Things are livening up now. In New York the Armory Show is modern art’s Big Bang, with Marcel Duchamp showing his Nude Descending a Staircase. After that, his star is firmly in the ascendant. Nudes are everywhere, especially in Vienna: a naked Alma Mahler (by Oskar Kokoschka) and lots of other Viennese socialites in works by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Others bare their souls to Sigmund Freud for 100 Kronen an hour. Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler is painting quaint watercolours of St Stephen’s Cathedral in the common room of Vienna’s boarding-house for men. In Munich, Heinrich Mann is working on Man of Straw and celebrating his forty-second birthday at his brother’s house. The snow still lies thick on the ground. Thomas Mann buys a plot of land and builds himself a house. Rilke continues to suffer, and Kafka continues to hesitate. A small hat shop belonging to Coco Chanel expands. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, races around Vienna in his golden-wheeled car, plays with his model railway and worries about assassination attempts in Serbia. Stalin meets Trotsky for the first time – and in the very same month, in Barcelona, a man is born who will later murder Trotsky on Stalin’s orders. Is 1913 perhaps an unlucky year after all?
When will his time finally come? All the waiting around is driving Franz Ferdinand mad. The 83-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph has been on the throne for an incredible sixty-five years and has no intention of giving it up for his nephew, who is now next in line following the deaths of Sissi, Franz Joseph’s beloved wife, and Rudolf, his beloved son. The young heir’s only consolation is that his car has wheels with golden spokes, just like the ones on the Emperor’s carriage. But when it comes to the majestic title, well, the only man to have held that since 1848 is Emperor Franz Joseph. Or, to be more precise:
His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty, by God’s Grace Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary and Bohemia, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slovenia, Galicia, Lodomeria and Illyria; King of Jerusalem etc.; Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Kraków; Duke of Lorraine, Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and Bukowina; Grand Prince of Transylvania, Margrave of Moravia; Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, of Auschwitz and Zator, of Teschen, Friaul, Dubrovnik and Zadar; Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, of Kyburg, Gorizia and Gradisca; Prince of Trento and Brixen; Margrave of Upper and Lower Lusatia and Istria: Count of Hohenems, Feldkirch, Bregenz, Sonnenburg etc.; Lord of Hohenems, Kotor and the Windic March; Grand Voivod of the Voivodship of Serbia etc., etc.
The schoolchildren who had to learn this by heart always laughed hardest at the ‘etc., etc.’, for it sounded like the whole world belonged to him, and as if only a small portion of it had been mentioned. But for Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne, it’s the three words right before the ‘etc., etc.’ that really make him seethe: the ‘Voivodship of Serbia’. A battle is raging down in the Balkans, and he’s deeply unsettled by it. So he requests a meeting in Schönbrunn Palace with the ‘Grand Voivod of the Vovoidship of Serbia’ – the Emperor, whose white side-whiskers are as long as his title.
Arriving at Schönbrunn, Franz Ferdinand alights from – or rather, springs out of – his Gräf & Stift automobile in his general’s uniform, and bolts up the steps towards Franz Joseph’s study. He announces that urgent action needs to be taken in order to stop the Serbs. The Kingdom of Serbia is becoming too rebellious at the southeastern flank of the Empire, he says, destabilising things, playing with fire. But they will have to act with good judgement. Under no circumstances should they wage a pre-emptive war, such as the one the General Chief of Staff called for in his memorandum of 20 January, because that would be sure to alert Russia to the plan. The Emperor listens impassively to his blustering, clamouring, trembling nephew: ‘I’ll give it some thought.’ Then he utters a cool farewell. The rest is silence. Agitated, Franz Ferdinand rushes off to his enormous automobile. The liveried chauffeur turns on the engine and, spurred on by the heir, roars off down Schönbrunner Schlossstrasse at breakneck speed. If Franz Ferdinand must resign himself to spending his whole life waiting, then at least he shouldn’t do so stuck in traffic.
Standing by an upstairs window in the Troyanovsky household, Stalin is taking one of his short breaks from his work. He pulls the curtain aside and peers curiously but distractedly down at the heir’s automobile, which is racing along at great speed beneath his gaze. Lenin too had once stood in that very spot, always staying with the Troyanovskys when he was in Vienna. Elsewhere in the city in that February of 1913, a young Croat casts an expert eye over the car with the golden wheels as it races past. As a car mechanic and, as of recently, a test driver for Mercedes in Wiener Neustadt, he’s intimately acquainted with the qualities of the heir’s automobile. His name is Josip Broz, a 21-year-old daredevil and lady’s man who is currently being ‘kept’ as a lover by the upper-class Liza Spuner, an arrangement that includes having his fencing lessons paid for. (He also uses her financial aid to send child support back to his homeland for his newborn son Leopard, whose mother he has recently left.) Liza has him drive her all over Austria in his test car on trips to buy her new clothes. When she falls pregnant, he leaves her too. And so it goes on. At some point he will return to his homeland, which will by then be called Yugoslavia, and assume control of it. Josip Broz will then call himself Tito.
So, in the first months of the year 1913, Stalin, Hitler and Tito, two of the twentieth century’s greatest tyrants and one of its most evil dictators, were, for a brief moment, all in Vienna at the same time. One was studying the question of nationality in a guest room, the second was painting watercolours in a men’s boarding house, and the third was circling aimlessly around the Ringstrasse to test how well various automobiles handled the corners. Three extras, or non-speaking parts, one might think, in the great play that was ‘Vienna in 1913’.
It was icy cold that February, but the sun was shining, which was and is rare for the Viennese winter, but it made the new Ringstrasse gleam all the more in its snow-white splendour. Vienna was bubbling over with vitality; it had become a world city, and this could be seen and felt all over the world – everywhere except in Vienna itself, where, through sheer joy in self-destruction, people hadn’t realised that they had unexpectedly moved to the apex of the movement which called itself Modernism. Because self-doubt and self-destruction had become a central component of the new way of thinking, and what Kafka called the ‘Nervous Era’ had dawned. And in Vienna nerves – virtually, metaphorically, artistically and psychologically – were laid bare like nowhere else.
