This is the month when Hitler and Stalin meet while strolling in the Castle Park at Schönbrunn, Thomas Mann nearly gets outed and Franz Kafka nearly goes mad with love. A cat creeps onto Sigmund Freud’s couch. It’s extremely cold, snow crunches under the feet. Else Lasker-Schüler is impoverished and in love with Gottfried Benn, gets a horse postcard from Franz Marc but says Gabriele Münter is a non-entity. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner draws the ladies of pleasure on Potsdamer Platz. The first loop-the-loop is flown. But it’s no good. Oswald Spengler is already at work on The Decline of the West.
The first second of 1913. A gunshot rings out through the dark night. There’s a brief click, fingers tense on the trigger, then comes a second, dull report. The alarm is raised, the police dash to the scene and arrest the gunman straight away. His name is Louis Armstrong.
The twelve-year-old had wanted to see in the New Year in New Orleans with a stolen revolver. The police put him in a cell, and early on the morning of 1 January they send him to a house of correction, the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys. Once there, his behaviour is so unruly that the only solution the institution’s director, Peter Davis, can come up with is to hand him a trumpet. (What he really wants to do is slap him.) All at once Louis Armstrong falls silent, picks up the instrument almost tenderly, and his fingers, which had been playing with the trigger of the revolver only the previous night, feel the cold metal once again, except that now, still in the director’s office, rather than a gunshot, he produces his first warm, wild notes from the trumpet.
‘The gunshot at midnight. Cries in the alley and on the bridge. Ringing bells and clock chimes.’ A report from Prague: Dr Franz Kafka, a clerk with the Workers’ Accident Insurance Company for the Kingdom of Bohemia. His audience in faraway Berlin, in the apartment at 29 Immanuelkirchstrasse, is a lone individual, but to him she is the whole world: Felice Bauer, twenty-five, a bit blonde, a bit bony, a bit gangling. A shorthand typist with Carl Lindström Ltd. They had met briefly in August, the rain pelting down, she had had wet feet, and he’d quickly got cold ones. But since then they’ve been writing to each other at night while their families are asleep: hot-headed, enchanting, strange, unsettling letters. And usually another one the next afternoon. Once, when there hadn’t been a word from Felice for a few days, after waking from unsettled dreams, in desperation he desperately started work on Metamorphosis. He told her about this story, which he had finished just before Christmas. (It now lay in his desk, warmed by the two photographs of herself that Felice had sent him.) But just how quickly her distant and beloved Franz could turn into a terrible mystery she would learn only from his New Year’s letter. He asks her out of nowhere, by way of introduction, whether, if they had arranged to go to the theatre in Frankfurt am Main, and if he had instead just stayed in bed, she would have beaten him violently with an umbrella. And then, apparently innocuously, he evokes their mutual love, dreams that his hand and Felice’s will be forever bound together. Before going on: it is, ‘however, always possible that a couple might once have been led to the scaffold bound together in such a way’. What a charming thought for a prenuptial letter. They haven’t even kissed, and here he is already fantasising about their walking hand in hand to the scaffold. Kafka himself seems momentarily startled by the thoughts spilling from him: ‘But what sort of things are these, pouring out of my head?’ he writes. The explanation is simple: ‘It’s the number 13 in the year.’ And that is how 1913 begins in world literature: with a fantasy of violence.
Missing person notice. Lost: Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. She was stolen from the Louvre in 1911; still no clues. Pablo Picasso is questioned by the Paris police, but he has an alibi and they let him go home. In the Louvre, French mourners lay bouquets against the bare wall.
In the first days of January, we don’t know exactly when, a slightly scruffy 34-year-old Russian arrives at Vienna’s Northern Station from Kraków. A flurry of snow outside. He is limping. His hair hasn’t been washed this year, and his bushy moustache, which spreads like rampant undergrowth beneath his nose, can’t conceal the pock-marks on his face. He is wearing Russian peasant shoes, and his suitcase is full to bursting. As soon as he arrives, he boards a tram for Hietzing. His passport bears the name Stavros Papadopoulos, which is supposed to sound like a mixture of Greek and Georgian, and in view of his scruffy appearance and the piercing cold, every border guard has let him through. In Kraków, in his other exile, he had beaten Lenin at chess one last time the previous evening, making that the seventh time in a row. He was plainly better at chess than he was at cycling. Lenin had desperately tried to teach him. Revolutionaries have to be quick, he had drummed that into him time and again. But the man, whose name was actually Josef Vissiaronovich Djugashvili and who now called himself Stavros Papadopoulos, couldn’t learn how to ride a bike. Just before Christmas he had a bad fall on the icy cobbled streets of Kraków. His leg was still covered with grazes, his knee was sprained, and he had only been able to stand on it again for a few days. My ‘magnificent George’, Lenin had called him with a smile as he limped towards him to accept his forged passport for the journey to Vienna. And now bon voyage, Comrade.
He crossed borders unmolested, sat feverishly in the train, hunched over his manuscripts and books, which he frantically stuffed back into his suitcase every time he had to change trains.
