Is this the summer of the century? Who knows, but it is the month when Sigmund Freud has a fainting fit, and when Ernst Ludwig Kirchner is happy. Kaiser Franz Joseph goes hunting and Ernst Jünger spends hours on end sitting in a hot greenhouse with a winter coat on. Musil’s Man Without Qualities begins with some inaccurate information. Georg Trakl attempts to take a holiday in Venice. So does Schnitzler. Rainer Maria Rilke is in Heiligendamm and receives a lady visitor. Picasso and Matisse go horse-riding together. Franz Marc is presented with the gift of a house-trained deer. No one does any work.
In Heiligendamm, sitting out on the hotel terrace, Rainer Maria Rilke slowly pulls off his dark grey gloves and loosely grasps the hand of Helene von Nostitz, who is sitting next to him drinking an Austrian mokka. She gazes into his eyes, his gentle, deep blue eyes, the depths of which always make women forget the rest of his face. Rilke was with Lou Andreas-Salomé in Göttingen when he received Helena’s letter asking him to come and join her. To the great surprise of all involved, bound together as they were by a tightly interwoven, confusing network of affection and jealousy, Rilke accepted the invitation. As he wrote in a letter from Göttingen while Lou was off somewhere lying down, exhausted from all their mutual silence, talking, arguing, pining, reading and more silence, he had an ‘intense need for some sea air’. But when Rilke arrives in Heiligendamm, he is confronted by the colourful chaos of horse-racing, for the racetrack on the small hilltop between Heiligendamm and Bad Doberan is hosting its big, traditional derby. The hotel in Heiligendamm is overflowing with chic urbanites and fat stud farm owners whose waistcoats practically burst at the belly every time they stand up. There are horse boxes everywhere, women with big hats, businesslike hustle and bustle, conversations about wagers – Beppo is the big favourite today, or so he hears. Distraught, Rilke asks at the reception for some writing paper.
He writes a hasty note to Helene von Nostitz, informing her that he plans to set off again within the next half-hour. When the bellboy delivers the letter to her room, she is in the middle of an argument with her husband about her reasons for inviting the poet. After reading Rilke’s lament, she quickly gets dressed and hurries out, finding him in the Kurhaus dressed in his white summer suit, but looking ‘grey and exhausted’. The clouds rage outside, towering up to form mighty black mountains. A powerful wind starts up, blowing across from the sea. The women hold tightly onto their hats, while the first wilting leaves are swept from the tall beech trees up into the air.
Helene von Nostitz links arms with Rilke and marches him energetically out of the Kurhaus, past the little path to the newly built cottages, all the while firing out greetings to left and right, everyone hunched over against the stormy wind. Helene and Rainer reach the beech forest. They keep going; it gets calmer and calmer; the wind drops. Behind them, over Kühlungsborn, the sun pushes its way through the clouds and bathes the coast in glistening light. The beech trees rise up majestically into the Baltic Sea sky, their trunks rubbed completely smooth and their crowns pushed up high by the salty wind. Despite being many decades old, they still look so innocent. How do they do that? Rilke feels like he’s strolling among enormous stilts. The trees tear their gaze away from earthly moss formation and tree stumps up to the skies. He leans against a tree trunk and takes a deep breath. Helene von Nostitz gives him an encouraging glance, but all he can see is the blue sea, shining out from between the beech trunks, here and there a tiny frothed peak, but otherwise just blue, blue, blue.
Later, once his thoughts have come back to earth, he sits down and writes to Lou Andreas-Salomé: ‘This place is the oldest seaside resort in Germany, popular for its forest by the sea, and for its clientele, who consist almost entirely of the landowning nobility from the surrounding areas.’ The letter is surprisingly cool, given the newly rekindled relationship between Rilke and Lou, who only recently were holding hands in that Göttingen garden as if renewing their old bond. Then they parted ways – Lou decided to open a psychoanalytic practice in Göttingen, and Rilke decided to attempt a holiday. But, as always, he seems to feel under immense pressure to be suffering at least a little, as though Lou should never feel he can be happy when he’s not with her. This forms the basis of all the innumerable letters he sends to his faraway benefactress and admirer. So in Baedeker style he writes another few lines about Heiligendamm in 1913:
The Grand Duke has a villa here, but apart from that there’s only a Kurhaus with a lovely columned hall, a hotel, and around a dozen villas, everything still rather pristinely presented in the tasteful style of the early nineteenth century. The people are driven over from their mansions in the most exquisite of horse-driven carriages, providing these wonderful, lively reliefs against the backdrop of the sea. And yet it’s so peaceful in the forests and even on the beach, and all in all, it’s a …
Here the reader expects Rilke to let another enthusiastic or at least relatively positive adjective slip out, but the Chief Risk Officer of Happiness manages to rein it in just in time, and continues with: ‘all in all, it’s a reasonable little place.’
