Adolf Loos says ornament is a crime, and builds houses and tailors’ workshops filled with clarity. It’s all over between Else Lasker-Schüler and Dr Gottfried Benn: she’s in despair, so Dr Alfred Döblin, currently sitting for a portrait by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, gives her a morphine injection. Proust’s Swann in Love, the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, is published, and Rilke reads it straight away. Kafka goes to the cinema and cries. Prada opens its first boutique in Milan. Ernst Jünger, eighteen years of age, packs his things and goes to Africa with the Foreign Legion. The weather in Germany is disagreeable, but Bertolt Brecht thinks: anyone can have the sniffles.
On 7 November Albert Camus is born. He will later write the play The Possessed.
The lead magazine of the year: in Vienna – what a coincidence – on 7 November the first issue of the magazine The Possessed is published. On the front page: a self-portrait of Egon Schiele. Subtitle of the magazine: ‘A journal of passions’.
On 7 November, Adolf Hitler paints a watercolour of the Theatinerkirche in Munich and sells it to a junk dealer in the Viktualienmarkt.
In mid-November the fun-loving countess of Schwerin-Löwitz, wife of the president of the state parliament, or Landtag, issues an invitation to a tango tea-dance in the Prussian Landtag. On the floor: dancers in a close embrace with dignitaries and serious military officers. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who finds the tango vulgar, cracks down. On 20 November an imperial bill is passed, henceforth banning officers in uniform from dancing the tango.
Still no sign of the Mona Lisa.
For Adolf Loos his greatest year is coming to an end. Ornament and Crime was the name he gave to his furious cri de coeur against the threat of asphyxiation by wedding-cake architecture on Vienna’s Ringstrasse. And now, in 1913, more and more people want their plans and souls and shops and houses to be cleansed by Loos’s free spirit and clear vision. His ‘Haus Scheu’ at 3 Larochegasse has just been finished, as has his ‘Haus Horner’ at 7 Nothartgasse. And two internal spaces, which he has designed in an inimitably magnificent, minimalist and yet sedate elegance, also celebrate their opening: the Café Capua on Johannesgasse and the Kniže tailor’s shop at 13 Graben.
Precisely because Loos and his American wife, Bessie, are close friends with many of Vienna’s artistic avant-garde – with Kokoschka, Schönberg, Kraus and Schnitzler – he sees art and architecture as being worlds apart: ‘The house has only to please. Unlike the work of art, which doesn’t have to please anybody. The art work seeks to drag people from their comfort. The house has to serve comfort. The art work is revolutionary, the house conservative.’
His masterpiece from 1913 is the ‘Haus Scheu’ in Hietzing, the first stepped house in Europe which, in its plain white elegance and Arabic-looking tiers, enraged the Viennese from the year of its construction. But the clients, the lawyer and friend of Loos, Gustav Scheu, and his wife, Helene, were happy. ‘I wasn’t thinking about the East at all when I designed this house,’ Loos said. ‘I just thought it would be very pleasant to be able to step from the bedrooms on the first floor onto a big, communal terrace.’ And yet ‘Haus Scheu’ does have the look of a mirage. The living and sleeping areas open into fresh air, you walk out onto large terraces, the whole house is flooded with light and air. The neighbours and the local authorities protest loud and long, and then Loos suggests a compromise: he agrees that plants should grow over the façades. Loos is primarily concerned with the effect of spaces on people:
but I want the people in my rooms to feel the material around them, that it has an effect on them, that they know about the closed space, that they feel the material, the wood, that they perceive it with their senses of sight and touch, sensually, in short, and that they can sit down comfortably and feel the chair on a large surface of their peripheral physical sense of touch and say: here you can sit perfectly.
Adolf Loos did not make jokes, and meant everything in complete earnest. And yet he came across as incredibly winning. You could tell from all of his internal spaces and each of his houses that they were really made to measure. And also that Loos would prefer not to build anything at all rather than build something unsuitable. Or, as he himself said in his great, true credo: ‘Do not fear abuse for being unmodern. Changes in the old building style are only permitted when they represent an improvement; otherwise stay with the old things. Because the truth, even if it is hundreds of years old, has more of a connection with us than the lie that walks beside us.’ The provocative innovator as a thoughtful traditionalist – Loos overtaxed his contemporary audience. He had no problem with not being considered modern (whatever that word might actually mean). But we know how modern he was. More so than any other architect working in 1913.
