Sketch of Emil Fahrenkamp’s Bauhaus-style hotel built in 1927 on Monte Verità
After the war, the Baron’s relations with Nazi officialdom came under Swiss scrutiny. He had rejoined the Nazi Party in 1933 and took Swiss citizenship in 1937. Swiss authorities accused him of treason (for violating neutrality by passing funds), but he was eventually acquitted. A declassified document from no less a source than J. Edgar Hoover attests to his ‘being a German espionage agent remitting funds to other German agents operating in the United States and Mexico’.35
Following the Baron’s acquittal, Monte Verità became the property of Canton Ticino. His considerable art collection, donated to the city of Zürich in 1945, forms the basis of the present Museum Rietberg. The Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal also has a rich collection of mostly oriental artworks. Was a deal struck with the Swiss authorities – acquittal in exchange for art? The museum in Zürich comes clean about the Baron’s Nazi allegiance. but it is clear who has benefited: ‘The judgement, therefore, was lenient and influenced by concern for his patronage. Had von der Heydt been found guilty, he would have lost his Swiss citizenship and he would probably have left Switzerland and taken his artworks out of the country.’36 The museum is a big supporter of provenance research.
A certain irony attends a high-level meeting in October 1997 at Monte Verità, convened by the Bergier Commission to report on the so-called Nazi gold, Raubengeld, and Jewish dormant accounts. Representatives of the US Jewish community sought to bring to a close a decades-long struggle to unearth the truth about Swiss banking conduct during the war and to seek reparations. And so H.G. Wells’ dream of a peace conference among the nudists, vegetarians and nature lovers came eventually to pass. What began as a utopian experiment in the last decades of the nineteenth century ended in a post-war Swiss quagmire of bankers, funny money and dodgy art.
6
KEEPING THE WARS AT ARM’S LENGTH
James Joyce’s wanderlust in Zürich
Sketch by Frank Budgen showing himself and James Joyce in Zürich during the First World War
Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.
James Joyce
When James Joyce and Nora Barnacle first arrived in Zürich, on the morning of 11 October 1904, they were living on borrowed funds. Joyce was wearing another man’s boots. Eloping from Ireland, via Paris, they took a room in the Gasthaus Hoffnung at 16 Reitergasse in Zürich. This was where the young lovers consummated their union. Hoffnung (hope) often proved elusive during the decades ahead, but they were to stick by each other through poverty, two world wars, family crisis and literary fame. They were to find themselves back in Zürich again and again, always by the skin of their teeth.
The proprietor of the guesthouse behind the station was called Döblin, a name the superstitious Joyce appreciated. Under the impression a job was waiting for him at the Berlitz School, Joyce next morning discovered to his dismay there was no such thing. The Director did his best to find the penniless Irish graduate a teaching position in Switzerland, but without success.
Writing to his brother Stanislaus, Joyce emphasised shortage of funds and the secrecy surrounding his elopement: ‘Go about the highways of the city but not to any of my touched friends and make up £1 before Saturday which send me on that day without fail.’1 The twenty-two-year-old couldn’t resist a laddish boast: ‘Finalement, elle n’est pas encore vièrge; elle est touchée.’
The lovers spent a week in Zürich, kicking their heels. Eventually a vacancy turned up in Trieste on the Adriatic. They were off again. That vacancy too proved as elusive as the Swiss one and they continued down the coast to Pola. It was to be a vagabond life.
A decade later, in July 1914, Austria declared war on Serbia. In August, Great Britain entered the war. As holders of British passports, the Joyces in Austro-Hungarian Trieste grew worried. Joyce’s brother was interned as an enemy alien in January 1915. In May of that year, Italy mobilised its army, prompting anti-Italian demonstrations in Trieste. Despite the encroaching debacle, Joyce was gestating the novel that would make his name and send its own salvoes across the literary landscape. In a letter to Ezra Pound, he informed the poet that he had already completed the first two episodes of Ulysses (1922).
