Like Rilke and Freud, Arthur Schnitzler is in Munich during the first days of September. He is staying at the Hotel Continental and attending the rehearsals of his play Liebelei. As chance will have it, his former lover Marie, known as Mizi, has a leading role. This Marie Glümer, ‘Mz’ in the diaries, is a former patient and one of those ‘sweet girls’ from Vienna that Schnitzler always loved, who had a grip on their guilty consciences, girls you could take out to dinner, or take on outings, no more than that, and who fitted nicely into the bourgeois lives of their lovers. But now, in Munich, where he is staying with his wife, things become a little unclear.
On 9 September he is invited to Leopoldstrasse, to someone who loves women as much as he does: ‘Lieslo takes us to see Heinrich Mann, who lives here with his lover, a Prague Jewess. He introduces her as his wife and insists she be addressed and treated accordingly. Duke and Miss Morena are also there. Coffee on the terrace. Tolerable conversation. I cannot find Frau Mann as bad as other people paint her. Everyone together to the lake.’ And the atmosphere? ‘There is none.’
In Düsseldorf the lawyer Carl Schmitt waits daily to be discovered. In the evening he goes to bed with his lover Cari and is, as he confides in his diary, ‘wonderfully clumsy’: ‘nice fingering at night’.
So it goes, day after day; there’s nothing to do in court and the publishers reject his book The Value of the State, which contains Schmitt’s big anti-individualist programme. But then on 20 September the time has come. The publisher Mohr wants to publish Schmitt’s book, and the author grows an extra three feet tall: ‘Wonderful autumn weather. I feel like a great man walking unrecognised through the streets with secret superiority.’
Sadly it is not to last. On 30 September he writes after a visit to a concert: ‘The music stirred up all my complexes. I wanted to kill myself. What’s the point? No one cares about me, I don’t care about anybody. If only my book was there.’ Then, according to his wonderfully naïve hope, everything will be fine. But even the lawyer Dr Carl Schmitt cannot enforce such a law.
On 25 September 1913 Charlie Chaplin signs his first film contract with Keystone Studios. He receives $150 a week during the shoot for his début film, Making a Living.
Walther Rathenau publishes his book On the Mechanics of the Mind, in which he – chairman of the board of AEG and one of the central figures in German business – warns sharply of the dangers of technology and mechanisation to purity and the ‘Empire of the Soul’. He dedicates the book to ‘the young race’.
OCTOBER
This is the month when Thomas Mann’s past catches up with him. In Dresden-Hellerau the avant-garde gather to watch a mystery play. Young Germans go hiking on the Meissner, which has been known as the ‘High Meissner’ ever since. Emil Nolde leaves Berlin to join an expedition to the South Pacific. August Macke finds paradise in Switzerland, by the shores of sunny Lake Thun. This month’s big question: is it OK to feel repulsed by the sight of Franz Werfel? And how much avant-garde can Berlin handle? Completely out of the blue, Ludwig Meidner paints a battlefield, which he calls Apocalyptic Landscape. Kaiser Wilhelm II inaugurates the Monument to the Battle of the Nations. Freud picks up his hat – and throws it at some mushrooms.