On 8 November, at 10.27 p.m., after an eight-hour train journey, Franz Kafka arrives at Anhalt Station in Berlin. At the end of October, Grete Bloch, Felice Bauer’s friend, had stepped in as an intermediary between Prague and Berlin and attempted a reconciliation between the unhappy lovers, who seemed to have been paralysed by Kafka’s disastrous proposal.
On 9 November, the German day of destiny, the two of them meet for a second time in Berlin. Again it is a tragedy. In the late morning they walk through the Tiergarten for an hour. Then Felice has to go to a funeral, after which she says she will call at Kafka’s hotel, the Askanischer Hof. She doesn’t. It rains slowly and incessantly. Again Kafka sits in the hotel, as he did in March, waiting for news from Felice. But nothing happens. At 4.28 p.m. Kafka boards the train for Prague. And he informs Grete Bloch, the intermediary: ‘I departed from Berlin like someone who went there quite without justification.’
On the same 9 November in Berlin, the well-known psychoanalyst and author Otto Gross is arrested by Prussian police officers in Franz Jung’s flat and extradited to Austria. There his father declares him insane, and he is committed to the sanatorium at Tulln. From Heidelberg, Max Weber vehemently campaigns in favour of his friend Frieda Gross, Otto’s wife. From Berlin the magazine Die Aktion protests with a special issue. It is a battle between father and son, a generational conflict of a very different kind. Controlling the uncontrollable son by declaring him unfit to handle his own affairs.
In the Minerva Hall in Trieste, the southernmost harbour city of Austria-Hungary, James Joyce delivers a series of lectures on Hamlet. He has previously tried to make some money by opening a cinema in Dublin and has toyed with the idea of importing tweed from Ireland to Italy. But it came to nothing. His attempts to earn money with his books have been a disaster too. Now he is scraping a living as an English teacher in the morning – and in the afternoon he gives private lessons, notably to the future author Italo Svevo. And in the evening he talks about Hamlet. The local newspaper Piccolo della Sera is enthusiastic: with its ‘dense but clear thoughts, with a form at once sublime and simple, with its wit and vividness the lecture revealed genuine brilliance’.
‘Those who touch you are bound to fall’, wrote wise, wild Else Lasker-Schüler when she met Gottfried Benn. Now he has left her. And she is laid low with unbearable abdominal pains. Dr Alfred Döblin, who has just sat for a portrait by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, drives out into the Grunewald and gives her a morphine injection. He can think of no other way to help her.
On 13 November, Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s great novel In Search of Lost Time, is published. After the book was turned down not only by the Fasquelle and Oldenbourg publishing houses and the Nouvelle Revue Française but also by André Gide, the then editor at Gallimard, Proust had the book published by Grasset at his own expense. No sooner does he hold the first copy in his hands than his chauffeur and lover Alfred Agostinelli splits up with him. Everyone else falls for the author. Rilke reads the book only a few days after its publication. It begins with the golden words ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’ – ‘For a long time I went to bed early’ – and in saying this, Proust touched the nerve of an exhausted avant-garde who, from Kafka to Joyce, from Musil to Thomas Mann, boasted in their diaries whenever they managed to go to bed before midnight. Going to bed early – to the ever weary pioneers of the modern age it seemed like the bravest struggle against depression, drinking, senseless distraction and the advance of time.
In Munich, Oswald Spengler goes on feverishly writing his mammoth work The Decline of the West. The first part is finished. Spengler’s state of mind: similar to that of the West. His diary: a tragedy. He notes: ‘I have never had a month without thoughts of suicide.’ And yet: ‘Inwardly I have experienced more than perhaps any other human being of my time.’
Alma Mahler always piled her hair up high so that it often came tumbling down in conversation or while dancing. She had made an art of letting the dark tendrils fall into her face at precisely the right moment, sending men out of their minds. Today she grants this joy to Kokoschka again. Because he has just completed the double portrait of them both, the painting that has stood on his easel since the start of the year, and which shows Alma and the painter on a stormy sea. He originally wanted to call it Tristan and Isolde, after the Wagner opera from which she sang to him the first time they met. But then Georg Trakl gave the painting the title The Bride of the Wind – and that was the one that stuck. In November, Kokoschka, deeply in debt, writes to his dealer Herwarth Walden in Berlin:
In my studio is a large painting I have been working on since last January, Tristan and Isolde, 2 ½ × 3 ½, 10,000 Kronen, finished for several days. I must receive a security of 10,000 Kronen before 1 January, because my sister is engaged to a man and getting married in February. The painting will be an event when it is made public, my strongest and greatest work, the masterpiece of all my Expressionistic efforts: will you buy it for yourself? It could make you an international success.