What a shame he can’t let himself go even here. For Rilke, that ardent lover of tender unhappiness, high priest of the inexpressible, even Paradise was probably only a ‘reasonable place’. But he cannot deny that he grows increasingly fond of Heiligendamm, helped by the fact that the weather is better here than anywhere else in the country, for the sea wind always drives the clouds away, and the most beautiful of sights play out on the beach before Rilke’s eyes, with fluttering garments and Impressionist gatherings of people. It pleases him to sit there on a deckchair, his legs crossed, and read poems by Goethe or Werfel, that young hothead he is currently so in awe of. And so he becomes increasingly fond of the place, but this has little to do with the presence of Helene von Nostitz, who, like all his women, he finds very alluring from a distance but demanding and irritating at close quarters. He knows how to escape her without being choked by her jealousy, though, and declares the following: ‘The Unknown is drawing me in.’ That must have delighted Herr von Nostitz, who was seriously bothered by the goings-on between his wife and the strange poet. So Rilke goes to his room and tries – in complete earnest – to make super-sensory contact with his ‘Unknown’.
He got to know her at the séances held by Marie von Thurn und Taxis in Duino, when she, this unknown lady, instructed him to throw a key or ring from the bridge into the river in Toledo. And because he was planning to travel to Spain at some point anyway, he took this order very seriously and had the princess pay his first-class fare for the journey. Rilke’s restless and lavish lifestyle depended on permanent contributions from a circle of powerful women – in order to keep them sweet, he developed an intense correspondence with each of them. Every day he sent off many dove-blue pages to the palaces and hotels of Central Europe. He wooed them to solicit money, understanding, affection, even a wife. But he shied away from it too – not from the money, understanding or affection – he was perfectly happy to take all that. It was just the wife he wasn’t sure about. He preferred to keep them at a tender distance through his letters. He even became the German champion at doing so. And this is what he is doing now, in Heiligendamm. On 1 August he writes one of his epic letters to Sidonie Nádherný, who is drowning in grief since her brother shot himself. Rilke dries the tears of her soul with his pen, as if it were some exquisite handkerchief, and urges her to turn her mind to practical grieving: she should play some Beethoven on the piano, he instructs, for that will help, and she should do it ‘this very evening’.
Then he turns his attention back to his super-sensory relationship. Unfortunately, we don’t know what the ‘Unknown’ told Rilke to do in Heiligendamm. We do know, however, that he stayed on there even after Helene von Nostitz’s departure. But that’s probably for sensory, rather than extra-sensory, reasons: for he met Ellen Delp, one of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s ‘adoptive daughters’, a young actress favoured by Max Reinhardt, who was recuperating in nearby Kühlungsborn. No sooner has Helene set off to Bad Doberan by train than Rilke writes the following on the afternoon of 14 August: ‘Dear Lou’s daughter, I’ve come to extend my hand to you in greeting.’ And he does: far away from their social circle and from convention, Rilke seems to achieve a relatively uncomplicated affair with Ellen Delp here in Heiligendamm. After their first walk together beneath the tall beeches, he writes the following poem:
Behind the guiltless trees
the old fate slowly forms
her silent face.
Moths draw towards it …
A bird’s cry here
rebounds there as a train of sorrow
against the hard soothsaying mouth.
O and those soon-to-be-lovers
smile at one another, still farewellless,
their destiny soaring and falling above them
like a constellation,
inspired by night.
Still not near enough for them to experience,
still it dwells
floating in its heavenly course,
a bright figure.
The ‘soon-to-be-lovers’! This state of affairs is Rilke’s second favourite. His favourite is that of ‘having once loved’. Because then he no longer needs to exert himself and can just get on with writing his letters. The in-between state, normally called the present, love and uncertainty – he’s not too fond of that one; it overwhelms him. But here in Heiligendamm, behind the innocent trees, he seems to feel freer than usual.