And so, on 28 June 1915, leaving behind all their furniture and belongings, the Joyce family were able to leave for Zürich from the Southern Railway Station. Weighed down with suitcases, which fortunately were not checked by the Austrian police at the border, they took a train bound for Innsbruck through the Brenner Pass. They were to come back for less than nine months at the end of the war after Trieste had become Italian, but only to depart once more, in 1920, for Paris. Never to return.2
Their train was detained at Innsbruck to allow the emperor’s train to pass. Joyce had declared earlier in Trieste: ‘Kings are mountebanks. Republics are slippers for everyone’s feet.’ Nonetheless, his eleven years in Trieste under Austro-Hungarian rule – ‘Each archduke proud, the whole jimbang crowd’3 – had been benign.
The Joyces returned for a nostalgic stay in Gasthaus Hoffnung before settling into Zürich for the duration of the war. In the interim two children had been born, Joyce had matured as a writer and the realities of poverty, drink and prostitutes had strained his and Nora’s relationship. It had been a scramble to get out of Trieste, then the principal port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Sales of Dubliners (1914) stood at 499 copies. The manuscript of ‘Stephen Hero’, tinkered with in 1904, had become A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Published serially in The Egoist, it was a succès d’estime. Five publishers turned it down and seven printers refused to set up the type. Joyce had to wait until the last days of 1916 for book publication. His novel of growing up in Dublin in the last decades of the nineteenth century sank virtually unnoticed during the First World War.
Shortly after arriving in Zürich, Joyce was awarded £75 from the Royal Literary Fund, and so buttoned his lip as regards mountebanks. He was granted a Civil List fund in 1916 as well as other monies privately donated to an author who was beginning to attract notice. In 1904 and on this occasion in 1915 he had arrived in Zürich skint. By the time he left for Paris in 1920, he had moved from poverty into a qualified bourgeoisie, at home with some but not all of the bürgerlich habits of the banking city.
Zürich during the First World War was awash with refugees and war profiteers – a vibrant hodgepodge of pacifists, revolutionaries, anarchists and artists who kept the Swiss police in shoe leather. Lenin arrived in 1916, taking a room one hundred yards from the Cabaret Voltaire where the Dada movement held noisy court. Switzerland had long been a crucible of Russian revolutionary thought, hosting such firebrands as Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, Piotr Kropotkin, Rosa Luxembourg and Lenin. Many of them were shielded from Siberian exile by Switzerland’s tolerance and judicial system. Lenin was a habitué of the Café Odéon and most likely rubbed shoulders there with Joyce. The political revolutionary was more outspoken about his hosts than the Irish writer:
Switzerland is the most revolutionary country in the world… There is only one slogan that you should spread quickly in Switzerland and in all other countries: armed insurrection!4
No wonder the Swiss were keen to see him safely across the border. After the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917, Lenin boarded a sealed train in Zürich that took him across Germany to the Finland Station. The rest, as they say, is history.
From a provincial town, Zürich had grown to become the centre of European modernism. Partly this had to do with the influx of German and other refugees – Joyce, Frank Wedekind, Tristan Tzara, Stefan Zweig and the painters Wassily Kandinsky and Jean Arp. Partly too it was because theatres were closed or restricted elsewhere. Little of this ferment was homegrown. Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, the wild spirits behind Dada, were German pacifists. Carl Jung’s theories derived from the Viennese Sigmund Freud. The Swiss themselves were suspicious of the backwash of foreigners
and showed scant interest in their avant-garde activities. Police files during these years followed émigré movements, as they did during the Second World War.
Zürich was where Joyce got down to writing Ulysses. The germ for the novel had come to him during an aborted stay in Rome, and its last line – ‘Trieste, Zürich, Paris’ – is, as Alain de Botton says, ‘a symbol of the cosmopolitan spirit behind its composition’.5 Leopold Bloom, its urban Jewish protagonist, borrows characteristics from Joyce’s friends and acquaintances in the rump of the Austro-Hungarian empire. But Bloom has a bit of Zürich in him too – modernist multi-culti Zürich, the Zürich of the flâneur as well as the banker. Joyce’s friends in the Swiss city were mostly Jews, Greeks and displaced Austro-Hungarians, as they had been in Trieste.
