1913- The Year Before the Storm

by Florian Illies

  And of course, Munich’s quiet, gentle abdication as the capital of Art Nouveau and the fin de siècle can also be witnessed in the name of the guest house in Theresienstrasse where Else Lasker-Schüler is living in February 1913: the Pension Modern (not to be confused with La Maison Moderne, the legendary Parisian gallery of Art Nouveau set up by the German art propagandist and writer Julius Meier-Grafe, which closed in 1904). So if the guest houses proudly carry their modernity in their names, then it has clearly long since moved on – to the Café Grössenwahn in Berlin (whose name means ‘megalomania’) and to the Café Central at 14 Herrengasse in Vienna, to be precise. Names can be so revealing.

  And so the capital of the modern age anno 1913 is Vienna. Its star players are Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Adolf Loos, Karl Kraus, Otto Wagner, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Georg Trakl, Arnold Schönberg and Oskar Kokoschka, to name but a few. Here the battles raged: about the unconscious, about dreams, the new music, the new way of seeing, the new architecture, the new logic, the new morality.

  ‘Fear of women – the minute they take their clothes off.’ There are two places in Europe in 1913 where this fear of Spengler’s is not an issue. One is Monte Verità in Ascona, near Lake Maggiore, where a wonderfully eccentric group of free-thinkers, free spirits and nudists are doing their exercises, a specific blend of eurhythmics, yoga and physiotherapy. The others are Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele’s studios in Vienna. Their drawings, whose lines teetered so sensually between pornography and the so-called New Objectivity, delineated the curves of the ‘most erotic city in the world’, as Lou Andreas-Salomé declared Vienna to be back then. Although the women in Klimt’s paintings were always swathed in golden ornament, he encircled the bodies in his sketches with an inimitable line that swept across the page, softly undulating like curls falling loose over a shoulder. Egon Schiele went even further in his explorations of the human body – the forms he depicted were tormented, strained with nerves and martyred, distorted, more sexual than erotic. Where Klimt’s work reveals soft skin, Schiele shows nerves and sinews; where Klimt’s bodies flow, Schiele’s splay, entangle and contort. Klimt’s women lure, while Schiele’s shock.

  ‘I’m not interested in my own person’, said Klimt, ‘but rather in other people, especially women.’

  If these drawings, which made a voyeur of everyone exposed to them, were well known, they were soon subjected to censorship, thereby increasing the notoriety of their creators. When Schiele wanted to exhibit his work Friendship in Munich, he received an interesting rejection letter. The director of the gallery wrote to inform him that his work could not be shown under any circumstances because of its extreme nature, and that it would offend common decency. Full stop. New paragraph. He, however, would be very interested in purchasing the work. There, neatly encapsulated, is the chasm between public and private morality in 1913.

  Berlin is becoming too bright. The gas lanterns, neon signs and city lights are threatening to outshine the stars in the night sky. In 1913 the demolition vehicles roll in to tear down the New Berlin Observatory, near Hallesches Tor. Located between Lindenstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, the new Prussian observatory was completed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1835. Like everything else from this most beautiful decade of German history, it was barely surpassed in either practical or aesthetic terms. A wonderfully simple building, over which the dome sits enthroned like a church tower – a church of the world, but with a view straight up to the heavens. A few comets were discovered here, and a few asteroids too. But the most significant discovery was the planet Neptune. In 1913, however, no one was interested in that. It only took a few weeks before there were only fields where one of Schinkel’s boldest structures had once stood. The observatory was relocated to Babelsberg, where the sky was darker and where Neptune could be seen more easily. And because they were good with figures in Prussia, the land between Lindenstrasse and Friedrichstrasse was sold: 1.1 million Goldmarks from the sale were used for the construction of the new observatory, and 450,000 for the purchase of new instruments. The land itself funded the Royal House – in the grounds of the Babelsberg Palace Park. And so it was that by 1913, perfectly timed after the foundation of the film studio the year before, everything in Berlin to do with stars and starlets ended up in Babelsberg.

  On 6 February, according to the Chinese calendar, the year of the buffalo begins. The buffalo, according to an ancient Chinese saying, prefers fresh grass to a golden trough.

  In Sindelsdorf, Franz Marc is back to work on his masterpiece, and Else Lasker-Schüler has returned to Berlin. He has set up his studio in the unheated attic of the old farmhouse in Sindelsdorf, from where he can barely hear Maria Marc playing the piano downstairs. It’s so cold that even Hanni, their beloved cat, retreats to the stove. Kandinsky comes to visit from Munich and reports:

  Outside, everything is white – snow covers the fields, the mountains, the forests – the frost nips at your nose. Upstairs in the humble attic (where you constantly bang your head against the rafters), The Tower of Blue Horses is perched on the easel, and Franz Marc stands there in his fur coat, a big fur hat and straw shoes that he made himself. Now, tell me in all honesty what you make of this picture!

  What a question.

