In July, Rilke goes briefly to Berlin and sees the newly discovered head of Amenophis in the city’s museum: ‘A marvel, I tell you’, he writes excitedly to Lou Andreas-Salomé. These are the excavations from Tell el-Amarna, from the expedition financed by James Simon. The whole city is in Egypt fever about the beauty of the sculptures. The Berliner Tageblatt writes excitedly about Amenophis: ‘A true modern, in the boldest sense of the word.’ Advice is suggested to the avant-garde: ‘Futurists, lower your heads!’ Else Lasker-Schüler comes to the museum, falls to her knees with enthusiasm; her paintings of Prince Yussuf soon bear the features of Amenophis IV, also known as Akhenaten. And the greatest marvel, the head of his wife, Nefertiti, is even in the basement of the museum. The archaeological expedition initially decided not to show their most beautiful item. The curators of the exhibition guess that if everything taken from the country in January 1913 were put on display, the Egyptians would soon start demanding the return of their works. So Nefertiti stays in storage.
Anyone who has spent a thousand years under Egyptian soil can wait a few years until the world is at her feet.
So it’s July, everyone’s convalescing, Rilke has Egypt fever, a bit of money and nothing to do. So one might think it obvious for him to take a few days’ holiday by the sea in August. But for someone who must justify himself daily to his lady patrons and his superego for his cultivated leisure, ‘holiday’ is a dirty word. So it’s quite obvious that it seems ‘frivolous’ to Rilke to go to the coast in August. He leaves Lou in Göttingen and then writes to her from Leipzig immediately: ‘I have had the frivolous idea of going to the sea for eight days at the end of the week (to Heiligendamm, where the Nostitzens are). There are supposed to be lovely beech woods there, and suddenly my soul is filled with the idea of the sea. So perhaps I’ll do that.’
Frank Wedekind is in Rome, where on 8 July he finishes his play Samson, which he began on 26 January. He has gone to Rome to be alone and to recover from the chaos surrounding the ban on his play Lulu. A nymphomaniac who destroys the world of men, that’s not allowed. But Wedekind senses that with his Lulu he has created a new heroine for the twentieth century. He consoles himself with the heroes of the past for the ignominy of the present – and in Rome he reads Goethe’s Italian Journey and Burckhardt’s Culture of the Renaissance in Italy and visits the Sistine Chapel. The censors in Munich would have rubbed their eyes in amazement at this troublemaker’s haut bourgeois ambitions. He writes to his wife, Tilly Wedekind: ‘The loveliest thing I have experienced here was my walk among the ruins of the Monte Palatino.’ But then he warns her: Rome is fast asleep, no theatre, no variété. ‘For my own purposes Rome leaves nothing to be desired. But if we want to enjoy ourselves together, we would probably be better off going to Paris.’ Because this is worth establishing once and for all: ‘Paris is the most beautiful city in the world, then comes Rome, and just below that, Munich.’
Lovis Corinth is sitting in the Villa Mondschein in the Tyrol, with his children, his wife and his mother. He hasn’t quite recovered from his stroke, but here in Sankt Ulrich in the Grödner Tal he slowly starts feeling better. It is raining so hard that Corinth can hardly paint outside. So his family has to sit for him. First he paints himself, in local costume, his heavy green loden jacket and his hat decorated with a feather (he looks cheerfully growly again). Then his wife, Charlotte, also as a Tyrolean. He applies the paint thickly onto the canvas, as if to demonstrate that he’s alive again. And when the world sinks back into fog and rain, he brings the green and red and brightness of the costumes into his art. His son Thomas doesn’t want to be painted; he is freezing, and is soon in bed with flu at their boarding house.
Corinth receives the post from Berlin each morning as ‘manna in the desert’. Most of the letters concern the big dispute in the Berlin Secession, which has been raging since Paul Cassirer, the dealer, was made its chair. For the next exhibition he has uninvited all thirteen artists who didn’t vote for him, which led to a big falling out. Now the association belongs to the remaining Secessionists around Corinth, but the limited company, the owner of the exhibition house at 208–9 Kurfürstendamm, is controlled by Cassirer and Liebermann. So the association around Corinth has to erect a new building to regain its space and fame. When Corinth, in the Tyrol, learns of the idea that this is to be constructed by Peter Behrens, the architect and designer of houses, lamps and tables for the AEG electrical company, he admits he doesn’t like him, but he recognises the possible improvement in the association’s profile, because Behrens is ‘modern’. In fact, amid the driving rain here in the Tyrol, all those quarrels in his distant homeland are far too much. He thinks ‘with horror of Berlin’, and spends days immersed in Bernhard Kellermann’s book The Tunnel, about which Corinth writes the shortest and most concise review of the year: ‘Good book, I’d like to go to America.’ But it’s no use: in August, Corinth has to go back to Berlin.
Käthe Kollwitz is in the Tyrol too, with her husband, Karl. They are forever arguing, the rain cascades down, they can’t get out into the freedom of the landscape, they sit there dully on the chairs in their pension and are profoundly unhappy with each other. After the summer holidays she falls into a ‘great depression’. She has suicidal thoughts, is in despair about her life and her artistic work, is unsatisfied with her first attempts at sculpture. And then she asks her diary: ‘Karl and me?’ Answer: ‘Such a love I have never known.’
