Everything is open: the future, and the lips of beautiful women. Kasimir Malevich paints a black square. Robert Musil finds Germany to be very dark. The Mona Lisa is found in Florence and becomes the most important painting in the world. Rainer Maria Rilke would like to be a hedgehog. Thomas Mann makes one thing clear: ‘I’m not writing The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but The Magic Mountain!’ Emil Nolde finds only disturbed people in his South Pacific paradise, while Karl Kraus finds happiness in Janowitz. Ernst Jünger is found in Africa and celebrates Christmas in Bad Rehburg. And what do the stars tell us?
In December 1913 the first ‘ready-made’, the bicycle wheel on the wooden stool, is turning at the hand of Marcel Duchamp in Paris, while the first ‘Black Square’ comes into being in Moscow – the twin starting-points of modern art.
At the 1913 Futurist Congress in Uusikirkko, in Finland, Malevich introduces the term ‘Suprematism’, which for him represents ‘the beginning of a new civilisation’. He throws aside the burden of representational art, which still held even Cubism under its spell. He wants to move forward, and to a place where nothing is needed: no reality and no colours. In December 1913 he presents thirty-five of his latest works at the ‘0,10’ exhibition in St Petersburg, including his Suprematist Manifesto and even his unprecedented painting Black Square on a White Background. The picture is an all-out provocation, and a revelation. For Malevich the square embodies the ‘zero state’, the experience of pure abstraction. And the elementary contrast between white and black creates a universal energy for him. It is an end-point for art – and yet, at the same time, the beginning of something completely new. It is the rejection of all demands made on artists and art – and, in the process, one of the greatest self-assertions of artistic autonomy. We should always think of the Black Square when we think of 1913.
The second masterpiece that defines 1913 is 400 years old and painted on a 77cm by 53cm wood panel made from Lombard white poplar. The Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci. There has been no trace of her since she was stolen from the Louvre two years ago.
But at the beginning of December the Florentine art dealer Alfredo Geri receives a letter. This portly, broad-shouldered and gregarious gentleman caters to Florence’s upper classes from his antiques shop in Via Borgo Ognissanti. His clients include Eleonora Duse, known as ‘La Duse’ for short, and her lover, Gabriele d’Annunzio. The letter he is holding in his hands disturbs him. Is it the truth, or simply a letter from a lunatic? He reads it again: ‘The stolen painting by Leonardo da Vinci is in my possession. It is quite clear that it belongs to Italy, because the painter was Italian. It is my desire to give this masterpiece back to the country it came from and by which it was inspired. Leonardo.’
Geri manages to arrange a meeting with the ominous sender for 22 December in Milan. But on 10 December, when Geri is about to close up his shop at half-past eight in the evening, a man comes up to him from among the last customers: ‘My name is Leonardo.’ Geri looks at the man, aghast: he has a dark complexion, pomade-black hair and, all in all, makes quite a greasy impression with his twirly little walrus moustache. He had, the man told Geri, come a little earlier after all, and was staying at the Albergo Tripoli-Italia in Via Panzani under the name of Leonardo Vincenzo. In other words, just one block away from Borgo San Lorenzo, where, 400 years previously, Lisa del Giocondo had sat and modelled for Leonardo.
Leonardo went on to say that Signore Geri could come to see the Mona Lisa in the guest house at three in the afternoon the following day. Geri subsequently alerts the director of the Uffizi Gallery, Giovanni Poggi, and the three of them go from the antiques shop to the run-down guest house. As they walk through the streets, Geri and Leonardo agree that he will receive 500,000 Lire if the painting is genuine. That would be nice, Leonardo says, but it really isn’t about the money; he just wants to bring Italy’s stolen art treasure back home. Poggi and Geri look at each other, confused.