Now, having arrived in Vienna, he had discarded his Georgian alias. From January 1913 onwards he said: My name is Stalin, Josef Stalin. When he had got out of the tram, on his right he saw the Schönbrunn Palace, brightly lit against the dull winter grey, and the park behind it. He enters the house at 30 Schönbrunner Schlossstrasse, which is what it says on the little slip of paper that Lenin had given him. And: ‘Ring the bell marked Trojanow’. So he shakes the snow off his shoes, blows his nose in his handkerchief and slightly nervously presses the button. When the maid appears, he says the agreed code word.
A cat creeps into 19 Berggasse, Vienna, and into the study of Sigmund Freud, where the Wednesday club has just assembled. The cat is the second surprise visitor in a very short time: in the late autumn Lou Andreas-Salomé had joined the menfolk. At first she had been eyed suspiciously, but now she was fervently worshipped. On her garter belt Lou Andreas-Salomé wore the many scalps of the great minds she had bagged: she had been in a confessional in St Peter’s with Nietzsche, in bed with Rilke and in Russia with Tolstoy, Frank Wedekind named his Lulu after her and Richard Strauss his Salomé. Now her latest victim, intellectually at least, was Freud – that winter she was even allowed to stay on the same floor as his study, discussed his new book about Totem and Taboo, on which he was currently working, and listened to his complaints about C. G. Jung and the renegade school of Zurich psychologists. Above all, however, Lou Andreas-Salomé, now fifty-two, the author of several books about eroticism and the mind, was receiving psychoanalytic training from the master himself – in March she would set up her own practice in Göttingen. So there she sits at the solemn Wednesday lecture. Beside her the master’s learned colleagues, on her right the already legendary couch and everywhere the little sculptures that the antique-obsessed Freud collected to console himself about the present day. And into this devout room, as Lou stepped through the door, there slipped a cat. At first Freud was irritated, but when he saw the curiosity with which the cat was studying his Greek vases and Roman miniatures, he brought it some milk. But Lou Andreas-Salomé reports: ‘As he did so, in spite of his mounting love and admiration, she paid him no attention, coldly turned the slanting pupils of her green eyes on him as if on a random object, and if for a moment he wanted something more than the cat’s egoist-narcissist purring, he had to take his foot off the comfortable couch, and try to win her attention with enticing wiggles of the toe of his boot.’ From then on, week after week, the cat was allowed to attend Freud’s lectures, and if she wheedled she was allowed to lie on his couch, on gauze compresses. She clearly proved susceptible to therapy.
Speaking of sickly: where is Rilke, by the way?
Contemporaries are worried that 1913 may prove to be an unlucky year. Gabriele D’Annunzio gives a friend a copy of his Martyrdom of St Sebastian and in the dedication prefers to date it ‘1912 + 1’. And Arnold Schönberg refuses to mention the unlucky number. Not for nothing had he invented twelve-tone music – a fundamental principle of modern music, born in part of its creator’s fear of what might come next. The birth of the rational out of the spirit of superstition. In Schönberg’s music the number ‘13’ does not occur, not even as a rhythm. Not even as a page number. When he realised with horror that the title of his opera about Moses and Aaron would have thirteen letters, he crossed out the second A from Aaron, and henceforth it was called Moses and Aron. And now a whole year fell under the shadow of that unlucky number. Schönberg was born on 13 September – and he was terrified at the idea of dying on Friday the 13th. It was no good. Arnold Schönberg did in fact die on Friday the 13th (although in 1913 + 38, or 1951). But 1913 also had a fine surprise in store for him. He would receive a slap in the face. But one thing at a time.
And now enter Thomas Mann. Early on 3 January, Mann takes his seat on the train in Munich. First of all, he reads some newspapers and letters, looks out at the snow-covered hills of the Thuringian Forest, and then, in the overheated compartment, he repeatedly nods off while worrying about his Katia, who has gone off once more for a spa treatment in the mountains. The previous summer he had visited her in Davos, and in the waiting room he had suddenly had an idea for a great short story, but now it strikes him as pointless, too remote from the world, this sanatorium-based tale. In any case, his Death in Venice would be published in only a few weeks.
Thomas Mann sits in the train and frets over his wardrobe: so annoying that long train journeys always leave those creases in one’s clothes, he would have to have his coat ironed again in the hotel. He gets up, slides the carriage door open and decides to walk up and down the corridor. So stiffly that the other guests keep mistaking him for the conductor. Outside the castles of Dornburg fly past, Bad Kösen, the vineyards of the Saale, covered with snow, the rows of vines running across the slopes like zebra stripes. Pretty, in fact, but Thomas Mann senses anxiety mounting within him the closer he gets to Berlin.
When he has stepped out of the train, he immediately takes a cab to the Hotel Unter den Linden, and he looks around the lobby to see whether the other guests recognise him as they push their way to the lifts. Then he steps into his usual room to change into expensive new clothes and comb his moustache.
At the same time, in the Grunewald deep in the west of the city, Alfred Kerr is tying his bow tie in the dressing room of his villa at 6 Höhmannstrasse and combatively twirling the tips of his moustache.