(illustration credits 10.1)
Between 11 and 13 October the legendary meeting of reformist and youth movement groups takes place on the 753-metre-high Meissner in the Kaufunger Wald. Ever since then, the mountain has been known as the ‘High Meissner’. The German Woodstock of the last generation to be born in the nineteenth century is an attempt to unite the Wandervogel hiking associations and the Free German youth groups in the open air. It’s a protest against the pompous statement of hyper-German patriotism going on at the same time in Leipzig, with the inauguration of the Leipzig Monument to the Battle of the Nations. A huge camp of tents assembles at the base of the mountain, with two thousand youths taking part. They hike through the forests, sing, take part in debates and listen to a variety of speakers. One of these is Ludwig Klages, who tells the young people that the modern age poses a grave threat, endangering Germany’s forests and, by association, the very essence of the German life principle. Klages warns them about technology destroying nature and pleads for a return to a more natural way of life. Titled ‘Man and Earth’, his provocative speech is a warning against progress and environmental destruction. The logo for the gathering on the ‘High Meissner’ is created by the reformist Fidus, a painter of down-to-earth yet sublime watercolours, in his dramatic painting Hohe Wacht, printed in the commemorative publication: young, naked men, with blades at their belt, stare proudly upwards. These men are also the audience for the young student Walter Benjamin’s very first public appearance. Having just switched from Freiburg to Berlin University, he has come to the mountain with his friends. As one of the speakers at the gathering, he explains that there can only be a truly free German youth once anti-Semitism and chauvinism are no longer in the picture. Next, the progressive educator Gustav Wynekens, co-founder of the Wickersdorf Free School and Walter Benjamin’s teacher, appeals to the crowd of young people:
Does it have to get to the point when a speaker only needs to call out certain words to you – like ‘Germany’, or ‘national’ – to hear your applause and cheers? Should every pushy prattler be able to win you over just by adopting the right vocabulary? When I gaze at the shining valleys of our Fatherland, I only hope the day will never come when warmongering hordes rage through them. And what’s more, that the day will never come when we are compelled to carry war into the valleys of another nation.
The conference’s closing statement, the ‘Meissner Formula’, sworn to by all the participants, is much less dramatic. It states that ‘the free German youth bases its life around inner truthfulness.’ Conference also rules that ‘all events of the free German youth will be alcohol- and nicotine-free.’ Alcohol- and nicotine-free: no wonder it never turned into a revolution! Herbert Eulenberg said something along similar lines in his rhyming foreword: ‘My greetings to the youth that is no longer drinking/Instead, hiking through Germany and thinking.’ But once everyone comes back down from the mountain, returning to the valleys of the Fatherland, disillusionment quickly sets in. For Walter Benjamin too, who draws the following conclusion under the pseudonym ‘Ardor’ in Fritz Pfemfert’s Berlin magazine Die Aktion: ‘Hikes, festive garb and folk dances are not the ultimate and – in the year 1913 – not yet intellectual. This youth has not yet found its enemy, the born enemy it must hate.’ Benjamin misses the uprising against the fathers of the previous, affluent generations. He misses parricide. It’s worth noting, though, that he writes these fine words – and hopefully Benjamin disciples will forgive him for this – from his parents’ house at 23 Delbrückstrasse in Berlin, having moved back home following his semester in Freiburg.
But let’s give him credit for coming back from Freiburg to Berlin. As Else Lasker-Schüler said in 1913: ‘The artist will always come back to Berlin: for the clock of art is here, and it moves neither back nor forwards.’
After days of rain, the sunshine is causing mushrooms to shoot up from the ground all over the place. Sigmund Freud, visibly relieved that he managed to handle the gathering of psychoanalysts with dignity and good grace (and with a nice defeat for Jung), goes mushrooming on Sunday with his family. They all have their little wicker baskets with them, covered with checked cloths, and their eyes are fixed on the mossy ground of the Vienna Woods. Sometimes they go to the Semmering mountain too, where everyone whispers about the love nest that Mahler’s widow, Alma, is building out there for herself and the chaotic painter Kokoschka. But Freud and his family are drawn to the woods, not the summer residences. The children slip into their dirndls and shorts, Freud into his lederhosen, his green jacket and the hat with the gamsbart, and then the hunt begins. Freud leads the mushroom hunters – and it is always he who, with his eagle eye, finds the best mushrooms in the most hidden of spots. He then takes a few steps forward, pulls off his hat, throws it over the mushro
om and whistles shrilly through his silver pipe, bringing his fellow hunters storming out from the undergrowth. Then, once he has the whole family’s rapt attention, he finally lifts his hat and lets them admire the booty. Anna, his beloved daughter, is usually granted the honour of laying the mushroom in her basket.
Just when Futurism is once again being proclaimed as the movement of the hour in Berlin, with Tommaso Marinetti speaking at the ‘First German Autumn Salon’, Dr Alfred Döblin, the great doctor, great author and great friend of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Else Lasker-Schüler, publishes his ‘Letter to F. T. Marinetti’. It contains these delightful words: ‘You tend to your Futurism, I’ll tend to my Döblinism.’ Döblin is unwilling to accept the destruction of syntax promoted by Marinetti in his Futurist Manifesto as the basis of a new literature and art form. Instead, Döblin asks this of writers: don’t destroy, but rather get closer to life.
