1913- The Year Before the Storm

by Florian Illies

  In May, Berlin is preparing itself for the greatest social event of the young century: the wedding of Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia to Duke Ernst August of Hanover on 24 May. The bridal couple drive along Unter den Linden, where thousands of people are cheering. And then, as the Berliner Tageblatt reports, there is a special moment: an unequal coincidence of democracy and monarchy. Or: ‘It was truly a heart-rending sight to see the democratic bus having to wait as the aristocratic carriage passed, but then the carriage had to wait to let the bus pass.’ Both the Russian Tsar Nicholas II and the English King George V travel to Berlin and Potsdam for the wedding – as do countless crowned and uncrowned heads from all over Europe. The wedding was a diplomatic event above all. As the Berliner Tageblatt observed:

  Of course, the visit was not political. But after the agitated political processes of the past winter, it had to be seen as a welcome example of a relaxation in the international situation, that the rulers of Russia and England, the crucial monarchs of the triple entente, were guests of the German Kaiser. It is in the nature of things that personal contacts of this kind also make their mark on the political attitude of the cabinets, although only in the sense that on all sides the will to peace is being still more keenly accentuated.

  So on 24 May the world’s monarchs gathered rather oddly at five o’clock for the wedding in the Palace Chapel, which was illuminated by hundreds of candles. Only Franz Ferdinand, the successor to the Austrian throne, was not invited – even in Vienna he had long been shunned because of his unsuitable bride, and even on occasion victimised, but this public humiliation on a European stage is a fresh blow for him. All the others celebrate until the small hours. But then, before breakfast, the kings and tsars are given the news from Vienna by their intelligence services: Colonel Redl has been convicted and shot. But the Tsar gives no sign that he has lost his most important informer. He cuts the top off his boiled egg and chats. Decorum is maintained.

  It’s an exhausting spring for Rainer Maria Rilke in Paris. Again he can barely write. He must live. Or something of the kind. Friends and acquaintances want to see him, he goes out for breakfast, lunch, dinner, meets André Gide, Henry van de Velde, the Insel Verlag publisher Anton Kippenberg, Romain Rolland and Stefan Zweig. Rilke complains: ‘People don’t get on with me.’ Above all, he has become unpleasantly entangled in a series of misunderstandings with his old friend and hero Auguste Rodin. Once he had elevated him in his book to the status of a god of sculpture, but now the awkward sculptor refuses to comply when Rilke begs him please please please to sit for a portrait bust by his wife, Clara Rilke-Westhoff. Clara, long since separated from Rilke, lives with their daughter, but he feels responsible and wants to help her make her artistic breakthrough. Rodin won’t budge, which puts Rilke’s nose out of joint. And when Rilke visits him with Kippenberg to discuss photographs for a new edition of his book with Insel Verlag, Rodin eventually takes the photographs back.

  Clara is in Paris, in a state of despair. She has no money (she is kept financially afloat by Rilke’s close friend Eva Cassirer) and has staked everything on making her bust of Rodin. Then Rilke asks Sidonie Nádherný, the ex-lover and close friend that he has just put up at the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, to sit for his wife – Rilke alone seems quite comfortable with these arrangements; he is at his happiest when the rough edges of the past are smoothed by the bond of harmony. Sidonie proudly stretches her neck as her lovely features are chiselled into stone. But then, on 28 May, her beloved brother Johannes Nádherný shoots himself in Munich. Sidonie has a breakdown and sinks into a depression, and Rilke joins her. He has, he writes to his publisher Kippenberg, ‘had a small breakdown’ caused by the death of Johannes, whom he knew well from visits to the accursed castle of the Nádhernýs in Bohemia, ‘and just before that, had a new rift with Rodin, just as unexpected as the one eight years ago but, because it could even come to that, probably more final and irreparable’.

  In a panic Sidonie leaves Paris; Clara, having nothing to do, escapes back to Munich, and Rilke, somehow relieved that he can love from a distance again, takes them both by the hand, with letters, with words, with consolations; he’s good at that. In Munich, Clara goes on working on a bust that is not yet acquainted with grief. By the autumn, when Sidonie sees the bust for the first time, she is visiting Clara with her new boyfriend. His name: Karl Kraus.