He reads poems out loud to his ‘matutinal Ellen’, Franz Werfel mostly. They go to the beach together, Rilke letting the fine Baltic Sea sand glide through his long, slender fingers. After that, they probably go to his room. The day after, Ellen has roses sent to the poet’s room. And he sends a thank-you letter on his dove-blue paper: ‘The roses are beautiful, beautiful, bountiful, and cheer, the way they stand there, one’s own heart boundlessly. Rainer.’
To increase the strength of the armed forces, a search begins throughout Austro-Hungary for deserters from military service. As part of the campaign, on 22 August the police publish this missing persons notice: ‘Hietler [!], Adolf, last known residence in a men’s hostel in Meldemannstrasse, Vienna, current residence unknown, enquiries under way.’
It’s a beautiful August day in 1913. Or, to be more precise:
There was a barometric low over the Atlantic; it moved eastwards towards a high-pressure area situated over Russia, not yet showing any inclination to bypass that high by heading northwards. The isotherms and isotheres were functioning as expected. The air temperature was in the appropriate proportion to the mean annual temperature, to the temperature of the coldest and the warmest months and to the aperiodic monthly temperature fluctuations. The rising and setting of the sun and the moon, the changing phases of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn and many other significant signs all corresponded to the forecasts in the astronomical almanacs. The water vapour in the air was at its highest buoyancy level, and air humidity was low. To sum it up more briefly in a way that corresponds to fact, despite being a little old-fashioned: it was a lovely August day in the year 1913.
These are the opening lines of Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities. Alongside Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and James Joyce’s Ulysses, this was the third classic of the modern era, saturated with the explosive power of the year 1913.
But what was the weather really like in Vienna during these August days of 1913? A detailed article was printed in the Neue Freie Presse on 15 August, with the lovely headline ‘Persistent bad weather’. In it, Dr O. Baron von Myrbach, assistant at the Central Institute for Meteorology by trade, offers little comfort: ‘As feared, this year’s summer weather loyally retained the characteristics it possessed from the very beginning. Its harshness has relented a little. But that is not saying much, for the start of the summer was so unusually bad that even the period that followed, despite the improvement, must still be described as bad.’ In other words, there was not one single beautiful August day in the year 1913. No, in Vienna the average temperature was 16°. It was the coldest August of the entire twentieth century. Perhaps it’s a good thing that people didn’t know that back in 1913.
Franz Marc has gone to East Prussia with his sister to stay at her husband’s property in Gendrin. After dozens of horse paintings and horse sketches, now Marc himself is in the saddle. A lovely photograph taken that August shows him out riding with his brother-in-law Wilhelm. The horse, a grey, stands to attention, knowing that he’s carrying him, the horse whisperer. And Marc hardly dares to press his thighs against its flanks through sheer respect for the animal’s elegance. On the day of their departure Wilhelm presents Marc with a tame deer. The deer is sent by train to Sindelsdorf, survives the journey and lives from then on in the garden, named Hanni (not to be confused with the Sindelsdorf cat of the same name). To save it from the loneliness of roaming the meadow in front of Marc’s studio by itself, Hanni soon gets a life partner, a doe named Ruth. Captivated by their brown, shy beauty, Marc creates picture after picture of the two animals as symbols of paradise.
On 16 August a moving assembly line is installed at the Ford automobile factory in Detroit for the first time. In the 1913 business year Ford produces 264,972 cars.
While Alma Mahler stayed in Franzensbad, letting her wedding date pass by, Kokoschka finally carried on with painting The Tempest, turning in despair to his black paint and transforming his entire studio into a coffin. But then Alma comes back, and they fall for each other all over again. On 22 August, her birthday, they celebrate at the Tre Croci Hotel in the Dolomites, not far from Cortina d’Ampezzo. The next morning they set off early into the dense forest and stumble upon a clearing where foals are frolicking. In spite of his panic-ridden fear of being alone, Kokoschka sends Alma away, takes out his pencils and sketches the horses as if in a frenzy. The young horses come over to him, eat from his hand and rub their beautiful heads against his arms.