Their duel is scheduled for eight o’clock that evening. At a quarter past seven they climb aboard their respective droschkes. They drive to the Kammerspiele of the Deutsches Theater, arriving at the same time. And they ignore one another. It is cold, they both hurry inside. Once (in Bansin, on the Baltic), strictly between ourselves, he, Alfred Kerr, Germany’s greatest critic and vainest popinjay, had wooed Katia Pringsheim, the wealthy, cat-eyed Jewess. But she had turned him down, the proud and reckless man from Breslau, and thrown herself instead at Thomas Mann, the stiff northerner. Incomprehensible. But perhaps he can get his own back this evening.
Thomas Mann takes his seat in the front row and tries to emanate calm gravitas. This evening sees the première of his Fiorenza, the play he was writing when he met and fell in love with Katia. But he senses that tonight there may be a débâcle of sorts: the piece has long been his problem child. They shouldn’t have made such a drama about keeping a drama off the stage, he thinks. ‘I’ve tried to save some things, but no one listens to me’, he wrote to Maximilian Harden before he left 13 Mauerkirchstrasse in Munich.
He hated walking eyes open into a disaster. It wasn’t worthy of someone like Thomas Mann. What he had seen at the rehearsals in December didn’t bode well. Tormented, he watches the play that is supposed to bring the Florentine High Renaissance to life, but it just refuses to get going.
Eventually Mann glances furtively over his left shoulder. There, in the third row, he spots Alfred Kerr, whose pencil is scurrying over his pad. The auditorium is pitch dark, but he thinks he can discern a smile on Kerr’s face. It is the smile of the sadist, delighted that the production is providing ample material for torture. And when he catches Thomas Mann’s anxious expression, an even more agreeable shiver runs through him. He is delighted to have Thomas Mann and his unfortunate Fiorenza in the palm of his hand. For he knows he is going to grip it very hard, and when he lets go, it will slump lifeless to the floor. The curtain falls and there is a ripple of friendly applause – so friendly, in fact, that the director, in his only successful production, manages to invite Mann on stage twice. In countless letters over the next few weeks he will not fail to mention the fact. Twice! So he tries to bow with great dignity, twice! And ends up looking rather awkward. Alfred Kerr sits in the third row, not clapping. That night, when he arrives at his elegant villa in Grunewald, he asks for some tea and begins to write. He sits down solemnly at his typewriter and sets a roman ‘I’ down on the paper. Kerr numbers his paragraphs individually, like volumes in a collected edition. First he whets his sabre: ‘The author is a delicate, rather thin little soul, whose dwelling-place has its quiet roots in stasis.’ Then he lets rip: the lady Fiorenza, who is presumably supposed to be a symbol of Florence, is completely bloodless, the whole thing was cobbled together in libraries, stiff, dry, feeble, kitschy, superfluous. Those are more or less his words.
When Kerr has numbered and concluded his tenth paragraph, he contentedly pulls the last sheet of paper from the typewriter. An annihilation.
The next morning, as Thomas Mann boards the train for Munich, Kerr has dispatched his piece to the editors of the newspaper Der Tag. It appears on 5 January. When Mann reads it, he breaks down. He is ‘unmanly’, Kerr writes – that will hit Mann the hardest. Whether Kerr was alluding to Thomas Mann’s concealed homosexuality, or whether Mann only understood it as an allusion, is irrelevant. Kerr alone, apart from Karl Kraus, saw where his words could inflict the deepest wounds. At any rate, Thomas Mann was deeply hurt, ‘to the marrow’, he wrote. Throughout the whole spring of 1913 he would not recover from that criticism. Not one letter omits a reference, not a day passes without fury directed at this fellow Kerr. Mann writes to Hugo von Hofmannsthal: ‘I had known more or less what to expect, but it exceeded anything I could have foreseen. A toxic affront, in which the personal bloodlust must surely be apparent even to the most unsuspecting!’
‘He wrote that only because he didn’t get me, my dear Tommy,’ Katia says by way of consolation, and strokes his forehead maternally when she returns from her spa cure.
Two national myths are founded: in New York, the first edition of Vanity Fair is published. In Essen, Karl and Theo Albrecht’s mother opens the prototype of the first Aldi supermarket.
And how is Ernst Jünger? ‘Fair.’ At least, that’s what it says in the report the seventeen-year-old Jünger has been given in the reform school in Hameln for his essay on Goethe’s ‘Hermann and Dorothea’. He wrote: ‘The epic takes us back to the time of the French Revolution, whose blaze disturbs even the peaceful residents of the quiet Rhine valley from the contented half-sleep of their everyday lives.’ But that wasn’t enough for his teacher, who wrote in the margin, in red ink: ‘Expression too sober this time.’ We learn: this means that Ernst Jünger was already sober, when everyone else thought he was drunk.