The gentlemen climb up the steep steps to the Albergo Tripoli-Italia, where Leonardo’s shabby single room is situated on the second floor. He fetches a trunk out from under the bed, throwing its entire contents – underwear, work tools and his shaving things – onto the mattress. Then he opens a false bottom inside the trunk and takes out a board wrapped in red silk: ‘Before our eyes, the divine Gioconda appeared, unharmed and in magnificent condition. We carried her over to the window for comparison with a photograph we had brought along with us. Poggi inspected her’, as Geri later explained. There is no doubt; the inventory number from the Louvre is even on the back. But despite their excitement, Geri and Poggi keep their nerve – they tell Leonardo that the painting may be the one everybody’s looking for, but that they have to make further enquiries. Leonardo, exhausted from the long journey and with the 500,000 Lire in his sights, hangs the picture on his bedroom wall and lies down for an afternoon nap.
Poggi immediately informs the police – when the Carabinieri open the door, Leonardo is still asleep, and the entire contents of his trunk are on the floor next to the bed. He does not resist arrest. The Mona Lisa is taken to the Uffizi under police protection. Then, aware of the significance of his find, Poggi doesn’t just call the Culture Minister, Corrado Ricci, in Rome, and the French Ambassador, Camille Barrère, but even has his calls put through to King Vittorio Emmanuele and Pope Pius X.
In the Italian parliament two representatives are exchanging blows when someone runs into the plenary hall and cries out: ‘La Gioconda è trovata.’ The Gioconda is back! The message is immediately understood. The two adversaries embrace and kiss each other through sheer excitement.
From this moment on the whole of Italy is overcome by Mona Lisa Fever. And Leonardo? Leonardo’s real name was Vincenzo Peruggia, he was thirty-two years old and had been working as a temporary glazier in the Louvre at the time of the theft. It was he who had put the Mona Lisa in the controversial glass frame. And because he had put her there, he also knew how to get her out. He hid himself one evening so that he would be locked in, took the painting out, wrapped it in linen and then walked out of the Louvre the next morning in broad daylight. The guards, who knew him well, nodded to him in greeting.
The whole story was absurd. The police had taken fingerprints from everyone, every cleaning woman, every art historian, every archivist in the Louvre in order to catch the thief, because he had left prints on the picture’s frame. But they forgot the temporary glazier Vincenzo Peruggia. During their search for the Mona Lisa the police had even visited him at home in his shabby little room at 5 Rue de l’Hôpital Saint-Louis, just like they had every other Louvre staff member. But the policemen didn’t look under the bed.
There, just a kilometre away from the Louvre as the crow flies, the most-hunted art work in the world lay for two whole years. The story was a shock: for the Louvre and for the Parisian police. But at the same time it is also a wonderful Christmas message filled with joy. Locked up in his cell, Peruggia receives innumerable thank-you letters, sweets and presents from grateful Italians.
Gabriele d’Annunzio wrote the following: ‘He who dreamed of fame and honour, he, the avenger of the thefts of Napoleon, brought her over the border back to Florence. Only a poet, a great poet, can dream such a dream.’
By 13 October the French government officials and art historians had arrived in Florence to check the authenticity of the Mona Lisa. The Italian Culture Minister, Ricci, said these wonderful words: ‘I just wish the French had declared the picture to be a copy, for then Mona Lisa would have stayed in Italy.’ But even the French declared the painting to be the original.
Alfredo Geri was given a reward by the Louvre and the rosette of the Légion d’Honneur by the French state. Leonardo, otherwise known as Vincenzo Peruggia, was sentenced to seven months’ imprisonment.
On 14 December, watched over by a unique international honour guard consisting of Gendarmes and Carabinieri in parade uniform, the Mona Lisa was hung in the Uffizi, carried through the walkways in an elaborate gilded walnut frame as if part of a procession. Thirty thousand people saw her; Italian children even got a day off school to go to Florence and admire the national shrine. Then, on 20 December, the painting was taken to King Vittorio Emmanuele in Rome, in a saloon carriage filled with guests of honour. The next day he handed it over in the French Embassy, the Palazzo Farnese, as part of a symbolic act. Over Christmas 1913 the painting was on display in the Villa Borghese once more – the Culture Minister himself sat next to it during the opening hours; he had promised not to let it out of his sight for a second. At night a dozen police officers stood guard. Next, the Mona Lisa was taken to Milan in a saloon carriage – under strict security precautions, the painting was then on display in the Brera Museum for two days. Mona Lisa’s journey through Italy was an unparalleled victory parade. Whenever the carriage passed a train station, people would cheer and wave. From Milan onwards the Mona Lisa was given a private carriage in the express train from Milan to Paris. She was treated like a queen. Late in the evening of 31 December the Mona Lisa crossed the French border. She had left the Louvre as a painting but was returning as an enigma.
The December edition of the Neue Rundschau prints a short notice from Oscar Bie, who had recently visited Thomas Mann at his home: he reports that Mann is working on a new novel entitled ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’. Bie’s handwriting was so indecipherable that even he sometimes had problems decoding it. So Thomas Mann ends up spending December putting straight all the friends and acquaintances who write to him about it: ‘You won’t believe it, but (the novel) is finished. And by the way, it’s called The Magic Mountain (Bie misread his own handwriting).’
On 15 December, Ezra Pound, the great poet and one of London’s most important and proactive cultural mediators, sends a letter to James Joyce in Trieste. He asks the poverty-stricken English teacher for some of his newest poems for the magazine The Egoist. ‘Dear Sir!’ this friendly letter begins, and it ends: ‘From what Yeats says I imagine we have a hate or two in common.’ This letter has the effect of making Joyce feel as if he has been raised from the dead. Soon Pound sends a second letter from his Kensington home, saying that Yeats has sent him the poem ‘I Hear an Army’, and that he liked it very much. So emboldened is James Joyce that he sits down that very day and corrects his two manuscripts. After two weeks the first chapter of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and his short stories Dubliners are ready, and he sends them by express train to Ezra Pound in London. A star is born.
Dr. Med. Alfred Döblin, the writer and neurologist, and collaborator on Herwath Walden’s magazine Der Sturm, spends nights on end in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s new studio in Körnerstrasse. Döblin wrote again and again about men and women and their relationships, about the battle of the sexes. He wrote this, for example, after one of his lovers gave birth to his son: ‘Marriage isn’t a shop specialising in sexuality. Equally foolish is the insistence on fulfilling all sexual relations within the framework of the marriage, as if one could predict that you would only be hungry at mealtimes and in certain places.’ Kirchner liked that a lot. Back in the summer he had done the etchings for Döblin’s novella The Canoness and Death, which was published in November by A. R. Meyer’s small Wilmersdorf publishing house. The very same publishing house which issued Gottfried Benn’s Morgue in 1912 and his new volume of poetry, Sons, in 1913.
In December, Kirchner starts work on illustrations for Döblin’s one-act play Countess Mizi, a play about the coquettes Kirchner devoured so hungrily with his painter’s eye on their forays along Friedrichstrasse and around the outskirts of Potsdamer Platz. Döblin said this of the ladies of the night: ‘Their sexual organs are machine parts.’ That is the theory behind the practice painted by Kirchner. This December he tries time and again to transfer the fascination and coldness of Potsdamer Platz into art. The coquettes’ fur collars, their pink faces against the pale, icy delirium of the collars, the glaring green feather boas – and alongside them the faceless, hunted men. Kirchner sketches and sketches, and once even writes these words in his sketchbook: ‘Coquette = the momentary mistress.’
Christmas Eve in Berlin’s Klopstockstrasse, at Lovis Corinth’s place.
His life’s work has become another year richer. It was mainly in the Tyrol that Corinth expanded his palette, finding the tone for the mountains that he would then fully master in his portraits of Lake Walchen. But he isn’t on top form yet. Once the Christmas dinner is finally over and the handing out of presents is due to begin, Papa Corinth asks the children for just a moment’s patience. He fetches his easel, a stretcher frame and his paints. Charlotte also slips out of the room, telling the children she’s keeping an eye out for Father Christmas. But it’s really so she can dress up as Father Christmas herself. The children, Thomas and Wilhelmine, wait with eager anticipation. Then Father Christmas – in actual fact Mother Christmas – arrives, and the giving of presents can begin. But Lovis Corinth leaves his untouched; he only has eyes for his canvas – and with just a few energetic brushstrokes he depicts the Christmas tree with its glowing red candles. Next to it in the painting is Thomas, completely immersed in looking at his new red-curtained puppet theatre. Little Wilhelmine, in a white dress, has just unwrapped a puppet and is already moving on to the next present. Charlotte, on the left, still has her Father Christmas costume on. In the foreground of the picture, to the left-hand side, is the still uncut marzipan cake. But once Corinth has painted it in the most beautiful shades of brown, he wipes his fingers on a cloth and cuts himself a piece.