  To get a sense of the cultural networks in Paris in 1913, and of the life of the German bon vivant, aesthete, dandy, cultural commentator and legendary diary author Harry Graf Kessler, you only need to take a look at his entry for 14 May 1913: he sleeps late, then meets André Gide and Igor Stravinsky at the Ritz in the early afternoon, after which they go together to the rehearsal of the new ballet by the legendary Russian dancer and choreographer Nijinsky and Diaghilev – the music is by Claude Debussy. He talks to Debussy and to Jean Cocteau during the interval. Tempers suddenly flare in the middle of the rehearsal: Stravinsky shouts, Debussy shouts, Diaghilev shouts. Then they all make up and have champagne next door. Kessler, as he confides to his diary that night, finds Debussy’s music too ‘thin’. But he finds the costume of the great Nijinsky even worse: short white trousers with a black velvet border and green braces, which is too ‘unmanly and comical’ even for Harry Graf Kessler. A good thing, then, that Nijinsky, the Russian with the unreliable taste, had cultured French and German style advisers: ‘Cocteau and I persuaded him, before the première tomorrow, to get hold of some sport trousers and a sport shirt from Willixx.’ And so he did.

  Exactly two weeks later, the next general rehearsal in that very special May in Paris – Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. This time Harry Graf Kessler doesn’t even go to the rehearsal, heading instead straight to the post-rehearsal party at the Larue restaurant – with Nijinsky, with Maurice Ravel, with André Gide, with Diaghilev, with Stravinsky, ‘where the general view was that the première tomorrow evening would cause a scandal’. And so it did. The première of The Rite of Spring was an event that electrified Paris and sent shock waves as far as New York and Moscow. What happens on the evening of 29 May between 8 and 10 p.m. is one of those rare moments when eye-witnesses sense they’re part of a historical event. Even Harry Graf Kessler is ecstatic: ‘A new form of choreography and music. An entirely new vision, something never seen before, something gripping and convincing, has suddenly come into existence. Savagery in un-art and also in art: old form is ravaged, new form suddenly arising out of chaos.’ What Kessler confides in his diary at three o’clock in the morning is one of the most concise and workable formulations for the thrust of modernity that grips the world in 1913.

  The audience on 29 May in Paris is the noblest and most cultivated in Old Europe: sitting in one of the boxes is Gabriele d’Annunzio, who has fled to Paris to get away from his disciples in Italy. In another is Claude Debussy. Coco Chanel is in the auditorium, and so is Marcel Duchamp. For the rest of his life, he will say later, he would never forget the ‘shouting and screeching’ of that evening. Stravinsky’s music brought the primal violence of archaic powers back on the stage – the primordial nature of people from Africa and Oceania, who had served as a model for the art of Expressionism, were now at the centre of civilisation, brought to pulsating life in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

  From the first note of the extremely high solo bassoon, roars of laughter can be heard – is that music, or a spring storm, or the noise of hell the outraged audience wants to know. Drumming everywhere, up on stage the dancers are in ecstatic motion – there’s laughter, then, when the Parisians realise it is meant seriously, shouting. The devotees of the Modern, on the other hand, applaud from the cheap seats, the music rages on and the dancers get tangled up; they can no longer hear the music for all the noise. From somewhere or other Maurice Ravel is shouting ‘Genius!’ into the auditorium. Nijinsky, who wrote the choreography for the ballet, hammers out the rhythm with his fingers – against the furious whistling of the audience.

/>   The dancers seem to be intoxicated, and the theatre manager turns off the lights in the middle of the performance to avoid an escalation of the chaos, but the dancers at the front keep going, and when the lights come back on the people in the auditorium have the unsettling feeling that they’re the stage and the dancers are the audience. It is only thanks to the stoical calm of the conductor, Pierre Monteux, who keeps going just as the dancers do, that they manage to carry the performance to the final bar. Le Figaro writes the next morning:

  The stage represented humanity. On the right, strong young people are picking flowers, while a 300-year-old woman dances around like mad. On the left-hand edge of the stage an old man studies the stars, where here and there sacrifices are being made to the god of light. The audience couldn’t swallow it. They roundly hissed the piece. A few days previously they might have applauded. The Russians, who aren’t entirely familiar with the manners and customs of the countries they visit, didn’t know that the French start protesting at the drop of a hat once stupidity has reached its nadir.