But when writers get closer to life, a collision can easily occur. On 28 October 1913 the following announcement appears in the Lübeck Nachrichten:
In the course of the last twelve years, the publication of Buddenbrooks, written by my nephew, Mr Thomas Mann from Munich, has caused me so many difficulties, resulting in the saddest of consequences for me, and these will now be added to by the publication of Wilhelm Albert’s book Thomas Mann and his Duty. For this reason, I feel compelled to turn to the reading public and ask that they give the aforementioned book the reception it deserves. I’m sure every person in their right mind will find it to be reprehensible that the creator of Buddenbrooks is using caricature to drag his closest relatives through the mud and flagrantly expose their lives. It is a sad bird who dirties his own nest.
Friedrich Mann, Hamburg.
These are the words of Mann’s then 67-year-old Uncle Friedrich, who is known as ‘Christian’ in Buddenbrooks. Thomas Mann delivers an amused response in a letter to his brother: ‘Did he feel he was being passed up in favour of Christian B., and perhaps wanted to remind people of his existence? I pity him, truly. My Christian Buddenbrook would never have written a letter like that.’
After fifteen years of construction, the grandiose Monument to the Battle of the Nations is inaugurated in Leipzig on 18 October, in honour of the hundredth anniversary of the battle against Napoleon. Kaiser Wilhelm II pays tribute to the fighting spirit of the German people. The 91-metre-high monument, at a cost of 6 million Reichsmarks, commemorating the defeat of the French at the hands of the Prussians and their Russian and Austrian allies, was funded entirely from donations and lottery funding. The dark stone is granite porphyry, quarried in Baucha near Leipzig: 26,500 pieces of granite and 120,000 cubic metres of concrete were used for its construction. The inauguration of Clemens Thieme’s monument is attended by the German Kaiser, the king of Saxony, as well as all the rulers of all the German states and representatives of Austria, Russia and Sweden. The inauguration becomes a national, martial celebration with a grand parade. Dignitaries from the three victor countries lay down wreaths at the foot of the monument. Afterwards, there is a celebratory dinner in the Gewandhaus for 450 guests. No toast is made to freedom, only to the indestructible brotherhood of arms between Prussia and Austro-Hungary.
For just five days, from 23 October onwards, this brotherhood is given a test-run: on pheasants. Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, who was in Leipzig for the inauguration of the Monument to the Battle of the Nations, has just achieved the Serbians’ withdrawal from Albania in the Second Balkan War through an adept diplomatic initiative. This relieves and impresses the German Kaiser Wilhelm so much that he visits the heir in his castle in Konopiště. The two men get along magnificently. Franz Ferdinand organises a two-day hunt, on which Kaiser Wilhelm II, believe it or not, shoots 1,100 pheasants. Unfortunately, he only eats one for dinner.
In Ludwig Meidner’s studio at 21 Wilhelmshöher Strasse in Berlin-Friedenau an illustrious circle gathers every Wednesday evening: Jakob van Hoddis, famed for his doomsday poem ‘Weltende’, Paul Zech, René Schickele, Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Pinthus and Max Hermann-Neisse. First, the master of the house shows the guests his latest works. He calls them ‘Apocalyptic Landscapes’. They are in keeping with his motto: ‘Paint your grief, your entire insanity and sanctity out of the whole of your being.’ In Meidner’s landscapes everything is exploding. In 1913 he paints The City and I, a picture in which his head seems to be exploding just like the city behind it. The sun hangs there shakily in the background, as if about to fall down.
Meidner is repeatedly overcome by these visions of horror. He works obsessively, day and night, in his little atelier in Friedenau. He writes: ‘A painful impulse inspired me to break away from all straight-lined verticals. To spread ruin, destruction and ashes across all landscapes. My brain bled amid these awful visions. All I could see was a thousand-strong roundelay of skeletons prancing around in front of me. Numerous graves and burned-out cities with plains winding through them.’