Meanwhile, Josef Stalin is freezing in his Siberian exile.
Ernst Jünger has finally arrived in Africa. A newly recruited legionnaire in the Foreign Legion, he is in a dusty tent with his comrades in North Africa, near Sidi bel Abbès. Instead of endless freedom, all he finds are endless drills. In the blazing heat they are forced to carry out military training exercises, manoeuvres and endurance runs. What on earth made him commit himself to five years straight? So Jünger tries to run away again, this time from the Foreign Legion. He hides out in Morocco. But he is caught and sentenced to a week’s imprisonment in the garrison prison. Somehow he had imagined Africa would be completely different. On 13 December a messenger brings the following telegram: ‘SENT FROM REHBURG CITY, 12:06. THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT HAS GRANTED YOUR RELEASE HAVE PICTURE TAKEN JÜNGER.’ After diplomatic intervention Jünger’s father has managed to secure his release and transport home. On 20 December he leaves the Foreign Legion’s North African barracks with the following grounds for his discharge written on the release form: ‘Father’s appeal due to soldier being under-age.’ Deeply tanned, deeply ashamed and deeply confused, Jünger sets off by train on the long journey from Marseille to Bad Rehburg. He arrives at his parents’ home just in time for Christmas. On Christmas Eve, therefore, he is sitting not under a starry African sky but under a Christmas tree that was chopped down a few days earlier in the Rehburg Forest. There is carp for dinner. Jünger promises his father he will now study hard for his Abitur. Then he excuses himself and goes to bed. This time, however, he doesn’t read Secrets of the Dark Continent before going to sleep.
Emil Nolde has reached the destination of his dreams. On 3 December, two months after their departure, he sails past the Palau islands with Ada and the expedition group on the North German Lloyd steamboat Prinz Waldemar. On the small island of Jap, in the Western Caroline Islands, they make their first contact with the native inhabitants, who berth their boats next to theirs and come on board. Then they journey on, towards the equator, sailing past the island of German New Guinea, where August Engelhardt founded his empire. The German reformist, incredibly gaunt by now, lives here in his book-filled hut on the beach, gathering the followers of his coconut religion around him. He believes the coconut to be a heavenly fruit (because it grows at such heights) and preaches that people can only be healthy if they nourish themselves exclusively on its milk and flesh. He loves the wonderful, heavenly sound it makes when opened, that moment when the coconut splits.
Even Nolde is eating many coconuts these days, but it isn’t enough for him; he needs the regular supplement of a freshly killed chicken. On 13 December the expedition group reaches Rabaul, the capital city of the Neu-Pommern nature reserve. There they are each appointed with a native ‘boy’. Tulie and Matam are the names of the two boys who will tend to Emil and Ada Nolde from now on. So they can all acclimatise, the group now spends four weeks on a small mountain above Rabaul, named Narmanula, where they are able to stay in a newly built but as yet unused colonial hospital. After weeks of waiting, Nolde is overcome by an intense urge to create. He takes his watercolour paper, pours a little stream water into a holder and paints from early in the morning until late at night: Matam and Tulie at first, then the natives’ huts too, the women, the children, the tranquillity, the palm trees. He also cuts a block of wood and makes a woodcut of the two boys. Their ears and eyes are delicately carved onto the dark heads, and you can even see Tulie’s curious nose and Matam’s protruding upper lip, with the lush South Pacific vegetation visible in the background.
Emil Nolde is not only fascinated but also disillusioned. Here in Palau he can no longer see the untouched South Pacific that Paul Gauguin once painted, the one the European poets conjured up in their poems. The native inhabitants of the colonies are sadly Europe-anised, ‘their defiance broken, their hair cut short’, he writes. They are all being brought to Rabaul to learn German or English, and after that they return to their native villages to work as interpreters for tourists. Nolde heads across by boat to the Gazelle peninsula, where he hopes to find a more native way of life – realising that he is witnessing a culture at the moment of its demise, he reaches for his watercolours to preserve the evidence. He searches for paradise in the vibrant pink and red blooms of the bougainvillaea and hibiscus, and in the naked bodies of the natives too. But in their faces Nolde finds a frightening apathy. Instead of unspoilt joy for life, his pictures of the South Pacific speak of the seriousness of the modern era. He writes letters back to his distant homeland: ‘I’m painting and drawing and trying to capture something of primordial being. I may have succeeded here and there, but I am nonetheless of the opinion that my paintings of the primordial people and some of my watercolours are so genuine and crude that they could not under any circumstances be hung in perfumed salons.’