Berlin, Paris, Munich, Vienna. These were the four capitals of Modernism in 1913. Chicago was flexing its muscles, New York was blossoming gradually but didn’t definitively take the baton from Paris until 1948. And yet 1913 saw the completion of the Woolworth Building, the first one in the world to rise above the Eiffel Tower, and of Grand Central Station, making it the biggest railway station in the world, and the Armory Show made sure that the sparks of the avant-garde ignited in America too. But Paris was still in a league of its own that year, and the French press saw neither the Woolworth Building nor the Armory Show as cause for excitement. Why should they be? After all, the French had Rodin, Matisse, Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust, Chagall ‘etc., etc.’ – all of whom were working on their next great masterpieces. And the city itself, at the peak of its affectation and decadence, embodied in the dance experiments of the Ballets Russes and Sergei Diaghilev, had a magnetic attraction for every cultivated European, in particular four über-cultivated individuals in white suits: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Julius Meier-Graefe, Rainer Maria Rilke and Harry Graf Kessler. In the Paris of 1913 only Proust wanted to reminisce; everyone else wanted to keep moving forwards, but, unlike in Berlin at the time, preferably with a glass of champagne.
Over in the German-speaking world, Berlin’s population was exploding, but culturally speaking its golden age was still to come. It forged ahead rather impetuously – but word that ‘Berlin’s nightlife was its speciality’ had already reached Paris and the artistic circle surrounding Marcel Duchamp. Munich, by contrast, was stylish and yet had taken a kind of well-earned rest – most evidently in the fact that self-glorification was becoming all the rage there (and no one in Berlin had any time for that). One other indicator is, of course, that the bohemians are becoming completely bourgeois: Thomas Mann is seeking – for the sake of his children – a house in the suburbs, in a peaceful location with a large garden. On 25 February 1913 he buys a plot of land at 1 Poschingstrasse and has a magnificent villa built there. His brother Heinrich has sought out Munich as an excellent location from which to write about Berlin, the city hurling itself into the future that is the setting for Man of Straw, the epic novel that he is completing. If one were to read Munich’s satirical magazine Simplicissimus, one would find him mocking the fact that the policemen worry about falling asleep out of boredom after eight o’clock in the evening; the great magazine of the fin de siècle can’t even provoke its own city any more and seems, in the most pleasant of ways, to be fatigued, as if it were stretched out on a chaise longue with a cigarette in its left hand. The magazine’s counterparts in other cities are Die Fackel in Vienna, and Der Sturm, Die Tat and Die Aktion in Berlin, their breathless names alone revealing that the true battles of the modern era are being fought there.
And of course, Munich’s quiet, gentle abdication as the capital of Art Nouveau and the fin de siècle can also be witnessed in the name of the guest house in Theresienstrasse where Else Lasker-Schüler is living in February 1913: the Pension Modern (not to be confused with La Maison Moderne, the legendary Parisian gallery of Art Nouveau set up by the German art propagandist and writer Julius Meier-Grafe, which closed in 1904). So if the guest houses proudly carry their modernity in their names, then it has clearly long since moved on – to the Café Grössenwahn in Berlin (whose name means ‘megalomania’) and to the Café Central at 14 Herrengasse in Vienna, to be precise. Names can be so revealing.
And so the capital of the modern age anno 1913 is Vienna. Its star players are Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Adolf Loos, Karl Kraus, Otto Wagner, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Georg Trakl, Arnold Schönberg and Oskar Kokoschka, to name but a few. Here the battles raged: about the unconscious, about dreams, the new music, the new way of seeing, the new architecture, the new logic, the new morality.
‘Fear of women – the minute they take their clothes off.’ There are two places in Europe in 1913 where this fear of Spengler’s is not an issue. One is Monte Verità in Ascona, near Lake Maggiore, where a wonderfully eccentric group of free-thinkers, free spirits and nudists are doing their exercises, a specific blend of eurhythmics, yoga and physiotherapy. The others are Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele’s studios in Vienna. Their drawings, whose lines teetered so sensually between pornography and the so-called New Objectivity, delineated the curves of the ‘most erotic city in the world’, as Lou Andreas-Salomé declared Vienna to be back then. Although the women in Klimt’s paintings were always swathed in golden ornament, he encircled the bodies in his sketches with an inimitable line that swept across the page, softly undulating like curls falling loose over a shoulder. Egon Schiele went even further in his explorations of the human body – the forms he depicted were tormented, strained with nerves and martyred, distorted, more sexual than erotic. Where Klimt’s work reveals soft skin, Schiele shows nerves and sinews; where Klimt’s bodies flow, Schiele’s splay, entangle and contort. Klimt’s women lure, while Schiele’s shock.
‘I’m not interested in my own person’, said Klimt, ‘but rather in other people, especially women.’
If these drawings, which made a voyeur of everyone exposed to them, were well known, they were soon subjected to censorship, thereby increasing the notoriety of their creators. When Schiele wanted to exhibit his work Friendship in Munich, he received an interesting rejection letter. The director of the gallery wrote to inform him that his work could not be shown under any circumstances because of its extreme nature, and that it would offend common decency. Full stop. New paragraph. He, however, would be very interested in purchasing the work. There, neatly encapsulated, is the chasm between public and private morality in 1913.
Berlin is becoming too bright. The gas lanterns, neon signs and city lights are threatening to outshine the stars in the night sky. In 1913 the demolition vehicles roll in to tear down the New Berlin Observatory, near Hallesches Tor. Located between Lindenstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, the new Prussian observatory was completed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1835. Like everything else from this most beautiful decade of German history, it was barely surpassed in either practical or aesthetic terms. A wonderfully simple building, over which the dome sits enthroned like a church tower – a church of the world, but with a view straight up to the heavens. A few comets were discovered here, and a few asteroids too. But the most significant discovery was the planet Neptune. In 1913, however, no one was interested in that. It only took a few weeks before there were only fields where one of Schinkel’s boldest structures had once stood. The observatory was relocated to Babelsberg, where the sky was darker and where Neptune could be seen more easily. And because they were good with figures in Prussia, the land between Lindenstrasse and Friedrichstrasse was sold: 1.1 million Goldmarks from the sale were used for the construction of the new observatory, and 450,000 for the purchase of new instruments. The land itself funded the Royal House – in the grounds of the Babelsberg Palace Park. And so it was that by 1913, perfectly timed after the foundation of the film studio the year before, everything in Berlin to do with stars and starlets ended up in Babelsberg.
