His senses are still so keen from the months by the sea, his perception and pores so open, that the city, its noise, its power and its faces penetrate his soul with elemental force. Only now that his visual nerves have been cleansed by the brisk Baltic Sea air is he able to see entirely fresh images: He begins with Berlin Street Scene, the first picture from his ‘Potsdamer Platz’ series. It depicts urban modernity, the city and its main characters all condensed together, the garishly clad coquettes with their dead faces, promising the men a happiness that not even the whoremonger could believe. Kirchner senses how the physicality which he was able to experience and paint on a pure, natural level in the women and children in Fehmarn is now no longer possible in the urban space of the new era, amid all the garments and the noise, the different glances and different expectations. The city’s driving force is its speed, its incessant forward propulsion, its obliviousness to the present. But in those pictures of Potsdamer Platz, Kirchner is pressing the pause button. Suddenly, everything stands still. And by making the viewer of the picture into a whoremonger, the coquettes and the city offering themselves to him in their meaningless disposability and senseless belief that, tomorrow, everything will be different and better, Kirchner succeeds in creating unique pictures of a modern age in which the bodies of the city consist no longer of flesh and blood, but only of longing and nerves.
Emil Nolde simply can’t bear to be in Berlin any more. So on 1 October he and his wife, Ada, pack up his painting tools and clothes into numerous large trunks. Then, early on the evening of 2 October, they head to the house of the art collector Eduard Arnhold at 19 Prinzregentenstrasse, in the Tiergarten district.
By 1913 Arnhold has climbed to the top rung of the social ladder. Having made his fortune in the coal trade, he is now on the board of directors of the Dresdner Bank and, that same year, becomes the first and only Jew to be appointed to the Prussian House of Lords by Kaiser Wilhelm II – he is offered a peerage too but turns it down. He invests his money almost exclusively in artists and art and, along with James Simon, is a major untitled patron of the arts, donating the Villa Massimo in Rome to the Prussian state as a cultural institute in around 1913. His own house in Prinzregentenstrasse is a masterful demonstration of the taste and power of a ‘Kaiser Jew’, as the future Israeli state president Chaim Weizmann scornfully named a group of prominent Berlin Jews, including James Simon, Albert Ballin and Walter Rathenau, because of their closeness to Wilhelm II. Works by Menzel and Liebermann, and Böcklin’s Prometheus, were hung up in his home, but there were also portraits of Wilhelm I and Bismarck alongside them.
So, on the evening of 2 October, an illustrious group of travellers have gathered in the Arnhold residence. Emil and Ada Nolde are nervous with excitement. They feast, dine and drink before setting off for Bahnhof Zoo at a quarter to twelve. When they arrive, a little sleepy by now, the night train to Moscow via Warsaw is already on the platform. It departs at 00:32, right on time. The expedition leader, Dr Alfred Weber, claims a sleeping compartment, while the young nurse Gertrud Arnthal, Arnhold’s niece, sets up camp next to the Noldes, there to look after the ailing Ada. The ‘Medical-Demographic German-New-Guinea Expedition’ has begun.
On 5 October the train for the expedition – which was the simplest way for Nolde to get to his adored, distant South Pacific – arrives in Moscow. On 7 October they continue their journey by the Trans-Siberian Railway, over the Ural Mountains and Siberia to Manchuria. As representatives of a German government expedition, they all travel first-class. From Manchuria the journey continues to Shenyang and Seoul. From there the travellers set off to Japan by ship, arriving at the end of October. It’s cold, wet and uncomfortable, and there’s still no sign of the South Pacific.
On 5 October 1913, Paul Claudel’s play L’Annonce faite à Marie is performed in Dresden-Hellerau. Lured by the reformist zeal of the Hellerau Dance School, the Dalcroze Method and Heinrich Tessenow’s new Festival Hall, the audience is extremely select: Thomas Mann is there, Rainer Maria Rilke with his two closest friends, Lou Andreas-Salomé and Sidonie Nádherný, as well as Henry van de Velde and Else Lasker-Schüler. Max Reinhardt is in Hellerau that evening too, along with Martin Buber, Annette Kolb, Franz Blei, Gerhart Hauptmann, Franz Werfel, Stefan Zweig and the two most prominent young publishers, Ernst Rowohlt and Kurt Wolff.