The cities burn, as do the faces of the people – even his own, albeit contorted with pain – and the landscape is torn apart by bombs and war. An eerie light plays ghost-like above it all. Armed with his paintbrush, Meidner seems to be fighting against the sinister powers threatening him, and he tries to exorcise his nightmares by putting them down on paper. He takes Cubism and Expressionism very seriously. He names his traumatic paintings Vision of the Trenches or, repeatedly, Apocalyptic Landscape. He lives, as we already mentioned, in idyllic Friedenau. These are warm, peaceful October days. And the year is 1913. The friends who visit him on Wednesday evenings see the pictures and grow concerned about their creator. Is he losing his mind?
On 17 October, a month after the airship L1 crashed into the sea by Heligoland, the military airship L2 explodes over Johannisthal, near Berlin, on its maiden voyage. Its thirty-man crew dies as the burning wreck crashes to the ground, sending a nearby pine forest up in flames, and the bodies of the soldiers on board are burned to a cinder. Their namesake, Count Zeppelin, writes to Great Admiral von Tirpitz that very same day: ‘Who could be more stricken or grieve more deeply with the Navy than I?’
Reviews of the re-opening of the Neue Galerie opened in autumn 1913 by Otto Feldmann at 6a Lennéstrasse in Berlin spoke of the state of Picasso’s reputation, and that of Modernism in general. This inaugural exhibition is the reason, thus far overlooked, why such greats from the French art world as Picasso and Braque were not on display at the ‘First German Autumn Salon’, which was being held at the same time. Kahnweiler, their Parisian dealer, was more keen on selling the works than exhibiting them, and sent them to the more commercial rival exhibition in Berlin. If you consider them together, the two exhibitions collected the entire artistic repertoire of the year 1913 and, moreover, its heroes. For next to the Paris artists Neumann also showed ‘negro sculptures’, Hellenistic sculptures and ‘Oriental’ pieces. Early works from cultural expeditions to distant lands, which were having such a great influence on artists at the time, were therefore mixed with European works – and Carl Einstein, who would become famous for his book about Negro Sculpture, wrote the foreword. It was a fascinating display of the situation of French art around 1913. In the magazine Die Kunst, however, Kurt Glaser drew the following surprising conclusion about new art salons in Berlin: ‘A still-life by Matisse is exhibited, the colours lacking impact. Picasso has a whole wall to himself, and you get the impression that it’s been designated as the exhibition’s shrine. Perhaps a little late, too, for one would hope that the fuss that has been made about these decent but nonetheless feeble artists will soon die down.’ But Feldmann refused to be deterred by this. In December, straight after his inaugural show, he exhibited sixty-six of Picasso’s works, again commissioned by Kahnweiler. The German critics kept up their attack: a review in Cicerone stated that Picasso, whose Cubist works were included in the exhibition, ‘still doesn’t seem very strong, or very independent for that matter’. The great Karl Scheffler gave his judgement in Kunst und Künstler: ‘And there’s really not
much that can be said about Picasso.’ In the magazine Die Kunst the devastating verdict is that ‘there can hardly be any doubt that Picasso has reached a dead end.’
There’s only one person missing from this line-up: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. There was no trace of his work in either exhibition, because he was in the process of creating something entirely new and wonderful. He returns to Berlin from Fehmarn at the end of September, happy and laden down with paintings. His months by the sea have produced sixty. Now he wants to leave the old times behind him, as well as the dissolution of Die Brücke and the apartment on Durlacher Strasse. He and Erna Schilling hunt for a new den together, and find one at 45 Körnerstrasse. They are back in Berlin, that ‘tastelessly muddled and rather senselessly unfurling city’, as Rilke so eloquently described it at the time. Kirchner discovered a new type of woman on Fehmarn, modelled on Erna and Maschka as they emerged naked from the gentle tides of the Baltic Sea. These bodies are almost Gothic, tapering off towards the top, with faces whose features appear carved as if into a piece of wood. While Erna dedicates herself to transforming the Körnerstrasse studio into an art work of sculptures, paintings, hangings and embroidery, with great expanses of cushions for the models and their friends to lie around on in comfort, Kirchner is drawn back out to Potsdamer Platz.
1913- The Year Before the Storm Page 19