On 6 February, according to the Chinese calendar, the year of the buffalo begins. The buffalo, according to an ancient Chinese saying, prefers fresh grass to a golden trough.
In Sindelsdorf, Franz Marc is back to work on his masterpiece, and Else Lasker-Schüler has returned to Berlin. He has set up his studio in the unheated attic of the old farmhouse in Sindelsdorf, from where he can barely hear Maria Marc playing the piano downstairs. It’s so cold that even Hanni, their beloved cat, retreats to the stove. Kandinsky comes to visit from Munich and reports:
Outside, everything is white – snow covers the fields, the mountains, the forests – the frost nips at your nose. Upstairs in the humble attic (where you constantly bang your head against the rafters), The Tower of Blue Horses is perched on the easel, and Franz Marc stands there in his fur coat, a big fur hat and straw shoes that he made himself. Now, tell me in all honesty what you make of this picture!
What a question.
On 13 February there is still no sign of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The Louvre’s new catalogue is published, no longer listing the painting. In Berlin, on 13 February, Rudolf Steiner holds one of his great lectures – ‘Leonardo’s Spiritual and Intellectual Greatness at the Turning Point of the New Age’. Steiner speaks for a long time, almost two hours. The audience hang on his every word. He, just like Oswald Spengler, talks a lot about things falling into ruin, about the decline of an era. But he regards this as necessary to make room for the new:
For in those dying forces we finally sense, even see, the forces preparing themselves for the future, and in the sunset, the promise and hope of a new dawn moves closer to us. Our souls must always respond to human evolution in such a way that we tell ourselves: All progress is so. When what we have created turns to ruin, we know that out of those ruins, new life will always blossom forth.
On 17 February the Armory Show, one of the most important art exhibitions of the century, opens in a former arsenal in New York. Which century, I hear you ask? Well, you could say that the art of the nineteenth century only came to an end when the first Armory Show began. And it led to the supremacy of modern art not only in Europe but globally too.
Towards the end of 1912 three Americans with highly inquisitive natures and the necessary expertise – the painters Walter Pach, Arthur Davies and Walt Kuhn – travelled to Europe to identify the most interesting artists and bring their key works back to New York. Great painters and photographers such as Claude Monet, Odilon Redon and Alfred Stieglitz sat on the selection committee – and the American public quickly realised that it was about pitting the Cubists and Futurists and Impressionists of Old Europe against the affluent American fin-de-siècle art scene. This was war. And for the first time the war was being waged on American soil – now that Europe’s battles had been fought. In total there were 1,300 paintings on display, only a third of them from Europe. But it was this third that made the American pictures look ancient – particularly the eight Picassos and twelve Matisses. The Brancusi sculptures and paintings by Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp provoked particularly outraged debate. Camera Work, Stieglitz’s legendary magazine, reported: ‘The exhibition of new work from Europe dropped on us like a bomb.’ And the force of the detonation was just as intense – rage, incomprehension and laughter were among the reactions, but people flocked to the exhibition in order to see it for themselves. The newspapers printed caricatures almost every day, and during the exhibition’s second residency, in Chicago, there was even a protest staged by students of The Art Institute of Chicago – who reportedly burned copies of three Matisse paintings. In the eyes of the American public Matisse was the most ‘primitive’ of all the artists. That has always been the supreme guarantee of quality.
The greatest sensation was caused by the three brothers Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Jacques Villon and Marcel Duchamp. Seventeen of their works were exhibited, and all but one were sold. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase became the focal point of the Armory Show, the most discussed and most caricatured art work on show. One critic called it Explosion in a Shingle Factory, a comment that, although intended to ridicule the work, instead demonstrated how strong the shock waves caused by the piece really were. A woman striding through space and time – a genial combination of Cubism, Futurism and relativity theory. The room housing the picture was flooded with visitors every single day; people queued for over forty minutes just to catch a glimpse of the scandalous painting. Evidently, for the traditionally minded Americans, this work was the embodiment of a strange, irrational Europe. An antique dealer from San Francisco bought it – somewhere along his endless train journey back from New York, at a provincial station in New Mexico, he got off and sent a telegram to New York: ‘I will buy Duchamp nude woman descending stairway please reserve.’
The Duchamps went on working away in their studio in Neuilly, oblivious to their new-found American fame – until the cheques suddenly started coming in the post. Marcel Duchamp received $972 for his four sales – not a high price, even in 1913. Cézanne’s La Colline des Pauvres, for example, was sold from the exhibition to the Metropolitan Museum for $6,700. Duchamp was pleased nonetheless.
At the moment when America and Paris too had started to pay attention to his work, Marcel Duchamp had turned his back on Cubism and the theme of motion – or, as he so eloquently put it, ‘motion mixed with oil paint’. At the very moment when he should have become one of the greatest artists of his generation Duchamp declared that he was bored with painting. He was looking for something different, something new.
In Prague, Franz Kafka is suffering. He’s suffering because Felice, for whom he has been pining from afar in letters, hasn’t said a word about the book Contemplations, which he sent her in December. And because his sister Valli is getting married, and because it’s always too noisy in the apartment (the doors are always banging, and his parents and sister have the impertinence to talk to one another), and because he’s working for an insurance company by day and writing by night. He also has to contend with work trips, interruptions and colds. But above all he’s suffering from the fear that his creativity has withered away. And as dreadful as the idea of living as a bachelor is – perhaps it was the only way of being a writer. In moments of panic he is overwhelmed by the question ‘What will become of me if I get married?’ How would he deal with what he called ‘A Wife’s Rights’? For him there were two equally horrific scenarios: the physical demands of the wife and, above all, the demands on his time. He implored Felice never again to write that she wanted to sit by him while he was working on his books – for if she or anyone else were to sit behind him, the secret of writing would be destroyed. And then he also wrote: ‘I would never expose myself to the risk of becoming a father.’ Is it possible to warn someone off more than Kafka did in these letters? But Felice responds, although torn between office and home, letter-writing and worries about her family, as if it were her true calling to be his addressee, a reader both for Kafka and for world literature. She assumes the role calmly and in complete earnest.
