1913- The Year Before the Storm
Page 16
Then he turns his attention back to his super-sensory relationship. Unfortunately, we don’t know what the ‘Unknown’ told Rilke to do in Heiligendamm. We do know, however, that he stayed on there even after Helene von Nostitz’s departure. But that’s probably for sensory, rather than extra-sensory, reasons: for he met Ellen Delp, one of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s ‘adoptive daughters’, a young actress favoured by Max Reinhardt, who was recuperating in nearby Kühlungsborn. No sooner has Helene set off to Bad Doberan by train than Rilke writes the following on the afternoon of 14 August: ‘Dear Lou’s daughter, I’ve come to extend my hand to you in greeting.’ And he does: far away from their social circle and from convention, Rilke seems to achieve a relatively uncomplicated affair with Ellen Delp here in Heiligendamm. After their first walk together beneath the tall beeches, he writes the following poem:
‘Behind the Guiltless Trees’
Behind the guiltless trees
the old fate slowly forms
her silent face.
Moths draw towards it …
A bird’s cry here
rebounds there as a train of sorrow
against the hard soothsaying mouth.
O and those soon-to-be-lovers
smile at one another, still farewellless,
their destiny soaring and falling above them
like a constellation,
inspired by night.
Still not near enough for them to experience,
still it dwells
floating in its heavenly course,
a bright figure.
The ‘soon-to-be-lovers’! This state of affairs is Rilke’s second favourite. His favourite is that of ‘having once loved’. Because then he no longer needs to exert himself and can just get on with writing his letters. The in-between state, normally called the present, love and uncertainty – he’s not too fond of that one; it overwhelms him. But here in Heiligendamm, behind the innocent trees, he seems to feel freer than usual.
He reads poems out loud to his ‘matutinal Ellen’, Franz Werfel mostly. They go to the beach together, Rilke letting the fine Baltic Sea sand glide through his long, slender fingers. After that, they probably go to his room. The day after, Ellen has roses sent to the poet’s room. And he sends a thank-you letter on his dove-blue paper: ‘The roses are beautiful, beautiful, bountiful, and cheer, the way they stand there, one’s own heart boundlessly. Rainer.’
To increase the strength of the armed forces, a search begins throughout Austro-Hungary for deserters from military service. As part of the campaign, on 22 August the police publish this missing persons notice: ‘Hietler [!], Adolf, last known residence in a men’s hostel in Meldemannstrasse, Vienna, current residence unknown, enquiries under way.’
It’s a beautiful August day in 1913. Or, to be more precise:
There was a barometric low over the Atlantic; it moved eastwards towards a high-pressure area situated over Russia, not yet showing any inclination to bypass that high by heading northwards. The isotherms and isotheres were functioning as expected. The air temperature was in the appropriate proportion to the mean annual temperature, to the temperature of the coldest and the warmest months and to the aperiodic monthly temperature fluctuations. The rising and setting of the sun and the moon, the changing phases of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn and many other significant signs all corresponded to the forecasts in the astronomical almanacs. The water vapour in the air was at its highest buoyancy level, and air humidity was low. To sum it up more briefly in a way that corresponds to fact, despite being a little old-fashioned: it was a lovely August day in the year 1913.
These are the opening lines of Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities. Alongside Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and James Joyce’s Ulysses, this was the third classic of the modern era, saturated with the explosive power of the year 1913.
But what was the weather really like in Vienna during these August days of 1913? A detailed article was printed in the Neue Freie Presse on 15 August, with the lovely headline ‘Persistent bad weather’. In it, Dr O. Baron von Myrbach, assistant at the Central Institute for Meteorology by trade, offers little comfort: ‘As feared, this year’s summer weather loyally retained the characteristics it possessed from the very beginning. Its harshness has relented a little. But that is not saying much, for the start of the summer was so unusually bad that even the period that followed, despite the improvement, must still be described as bad.’ In other words, there was not one single beautiful August day in the year 1913. No, in Vienna the average temperature was 16°. It was the coldest August of the entire twentieth century. Perhaps it’s a good thing that people didn’t know that back in 1913.