And what about Golo Mann? His mother, Katia, writes this in her memoir, A Youth in Germany:
Summer 1913: Golo is gabbing on even more than Aissi. He’ll often talk all day long without uttering one sensible word, nothing but nonsense, about his friends, about Hofmannsthal and Wedekind, about the Balkan War, a mixture of things he’s picked up or invented, so I really have no option but to rebuke him […] one of the children’s favourite games, following on from all the military concerts this summer, is to pretend to be conductors. Golo does it in such an indescribably comic fashion, with those unsightly enraptured expressions, that feeble pathos summoned up from deep within, and given that he’s never even seen a proper conductor before, I can hardly believe what I’m seeing.
Golo, Thomas Mann’s son, was four at the time. Where did it all come from?
Like father, like son: in Germany, jus sanguinis, right of blood, becomes the basis for citizenship in 1913.
Ernst Jünger is bored during his summer holidays in Rehburg, on the banks of Lake Steinhude. Tall oaks rustle next to the family’s country house in Brunnenstrasse, the view stretches for miles. But Jünger feels imprisoned in the house, with all its little turrets and alcoves. Dark wood panelling from Germany’s industrial era set the tone for the entire property; the windows hardly allow any light in through their stained-glass panes. Magnificent wood-carvings sit enthroned on the door frames. The hunting room is always gloomy, the windows painted over with the scene of a belling stag and a skulking fox. This is where Ernst’s father sits with his friends, smoking fat cigars and hoping to shut the world out. Ernst Jünger feels his room is suffocating him, he lies on his bed up in the loft and goes back to reading adventure stories set in Africa. It’s raining. But as soon as the sun appears, its sheer summer-like energy warms the air outside in minutes. Jünger opens the window. His parents are setting off on an excursion. The water rolls down the hard leaves of the huge rhododendron bushes in the garden and drips heavily on the ground. He can hear it. Plop, plop, plop. Other than this, it’s deathly quiet this August lunchtime. Eighteen-year-old Ernst walks down the wide, dark brown steps to the cloakroom and searches for his warmest winter coat, the one that’s lined with fine fur. He takes the fur hat down from the hat rack too, and then sneaks out of the house. It’s a humid 31° outside. Jünger walks through the rhododendron bushes along the narrow path leading to the greenhouses. This is where his father cultivates his tropical plants and vegetables. As Jünger opens the door to the cucumber house, musty, stale heat hits him in the face. He quickly shuts the door behind him, pulls on the fur cap and winter coat and sits down on a wooden stool next to the flowerpots. The cucumber shoots snake wildly up in the air like darting green tongues. It’s two o’ clock in the afternoon. The thermometer inside the greenhouse is showing 42°. Jünger smiles. It can’t be much hotter than this even in Africa, he thinks.
On 3 August an artist suffocates inside a pile of sand at Berlin Jungfernheide. His art form consisted of being buried alive for up to five minutes. Today, however, the director of the artists’ group was immersed in conversation and forgot to start the excavation until ten minutes had passed.
On 11 August, Sigmund Freud continues his journey with his wife, sister-in-law and daughter Anna from Marienbad on to San Martino di Castrozza. This small mountain village in the Dolomites is home to a branch of Dr Von Hartungen’s legendary Riva sanatorium. Freud plans to spend another four weeks recharging here before he has to go to Munich at the beginning of September for that confounded Congress of the Psychoanalytical Society. Freud summons his friend Josef Ferenczi to his hotel; Ferenczi is more than happy to come, and together they work on a strategy for Munich. In the afternoons he goes for his daily constitutional with Anna, arm in arm through the cool forest. A picture of them on one of their walks shows Anna in traditional garb, staring jauntily at the camera, full of confidence, and her father next to her, proud but morose too, even a little anxious. During his stay at the mountain sanatorium he receives treatment for his migraines and chronic cold. Christl von Hartungen prescribes strict abstinence from tobacco and alcohol, and plenty of fresh air. But Freud struggles to re-charge at all. The nearer the event in Munich gets, the more distracted he becomes. Then, in the middle of the night, just one day before his departure, Dr Freud sends for Dr Von Hartungen; he has suffered a fainting fit and requests urgent medical assistance via a calling card.
