1913- The Year Before the Storm

by Florian Illies

  Even if such reservations as exist regarding the performance of the work – from the perspective of safeguarding the religious sentiments of the people – could be overcome by editing or altering certain sections of the text, the entire construction of the play, through its combination of episodes relating to Austrian state establishments and exploring public life, grossly distorts conditions here in such a disparaging way that its performance on a domestic stage cannot be permitted with a view to the necessity of safeguarding public interest.

  After the Gurrelieder evening an illustrious circle meets in Arthur Schnitzler’s drawing room at a quarter to six on Monday. Hugo von Hofmannsthal had accepted the invitation on 21 February: ‘Because I consider the opportunity to hear you read one of your new works to be one of the greatest and purest pleasures – and also because I am continually saddened by the fact that I so seldom see you. Heartfelt wishes, your Hugo.’ Schnitzler himself struggles through the reading, coughing and sweating; he has a bad fever, which kept him from attending the Gurrelieder. It is well known that doctors rarely make good patients, so on Monday evening he bravely reads from Frau Beate and her Son, his latest novella, an Oedipus story which Freud very much enjoyed. It’s a long text, but Schnitzler manages to read it to the end. A woman sleeps with the friend of her teenage son. The friend boasts about it to others, the son is mortified with shame, the mother is mortified with shame, mother and son row out onto a lake, make love and then their shame really does become mortal when they drown themselves. Schnitzler was regarded by everyone, even his critics, as knowledgeable in matters of sensuality. Even more so today, now that his diaries have been discovered.

  While his wife, Olga, with whom he spends 1913 immersed in subversive positional warfare, eats and drinks with the guests, he retreats to his room and writes in his diary: ‘Reading aloud from Beate while struck down with the flu from six to almost nine in the evening. Richard, Hugo, Arthur Kaufmann, Leo, Salten, Wasserman, Gustav, Olga.’ Salten, by the way, was Felix Salten, the wonderfully enigmatic Viennese double talent of the early twentieth century, who published the story ‘Bambi’ and – under his pseudonym – The Memoirs of Josefine Mutzenbacher, a pornographic work in Viennese dialect that was challenging even for Vienna, advanced as the city was in sexual matters. From porn to Bambi – this was precisely the Janus-faced character that made up the particular enchantment and the particularly subversive force of Vienna at that time. Adolf Loos came up with a unique description for all the figures from Sigmund Freud’s analysis, Arthur Schnitzler’s stories and Gustav Klimt’s pictures: Ornament and Crime.

  The day after the reading at the Schnitzler residence, on Tuesday 25 February, Thomas Mann buys a plot of land at 1 Poschingerstrasse in Munich. That very same day he commissions the architects Gustav and Alois Ludwig to build a villa worthy of him: tranquil, supercilious, somewhat stiff. Together with the architect, he waits right next to the plot of land for the number 30 tram into the city centre. His red-handled walking-stick hangs, as ever, from his left arm. Noticing a speck of dust on his overcoat, he brushes it away. Then he hears the tram coming down from the Bogenhausener Höhe.

  Picasso owns three Siamese cats, Marcel Duchamp only two. And that remains the score, even today, between the two great revolutionaries: 3–2.

  Franz Kafka’s letters to Felice are the most important work he will produce in 1913.

  It is a work full of earnestness, full of despair, full of comedy. On 1 February he writes: ‘My stomach, like my whole being, has been out of sorts for days, and I am trying to deal with it by fasting.’ Then he tells her, in the most wonderful words, about a reading by Franz Werfel the previous day: ‘How a poem like that rises up – its inherent ending within its beginning – with an uninterrupted, inner, flowing development – how I widened my eyes, perched there on the couch!’ He has even asked Werfel to dedicate a copy of his new volume of poetry ‘to an unknown woman’; but ‘oh dear’: ‘I will send you the book soon … if only the necessity of preparing the package and the task etc. didn’t vex me so.’ So Franz Kafka sits there in his room in Prague, despairing over how to pack a book. Luckily for him, the proofs of The Judgement turn up at that very moment.

