1913

by Florian Illies

  Emil Nolde is not only fascinated but also disillusioned. Here in Palau he can no longer see the untouched South Pacific that Paul Gauguin once painted, the one the European poets conjured up in their poems. The native inhabitants of the colonies are sadly Europe-anised, ‘their defiance broken, their hair cut short’, he writes. They are all being brought to Rabaul to learn German or English, and after that they return to their native villages to work as interpreters for tourists. Nolde heads across by boat to the Gazelle peninsula, where he hopes to find a more native way of life – realising that he is witnessing a culture at the moment of its demise, he reaches for his watercolours to preserve the evidence. He searches for paradise in the vibrant pink and red blooms of the bougainvillaea and hibiscus, and in the naked bodies of the natives too. But in their faces Nolde finds a frightening apathy. Instead of unspoilt joy for life, his pictures of the South Pacific speak of the seriousness of the modern era. He writes letters back to his distant homeland: ‘I’m painting and drawing and trying to capture something of primordial being. I may have succeeded here and there, but I am nonetheless of the opinion that my paintings of the primordial people and some of my watercolours are so genuine and crude that they could not under any circumstances be hung in perfumed salons.’

  Dozens and dozens of watercolours are created in Neu-Pommern that December, melancholic studies of the agony of a culture broken by European pressure. Mothers and children huddle up to one another as if on a sinking ship. So this is the paradise he dreamed of for years on end, and which he spent sixty arduous days travelling to.

  On 23 December, Nolde sends 215 drawings and watercolours with the Rabaul post steamer to his friend and patron Hans Fehr in Halle. On 24 December, Emil Nolde notes in his diary how much he misses a white Christmas, the crackle of wood in the fireplace and the decorated Christmas tree: ‘It was almost impossible for us to get into the Christmas spirit in this heat. Our thoughts wandered over the seas and across the world to the cosy corners of the German homeland, where the lights burned brightly. I put the little wooden figures that I carved during the sea journey with a pocket knife onto our Christmas table.’

  On 25 December, issue 52 of Die Schaubühne published the poem ‘City Christmas’, by Kurt Tucholsky, alias Theobald Tiger. It portrays Christmas as a bourgeois drama in which people no longer have feelings, only roles.

  City Christmas

  The Christ Child comes! We young ones listen

  To quiet, holy gramophone.

  The Christ Child comes, prepared to swap

  New ties, dolls and lexicon.

  And if the bourgeois sits with family

  In his chair, at half past nine,

  At peace with life and with the world

  ‘Yes, Christmas certainly is fine!’

  And cheerily he speaks of ‘Christmas weather’,

  Rain today, or snow perhaps.

  Smoking as he reads his paper,

  Tales of famous girls and chaps.

  So does the Christ Child’s flight encounter

  Purest bliss down here below?

  Good God, they’re playing Christmas peace out …

  ‘We’re all acting. The clever ones are those who know.’

  Arthur Schnitzler is not proud. That December he notes in his journal that he has finally given up hope that anyone will ever really understand him: ‘Dr Roseau is sending around a pamphlet about me – well-meaning, and in essence, the same thing that is written about me everywhere. I have now given up on expecting the critics of today to understand me.’

  On 1 December 1913 in Lübeck, Ernst Karl Frahm is born. He will later call himself Willy Brandt.

  Oskar Kokoschka spends Christmas with Alma, her mother and her daughter in the newly built house in Breitenstein. The lighting isn’t working yet, so after dusk they all sit around the fireplace, the blazing fire and numerous candles bathing everything in a festive glow. Kokoschka gives Alma a fan which he painted for her; on it a man is pictured losing Alma to a large fish. Kokoschka is convinced that ‘there has been nothing of its kind since the Middle Ages, for no lovers have ever breathed into one another so passionately.’ (Later, once Alma has been breathing into Walter Gropius for a good while, Kokoschka has a life-size puppet modelled on Alma, discussing every wrinkle and every pad of fat around the hip region with the puppet-maker, and he goes on to live longer with the puppet than he lived with Alma herself. But that’s just an aside, after all, because we don’t really want to know what will happen next, not here in 1913.)

  D. H. Lawrence, who is enjoying his greatest success ever in England with Sons and Lovers, according to which a man can only be either a son or a lover (which is a parricide of sorts), has already made the conflict between intellect and instinct into a big topic with this book. Back in the autumn, in an attempt to make his beloved Frieda von Richthofen believe him, he walked through the whole of Switzerland, and now the two of them are celebrating a warm Christmas in a dockside bar by the Mediterranean. That Christmas, Lawrence composes his very own confession of faith: ‘My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true.’