Modesty has never been Oskar Kokoschka’s strong point. But the surprising thing is: Alma Mahler actually sees The Bride of the Wind as Kokoschka’s long-awaited masterpiece. ‘In his large painting The Bride of the Wind he has painted me lying pressed trustingly against him in a storm amid high winds – entirely dependent on him, a tyrannical expression on his face, radiating energy as he calms the waves.’ She liked that. It was how she saw herself: full of energy, reposing, calming the waves. Alma, the ruler of the world. That was how she had imagined her lover’s masterpiece. A blind homage. She studiously ignores the fact that she once promised to marry him for it. But as a reward he is allowed to come out to Semmering, because her new house is ready. And he is allowed to paint a new picture there.
In Breitenstein, Alma has had a curious house built for herself, on the land that Mahler bought three years previously. The house looks like an over-sized chimney, dark, with larch shingles still being fitted to the roof; the verandas running along the outside make all the rooms dark and gloomy. A temple to melancholy. Hanging in the sitting room is Kokoschka’s portrait of Alma as the poisoner Lucrezia Borgia. And beside it, in a glass case, Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony, open at the page where the dying composer wrote his cries: ‘Almschi, dearest Almschi.’
Kokoschka’s only reward for his Bride of the Wind was to paint the sitting room in Semmering, a fresco above the fireplace, 4 metres wide. The subject is, surprisingly enough: Alma Mahler and Oskar Kokoschka. Or as Alma puts it: ‘showing me, pointing in spectral brightness at the sky, while he appeared standing in hell, wrapped in death and serpents. The whole thing is based on the idea of a continuation of the flames in the hearth. My little “Gucki” stood next to it and said: “Can’t you paint anything but Mami?” ’ Good question. Answer: No.
Rilke sits in Paris, thinking distractedly about summer and autumn in Germany. As he travelled uneasily back and forth between all his wives and über-mothers, between Clara, still his wife, his ex-lovers Sidonie and Lou, his summer love Ellen Delp, his mother, his helpless admirers Cassirer, von Nostitz and von Thurn und Taxis. Keep everything open, don’t go down any one path, wherever it may lead: that is what Rainer Maria Rilke is thinking on 1 November. As an attitude to life it’s disastrous. As poetry it’s a revelation:
That this no more before me lies,
failing, I rein myself back:
paths, open, heavens, pure hills,
leading past no dear faces.
Oh, the pain of love’s possibilities
I have felt day and day after night:
to flee to one another, slip from one another’s grasp,
nothing has led to joy.
In Augsburg, Bertolt Brecht is suffering: it is November, and the season of colds. And the fifteen-year-old schoolboy is suffering from everything going: his diary records headaches, sniffles, catarrh, stitches, back pains, nosebleeds. There are short daily bulletins about his own ‘condition’. He observes his pains with relish and works himself up to a secondary state of illness: ‘Morning Doctor Müller came. Dry Bronchitis. Interesting illness. Anyone can have sniffles.’
The phrase ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’ appears in England for the first time in 1913. It comes from the book Rustic Speech and Folklore, by Elizabeth M. Wright.
Emil Nolde works his way towards the South Sea. On 6 November he crosses the Yellow Sea to China. The steamer Prince Eitel Friedrich takes five days to reach Hong Kong, passing by Taiwan. From Hong Kong the expedition group then continues on the steamer Prince Waldemar across the South China Sea to German New Guinea. But when he comes ashore in the far-off German colony, he is perturbed. He finds not an untouched paradise but an enormous car boot sale. In November 1913 he writes home, ‘It is depressing to note that all the countries here are swamped with the very worst European knick-knacks, from paraffin lamps to the coarsest cotton materials, dyed in inauthentic aniline colours.’ To see that, he complains, he didn’t need to make the journey. He leaves his painting equipment in his suitcase and flees.
On 2 November, Burt Lancaster is born.
When Georg Trakl comes back from Venice to Austria, the declining city becomes a source of retrospective inspiration. In the last months of 1913 poetry assails him with unanticipated force, so much so that his skull almost shatters. A linguistic frenzy reveals his internal inferno.
