Out of gratitude to his patron and saviour Ludwig von Ficker he allows himself to be persuaded to make a public appearance, in spite of his desolate state of mind. He reads at the fourth literary soirée of Ficker’s magazine Der Brenner in the Innsbruck Musikvereinssaal. And the poet must have spoken as if he were still mumbling as he walked along the beach of the Lido in Venice: ‘Unfortunately the poet read too faintly, as if from things hidden, things past or yet to come, and only later could one discern from the monotonously prayer-like murmurings the words and phrases, then images and rhythms that form his futuristic poetry.’ So wrote Josef Anton Steurer in the Allgemeiner Tiroler Anzeiger.
Between these two disastrous appearances, at the Lido and before the Musikverein, one of the central chapters of twentieth-century German-language lyric poetry is produced. A total of fifty-nine poems, including the major works ‘Sebastian in a Dream’ and the ‘Kaspar Hauser Lied’ (one devoted to the Venice-lover Adolf Loos, the other to his wife, Bessie), and ‘Transformation of Evil’. In fact, he produces 499 poems, or 4,999, because Trakl’s poems are never finished; there are countless versions, over-writings, rewritings, corrections and variants. Again and again he picks up his pen, changes the manuscripts; again and again he writes to the publishers of the magazines that publish his poems, that this word must be changed to that, and that to this. A ‘blue’ can become a ‘black’, a ‘quiet’ a ‘wise’. You can see him dragging motifs around with him, trying to capture them verse by verse and, if it still doesn’t work, crossing them out again and then carrying them on to the next poem, to the next year. ‘In an elevated sense unimprovable’, Albert Ehrenstein wrote of Georg Trakl. But that is incorrect. Even he still needed improving. But only by himself. His poems are montages of things heard and things read (above all, Rimbaud and Hölderlin), and things sensed. But it may also happen to him, as in the poem ‘Transfiguration’ from November 1913, that what begins as a ‘blue spring’ that ‘breaks from the dead rocks’ turns finally into the ‘blue flower’, ‘which sounds quietly among the gilded rocks’. Romanticism is always the starting-point, but it is also the longed-for destination of Trakl, the quiet musician. Nine times the blue flower blooms in Trakl’s poems in autumn 1913 alone. But in his inscription for the grave of the nineteen-century poet Novalis it already blossoms in an early version. But no sooner has the ‘blue’ faded and been crossed out than many new verbal experiments follow. Then the flower can be anything: first ‘nocturnal’, then ‘radiant’ and finally ‘rosy’. In their bid to sound prophetic, Trakl’s poems lack concision. Instead, what glimmers here in all its magnificence, in all its power, is the vocabulary of the German language of the Salzburg late Baroque, before Trakl opens the door to the engine room of his inspiration and allows the pestilential breath of death to blow over it, the icy breath of his soul. Everywhere flowers are dying, the forests darkening, the deer fleeing, voices falling mute.
A dead man visits you.
The self-poured blood runs from his heart.
And in his black brow there nests unspeakable moment;
Dark encounter
You – purple moon, appearing in the green shade
Of the olive tree.
After him comes everlasting night.
These everlasting vanitas experiences seem too existentially lived to be accused of verbal frenzy, even kitsch. Trakl could only express himself through poetry; his corrections and rewritings are his autobiography. He saw the dark, he captured the fleeting, he interrogated the intangible. He looked within himself and thus became the witness of the invisible, with an imagination only truly liberated through introspection.
Trakl hones his words, battles with his language until he knows he can release it into the world. A world in which he himself cannot survive. His poems – even those about the last days of mankind – do not herald disaster. In them history has long since taken what Friedrich Dürrenmatt calls ‘the worst possible turn’, precisely because it has now been thought and written down as poetry.
Robert Musil is tired and goes to bed before his wife. But he can’t get to sleep, and eventually he hears her going to the bathroom to get herself ready. Then he takes his notepad, which always lies on his bedside table, and his pencil, and simply writes down what he is experiencing:
I hear you putting on your night dress. But it doesn’t stop there by any means. Again there are a hundred little actions. I know you are hurrying; clearly it is all necessary. I understand: we watch the mute gestures of animals, amazed that they, who are supposed to have no soul, line up their actions from dawn till dusk. It is exactly the same. You have no awareness of the countless moves you make, above all those that seem necessary to you, and remain quite unimportant. But they loom widely into your life. I, as I wait, feel it by chance.