  From his lips to Kafka’s ears. Felice Bauer is no longer returning his letters. He writes to her by registered post, he writes to her by special delivery, he even sends his friend Ernst Weiss with a message to her office at Lindström AG, but she doesn’t answer. Then Kafka receives a telegram announcing the imminent arrival of a letter. But the letter never arrives. They speak briefly on the phone: Felice begs him not to come to Berlin for Christmas and promises she will write to him soon. But she doesn’t. When there is still no sign of a letter by midday on 29 November, Franz Kafka sits down in Prague and starts a new letter, his second proposal. He writes and broods, writes and broods. By New Year’s Eve he has reached page 22. By the time he finishes, the letter is thirty-five pages long. Kafka writes: ‘Felice, I love you with all that is humanly good in me, with everything that makes me worthy of being among the living.’ When the bells of Hradčany ring out at midnight, Kafka stands up briefly and goes over to the window. The family moved in November, so Kafka is no longer looking out over the river and the bridge and the parks, but is looking at the Altstadtring. It’s snowing softly and unrelentingly, muffling the cannon shots from the castle, and outside in the streets people are celebrating the arrival of a New Year. Kafka sits back down and continues to write: ‘Even the fact that there are things in me you find fault with and would like to change, I love that too, I just want you to know that.’

  Käthe Kollwitz, weary of life with her husband and uncertain about which direction her art should take, acknowledges: ‘At any rate 1913 has passed quite innocuously, not dead and sleepy, quite a lot of inner life.’

  Quite a lot of inner life: probably so. In the dark December night Robert Musil takes notes from which his novel The Man without Qualities will later grow. Now he writes the lovely sentence: ‘Ulrich predicted the future and had no idea.’ Not bad. He takes another sip of red wine and lights a cigarette (or at least that is how one imagines it), then, writing as Ulrich, his protagonist, he turns his attention to the heroine, Diotima, the much-desired beauty, the Woman Full of Qualities; and all the time he had that particular sentence on his lips. So he writes: ‘And something was open: it was probably the future, but to some extent it was her lips too.’

  There are a few happy people this Christmas Day in 1913. Karl Kraus and Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin are two of those for whom everything remains open. The shock waves of the argument with Franz Werfel have not yet reached their idyll. They are still enjoying each other, secretly, but with a great deal of love. Kraus is overwhelmed by the Borutins’ charming castle in Janowitz, still lit only by paraffin lamps, and by its dreamlike park, with the wonderful, 500-year-old poplar tree in the courtyard – the park that also cast its eternal spell on Rilke. Even now, in December, the great poplar still has a f
ew ragged leaves up in its crown, which rustle when the wind blows over the hill. Kraus succumbs entirely to the magic of this place. Here, where his beloved Sidonie is mistress of the horses and the dogs and the pigs, this is his paradise. Here everything is what it is, good, and natural, and true. Sidonie and Janowitz, this liberation from Vienna and its intellectual corset, turn Karl Kraus into a different person. Sidonie’s brother wishes his sister to have a suitable marriage, but at night, when Karl creeps down the dark, cold corridors of the castle as soon as the brother has gone to sleep and climbs into Sidonie’s warm bed, they stop thinking about suitability. Karl Kraus arrived on 23 December; his friend Adolf Loos will follow him on 24 December. They want to celebrate Christmas together. Loos tries, probably so as not to disturb the young couple for long, to visit the castle of the successor to the throne in Konopiště, next door to the Borutins’ castle. He writes a letter and asks to be allowed in. But Franz Ferdinand does not want to be disturbed. A shame, it would have been an interesting encounter: the two opposite poles of Austria-Hungary. Loos, the ice-cold adversary of ornament, and Franz Ferdinand, the hot-blooded commander in chief of the army.

  Then a letter arrives for Sidi from Paris, sent by Rilke. ‘Is Karl Kraus with you?’ he asks, because Sidi has confided in him. And then he asks Sidi – who was so repelled by it – to pass on an essay about Franz Werfel to Karl Kraus, entitled ‘About the Young Poet’. He couldn’t have sent anything more unsuitable to Kraus, who learns soon afterwards that Werfel has been spreading rumours about his beloved, which makes him as angry as a raging bull.