‘Everything is breaking apart’, he writes in November. What happened there will never be quite explained, but we may assume that his beloved sister Grete is pregnant. Whether by her husband (who really existed, in Berlin), by himself or by his friend Buschbeck, whom he suspects of having a relationship with her, is completely unclear. We know only that in a poem by Trakl from November the word ‘unborn’ appears, and that he will write three months later that his sister has had a miscarriage. But who knows? He had such a tortured soul that life alone was quite enough to tear him in two.
Out of gratitude to his patron and saviour Ludwig von Ficker he allows himself to be persuaded to make a public appearance, in spite of his desolate state of mind. He reads at the fourth literary soirée of Ficker’s magazine Der Brenner in the Innsbruck Musikvereinssaal. And the poet must have spoken as if he were still mumbling as he walked along the beach of the Lido in Venice: ‘Unfortunately the poet read too faintly, as if from things hidden, things past or yet to come, and only later could one discern from the monotonously prayer-like murmurings the words and phrases, then images and rhythms that form his futuristic poetry.’ So wrote Josef Anton Steurer in the Allgemeiner Tiroler Anzeiger.
Between these two disastrous appearances, at the Lido and before the Musikverein, one of the central chapters of twentieth-century German-language lyric poetry is produced. A total of fifty-nine poems, including the major works ‘Sebastian in a Dream’ and the ‘Kaspar Hauser Lied’ (one devoted to the Venice-lover Adolf Loos, the other to his wife, Bessie), and ‘Transformation of Evil’. In fact, he produces 499 poems, or 4,999, because Trakl’s poems are never finished; there are countless versions, over-writings, rewritings, corrections and variants. Again and again he picks up his pen, changes the manuscripts; again and again he writes to the publishers of the magazines that publish his poems, that this word must be changed to that, and that to this. A ‘blue’ can become a ‘black’, a ‘quiet’ a ‘wise’. You can see him dragging motifs around with him, trying to capture them verse by verse and, if it still doesn’t work, crossing them out again and then carrying them on to the next poem, to the next year. ‘In an elevated sense unimprovable’, Albert Ehrenstein wrote of Georg Trakl. But that is incorrect. Even he still needed improving. But only by himself. His poems are montages of things heard and things read (above all, Rimbaud and Hölderlin), and things sensed. But it may also happen to him, as in the poem ‘Transfiguration’ from November 1913, that what begins as a ‘blue spring’ that ‘breaks from the dead rocks’ turns finally into the ‘blue flower’, ‘which sounds quietly among the gilded rocks’. Romanticism is always the starting-point, but it is also the longed-for destination of Trakl, the quiet musician. Nine times the blue flower blooms in Trakl’s poems in autumn 1913 alone. But in his inscription for the grave of the nineteen-century poet Novalis it already blossoms in an early version. But no sooner has the ‘blue’ faded and been crossed out than many new verbal experiments follow. Then the flower can be anything: first ‘nocturnal’, then ‘radiant’ and finally ‘rosy’. In their bid to sound prophetic, Trakl’s poems lack concision. Instead, what glimmers here in all its magnificence, in all its power, is the vocabulary of the German language of the Salzburg late Baroque, before Trakl opens the door to the engine room of his inspiration and allows the pestilential breath of death to blow over it, the icy breath of his soul. Everywhere flowers are dying, the forests darkening, the deer fleeing, voices falling mute.
A dead man visits you.
The self-poured blood runs from his heart.
And in his black brow there nests unspeakable moment;
Dark encounter
You – purple moon, appearing in the green shade
Of the olive tree.
After him comes everlasting night.
These everlasting vanitas experiences seem too existentially lived to be accused of verbal frenzy, even kitsch. Trakl could only express himself through poetry; his corrections and rewritings are his autobiography. He saw the dark, he captured the fleeting, he interrogated the intangible. He looked within himself and thus became the witness of the invisible, with an imagination only truly liberated through introspection.
Trakl hones his words, battles with his language until he knows he can release it into the world. A world in which he himself cannot survive. His poems – even those about the last days of mankind – do not herald disaster. In them history has long since taken what Friedrich Dürrenmatt calls ‘the worst possible turn’, precisely because it has now been thought and written down as poetry.