  Stravinsky is horrified by these words. He is deeply disturbed by the events of the evening. And yet he guesses he has written a work that will define an era. And he may have been reinforced in this view by Coco Chanel, whose little millinery salon in Paris has been attracting a great deal of attention, and who sees the great Russian composer for the first time this evening. And then becomes his lover.

  Two journeys to the centre of the earth: Piero Ginor Conti, in Larderello in Tuscany, manages to use water from the earth’s core to produce electricity. Geothermia has been discovered. At the same time Marshall B. Garner writes his book in which he claims that mammoths still live inside the earth. They didn’t die out at all, he claims, they just withdrew to warmer climes.

  In Vienna, Oskar Kokoschka goes on working on the canvas that is the same size as the bed of his lover Alma, the widow of Gustav Mahler. He is in great pain because Alma has just aborted their child. He cannot forgive her for destroying the fruit of their love. Again and again he paints accusatory pictures of Alma with that child, whose life he imagines through art. He was present at the abortion in a Vienna clinic and took the bloody cotton wool back to his studio, repeatedly mumbling to himself, ‘This will be my only child.’ (Tragically he was right.)

  And yet he’s still sexually obsessed with Alma; he can only work when she has granted him her favours. So day in, day out, he stands in his studio in Alma’s bright red pyjamas, which he tore off her at the start of their affair and which he always wears when he paints. In 1913 he paints her almost a hundred times: Alma. It’s an adventurous passion, full of rage, raving, happiness – ‘so much hell, so much paradise’, as Alma calls it. He used to want Alma to beat him during the act of love, which she didn’t enjoy, but in his daily letters Oskar pleads with her ‘to strike me with your beautiful dear little hand’.

  Between kisses he shouts out his murderous plans and his fury. It must have given him an almighty kick.

  Kokoschka’s jealousy is so colossal that, when he leaves Alma’s flat at night, he sometimes waits in the street until four o’clock, until he’s sure no other man is climbing the stairs to his beloved. ‘I shall tolerate no other gods before me’, he writes, beautifully and idiotically at the same time. His jealousy also extended with particular intensity to Gustav Mahler, Alma’s late husband. So time and again they have to make love right under the composer’s death mask. And Kokoschka pleads with Alma, who with her infallible knack of spotting artistic genius and the genius loci has, of course, been in Paris this particular May: ‘Please, my sweet Almi, shield your sweet body from prying eyes and further strengthen my feeling that every strange hand and every alien gaze is a blasphemy against the sanctity of your beautiful body.’ Then, at the end of May, worship turns to magic. Oskar Kokoschka writes pleading letters to her at her hotel in Paris: ‘I must soon have you as my wife, or else my great gift will perish miserably. You must bring me back to life in the night like a magic potion.’ Alma starts to get worried. She decides to stay an extra week in Paris after all.

  In Carl Sternheim’s play The Snob, on which he is working in the summer of 1913, he hides dozens of allusions to Walther Rathenau, the great chairman of AEG, romantic, author, politician, thinker. And also one of the most narcissistic figures of his time. At the première of The Snob, Sternheim’s wife, Thea, sits next to Rathenau, worrying that he might know he’s the one being depicted on stage. But narcissism can also act as a form of protection. Rathenau is unmoved. At the end he says only that he would like to read the play through carefully once more.

  The 27-year-old Ludwig Mies van der Rohe comes back to Berlin and sets himself up as an architect.

  Max Beckmann writes in his diary: ‘Man is and remains a first-class swine.’

