1913

by Florian Illies

  For the first time August Macke hasn’t brought any old paintings with him; he wants to make a new start here in Switzerland. He is still quite exhausted from the ‘First German Autumn Salon’ exhibition, and also bitter about his failure and bad reviews. But down here, by faraway Lake Thun and beneath the warm October sun, his mood lightens after just a few days. He buys some paints and makes a start – in a passionate fury, the like of which he has never experienced in his art work before – and manages to create the most important work of his oeuvre in those four weeks by the lake. He finds himself drawn to the lake promenade again and again, and repeatedly sketches the elegant strollers, the men in hats, the sunlight falling warm and bright through the rows of trees. And the blue of the sea beyond, here and there a white boat. In Sunlit Path, for example, painted at the very beginning of October, the tree trunk glows in the same tone as the woman’s dress, she gazes into the deep, dark blue of the water and the sky can’t even be seen for all the flashing bright green and yellow foliage. Here, by the banks of Lake Thun, August Macke paints his versions of paradise.

  The Mackes have a small boat there too. Louis Moilliet and his wife, Hélène, come to visit, the painter friend with whom Macke will soon depart on their legendary journey to Tunisia; but first they all set off together on a trip in Thun, out onto the lake. They berth on an island, where they build a small fire and Hélène brews up fine Arabic coffee in a Tunisian copper can that she has brought along with her.

  It’s an idyllic life, even on weekdays. In the mornings they push open the green window shutters and gaze out into the shimmering blue of the Indian summer.

  The days are so warm they are able to eat outside all through October; it’s only from the afternoon onwards, when the coolness slowly creeps across the lake towards the meadow, that Macke pulls on his favourite, unevenly striped roll-neck jumper and smokes his first pipe of the day. Then he romps around the garden with the two boys, Walter and Wolfgang.

  August Macke has installed his kingdom right at the top of the house, a room with a balcony and a wonderful view over the lake, where he paints whatever he has sketched on the promenades, in the hat shops, the shop windows. Elisabeth Macke will later tell of how her husband would bring the paintings out from the loft studio down to the garden, ‘which was flooded in gleaming autumnal colours by the sunlight, and stand them in the middle of this glow: by no means did they pale in comparison, they had their own luminescence. Then he asked me: “What do you think; do I have something here, or is it just kitsch? I really can’t tell.” ’ Elisabeth knew what it was. And so do we. They were pictures of such genuine, captivating beauty that sometimes the only way to bear them is to denounce them as kitsch.

  NOVEMBER

  Adolf Loos says ornament is a crime, and builds houses and tailors’ workshops filled with clarity. It’s all over between Else Lasker-Schüler and Dr Gottfried Benn: she’s in despair, so Dr Alfred Döblin, currently sitting for a portrait by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, gives her a morphine injection. Proust’s Swann in Love, the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, is published, and Rilke reads it straight away. Kafka goes to the cinema and cries. Prada opens its first boutique in Milan. Ernst Jünger, eighteen years of age, packs his things and goes to Africa with the Foreign Legion. The weather in Germany is disagreeable, but Bertolt Brecht thinks: anyone can have the sniffles.

  (illustration credits 11.1)

  On 7 November Albert Camus is born. He will later write the play The Possessed.

  The lead magazine of the year: in Vienna – what a coincidence – on 7 November the first issue of the magazine The Possessed is published. On the front page: a self-portrait of Egon Schiele. Subtitle of the magazine: ‘A journal of passions’.

  On 7 November, Adolf Hitler paints a watercolour of the Theatinerkirche in Munich and sells it to a junk dealer in the Viktualienmarkt.

  In mid-November the fun-loving countess of Schwerin-Löwitz, wife of the president of the state parliament, or Landtag, issues an invitation to a tango tea-dance in the Prussian Landtag. On the floor: dancers in a close embrace with dignitaries and serious military officers. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who finds the tango vulgar, cracks down. On 20 November an imperial bill is passed, henceforth banning officers in uniform from dancing the tango.

  Still no sign of the Mona Lisa.