Every afternoon Ernst Ludwig Kirchner boards the newly built underground train to Potsdamer Platz. The other painters of Die Brücke – Erich Heckel, Otto Mueller, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff – had moved to Berlin with Kirchner from Dresden, that wonderfully forgotten Baroque city where the group was founded. They were a community in every respect, sharing paints and women, their paintings indistinguishable from one another – but Berlin, that pounding mental overload of a capital city, turns them into individuals and cuts away the bridges connecting them. In Dresden all the others were able to celebrate pure colour, nature and human nakedness. In Berlin they threaten to founder.
In Berlin, in his early thirties, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner comes into his own. His art is urban, raw, his figures are overstretched and his drawing style as frantic and aggressive as the city itself; his paintings ‘bear the rust of the metropolis like varnish on the brow’. Even in the underground carriages his eyes greedily absorb people. He makes his first, quick studies in his lap: two, three strokes of the pencil, a man, a hat, an umbrella. Then he goes outside, pushes his way through the crowds, sketchpads and brushes in hand. He is drawn to Aschinger’s restaurant, where you can spend all day if you’ve bought a bowl of soup. So Kirchner sits there and looks and draws and looks. The winter day is already drawing to a close, the noise in the square is deafening, it’s the busiest square in Europe, and passing in front of him are the city’s main arteries, but also the lines of tradition and the modern age: come up out of the U-Bahn into the slushy streets of the day and you will see horse-drawn carts delivering barrels, side by side with the first high-class automobiles and the droschkes trying to dodge the piles of horse droppings. Several tram lines traverse the big square, the huge space rings with a mighty metallic scrape each time a tram leans into the curve. And in among them: people, people, people, all running as if their lives depended on it, above them billboards singing the praises of sausages, eau de cologne and beer. And beneath the arcades, the elegantly dressed ladies of the night, the only ones barely moving in the square, like spiders on the edge of a web. They wear black veils over their faces to escape the attention of the police, but the striking aspect is their huge hats, bizarre towering constructions with feathers, under the streetlights, whose green gaslight is lit when early winter evening falls.
That pale green glow on the faces of the prostitutes in Potsdamer Platz, and the raging noise of the city behind them, are what Ernst Ludwig Kirchner wants to turn into art. Into paintings. But he doesn’t yet know how. So for the time being he goes on drawing – ‘I’m on familiar terms with my drawings,’ he says, ‘I’m more formal with my paintings.’ So he grabs his intimate friends, stacks of sketches that he’s done from his table over the past few hours, and hurries home, to his studio. In Wilmersdorf, 14 Durlacher Strasse, second floor, Kirchner has made a burrow for himself: nearly every inch hung with oriental carpets, stuffed with figures and masks from Africa and Oceania and Japanese parasols, as well as his own sculptures, his own furniture, his own paintings. Photographs of Kirchner from those days show him either naked or wearing a black suit and tie, his high-collared shirt snow-white, his cigarette held as limply in his hand as if he were Oscar Wilde. Always by his side, Erna Schilling, his beloved, the successor to soft, scatty Dodo in Dresden, a ‘new’ woman with a free spirit beneath a page-boy haircut, the spitting image of Kafka’s Felice Bauer. She decorated the flat with embroideries based on her designs and Kirchner’s.
Kirchner had met Erna and her sister Gerda Schilling a year before at a Berlin dance hall, where Heckel’s girlfriend, Sidi, was also on stage. He lured the two pretty, sad-eyed dancers to his studio that first evening, because he knew straight away: their architecturally constructed bodies would ‘train my sense of beauty in the creation of the physically beautiful women of our time’. Kirchner first stepped out with nineteen-year-old Gerda, later with 28-year-old Erna, and in between with both. Flirt, muse, model, sister, saint, whore, lover – it’s hard to tell exactly which, where Kirchner is concerned. From hundreds of drawings we know every detail of these two women: Gerda sensually provocative, Erna with small, high breasts and a wide bottom, calm, at melancholy peace. There is a glorious painting from these days: on the left, three naked women, soliciting; on the right, the artist in his studio, cigarette in his mouth, checking the women out like a connoisseur. That’s how he likes to see himself. ‘Judgement of Paris’, he writes in black paint on the back of the canvas, ‘1913, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’.
But when Paris Kirchner comes home from Potsdamer Platz that evening, the lights are out, Paris comes home too late for his judgement, and Erna and Gerda have gone to sleep, buried in the enormous cushions in the sitting room that this trio infernal will turn into the most famous Berlin room in the world.
Prussian Crown Princess Victoria Louise and Ernst August of Hanover kiss for the first time in January.
The New Year edition of Die Fackel, Karl Kraus’s legendary one-man Viennese magazine, contains a cry for help: ‘Else Lasker-Schüler seeks 1,000 Mk towards the education of her son.’ It is signed by, among others, Selma Lagerlöf, Karl Kraus and Arnold Schönberg. After her divorce from Herwarth Walden, the poet could no longer pay the fees of the Odenwaldschule in which she had placed her son Paul. Kraus had wrestled with himself for six months about whether to publish the appeal. In the meantime Paul had been sent to a boarding school in Dresden, but at Christmas even Kraus, the cool executioner who could strictly separate emotion and rationality, was overwhelmed by generosity. He places the small ad in the last free space in Die Fackel. Before it, Kraus writes: ‘I see an apocalyptic Galopin preparing for the end of the world, the herald of ruin, overheating the limbo of temporality.’