Behind him Zürich, suddenly confronted by this and other manifestations of a revolutionary spirit, sat like some austere grandmother, long since inured and indifferent to the babbling of unfamiliar progeny.6
Café Odéon in Zürich, frequented by Lenin and Joyce
Joyce’s Zürich drinking haunts signal his relative affluence. Whereas in Trieste he had frequented sailors’ dens in the port, in Zürich a better class of establishment came to the fore: the restaurant Zum Roten Kreuz, the Café Terrasse and the Café Odéon. In The End of the World News (1982), Anthony Burgess imagines Lenin and Joyce at nearby tables in Zum Roten Kreuz, both plotting revolution in two different dimensions. Together with Joyce’s regular haunt, the Pfauen Café, these locales hosted a medley of polyglot drinking, singing and repartee. As the Swiss writer Dürrenmatt reminds us, the Hapsburgs originated just outside of town, and Zürich can strike the visitor as the most western of the Mitteleuropa cities.
Many of Joyce’s hostelries still flourish a century later. The Café Odéon, reduced to a third its original size, is usually crowded with shoppers and cappuccino drinkers – bags and dogs at their feet – rather than the radical loudmouths of the early twentieth century. In winter there’s a smell of wet cashmere. Gilt mirrors and brassy bar have seen generations come and go through the stained glass doors. Across the road, the Café Terrasse is also crowded. The pastries are good, the décor a bit doily. Gone are the newspapers on batons, that quintessential feature of the central European coffeehouse, but laptops are in evidence. Oompa music on public squares has been replaced by ringtones at tables. Joyce’s bars have weathered revolutions and wars and come up in the world in the meantime.
The Joyce family viewed Zürich as an interlude that stretched to four years, intending to return to furniture and pictures in Trieste as soon as the First World War had ended. But nobody knew when that would be. They occupied a number of furnished apartments in the course of their stay, the longest at Universitätsstrasse 29. The language at home was a Triestine dialect of Italian, with Slavic undertones. Giorgio was turning ten when they arrived in Zürich, and Lucia eight. They were put back two years in school, as they knew no German. Joyce himself had quite good German – enough to write lovelorn letters to his fancy women – but for Nora the language was a trial. Market day in Locarno reminded her of Trieste: ‘It was quite lively to hear the men calling out the prices and making as much noise as they could just like in Trieste.’7
Contact with other languages in the smithy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had made Joyce intensely aware of his own, its registers, dialects, history and slang. He code shifted from Triestine Italian to Zürich German to Modern Greek. Ulysses has the cosmopolitan soundscape of the war years, its language a mixing board, its constituent parts broken down, like notes, like an opera. On any given day in Zürich you never know what languages you might encounter. Joyce became an auditor of the world’s sounds, at sea in the flotsam of language, adrift from meaning, aware of multiple levels and the interpenetration of words. A tram bell. A cry in the street. The murmur along a bar. Rutting in the next room. Vision reduced, his ears took up the slack.
It was in Zürich that Joyce’s eye troubles turned serious. His glaucoma required an iridectomy, the first of eleven operations over the next fifteen years. In 1917 he wrote to Pound:
On Saturday when walking in the street I got suddenly a violent Hexenschuss which incapacitated me from moving for about twenty minutes. I managed to crawl into a tram and get home. It got better in the evening but next day I had symptoms of glaucoma again – slightly better today. Tomorrow morning I am going to the Augenklinik. This climate is impossible for me so that, operated or not, I want to go away next month. I am advised to go to Italian Switzerland.8
Neither Joyce nor Nora adapted to Zürich’s muggy climate after balmy seaside Trieste. In August 1917, Nora and the children went ahead to Locarno while Joyce remained behind. On Bahnhofstrasse he suffered the episode of glaucoma described to Pound. The eye clinic operated successfully and Nora returned to comfort her husband. In the days following, Joyce wrote one of his more touching poems about loss of youthful vision and vim. ‘Bahnhofstrasse’ is named for Zürich’s main thoroughfare, the most expensive shopping street in the world. He was only thirty-seven.
Ah star of evil! star or pain!
Highhearted youth comes not again
Nor old heart’s wisdom yet to know
The signs that mock me as I go.