While Reinhardt and Hugo von Hofmannsthal are staging Der Rosenkavalier at the Dresden Hoftheater, the new Festspielhaus becomes the meeting place for the avant-garde. Émilie Jacques-Dalcroze’s goal was to create a new unity of body, spirit and music. Through undertaking rhythmic exercises and improvisations to music, the body is supposedly freed from the blocks imposed on it by civilisation. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner would have liked that. Upton Sinclair, the American author, who was probably in Hellerau on 5 October too, later wrote in his novel World’s End: ‘At Hellerau they taught you an alphabet and a grammar of movement. With your arms you kept the time; a set of movements for three-part time, another for four, and so on. With your feet and body you indicated the duration of notes. It was a kind of rhythmic gymnastics, planned to train the body in quick and exact response to mental impressions.’
This new form of Expressionist dance captivated everyone. Combining it with Paul Claudel’s L’Annonce, however, did not go down so well. That night Claudel made a confused note in his journal about the almost complete absence of applause. Dalcroze even referred to it publicly as a fiasco. Rilke summed up the evening and its irritations beautifully in his letters to Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Helene von Nostitz: ‘Like overgrown children, the people of Hellerau are getting involved in something they don’t understand, but, God knows, perhaps they’ll learn in the process and bypass the bleakness of today’s theatre, heading instead straight to something transparent and pure. That would certainly be good for us all.’ Fundamentally, therefore, Rilke sees an opportunity in the Hellerau experiments, the secret that all avant-gardes exhausted by the modern era are searching for. Unfortunately Rilke is certain that Paul Claudel’s L’Annonce is of no use here whatsoever. Or, in his own words, as he writes to Hofmannsthal: ‘L’Annonce, Claudel, I wouldn’t know how to describe it precisely, was thought-provoking, but was so intertwined with the Hellerau experiments, which were also thought-provoking, that you couldn’t really tell whether the concerns you went home with were the result of one or the other.’
So the production itself didn’t go down in the annals of cultural history. But the intermission and the worries which some of the audience went home with certainly did. During the intermission the very first encounter takes place between Rainer Maria Rilke’s circle, which he has been swearing in for months now with eulogies about the poetic force of Franz Werfel, and the barely twenty-year-old poet Werfel himself. Rilke will later write a distraught letter to Marie von Thurn und Taxis in Duino, saying that when he saw Werfel he felt the ‘falsity of the Jewish mentality’ for the first time, ‘that spirit which penetrates things like poison, which gets in everywhere in revenge for not being part of an organism’. But then Rilke re-reads Werfel’s ‘glorious poems’ in the White Pages, which ‘allowed me abruptly to shake off everything which was confusing and restrictive about our personal encounter, and once again I would walk through fire for him’.
During that intermission in Hellerau, clearly distressed and incapable of striking up a conversation, Rilke introduces Werfel to his close friend Sidonie Nádherný – and her reaction is one of both confusion and repulsion. According to Rilke, she whispered ‘a Jew-boy!’ upon catching sight of Werfel. So maybe he heard her. In any case, the countess treats the young poet with contempt. It’s the opening chapter of a monstrous story.
The Prague-born Franz Werfel had, through Kafka’s close friend Max Brod, taken an editorial role with Kurt Wolff’s up-and-coming publishing house in Leipzig – a particularly avant-garde operation owing, not least, to the fact that the average age of its staff in 1913 was twenty-three. Werfel succeeded in signing the author Karl Kraus up to Kurt Wolf
f Verlag, and in the summer of 1913 wrote this lovely advertisement for the publisher:
It is important to point out that, in Karl Kraus, one of the greatest European masters lives among us. The publishing house is releasing this sublime satirist’s most shocking essay ‘The Wall of China’, in a monumental edition adorned with Kokoschka’s illustrations. The time has come for a new youth, for all intellectual and just individuals to let themselves be swept away by the apocalyptic force of this rhetorical fugue, lest future generations are ashamed of our own.