The tiny attic room at 13 Humboldtstrasse in Berlin-Grunewald is ice-cold. Else Lasker-Schüler has just wrapped herself up in lots of blankets when she hears the shrill doorbell dragging her from her daydreams. Lasker-Schüler – wild, black eyes, dark mane, lovesick, unfit for life – envelopes herself in her oriental dressing gown and opens the door to the postman, who holds out her mail: her severe and distant friend Kraus’s bright red Die Fackel from Vienna and then, just below, a little blue miracle – a postcard from Franz Marc, the Blaue Reiter artist. Lasker-Schüler, with her gaudy garments, her jangling rings and bracelets, her wild, fairy-tale imagination: in those days she was the embodiment of a society dashing into the modern age, a dream figure, the object of desire of such diverse men as Kraus, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Kokoschka, Rudolf Steiner and Alfred Kerr. But you can’t live on deification. Else Lasker-Schüler is in a bad way now that her marriage to Herwarth Walden, the great gallery owner and publisher of Sturm magazine, is at an end, and he’s with the appalling Nell, his new wife, sitting around in cafés from which Else has been banned, precisely because it means she won’t be there. But it was in just such an artists’ café, in December, that she met Franz and Maria Marc, who would become her guardian angels.
So Else Lasker-Schüler picks up her copy of Die Fackel, oblivious to the touching advertisement by Karl Kraus, and then she turns over the postcard that Franz Marc has sent her. She freezes in silent jubilation. On the tiny space her far-off friend has painted her a Tower of Blue Horses, powerful creatures towering up to the sky, outside of time and yet firmly within it. She senses that she’s been granted a unique gift: the first blue horses of the Blue Rider. Perhaps this special woman, who always senses everything, and more – senses that in the weeks that followed, the idea of his postcard will produce an even bigger ‘tower of blue horses’ in faraway Sindelsdorf, a painting as a programme, an artistic landmark. The larger painting will later be burned, and all that remains of it will be that postcard, which bears the fingerprints of both Marc and Lasker-Schüler, and which will always tell the tale of the moment when the Blue Rider began its gallop.
Touched, the poet notes how the great painter has included her emblems, the half-moon and the golden stars, into his little painting of horses. A dialogue begins; associations, words and postcards fly back and forth. She appoints him the imaginary ‘Prince of Cana’; she is ‘Prince Yussuf of Thebes’. On 3 January, Else writes back and thanks him for her blue miracle: ‘How beautiful this card is – I’ve always wished my own white horses could be joined by horses in my favourite colour. How can I thank you!!’
When Marc then invites her by postcard to come to Sindelsdorf, completely exhausted by the divorce and by Berlin, she boards the train with the Marcs. She is far too thinly dressed, so Maria Marc wraps her in a blanket she has brought along. It’s entirely possible she’s sitting in the same train in which Thomas Mann is hurrying back to his family fortress after his bungled Fiorenza première. It’s a lovely idea: the north and south poles of German culture in 1913, together in a single train.
When the enfeebled poet arrives in Sindelsdorf in the alpine uplands, she lives at first with Franz Marc and his wife, Maria, a strapping matron under whose wings Marc snuggled when the winds blew too chill. ‘Painter Marc and his lioness’, as Else called them.
She manages only a few days in the childless couple’s guest room, before moving on to the Sindelsdorf inn, with its terrific view across the moor to the mountains. But even here she can’t find peace. The worried landlady advises her to take a Kneipp cure and lends her the requisite books. Nothing does any good. Else Lasker-Schüler hurries from Sindelsdorf to Munich and finds a room in a pension on Theresienstrasse.
The Marcs come after her and find her in the breakfast room, with whole armies of tin soldiers that she’s probably bought for her son Paul, ‘fighting out violent battles’ on the blue and white table-cloth, ‘instead of the battles that life constantly threw her way’. She is in a fighting mood, furious, quivering, not entirely in her right mind. At the end of January, in the Galerie Thannhauser, at the opening of the big Franz Marc exhibition, she meets Kandinsky, then gets into a squabble with the painter Gabriele Münter. She had made a remark that Lasker-Schüler had taken as an insult to Marc, whereupon she screeched through the gallery: ‘I’m an artist and I’m not going to stand for that from some nonentity.’
Maria Marc stands between the bickering women, entirely at a loss, shouting, ‘Children, children’. Later she will claim that Else Lasker-Schüler already had ‘much of the pose of the world-weary writer about her’, but still, ‘she’d really experienced a great deal compared to the young Weltschmerz gang in Berlin.’ So that’s what the world of 1913 looks like from the vantage point of Sindelsdorf.