  But what must be going through the mind of Felice, that sociable, modern, tango-dancing young working woman in her prime, when she reads lines like these from her Franz: ‘My dearest, tell me why, of all people, you choose to love such an unhappy boy, one whose unhappiness is so contagious. I’m always compelled to carry an atmosphere of unhappiness around with me. But don’t be afraid, my dearest, stay by my side! Close by my side!’

  After that, he complains of discomfort in his shoulder, of constant colds and digestive problems. Then, on 17 February, come perhaps the most sincere and certainly the most beautiful words that he wrote to his beloved enchantress in faraway Berlin: ‘Sometimes I wonder, Felice, given that you have such an intense power over me, why you don’t just turn me into someone who’s capable of ordinary, everyday things.’

  In this she will not succeed.

  On 16 February 1913 Josef Stalin boards a train at Vienna’s Nordbahnhof and travels back to Russia.

  His daily ration is one corpse. In total, between 25 October 1912 and 9 November 1913, Dr Gottfried Benn dissects 297 bodies – draymen, prostitutes, anonymous drowned corpses. Day after day throughout that cold, wretched February he climbs down into the cellar of the clinic in Berlin-Charlottenburg wearing his white coat and brandishing his scalpel. He rummages through the bodies, finding cause of death, but no souls. It’s hell on earth for the sensitive priest’s son from Neumark, just twenty-six years old: ceaselessly cutting open, filling up, sewing up, cutting open. Throughout those lonely months, underground and surrounded by death, Benn’s eyelids begin to draw shut a little from above and below, as the photographs show. Never again will he fully open them. ‘He saw only sparsely through his eyelids’, writes Benn, barely out of the autopsy cellar, as he tries to scrape the suffering away from his soul in the character of ‘Rönne’. Peering sparsely through his own eyelids, Benn foresees, blinking uncontrollably, the model for the twentieth century in his gloomy cellar of corpses: eyes wide shut. In the evenings, after his second or third beer, he writes poems about it on scraps of paper: ‘The crown of creation: the pig, man.’ He knows that, come dawn the next day, the next corpse will be waiting downstairs in the cellar. Perhaps it’s even still alive and roaming around. By the next spring he is distraught, pleading to be dismissed. Professor Dr Keller lies in his final report: ‘During his time in office Herr Dr Benn showed himself to be up to the task in every way.’ Benn’s début collection, Morgue, published in mid-1912, begs to differ: merciless, cold yet daring late Romantic poems about the body, cancer and blood, they reveal a great existential trauma, and to this day cannot be read on an empty stomach.

  But their rage and force turn their author – an unremarkable pathologist, barely 5 foot 5 inches tall, with a receding hairline and the beginnings of a paunch, into a highly mysterious figure of the Berlin avant-garde. The enfant terrible in a three-piece suit. ‘As soon as my first collection of poetry was published, I gained a reputation as a brittle roué,’ Benn later recalled, ‘an infernal snob and one of the typical coffee house literati, while in reality I was marching along on military exercises in the potato fields of the Uckermark and setting off at an English trot over the pine-covered hills with the division commando in Döberitz.’ We don’t know whether it was the military doctor Benn who went over to Else Lasker-Schüler’s table one evening at the Café des Westens on the Ku’damm (corner of Joachimstalerstrasse) or the other way around. But there was no better place for these two outsiders, trembling with lyrical emotion, to find one another. The artists’ haunt was run down, but nobly so, and there was mediocre Viennese cuisine on offer, of the sort that you might find in any Berlin artists’ haunt today. The air was dense with cigarette smoke, the deafening noise from the street forced its way inside, the newspapers were stamped ‘Stolen from Caf
é des Westens’, and there the bohemians sat running up a tab. A cup of coffee or a glass of beer cost 25 Pfennigs, and you could sit in front of it until five o’clock in the morning.

