1913- The Year Before the Storm

by Florian Illies

  A small summit meeting at 16 Ainmillerstrasse. Paul Klee visits Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky, who are united in their desire to drive art forward. At the height of their love affair, in 1906, Münter and Kandinsky travelled together through Italy and France, painting shimmering oil studies of the sea so similar that even today we still don’t know which of them painted which. Now, seven years later, their lives are becoming more separate, as are their styles and – almost – their beds. Kandinsky is drifting away towards his blazingly colourful abstraction, while Gabriele Münter sticks to her weighty painting, with black lines bordering the colours like the lead in stained-glass windows. That’s also the style in which she paints Paul Klee when he comes to visit them. A jagged profile, starchy collar, precise moustache, against a backdrop of several Kandinsky and Münter paintings hanging on the walls. Klee is even wearing slippers in the portrait, showing just how at home he feels there. The snow is still thick on the ground that April in Munich, so Klee would probably have got his feet wet as he walked round to see his friends. Comfortably warm now, he tucks his feet into the slippers belonging to the mistress of the house. Perhaps it’s that small, friendly gesture that makes him finally give in today when Gabriele Münter asks, yet again, whether she can paint his portrait. His shoes will take another hour to dry anyway, he may have thought, stoically accepting his fate. And so he gazes out at us from the picture, a lasting legacy of this intimate moment from the private lives of the Blaue Reiter.

  Austro-Hungary doesn’t have a chance against the attack from the French. On 14 April the Frenchman Max Decugis beats the Austrian count Ludwig Salm in three sets at the final of the Madrid tennis tournament: 6–4, 6–3, 6–2.

  What’s the quickest way to get from America to Europe? In Telefunken Zeitschrift, no. 11 (April 1913), there’s a report on the ‘first radio-telegraphic success between Germany and America’. It says: ‘For the first time since the existence of radio telegraphy, radio-telegraphic messages have been successfully sent across the ocean on the New York–Berlin line. The distance spanned was around 6,500 kilometres.’

  In April, S. Fischer publishes the biggest best-seller of 1913: The Tunnel, by Bernhard Kellermann. Within four weeks 10,000 copies have been sold, and after just six months 100,000. (By way of comparison: Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, published in February 1913, sold just 18,000 copies in 1913, and it took until the 1930s for 100,000 copies to have been printed.)

  The Tunnel tells the story of the construction of a tunnel from New York to Europe. Deep under the Atlantic, hordes of people burrow towards one another. It’s a crazy story: science fiction mixed with realism, social criticism with engineering romanticism, capitalist belief in progress with wearily apocalyptic fantasy. The tunnel collapses, leading to strikes, rage and misery below the earth, and stock market flotations, dreams of marriage and disillusionment above. Then, after twenty-four years, the workers from Europe and America reach out their hands to one another thousands of metres under the Atlantic. Success at last. Two years later the first train travels under the earth between the continents. It takes twenty-four hours, but no one wants to board it. By then development has raced on, and the tunnel, which was once the technological utopia, is now a sentimental piece of history – people are flying from America to Europe by plane, and in half the time.

  And so Kellermann succeeds in creating a great novel – he understands the passion for progress that characterises the era he lives in, the faith in the technically feasible, and at the same time, with delicate irony and a sense for what is really possible, he has it all come to nothing. An immense utopian project that is actually realised – but then becomes nothing but a source of ridicule for the public, who end up ordering their tomato juice from the stewardess many thousand metres not under but over the Atlantic. According to Kellermann’s wise message, we would be wise not to put our utopian dreams to the test.

  Crazed with love, Oskar Kokoschka has relinquished common sense. With brute force he tries to put Alma, the personification of his own female utopia, to the test, which in his case is otherwise known as ‘marriage’. But Alma is more sensible than that. She doesn’t believe in marriage. Nonetheless, she doesn’t want Kokoschka to squander all the energy that seems to have arisen out of the intensity of his feelings. So she tells him: I’ll marry you if you create a real masterpiece. From this day on her beloved has no other goal but this. He buys a canvas which he cuts to the exact measurements of the bed they share, 180 by 200 centimetres, in order to create his masterpiece.