On 20 January, in Tell el-Amarna, in central Egypt, the spoils of the latest digs by the German Oriental Society, financed by the Berliner James Simon, are being divided: half are promised to the Cairo Museum, the other half to the German museums, including the ‘painted plaster bust of a royal princess’. The director of the French antiquities commission in Cairo authorises the division, suggested by the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt. Borchardt alone sensed straight away that what he was holding was the kind of discovery that comes along once in a thousand years, when an excited Egyptian assistant pressed the little statue into his hand. A few days later the plaster bust sets off on its journey to Berlin. It does not yet bear the name Nefertiti. It isn’t yet the most famous bust of a woman in the world.
The world bubbles over with excitement. Small wonder, then, that in 1913 the Russian pilot Piotr Nikoayevich Nesterov flew the first loop-the-loop in human history in his fighter plane. And that the Austrian figure-skater Alois Lutz spun so skilfully in the air on a deep-frozen lake in that bitter cold January that the jump bears the name Lutz to this day. To perform it, you have to take a backwards run-up, then jump from the left back outside edge. You achieve the spin by suddenly drawing your arms into your torso. Logically enough, for the double-Lutz you do the same thing twice.
Stalin will stay in Vienna for four weeks. Never again will he leave Russia for such a long time; his next foreign trip of any length will be thirty years later, to Tehran, where he will take part in discussions with Churchill and Roosevelt (in 1913 the former was First Lord of the British Admiralty, the latter a senator in Washington, campaigning against the stripping of the American forests). Stalin rarely leaves his secret hideaway at 30 Schönbrunner Schlossstrase, the home of the Troyanovskys; he is completely preoccupied with writing his essay ‘Marxism and the National Question’, commissioned by Lenin. Only very occasionally, early in the afternoon, does he stretch his legs in the nearby park at Schönbrunn Palace, which lies cold and neat in the January snow. Once a day there’s a moment of excitement when Kaiser Franz Joseph leaves the palace and sets off in his coach to do a spot of governing. Franz Joseph has now been in power for an incredible sixty-five years, since 1848. He has never got over the death of his beloved Sissi, the Empress Elisabeth, and even now her life-size portrait hangs above his desk.
The grizzled monarch hobbles the few steps to his dark green coach, his breath leaving a little cloud in the cold air, then a liveried footman shuts the door of the coach and the horses trot off through the snow. Then silence again.
Stalin walks through the park, thinking. It’s already getting dark. Then another walker comes towards him, twenty-three years old, a failed painter who’s been turned down by the Academy and who is now killing time in the men’s hostel on Meldemannstrasse. He is waiting, like Stalin, for his big break. His name is Adolf Hitler. The two men, whose friends at the time say they liked to walk in the park at Schönbrunn, may have greeted one another politely and tipped their hats as they made their way through the boundless park.
The age of extremes, the terrible short twentieth century, begins on a January afternoon in 1913 in Vienna. The rest is silence. Even when Hitler and Stalin sealed their fatal ‘pact’ in 1939, they never met. So they were never closer than they were on one of those bitterly cold January afternoons in the park of Schönbrunn Palace.
The drug ‘ecstasy’ has been synthesised for the first time; the patent application drags on through 1913. Then it’s completely forgotten about for several decades.
Here’s Rainer Maria Rilke, at last! Rilke is on the run from winter and his writer’s block, and has ended up in Ronda, in southern Spain. A female acquaintance had recommended during a séance that he should travel to Spain, and since Rilke always relied throughout his life on the advice of mature ladies, he clearly had to turn to the inhabitants of the beyond for orders. Now he’s staying in Ronda, at the elegant Hotel Reina Victoria, a British hotel of the very latest kind, but now, out of season, almost empty. From up here he writes to his ‘dear, good Mama’ every week like a good boy. And to the other faraway ladies that he pines after so beautifully: to Marie von Thurn und Taxis, to Eva Cassirer, to Sidonie Nádherný, to Lou Andreas-Salomé. We will be hearing more about these ladies this year, don’t you worry.
Right now it is Lou, the woman who took his virginity and persuaded him to change his first name from René to Rainer, whose star is suddenly in the ascendant: ‘Merely to see one another, dear Lou [the word ‘dear’ is underlined three times], that’s my greatest hope.’ And he goes on to scribble in the margin, ‘my support, my everything, as ever’. Then off to the mail train, which takes three hours to get to Gibraltar. And from there it travels on to 19 Berggasse, Lou Andreas-Salomé, c/o Prof. Dr Sigmund Freud. And Lou writes to her ‘dear, dear boy’ that she thinks she can be tougher with him than before. And ‘I think you will always have to suffer, and always will.’ Is it sado-masochism, or is it love?
The days go by, filled with suffering and letter-writing. Sometimes Rilke goes on working on his Duino Elegies. He manages the first thirty-one lines of the sixth Elegy, but he simply can’t finish it; he’d rather go walking in his white suit and his pale hat, or read the Koran (before going on to write ecstatic poems about angels and the Assumption of Mary). You could feel good here, far away from the dark winter, and at first Rilke too enjoys the fact that the sun doesn’t sink behind the mountains before half-past five, even in January, that before it does so it bathes the city, perched on its rocky plateau, in a warm glow one last time – ‘an unforgettable spectacle’, as he writes to his dear Mama. The almond trees are already in blossom; so too the violets in the hotel garden, even the pale blue iris. Rilke pulls out his little black notebook, orders a coffee on the terrace, wraps his blanket around his hips, blinks into the sun one last time and then notes: ‘Ah, if only one knew how to blossom: one’s heart would be/ Consoled for both the slighter dangers and the greater.’