In 1913 art everywhere is driving towards abstraction. Kandinsky in Munich, Robert Delaunay and František Kupka in Paris, Kasimir Malevich in Russia and Piet Mondrian in the Netherlands – each in their own way they are trying to free themselves from all reference to reality. And then there’s that young, well-brought-up, reserved young man in Paris: Marcel Duchamp, a painter who has suddenly decided he doesn’t want to paint any more.
In Munich a benefit auction held for Else Lasker-Schüler turns into a complete disaster. In a touching gesture Franz Marc asked artist friends to donate paintings to raise more money for the relief effort initiated by Karl Kraus in Die Fackel. His call doesn’t go unanswered, with oil paintings arriving from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc himself for the auction on 17 February. Only Ludwig Meidner from Berlin declines (saying he himself has no money and is starving). An auction is held in the Neuer Kunstsalon, but no one shows any interest. So, to avoid total embarrassment, the artists all bid for each others’ work, and raise 1,600 Marks.
The total value of the works unauctioned on 17 February 1913 would amount to around 100 million Euros today. Oh, what the heck – probably closer to 200 million.
Sigmund Freud continues to work on his theory of parricide. At the same time, in the newly founded film studios in Potsdam-Babelsberg, filming begins on The Sins of the Fathers, starring Asta Nielsen. In keeping with the title, Nielsen later feels partly to blame for the ‘kitsch in that early dawn of film’. The film poster shows her wearing a tight skirt and a plunging blouse. She was slim, unusual at the time, and a source of great joy for cartoonists, who immediately saw a stick figure in the making. Most men too were quite happy with how she looked. In 1913 Asta Nielsen was the ultimate sex symbol, and a big contract led to her making eight films between 1912 and 1914, which were filmed and released back to back. The new magazine Bild und Film put it like this: ‘People are queuing up to see the film as if they’re at a bakery during a famine, almost breaking their necks to get a ticket. Many people watch the film two or three times in quick succession and are enchanted by it again and again.’ Samuel Fischer, the most renowned publisher of his time, watched with increasing amazement as Nielsen captivated the masses. Believing film to be the medium of the future, he tried to convince his most famous authors to write screenplays as well.
It’s 1913, but disaster has yet to strike for Arnold Schönberg. On Sunday 23 February, at around half-past seven in the evening, his Gurrelieder are premiered at the Great Music Hall in Vienna – and the public are expecting a new scandal. His recent appearances and compositions have already unsettled Vienna, causing great commotion, and the former Romantic has emphatically transformed himself into a Neutöner, an exponent of the new music. The previous year he caused uproar with his Pierrot Lunaire (opus 21). But now this. All of a sudden, they’re no longer hearing modern radicalism from Schönberg, but pure late Romanticism. Five vocalists, three four-part male choirs and a huge orchestra with every kind of flute and drum and stringed instrument. Eighty strings were used in the first performance alone: the gigantism of the new century is forging ahead. Schönberg declares that the oratorio cannot be performed without a 150-piece orchestra. The piece itself is a great, bombastic, murmuring and pulsating spectacle of nature, about storms and the summer winds. Vast choirs sing about the beauty of the sun – a spectacular wonder of nature, just as Schönberg once experienced it after a night of drinking led him to the Anninger, one of Vienna’s city mountains.
‘Schadenfreude lurks already in a hundred pairs of eyes: today will show once again whether he can really afford to compose as he chooses rather than how others before him have composed’, writes Richard Specht for his review in the Berlin journal März. But the scandal never comes: instead, it’s a triumph.
The resounding cheers that broke out even after the first section rose to a commotion after the third […] And when the choir’s powerfully surging dawn greeting was over, […] the cheering knew no bounds; with tear-stained faces, the audience called out their gratitude to the composer, sounding more warm and insistent than is usually the case with such a ‘success’: instead, it sounded like an apology. A few young people, unknown to me, came over, their cheeks aglow with shame, and admitted they had brought their house keys with them to add their – in their view appropriate – music to Schönberg’s, but now he had won them over so completely that nothing could turn them against him.
The Gurrelieder, with their hymnal, magnificent melodic arcs, were the greatest success that Schönberg would ever experience. But never again did he come as close to his audience as here – and this was clearly to do with his terror about the disaster looming over the year 1913. The Gurrelieder is a sumptuous and lavish piece of late Romanticism, melodic even though its composer had long since crossed the border of tonality. Bewitching beauty, bordering on kitsch. It had taken ten years for Schönberg to find the right orchestration, but the composition itself originated at the turn of the century – and thirteen years later was perfectly in tune with the taste of the Viennese public. The house keys with which they had planned to drown out Schönberg’s music stayed in their pockets.
But not for long.
It’s just one thing after another in Vienna in 1913.
On that very same evening the performance ban on Arthur Schnitzler’s new play Professor Bernhardi is breached in the form of a ‘reading’ of the play in the Koflerpark club house, right by the stop for the number 8 tram, ‘at precisely seven in the evening’. This contravened the ruling of the Viennese police department that
Even if such reservations as exist regarding the performance of the work – from the perspective of safeguarding the religious sentiments of the people – could be overcome by editing or altering certain sections of the text, the entire construction of the play, through its combination of episodes relating to Austrian state establishments and exploring public life, grossly distorts conditions here in such a disparaging way that its performance on a domestic stage cannot be permitted with a view to the necessity of safeguarding public interest.
After the Gurrelieder evening an illustrious circle meets in Arthur Schnitzler’s drawing room at a quarter to six on Monday. Hugo von Hofmannsthal had accepted the invitation on 21 February: ‘Because I consider the opportunity to hear you read one of your new works to be one of the greatest and purest pleasures – and also because I am continually saddened by the fact that I so seldom see you. Heartfelt wishes, your Hugo.’ Schnitzler himself struggles through the reading, coughing and sweating; he has a bad fever, which kept him from attending the Gurrelieder. It is well known that doctors rarely make good patients, so on Monday evening he bravely reads from Frau Beate and her Son, his latest novella, an Oedipus story which Freud very much enjoyed. It’s a long text, but Schnitzler manages to read it to the end. A woman sleeps with the friend of her teenage son. The friend boasts about it to others, the son is mortified with shame, the mother is mortified with shame, mother and son row out onto a lake, make love and then their shame really does become mortal when they drown themselves. Schnitzler was regarded by everyone, even his critics, as knowledgeable in matters of sensuality. Even more so today, now that his diaries have been discovered.