  But this time Rilke’s letter does not further disturb the loving idyll in Janowitz. Sidonie sets the letter aside – nothing urgent, she thinks – and goes for another walk in the park with Karl and her beloved dog Bobby. They dance among the snowflakes falling gently from the sky.

  Kraus, who never stays away from his desk for more than two days at a time, extends his holiday to the New Year and writes elegant nature poems. Sidonie, the tall, proud beauty, later gives him a dreamy photograph of herself, writing on the back in blue ink: ‘Karl Kraus/in memory of days shared by Sidi Nádherný/Janowitz 1913–14.’ He immediately hangs it over his desk in Vienna, and never takes it down. And at some point, at some point in his life thereafter, he sends her a postcard from St Moritz: ‘Please remember Christmas 1913 tonight.’ It must have been lovely, that Christmas.

  On 27 December the ministry in Vienna extends the sick leave of the neurasthenic librarian second-class Robert Musil by a further three months. He immediately travels to Germany to negotiate with Samuel Fischer, becoming editor of his magazine Neue Rundschau shortly afterwards. On his train journey from Vienna to Berlin he notes irritably: ‘Conspicuous in Germany; the great darkness.’

  New Year’s Eve 1913. Oswald Spengler writes in his diary: ‘I remember how I felt as a boy when the Christmas tree was plundered and cleared away, and everything was as prosaic as it had been before. I cried all night in bed, and the long, long year to the following Christmas was so long and bleak.’ And again: ‘Life in this century oppresses me today. Everything redolent of comfort, of beauty, of colour, is being plundered.’

  At the end of 1913 a surprising book is published. Its name is The Year 1913 – in it is the attempt to give an account of the present, which is ‘rich in cultural values’ but which at the same time sees an ‘increased blunting and superficiality in the masses’. The chief highlight is the last essay by Ernst Troeltsch about the religious phenomena of the present: ‘It is the old story that we all know, which for a while we called progress, and then decadence, and in which people now like to see the preparation of a new idealism. Social reformers, philosophers, theologians, businessmen, psychologists, historians signal it. But it is not there.’ The old story that was once called progress –how wisely people spoke in December 1913. But who understood those words in the hubbub of that year?

  In Babylon the temple site of Etemenanki is discovered. It is the legendary Tower of Babel.

  What are women wearing for New Year’s Eve? In issue 52, Welt der Frau, a supplement of Gartenlaube, provides tips for ‘fashion at the turn of the year’. ‘The delight in colour that distinguishes this season is also apparent in outfits for small festivities. With their loose cut, most fashions suit the slender form. But even for the fuller-figured woman, today’s fashions can be charming, blurring lines as they do, if one knows how to choose.’ On the following page there is a poem by Marie Möller, which bears the harmless-sounding title ‘New Year’s Eve’. It includes these disturbing lines:

  So let us work from dawn till dusk

  That a fine year may us befall!

  Bringing after strife and toil

  Victory and peace to all.

  And that the tune of global war

  May cease its gloomy, threatening knell.

  That it may soon in harmony

  Ring out like joyful chiming bells!

  Rainer Maria Rilke is in a bad way during those last December days in Paris. He writes: ‘I see nobody, it has been freezing, there was black ice, it’s raining, it’s dripping – this is winter, always three days of each. I have truly had my fill of Paris, it is a place of damnation.’ And then: ‘Here is the incarnation of my desires for 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917 etc. Which is: peace, and to be in the country with a sisterly person.’ He then writes to one of those sisterly people, although her thoughts are elsewhere right now: Sidonie Nádherný: ‘Now I would like to be as if without a face, a rolled-up hedgehog that only opens up in the ditch in the evening and cautiously comes up and holds its grey snout up at the stars.’

  The complete constellation of Sagitta is observed in the sky for the first time in 1913. South of the Fox and north of the Eagle, Sagitta is a clear, bright arrow flying towards the Swan. Enthralled eyes gaze heavenwards. Sagitta bears the name of the dangerous arrow fired, according to mythology, at Hercules. But the Swan is lucky once again: the arrow just misses it.

  It is 31 December 1913. Arthur Schnitzler records a few words in his diary: ‘In the morning, dictated my madness novella to the end for the time being.’ In the afternoon he reads Ricarda Huch’s book The Great War in Germany. Otherwise: ‘Very nervous during the day.’ Then a soirée. ‘Roulette was played.’ At midnight they clink glasses to the year 1914.

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  This book is based on a large number of biographies and cultural historical sources. What follows is a selection of the works quoted from which the author drew important information.

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