  Benn and Lasker-Schüler came here all the time. They eyed each other like two predators at first, prowling around one another, satiating their hunger by reciting each other’s poems aloud for weeks on end as they headed home at night through the newly built streets of the west. At the time she wrote the following about Benn: ‘Every one of his verses a leopard’s bite, the pounce of a wild animal.’ Else Lasker-Schüler, a poet seventeen years his senior, recently separated from her second husband, tangled up in love affairs with all the prominent figures of the Berlin bohemian scene, abundantly draped with jewellery, ankle bells and oriental garments, immediately falls under the spell of the stiff doctor with the sleepy gaze and the shy, almost uninterested, tone of voice, with which, as in his poetry, he could say devastating things about death, corpses and the female body as casually as if he were ordering a coffee. And Gottfried Benn, still somewhat pompous and insecure, falls under the spell of the sensuous, mature woman with eyes that sparkle like black diamonds.

  The two people who meet and become close during this cold Berlin winter are both failures: she forty-four years old and he almost twenty-six. Else Lasker-Schüler, once a cosseted banker’s daughter from Elberfeld, is now a pauper, surviving for weeks on end on just nuts and fruit. Wracked with fever, she roams through the night with her son, sheltering under bridges and in hostels, scrounging every cup of coffee. In her worn-out, oriental robes she looks like a tramp from the Arabian Nights. She writes on telegram slips from the Central Post Office. Benn, the lost, cosseted preacher’s son from the countryside, is searching desperately for his vocation in life and has just failed for the second time: first as a doctor in the Charité psychiatry department, then as an army doctor, where he has been laid off temporarily. Reports state that he has problems interacting with people. They recommend that he interact with corpses instead. Shortly after he moves into the pathology field his beloved mother dies. Benn, by now well versed in sewing people up, writes: ‘I carry you around on my brow like a wound that will never heal.’ Biographically, this is the moment when Benn and Lasker-Schüler first see each other and cling onto each other like drowning souls. ‘Oh, Your Hands’ is the name of Lasker-Schüler’s poem from October 1912 – revealing for the first time the handwriting of Gottfried Benn on her heart. She can even, such is their luck, write to him in Hebrew, for the priest’s son knows the Old Testament in theory from his Bible study days. Now the time has come to put it into practice.

  Will things work out?

  19 Berggasse is the residence of Dr Sigmund Freud, and the most famous address in Vienna even during his lifetime. His analyses have made him a rich man, he can get through up to eleven appointments a day, receiving 100 Kronen for each one: as much as his servants earn in a whole month. Alma Mahler will resent him for the rest of her days, ever since he wrote to the executor of Gustav Mahler’s will trying to collect payment for a stroll he and the late composer had once taken together. By 1913 his reputation is legendary, his research into dreams and sexuality common knowledge; when Schnitzler and Kafka jot down their dreams, they are always accompanied by the question of what Dr Freud would make of them. The focus of his research was sexuality, repressed not only by others, but also, according to the state of his research that day in 1913, by himself. After his wife had borne him six children, he apparently chose to abstain from sex. There are no known affairs; the only cause for speculation was his unexplained relationship with Minna Bernays, the sister-in-law, who lived with the couple, but nothing is known for certain.

  It was a cause of great amusement to Freud that the Viennese began to take his research into the suppressed and unconscious seriously at the very time when he was appointed Professor. ‘Congratulatory messages and bouquets of flowers are raining down now, as if the role of sexuality had suddenly been given the official seal of approval by His Majesty, as though the meaning of dreams had been confirmed by the Council of Ministers.’

  Dr Freud and Dr Schnitzler seemed like Siamese twins even to their contemporaries: The Interpretation of Dreams here, the Dream Novella there; the Oedipus complex here, Frau Beate and her Son there. But precisely because there were so many similarities between them, they politely avoided each other’s company. Once, Freud roused himself to write to Schnitzler about his timidity at the prospect of meeting him, a ‘kind of Doppelgänger anxiety’. He had received the impression, from his reading of Schnitzler’s stories and plays, that ‘you know through intuition – although really as a result of your keen self-awareness – all that I have uncovered through painstaking work with other people.’ But even this confession was not to change things. Like two similarly charged magnets, they couldn’t get too close to one another. Both approached the issue with humour. When the son of an industrialist was brought into Dr Schnitzler’s clinic in 1913, drenched in blood after having his penis bitten by a pony, the doctor ordered: ‘Take the patient to the emergency clinic straight away – and the pony to Professor Freud.’