While his wife, Olga, with whom he spends 1913 immersed in subversive positional warfare, eats and drinks with the guests, he retreats to his room and writes in his diary: ‘Reading aloud from Beate while struck down with the flu from six to almost nine in the evening. Richard, Hugo, Arthur Kaufmann, Leo, Salten, Wasserman, Gustav, Olga.’ Salten, by the way, was Felix Salten, the wonderfully enigmatic Viennese double talent of the early twentieth century, who published the story ‘Bambi’ and – under his pseudonym – The Memoirs of Josefine Mutzenbacher, a pornographic work in Viennese dialect that was challenging even for Vienna, advanced as the city was in sexual matters. From porn to Bambi – this was precisely the Janus-faced character that made up the particular enchantment and the particularly subversive force of Vienna at that time. Adolf Loos came up with a unique description for all the figures from Sigmund Freud’s analysis, Arthur Schnitzler’s stories and Gustav Klimt’s pictures: Ornament and Crime.
The day after the reading at the Schnitzler residence, on Tuesday 25 February, Thomas Mann buys a plot of land at 1 Poschingerstrasse in Munich. That very same day he commissions the architects Gustav and Alois Ludwig to build a villa worthy of him: tranquil, supercilious, somewhat stiff. Together with the architect, he waits right next to the plot of land for the number 30 tram into the city centre. His red-handled walking-stick hangs, as ever, from his left arm. Noticing a speck of dust on his overcoat, he brushes it away. Then he hears the tram coming down from the Bogenhausener Höhe.
Picasso owns three Siamese cats, Marcel Duchamp only two. And that remains the score, even today, between the two great revolutionaries: 3–2.
Franz Kafka’s letters to Felice are the most important work he will produce in 1913.
It is a work full of earnestness, full of despair, full of comedy. On 1 February he writes: ‘My stomach, like my whole being, has been out of sorts for days, and I am trying to deal with it by fasting.’ Then he tells her, in the most wonderful words, about a reading by Franz Werfel the previous day: ‘How a poem like that rises up – its inherent ending within its beginning – with an uninterrupted, inner, flowing development – how I widened my eyes, perched there on the couch!’ He has even asked Werfel to dedicate a copy of his new volume of poetry ‘to an unknown woman’; but ‘oh dear’: ‘I will send you the book soon … if only the necessity of preparing the package and the task etc. didn’t vex me so.’ So Franz Kafka sits there in his room in Prague, despairing over how to pack a book. Luckily for him, the proofs of The Judgement turn up at that very moment.
But what must be going through the mind of Felice, that sociable, modern, tango-dancing young working woman in her prime, when she reads lines like these from her Franz: ‘My dearest, tell me why, of all people, you choose to love such an unhappy boy, one whose unhappiness is so contagious. I’m always compelled to carry an atmosphere of unhappiness around with me. But don’t be afraid, my dearest, stay by my side! Close by my side!’
After that, he complains of discomfort in his shoulder, of constant colds and digestive problems. Then, on 17 February, come perhaps the most sincere and certainly the most beautiful words that he wrote to his beloved enchantress in faraway Berlin: ‘Sometimes I wonder, Felice, given that you have such an intense power over me, why you don’t just turn me into someone who’s capable of ordinary, everyday things.’
In this she will not succeed.
On 16 February 1913 Josef Stalin boards a train at Vienna’s Nordbahnhof and travels back to Russia.
His daily ration is one corpse. In total, between 25 October 1912 and 9 November 1913, Dr Gottfried Benn dissects 297 bodies – draymen, prostitutes, anonymous drowned corpses. Day after day throughout that cold, wretched February he climbs down into the cellar of the clinic in Berlin-Charlottenburg wearing his white coat and brandishing his scalpel. He rummages through the bodies, finding cause of death, but no souls. It’s hell on earth for the sensitive priest’s son from Neumark, just twenty-six years old: ceaselessly cutting open, filling up, sewing up, cutting open. Throughout those lonely months, underground and surrounded by death, Benn’s eyelids begin to draw shut a little from above and below, as the photographs show. Never again will he fully open them. ‘He saw only sparsely through his eyelids’, writes Benn, barely out of the autopsy cellar, as he tries to scrape the suffering away from his soul in the character of ‘Rönne’. Peering sparsely through his own eyelids, Benn foresees, blinking uncontrollably, the model for the twentieth century in his gloomy cellar of corpses: eyes wide shut. In the evenings, after his second or third beer, he writes poems about it on scraps of paper: ‘The crown of creation: the pig, man.’ He knows that, come dawn the next day, the next corpse will be waiting downstairs in the cellar. Perhaps it’s even still alive and roaming around. By the next spring he is distraught, pleading to be dismissed. Professor Dr Keller lies in his final report: ‘During his time in office Herr Dr Benn showed himself to be up to the task in every way.’ Benn’s début collection, Morgue, published in mid-1912, begs to differ: merciless, cold yet daring late Romantic poems about the body, cancer and blood, they reveal a great existential trauma, and to this day cannot be read on an empty stomach.
But their rage and force turn their author – an unremarkable pathologist, barely 5 foot 5 inches tall, with a receding hairline and the beginnings of a paunch, into a highly mysterious figure of the Berlin avant-garde. The enfant terrible in a three-piece suit. ‘As soon as my first collection of poetry was published, I gained a reputation as a brittle roué,’ Benn later recalled, ‘an infernal snob and one of the typical coffee house literati, while in reality I was marching along on military exercises in the potato fields of the Uckermark and setting off at an English trot over the pine-covered hills with the division commando in Döberitz.’ We don’t know whether it was the military doctor Benn who went over to Else Lasker-Schüler’s table one evening at the Café des Westens on the Ku’damm (corner of Joachimstalerstrasse) or the other way around. But there was no better place for these two outsiders, trembling with lyrical emotion, to find one another. The artists’ haunt was run down, but nobly so, and there was mediocre Viennese cuisine on offer, of the sort that you might find in any Berlin artists’ haunt today. The air was dense with cigarette smoke, the deafening noise from the street forced its way inside, the newspapers were stamped ‘Stolen from Café des Westens’, and there the bohemians sat running up a tab. A cup of coffee or a glass of beer cost 25 Pfennigs, and you could sit in front of it until five o’clock in the morning.