Franz Marc has gone to East Prussia with his sister to stay at her husband’s property in Gendrin. After dozens of horse paintings and horse sketches, now Marc himself is in the saddle. A lovely photograph taken that August shows him out riding with his brother-in-law Wilhelm. The horse, a grey, stands to attention, knowing that he’s carrying him, the horse whisperer. And Marc hardly dares to press his thighs against its flanks through sheer respect for the animal’s elegance. On the day of their departure Wilhelm presents Marc with a tame deer. The deer is sent by train to Sindelsdorf, survives the journey and lives from then on in the garden, named Hanni (not to be confused with the Sindelsdorf cat of the same name). To save it from the loneliness of roaming the meadow in front of Marc’s studio by itself, Hanni soon gets a life partner, a doe named Ruth. Captivated by their brown, shy beauty, Marc creates picture after picture of the two animals as symbols of paradise.
On 16 August a moving assembly line is installed at the Ford automobile factory in Detroit for the first time. In the 1913 business year Ford produces 264,972 cars.
While Alma Mahler stayed in Franzensbad, letting her wedding date pass by, Kokoschka finally carried on with painting The Tempest, turning in despair to his black paint and transforming his entire studio into a coffin. But then Alma comes back, and they fall for each other all over again. On 22 August, her birthday, they celebrate at the Tre Croci Hotel in the Dolomites, not far from Cortina d’Ampezzo. The next morning they set off early into the dense forest and stumble upon a clearing where foals are frolicking. In spite of his panic-ridden fear of being alone, Kokoschka sends Alma away, takes out his pencils and sketches the horses as if in a frenzy. The young horses come over to him, eat from his hand and rub their beautiful heads against his arms.
And what about Golo Mann? His mother, Katia, writes this in her memoir, A Youth in Germany:
Summer 1913: Golo is gabbing on even more than Aissi. He’ll often talk all day long without uttering one sensible word, nothing but nonsense, about his friends, about Hofmannsthal and Wedekind, about the Balkan War, a mixture of things he’s picked up or invented, so I really have no option but to rebuke him […] one of the children’s favourite games, following on from all the military concerts this summer, is to pretend to be conductors. Golo does it in such an indescribably comic fashion, with those unsightly enraptured expressions, that feeble pathos summoned up from deep within, and given that he’s never even seen a proper conductor before, I can hardly believe what I’m seeing.
Golo, Thomas Mann’s son, was four at the time. Where did it all come from?
Like father, like son: in Germany, jus sanguinis, right of blood, becomes the basis for citizenship in 1913.
Ernst Jünger is bored during his summer holidays in Rehburg, on the banks of Lake Steinhude. Tall oaks rustle next to the family’s country house in Brunnenstrasse, the view stretches for miles. But Jünger feels imprisoned in the house, with all its little turrets and alcoves. Dark wood panelling from Germany’s industrial era set the tone for the entire property; the windows hardly allow any light in through their stained-glass panes. Magnificent wood-carvings sit enthroned on the door frames. The hunting room is always gloomy, the windows painted over with the scene of a belling stag and a skulking fox. This is where Ernst’s father sits with his friends,
smoking fat cigars and hoping to shut the world out. Ernst Jünger feels his room is suffocating him, he lies on his bed up in the loft and goes back to reading adventure stories set in Africa. It’s raining. But as soon as the sun appears, its sheer summer-like energy warms the air outside in minutes. Jünger opens the window. His parents are setting off on an excursion. The water rolls down the hard leaves of the huge rhododendron bushes in the garden and drips heavily on the ground. He can hear it. Plop, plop, plop. Other than this, it’s deathly quiet this August lunchtime. Eighteen-year-old Ernst walks down the wide, dark brown steps to the cloakroom and searches for his warmest winter coat, the one that’s lined with fine fur. He takes the fur hat down from the hat rack too, and then sneaks out of the house. It’s a humid 31° outside. Jünger walks through the rhododendron bushes along the narrow path leading to the greenhouses. This is where his father cultivates his tropical plants and vegetables. As Jünger opens the door to the cucumber house, musty, stale heat hits him in the face. He quickly shuts the door behind him, pulls on the fur cap and winter coat and sits down on a wooden stool next to the flowerpots. The cucumber shoots snake wildly up in the air like darting green tongues. It’s two o’ clock in the afternoon. The thermometer inside the greenhouse is showing 42°. Jünger smiles. It can’t be much hotter than this even in Africa, he thinks.
