The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  Bourgeoise goddess: Gustav Klimt’s

  seductive Judith.

  The Secession’s claim to truth also expressed itself in a paradox. A depiction using all the illusionist skills of academic painting could end up lying to the spectator by creating an impression which, for all its realism, was false, much like the elaborate façade of a building. The Secessionists no longer trusted naturalism as the best way of depicting inner worlds. If they wanted to penetrate the inner truth (the very core of desires and experiences, they believed) they had to stylize their objects and use the flat space of mythology, showing archetypes and harking back to a past free of the stranglehold of Christian and bourgeois morality. In Klimt’s poster for a group exhibition, this programme is clearly expressed. Theseus and the Minotaur, Pallas Athena with the head of the Medusa on her shield - the male and the female principle were there in their noblest and most terrible incarnations, and stylized to reconnect them with the iconic world of Greek vase painting. His most striking coup, though, and a provocation to all academicians and all members of the middle classes with their salons crammed to the rafters with knick-knacks and ornaments, was that the central portion of the space was simply left blank, a challenging void which, in the context of the mythological male and female, raised as many troubling questions as any of Freud’s books - a void that also echoed the emptiness at the heart of Austria-Hungary.

  Sex and the void at the heart

  of the matter: Klimt’s

  Secession poster.

  If Klimt knew how to provoke from the safety of society’s firm embrace, his young friend Egon Schiele (1890-1918) went even further in his explorations (see plate section). There was no titillation in Schiele’s existentialist explicitness, no inviting curves to appeal to gentlemen of a certain age. His were angular, breathing creatures, lonely at the very moment of embrace, bereft of the protection of mythology Klimt had afforded his figures, and exposed to a vivisector’s pitiless eye. Everything that had been taboo, unspeakable and unshowable - sex, voyeurism, masturbation - everything that was practised in secret but denied in public, was exposed by Schiele with sparse brush strokes, and exhibited for all to see. His angular figures looked into the world with eyes wide open, shining with fear or alive with defiance, or deep loneliness; their hands are either iconic claws or missing altogether, and even when touching someone they are little more than dead branches of an emaciated trunk. These hands do not give the warmth of human closeness, they do not grasp the world. Like the philosophers doubtful about the ability of language to communicate, to form a handle on the world, Schiele did not allow his figures to be in touch with one another.

  In Schiele’s works, the very last façades were ripped away, the last safe places of the soul destroyed. What the young genius (who died at the age of twenty-eight during the 1918 influenza epidemic, three days after his wife) formulated instead was a world not of despair, but of strange, stark beauty.

  Schiele’s art resonated with the sensualism that is a constant motif in Viennese culture, and with the desire of a younger generation to return to the bare bones of life and to construct everything anew from the first principles. A painter and dramatist, Oskar Kokoschka worked along similar lines, as did another young artist, Richard Gerstl, who would later commit suicide out of despair over his love for Arnold Schönberg’s wife Mathilde, who chose to stay with her husband after a brief but passionate affair with the painter.

  By 1902, Sigmund Freud had been waiting for a professorship for years. In view of his seniority in the profession (to say nothing of his brilliance as an innovator) it was long overdue, and when it finally came he greeted the news with sarcasm: ‘Popular enthusiasm is huge. Flowers and congratulations are raining down on me, as if the role of sexuality had suddenly been recognized by His Majesty, the significance of dreams ratified by the council of ministers and the importance of the treatment of hysteria had received a two-thirds majority in parliament.’

  Freud was particularly bitter about the fact that the appointment had not come through merit, but through influence, that very Habsburgian network between the privileged few which he had always despised. He had gained his promotion only because one of his upper-class patients had promised to donate a valuable painting to a public gallery, the pet project of the then minister of education. Had his patient possessed an even more sought-after work, Freud mused, he might have been called to a full chair at the university, after all. He was well aware of the petty provincialism that had disadvantaged him for long, and he always expressed great ambivalence towards Vienna and the Viennese. He had based his theory of the subconscious on the most recent international research, had travelled widely and comprehensively devoured scientific literature before he formulated his ideas. Despite all this (and this is true for all great leaps of science) his thought was a creature of its environment, of its time.

  Every Habsburg subject was an Oedipus to the crushing father figure of the Emperor; every stroll through the city and every visit to the theatre reinforced the notion of the dangerous dichotomy between façade and structure, between external and internal life. In this world, every civil servant with sideburns as big as the Emperor’s was an example of feelings sublimated; every flirtatious ‘sweet girl’ in a hat shop a sign that these feelings still wanted out. Nowhere else had Jewish culture, the Talmudic tradition of respect for the word and of close textual analysis gained such an important place in the thought of a society. Nowhere else was there quite so pervasive a smell of decay in the air, a smell that sharpened the senses and stimulated analyses into the subject’s cause of death.

  The naked truth was staring Viennese society in the face, and Viennese society did not like it. The intelligentsia admired and enjoyed avant-garde works (though performances of Schönberg pieces were liable to produce riots), but most of the capital’s good burghers held with Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, who, after visiting an exhibition by Secession artists, went on record as saying: ‘Those rascals should have every bone in their body broken.’ The Dual Monarchy, wrote Karl Kraus, was ‘an experimental station for the apocalypse’, and there can be nothing more sumptuously gorgeous and rich in colour than the sky during the Twilight of the Gods.