Robert Musil is tired and goes to bed before his wife. But he can’t get to sleep, and eventually he hears her going to the bathroom to get herself ready. Then he takes his notepad, which always lies on his bedside table, and his pencil, and simply writes down what he is experiencing:
I hear you putting on your night dress. But it doesn’t stop there by any means. Again there are a hundred little actions. I know you are hurrying; clearly it is all necessary. I understand: we watch the mute gestures of animals, amazed that they, who are supposed to have no soul, line up their actions from dawn till dusk. It is exactly the same. You have no awareness of the countless moves you make, above all those that seem necessary to you, and remain quite unimportant. But they loom widely into your life. I, as I wait, feel it by chance.
Love is also apparent in feeling, marvelling, enthusiastic, tender hearing and observing.
On 1 November, King Otto of Bavaria is officially declared insane. The doctors diagnose the ‘final stage of a long-lasting psychical illness’. This makes the accession to the throne of the Prince Regent Ludwig as Ludwig III a legal possibility.
Woyzeck is mad and hallucinates: ‘Everything is in flames above the city! A fire blazes around the sky and a roar as if of trombones.’ On 8 November in the Residenztheater in Munich the unfinished drama Woyzeck, written in 1836 by Georg Büchner, who was born in 1813, is given its première, after years of lobbying by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It belongs wonderfully in this year and has chosen exactly the right moment to enter the public consciousness. What a play, what language, what pace! Almost eighty years old, and still quite contemporary. It is a parallel story to Heinrich Mann’s novel Man of Straw, except much more violent and archaic. Woyzeck is abused by a doctor for medical experiments, and then by the army captain, who humiliates him. When his beloved Marie betrays him with the brash ‘drum major’, he can no longer control his aggression and stabs her. The victim becomes the perpetrator. ‘The central point becomes’, in the words of the critic Alfred Kerr – ‘tormenting humanity, not the tormented human being.’ It is a proletarian drama, a play of revolt and rebellion. Rilke is speechless with enthusiasm: ‘It is a play like no other, that abused human being standing in his stable-jacket in the universe, malgré lui, in the infinite procession of the stars. That is theatre, that is what theatre could be.’ But it is above all the celebration of a unique kind of language that runs around between hallucination and fairy tale, the gutter and poetry, and comes down on you like a buzzard. At the end of the play a fairy tale is told about a lonely child:
And since there was no one left on earth, it wanted to go to heaven, and the moon looked down on it so kindly and when at last it came to the moon it was a piece of rotten wood and then it went to the sun and when it came to the sun it was a withered sunflower. And when it came to the stars, they were little golden flies, stuck on the way the shrike sticks them on the blackthorn and when it wanted to go back to earth, the earth was an upturned pot and the child was all alone.
This was a fairy tale very much in line with the taste of 1913. Unconsoling, beyond any utopian thoughts but full of poetry.
Ernst Jünger has ‘inwardly made excessively great preparations’. His desire for danger drives him to Bad Rehburg, the spa town that smells of cows and turf and old people, and out of the parental home, whose bull-glass windows the light barely penetrates.
In August he had climbed to his father’s greenhouse in his winter clothes to prepare his body for extreme conditions. Now he feels ripe for Africa. For years he has read adventure stories of journeys into the heart of darkness under his desk at school. Now he wants to go there himself. ‘One damp and misty autumn afternoon I went into a junk shop with much fear and trembling to buy a six-shooter revolver with ammunition. It cost 12 Marks. I left the shop with a feeling of triumph, before going immediately into a bookshop and buying a fat book, The Secrets of the Dark Hemisphere, which I considered indispensable.’
Then, with book and revolver in his bag, he sets off on 3 November without telling a soul. But how do you get from Rehburg to Africa by train? Unfortunately geography has never been his strong point. Now Ernst Jünger buys a pipe so he feels grown up and to strengthen his adventurous heart, and then he buys a fourth-class ticket and travels south-west from station to station. He travels on, first to Trier and then through Alsace-Lorraine; Jünger keeps on going and eventually, after an aimless odyssey, on 8 November he has reached Verdun, where he joins the Foreign Legion. He is assigned to the 26th Instruction Regiment as number 15,308, and taken to Marseille, where he boards a ship for the promised land: Africa. The local newspaper reports:
Bad Rehburg, 16 November. The sixth-former as Foreign Legionary. Jünger of the lower sixth, a son of the mine-owner Dr Jünger, applied to join the French Foreign Legion and is already on his way via Marseille to Africa. The father of the unfortunate young man has applied to the Foreign Office in Berlin for help. The German embassy has been instructed to contact the French government to release Jünger.