  JUNE

  This is the month when it becomes clear that war is simply not an option. Georg Trakl is searching for his sister and deliverance from damnation, while Thomas Mann is just looking for some peace and quiet. Franz Kafka makes a marriage proposal of sorts, but it doesn’t come across well. He seems to confuse it with an oath of disclosure. D. H. Lawrence publishes his Sons and Lovers, then runs off to Upper Bavaria with mother-of-three Frieda von Richthofen, who becomes his inspiration for Lady Chatterley. Other than that, nerves are raw everywhere. In cinemas, Asta Nielsen destroys an unknown masterpiece in Sins of the Fathers. The German army is set to grow and grow. Henkell Trocken celebrates Franco-German friendship.

  (illustration credits 6.1)

  There couldn’t possibly be another war, Norman Angell was sure of that. His 1911 book The Great Illusion became a worldwide best-seller. In 1913 he writes a well-received ‘Open Letter to German Students’, through which his theories reach an even greater audience. At the same time the fourth edition of his book is published. As ever more vexing noises push their way northwards from the Balkans that early summer, the intellectuals in Berlin, Munich and Vienna are able to calm their nerves by reading the British publicist’s book. In it Angell expounds his theory that the era of globalisation renders world wars impossible, because all countries are now economically interlinked to such a high degree. He also says that, alongside the economic networks, close international ties in communication and above all in the world of finance mean that any war would be preposterous. He argues that, even if the German military wanted to pit its strength against England, there is ‘no establishment of significance in Germany which would not suffer greatly’. This, he claims, will prevent war, because ‘the entire German financial world would exert its influence over the German government, thereby putting a stop to a situation which would be ruinous for German trade’. Angell’s theory convinced intellectuals all over the world. David Starr Jordan, the President of Stanford University, utters these great words after Angell’s lecture in 1913: ‘The Great War in Europe, that eternal threat, will never come. The bankers won’t come up with the money needed for such a war, and industry won’t support it, so the statesmen simply won’t be able to do it. There will be no Great War.’

  At the very same time Wilhelm Bölsche’s epic three-volume work Die Wunder der Natur is published, with the lovely title The Triumph of Life in the 1913 English-language edition. Bölsche, a divine writer, toned down Modernity, or more specifically the findings of modern science, for the bourgeois public, sprinkling on a fine dusting of sugar to make it more palatable. Instead of providing supporting evidence for Darwin, his intention was to depict the ‘Mysteries of the Universe’s Splendour’. This gave rise to some unusual biological and moral theories. The public responded enthusiastically in 1913 to Bölsche’s reasoning, for example, that all higher beings are, in essence, nice to one another. He claimed that conflict only arises in the animal kingdom when an opponent is deliberately provoked. So not only would countries no longer wage war in the future, but animals wouldn’t either. This, at least, was Wilhelm Bölsche’s comforting message. Small wonder that his book was prominently displayed on all respectable imperia
l bookshelves. Kurt Tucholsky described the basic configuration of the upper-class library as follows: ‘Heyse, Schiller, Bölsche, Thomas Mann, an old book of verse …’. In essence, Bölsche’s work was a book of verse as well – in that he inscribed peaceful verses into the album of Modernity, dreaming up a world in which the animals behave as peacefully and affectionately as they do in Franz Marc’s paintings.

  Restless and sweating, the morphine-addicted poet Georg Trakl travels back and forth between Salzburg and Innsbruck in June 1913. He can’t wait to see Grete again, his beloved lover, sister, his own flesh and blood, but he misses her; he wants to meet with Adolf Loos, the esteemed anti-ornamentalist, but he misses him too. He rushes to Vienna, where he starts an unpaid internship at the war ministry, only to call in sick a few days later. He vaguely suspects, perhaps even knows for certain, that Grete, who in his mind is allowed to be only with him, is betraying him with his friend Buschbeck. He writes to him: ‘Perhaps you know whether my sister Gretl is in Salzburg.’ Trakl retreats into drugs, suffering and alcohol, and descends into a ‘hell of self-made pain’. He writes and destroys; his corrections on the sheets are like stigmata, scratched into the paper as if it were raw flesh. He writes the poem ‘The Damned’, which includes the verse: