1913- The Year Before the Storm

by Florian Illies

  Every afternoon Ernst Ludwig Kirchner boards the newly built underground train to Potsdamer Platz. The other painters of Die Brücke – Erich Heckel, Otto Mueller, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff – had moved to Berlin with Kirchner from Dresden, that wonderfully forgotten Baroque city where the group was founded. They were a community in every respect, sharing paints and women, their paintings indistinguishable from one another – but Berlin, that pounding mental overload of a capital city, turns them into individuals and cuts away the bridges connecting them. In Dresden all the others were able to celebrate pure colour, nature and human nakedness. In Berlin they threaten to founder.

  In Berlin, in his early thirties, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner comes into his own. His art is urban, raw, his figures are overstretched and his drawing style as frantic and aggressive as the city itself; his paintings ‘bear the rust of the metropolis like varnish on the brow’. Even in the underground carriages his eyes greedily absorb people. He makes his first, quick studies in his lap: two, three strokes of the pencil, a man, a hat, an umbrella. Then he goes outside, pushes his way through the crowds, sketchpads and brushes in hand. He is drawn to Aschinger’s restaurant, where you can spend all day if you’ve bought a bowl of soup. So Kirchner sits there and looks and draws and looks. The winter day is already drawing to a close, the noise in the square is deafening, it’s the busiest square in Europe, and passing in front of him are the city’s main arteries, but also the lines of tradition and the modern age: come up out of the U-Bahn into the slushy streets of the day and you will see horse-drawn carts delivering barrels, side by side with the first high-class automobiles and the droschkes trying to dodge the piles of horse droppings. Several tram lines traverse the big square, the huge space rings with a mighty metallic scrape each time a tram leans into the curve. And in among them: people, people, people, all running as if their lives depended on it, above them billboards singing the praises of sausages, eau de cologne and beer. And beneath the arcades, the elegantly dressed ladies of the night, the only ones barely moving in the square, like spiders on the edge of a web. They wear black veils over their faces to escape the attention of the police, but the striking aspect is their huge hats, bizarre towering constructions with feathers, under the streetlights, whose green gaslight is lit when early winter evening falls.

  That pale green glow on the faces of the prostitutes in Potsdamer Platz, and the raging noise of the city behind them, are what Ernst Ludwig Kirchner wants to turn into art. Into paintings. But he doesn’t yet know how. So for the time being he goes on drawing – ‘I’m on familiar terms with my drawings,’ he says, ‘I’m more formal with my paintings.’ So he grabs his intimate friends, stacks of sketches that he’s done from his table over the past few hours, and hurries home, to his studio. In Wilmersdorf, 14 Durlacher Strasse, second floor, Kirchner has made a burrow for himself: nearly every inch hung with oriental carpets, stuffed with figures and masks from Africa and Oceania and Japanese parasols, as well as his own sculptures, his own furniture, his own paintings. Photographs of Kirchner from those days show him either naked or wearing a black suit and tie, his high-collared shirt snow-white, his cigarette held as limply in his hand as if he were Oscar Wilde. Always by his side, Erna Schilling, his beloved, the successor to soft, scatty Dodo in Dresden, a ‘new’ woman with a free spirit beneath a page-boy haircut, the spitting image of Kafka’s Felice Bauer. She decorated the flat with embroideries based on her designs and Kirchner’s.

  Kirchner had met Erna and her sister Gerda Schilling a year before at a Berlin dance hall, where Heckel’s girlfriend, Sidi, was also on stage. He lured the two pretty, sad-eyed dancers to his studio that first evening, because he knew straight away: their architecturally constructed bodies would ‘train my sense of beauty in the creation of the physically beautiful women of our time’. Kirchner first stepped out with nineteen-year-old Gerda, later with 28-year-old Erna, and in between with both. Flirt, muse, model, sister, saint, whore, lover – it’s hard to tell exactly which, where Kirchner is concerned. From hundreds of drawings we know every detail of these two women: Gerda sensually provocative, Erna with small, high breasts and a wide bottom, calm, at melancholy peace. There is a glorious painting from these days: on the left, three naked women, soliciting; on the right, the artist in his studio, cigarette in his mouth, checking the women out like a connoisseur. That’s how he likes to see himself. ‘Judgement of Paris’, he writes in black paint on the back of the canvas, ‘1913, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’.