Indeed, if only one knew how to blossom. In Munich, Oswald Spengler, the 33-year-old misanthrope, sociopath and unemployed maths teacher, is working on the first chapter of his monumental work The Decline of the West. He himself has already set an example with regard to this decline. ‘I am’, he writes in 1913, in the notes for his autobiography, ‘the last of my kind.’ Everything, he writes, comes to an end; the suffering of the West is visible within him and on his body. Negative megalomania. Fading blossoms. Spengler’s primal emotion: fear. Fear of setting foot inside a shop. Fear of relatives, fear of others speaking dialect. And of course: ‘Fear of women, when they take their clothes off.’ He knows fearlessness only in his mind. When the Titanic sank in 1912, he discerned in it a profound symbolism. In the notes he made at the time, he suffers, laments, complains about his unfortunate childhood and an even more unfortunate present. Every day he records it anew: a great era is coming to an end, hasn’t anybody noticed? ‘Culture – one last deep breath before extinction.’ In The Decline of the West he puts it like this: ‘Every culture has its new expressive possibilities, which appear, ripen, fade and never return.’ But such a culture sinks more slowly than an ocean liner, of that you may be sure.
Since the beginning of the year the Carl Simon Verlag in Düsseldorf had been selling a new series of original transparencies featuring seventy-two original colour glass plates in cardboard boxes inside a wooden case, along with a thirty-five-page accompanying brochure. Subject: ‘The Sinking of the Titanic’. All over the country slide shows were held. First you see the captain, the ship, the cabins, then the approaching iceberg. The disaster, lifeboats. The sinking ship. It’s true: an ocean liner goes down more quickly than the West. Leonardo DiCaprio has not yet been born.
Franz Kafka, a man who is terrified when women take off their clothes, has a quite different concern. A white-hot idea has come to him. In the night of 22–3 January he writes roughly his 200th letter to Felice Bauer, and asks, ‘Can you actually read my handwriting?’
Can you read the world? That’s what Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque wonder, and keep coming up with new codes that viewers are supposed to decipher. They’ve just taught the world that you can paint shifting perspectives – it’s known as Cubism – and now, in January 1913, they’re taking it one step further. Later it will be called Synthetic Cubism, when they stick bits of wood fibre and all kinds of other things onto their paintings; the canvas now becomes an adventure playground. Braque had just moved into a new studio in Paris, right at the top of the Hotel Roma in Rue Caulaincourt, when he suddenly picked up a comb and ran it through his painting Fruit-Dish, Ace of Clubs and the lines looked like wood-grain. Picasso discovered the same thing the same day. And, as always, he was soon better at it than the inventor himself. So the artistic revolutionaries dashed ever onwards, impelled by their horror of being fully understood by the bourgeois public. Picasso might have been reassured had he known that Arthur Schnitzler wrote in his diary on 8 February: ‘Picasso: the early paintings outstanding; violent resistance to his current Cubism.’
He only just managed to survive. And now Lovis Corinth must pay dearly for his life’s work. On 19 January a spectacular exhibition of 228 paintings, entitled ‘Life’s Work’, is due to open in the Secession building at 208 Kurfürstendamm. Today, on the first day of the year, lying hungover and exhausted on a sofa at 49 Klopstockstrasse, he is rather dreading it. It’s barely four o’clock and already it’s dark again, and sleet is falling from the sky.
So now Weber’s, the framers, from 28 Derfflingerstrasse, want their money for the framing of the ‘Life’s Work’ – a hefty 1,632.50 Marks. And for the reception that he’s giving for the opening, the caterer, Adolf Kraft Nachfolger, 116 Kurfürstendamm, wants 200 Marks up front. For this he will deliver: ‘1 dish tongue. 1 dish Coburg ham with Cumberland sauce. 1 dish saddle of venison with Cumberland sauce. 1 dish roast beef with remoulade.’ Even reading about it makes Lovis Corinth feel ill. Life’s Work with Cumberland sauce. Last night’s Polish carp still lies heavy on his stomach. When his beloved Charlotte is away, he invariably eats too much: it’s yearning, he knows that. And so he writes a New Year’s letter to his wife, Charlotte, who is hiking through the snow, far away in the mountains: ‘Who knows how this New Year will go; the last one was awful. Forget it!’ Indeed. Corinth, a painter always bursting with vigour, who swept out of the High Baroque into the Berlin of the early twentieth century, had been felled by a stroke, and his wife had looked after him at great personal sacrifice. When the ‘Life’s Work’ exhibition was being planned, everyone was afraid that Corinth’s was in fact over. But he had fought his way back to life. And back to the easel. Now the posters for his big exhibition were hanging all over the city, 9 to 4 every day, admission 1 Mark, with a picture of Corinth, amazed at himself, while Charlotte recovered from him off in the Tyrol. She’s back in time for the reception. ‘You’re looking well, Madame’, Max Liebermann says to her at the reception on 19 January at the Secession, his saddle of venison with Cumberland sauce in his right hand. My life’s work is looking good, Lovis Corinth thinks to himself as he stomps and grumbles his way through the exhibition halls. So it goes on. But – please – no more of that awful Cubism.