At the beginning of August, having recovered from the shock caused by the deaths of his father and his dog Frika, Picasso travels to Céret. But his fame is now such that on 9 August the local newspaper L’Indépendant runs the following report: ‘The small town of Céret is rejoicing. The Master of Cubism has arrived, ready to enjoy a well-earned rest. So far, the artists Herbin, Braque, Kisling, Ascher, Pichot, Gris and the sculptor Davidson have joined him in Céret.’ All this fuss is a source of anxiety to Picasso. His greatest concern is Juan Gris, for he has mastered the Cubist technique almost as well as Picasso by now, and has the ability expertly to create a whole new world from fragments, wallpaper and scraps of newspaper. Before long, his old friend Ramon Pichot also comes to Céret, attempting to convince Picasso to give money to his most recent lover, Fernande, to help her get by. But Picasso hates being pressured like that, and they come to blows. Picasso and Eva, who stole him away from Fernande, leave in a panic. They head back to pulsating Paris in search of some ‘peace and quiet’, as Picasso – in all honesty – writes in a letter to his art dealer Kahnweiler in Rome. Eva and Picasso move into their new apartment and studio at 5 Rue Schoelcher in Montparnasse.
From there it’s only ten minutes on the new railway line to Issy-les-Moulineaux, where Henri Matisse is now living. Scarcely back from Céret, Picasso and Eva drive out there and spend the summer horse-riding with Matisse. This is such an extraordinary event that it is immediately reported twice to Modernism’s head office, Gertrude Stein. First, a note from Picasso: ‘We’re riding through the Clamart forest’, on 29 August. And then, on the same day, this from Matisse: ‘Picasso is a horseman. We’re out riding together, which comes as a great surprise to everyone.’ The news of the two heroes’ reconciliation quickly becomes the most important topic of conversation in Montparnasse and Montmartre – in other words, the whole world.
‘We are each passionately interested in the technical problems of the other. We undoubtedly profited from one another, it was like an artistic brotherhood’, writes Matisse about the man who was once his greatest rival. And to Max Jacob, Matisse says: ‘If I didn’t do what I do, I would love to paint like Picasso does.’ And Max Jacob replies: ‘It’s crazy, but Picasso just said the very same thing to me about you.’
Georg Trakl is furious. He wants to see his sister Gretl, but can’t find her. His appointment as a clearing officer in the Viennese war ministry was, of course, a complete joke. He stops turning up and drinks his first five carafes of red wine by midday every day. He takes drugs. His friends Adolf Loos and his English wife, Bessie, prescribe him an immediate dose of: holiday – holiday from himself. They are due to travel to Venice. On 14 August he writes to his friend Buschbeck: ‘On Saturday I’m supposed to travel to Venice with the Looses, which inexplicably makes me somewhat nervous.’ The next day, a second letter, this time with a rare trace of euphoria ignited by the prospect of his first ever holiday: ‘Dearest Buschbeck! The world is round. On Saturday, I will be falling down towards Venice. Further and further – towards the stars.’ Of course, the whole thing turns out to be a failure: a displeasure trip. He who once reached for the stars has ended up with a handful of jellyfish. Even his adored Karl Kraus, who goes to the lido with them, even the caring attention of Adolf Loos, Ludwig von Ficker and their wives can’t brighten Trakl’s mood, which is further clouded by the presence of Peter Altenberg on this ‘staff outing’ of the Austrian intelligentsia. It’s mid-August, and Georg Trakl is walking aimlessly across the Lido in Venice. The sun is shining, the water is warm and the author is the unhappiest person in the entire world. A photograph from those days of 1913 shows him wandering tentatively across the sand, his hair brittle and shorn, his skin as pale as that of a moloch living in a hole deep under the earth. His left hand is curled upwards like a flower bud, his lips are pursed. He has his back to the sea, clearly feeling like a pitiful sight in his bathing costume, lost, homesick and may be mumbling poetry to himself. At night, in the hotel, he writes them down:
Darkens the stone room
And the head of the homeless man
Gazes tormented at the golden day.