Love is also apparent in feeling, marvelling, enthusiastic, tender hearing and observing.
On 1 November, King Otto of Bavaria is officially declared insane. The doctors diagnose the ‘final stage of a long-lasting psychical illness’. This makes the accession to the throne of the Prince Regent Ludwig as Ludwig III a legal possibility.
Woyzeck is mad and hallucinates: ‘Everything is in flames above the city! A fire blazes around the sky and a roar as if of trombones.’ On 8 November in the Residenztheater in Munich the unfinished drama Woyzeck, written in 1836 by Georg Büchner, who was born in 1813, is given its première, after years of lobbying by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It belongs wonderfully in this year and has chosen exactly the right moment to enter the public consciousness. What a play, what language, what pace! Almost eighty years old, and still quite contemporary. It is a parallel story to Heinrich Mann’s novel Man of Straw, except much more violent and archaic. Woyzeck is abused by a doctor for medical experiments, and then by the army captain, who humiliates him. When his beloved Marie betrays him with the brash ‘drum major’, he can no longer control his aggression and stabs her. The victim becomes the perpetrator. ‘The central point becomes’, in the words of the critic Alfred Kerr – ‘tormenting humanity, not the tormented human being.’ It is a proletarian drama, a play of revolt and rebellion. Rilke is speechless with enthusiasm: ‘It is a play like no other, that abused human being standing in his stable-jacket in the universe, malgré lui, in the infinite procession of the stars. That is theatre, that is what theatre could be.’ But it is above all the celebration of a unique kind of language that runs around between hallucination and fairy tale, the gutter and poetry, and comes down on you like a buzzard. At the end of the play a fairy tale is told about a lonely child:
And since there was no one left on earth, it wanted to go to heaven, and the moon looked down on it so kindly and when at last it came to the moon it was a piece of rotten wood and then it went to the sun and when it came to the sun it was a withered sunflower. And when it came to the stars, they were little golden flies, stuck on the way the shrike sticks them on the blackthorn and when it wanted to go back to earth, the earth was an upturned pot and the child was all alone.
This was a fairy tale very much in line with the taste of 1913. Unconsoling, beyond any utopian thoughts but full of poetry.
Ernst Jünger has ‘inwardly made excessively great preparations’. His desire for danger drives him to Bad Rehburg, the spa town that smells of cows and turf and old people, and out of the parental home, whose bull-glass windows the light barely penetrates.
In August he had climbed to his father’s greenhouse in his winter clothes to prepare his body for extreme conditions. Now he feels ripe for Africa. For years he has read adventure stories of journeys into the heart of darkness under his desk at school. Now he wants to go there himself. ‘One damp and misty autumn afternoon I went into a junk shop with much fear and trembling to buy a six-shooter revolver with ammunition. It cost 12 Marks. I left the shop with a feeling of triumph, before going immediately into a bookshop and buying a fat book, The Secrets of the Dark Hemisphere, which I considered indispensable.’
Then, with book and revolver
in his bag, he sets off on 3 November without telling a soul. But how do you get from Rehburg to Africa by train? Unfortunately geography has never been his strong point. Now Ernst Jünger buys a pipe so he feels grown up and to strengthen his adventurous heart, and then he buys a fourth-class ticket and travels south-west from station to station. He travels on, first to Trier and then through Alsace-Lorraine; Jünger keeps on going and eventually, after an aimless odyssey, on 8 November he has reached Verdun, where he joins the Foreign Legion. He is assigned to the 26th Instruction Regiment as number 15,308, and taken to Marseille, where he boards a ship for the promised land: Africa. The local newspaper reports:
Bad Rehburg, 16 November. The sixth-former as Foreign Legionary. Jünger of the lower sixth, a son of the mine-owner Dr Jünger, applied to join the French Foreign Legion and is already on his way via Marseille to Africa. The father of the unfortunate young man has applied to the Foreign Office in Berlin for help. The German embassy has been instructed to contact the French government to release Jünger.
After their wedding in May, Victoria Louise of Prussia and Prince Ernst August of Hanover move to Braunschweig. For the first time in almost fifty years there is once again a member of the Guelph family as ruling count of Braunschweig. The young couple are very happy and go on to have five children.