  For Adolf Loos his greatest year is coming to an end. Ornament and Crime was the name he gave to his furious cri de coeur against the threat of asphyxiation by wedding-cake architecture on Vienna’s Ringstrasse. And now, in 1913, more and more people want their plans and souls and shops and houses to be cleansed by Loos’s free spirit and clear vision. His ‘Haus Scheu’ at 3 Larochegasse has just been finished, as has his ‘Haus Horner’ at 7 Nothartgasse. And two internal spaces, which he has designed in an inimitably magnificent, minimalist and yet sedate elegance, also celebrate their opening: the Café Capua on Johannesgasse and the Kniže tailor’s shop at 13 Graben.

  Precisely because Loos and his American wife, Bessie, are close friends with many of Vienna’s artistic avant-garde – with Kokoschka, Schönberg, Kraus and Schnitzler – he sees art and architecture as being worlds apart: ‘The house has only to please. Unlike the work of art, which doesn’t have to please anybody. The art work seeks to drag people from their comfort. The house has to serve comfort. The art work is revolutionary, the house conservative.’

  His masterpiece from 1913 is the ‘Haus Scheu’ in Hietzing, the first stepped house in Europe which, in its plain white elegance and Arabic-looking tiers, enraged the Viennese from the year of its construction. But the clients, the lawyer and friend of Loos, Gustav Scheu, and his wife, Helene, were happy. ‘I wasn’t thinking about the East at all when I designed this house,’ Loos said. ‘I just thought it would be very pleasant to be able to step from the bedrooms on the first floor onto a big, communal terrace.’ And yet ‘Haus Scheu’ does have the look of a mirage. The living and sleeping areas open into fresh air, you walk out onto large terraces, the whole house is flooded with light and air. The neighbours and the local authorities protest loud and long, and then Loos suggests a compromise: he agrees that plants should grow over the façades. Loos is primarily concerned with the effect of spaces on people:

  but I want the people in my rooms to feel the material around them, that it has an effect on them, that they know about the closed space, that they feel the material, the wood, that they perceive it with their senses of sight and touch, sensually, in short, and that they can sit down comfortably and feel the chair on a large surface of their peripheral physical sense of touch and say: here you can sit perfectly.

  Adolf Loos did not make jokes, and meant everything in complete earnest. And yet he came across as incredibly winning. You could tell from all of his internal spaces and each of his houses that they were really made to measure. And also that Loos would prefer not to build anything at all rather than build something unsuitable. Or, as he himself said in his great, true credo: ‘Do not fear abuse for being unmodern. Changes in the old building style are only permitted when they represent an improvement; otherwise stay with the old things. Because the truth, even if it is hundreds of years old, has more of a connection with us than the lie that walks beside us.’ The provocative innovator as a thoughtful traditionalist – Loos overtaxed his contemporary audience. He had no problem with not being considered modern (whatever that word might actually mean). But we know how modern he was. More so than any other architect working in 1913.

  On 8 November, at 10.27 p.m., after an eight-hour train journey, Franz Kafka arrives at Anhalt Station in Berlin. At the end of October, Grete Bloch, Felice Bauer’s friend, had stepped in as an intermediary between Prague and Berlin and attempted a reconciliation between the unhappy lovers, who seemed to have been paralysed by Kafka’s disastrous proposal.

  On 9 November, the German day of destiny, the two of them meet for a second time in Berlin. Again it is a tragedy. In the late morning they walk through the Tiergarten for an hour. The
n Felice has to go to a funeral, after which she says she will call at Kafka’s hotel, the Askanischer Hof. She doesn’t. It rains slowly and incessantly. Again Kafka sits in the hotel, as he did in March, waiting for news from Felice. But nothing happens. At 4.28 p.m. Kafka boards the train for Prague. And he informs Grete Bloch, the intermediary: ‘I departed from Berlin like someone who went there quite without justification.’

  On the same 9 November in Berlin, the well-known psychoanalyst and author Otto Gross is arrested by Prussian police officers in Franz Jung’s flat and extradited to Austria. There his father declares him insane, and he is committed to the sanatorium at Tulln. From Heidelberg, Max Weber vehemently campaigns in favour of his friend Frieda Gross, Otto’s wife. From Berlin the magazine Die Aktion protests with a special issue. It is a battle between father and son, a generational conflict of a very different kind. Controlling the uncontrollable son by declaring him unfit to handle his own affairs.