Dozens and dozens of watercolours are created in Neu-Pommern that December, melancholic studies of the agony of a culture broken by European pressure. Mothers and children huddle up to one another as if on a sinking ship. So this is the paradise he dreamed of for years on end, and which he spent sixty arduous days travelling to.
On 23 December, Nolde sends 215 drawings and watercolours with the Rabaul post steamer to his friend and patron Hans Fehr in Halle. On 24 December, Emil Nolde notes in his diary how much he misses a white Christmas, the crackle of wood in the fireplace and the decorated Christmas tree: ‘It was almost impossible for us to get into the Christmas spirit in this heat. Our thoughts wandered over the seas and across the world to the cosy corners of the German homeland, where the lights burned brightly. I put the little wooden figures that I carved during the sea journey with a pocket knife onto our Christmas table.’
On 25 December, issue 52 of Die Schaubühne published the poem ‘City Christmas’, by Kurt Tucholsky, alias Theobald Tiger. It portrays Christmas as a bourgeois drama in which people no longer have feelings, only roles.
The Christ Child comes! We young ones listen
To quiet, holy gramophone.
The Christ Child comes, prepared to swap
New ties, dolls and lexicon.
And if the bourgeois sits with family
In his chair, at half past nine,
At peace with life and with the world
‘Yes, Christmas certainly is fine!’
And cheerily he speaks of ‘Christmas weather’,
Rain today, or snow perhaps.
Smoking as he reads his paper,
Tales of famous girls and chaps.
So does the Christ Child’s flight encounter
Purest bliss down here below?
Good God, they’re playing Christmas peace out …
‘We’re all acting. The clever ones are those who know.’
Arthur Schnitzler is not proud. That December he notes in his journal that he has finally given up hope that anyone will ever really understand him: ‘Dr Roseau is sending around a pamphlet about me – well-meaning, and in essence, the same thing that is written about me everywhere. I have now given up on expecting the critics of today to understand me.’
On 1 December 1913 in Lübeck, Ernst Karl Frahm is born. He will later call himself Willy Brandt.
Oskar Kokoschka spends Christmas with Alma, her mother and her daughter in the newly built house in Breitenstein. The lighting isn’t working yet, so after dusk they all sit around the fireplace, the blazing fire and numerous candles bathing everything in a festive glow. Kokoschka gives Alma a fan which he painted for her; on it a man is pictured losing Alma to a large fish. Kokoschka is convinced that ‘there has been nothing of its kind since the Middle Ages, for no lovers have ever breathed into one another so passionately.’ (Later, once Alma has been breathing into Walter Gropius for a good while, Kokoschka has a life-size puppet modelled on Alma, discussing every wrinkle and every pad of fat around the hip region with the puppet-maker, and he goes on to live longer with the puppet than he lived with Alma herself. But that’s just an aside, after all, because we don’t really want to know what will happen next, not here in 1913.)
D. H. Lawrence, who is enjoying his greatest success ever in England with Sons and Lovers, according to which a man can only be either a son or a lover (which is a parricide of sorts), has already made the conflict between intellect and instinct into a big topic with this book. Back in the autumn, in an attempt to make his beloved Frieda von Richthofen believe him, he walked through the whole of Switzerland, and now the two of them are celebrating a warm Christmas in a dockside bar by the Mediterranean. That Christmas, Lawrence composes his very own confession of faith: ‘My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true.’