Benn and Lasker-Schüler came here all the time. They eyed each other like two predators at first, prowling around one another, satiating their hunger by reciting each other’s poems aloud for weeks on end as they headed home at night through the newly built streets of the west. At the time she wrote the following about Benn: ‘Every one of his verses a leopard’s bite, the pounce of a wild animal.’ Else Lasker-Schüler, a poet seventeen years his senior, recently separated from her second husband, tangled up in love affairs with all the prominent figures of the Berlin bohemian scene, abundantly draped with jewellery, ankle bells and oriental garments, immediately falls under the spell of the stiff doctor with the sleepy gaze and the shy, almost uninterested, tone of voice, with which, as in his poetry, he could say devastating things about death, corpses and the female body as casually as if he were ordering a coffee. And Gottfried Benn, still somewhat pompous and insecure, falls under the spell of the sensuous, mature woman with eyes that sparkle like black diamonds.
The two people who meet and become close during this cold Berlin winter are both failures: she forty-four years old and he almost twenty-six. Else Lasker-Schüler, once a cosseted banker’s daughter from Elberfeld, is now a pauper, surviving for weeks on end on just nuts and fruit. Wracked with fever, she roams through the night with her son, sheltering under bridges and in hostels, scrounging every cup of coffee. In her worn-out, oriental robes she looks like a tramp from the Arabian Nights. She writes on telegram slips from the Central Post Office. Benn, the lost, cosseted preacher’s son from the countryside, is searching desperately for his vocation in life and has just failed for the second time: first as a doctor in the Charité psychiatry department, then as an army doctor, where he has been laid off temporarily. Reports state that he has problems interacting with people. They recommend that he interact with corpses instead. Shortly after he moves into the pathology field his beloved mother dies. Benn, by now well versed in sewing people up, writes: ‘I carry you around on my brow like a wound that will never heal.’ Biographically, this is the moment when Benn and Lasker-Schüler first see each other and cling onto each other like drowning souls. ‘Oh, Your Hands’ is the name of Lasker-Schüler’s poem from October 1912 – revealing for the first time the handwriting of Gottfried Benn on her heart. She can even, such is their luck, write to him in Hebrew, for the priest’s son knows the Old Testament in theory from his Bible study days. Now the time has come to put it into practice.
Will things work out?
19 Berggasse is the residence of Dr Sigmund Freud, and the most famous address in Vienna even during his lifetime. His analyses have made him a rich man, he can get through up to eleven appointments a day, receiving 100 Kronen for each one: as much as his servants earn in a whole month. Alma Mahler will resent him for the rest of her days, ever since he wrote to the executor of Gustav Mahler’s will trying to collect payment for a stroll he and the late composer had once taken together. By 1913 his reputation is legendary, his research into dreams and sexuality common knowledge; when Schnitzler and Kafka jot down their dreams, they are always accompanied by the question of what Dr Freud would make of them. The focus of his research was sexuality, repressed not only by others, but also, according to the state of his research that day in 1913, by himself. After his wife had borne him six children, he apparently chose to abstain from sex. There are no known affairs; the only cause for speculation was his unexplained relationship with Minna Bernays, the sister-in-law, who lived with the couple, but nothing is known for certain.
It was a cause of great amusement to Freud that the Viennese began to take his research into the suppressed and unconscious seriously at the very time when he was appointed Professor. ‘Congratulatory messages and bouquets of flowers are raining down now, as if the role of sexuality had suddenly been given the official seal of approval by His Majesty, as though the meaning of dreams had been confirmed by the Council of Ministers.’
Dr Freud and Dr Schnitzler seemed like Siamese twins even to their contemporaries: The Interpretation of Dreams here, the Dream Novella there; the Oedipus complex here, Frau Beate and her Son there. But precisely because there were so many similarities between them, they politely avoided each other’s company. Once, Freud roused himself to write to Schnitzler about his timidity at the prospect of meeting him, a ‘kind of Doppelgänger anxiety’. He had received the impression, from his reading of Schnitzler’s stories and plays, that ‘you know through intuition – although really as a result of your keen self-awareness – all that I have uncovered through painstaking work with other people.’ But even this confession was not to change things. Like two similarly charged magnets, they couldn’t get too close to one another. Both approached the issue with humour. When the son of an industrialist was brought into Dr Schnitzler’s clinic in 1913, drenched in blood after having his penis bitten by a pony, the doctor ordered: ‘Take the patient to the emergency clinic straight away – and the pony to Professor Freud.’
The big Berlin cigarette company Problem advertised all over Berlin, on its buses and cabs, promoting a brand of cigarettes bearing the name Moslem. So anyone walking across Potsdamer Platz or down the Ku-damm could see the words, spelt out in large letters: ‘Moslem. Problem Cigarettes.’
Heinrich Mann is now living in Munich with Mimi Kanova, a woman whom he met – quite fittingly – during the Berlin rehearsals of his play The Great Love in 1912. She is a little on the fat side. He calls her ‘Pummi’. She writes to him to say that if he can find her more work at the theatre she will ‘care for him like a baby’. He clearly found that to be an attractive prospect. Everyone else turns up their noses at the vulgar woman and their low-class relationship (including, of course, his brother Thomas, who always purses his lips whenever Heinrich acts in too aggressively heterosexual a manner). Heinrich, whose pointy beard and softly drooping eyelids make him look like a Spanish aristocrat, contentedly spends his days with his Mimi at 49 Leopoldstrasse in Munich and writes.
When Heinrich’s forty-second birthday approaches, Thomas invites his brother and his wife over for an intimate dinner. Other than that, he spends most of his time working on his big book Man of Straw. He is disciplined, filling page after page of his small, square notebooks with delicate handwriting. His merciless analysis of German society under Kaiser Wilhelm II is almost finished. Now and then he sketches nudes, mostly stout women in risqué poses, rather reminiscent of George Grosz’s brothel sketches. Later, after his death, they will be found in the bottom drawer of his writing desk.