Venice, the sinking city, exerts an irresistible pull on the morbidly inclined Viennese intelligentsia in the summer of 1913. As well as Trakl, Peter Altenberg, Adolf Loos and his wife and the Von Fickers, Arthur Schnitzler and his wife, Olga, also arrive in Venice on 23 August. They have travelled from Brioni, and are staying in the Grand Hotel. On the beach they meet more old acquaintances: Hermann Bahr, a bearded giant of a man, and his wife. The very next day, after a gondola ride with Olga, Schnitzler meets with his publisher Samuel Fischer to discuss forthcoming publications. The Fischers are in Venice with their best friends to celebrate their son Gerhart’s nineteenth birthday. Richard Beer-Hoffmann is there, the actor Alexander Moissi, and Hermann Bahr and Altenberg come along too. There’s no mention of Trakl. Unfortunately, they are all ailing from something: Gerhart, the birthday boy, is scrawny and feverish, and Samuel Fischer has an inflammation of the middle ear. But they celebrate anyway, toasting young life and its rich prospects. At the end of August the Schnitzlers set off in leisurely fashion via St Moritz and Sils Maria, where on 28 August in the ‘Waldhaus’, they celebrate Goethe’s birthday and also, just a bit, their tenth anniversary.
We can’t forget Kafka, or his bride! So how did Felice Bauer react to reading the most preposterous marriage proposal of all time? She was distraught. But even she, hardened as she is by now, probably hadn’t thought Kafka capable of surpassing that disastrous note of self-incrimination masked as a marriage proposal. But then Kafka writes his ‘Letter to the Father’. It never became as famous as the one he wrote to his own father. But it deserved to, because it’s simply incredible. On 28 August, Goethe’s birthday, Kafka asks Felice’s father whether he would entrust his daughter to him. Or rather: he implores him desperately not to entrust his daughter to him:
I am taciturn, unsociable, morose, selfish, a hypochondriac and genuinely in poor health. Among my family, the best, most loving of people you could ever encounter, I live as a complete stranger. In recent years I’ve spoken an average of less than twenty words a day to my mother, and I’ve barely ever exchanged more than a few words of greeting with my father. I don’t speak to my married sisters and their husbands at all, unless I have something bad to say. I have no sense of how to co-habit normally with my family. And yet your daughter is supposed to live alongside a person like this, a healthy girl like her, whose nature has predestined her for genuine marital bliss? Is she supposed to bear it, leading a cloistered existence alongside the man who, admittedly, loves her as he’s never been able to love anyone else, but who, by virtue of his unalterable destiny, spends most of his time either shut away in his room or wandering around alone?
Marriage as a stroke of fate. Issue 21 of Die Gartenlaube has something to say on the matter:
In some regions of our Fatherland, there still exists a beautiful custom long forgotten elsewhere. The bride, when crossing the threshold of her parents’ house as a girl for the last time before setting off for her wedding, is handed a handkerchief made of new linen by her mother. The bride clasps this handkerchief in her hand during the ceremony, in order to dry her bridal tears. On the wedding night, the young woman then stashes away the little handkerchief in her linen closet, and there it stays – unused and unwashed – until the day when it will veil the face of its owner, its features now frozen by death, and follow her into the grave. This handkerchief is called the ‘Cloth of Tears’.
These are lines from Die Gartenlaube. They read like one of Kafka’s short stories.
Marcel Duchamp travels to England with his eighteen-year-old sister Yvonne, who wants to study English at a language school in Herne Bay, on the north Kent coast. Duchamp, on the other hand, is just on holiday, and writes: ‘Delightful weather. Playing as much tennis as I can. A few French people here, so I don’t even need to learn English.’ He still doesn’t feel like making art.
As he does every year, Max Liebermann sets off at the beginning of August for the Dutch coast, this time staying at the chic beach hotel Huis ter Duin in Noordwijk. But he doesn’t see any reason to relax. All he wants to do is paint. Among the dunes of the coastal resort he once again paints the huntsmen, the horse-riders in the water, the women playing tennis. The sky is always grey in these pictures from the summer of 1913, but Liebermann, unlike the other holiday-makers, isn’t bothered by that in the slightest, for it offers a beautiful contrast against the sandy beige and white of the clothing. On 18 August he writes to his friend and patron Alfred Lichtwark in Hamburg: ‘I’ve been here again for a week now, the place where I know every person, every house, almost every tree, where I’ve painted practically everything. My weeks here alone are like therapy for my inner self.’ Day after day he sets off with his paints and his easel, and on this particular day he and Paul Cassirer, his friend, art dealer and the former chairman of the Berlin Secession, plan to visit a tobacco magnate in his summer house in Noordwijk. Or, more specifically: his kennel. A huntsman opens the door, upon which eight rather small grey or white shaggy-haired spaniels appear, yapping wildly over one another as their droopy ears jiggle excitedly back and forth. The owner informs Liebermann that spaniels are excellent for hunting rabbits. They set off into the dunes together. Liebermann takes his easel with him in order to paint a picture of the hunter with his dogs in tow. Soon, the first shot rings out through the air. Every single report startles Liebermann, and it bothers him that his models have to make such a racket. He tries to paint the dogs as quickly as possible, their silhouettes standing out on the crest of the dunes against the rosy, setting sun. Then Liebermann starts to sketch the hunter placing the rifle over his shoulder and organising the dogs into pairs, but the sun is already sinking into the sea and Liebermann has to break off mid-sketch. He makes plans to return the following morning – and the hunter promises to just pose rather than shoot. And so A Hunter in the Dunes – Trainer with Dogs is born.