From his lips to Kafka’s ears. Felice Bauer is no longer returning his letters. He writes to her by registered post, he writes to her by special delivery, he even sends his friend Ernst Weiss with a message to her office at Lindström AG, but she doesn’t answer. Then Kafka receives a telegram announcing the imminent arrival of a letter. But the letter never arrives. They speak briefly on the phone: Felice begs him not to come to Berlin for Christmas and promises she will write to him soon. But she doesn’t. When there is still no sign of a letter by midday on 29 November, Franz Kafka sits down in Prague and starts a new letter, his second proposal. He writes and broods, writes and broods. By New Year’s Eve he has reached page 22. By the time he finishes, the letter is thirty-five pages long. Kafka writes: ‘Felice, I love you with all that is humanly good in me, with everything that makes me worthy of being among the living.’ When the bells of Hradčany ring out at midnight, Kafka stands up briefly and goes over to the window. The family moved in November, so Kafka is no longer looking out over the river and the bridge and the parks, but is looking at the Altstadtring. It’s snowing softly and unrelentingly, muffling the cannon shots from the castle, and outside in the streets people are celebrating the arrival of a New Year. Kafka sits back down and continues to write: ‘Even the fact that there are things in me you find fault with and would like to change, I love that too, I just want you to know that.’
Käthe Kollwitz, weary of life with her husband and uncertain about which direction her art should take, acknowledges: ‘At any rate 1913 has passed quite innocuously, not dead and sleepy, quite a lot of inner life.’
Quite a lot of inner life: probably so. In the dark December night Robert Musil takes notes from which his novel The Man without Qualities will later grow. Now he writes the lovely sentence: ‘Ulrich predicted the future and had no idea.’ Not bad. He takes another sip of red wine and lights a cigarette (or at least that is how one imagines it), then, writing as Ulrich, his protagonist, he turns his attention to the heroine, Diotima, the much-desired beauty, the Woman Full of Qualities; and all the time he had that particular sentence on his lips. So he writes: ‘And something was open: it was probably the future, but to some extent it was her lips too.’
There are a few happy people this Christmas Day in 1913. Karl Kraus and Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin are two of those for whom everything remains open. The shock waves of the argument with Franz Werfel have not yet reached their idyll. They are still enjoying each other, secretly, but with a great deal of love. Kraus is overwhelmed by the Borutins’ charming castle in Janowitz, still lit only by paraffin lamps, and by its dreamlike park, with the wonderful, 500-year-old poplar tree in the courtyard – the park that also cast its eternal spell on Rilke. Even now, in December, the great poplar still has a few ragged leaves up in its crown, which rustle when the wind blows over the hill. Kraus succumbs entirely to the magic of this place. Here, where his beloved Sidonie is mistress of the horses and the dogs and the pigs, this is his paradise. Here everything is what it is, good, and natural, and true. Sidonie and Janowitz, this liberation from Vienna and its intellectual corset, turn Karl Kraus into a different person. Sidonie’s brother wishes his sister to have a suitable marriage, but at night, when Karl creeps down the dark, cold corridors of the castle as soon as the brother has gone to sleep and climbs into Sidonie’s warm bed, they stop thinking about suitability. Karl Kraus arrived on 23 December; his friend Adolf Loos will follow him on 24 December. They want to celebrate Christmas together. Loos tries, probably so as not to disturb the young couple for long, to visit the castle of the successor to the throne in Konopiště, next door to the Borutins’ castle. He writes a letter and asks to be allowed in. But Franz Ferdinand does not want to be disturbed. A shame, it would have been an interesting encounter: the two opposite poles of Austria-Hungary. Loos, the ice-cold adversary of ornament, and Franz Ferdinand, the hot-blooded commander in chief of the army.
Then a letter arrives for Sidi from Paris, sent by Rilke. ‘Is Karl Kraus with you?’ he asks, because Sidi has confided in him. And then he asks Sidi – who was so repelled by it – to pass on an essay about Franz Werfel to Karl Kraus, entitled ‘About the Young Poet’. He couldn’t have sent anything more unsuitable to Kraus, who learns soon afterwards that Werfel has been spreading rumours about his beloved, which makes him as angry as a raging bull.
But this time Rilke’s letter does not further disturb the loving idyll in Janowitz. Sidonie sets the letter aside – nothing urgent, she thinks – and goes for another walk in the park with Karl and her beloved dog Bobby. They dance among the snowflakes falling gently from the sky.