Karl no longer interests her. ‘Always the same, you already know every nuance, slack sensuality can no longer stimulate it. Quite different fare is needed to revive the appetite.’ That is Käthe Kollwitz’s declaration of freedom in 1913. She seeks comfort in Strindberg, plunges into his dramas: wild hatred between the sexes, dull togetherness, it helps her, she doesn’t feel alone. She tells her son about it, says Strindberg is about the way couples ‘maul and hate each other’. Kollwitz sits listlessly at the window, gazes into the rain and writes in her diary: ‘Summer is passing and I don’t feel it.’
In Vienna, Oskar Kokoschka has called the banns for his marriage to Alma Mahler. It is scheduled for 19 July, at the town hall of Döbling, the district where the bride’s parents live. He has gone to the Hohe Warte to see Carl Moll and ask for Alma’s hand. Moll has no objections. But when Alma learns of Oskar’s plans on 4 July, she panics, packs her bags and flees; she wants to go to Marienbad. Kokoschka chases after her, catches up with her at the station, shouts, rages at her to open the window again, Kokoschka shoves a self-portrait at her and orders her to hang it in her hotel room to ward off all the other men. And as soon as she’s gone, he sends her his first letter: ‘Please, my little Alma, don’t look at anyone, the men there will always stare at you.’ And then: ‘Why did you laugh when I said: stay healthy! I would have loved to ask you, but you’d already gone.’ Yes, why did she laugh? In the few clear-sighted moments of their relationship (which were also the darkest) Alma probably felt that they could not be healthy together because they were sick with love. Or, as Kokoschka puts it two days later in his next little letter: ‘For example, I’m uncomfortable with a thug of a doctor feeling you up, a waitress seeing you partially undressed or in your bed and so on.’ She puts up with all these letters, perhaps even enjoys them, but she writes to him from Franzensbad that she’s only coming back when he’s finally finished his masterpiece. She calls him a ‘weed’ and ‘Jewified’; he’s that too. Kokoschka is furious and goes straight to Franzensbad – when he arrives at the hotel, Alma isn’t there. And his self-portrait isn’t hanging over her bed, as he had ordered. When she comes back from her walk, he erupts. He rages against Alma, drums his fists on her bed and jumps on the next train back to Vienna. The date of the wedding passes. And then, with the smell of Kokoschka’s sweat still lingering in her hotel room, Alma, the great tactician, writes a letter to Berlin. She would like to know what chance she has with Walter Gropius, her serious, strict former lover, who withdrew disappointed when he saw the double portrait of Alma and Kokoschka in
the Secession exhibition. So Alma writes to him on 26 July: ‘I may marry – Oskar Kokoschka, a man both our souls know intimately, but I will remain bound to you throughout all eternity. Tell me if you are alive and if this life is worth living.’
Kokoschka still has no idea that Alma has been putting out feelers again. He is still in Vienna, painting for dear life. But also wondering if this life is worth living. He works away at the huge canvas of their double portrait. He works away on his masterpiece. Perhaps only his visitor keeps him from despair that July in Vienna. Because compared with Georg Trakl, Kokoschka’s soul is still in pretty good order. Trakl is staying temporarily in Vienna, at 27 Stiftsgasse, and between his alcoholic and drug-induced stupors he has taken an unpaid job in Vienna, as an accounts clerk at the war ministry. It is hard to imagine a more absurd job for Georg Trakl. He holds it down for only a few days. But during that time, as soon as work is over, he steals away to Kokoschka’s studio. The painter is standing in front of his canvas, hopping nervously back and forth, sunk in wild inner dreams about Alma’s infidelity, cigarette in his mouth and paint on his palette, painting with brush and right forefinger. Behind him, Trakl sits on a beer barrel, rolling back and forth for hours on end. Kokoschka, the lunatic, finds that calming. Every now and again a faint growl is heard from Trakl’s corner. He is starting to recite his poems, talking about crows, fate, corruption and decline; he cries out desperately for his sister, then sinks back into eternal silence and rolls mutely back and forth, back and forth. Trakl is there every day while Kokoschka is painting the double portrait. And it is also Trakl who gives the painting its name: The Wind-Bride. In a poem by Trakl written during his chaotic Vienna days, ‘The Night’, he writes:
Golden flicker the flames
Around the peoples.
Over deep black cliffs
Death-drunken plunges
The glowing bride of the wind.
So Wind-Bride Alma glows in the studio and on the easel, but in real life she is beginning to cool off. Or perhaps it is precisely the other way around, that because Kokoschka sensed with his neuraesthenic imagination that Alma was threatening to slip away from him, that she was distancing herself from him, precisely because a cloud had fallen over their symbiotic love, that he is even in a position to paint a portrait of them both that is a work of art rather than a declaration of love. It is only when Alma bears the title ‘Bride of the Wind’, only when he has imbued his bride with the fleeing evanescence of the wind that he is able to make a portrait of her. You can’t marry a ‘Wind-Bride’. Only paint one.
AUGUST
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.
(illustration credits 8.1)
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 e
lse 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’.
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