Fine words indeed. At the same time they also reveal the twenty-year-old Werfel’s obsessive and total adoration of Karl Kraus, then thirty-seven. Whenever they met, he would hang on his every word for hours; his letters are characterised by awe and submissiveness. In June he sent this sentence to Ludwig von Ficker in response to the survey among Brenner readers about Karl Kraus: ‘I love this man, painfully.’ Karl Kraus responded to this love by offering recognition; he regularly printed Werfel’s poems in his magazine Die Fackel, giving them euphoric reviews.
So when Franz Werfel and Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin met in Hellerau on 5 October, no one knew that Karl Kraus had barely moved from her side for the past month and that they were passionately in love. Sidonie, in turn, knew nothing about her Karl’s high regard for the young poet. And so they were both completely uninhibited: Sidonie in her dismissal of him, and the insulted Franz Werfel in spreading rumours about Sidonie – for example, that Rilke had once been passionately in love with her, and that she used to travel around with a circus troupe. When these rumours finally make their way back to Sidonie, and then to Karl Kraus, Kraus is filled with rage and cold fury. He severs all ties with Werfel and picks his poetry to pieces. Disparaging his poems in Die Fackel, he writes this devastating judgement of Werfel: ‘A poem is good until you know who wrote it.’
We don’t know whether Kraus, himself a Jew, ever found out that it was his beloved Sidonie’s exclamation of ‘Jew-boy’ that had so wounded Werfel that he felt his only recourse was to spread rumours about her. Finally, the fact that Rilke, after finding out about her close relationship with Kraus, warned Sidonie, in one of his intimate letters to her, against a potential marriage, arguing that ‘one last indelible difference’ separated them, means that the events during that intermission on 5 October in Dresden mark a very sad date in German cultural history. In the same intermission, by the way, Else Lasker-Schüler, the great poet of the Hebrew Ballads, kept exclaiming, ‘Bad, bad!’ because the performance displeased her so much – and that distressed Rilke as well, as he found her actions barbaric.
Brief epilogue on the theme: ‘Love Comes and Love Goes’: In Hellerau, on 16 October, Rainer Maria Rilke has Émile Jacques-Dalcroze and his students dance for him once more, so that he may see exactly what their method of body activation involves. Sitting beside him in the otherwise empty festival theatre are Lou Andreas-Salomé, to his right, and Ellen Delp, to his left: that much-desired ‘matutinal Ellen’ from Heiligendamm in August whom Lou refers to as her ‘chosen daughter’. Rilke, who, as coincidence would have it, is staying in Dresden’s Sidoniestrasse (in the European Court Hotel), then writes a joint letter with Lou Andreas-Salomé to Sidonie Nádherný, in which they advise her to turn at once to Dr Friedrich Pineles in Vienna in her time of need – the same Pineles who was more successful as a seducer than as a psychiatrist, and who, as ‘Erdenmann’, had taught Lou Andreas-Salomé the joys of physical love a few years before. How delightfully confusing things were. It’s possible that it all became too much even for Rilke; the following day he sets off in haste back to Paris. From there he writes on 31 October that he wants to file for divorce from Clara.
Parricide again. The young Alfred Bronnen writes his wrathful drama Parricide, in which the son kills his father in order to make love to his mother. And then there’s Gottfried Benn, who the year before watched helplessly as his fatally ill mother died a painful death after his father, Gustav Benn, the country parson for Mohrin in Neumark, had on ethical grounds denied her the morphine which her son, a doctor, wanted to prescribe to alleviate her suffering. Even pain, the parson preached to his wife and son, is a gift from God. This was the very last time that Gottfried Benn was to obey the world of the fathers. In 1913, a year later, he sentenced his father to execution by verse. The volume of poetry is called Sons, the title alone expressing who is in charge now. It is a sign of self-assertion against overbearing fathers. Fathers are being challenged, under torture, only in thoughts at first, but later with words as well. But it will take a while. That autumn Georg Trakl writes this screaming self-accusation in his Metamorphosis of Evil: ‘What compels you to stand silently on the derelict stair in the house of your fathers?’ Kafka will write the ‘Letter to the Father’. And Benn extols his mother’s memory in his poems. Much later, in his century-spanning poem ‘Teils-Teils’: ‘My father went to the theatre once/Wildenbruch’s Crested Lark.’ In his eyes that was the ultimate parricide, unlike that of Freud’s ‘primal horde’: in other words, camouflaged as cultural snobbery.