  4

  1903: A Strange Luminescence

  Few New Yorkers realize that all through the roar of the big city there are constantly speeding messages between people separated by vast distances, and that over housetops and even through the walls of buildings and in the very air one breathes are words written by electricity. - New York Times, 21 April 1912

  Wen Maria Sklodowska (1867-1934), Manya to her friends, had come to Paris from Poland in 1891 to study, she was already used to swimming against the stream, or rather, to having the stream flow against her. Born in Warsaw in 1867, she grew up in a country and a family marked by a history of occupation and revolt. Her grandfather, a patriot and a republican, had supported the 1864 uprising against Tsarist rule and had seen his career all but broken as a consequence by the brutal Russian reprisals which had culminated in the hanging of the leaders of the rebellion from the Alexander Citadel. Their bodies were left out for months, exposed to the elements, rotting and eaten by ravens, a gruesome reminder to the Poles that their Tsar was determined to crush any opposition. Manya’s father, Władysław Skłodowski, was an ardent republican and atheist whose convictions resulted in a career thwarted by Russian officials who allotted him more and more humiliating, difficult and badly paid teaching jobs so that finally he found it almost impossible to support his family of four children and a wife whose tuberculosis made it necessary for her to go abroad for lengthy and expensive cures. She died in 1877, when Manya was ten. The children had known little affection from their mother. Even when she was with them, she would not touch them and would eat from separate crockery for fear of infecting them with the deadly virus.

  Manya determined early that she would become a scientist, and that she would go to Paris to study there. Unable to afford the journey or her upkeep
there, she made a pact with her older sister: she would work as a governess to enable her sister to study if her sister would then take her in when it was time for her to enter university herself. During these years in the provinces she already showed the determination and independence that were to be characteristic in her life: next to her official duties, she taught Polish peasant children to read and write in their mother tongue. According to Russian law this was treason, punishable with years of exile. In 1891, Manya Sklodowska boarded a train, armed with clothes, a feather mattress, food and water, and a stool for the long voyage. She was twenty-four years old. Two days later she arrived at the Paris Gare du Nord station, where she was met by her sister. Here Manya, who now called herself Marie, would be free from political oppression, here she would be able to realize her dream and study, do research. Here her life would be transformed, and here she would become world-famous as a pioneering scientist together with her husband, the physicist Pierre Curie (1859-1906). Maria klodowska was on her way to becoming Marie Curie.

  Marriage of minds: Pierre and Marie Curie.

  All this has become part of the Curie legend, as have the events that followed: the years of patient study holed up in an unheated garret in the Quartier Latin (her sister’s flat, she found, offered too many distractions), her practising for a perfect French accent and her meeting with the brilliant and completely unworldly scientist Pierre Curie, their love and their marriage, their extraordinary collaboration. Having investigated questions of magnetism, Marie Curie, as she was now, had an extraordinary intuition for scientific research. In 1897 she attended a meeting of scientists at the Académie des Sciences during which the physicist Henri Becquerel informed his colleagues about an interesting and unexplained phenomenon, a byproduct of his research into the most fashionable phenomenon of the period, X-rays. While investigating a possible connection between the mysterious invisible rays and different luminescent materials he had noted that uranium appeared to emit a kind of radiation that was unlike X-rays and appeared to be a property of the material itself. The assembly listened and then passed to other business, consisting mainly of papers about X-rays, their nature and their possible applications.

  Becquerel’s observation excited Marie Curie’s curiosity and she decided to investigate this phenomenon, a choice that condemned her to obscurity, for scientific interest, research grants and career opportunities lay elsewhere. X-rays were the hot topic of the day in fin-de-siècle Europe.

  Two years earlier a mysterious discovery had been made by the German physicist Conrad Wilhelm Röntgen (1845-1923). Working on a cathode tube - a vacuum tube highly charged with electricity on the inside - Röntgen noticed that a plate coated with barium platinocyanide, used to detect ultraviolet light, began to fluoresce if placed in the path of the discharge of rays, which was itself invisible. During subsequent experiments he found out that the invisible rays would shade photographic plates and that objects interposed between cathode and plate would leave an imprint on the plate, showing denser tissues more clearly than softer ones. The dramatic effect was seen most clearly when Röntgen asked his wife to hold her hand in front of the screen. Once developed, her hand was clearly visible - her flesh a faint outline surrounding the bones and the wedding band seemingly afloat on the skeletal ring finger. The researcher had stumbled on a means of penetrating the deepest secrets of the human body without so much as cutting the skin.

  Röntgen knew that he had made an extraordinary discovery, but he was cautious about publicizing it. He sent some copies of the photo to other researchers, one of whom leaked the image to the press. When the London Standard published the photograph on 24 January 1896, the effect was immediate and extraordinary. X-rays became a medical craze, a fashion, a miraculous panacea for all ills. Röntgen had refused to patent his invention, and X-ray machines were rapidly copied and used. It took only a year for more than thirty different designs of machine to be put on the market and employed for diagnosis, fighting infections and cancer, killing bacteria; one scientist even proposed that the invisible light might be used for ‘bleaching Ethiopians’ and grant Africans the light skin of their European colonial masters.