Back to Freud’s, at 19 Berggasse. He’s spending these January days in his study, finishing off his book on Totem and Taboo. And it’s quite natural that the unconscious should be forcing its way powerfully into this book about taboo-breaking and fetishisation. But there’s one thing he doesn’t seem to be aware of: at that moment, at any rate, when his pupils, above all the Zurich psychologist C. G. Jung (b. 1875), are challenging him and hurling violent accusations at him, Freud (b. 1856) is developing his theory of parricide. So in December 1912 Jung had written to Freud: ‘I would like to make you aware that your technique of treating your pupils as patients is a mistake.’ By so doing Freud is creating ‘impudent rogues’ and ‘slavish sons’, he writes. And he continues: ‘Meanwhile you always remain comfortably on top as the father. Out of pure subservience, no one dares to tug the prophet’s beard.’
Seldom in his life has anything hit Freud as hard as this act of parricide. During those few months, when his beard must have sprouted new grey hairs, he drafts a first reply which he doesn’t send, and which will only be found in his desk after his death. But on 3 January 1913 he summons all his strength and writes to Jung in Küsnacht: ‘Your assumptions that I am treating my pupils as patients are demonstrably inaccurate.’ And then:
Besides, your letter is unanswerable. It creates a situation that would cause difficulties in spoken communication, and is entirely insoluble through written channels. But anyone encountering abnormal behaviour who shouts that it is normal arouses suspicions that he lacks an understanding of illness. I therefore propose that we abandon our private relationship entirely. I will lose nothing, because I have long been joined to you only by the thin thread of the further development of past disappointments.
What a letter! A father, challenged by his son, stabs furiously back. Never has Freud lost his temper so badly as during these January days. Never has she seen him so depressed as in 1913, his beloved daughter Anna will later say.
Jung replies on 6 January: ‘I will comply with your wish to abandon the personal relationship. Besides, you will probably know better than anyone what this moment means for you.’ He writes that in ink. Then he adds by typewriter, and it looks like a tombstone for one of the great intellectual friendships of the twentieth century: ‘The rest is silence.’ It’s a fine irony that one of the most interpreted and most discussed break-ups of 1913 should begin with a vow of silence. From this moment on Jung will chafe at Freud’s methods, and Freud, conversely, at Jung’s. Before that he gives a precise definition of parricide among primitive people: they put on masks of the murdered father – then pray to their victim. You might almost call it the Dialectic of Enlightenment.
And speaking of Enlightenment, the ten-year-old Theodor W. Adorno, nicknamed ‘Teddie’, who will later come up with that phrase, is living at 12 Schöne Aussicht, Frankfurt am Main. The key person in his life, apart from his mother, is the chimpanzee Basso in Frankfurt Zoo. At the same time Frank Wedekind, author of Spring Awakening and Lulu, is friends with Missie, a chimpanzee from the Zoological Garden in Berlin.
Marcel Proust sits in his study at 102 Boulevard Haussmann in Paris, building his own cage. Neither sunlight nor dust nor noise must bother him while he’s working. It’s a special form of work/life balance. He has hung his study with three layers of curtains and papered his walls with cork panels. In this soundproofed room Proust sits by electric light, sending excessively polite New Year letters, as he does every year, with the urgent request that they henceforth spare him presents. He was constantly receiving invitations, but anyone who sent them knew how exhausting it was for him, because he sent letters and notes in advance about whether he was coming or not, and how he probably wouldn’t etc. – a great procrastinator, actually matched in this respect only by Kafka.
Here sits Marcel Proust, in this soundproofed room of the mind, trying his hand at his novel about memory and the search for lost time. The first part would be called ‘A Love of Swann’s’, and in fine ink he writes the final sentence down on paper: ‘The reality I once knew no longer exists. The memory of a particular image is the melancholy remembering of a particular moment; and houses, streets, avenues are fleeting, oh! the years.’
Must memory be melancholy remembering? Gertrude Stein, the great Parisian salon hostess and friend of the avant-garde, is shivering a few streets away from Proust. She is engaged in a terrible fight with her brother Leo; their decades-long flat-share is threatening to come apart at the seams. Is everything ephemeral? She dreams of the spring. She draws warmth from a thought. She looks at the Picassos and Cézannes on her wall. But does one thought make a spring? She writes a short poem including the phrase ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’. Just like Proust, she is trying to capture something that wants to be forgotten. So this is the world of poetry, the world of the imagination, in January 1913.
Max Beckmann finishes his painting The Sinking of the Titanic.