They wintered in Locarno, staying at the Pension Villa Rossa and later at the Pension Daheim. The nearby fishing village of Ascona was already an artists’ colony. But Joyce grew bored in Locarno: he was a city boy at heart. Despite snow and an earthquake, he was able to complete there the three opening episodes of Ulysses – the manuscript title page bears the inscription ‘Pension Daheim, Locarno, Switzerland’. Nora and the children relaxed into the Italian atmosphere, with its accents of home. Pizza was on the menu. Because of his glaucoma Joyce decided to forgo absinthe, his tipple at the time, for Swiss white wines. He settled on Fendant de Sion, comparing its golden hue to an Archduchess’s piss: ‘From now on the wine was known as the Archduchess, and is so celebrated in Finnegans Wake.’9
Glaucoma didn’t prevent his other eye wandering. Two women took hold of Joyce’s imagination, apart from Nora, during his stay in Switzerland. Both made their way into Ulysses, forming the composite figure of Gerty MacDowell showing her drawers to a masturbating Bloom.
Dr Gertrude Kaempffer was a twenty-six-year-old recovering from tuberculosis in Orselina above Locarno, where the Madonna del Sasso basilica commands the valley. When she rebuffed his initial advances, Joyce conducted an erotic correspondence with her from Zürich, using a poste restante address, as Bloom does in Ulysses. Joyce revealed to her his first sexual experience when he was fourteen while out walking with the family nanny through fields on the edge of a wood. The nanny was taken short and asked him to look the other way. She went off to pee. ‘He heard the sound of liquid splashing on the ground … The sound aroused him: “I jiggled furiously.”’10
This information proved less stimulating to Dr Kaempffer than to the author of Ulysses, and so their correspondence fizzled out.
The second of Joyce’s dalliances, Marthe Fleischmann, was closer to home. She lived around the corner from the Joyce flat at 29 Universitätsstrasse. Kitty-corner. Their windows were in sight of each other and he first spotted her as she was pulling the toilet chain. Joyce gives to the hero of Finnegans Wake an erotic interest in watching girls pee, and the author’s correspondence with his wife Nora confirms this peccadillo. Marthe was attractive, had notions about herself and walked with a slight limp (as does Gerty in Ulysses). Joyce cast Marthe as the reincarnation of his youthful muse first spotted on Dublin’s North Strand: girlish, birdlike, ethereal, her skirts hiked up. He began a correspondence in French with Marthe, deploying his usual Irish blether about Dante, Shakespeare and the Dark Lady of the Sonnets – and by the way, could we meet? He shaved two years off his age, continued ogling her through the window and sent her a copy of his wee book of poems, Chamber Music, named in jest for another piddling floozy.
They arranged to meet on his birthday – 2 February, Can
dlemas Day. Joyce borrowed his friend Frank Budgen’s flat for the assignation. Smells and bells, a Hanukkah candelabra (Joyce thought she was of Jewish ancestry), the whole caboodle:
By nightfall everything was ready. He had lit the candles both because they were romantic and because he wished to see his visitor in a flattering light. His Pagan Mary both yielded and withheld. He confided to Budgen when they met later on that he had ‘explored the coldest and hottest parts of a woman’s body’.11
Marthe was already a kept woman. She liked her airs and graces, and secreted rosewater hankies in her cleavage. But she wasn’t averse to a bit of Joyce’s dirty talk about undergarments. Her paramour (‘Vormund’) was an engineer named Rudolf Hiltpold, himself putting it about a bit with sundry mistresses, who soon got wind of the peeping Paddy next door. As Joyce expressed it militarily in a letter to Frank Budgen: ‘Result, stasis: Waffenstillstand.’
It was Budgen with whom Joyce made a second visit to Locarno in May 1919. He was an ex-sailor, a painter and had modelled for the Swiss artist August Suter. He had an associative, imaginative mind, much like Joyce’s. The allegorical figure representing Labour, wielding a hammer under the Uraniabrücke in Zürich, was modelled on Budgen, as was the sailor on a pack of Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes. Joyce was continually looking for material to feed his mythopoeic imagination, even manipulating conversations to get it, as August Suter noticed: ‘he imperceptively brought on conversation that he happened to need for his work’.12
On this second visit to Locarno, Joyce and Budgen encountered the Baroness St Leger, who lived on the tiny Isola di Brissago on Lago Maggiore. Joyce was working on the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses. Circe in Homer is a kind of temptress emasculator, with Odysseus as her captive toy-boy and her island as a dolce far niente. Joyce thought the Baroness might fit the bill: she had been thrice married. He dubbed her the ‘Siren of the Lago Maggiore’.
The Gilded Chalet Page 12