  In the midst of life: the ghostly apparition of a

  hand under the X-ray machine.

  There was another, more sinister aspect to the new rays, however. In making every living body appear skeletal, they became a technological memento mori, a high-tech injunction whispering through the dark: Remember you will die. The act of stepping into one of these quasi-mystical contraptions and being subjected to the procedure with its accompanying startling noises became a surreal moment of truth for many patients. The doctor became a magus officiating in a ceremony between life and death, as described in the examination of Hans Castorp who, in Thomas Mann’s novel Der Zauberberg, enters the ‘transillumination cabinet’ of the lung sanatorium to visit Joachim, his cousin:

  It smelled peculiar here. A kind of stale ozone filled the atmosphere. A separation between the blackened windows divided the laboratory into two unequal halves. One could distinguish physical apparatuses, glasses, control boards, measuring instruments standing erect, but also a camera-like case on wheels, photographic plates made of glass which covered the walls in rows - impossible to know whether this was a photographer’s atelier, a dark room, or the workroom of an inventor and technical wizard …

  Hans Castorp saw limbs: hands, feet, knee caps, femurs and shin bones, arms and parts of the basin. But the rounded form of life of these fragments of a human body was only ghostly and vaporous; like a mist and bleak glow it tentatively surrounded its core which appeared clearly and in exact detail: the skeleton....

  At this moment, the assistant threw the switch on the controls. For two seconds, terrifying forces were at play, necessary to penetrate matter, streams of thousands of volts, of hundreds of thousands, as Hans Castorp seemed to recall. Barely tamed for the purpose, the powers were looking for alternative ways to regain their freedom. Discharges rang out like shots. Blue crackling surrounded the measuring apparatus. Extended lightning ran along the walls. A red light was looking on from somewhere like an eye, silent and menacing…Then everything fell quiet again; the light phenomena vanished and Joachim heaved a sigh of relief. It was over.

  This was science bordering on the miraculous, a revelation in both the analytical and the religious sense, and while the hidden power of X-rays held the general public in its thrall, it also fascinated scientists: during the years leading up to 1900, fully 60 per cent of papers given at the Paris Académie des Sciences were devoted to the subject. Henri Becquerel decided to investigate one possible connection with known qualities of matter. During the production of X-rays, the vacuum tubes emitted a faint light similar to the phosphorescence of certain substances which would glow in the dark if exposed to light before. An able scientist and a pillar of the French scientific establishment, Becquerel was ideally placed for this research: like his father and his grandfather before him, he was director of the Paris Museum of Natural History and had a vast number of natural samples at his disposal. To see whether these phosphorescent substances also emitted X-rays Becquerel first exposed them to light and then put them on top of a photographic plate to see whether they would create a radiation shadow.

  Using phosphorescent uranium salts, Becquerel had already set up his experiment when bad weather forced him to interrupt his research. He decided simply to wrap up the salts in their container and the photographic plate in black cloth to avoid any exposure of the plate and wait until sufficient sunlight was available. When he took out the bundle again he found to his surprise that the photographic plate had been exposed without light. Uranium appeared to emit a radiation unknown to science. Becquerel found his discovery interesting, but not significant enough to distract him from his research into the rays discovered by Röntgen.

  Marie Curie, then a doctoral student in search of a project who was earning a modest living by teaching at a vocational training college for women, had liste
ned to Becquerel with great interest. The unknown form of radiation appeared important to her, and she decided to take up the challenge. On top of her obligations as a teacher and despite having given birth to a baby girl whose care devolved largely on her herself, she found the time to enter into perhaps the most laborious and back-breaking process of individual scientific discovery the century had seen.

  Curie worked under terrible conditions, as she later remembered herself:

  The School of Physics could give us no suitable premises, but for lack of anything better, the Director permitted us to use an abandoned shed which had been in service as a dissecting room of the School of Medicine. Its glass roof did not afford complete shelter against rain; the heat was suffocating in summer, and the bitter cold of winter was only a little lessened by the iron stove, except in its immediate vicinity. There was no question of obtaining the needed proper apparatus in common use by chemists. We simply had some old pine-wood tables with furnaces and gas burners. We had to use the adjoining yard for those of our chemical operations that involved producing irritating gases; even then the gas often filled our shed. With this equipment we entered on our exhausting work.

  […] One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles or capsules containing our products. It was really a lovely sight and one always new to us. The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights.

  To find out more about the mysterious radiation it was necessary to find which substances emitted it and to purify these substances, which appeared in nature only in conjunction with other elements, particularly as salts or metallic compounds. Becquerel had already discovered that air exposed to ‘uranium rays’ could conduct electricity. Using a complicated instrument developed by her husband for measuring very weak currents, Marie could therefore prove the presence of radiation by determining the degree to which the air in her laboratory had become able to transport an electric current.