  On 13 February there is still no sign of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The Louvre’s new catalogue is published, no longer listing the painting. In Berlin, on 13 February, Rudolf Steiner holds one of his great lectures – ‘Leonardo’s Spiritual and Intellectual Greatness at the Turning Point of the New Age’. Steiner speaks for a long time, almost two hours. The audience hang on his every word. He, just like Oswald Spengler, talks a lot about things falling into ruin, about the decline of an era. But he regards this as necessary to make room for the new:

  For in those dying forces we finally sense, even see, the forces preparing themselves for the future, and in the sunset, the promise and hope of a new dawn moves closer to us. Our souls must always respond to human evolution in such a way that we tell ourselves: All progress is so. When what we have created turns to ruin, we know that out of those ruins, new life will always blossom forth.

  On 17 February the Armory Show, one of the most important art exhibitions of the century, opens in a former arsenal in New York. Which century, I hear you ask? Well, you could say that the art of the nineteenth century only came to an end when the first Armory Show began. And it led to the supremacy of modern art not only in Europe but globally too.

  Towards the end of 1912 three Americans with highly inquisitive natures and the necessary expertise – the painters Walter Pach, Arthur Davies and Walt Kuhn – travelled to Europe to identify the most interesting artists and bring their key works back to New York. Great painters and photographers such as Claude Monet, Odilon Redon and Alfred Stieglitz sat on the selection committee – and the American public quickly realised that it was about pitting the Cubists and Futurists and Impressionists of Old Europe against the affluent American fin-de-siècle art scene. This was war. And for the first time the war was being waged on American soil – now that Europe’s battles had been fought. In total there were 1,300 paintings on display, only a third of them from Europe. But it was this third that made the American pictures look ancient – particularly the eight Picassos and twelve Matisses. The Brancusi sculptures and paintings by Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp provoked particularly outraged debate. Camera Work, Stieglitz’s legendary magazine, reported: ‘The exhibition of new work from Europe dropped on us like a bomb.’ And the force of the detonation was just as intense – rage, incomprehension and laughter were among the reactions, but people flocked to the exhibition in order to see it for themselves. The newspapers printed caricatures almost every day, and during the exhibition’s second residency, in Chicago, there was even a protest staged by students of The Art Institute of Chicago – who reportedly burned copies of three Matisse paintings. In the eyes of the American public Matisse was the most ‘primitive’ of all the artists. T
hat has always been the supreme guarantee of quality.

  The greatest sensation was caused by the three brothers Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Jacques Villon and Marcel Duchamp. Seventeen of their works were exhibited, and all but one were sold. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase became the focal point of the Armory Show, the most discussed and most caricatured art work on show. One critic called it Explosion in a Shingle Factory, a comment that, although intended to ridicule the work, instead demonstrated how strong the shock waves caused by the piece really were. A woman striding through space and time – a genial combination of Cubism, Futurism and relativity theory. The room housing the picture was flooded with visitors every single day; people queued for over forty minutes just to catch a glimpse of the scandalous painting. Evidently, for the traditionally minded Americans, this work was the embodiment of a strange, irrational Europe. An antique dealer from San Francisco bought it – somewhere along his endless train journey back from New York, at a provincial station in New Mexico, he got off and sent a telegram to New York: ‘I will buy Duchamp nude woman descending stairway please reserve.’

  The Duchamps went on working away in their studio in Neuilly, oblivious to their new-found American fame – until the cheques suddenly started coming in the post. Marcel Duchamp received $972 for his four sales – not a high price, even in 1913. Cézanne’s La Colline des Pauvres, for example, was sold from the exhibition to the Metropolitan Museum for $6,700. Duchamp was pleased nonetheless.

  At the moment when America and Paris too had started to pay attention to his work, Marcel Duchamp had turned his back on Cubism and the theme of motion – or, as he so eloquently put it, ‘motion mixed with oil paint’. At the very moment when he should have become one of the greatest artists of his generation Duchamp declared that he was bored with painting. He was looking for something different, something new.

  In Prague, Franz Kafka is suffering. He’s suffering because Felice, for whom he has been pining from afar in letters, hasn’t said a word about the book Contemplations, which he sent her in December. And because his sister Valli is getting married, and because it’s always too noisy in the apartment (the doors are always banging, and his parents and sister have the impertinence to talk to one another), and because he’s working for an insurance company by day and writing by night. He also has to contend with work trips, interruptions and colds. But above all he’s suffering from the fear that his creativity has withered away. And as dreadful as the idea of living as a bachelor is – perhaps it was the only way of being a writer. In moments of panic he is overwhelmed by the question ‘What will become of me if I get married?’ How would he deal with what he called ‘A Wife’s Rights’? For him there were two equally horrific scenarios: the physical demands of the wife and, above all, the demands on his time. He implored Felice never again to write that she wanted to sit by him while he was working on his books – for if she or anyone else were to sit behind him, the secret of writing would be destroyed. And then he also wrote: ‘I would never expose myself to the risk of becoming a father.’ Is it possible to warn someone off more than Kafka did in these letters? But Felice responds, although torn between office and home, letter-writing and worries about her family, as if it were her true calling to be his addressee, a reader both for Kafka and for world literature. She assumes the role calmly and in complete earnest.

  In 1913 art everywhere is driving towards abstraction. Kandinsky in Munich, Robert Delaunay and František Kupka in Paris, Kasimir Malevich in Russia and Piet Mondrian in the Netherlands – each in their own way they are trying to free themselves from all reference to reality. And then there’s that young, well-brought-up, reserved young man in Paris: Marcel Duchamp, a painter who has suddenly decided he doesn’t want to paint any more.

  In Munich a benefit auction held for Else Lasker-Schüler turns into a complete disaster. In a touching gesture Franz Marc asked artist friends to donate paintings to raise more money for the relief effort initiated by Karl Kraus in Die Fackel. His call doesn’t go unanswered, with oil paintings arriving from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc himself for the auction on 17 February. Only Ludwig Meidner from Berlin declines (saying he himself has no money and is starving). An auction is held in the Neuer Kunstsalon, but no one shows any interest. So, to avoid total embarrassment, the artists all bid for each others’ work, and raise 1,600 Marks.

  The total value of the works unauctioned on 17 February 1913 would amount to around 100 million Euros today. Oh, what the heck – probably closer to 200 million.

  Sigmund Freud continues to work on his theory of parricide. At the same time, in the newly founded film studios in Potsdam-Babelsberg, filming begins on The Sins of the Fathers, starring Asta Nielsen. In keeping with the title, Nielsen later feels partly to blame for the ‘kitsch in that early dawn of film’. The film poster shows her wearing a tight skirt and a plunging blouse. She was slim, unusual at the time, and a source of great joy for cartoonists, who immediately saw a stick figure in the making. Most men too were quite happy with how she looked. In 1913 Asta Nielsen was the ultimate sex symbol, and a big contract led to her making eight films between 1912 and 1914, which were filmed and released back to back. The new magazine Bild und Film put it like this: ‘People are queuing up to see the film as if they’re at a bakery during a famine, almost breaking their necks to get a ticket. Many people watch the film two or three times in quick succession and are enchanted by it again and again.’ Samuel Fischer, the most renowned publisher of his time, watched with increasing amazement as Nielsen captivated the masses. Believing film to be the medium of the future, he tried to convince his most famous authors to write screenplays as well.

  It’s 1913, but disaster has yet to strike for Arnold Schönberg. On Sunday 23 February, at around half-past seven in the evening, his Gurrelieder are premiered at the Great Music Hall in Vienna – and the public are expecting a new scandal. His recent appearances and compositions have already unsettled Vienna, causing great commotion, and the former Romantic has emphatically transformed himself into a Neutöner, an exponent of the new music. The previous year he caused uproar with his Pierrot Lunaire (opus 21). But now this. All of a sudden, they’re no longer hearing modern radicalism from Schönberg, but pure late Romanticism. Five vocalists, three four-part male choirs and a huge orchestra with every kind of flute and drum and stringed instrument. Eighty strings were used in the first performance alone: the gigantism of the new century is forging ahead. Schönberg declares that the oratorio cannot be performed without a 150-piece orchestra. The piece itself is a great, bombastic, murmuring and pulsating spectacle of nature, about storms and the summer winds. Vast choirs sing about the beauty of the sun – a spectacular wonder of nature, just as Schönberg once experienced it after a night of drinking led him to the Anninger, one of Vienna’s city mountains.

  ‘Schadenfreude lurks already in a hundred pairs of eyes: today will show once again whether he can really afford to compose as he chooses rather than how others before him have composed’, writes Richard Specht for his review in the Berlin journal März. But the scandal never comes: instead, it’s a triumph.

  The resounding cheers that broke out even after the first section rose to a commotion after the third […] And when the choir’s powerfully surging dawn greeting was over, […] the cheering knew no bounds; with tear-stained faces, the audience called out their gratitude to the composer, sounding more warm and insistent than is usually the case with such a ‘success’: instead, it sounded like an apology. A few young people, unknown to me, came over, their cheeks aglow with shame, and admitted they had brought their house keys with them to add their – in their view appropriate – music to Schönberg’s, but now he had won them over so completely that nothing could turn them against him.

  The Gurrelieder, with their hymnal, magnificent melodic arcs, were the greatest success that Schön
berg would ever experience. But never again did he come as close to his audience as here – and this was clearly to do with his terror about the disaster looming over the year 1913. The Gurrelieder is a sumptuous and lavish piece of late Romanticism, melodic even though its composer had long since crossed the border of tonality. Bewitching beauty, bordering on kitsch. It had taken ten years for Schönberg to find the right orchestration, but the composition itself originated at the turn of the century – and thirteen years later was perfectly in tune with the taste of the Viennese public. The house keys with which they had planned to drown out Schönberg’s music stayed in their pockets.

  But not for long.

  It’s just one thing after another in Vienna in 1913.

  On that very same evening the performance ban on Arthur Schnitzler’s new play Professor Bernhardi is breached in the form of a ‘reading’ of the play in the Koflerpark club house, right by the stop for the number 8 tram, ‘at precisely seven in the evening’. This contravened the ruling of the Viennese police department that