In the small garrison town of Zabern in Alsace-Lorraine, which has been part of the German Reich since 1871, something horrendous happens on 28 November. In the evening a few dozen demonstrators turn up outside the German army barracks, protesting that the regiment commander Baron Günter von Forstner has declared that all Frenchmen are ‘Wackes’ – a term of abuse for the Alsatian French – and that ‘you can shit on the French flag’. These words had reached the local newspaper and provoked shock among the population. When the demonstrators hold up placards and ask for respect, the commander of the regiment has three infantry units advance with live ammunition and bayonets at the ready. Panic breaks out among the demonstrators, but the German soldiers lay into them and arrest more than thirty people, including some innocent passers-by. They are locked in a coal cellar without light and toilets. Then commander Baron Günter von Forstner says the following words: ‘I consider it a great fortune if blood flows now […] I am in charge, I owe it to the army to create respect.’
Five days later he is recognised with a troop of soldiers, and some workers at a shoe factory call him ‘the Wackes Lieutenant’, whereupon he loses his temper and brings his sabre down on the head of a disabled hostage, who cannot run away quickly enough, making him collapse in a pool of blood.
The very next day the Reichstag in Berlin discusses events in Zabern. The ‘Zabern Affair’ threatened peace between France and the German Reich more than any previous event. The German war minister, Erich von Falkenhayn, refuses to be diverted by this open flouting of the law by the German army. He claims that ‘noisy rioters’ and ‘provocative organs of the press’ are responsible for the intensification of the situation in Zabern. In response there are fights in the Landtag, and the opposition opposes any illegal actions by the military. The centre-party member Konstantin Fehrenbach: ‘The army is also subject to the law, and if we place the army outside the law and abandon the civilian population to the arbitrary rule of the army, then, gentlemen: Finis Germaniae! … It will be a disaster for the German Reich.’ But the real disaster is yet to come, because the German head of state, Wilhelm II, actually approves of the spirited response of the German military and cannot find anything really dramatic in the so-called ‘Zabern Affair’. But the reaction in the European press reached a furore when the sentence of Commander Forstner, which initially carried a prison term of only 43 days for grievous bodily harm, was reduced on appeal in the higher military court to acquittal. Forstner, the judges ruled, had acted in ‘putative self-defence’ and was consequently innocent. The left-liberal Frankfurter Zeitung acknowledges the frightening message of this acquittal: ‘The bourgeoisie has suffered a defeat. That is the actual, visible sign of the Zabern trial […] In the argument between military force and civilian force, the court martial has laid down the right of the unrestricted dominion of the former towards the bourgeoisie.’
In 1913 Prada is founded and opens its first shop, selling high-class leather goods in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan.
In mid-November, Kaiser Wilhelm takes the train to Halbe, to the ‘Kaiser Station’, then continues on into the forest of Dubrow, south of Berlin. The hunt begins at half-past one in the afternoon, in an area spanned with cloths and nets. By the time the horn is blown again at a quarter to three, a total of 560 animals have been killed. Kaiser Wilhelm II alone has killed ten stags and ten boar. At the hunt dinner in the evening he asks that a memorial be erected to his marksmanship forthwith.
November 1913 produces the most intimate, sympathetic and perhaps most honest correspondence between Thomas and Heinrich Mann. Thomas Mann is not in a good way right now. His wife, Katia, isn’t getting any better; her cough, which she has been trying to heal for months, even years, in sanatoriums, is there again, more hacking than ever. And for the first time he is in debt, having over-reached himself with the construction of a house on Poschingerstrasse, now almost completed. He asks his publisher Samuel Fischer for an advance of 3,000 Marks for his next novel. And to his brother Heinrich he writes: ‘I have only ever been interested in decay, and that is precisely what prevents me from taking an interest in progress.’ And then:
But what nonsense is that. Things are serious when all the wretchedness of the times and of the fatherland weigh down on one, and one does not have the strength to shape it. But that is part of the wretchedness of the times and of the fatherland. Or will it find shape in Man of Straw? I look forward more to your works than I do to my own. You are spiritually better off, and that’s the crucial thing.