  But when Paris Kirchner comes home from Potsdamer Platz that evening, the lights are out, Paris comes home too late for his judgement, and Erna and Gerda have gone to sleep, buried in the enormous cushions in the sitting room that this trio infernal will turn into the most famous Berlin room in the world.

  Prussian Crown Princess Victoria Louise and Ernst August of Hanover kiss for the first time in January.

  The New Year edition of Die Fackel, Karl Kraus’s legendary one-man Viennese magazine, contains a cry for help: ‘Else Lasker-Schüler seeks 1,000 Mk towards the education of her son.’ It is signed by, among others, Selma Lagerlöf, Karl Kraus and Arnold Schönberg. After her divorce from Herwarth Walden, the poet could no longer pay the fees of the Odenwaldschule in which she had placed her son Paul. Kraus had wrestled with himself for six months about whether to publish the appeal. In the meantime Paul had been sent to a boarding school in Dresden, but at Christmas even Kraus, the cool executioner who could strictly separate emotion and rationality, was overwhelmed by generosity. He places the small ad in the last free space in Die Fackel. Before it, Kraus writes: ‘I see an apocalyptic Galopin preparing for the end of the world, the herald of ruin, overheating the limbo of temporality.’

  The tiny attic room at 13 Humboldtstrasse in Berlin-Grunewald is ice-cold. Else Lasker-Schüler has just wrapped herself up in lots of blankets when she hears the shrill doorbell dragging her from her daydreams. Lasker-Schüler – wild, black eyes, dark mane, lovesick, unfit for life – envelopes herself in her oriental dressing gown and opens the door to the postman, who holds out her mail: her severe and distant friend Kraus’s bright red Die Fackel from Vienna and then, just below, a little blue miracle – a postcard from Franz Marc, the Blaue Reiter artist. Lasker-Schüler, with her gaudy garments, her jangling rings and bracelets, her wild, fairy-tale imagination: in those days she was the embodiment of a society dashing into the modern age, a dream figure, the object of desire of such diverse men as Kraus, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Kokoschka, Rudolf Steiner and Alfred Kerr. But you can’t live on deification. Else Lasker-Schüler is in a bad way now that her marriage to Herwarth Walden, the great gallery owner and publisher of Sturm magazine, is at an end, and he’s with the appalling Nell, his new wife, sitting around in cafés from which Else has been banned, precisely because it means she won’t be there. But it was in just such an artists’ café, in December, that she met Franz and Maria Marc, who would become her guardian angels.

  So Else Lasker-Schüler picks up her copy of Die Fackel, oblivious to the touching advertisement by Karl Kraus, and then she turns over the postcard that Franz Marc has sent her. She freezes in silent jubilation. On the tiny space her far-off friend has painted her a Tower of Blue Horses, powerful creatures towering up to the sky, outside of time and yet firmly within it. She senses that she’s been granted a unique gift: the first blue horses of the Blue Rider. Perhaps this special woman, who always senses everything, and more – senses that in the weeks that followed, the idea of his postcard will produce an even bigger ‘tower of blue horses’ in faraway Sindelsdorf, a painting as a programme, an artistic landmark. The larger painting will later be burned, and all that remains of it will be that postcard, which bears the fingerprints of both Marc and Lasker-Schüler, and which will always tell the tale of the moment when the Blue Rider began its gallop.

  Touched, the poet notes how the great painter has included her emblems, the half-moon and the golden stars, into his little painting of horses. A dialogue begins; associati
ons, words and postcards fly back and forth. She appoints him the imaginary ‘Prince of Cana’; she is ‘Prince Yussuf of Thebes’. On 3 January, Else writes back and thanks him for her blue miracle: ‘How beautiful this card is – I’ve always wished my own white horses could be joined by horses in my favourite colour. How can I thank you!!’

  When Marc then invites her by postcard to come to Sindelsdorf, completely exhausted by the divorce and by Berlin, she boards the train with the Marcs. She is far too thinly dressed, so Maria Marc wraps her in a blanket she has brought along. It’s entirely possible she’s sitting in the same train in which Thomas Mann is hurrying back to his family fortress after his bungled Fiorenza première. It’s a lovely idea: the north and south poles of German culture in 1913, together in a single train.