On 28 August, Kaiser Franz Joseph joins in the last Hochleiten hunt on Steinkogl, near Bad Ischl, and shoots a goat.
On 14 August 1913, Hugo von Hofmannsthal loses his cool in a letter to Leopold von Andrian:
This year taught me to see Austria the way that the thirty previous years had taught me not to see it. I’ve completely lost both the trust I had in the highest class of society, the high nobility, and the confidence that it had something to give in Austria, especially in Austria. Vienna has been left at the mercy of mob rule, the worst there is, that of the wicked, stupid, vile petty bourgeoisie.
A new man takes to the stage of 1913: Heinrich Kühn. A middle-class intellectual from Dresden, born in the house ‘Nine Muses’. Thanks to his father’s financial support, he lives as a gentleman of independent means in Innsbruck, dedicating himself entirely to photography. Kühn is a deliberate eccentric, who wears either a Tyrolean costume or English suits, with a long, rumpled coat over them while he takes his photographs – this can be seen on his bookplate, in which it’s hard to tell which is more crumpled, his overcoat or his folding camera. He had an old-fashioned and naïve aura to him. And yet he managed to take photographs of the utmost modernity. His pictures from 1913 are fresh and full of innocence, grace and strength. This is partly down to their composition, the extreme low-angle shots. And then there’s his technique, for it was he who perfected the use of Autochrome in collaboration with the great American photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Even in those days he was able to use it to create excellent colour pictures, one after the other, of the Tyrol’s alpine pastures and meadows. After the death of his wife, who had always regarded his strange passion with great scepticism, he had only five models: his four children and their nanny, Mary Warner, who became his partner. The villa in Innsbruck became the ‘House of the Five Muses’.
In 1913 the family was slowly running out of money: the allowance from Dresden had dwindled to nothing, his brother-in-law had gambled away the family fortune and Heinrich Kühn was desperately searching for a way to earn a living. He had been trying to establish a state teaching position for art photography in Innsbruck – and the prospects were looking very good. But in August he discovered, after two years of negotiations, that the ministry responsible was withholding its signature for lack of funds; all the money had been spent on military matters, for the Balkan War: ‘You know how it is, Herr Kühn.’
But Kühn refuses to be discouraged and continues to take photograph after photograph of his private theatrical troupe – in other words, the children: Walter, Edeltrude, Lotte and Hans. And Mary. One photograph (used on the cover of the German edition of this book), shows Mary and his eldest daughter darting across the crest of a hill, the heavy August clouds pressing down from above. White is one of the few choices available to them for their clothing, along with blue, red and green – the father buys the children special ‘photography clothes’, which are suitable for the pure colour tones of the three layers of the Autochrome plate.
There’s the melancholic Walter, with his metal-rimmed glasses resting on his teenage nose, who began painting at a young age; then introvert Edeltrude, who looks like she’s suffering greatly from the world in general and her forename in particular; then Lotte, the liveliest and most radiant; and then Hans, the youngest, a patient lad. Heinrich Kühn is a loving father, but a radical artist. If one of the children accidentally hogs the painting, destroying the balance of the image, he rigorously airbrushes them out, even if it took him hours to get all the children in position in the first place. What Kühn wants to depict in his photographs is nothing less than paradise. Children at play, children resting, women in swirling clothes, the innocence of nature. ‘The Fall of Man’, he writes in a letter ‘takes two forms: Social democracy. And Cubism.’