On 3 August an artist suffocates inside a pile of sand at Berlin Jungfernheide. His art form consisted of being buried alive for up to five minutes. Today, however, the director of the artists’ group was immersed in conversation and forgot to start the excavation until ten minutes had passed.
On 11 August, Sigmund Freud continues his journey with his wife, sister-in-law and daughter Anna from Marienbad on to San Martino di Castrozza. This small mountain village in the Dolomites is home to a branch of Dr Von Hartungen’s legendary Riva sanatorium. Freud plans to spend another four weeks recharging here before he has to go to Munich at the beginning of September for that confounded Congress of the Psychoanalytical Society. Freud summons his friend Josef Ferenczi to his hotel; Ferenczi is more than happy to come, and together they work on a strategy for Munich. In the afternoons he goes for his daily constitutional with Anna, arm in arm through the cool forest. A picture of them on one of their walks shows Anna in traditional garb, staring jauntily at the camera, full of confidence, and her father next to her, proud but morose too, even a little anxious. During his stay at the mountain sanatorium he receives treatment for his migraines and chronic cold. Christl von Hartungen prescribes strict abstinence from tobacco and alcohol, and plenty of fresh air. But Freud struggles to re-charge at all. The nearer the event in Munich gets, the more distracted he becomes. Then, in the middle of the night, just one day before his departure, Dr Freud sends for Dr Von Hartungen; he has suffered a fainting fit and requests urgent medical assistance via a calling card.
At the beginning of August, having recovered from the shock caused by the deaths of his father and his dog Frika, Picasso travels to Céret. But his fame is now such that on 9 August the local newspaper L’Indépendant runs the following report: ‘The small town of Céret is rejoicing. The Master of Cubism has arrived, ready to enjoy a well-earned rest. So far, the artists Herbin, Braque, Kisling, Ascher, Pichot, Gris and the sculptor Davidson have joined him in Céret.’ All this fuss is a source of anxiety to Picasso. His greatest concern is Juan Gris, for he has mastered the Cubist technique almost as well as Picasso by now, and has the ability expertly to create a whole new world from fragments, wallpaper and scraps of newspaper. Before long, his old friend Ramon Pichot also comes to Céret, attempting to convince Picasso to give money to his most recent lover, Fernande, to help her get by. But Picasso hates being pressured like that, and they come to blows. Picasso and Eva, who stole him away from Fernande, leave in a panic. They head back to pulsating Paris in search of some ‘peace and quiet’, as Picasso – in all honesty – writes in a letter to his art dealer Kahnweiler in Rome. Eva and Picasso move into their new apartment and studio at 5 Rue Schoelcher in Montparnasse.
From there it’s only ten minutes on the new railway line to Issy-les-Moulineaux, where Henri Matisse is now living. Scarcely back from Céret, Picasso and Eva drive out there and spend the summer horse-riding with Matisse. This is such an extraordinary event that it is immediately reported twice to Modernism’s head office, Gertrude Stein. First, a note from Picasso: ‘We’re riding through the Clamart forest’, on 29 August. And then, on the same day, this from Matisse: ‘Picasso is a horseman. We’re out riding together, which comes as a great surprise to everyone.’ The news of the two heroes’ reconciliation quickly becomes the most important topic of conversation in Montparnasse and Montmartre – in other words, the whole world.