After their wedding in May, Victoria Louise of Prussia and Prince Ernst August of Hanover move to Braunschweig. For the first time in almost fifty years there is once again a member of the Guelph family as ruling count of Braunschweig. The young couple are very happy and go on to have five children.
In the small garrison town of Zabern in Alsace-Lorraine, which has been part of the German Reich since 1871, something horrendous happens on 28 November. In the evening a few dozen demonstrators turn up outside the German army barracks, protesting that the regiment commander Baron Günter von Forstner has declared that all Frenchmen are ‘Wackes’ – a term of abuse for the Alsatian French – and that ‘you can shit on the French flag’. These words had reached the local newspaper and provoked shock among the population. When the demonstrators hold up placards and ask for respect, the commander of the regiment has three infantry units advance with live ammunition and bayonets at the ready. Panic breaks out among the demonstrators, but the German soldiers lay into them and arrest more than thirty people, including some innocent passers-by. They are locked in a coal cellar without light and toilets. Then commander Baron Günter von Forstner says the following words: ‘I consider it a great fortune if blood flows now […] I am in charge, I owe it to the army to create respect.’
Five days later he is recognised with a troop of soldiers, and some workers at a shoe factory call him ‘the Wackes Lieutenant’, whereupon he loses his temper and brings his sabre down on the head of a disabled hostage, who cannot run away quickly enough, making him collapse in a pool of blood.
The very next day the Reichstag in Berlin discusses events in Zabern. The ‘Zabern Affair’ threatened peace between France and the German Reich more than any previous event. The German war minister, Erich von Falkenhayn, refuses to be diverted by this open flouting of the law by the German army. He claims that ‘noisy rioters’ and ‘provocative organs of the press’ are responsible for the intensification of the situation in Zabern. In response there are fights in the Landtag, and the opposition opposes any illegal actions by the military. The centre-party member Konstantin Fehrenbach: ‘The army is also subject to the law, and if we place the army outside the law and abandon the civilian population to the arbitrary rule of the army, then, gentlemen: Finis Germaniae! … It will be a disaster for the German Reich.’ But the real disaster is yet to come, because the German head of state, Wilhelm II, actually approves of the spirited response of the German military and cannot find anything really dramatic in the so-called ‘Zabern Affair’. But the reaction in the European press reached a furore when the sentence of Commander Forstner, which initially carried a prison term of only 43 days for grievous bodily harm, was reduced on appeal in the higher military court to acquittal. Forstner, the judges ruled, had acted in ‘putative self-defence’ and was consequently innocent. The left-liberal Frankfurter Zeitung acknowledges the frightening message of this acquittal: ‘The bourgeoisie has suffered a defeat. That is the actual, visible sign of the Zabern trial […] In the argument between military force and civilian force, the court martial has laid down the right of the unrestricted dominion of the former towards the bourgeoisie.’
In 1913 Prada is founded and opens its first shop, selling high-class leather goods in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan.
In mid-November, Kaiser Wilhelm takes the train to Halbe, to the ‘Kaiser Station’, then continues on into the forest of Dubrow, south of Berlin. The hunt begins at half-past one in the afternoon, in an area spanned with cloths and nets. By the time the horn is blown again at a quarter to three, a total of 560 animals have been killed. Kaiser Wilhelm II alone has killed ten stags and ten boar. At the hunt dinner in the evening he asks that a memorial be erected to his marksmanship forthwith.
November 1913 produces the most intimate, sympathetic and perhaps most honest correspondence between Thomas and Heinrich Mann. Thomas Mann is not in a good way right now. His wife, Katia, isn’t getting any better; her cough, which she has been trying to heal for months, even years, in sanatoriums, is there again, more hacking than ever. And for the first time he is in debt, having over-reached himself with the construction of a house on Poschingerstrasse, now almost completed. He asks his publisher Samuel Fischer for an advance of 3,000 Marks for his next novel. And to his brother Heinrich he writes: ‘I have only ever been interested in decay, and that is precisely what prevents me from taking an interest in progress.’ And then:
But what nonsense is that. Things are serious when all the wretchedness of the times and of the fatherland weigh down on one, and one does not have the strength to shape it. But that is part of the wretchedness of the times and of the fatherland. Or will it find shape in Man of Straw? I look forward more to your works than I do to my own. You are spiritually better off, and that’s the crucial thing.
And then, with unusual warm brotherly love: ‘It is of course crassly tactless of me to write to you like this, for what can you reply?’ But Heinrich Mann, who will conclude his great novel of the times, Man of Straw, in the next few months, clearly knows what to reply. We don’t know his reaction. But we do know Thomas’s: ‘For your intelligent, tender letter I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’ And again, a kind of sudden declaration of love to his sibling: ‘In my fondest hours I have long dreamt of writing another long and faithful book of life, a continuation of Buddenbrooks, the story of us five siblings. We are worth it. All of us.’ Never again will he grant his brother so deep an insight into his soul, so tortured by weariness and doubts.
Still no sign of the Mona Lisa.
Marcel Duchamp still doesn’t feel like making art, but he has an idea. ‘Can one,’ he wonders, ‘create works that are not art works?’ And then, in the autumn, in his new flat on Rue Saint-Hippolyte in Paris, the front wheel of a bicycle suddenly appears, and he mounts it on an ordinary kitchen stool. Marcel Duchamp mentions it quite casually: ‘It was something I wanted to have in my room, the way one has a fireplace or a pencil sharpener, except that it was not in any way useful. It’s a pleasant device, pleasant because of the movements it made.’ Duchamp finds it so calming to spin the wheel with his hand. He likes its endless rotation on its own axis. While in Paris and Berlin and Moscow artists are still fighting about whether Cubism, Realism, Expressionism or Abstraction is the royal road, the young Duchamp just puts a bicycle wheel in his kitchen and thus creates the first ‘ready-made’. It’s the most casual quantum leap in art history.
On 20 November, Franz Kafka notes in his diary: ‘Went to the cinema. Wept.’
Emotional overload in the cinema brings the youth protection officers out in force. The pedagogue Adolf Sellman writes in the foreword to his book Cinema and School:
The teaching body is prepared to draw attention to all the dangers posed by bad cinema, and to protect our young people against them. School must work to enlighten, in such a way that within and without its walls it will be apparent what bad intellectual nourishment is available in cinemas, even today. School must ensure enlightenment in the press, at parents’ evenings and conferences. It must urge that legal measures and police regulations be passed so that our young people are granted protection against all the corrupting influences that the cinema can exert.
In Fulda the German Episcopal Conference draws up special guidelines for the clergy to protect against the negative effects of visiting the cinema. No longer was anyone to weep at trashy tales! The demand is made that children under the age of six should not be allowed into the cinema. And adults should also avoid morally inferior films.
That is what is known as a pious wish.
What a lovely name: Albert Duke Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein. Thanks to the marriage of one of his ancestors to a princess of Sachsen-Coburg long ago in the nineteenth century, Albert Mensdorff, known as Duke Ali, was related to almost all the courts of Europe, a fact that delighted him anew every day. The cousin of the British king, and Imperial Ambassador in London, pulls off his masterstroke in November 1913. King George V writes to him, hoping that the archduke and duchess will be able to come to Windsor in November for a few days’ shooting. Can they? It’s the first official invitation to the successor to the Austrian throne and his wife, Countess Sophie, hitherto subjected to an endless series of official humiliations. Duke von Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein knows what he has succeeded in doing, and therefore writes to Archduke Franz Ferdinand: ‘As you know, such official occasions, with dinners, toasts, receptions, theatres etc. etc., where one becomes half sick and plagued to death, have always been a horror to me.’ It is a bad joke, because the duke is really the biggest party animal in the world of Austro-Hungarian diplomacy – he keeps the menu from each of his dinners and the next morning draws a seating plan, marking on it who was sitting next to him. His reason for denouncing the social aspect of the archduke’s visit has entirely to do with the fact that he and the successor to the throne cordially dislike one another. But the archduke couldn’t care less. He is enjoying making his first official trip abroad with his wife. And he is enjoying the fact that barely two weeks after the hunt with Kaiser Wilhelm he is now able to go pheasant shooting with King George V near Windsor Castle. Franz Ferdinand and the king are accompanied by three English earls, while the ladies chat in Windsor Castle and listen to concerts. On Tuesday 18 November a thousand pheasants and 450 wild ducks are brought down by the marksmen after being driven into the line of fire by beaters. On Wednesday 19 November, in the loveliest sunshine, they shoot 1,700 pheasants. On Thursday they shoot about 1,000. And then on Friday, with rain lashing the faces of the royal hunting party, 800 pheasants and 800 wild ducks are slaughtered. A bloodbath.