Kraus, who never stays away from his desk for more than two days at a time, extends his holiday to the New Year and writes elegant nature poems. Sidonie, the tall, proud beauty, later gives him a dreamy photograph of herself, writing on the back in blue ink: ‘Karl Kraus/in memory of days shared by Sidi Nádherný/Janowitz 1913–14.’ He immediately hangs it over his desk in Vienna, and never takes it down. And at some point, at some point in his life thereafter, he sends her a postcard from St Moritz: ‘Please remember Christmas 1913 tonight.’ It must have been lovely, that Christmas.
On 27 December the ministry in Vienna extends the sick leave of the neurasthenic librarian second-class Robert Musil by a further three months. He immediately travels to Germany to negotiate with Samuel Fischer, becoming editor of his magazine Neue Rundschau shortly afterwards. On his train journey from Vienna to Berlin he notes irritably: ‘Conspicuous in Germany; the great darkness.’
New Year’s Eve 1913. Oswald Spengler writes in his diary: ‘I remember how I felt as a boy when the Christmas tree was plundered and cleared away, and everything was as prosaic as it had been before. I cried all night in bed, and the long, long year to the following Christmas was so long and bleak.’ And again: ‘Life in this century oppresses me today. Everything redolent of comfort, of beauty, of colour, is being plundered.’
At the end of 1913 a surprising book is published. Its name is The Year 1913 – in it is the attempt to give an account of the present, which is ‘rich in cultural values’ but which at the same time sees an ‘increased blunting and superficiality in the masses’. The chief highlight is the last essay by Ernst Troeltsch about the religious phenomena of the present: ‘It is the old story that we all know, which for a while we called progress, and then decadence, and in which people now like to see the preparation of a new idealism. Social reformers, philosophers, theologians, businessmen, psychologists, historians signal it. But it is not there.’ The old story that was once called progress –how wisely people spoke in December 1913. But who understood those words in the hubbub of that year?
In Babylon the temple site of Etemenanki is discovered. It is the legendary Tower of Babel.
What are women wearing for New Year’s Eve? In issue 52, Welt der Frau, a supplement of Gartenlaube, provides tips for ‘fashion at the turn of the year’. ‘The delight in colour that distinguishes this season is also apparent in outfits for small festivities. With their loose cut, most fashions suit the slender form. But even for the fuller-figured woman, today’s fashions can be charming, blurring lines as they do, if one knows how to choose.’ On the following page there is a poem by Marie Möller, which bears the harmless-sounding title ‘New Year’s Eve’. It includes these disturbing lines:
So let us work from dawn till dusk
That a fine year may us befall!
Bringing after strife and toil
Victory and peace to all.
And that the tune of global war
May cease its gloomy, threatening knell.
That it may soon in harmony
Ring out like joyful chiming bells!
Rainer Maria Rilke is in a bad way during those last December days in Paris. He writes: ‘I see nobody, it has been freezing, there was black ice, it’s raining, it’s dripping – this is winter, always three days of each. I have truly had my fill of Paris, it is a place of damnation.’ And then: ‘Here is the incarnation of my desires for 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917 etc. Which is: peace, and to be in the country with a sisterly person.’ He then writes to one of those sisterly people, although her thoughts are elsewhere right now: Sidonie Nádherný: ‘Now I would like to be as if without a face, a rolled-up hedgehog that only opens up in the ditch in the evening and cautiously comes up and holds its grey snout up at the stars.’
The complete constellation of Sagitta is observed in the sky for the first time in 1913. South of the Fox and north of the Eagle, Sagitta is a clear, bright arrow flying towards the Swan. Enthralled eyes gaze heavenwards. Sagitta bears the name of the dangerous arrow fired, according to mythology, at Hercules. But the Swan is lucky once again: the arrow just misses it.
It is 31 December 1913. Arthur Schnitzler records a few words in his diary: ‘In the morning, dictated my madness novella to the end for the time being.’ In the afternoon he reads Ricarda Huch’s book The Great War in Germany. Otherwise: ‘Very nervous during the day.’ Then a soirée. ‘Roulette was played.’ At midnight they clink glasses to the year 1914.