‘We are each passionately interested in the technical problems of the other. We undoubtedly profited from one another, it was like an artistic brotherhood’, writes Matisse about the man who was once his greatest rival. And to Max Jacob, Matisse says: ‘If I didn’t do what I do, I would love to paint like Picasso does.’ And Max Jacob replies: ‘It’s crazy, but Picasso just said the very same thing to me about you.’
Georg Trakl is furious. He wants to see his sister Gretl, but can’t find her. His appointment as a clearing officer in the Viennese war ministry was, of course, a complete joke. He stops turning up and drinks his first five carafes of red wine by midday every day. He takes drugs. His friends Adolf Loos and his English wife, Bessie, prescribe him an immediate dose of: holiday – holiday from himself. They are due to travel to Venice. On 14 August he writes to his friend Buschbeck: ‘On Saturday I’m supposed to travel to Venice with the Looses, which inexplicably makes me somewhat nervous.’ The next day, a second letter, this time with a rare trace of euphoria ignited by the prospect of his first ever holiday: ‘Dearest Buschbeck! The world is round. On Saturday, I will be falling down towards Venice. Further and further – towards the stars.’ Of course, the whole thing turns out to be a failure: a displeasure trip. He who once reached for the stars has ended up with a handful of jellyfish. Even his adored Karl Kraus, who goes to the lido with them, even the caring attention of Adolf Loos, Ludwig von Ficker and their wives can’t brighten Trakl’s mood, which is further clouded by the presence of Peter Altenberg on this ‘staff outing’ of the Austrian intelligentsia. It’s mid-August, and Georg Trakl is walking aimlessly across the Lido in Venice. The sun is shining, the water is warm and the author is the unhappiest person in the entire world. A photograph from those days of 1913 shows him wandering tentatively across the sand, his hair brittle and shorn, his skin as pale as that of a moloch living in a hole deep under the earth. His left hand is curled upwards like a flower bud, his lips are pursed. He has his back to the sea, clearly feeling like a pitiful sight in his bathing costume, lost, homesick and may be mumbling poetry to himself. At night, in the hotel, he writes them down:
Black swarm of flies
Darkens the stone room
And the head of the homeless man
Gazes tormented at the golden day.
Venice, the sinking city, exerts an irresistible pull on the morbidly inclined Viennese intelligentsia in the summer of 1913. As well as Trakl, Peter Altenberg, Adolf Loos and his wife and the Von Fickers, Arthur Schnitzler and his wife, Olga, also arrive in Venice on 23 August. They have travelled from Brioni, and are staying in the Grand Hotel. On the beach they meet more old acquaintances: Hermann Bahr, a bearded giant of a man, and his wife. The very next day, after a gondola ride with Olga, Schnitzler meets with his publisher Samuel Fischer to discuss forthcoming publications. The Fischers are in Venice with their best friends to celebrate their son Gerhart’s nineteenth birthday. Richard Beer-Hoffmann is there, the actor Alexander Moissi, and Hermann Bahr and Altenberg come along too. There’s no mention of Trakl. Unfortunately, they are all ailing from something: Gerhart, the birthday boy, is scrawny and feverish, and Samuel Fischer has an inflammation of the middle ear. But they celebrate anyway, toasting young life and its rich prospects. At th
e end of August the Schnitzlers set off in leisurely fashion via St Moritz and Sils Maria, where on 28 August in the ‘Waldhaus’, they celebrate Goethe’s birthday and also, just a bit, their tenth anniversary.
We can’t forget Kafka, or his bride! So how did Felice Bauer react to reading the most preposterous marriage proposal of all time? She was distraught. But even she, hardened as she is by now, probably hadn’t thought Kafka capable of surpassing that disastrous note of self-incrimination masked as a marriage proposal. But then Kafka writes his ‘Letter to the Father’. It never became as famous as the one he wrote to his own father. But it deserved to, because it’s simply incredible. On 28 August, Goethe’s birthday, Kafka asks Felice’s father whether he would entrust his daughter to him. Or rather: he implores him desperately not to entrust his daughter to him: