1913- The Year Before the Storm

by Florian Illies

  Egon Schiele’s mother saw everything exactly as his dealer did – those ‘strange moods’ could have come from one of her letters. She accuses her son not only of moral neglect but also of ignoring his father’s legacy, of failing to pay for his grave and forgetting about her. She writes to Egon again. This prompts the second ‘Letter to his Mother’, which could find its way into any psychoanalytic textbook: ‘Dear Mother Schiele, why all these letters, which end up in the stove anyway? Next time you need anything, come to me, I’m never coming back, Egon.’

  The year of parricide, 1913, was also a challenge to mothers. Or, as Georg Trakl writes to his friend Erhard Buschbeck: ‘Write and tell me, my dear fellow, whether I am a great source of concern to my mother.’ (Trakl had, in fact, just sold his father’s bracelet to pay for his brothel visits.) Not bad.

  Gustav Klimt, on the other hand, is still living with his mother at the age of fifty-one. After breakfast he goes off to 11 Feldmühlgasse in the 13th District. (Schiele’s studio is only four blocks away.) He paints there and he lives there, he has written ‘G.K.’ on the door in chalk, along with the words ‘Knock loudly’. There are sketches scattered over the floor, and several canvases on easels. When he arrives in the morning, the women who long to undress for him are already waiting by the door. As he stands in silence at his canvas, half a dozen naked women or girls are walking about, stretching, lazing around, waiting until he summons them with a little wave of his hand. He wears nothing under his apron, so that he can take it off quickly when desire overwhelms him and the pose of one of his models becomes too seductive for the man inside the painter. But he’s home with Mum on the dot for dinnertime, or else he goes to the theatre with Emilie Flöge. When Klimt dies, fourteen former models will come forward with paternity suits.

  In the spring of 1913 Georg Trakl is in a pretty odd way. He’s drifting through the world, he’s only ‘half born’, he admits to a friend. So he drinks his money away, takes Veronal and other tablets and drugs, drinks again, dashes around, screams like a child, falls in love with his sister and hates himself for it as much as he hates the rest of the world. He tries to be a chemist. Nothing comes of it. He tries to live normally. Nothing comes of that either, of course. But in between he writes the most beautiful, terrifying poems. And letters like this: ‘I long for the day when the soul will no longer wish, no longer be able to dwell in this ill-omened, gloom-plagued body, when it will abandon this figure of mockery, of filth and foulness, nothing but an all too true reflection of a godless, cursed century.’ This is a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, his patron, father-substitute, even his friend, if one can use such a word about Trakl. His publisher, too, because Der Brenner, his magazine, will be the first place in which Trakl’s desperate litanies appear. This year he wanders aimlessly and hopelessly between three places: Salzburg is the ‘rotted city’, Innsbruck the ‘most brutal, vulgar city’ and Vienna, finally, ‘the city of filth’. He can’t sit in the train, because it would mean having someone directly opposite, facing him, and he can’t bear that. So he always stands in the corridor, his expression shy and hunted. If someone looks at him, he sweats so much he has to change his shirt.

  But then, in March 1913, he suddenly receives a letter from Leipzig, from the Kurt Wolff Verlag. They would like to publish a volume of his poems in their new series, ‘Der jüngste Tag’ (‘The Day of Reckoning’). Will things turn out for the best after all?

  Rainer Maria Rilke has the sniffles.

  On 9 March the profoundly depressive 32-year-old Virginia Woolf sends the manuscript of her first novel, The Voyage Out, to her publishers. She has worked on it for six years. It also happens to be the day when her future lover Vita Sackville-West comes of age, having reached twenty-one. But for now Virginia Woolf is trapped in some very old spiders’ webs. The publisher to whom Virginia Woolf sends her manuscript is her half-brother Gerald Duckworth. Together with his brother George, as we know now from secret diary entries, he clearly threatened or abused her as a child.

  The Voyage Out, the novel about the unmarried, childless Rachel Vinrace, already contains many of the central elements of Virginia Woolf’s later major works. There is an appearance by one ‘Mrs Dalloway’, for example, who will later achieve independence as the heroine of a novel, and Rachel also has a ‘room of her own’, the title of an important later essay. In The Voyage Out Woolf has her male protagonist give a startling account of the situation in 1913:

  Just consider: it’s the beginning of the twentieth century, and until a few years ago no woman had come out by herself and said things at all. There it was going on in the background, for all those thousands of years, this curious, silent, unrepresented life. Of course we’re always writing about them, abusing them, or jeering at them, or worshipping them; but it’s never come from women themselves.

  But that ‘silent, unrepresented life’ went on. Barely fifty copies of the book were sold in 1913, and by 1929 it was only 479. The Voyage Out was a difficult journey for Virginia Woolf.

  Franz Marc wants to illustrate the Bible with some artist friends. In March 1913 he writes to Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Erich Heckel and Oskar Kokoschka. He himself – and this can hardly come as a surprise – chooses the Creation story and creates new animals every day, blue horses that have no need of blue riders.

  Terrible things are happening in Prague. On 16 March Franz Kafka actually writes to Felice: ‘A direct question, Felice: would you have an hour free for me any time at Easter, on Sunday or Monday, and if you did, would you think it a good thing if I came? I repeat, an hour at any time, I would do nothing in Berlin but wait for you.’ Felice immediately says yes. And as the post is quicker in 1913 than in 2013, on 17 March Kafka already writes, as expected: ‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to come.’ Then on 18 March: ‘Essentially the obstacle to my journey still exists and will, I fear, continue to exist as an obstacle, but it has lost its significance so, as far as that goes, I could come.’ Then, on 19 March: ‘If I were to be prevented from travelling after all, I would send you a telegram by Saturday at the latest.’ On 21 March the uncertainty is cemented: ‘Felice! It’s still by no means certain whether I’ll be coming; the decision won’t be made until tomorrow, the millers’ convention still hangs over our heads.’ Supposedly, and this is his marvellous excuse, at Easter he might be sent by his insurance company to the convention of the Czech Millers’ Association. Then new worries – and also, as with Musil, symptoms of neurasthenia: ‘But I must have a good sleep before I see you. I have slept so badly this week, much of my neurasthenia and many of my white hairs come from insufficient sleep. As long as I have slept properly when I meet up with you!’ Then, on 22 March, the day he is supposed to set off (and will, in fact, set off), he writes these big words on his envelope to Felice: ‘Still undecided. Franz.’ Three words, an autobiography.

  Hard to believe, but the next letter from Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer really does bear the letterhead of the hotel ‘Askanische Hof, Berlin’, from where he writes in a panic on the morning of Easter Sunday:

  What’s happened, Felice? You must have received my express letter on Friday, in which I indicated that I was coming on Saturday night. Surely that letter of all letters can’t have gone missing. And now I’m in Berlin, I have to leave at about four or five in the afternoon, the hours pass and I hear nothing from you. Please send me an answer through the boy. If you can do it inconspicuously, you can also phone me for safety’s sake, I’ll sit in the Askanische Hof and wait. Franz.

  He had arrived at Anhalt Station late on Easter Eve, probably hoping to see her on the platform so that they could celebrate their resurrection together. But she didn’t come. He paced uneasily back and forth along the platforms. Then sat in the waiting room so that he wouldn’t miss her. Then, after endless minutes of waiting, he leaves for his hotel. Can’t sleep. As soon as day dawns, he leaps up and shaves. Still no sign of Felice.

  It’s Easter Sunday in Berlin. Franz Kafka is sitting in his hotel room, gloomy wea
ther outside, he kneads his hands, stares at the door in the hope that a messenger may come, and stares out of the window, in the hope that an angel might.

  Then, eventually, she must have called. She has strong nerves. They drive out into the Grunewald. Sit side by side on a tree trunk. That’s all we know. It’s a strange gap in this double life – after seeing every breath and every day reflected in two to four letters, now all of a sudden: nothing.

  On 26 March Kafka writes to her from Prague: ‘Do you know that since I got back you have been more of an incomprehensible miracle than ever?’ That’s all we know about that Sunday in Berlin. An Easter miracle, at any rate.

  That’s Kafka’s life in that March of 1913. But there is also the ‘work’. So a letter arrives from Leipzig, from Kurt Wolff, who is at the centre of all German-language literature that spring: ‘Herr Franz Werfel has told me so much about your new novella – is it called The Bug? – that I would like to meet you. Will you send it to me?’ The most famous German short story of the twentieth century, called The Bug? One morning when Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams he found himself turned into a bug? Of course not. So Kafka writes to Wolff: ‘Don’t believe Werfel! He doesn’t know a word of the story. Once I’ve had it written up in a presentable version, of course I would be delighted to send it to you.’ And then: ‘The next story I have, The Metamorphosis, has not yet been copied out.’ And that was how The Metamorphosis came into the world.

  Robert Musil lives with his wife in the 3rd District of Vienna, at 61 Untere Weissgerberstrasse. He is a man with many qualities. He is neatly turned out, fit, his shoes are the shiniest in all the coffee houses of Vienna, and for an hour every day he does sit-ups and knee-bends. He is incredibly vain. But he emanates the quiet power of self-discipline. In a special little notebook he records every single cigarette he smokes, every time he sleeps with his wife he puts a ‘C’ in his diary, for ‘coitus’. Order is all.

  But in March 1913 he’s had enough. He can bear his dull job as Librarian, Second Class, at Vienna’s Technical University no longer. He feels small and weak, and at the same time called to higher things, to a novel of the century. But he is not certain that this isn’t just a sign that he’s going slowly but surely round the bend. Or whether he should quit his job.

  At last, on 30 March, he gets an appointment with the neurologist Dr Otto Pötzl. He waits for two hours. Then the first thing he does is give the doctor a copy of his first book, The Confusions of Young Törless. He inscribes it ‘To Dr Pötzl, with fond memories’. In the days of his increasing suffering he is consoled by the memory of the times of Dante. He writes in his diary: ‘But what is considered mental illness in 1913 might have been mere eccentricity in 1300.’ But what would the doctor say? Today they would call it ‘burn-out’; in those days they said, ‘He’s suffering from the manifestations of a serious cardiac neurosis: attacks of pounding heart with a racing pulse, palpitations when falling asleep, disturbances of the digestion with the related psychical phenomena: a depressive state and with high levels of physical and psychical fatigability.’ In 1913 this was summed up under the heading of ‘neurasthenia’. People mocked, but in the official world of the imperial–royal monarchy the word was immediate grounds for leave of absence. So, at the request of the library, one Dr Blanka writes an ‘official medical report’: ‘Herr Dr. Phil. Ing. Robert Musil Kk. Bibliothekar Wien III unt. Weissgerberstrasse 61 reveals considerable symptoms of neurasthenia, in consequence of which he is incapable of working.’

  At the same time as Musil’s leave is granted, Franz Blei writes to the Kurt Wolff Verlag in Leipzig and tells them about the great, ‘splendid’ novel that Robert Musil was working on. If he had a ‘library-less summer’, it would soon be completed.

  Who am I, and if so how many? In 1913 Otto Dix paints his Small Self-Portrait, his Self-Portrait, the painting Heads (Self-Portraits), then the Self-Portrait with Gladioli and, of course, the Self-Portrait as Smoker. Max Beckmann, the great self-portraitist, writes in his diary in 1913: ‘How sad and unpleasant always having to spend time with oneself. Sometimes one would be glad to be free of oneself.’

  For Picasso, as always when a new lover came along, life and art have been transformed completely. In this case it was a particularly lovely story: the great odalisque, the sultry beauty Fernande Olivier, lascivious by profession, cheated on Picasso with the young painter Ubaldo Oppi and got her friend Marcelle Humbert involved, one of the most unpopular women in Montmartre. Marcelle was more than happy to distract Picasso during Fernande’s rendezvous, because she herself had long been smitten with Picasso. And before he chose her as his new paramour, he gave her a new name: Eva. Above all, he didn’t want his girlfriend to have exactly the same name as the lover of his friend, and increasingly his competitor, Braque. So for Picasso, Eva became the symbol of his rejection of the first phase of Cubism and a move to Synthetic Cubism. In his early thirties he seems to have seen in Eva the opportunity to become bourgeois, to get away, at least a little, from the bohemianism that was keeping him from working. And so they both move from Montmartre to Montparnasse, where the new Line 12 of the Paris Métro happened to go. While Montmartre remained the place for the penurious artists, the opium smokers, the prostitutes and the seedy varieties, Montparnasse was becoming the new haunt of the successful players in the Paris creative industry. In the words of the great impresario Apollinaire, ‘In Montparnasse, on the other hand, you find the real artists, dressed in the American style. Some of them might dip their noses in cocaine, but no matter.’

  In 1912 the 31-year-old Picasso and Eva moved into an apartment and a studio in a complex that was barely ten years old, at 242 Boulevard Raspail. Then, in January 1913, Picasso even introduced his new girlfriend to his father in Barcelona. Don José, formerly a stern paterfamilias, clearly had nothing against either Eva or against Pablo’s Synthetic Cubism – but that may have had something to do with the fact that he was by now entirely blind. When Picasso and Eva met, they had escaped to Céret, in the Pyrenees. And now, on 10 March 1913, they did it again. Picasso wanted to flee the city and its art scene so he could finally get some work done. They took a deep breath when they reached the mountain town, sat down at a pavement café and enjoyed a cup of coffee as the spring sun began to glow. They immediately rented the Maison Delcros and prepared to stay there till autumn. Two days later he sends two cheerful postcards to his most important patrons: his art dealer Kahnweiler, with whom he had signed a lucrative exclusive contract in December 1912, which means that for the first time he is earning proper money (and can buy lots of pretty blouses for Eva). And he writes to Gertrude Stein, the salon hostess and great art collector, who had done a lot of work in the background to ensure that Picasso was shown in the Armory Show in February. The postcard to Gertrude Stein, who is trying to throw her brother Leo out of the flat they share, and who is now living with her friend Alice Toklas, shows three Catalan farmers – in a handwritten caption Picasso identifies the one with the beard as ‘portrait of Matisse’.

  Soon Picasso’s good mood evaporates, because his father’s health is deteriorating. He hurries to Barcelona, before going on to bury himself away in his studio in Céret again. He is happy when his slovenly friend Max Jacob comes from Paris. Max writes to friends in the city: ‘I would like to change my life, I’m going to Céret to spend a few months with Picasso.’ But as the painter spends most of his time sitting in his studio stubbornly working away on new possibilities for his papiers collés, the collages of Synthetic Cubism, Max Jacob spends most of his time with Eva. As it rains incessantly, they sit inside and sip cocoa and wait until the Master has finished his day’s work. In the evening they drink wine together; at night the damp air is filled with frogs and toads and nightingales.

  But Picasso’s thoughts are with his sick father, the father of fathers, who taught him to draw, whom he loves and whom he hates. When he was sixteen, he had said, ‘In art you must kill your father.’ And now the time has come. Don José dies,
and Picasso is paralysed with grief. But that’s not the last of it: that spring Eva falls seriously ill. She has cancer. And then, when his greatest comforter falls ill too, it’s the final straw: Frika, his beloved dog, to whom he has paid just as much devoted attention as to his wives (perhaps even more), is on her deathbed. Since Picasso’s first days in Paris, Frika, that curious mixture of Alsatian and Breton spaniel, had always been by his side, had lived through many wives and the Blue and Rose and Cubist periods. On 14 May Eva writes to Gertrude Stein: ‘Frika can no longer be saved.’ No vet can help now, so Picasso asks the local huntsman-in-chief to deal Frika the coup de grâce. As long as he lives, Picasso will never forget the name of the huntsman, ‘El Ruquetó’ – nor how he wept during those days. Father dead, dog dead, beloved terminally ill, incessant rain outside. In the spring of 1913, in Céret, Picasso is having his greatest spiritual crisis.

  On 22 March Dr Gottfried Benn receives a welcome piece of news: ‘Dr Benn, assistant physician with the Infantry Regiment General Field Marshall Prince Friedrich Karl von Preussen No. 64, is being transferred at his own request to the medical officers of Landwehr Division 1.’ Then he switches from the institute of pathology and anatomy of the Westend Hospital to the City Hospital Charlottenburg.

  On 29 March Karl Kraus delivers a lecture in the Vierjahreszeiten-Saal in Munich. Among the audience is Heinrich Mann. Warm applause.

  On 4 March there is a big dinner at the German Embassy in London. Among those present is, of course, Harry Graf Kessler, that German snob in the white three-piece suit whose address book has 10,000 entries, friend of Henry van de Velde, Edvard Munch and Aristide Maillol, who founded the Cranach Press in Weimar and had to clear his desk as museum director there over some supposedly salacious Rodin watercolours. That same Graf Kessler who commutes between Paris, Weimar, Brussels, London and Munich as one of the great catalysts of modern art and Art Nouveau. It is through him that we become a little better acquainted with the queen of England. At this particular reception he had just introduced the German ambassador, Von Lichnowsky (whose artistically minded, Picasso-collecting, wife liked him), to George Bernard Shaw. Now, at this dinner, she pays him back: Kessler is introduced to the English queen. ‘She looked reasonably good, in silver brocade with a crown of diamonds and big turquoise stones.’ Otherwise she was rather a trial: ‘I couldn’t leave her standing on her own, and she couldn’t find a way out of the conversation, and you have to keep winding the poor thing up like a run-down watch, but that only works for thirty seconds at a time.’ Incidentally, as he confides to his diary, there is no threat of war, or so he has heard: ‘The European situation has been completely reversed for a year and a half. The Russians and the French are forced to be peaceful, as they can no longer rely on England’s support.’ Well, then.