  In the Minerva Hall in Trieste, the southernmost harbour city of Austria-Hungary, James Joyce delivers a series of lectures on Hamlet. He has previously tried to make some money by opening a cinema in Dublin and has toyed with the idea of importing tweed from Ireland to Italy. But it came to nothing. His attempts to earn money with his books have been a disaster too. Now he is scraping a living as an English teacher in the morning – and in the afternoon he gives private lessons, notably to the future author Italo Svevo. And in the evening he talks about Hamlet. The local newspaper Piccolo della Sera is enthusiastic: with its ‘dense but clear thoughts, with a form at once sublime and simple, with its wit and vividness the lecture revealed genuine brilliance’.

  ‘Those who touch you are bound to fall’, wrote wise, wild Else Lasker-Schüler when she met Gottfried Benn. Now he has left her. And she is laid low with unbearable abdominal pains. Dr Alfred Döblin, who has just sat for a portrait by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, drives out into the Grunewald and gives her a morphine injection. He can think of no other way to help her.

  On 13 November, Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s great novel In Search of Lost Time, is published. After the book was turned down not only by the Fasquelle and Oldenbourg publishing houses and the Nouvelle Revue Française but also by André Gide, the then editor at Gallimard, Proust had the book published by Grasset at his own expense. No sooner does he hold the first copy in his hands than his chauffeur and lover Alfred Agostinelli splits up with him. Everyone else falls for the author. Rilke reads the book only a few days after its publication. It begins with the golden words ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’ – ‘For a long time I went to bed early’ – and in saying this, Proust touched the nerve of an exhausted avant-garde who, from Kafka to Joyce, from Musil to Thomas Mann, boasted in their diaries whenever they managed to go to bed before midnight. Going to bed early – to the ever weary pioneers of the modern age it seemed like the bravest struggle against depression, drinking, senseless distraction and the advance of time.

  In Munich, Oswald Spengler goes on feverishly writing his mammoth work The Decline of the West. The first part is finished. Spengler’s state of mind: similar to that of the West. His diary: a tragedy. He notes: ‘I have never had a month without thoughts of suicide.’ And yet: ‘Inwardly I have experienced more than perhaps any other human being of my time.’

  Alma Mahler always piled her hair up high so that it often came tumbling down in conversation or while dancing. She had made an art of letting the dark tendrils fall into her face at precisely the right moment, sending men out of their minds. Today she grants this joy to Kokoschka again. Because he has just completed the double portrait of them both, the painting that has stood on his easel since the start of the year, and which shows Alma and the painter on a stormy sea. He originally wanted to call it Tristan and Isolde, after the Wagner opera from which she sang to him the first time they met. But then Georg Trakl gave the painting the title The Bride of the Wind – and that was the one that stuck. In November, Kokoschka, deeply in debt, writes to his dealer Herwarth Walden in Berlin:

  In my studio is a large painting I have been working on since last January, Tristan and Isolde, 2 ½ × 3 ½, 10,000 Kronen, finished for several days. I must receive a security of 10,000 Kronen before 1 January, because my sister is engaged to a man and getting married in February. The painting will be an event when it is made public, my strongest and greatest work, the masterpiece of all my Expressionistic efforts: will you buy it for yourself? It could make you an international success.

  Modesty has never been Oskar Kokoschka’s strong point. But the surprising thing is: Alma Mahler actually sees The Bride of the Wind as Kokoschka’s long-awaited masterpiece. ‘In his large painting The Bride of the Wind he has painted me lying pressed trustingly against him in a storm amid high winds – entirely dependent on him, a tyrannical expression on his face, radiating energy as he calms the waves.’ She liked that. It was how she saw herself: full of energy, reposing, calming the waves. Alma, the ruler of the world. That was how she had imagined her lover’s masterpiece. A blind homage. She studiously ignores the fact that she once promised to marry him for it. But as a reward he is allowed to come out to Semmering, because her new house is ready. And he is allowed to paint a new picture there.

  In Breitenstein, Alma has had a curious house built for herself, on the land that Mahler bought three years previously. The house looks like an over-sized chimney, dark, with larch shingles still being fitted to the roof; the verandas running along the outside make all the rooms dark and gloomy. A temple to melancholy. Hanging in the sitting room is Kokoschka’s portrait of Alma as the poisoner Lucrezia Borgia. And beside it, in a glass case, Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony, open at the page where the dying composer wrote his cries: ‘Almschi, dearest Almschi.’

