. 1913 a. Chr. b.’ This is followed by the position of the stars on that day: ‘With Mercury as the evening star in Libra.’ Mercury corresponds to the sound I, and the star sign Libra represents CH, so that the constellation of Mercury in Libra signifies the word ‘ICH’. Rudolf Steiner has clearly been waiting for the day when this cosmic rune would stand in the sky. And he has also chosen it because Mercury is the evening star that day. Mercury forms a conjunction with the sun, at a declination of 03° 26’ 45. (Not that it does much good: the place burns down ten years later.)
1913 Page 17