Kaiser Franz Joseph appoints the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Franz Ferdinand, as ‘Inspector General of All the Armed Forces’, thus extending his authority. The heir subsequently refuses to approve the demand for a preventative war made by the Chief of the General Staff, Franz Count Conrad von Hötzendorf, his arch-nemesis.
In The Hague, the Palace of Freedom is inaugurated in September, built with the help of donations from all over the world, including around $1.25 million from the American multi-millionaire Andrew Carnegie. Preparations begin for a new Hague peace conference in 1915, which is intended to resolve all unresolved issues between nations.
After the dissolution of Die Brücke, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner leaves Berlin, heading for the island of Fehmarn. So eager is he to leave the city, its noise and motifs behind him, that he travels all the way to the south-east tip of the island, to the isolated home of the lighthouse keeper, Lüthmann – and then right to the top, to the ‘Gable Room’, where he spent some time last year. The lighthouse, the isolated beach, the lighthouse keeper’s eight children – these become his motifs for the summer. The bad weather is clearly visible in the paintings, dark clouds moving across the horizon again and again. Down on the beach, the trees stoop over into the water, almost reminiscent of the South Pacific. Above, the golden rainbow blooms, and Kirchner paints it for days on end, its blazing gold splendour. This time Kirchner brought not just Erna, who is called ‘Frau Kirchner’ here – even though she’s always running around practically naked – but Otto Mueller and his wife, Maschka, too. They take turns painting one another swimming; they relish the freedom, their steadily increasing fame. The Lüthmanns’ children and the lighthouse keeper himself welcome the Kirchners into their family circle with warmth and trust. Those summer weeks on Fehmarn may be the happiest days of Kirchner’s entire life. ‘Oh, Staberhuk, how wonderful you are, a little corner of happiness, so peaceful and beautiful!’ he cries out into the wind, again and again. Even Kirchner’s style ascends to new heights. The women are no longer broadly sprawled out but reach towards the skies; his brushstrokes are more nervous, slender, lengthy figures, his sketches and paintings dominated by Erna and Maschka naked on the beach. He is addicted to the body’s form, he complains jovially, utterly addicted to it. Whenever he is dissatisfied with a picture, he throws it into the sea in a fit of rage – only to plunge in after it, rescue it from the waves and put it back on his easel, to paint it all over again, but better. The most wonderful driftwood keeps washing up on the beach; a year before, at the same time as the Titanic, a ship capsized off Fehmarn. The schooner Marie. Its wood has become part of art history, for Kirchner swam repeatedly out to the sandbank where the wreck lay in order to pick out especially fine pieces of wood which were suitable for carving. On 12 August he writes to his Hamburg collector and patron Gustav Schiefler: ‘The head I sent you is a wood carving (oak), I’ve made several like it out here.’ And in September, in a letter to his student Hans Gewecke, he writes:
Unfortunately we have to leave soon. You won’t believe how difficult this is for us. I can’t decide whether the sea is more beautiful in summer or in autumn. I am painting as much as I can, so that I can take at least some of the thousand things I would like to paint back with me. On top of that, the oak wood from the stranded ship is becoming more and more appealing for statues. I’ll have to take a few unhewn pieces with me, for time is limited now, and the days are getting shorter and shorter.
As fascinated as Kirchner was by the wreck, and as much as he plundered it for his work, it doesn’t appear in a single one of his sketches, art works or paintings from Fehmarn, even though he created hundreds of works there in 1913 alone. The ship stranded in the Baltic Sea – he had the classic motif of Romanticism embodied in front of his very eyes, the ultimate Caspar David Friedrich scenario. But Ernst Ludwig Kirchner impudently denied the wreck a place in his oeuvre. There can hardly be a more conclusive sign that German Romanticism is definitively over.
The Mona Lisa is still nowhere to be found. In the Louvre a Corot has been hung on the orphaned nail.
Felice Bauer, shocked by Kafka’s letters, spends August in Sylt. Innumerable letters go back and forth between her and Prague, about whether Kafka is going to join her there or not, about whether or not the bracing climate will do him good. In the end, of course, he doesn’t come. Such a shame, it would have made for such wonderful journal entries: Kafka in Kampen. But it wasn’t to be.