And then, with unusual warm brotherly love: ‘It is of course crassly tactless of me to write to you like this, for what can you reply?’ But Heinrich Mann, who will conclude his great novel of the times, Man of Straw, in the next few months, clearly knows what to reply. We don’t know his reaction. But we do know Thomas’s: ‘For your intelligent, tender letter I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’ And again, a kind of sudden declaration of love to his sibling: ‘In my fondest hours I have long dreamt of writing another long and faithful book of life, a continuation of Buddenbrooks, the story of us five siblings. We are worth it. All of us.’ Never again will he grant his brother so deep an insight into his soul, so tortured by weariness and doubts.
Still no sign of the Mona Lisa.
Marcel Duchamp still doesn’t feel like making art, but he has an idea. ‘Can one,’ he wonders, ‘create works that are not art works?’ And then, in the autumn, in his new flat on Rue Saint-Hippolyte in Paris, the front wheel of a bicycle suddenly appears, and he mounts it on an ordinary kitchen stool. Marcel Duchamp mentions it quite casually: ‘It was something I wanted to have in my room, the way one has a fireplace or a pencil sharpener, except that it was not in any way useful. It’s a pleasant device, pleasant because of the movements it made.’ Duchamp finds it so calming to spin the wheel with his hand. He likes its endless rotation on its own axis. While in Paris and Berlin and Moscow artists are still fighting about whether Cubism, Realism, Expressionism or Abstraction is the royal road, the young Duchamp just puts a bicycle wheel in his kitchen and thus creates the first ‘ready-made’. It’s the most casual quantum leap in art history.
On 20 November, Franz Kafka notes in his diary: ‘Went to the cinema. Wept.’
Emotional overload in the cinema brings the youth protection officers out in force. The pedagogue Adolf Sellman writes in the foreword to his book Cinema and School:
The teaching body is prepared to draw attention to all the dangers posed by bad cinema, and to protect our young people against them. School must work to enlighten, in such a way that within and without its walls it will be apparent what bad intellectual nourishment is available in cinemas, even tod
ay. School must ensure enlightenment in the press, at parents’ evenings and conferences. It must urge that legal measures and police regulations be passed so that our young people are granted protection against all the corrupting influences that the cinema can exert.
In Fulda the German Episcopal Conference draws up special guidelines for the clergy to protect against the negative effects of visiting the cinema. No longer was anyone to weep at trashy tales! The demand is made that children under the age of six should not be allowed into the cinema. And adults should also avoid morally inferior films.
That is what is known as a pious wish.
What a lovely name: Albert Duke Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein. Thanks to the marriage of one of his ancestors to a princess of Sachsen-Coburg long ago in the nineteenth century, Albert Mensdorff, known as Duke Ali, was related to almost all the courts of Europe, a fact that delighted him anew every day. The cousin of the British king, and Imperial Ambassador in London, pulls off his masterstroke in November 1913. King George V writes to him, hoping that the archduke and duchess will be able to come to Windsor in November for a few days’ shooting. Can they? It’s the first official invitation to the successor to the Austrian throne and his wife, Countess Sophie, hitherto subjected to an endless series of official humiliations. Duke von Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein knows what he has succeeded in doing, and therefore writes to Archduke Franz Ferdinand: ‘As you know, such official occasions, with dinners, toasts, receptions, theatres etc. etc., where one becomes half sick and plagued to death, have always been a horror to me.’ It is a bad joke, because the duke is really the biggest party animal in the world of Austro-Hungarian diplomacy – he keeps the menu from each of his dinners and the next morning draws a seating plan, marking on it who was sitting next to him. His reason for denouncing the social aspect of the archduke’s visit has entirely to do with the fact that he and the successor to the throne cordially dislike one another. But the archduke couldn’t care less. He is enjoying making his first official trip abroad with his wife. And he is enjoying the fact that barely two weeks after the hunt with Kaiser Wilhelm he is now able to go pheasant shooting with King George V near Windsor Castle. Franz Ferdinand and the king are accompanied by three English earls, while the ladies chat in Windsor Castle and listen to concerts. On Tuesday 18 November a thousand pheasants and 450 wild ducks are brought down by the marksmen after being driven into the line of fire by beaters. On Wednesday 19 November, in the loveliest sunshine, they shoot 1,700 pheasants. On Thursday they shoot about 1,000. And then on Friday, with rain lashing the faces of the royal hunting party, 800 pheasants and 800 wild ducks are slaughtered. A bloodbath.
1913- The Year Before the Storm Page 22