Heinrich Mann negotiates with different journals about an advance publication of Man of Straw and strikes a deal with the Munich magazine Zeit im Bild. Publication is set to begin on 1 November 1913. In exchange for a payment of 10,000 Reichmarks, Mann consents to ‘undertake the deletion of sections of an overly erotic nature’ where necessary. Fair enough, Mann may have thought to himself, in this case it’s more a question of ‘scenes of an overly socially critical nature’. The idea had come to him a few years before, in a café on Unter den Linden in Berlin, when he witnessed the sight of crowds of bourgeois pressing curiously up against the windowpanes to see the Kaiser pass by. ‘The old inhumane Prussian military spirit has been joined here by the machine-like, massive scale of the metropolis,’ wrote Mann, ‘and the result is the lowering of human dignity below every known measure.’ Mann quickly comes up with the idea for a paper factory which prints nothing but postcards glorifying the Kaiser; he engages in thorough research, travels to paper mills and printworks, makes fastidious notes, talks with the workers, acting like a reporter. Richard Wagner – particularly his vexingly narcotic effect on the spirit of protest – is such a puzzle to him that, for the first time, and in the interests of research, he goes to see Lohengrin. So while his brother is preoccupied with Royal Highness and the con-man Felix Krull, Heinrich Mann is in search of German subservience – and establishes with horror that it is, in fact, everywhere. He has a judge explain the legal implications of the crime of ‘Offence against the Sovereign’ to him in minute detail. But that is precisely what it will be, his book Man of Straw: an insult to His Majesty, to the German bourgeois spirit.
Hermann Hesse is living very unhappily in Bern with his wife, Maria. He, together with Theodor Heuss (yes, the future President of the Federal Republic), becomes involved with the journal März, but the situation at home is taking its toll on both him and his writing. Not even the move from Lake Constance, where they were attempting to live a healthy, vegetarian life, to the peaceful capital of Switzerland, his wife’s home, helps their relationship. They have three children: Martin, the youngest, has just turned two, but the bond between his parents has worn thin. And so Hesse reaches for the medicine that only writers can prescribe themselves for difficulties of the heart: fictionalisation. He squabbles with his wife in the parlour, then goes into his office, puts a new ribbon into his beloved typewriter and writes down the row as dialogue. And so Rosshalde comes into being in 1913, and is published that same year in Velhagens & Klasings Monatshefte. The main character, Johannes Veraguth, relives all of Hesse’s suffering, all of his raptures, and of course it ends in disillusionment. The wife in the novel is named Adele, and she is as stubborn and embittered as Maria. He openly takes as his subject not only the failure of his marriage but also, fundamentally, the impossibility of retaining a sense of yourself as an artist within a marriage and within society. The law student Kurt Tucholsky, twenty-three years young, who has been working for the magazine Schaubühne (later Weltbühne) since January 1913, writes very shrewdly of Rosshalde: ‘If the name Hesse did not appear on the title-page, there would be no way of knowing that he had written it. This is not the dear, good old Hesse we know: this is someone different.’ Furthermore, Tucholsky immediately sees through the feeble boundaries between fiction and reality: ‘Hesse is like Veraguth: he has abandoned the heaven of marriage – but where will he go now?’ Good question.
Not everything goes according to plan in 1913, of course. Preparations have been under way for a touring exhibition, opening in Frankfurt, which is to unite the work of the Berlin Expressionist and Secessionist artists with that of the Blaue Reiter. But to their surprise, the Blaue Reiter in Upper Bavaria soon find their pictures sent back to them from Berlin. Aggrieved, Franz Marc writes a letter from Sindelsdorf, with the seal of the Blaue Reiter on the letterhead, to Georg Tappert, the Chairman of the New Secession in Berlin:
While unpacking my crate of paintings, I was greatly frustrated to see that the Deer was among them, despite the fact that I had stipulated it be included in the tour (Frankfurt in April). Then Kandinsky writes to me today saying that, to his immense surprise, his Berlin paintings have been returned to him in Munich. How should we respond to this? Logic would imply that the tour has come to nothing. But how can you simply send the pictures back to us out of the blue, without even speaking to us about it first?
It isn’t all over yet. In autumn the unique summit meeting of the two poles of German Expressionism will take place after all.
It’s too hot for Rainer Maria Rilke, even in early February. He has flown south in search of the sun. But now, lying on a garden lounger at the Hotel Reina Victoria in Ronda, in his white summer suit, he longs for the cool North. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be Rilke. His ability to understand women, to be at one with nature and connect with others is so strong that he even suffers along with the towns themselves when they are ‘worn out from the relentless summer’. That’s probably why only someone like Rilke would sense the destructive force to come in the year’s first warm beams of sunlight. And so he complains in letters to his mother and faraway soulmates that spring doesn’t suit him: ‘The sun is too strong; at seven in the morning it’s quite clearly February, but by eleven one could easily believe it to be August.’ She would surely understand, he writes to Sidonie Nádherný, that it is simply ‘unbearable’ when the sun beats down like that. On 19 February he hurriedly departs. At the end of the month he moves into his new apartment in Paris, in the Rue Champagne-Première. After eighteen months on the run from himself across half of Europe, he arrives in the metropolis as it shimmers with early spring. He is afraid of arriving. But he wants to try one more time, here, in this Paris, in this place. But he can’t remember how you do those things: sitting, working, staying calm. Living.
In the spring of 1913 Charles Fabry successfully concludes a series of experiments culminating in the discovery of the ozone layer. It is still fully intact.
Vienna is only a day’s train ride away from the Austrian Crown land of Galicia, and that’s why it has become the most popular political exile for refugee revolutionaries from Russia. In the Döblinger Rodlergasse, for example, the writer and journalist Leo Bronstein, better known as Leo Trotsky, is working in a humble yet bourgeois atmosphere with his wife, Natalia, and their children. At Christmas the Trotskys stretch to a tree, trying to act as if they belong and never want to leave. Trotsky earns very little from his journalism for various liberal and social-democratic pamphlets, and often spends entire days sitting in the Café Central playing chess. In 1913 ‘Herr Bronstein’ is regarded as the best chess player in the Viennese café scene, and that is saying something. Whenever he needs money, his only option is to bring some of his books to the pawnshop. He has no choice.