  He heats up the glue, he mixes the colours. Alma is to stand and pose for him, no: lie down and pose. He wants the picture to depict her as he likes her best: naked and horizontal. Alma Mahler – or, the Position of the Woman in 1913. He intends to paint himself lying next to her, but isn’t yet sure exactly how to do it. He writes her a letter: ‘The picture is moving slowly, but with constant improvements, towards completion. The two of us with strong, calm expressions, our hands entwined, at the bottom a semicircle, a sea illuminated by Bengal lights, a water tower, mountains, lightning and the moon.’ It is intended to be Oskar Kokoschka’s Meisterwerk. And against all expectation, it really is. But will it be enough to make Alma marry him?

  In 1913 Walter Gropius publishes his essay ‘The Development of Modern Industrial Architecture’ in the yearbook of the German Workers’ Association. It includes fourteen photographs of American warehouses and silos, which Gropius perceives to be the embodiment of a new architectural language: form follows function. They were built by engineers according to purely functional principles: simple cube formations, no ornamentation, no fuss. Gropius claims that this architectural ethos is a return to ‘purity’. Or, to use his words: ‘In the motherland of industry, America, large industrial buildings have been created whose unknown majesty towers above even the very best of Germany’s industrial buildings. They wear an architectonic face of such certainty that the meaning of the building becomes comprehensible to the onlooker with persuasive force.’

  MAY

  A warm spring evening in Vienna: Arthur Schnitzler has such a violent argument with his wife that on 25 May he dreams of shooting himself. Nothing comes of it. But that same night in Vienna, Colonel Redl shoots himself after being convicted of espionage. On the very same night in Vienna, Adolf Hitler packs his bags and takes the first train to Munich. The artists’ group Die Brücke breaks up. In Paris, Stravinsky celebrates the première of The Rite of Spring and catches his first glimpse of his future lover Coco Chanel. Brecht is bored at school and has palpitations. So he starts writing poetry. Alma Mahler runs away from Oskar Kokoschka. Rilke argues with Rodin and can’t get round to writing.

  (illustration credits 5.1)

  The time has come: Max Weber invents his memorable phrase ‘the disenchantment of the world’. In a little essay on fundamental concepts in sociology he writes about what is important for the capitalist structure of society – and that includes the increasingly mechanical, scientific and rational treatment of everything previously considered a miracle. ‘Disenchantment of the world’ means, in Weber’s own words, that humanity believes it can control everything by means of calculation. Still, Weber’s own body resists the calculations of diet pills. In the spring of 1913 the 49-year-old had travelled to Ascona without his wife, Marianne, to cure himself of his drug addiction and his alcoholism. In this way, disenchanted, he wants to create an ‘outer’ beauty. But not a chance. He fasts in Ascona and takes a diet of ‘vegetarian fodder’, as he writes to his wife. But it’s no good: ‘The upholstery and the swill won’t budge. It’s how the plan of creation meant it to be.’ So he stays fat, because that’s how it was calculated to be. So with him there’s clearly more plan than creation involved. Thus his own weight problem becomes the basis for one of the most important slogans of the twentieth century.

  The month gets off to a difficult start for Oskar Kokoschka. On 1 May he writes to Alma Mahler: ‘Today wasn’t easy for me, as I didn’t get a letter fr
om you.’

  The love story between the vicar’s son Gottfried Benn and the Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler, who had published her ecstatic ‘Hebrew Ballads’ at the same time as his dances of death in the collection Morgue, lasted throughout the spring of 1913. On 3 May, Else writes to Franz Marc in Sindelsdorf: ‘I’ve really fallen in love again after all.’ And she’s fallen in love with Dr Benn.