  When the enfeebled poet arrives in Sindelsdorf in the alpine uplands, she lives at first with Franz Marc and his wife, Maria, a strapping matron under whose wings Marc snuggled when the winds blew too chill. ‘Painter Marc and his lioness’, as Else called them.

  She manages only a few days in the childless couple’s guest room, before moving on to the Sindelsdorf inn, with its terrific view across the moor to the mountains. But even here she can’t find peace. The worried landlady advises her to take a Kneipp cure and lends her the requisite books. Nothing does any good. Else Lasker-Schüler hurries from Sindelsdorf to Munich and finds a room in a pension on Theresienstrasse.

  The Marcs come after her and find her in the breakfast room, with whole armies of tin soldiers that she’s probably bought for her son Paul, ‘fighting out violent battles’ on the blue and white table-cloth, ‘instead of the battles that life constantly threw her way’. She is in a fighting mood, furious, quivering, not entirely in her right mind. At the end of January, in the Galerie Thannhauser, at the opening of the big Franz Marc exhibition, she meets Kandinsky, then gets into a squabble with the painter Gabriele Münter. She had made a remark that Lasker-Schüler had taken as an insult to Marc, whereupon she screeched through the gallery: ‘I’m an artist and I’m not going to stand for that from some nonentity.’

  Maria Marc stands between the bickering women, entirely at a loss, shouting, ‘Children, children’. Later she will claim that Else Lasker-Schüler already had ‘much of the pose of the world-weary writer about her’, but still, ‘she’d really experienced a great deal compared to the young Weltschmerz gang in Berlin.’ So that’s what the world of 1913 looks like from the vantage point of Sindelsdorf.

  On 20 January, in Tell el-Amarna, in central Egypt, the spoils of the latest digs by the German Oriental Society, financed by the Berliner James Simon, are being divided: half are promised to the Cairo Museum, the other half to the German museums, including the ‘painted plaster bust of a royal princess’. The director of the French antiquities commission in Cairo authorises the division, suggested by the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt. Borchardt alone sensed straight away that what he was holding was the kind of discovery that comes along once in a thousand years, when an excited Egyptian assistant pressed the little statue into his hand. A few days later the plaster bust sets off on its journey to Berlin. It does not yet bear the name Nefertiti. It isn’t yet the most famous bust of a woman in the world.

  The world bubbles over with excitement. Small wonder, then, that in 1913 the Russian pilot Piotr Nikoayevich Nesterov flew the first loop-the-loop in human history in his fighter plane. And that the Austrian figure-skater Alois Lutz spun so skilfully in the air on a deep-frozen lake in that bitter cold January that the jump bears the name Lutz to this day. To perform it, you have to take a backwards run-up, then jump from the left back outside edge. You achieve the spin by suddenly drawing your arms into your torso. Logically enough, for the double-Lutz you do the same thing twice.

  Stalin will stay in Vienna for four weeks. Never again will he leave Russia for such a long time; his next foreign trip of any length will be thirty years later, to Tehran, where he will take part in discussions with Churchill and Roosevelt (in 1913 the former was First Lord of the British Admiralty, the latter a senator in Washington, campaigning against the stripping of the American forests). Stalin rarely leaves his secret hideaway at 30 Schönbrunner Schlossstrase, the home of the Troyanovskys; he is completely preoccupied with writing his essay ‘Marxism and the National Question’, commissioned by Lenin. Only very occasionally, early in the afternoon, does he stretch his legs in the nearby park at Schönbrunn Palace, which lies cold and neat in the January snow. Once a day there’s a moment of excitement when Kaiser Franz Joseph leaves the palace and sets off in his coach to do a spot of governing. Franz Joseph has now been in power for an incredible sixty-five years, since 1848. He has never got over the death of his beloved Sissi, the Empress Elisabeth, and even now her life-size portrait hangs above his desk.

  The grizzled monarch hobbles the few steps to his dark green coach, his breath leaving a little cloud in the cold air, then a liveried footman shuts the door of the coach and the horses trot off through the snow. Then silence again.