By the beginning of February, Stalin is back to working on Marxism and the National Question, which is to become his most famous work – and the mix of peoples in the Austro-Hungarian Empire provides him with a vivid learning exercise. In Vienna, Stalin develops the idea of a central empire behind feigned national autonomy – which, in the end, amounts to the aims and objectives of the Soviet Union. Stalin, ‘Sosso’ to his friends, talks about nothing else, even with the Troyanovskys’ children. He makes a brief attempt to flirt with the nanny, but nothing comes of it, so he flees back to his work. And quite rightly so; he has little time to waste on the practical application of the evils of capitalism. On one of his walks with the mother through Schönbrunn Park, he bets her that Galina, the temperamental daughter, will run to him if they both call out to her (based on the belief that she’ll be hoping he’s bought sweets for her again). He turns out to be right.
Two men visit him during his stay in the Troyanovsky residence. To Stalin’s delight Nikolai Bukharin helps him with translations, but, unlike Stalin, Bukharin proves to be successful with the nanny, for which the former will never forgive him (and for which Bukharin will one day have to pay with a bullet in the head). Even Trotsky drops by once: ‘I was sitting next to the samovar at the table in Skobelow’s apartment […] in the old Habsburg capital,’ writes Trotsky, ‘when, after a brief knock, the door suddenly opened and a stranger walked in. He was short […] thin […] pock marks covered his grey-brownish skin […] I couldn’t see even the slightest trace of friendliness in his eyes.’ It was Stalin. He fetched himself a cup of tea from the samovar and went out as quietly as he had come in. He didn’t recognise Trotsky – luckily, for in one of his articles he had already labelled him a ‘gimmicky athlete with fake muscles’.
In that same February of 1913, as Stalin and Trotsky see each other for the first time, a man is born in faraway Barcelona who will later murder Trotsky, on Stalin’s orders. His name is Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río Hernández.
On 23 February, Josef Stalin is arrested on the street in St Petersburg. Dressed in women’s clothes and a wig, he is running for his life. His attire has nothing to do with carnival fancy dress or any special predilection for women’s clothing. The revolutionary is in Russia illegally, and has stolen the clothes from the wardrobe of a musical benefit performance for Pravda which was raided by police. They apprehend the limping fugitive and rip the gaudy summer dress and wig from his person, revealing Stalin. He is recognised and exiled to Turukhansk in Siberia.
In turbulent Vienna there is an affair that stuns even the Viennese. Alma Mahler, the most beautiful girl in Vienna, with a legendary waist and a generous bosom, newly widowed after the death of the great composer and still dressed in mourning, falls for Oskar Kokoschka, the ugliest painter in Vienna, a brash provocateur who walks around with his trousers hanging low or his shirt unbuttoned, and whose most famous painting is entitled Murderer, Hope of Womankind – he means every word. But almost as soon as he captures the beautiful young widow’s heart, he gets scared. Not of her – but of his potential love rivals: ‘Almi, I don’t like it when other people can see your bare breasts, whether in night-dress or frock. Cover up the secrets, my secrets, of your beloved body.’ Hardly anything in the Vienna of 1913 was as unabashedly sexual as the letters and affair between Kokoschka and Alma Mahler – by day Alma was able to pursue her social life as the city’s First Widow, holding receptions and salons in her apartment. But by night Kokoschka asserted his rights. He could only work if he could sleep with her every night, he told her, and she becomes obsessed with his obsession. The day when she is supposed to sit for him, in the house belonging to the Mools, her parents-in-law, she drags him into the neighbouring room and sings a heartbreaking rendition of Isolde’s Liebestod. She throws herself into the affair with operatic totality. Kokoschka is no longer able to paint anything but her. Mostly naked, her hair cascading wantonly over her shoulders, blouse open, he paints her as wildly and violently as he loves her. Impatient that it’s taking too long, he throws away his paintbrush and paints with his fingers instead, using the palm of his left hand as a palette and scratching lines into the mounts of colour with his fingernails. Life, love, art: all one great battle.
When Kokoschka isn’t painting Alma alone, he is painting Alma and himself: for example, the Double Portrait of Oskar Kokoschka and Alma. He calls it the ‘Engagement Picture’. He wants to marry her, hoping to capture her for ever. But Alma is cunning. She can only marry him, she explains, once he creates an absolute masterpiece. Kokoschka hopes that this engagement picture will be his masterpiece. By the end of February he is almost finished, and Alma is restless. He pleads with her: ‘Please write me a long letter, my love, so I don’t regress and lose time on the painting.’ But Alma has just aborted their child, and is angered by the bump on her belly in Kokoschka’s painting. The picture shows the two of them strangely entangled – Kokoschka’s gaze is full of suffering, Alma’s calm and composed. She travels with her mother to Semmering and looks for a plot of land on the estates Gustav Mahler once bought for the two of them. Now she is planning a love nest with his successor. Once the ‘Engagement Picture’ is ready, Kokoschka sends it to Berlin, to the Secession. It is, of course, what he hoped it would be: a public engagement notice. Upon seeing the picture in Berlin, Walter Gropius breaks down. The great architect, whose Fagus Factory was under construction at the time, had also hoped to marry Alma. The picture has achieved its desired impact. (But, between ourselves, it is he who will marry Alma in the end, not Kokoschka.)
Albert Schweitzer is in Strasbourg, working on his third doctorate. He has already been a D.Phil. for some time, ever since completing his philosophical dissertation ‘The Religious Philosophy of Kant from the Critique of Pure Reason to Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason’. He’s a doctor of theology too: ‘The Problem of the Last Supper: A Study Based on the Scientific Research of the Nineteenth Century and the Historical Accounts’. After becoming a lecturer in theology in Strasbourg and even vicar of the Church of St Nikolai, he decided to become a doctor of medicine as well, receiving his licence to practice in 1912. But the Doctor and Vicar and Lecturer and D.Phil. and Lic.Theol. aren’t enough. His doctoral thesis ‘The Psychiatric Study of Jesus’ has yet to be completed. With the burden of threefold roles tiring him out, the secondary literature threatens to defeat him. To make sure he doesn’t fall asleep while reading, he develops the habit of putting a bucket of cold water under his desk. When he can’t follow the explanations in the books any more, he takes off his socks, puts his feet in cold water, then goes on reading. He’s almost finished now. And he has his next great goal in sight: Africa.