  Kokoschka’s only reward for his Bride of the Wind was to paint the sitting room in Semmering, a fresco above the fireplace, 4 metres wide. The subject is, surprisingly enough: Alma Mahler and Oskar Kokoschka. Or as Alma puts it: ‘showing me, pointing in spectral brightness at the sky, while he appeared standing in hell, wrapped in death and serpents. The whole thing is based on the idea of a continuation of the flames in the hearth. My little “Gucki” stood next to it and said: “Can’t you paint anything but Mami?” ’ Good question. Answer: No.

  Rilke sits in Paris, thinking distractedly about summer and autumn in Germany. As he travelled uneasily back and forth between all his wives and über-mothers, between Clara, still his wife, his ex-lovers Sidonie and Lou, his summer love Ellen Delp, his mother, his helpless admirers Cassirer, von Nostitz and von Thurn und Taxis. Keep everything open, don’t go down any one path, wherever it may lead: that is what Rainer Maria Rilke is thinking on 1 November. As an attitude to life it’s disastrous. As poetry it’s a revelation:

  Paths, open

  That this no more before me lies,

  failing, I rein myself back:

  paths, open, heavens, pure hills,

  leading past no dear faces.

  Oh, the pain of love’s possibilities

  I have felt day and day after night:

  to flee to one another, slip from one another’s grasp,

  nothing has led to joy.

  In Augsburg, Bertolt Brecht is suffering: it is November, and the season of colds. And the fifteen-year-old schoolboy is suffering from everything going: his diary records headaches, sniffles, catarrh, stitches, back pains, nosebleeds. There are short daily bulletins about his own ‘condition’. He observes his pains with relish and works himself up to a secondary state of illness: ‘Morning Doctor Müller came. Dry Bronchitis. Interesting illness. Anyone can have sniffles.’

  The phrase ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’ appears in England for the first time in 1913. It comes from the book Rustic Speech and Folklore, by Elizabeth M. Wright.

  Emil Nolde works his way towards the South Sea. On 6 November he crosses the Yellow Sea to China. The steamer Prince Eitel Friedrich takes five days to reach Hong Kong
, passing by Taiwan. From Hong Kong the expedition group then continues on the steamer Prince Waldemar across the South China Sea to German New Guinea. But when he comes ashore in the far-off German colony, he is perturbed. He finds not an untouched paradise but an enormous car boot sale. In November 1913 he writes home, ‘It is depressing to note that all the countries here are swamped with the very worst European knick-knacks, from paraffin lamps to the coarsest cotton materials, dyed in inauthentic aniline colours.’ To see that, he complains, he didn’t need to make the journey. He leaves his painting equipment in his suitcase and flees.

  On 2 November, Burt Lancaster is born.

  When Georg Trakl comes back from Venice to Austria, the declining city becomes a source of retrospective inspiration. In the last months of 1913 poetry assails him with unanticipated force, so much so that his skull almost shatters. A linguistic frenzy reveals his internal inferno.

  ‘Everything is breaking apart’, he writes in November. What happened there will never be quite explained, but we may assume that his beloved sister Grete is pregnant. Whether by her husband (who really existed, in Berlin), by himself or by his friend Buschbeck, whom he suspects of having a relationship with her, is completely unclear. We know only that in a poem by Trakl from November the word ‘unborn’ appears, and that he will write three months later that his sister has had a miscarriage. But who knows? He had such a tortured soul that life alone was quite enough to tear him in two.

  Out of gratitude to his patron and saviour Ludwig von Ficker he allows himself to be persuaded to make a public appearance, in spite of his desolate state of mind. He reads at the fourth literary soirée of Ficker’s magazine Der Brenner in the Innsbruck Musikvereinssaal. And the poet must have spoken as if he were still mumbling as he walked along the beach of the Lido in Venice: ‘Unfortunately the poet read too faintly, as if from things hidden, things past or yet to come, and only later could one discern from the monotonously prayer-like murmurings the words and phrases, then images and rhythms that form his futuristic poetry.’ So wrote Josef Anton Steurer in the Allgemeiner Tiroler Anzeiger.