  Within a short time Marc, whom she had only met in December 1912 and who had shortly afterwards invited her to join him in his rural idyll in Sindelsdorf, had become Lasker-Schüler’s confidant. She called him not only her ‘Blue Rider’ but also, above all, her ‘Half-Brother Ruben’. No one came closer to her in her imaginary oriental realm. Karl Kraus was her ‘Dalai Lama’; she changed her husband’s name from Georg Lewin to ‘Herwarth Walden’ (when he left her, he kept the name at least). Oskar Kokoschka is the ‘Troubadour’ at the court, Kandinsky the ‘Professor’, Tilla Durieux the ‘White Leopardess’ – and Benn becomes ‘Giselher’, the Nibelung, the heathen, the barbarian.

  The euphoric, scatterbrained visionary Lasker-Schüler grabbed testosterone-fuelled men by their poetic hearts and propelled them to unsuspected heights. But men afraid of too much femininity – Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Kafka, for example – were startled by her surging sexuality and tended to run away. And the women of her time despised this unkempt femme fatale by day for her negligence, her irresponsibility, her licentiousness – and secretly admired her in the evening, when their husbands had gone out for a drink and they were left by themselves to flick through a magazine from their lonely armchairs. Only Rosa Luxembourg admired her unreservedly, and pointedly walked down the streets with her in the hot summer months of 1913.

  So one May evening Else Lasker-Schüler wrote to Franz Marc to tell him how in love she was with Benn: ‘When I fall in love a thousand times, it’s always a new miracle, it’s the same old thing when someone else falls in love. I have to tell you, it was his birthday yesterday. I sent him a box full of presents. His name is Giselher. He’s out of the Nibelungs.’ But Marc, whether his wife wouldn’t let him or whether he himself was already too exhausted by his demanding Berlin girlfriend, took a few months to write back. To which Else replied by return: ‘You are glad about my “New Love” – You say that so easily, and have no idea that you should really be weeping along with me – because – it has already gone out in his heart, like a sparkler, like a burning Catherine wheel – which has rolled over me.’ NB: write quickly if you want to congratulate Else Lasker-Schüler on a new love, otherwise it’ll be too late.

  Between Gottfried Benn and Else Lasker-Schüler, at first, it was as if an inter-city train and an Orient Express had come hurtling straight at one another and locked in a steaming, artistic tangle of steel and blood. But all that remains by the autumn is rubble and stale smoke. The intervening nine months produce some of the most beautiful German love poetry of the twentieth century.

  We know everything and nothing about this love affair, because the dates are unclear, disputed; the beginning in Berlin is as obscure as the end in the autumn, probably on the Baltic island of Hidden-see – and yet we know everything about their feelings because they put their love on stage like a public romance, with poems to, for and about each other, published in Der Sturm, Die Fackel and Aktion, the magazines that set the standards of the day. In these poems Benn is the ‘Monkey Adam’, drawn to the ‘Brownest One’, to his ‘Ruth’, the archaic woman. It’s an unparalleled attraction that grips both of them, followed by battles, border disputes of the most violent kind, white-hot oaths, injuries, claw-swipes. When it gets going, she writes: ‘The august King Giselher/With the tip of his lance/Pierced my heart through.’

  With her rare grasp of the essential, she produces one of the quickest, clearest portraits in existence of Benn, an indian-ink line drawn across the page in a matter of seconds, the hooked nose, the big reptilian head, the eyelids with the centuries apparently weighing upon them. And down on his chest the Nibelung wears an oriental star as a piece of jewellery. It appears in the 25 June 1913 issue of Aktion with, below it, Lasker-Schüler’s piece about ‘Dr Benn’: ‘He goes down into the vault of his hospital and cuts open corpses. Tirelessly enriching himself with secrets. He says, “dead is dead”. He is an evangelical heathen, a Christ with the head of an idol, with the nose of a hawk and the heart of a leopard.’ Beside this was a poem by Benn, the eighth part of his ‘Alaska’ cycle, whose very title reveals that this is about a lesson in coldness. And for simplicity’s sake his first love poem to the deified poet is called ‘Threats’:

  I make animal love

  In the first night all is decided

  You grip what you long for with your teeth

  Hyenas, tigers, vultures are my coat of arms.

  Else Lasker-Schüler’s reply appears in the next eidition of Der Sturm, under the title ‘Giselher the Tiger’: ‘I carry you around always/Between my teeth.’ And the whole Berlin art scene watches as the two outsiders celebrate each other in public. The doctor with the good manners and tightly knotted tie, whose hands always smell of the disinfectant with which he washes his hands, which have just been rooting about inside corpses. And the twice-divorced single mother with her tatty robes, her neck and arms hung with fake jewellery, chains and ear-rings. And as she was forever brushing an unruly strand of hair from her forehead, she was forever surrounded by lots of jangling and rattling. ‘You couldn’t cross the street with her, then or later, without the whole world stopping to look’, Benn wrote later. And if they weren’t walking down the street together, they were publishing their blazing declarations to one another, their wooing and their rejections. Else Lasker-Schüler’s greatest triumph was when Benn refused military service, denied the Kaiser and settled in her personal kingdom. He became King Giselher at the Court of Prince Yussuf – in his military files he imagined he had something called a ‘wandering kidney’, which made it impossible for him to ride across fields on horseback. Of course, no such kidney existed, either then or now. Benn never suffered from it, and yet this invention helped him turn his inner turmoil into a poetic diagnosis. Benn broke away from his military world, moved through the night with his lover, climbed up to attics and down to basements, learned to love, learned to live. When the winter nights in cafés and lofts and house doorways are over and spring breaks out in Berlin like a feverish virus, it’s easy for us to imagine Benn and Else Lasker-Schüler drifting out of the city on one of the many barges that bring fruit and vegetables from the country into the city; they let themselves be carried out into the Havelland, the lakes and rivers of Mecklenburg, to settle on an island, the dark water playing around them. They sit there, the two of them, in the reeds, naked beneath the moon. She plays with his hands, he plays with her hair and then they write poems: ‘Oh, I became acquainted with too much bliss from your sweet mouth.’

  But in the end, once the battle has been fought, she will write: ‘I am a warrior with the heart, he with the head.’ The great Protestant–Jewish reconciliation project that they made out of their life, here Yussuf or the Prince of Thebes, as she called herself, there the Nibelungen, is a failure. For her, ‘Nibelung fidelity’ means being senselessly faithful to something that is false. So she knew from the start what she was letting herself in for with this doctor with the piercing eyes and the receding hair-line. But when it happens, it throws her off track more than any man before or after him. She knew she was the prophetess of the Jewish people – and she needed Dr Benn, with the pomade in his hair and the galoshes on his feet, as the perfect counter-image to her oriental world, as the embodiment of the Germanic. But the young Nibelung moves on and the older Jewess stays behind in despair. She is gripped by a constant fever, abdominal inflammations, pains. In the autumn of 1913 Dr Alfred Döblin will prescribe her morphine against the mental pain caused her by Dr Gottfried Benn.

  And so Franz Kafka writes about Else Lasker-Schüler to his distant Felice:

  I can’t bear her poems, they
make me feel nothing but boredom with their emptiness and revulsion about artistic effort. Her prose irritates me for the same reasons. What’s at work in it is the randomly twitching brain of an overwrought city-dweller. Yes, she’s in a bad way, her second husband left her, as far as I know, and even here people are collecting for her; I had to hand over 5 Kronen even though I haven’t got the slightest sympathy for her. I don’t know the actual reason, but I only ever imagine her as a lush, dragging herself around the coffee houses all night.

  There is still no trace of the Mona Lisa. J. P. Morgan, the American billionaire, receives a letter from a lunatic who signs himself ‘Leonardo’ and says he knows where the painting is. Morgan’s receptionist throws the letter away.

  ‘Life is too short and Proust too long’, Anatole France writes with wonderful precision in 1913 about the publication of the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. So Proust struck him as ‘too long’ even before the remaining six volumes had come out. No one, not even Proust himself, had any idea where Proust’s meticulous search for the depths of memory would lead. The book as an attempt to capture the past in language – against the flow of time.