  Stalin walks through the park, thinking. It’s already getting dark. Then another walker comes towards him, twenty-three years old, a failed painter who’s been turned down by the Academy and who is now killing time in the men’s hostel on Meldemannstrasse. He is waiting, like Stalin, for his big break. His name is Adolf Hitler. The two men, whose friends at the time say they liked to walk in the park at Schönbrunn, may have greeted one another politely and tipped their hats as they made their way through the boundless park.

  The age of extremes, the terrible short twentieth century, begins on a January afternoon in 1913 in Vienna. The rest is silence. Even when Hitler and Stalin sealed their fatal ‘pact’ in 1939, they never met. So they were never closer than they were on one of those bitterly cold January afternoons in the park of Schönbrunn Palace.

  The drug ‘ecstasy’ has been synthesised for the first time; the patent application drags on through 1913. Then it’s completely forgotten about for several decades.

  Here’s Rainer Maria Rilke, at last! Rilke is on the run from winter and his writer’s block, and has ended up in Ronda, in southern Spain. A female acquaintance had recommended during a séance that he should travel to Spain, and since Rilke always relied throughout his life on the advice of mature ladies, he clearly had to turn to the inhabitants of the beyond for orders. Now he’s staying in Ronda, at the elegant Hotel Reina Victoria, a British hotel of the very latest kind, but now, out of season, almost empty. From up here he writes to his ‘dear, good Mama’ every week like a good boy. And to the other faraway ladies that he pines after so beautifully: to Marie von Thurn und Taxis, to Eva Cassirer, to Sidonie Nádherný, to Lou Andreas-Salomé. We will be hearing more about these ladies this year, don’t you worry.

  Right now it is Lou, the woman who took his virginity and persuaded him to change his first name from René to Rainer, whose star is suddenly in the ascendant: ‘Merely to see one another, dear Lou [the word ‘dear’ is underlined three times], that’s my greatest hope.’ And he goes on to scribble in the margin, ‘my support, my everything, as ever’. Then off to the mail train, which takes three hours to get to Gibraltar. And from there it travels on to 19 Berggasse, Lou Andreas-Salomé, c/o Prof. Dr Sigmund Freud. And Lou writes to her ‘dear, dear boy’ that she thinks she can be tougher with him than before. And ‘I think you will always have to suffer, and always will.’ Is it sado-masochism, or is it love?

  The days go by, filled with suffering and letter-writing. Sometimes Rilke goes on working on his Duino Elegies. He manages the first thirty-one lines of the sixth Elegy, but he simply can’t finish it; he’d rather go walking in his white suit and his pale hat, or read the Koran (before going on to write ecstatic poems about angels and the Assumption of Mary). You could feel good here, far away from the dark winter, and at first Rilke too enjoys the fact that the sun doesn’t sink behind the mountains before half-past five, even in January, that before it does so it bathes the city, perched on its rock
y plateau, in a warm glow one last time – ‘an unforgettable spectacle’, as he writes to his dear Mama. The almond trees are already in blossom; so too the violets in the hotel garden, even the pale blue iris. Rilke pulls out his little black notebook, orders a coffee on the terrace, wraps his blanket around his hips, blinks into the sun one last time and then notes: ‘Ah, if only one knew how to blossom: one’s heart would be/ Consoled for both the slighter dangers and the greater.’

  Indeed, if only one knew how to blossom. In Munich, Oswald Spengler, the 33-year-old misanthrope, sociopath and unemployed maths teacher, is working on the first chapter of his monumental work The Decline of the West. He himself has already set an example with regard to this decline. ‘I am’, he writes in 1913, in the notes for his autobiography, ‘the last of my kind.’ Everything, he writes, comes to an end; the suffering of the West is visible within him and on his body. Negative megalomania. Fading blossoms. Spengler’s primal emotion: fear. Fear of setting foot inside a shop. Fear of relatives, fear of others speaking dialect. And of course: ‘Fear of women, when they take their clothes off.’ He knows fearlessness only in his mind. When the Titanic sank in 1912, he discerned in it a profound symbolism. In the notes he made at the time, he suffers, laments, complains about his unfortunate childhood and an even more unfortunate present. Every day he records it anew: a great era is coming to an end, hasn’t anybody noticed? ‘Culture – one last deep breath before extinction.’ In The Decline of the West he puts it like this: ‘Every culture has its new expressive possibilities, which appear, ripen, fade and never return.’ But such a culture sinks more slowly than an ocean liner, of that you may be sure.