Benn’s volume Sons is dedicated to Else Lasker-Schüler. ‘I salute Else Lasker-Schüler: Aimless hand of play and blood’, he writes on the endpaper, in what is evidently a last, brief trace of sentimentality before the pathologist’s fit of emotion turns truly pathological. From her mattress tomb, made bearable only by her daily opium and the visits of her family doctor and shrink Alfred Döblin, Else sends an update to her ‘Blue Rider’ Franz Marc in Sindelsdorf on the state of her love affair: ‘The Cyclops Dr Benn has dedicated his new poems to me. They are as red as the moon, as hard as the earth, wild twilight, hammering in the blood.’ And so this great love ends as it once began: with great words.
On 16 October, Ludwig Wittgenstein journeys with his friend David Pinsent by ship from England to Norway and continues to work on his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He records his thoughts neatly in a notebook. First, though, he annotates the first page with these words: ‘In the event of my death, please send to Frau Poldy Wittgenstein, Neuwaldeggerstrasse 38, Vienna, and to B. Russell, Trinity College, Cambridge.’ Wittgenstein’s family and the Cambridge academic are his twin pillars as he attempts to erect a new structure of logic. While still on the crossing he writes Russell a letter with key questions, only to leave it on board by accident. On 29 October he writes to Russell again: ‘Did you get my letter? I left it in the boat’s dining room and it was supposed to have been sent to you, but perhaps it was forgotten?’
Carl Schmitt, who believed he would be happy just as soon as his book The Value of the State was published, writes unhappily in his journal, despite the fact that the book has just been published: ‘No one writes to me.’ And it gets even worse: he has the sniffles. He doesn’t know if he will survive, and on 2 October he writes: ‘It’s hideous, this catarrh; oh God, and some day we will all die.’
First, though, Schmitt wants to get married to his beloved Cari, to whom he dedicated his first book. Even the privy councillor Hugo am Zehnhoff – Schmitt’s father figure during these months – agrees, and keeps sending little legal mandates his way. Zehnhoff is the second most important person in Schmitt’s life in 1913; he bows to him in constant fear and affection, pleading for his favour, drinking and smoking with him late into the night. Zehnhoff warns Schmitt about the ‘music-hall’ nature that Cari exudes, but then demands that she at least become Catholic so they can be married in Maria Laach Abbey.
Cari buys herself a hat, and Carl buys a ring; they get engaged. But then Cari suddenly loses her passport, making marriage impossible and Carl furious. Cari, though, remains strangely calm. Given that they now can’t move into their new apartment in the Conservatorium as a married couple, and also because they are hard up financially because Carl does not yet have a fixed tenure, Cari has to go and live with Schmitt’s parents in Plettenberg until they are able to get married and live together. They travel there by train, then Schmitt has to go back to Düsseldorf in full knowledge of the awful surr
oundings in which he has left his beloved: ‘She is in Plettenberg, in the company of my loathsome and evil mother and spoilt little Anna.’ Soon, he writes, he will free Cari from the family hell-hole and lead her to the altar.
He met Cari, a Spanish dancer, in a music hall in 1912, and promptly fell head over heels in love with her. She said her name was Pabla Carita Maria Isabella von Dorotic. Her passport would never turn up again, and for good reason too. Later, when they divorce, he will find out that his wife was not of Spanish nobility, but an illegitimately born Munich girl by the name of Pauline Schachner.
It may seem unlikely, but there was a place filled with sunshine and happiness in this October of 1913. August and Elisabeth Macke and their two sons move into Haus Rosengarten in Hilterfingen, on the banks of Lake Thun, with a view across the water, and with the steep, snow-capped peaks of the Stockhorn on the horizon. In the foreground a meadow runs gently down to the shore, where the Mackes drink freshly brewed coffee at four o’clock every afternoon in the rose-covered veranda.
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