  The big Berlin cigarette company Problem advertised all over Berlin, on its buses and cabs, promoting a brand of cigarettes bearing the name Moslem. So anyone walking across Potsdamer Platz or down the Ku-damm could see the words, spelt out in large letters: ‘Moslem. Problem Cigarettes.’

  Heinrich Mann is now living in Munich with Mimi Kanova, a woman whom he met – quite fittingly – during the Berlin rehearsals of his play The Great Love in 1912. She is a little on the fat side. He calls her ‘Pummi’. She writes to him to say that if he can find her more work at the theatre she will ‘care for him like a baby’. He clearly found that to be an attractive prospect. Everyone else turns up their noses at the vulgar woman and their low-class relationship (including, of course, his brother Thomas, who always purses his lips whenever Heinrich acts in too aggressively heterosexual a manner). Heinrich, whose pointy beard and softly drooping eyelids make him look like a Spanish aristocrat, contentedly spends his days with his Mimi at 49 Leopoldstrasse in Munich and writes.

  When Heinrich’s forty-second birthday approaches, Thomas invites his brother and his wife over for an intimate dinner. Other than that, he spends most of his time working on his big book Man of Straw. He is disciplined, filling page after page of his small, square notebooks with delicate handwriting. His merciless analysis of German society under Kaiser Wilhelm II is almost finished. Now and then he sketches nudes, mostly stout women in risqué poses, rather reminiscent of George Grosz’s brothel sketches. Later, after his death, they will be found in the bottom drawer of his writing desk.

  Heinrich Mann negotiates with different journals about an advance publication of Man of Straw and strikes a deal with the Munich magazine Zeit im Bild. Publication is set to begin on 1 November 1913. In exchange for a payment of 10,000 Reichmarks, Mann consents to ‘undertake the deletion of sections of an overly erotic nature’ where necessary. Fair enough, Mann may have thought to himself, in this case it’s more a question of ‘scenes of an overly socially critical nature’. The idea had come to him a few years before, in a café on Unter den Linden in Berlin, when he witnessed the sight of crowds of bourgeois pressing curiously up against the windowpanes to see the Kaiser pass by. ‘The old inhumane Prussian military spirit has been joined here by the machine-like, massive scale of the metropolis,’ wrote Mann, ‘and the result is the lowering of human dignity below every known measure.’ Mann quickly comes up with the idea for a paper factory which prints nothing but postcards glorifying the Kaiser; he engages in thorough research, travels to paper mills and printworks, makes fastidious notes, talks with the workers, acting like a reporter. Richard Wagner – particularly his vexingly narcotic effect on the spirit of protest – is such a puzzle to him that, for the first time, and in the interests of research, he goes to see Lohengrin. So while his brother is preoccupied with Royal Highness and the con-man Felix Krull, Heinri
ch Mann is in search of German subservience – and establishes with horror that it is, in fact, everywhere. He has a judge explain the legal implications of the crime of ‘Offence against the Sovereign’ to him in minute detail. But that is precisely what it will be, his book Man of Straw: an insult to His Majesty, to the German bourgeois spirit.

  Hermann Hesse is living very unhappily in Bern with his wife, Maria. He, together with Theodor Heuss (yes, the future President of the Federal Republic), becomes involved with the journal März, but the situation at home is taking its toll on both him and his writing. Not even the move from Lake Constance, where they were attempting to live a healthy, vegetarian life, to the peaceful capital of Switzerland, his wife’s home, helps their relationship. They have three children: Martin, the youngest, has just turned two, but the bond between his parents has worn thin. And so Hesse reaches for the medicine that only writers can prescribe themselves for difficulties of the heart: fictionalisation. He squabbles with his wife in the parlour, then goes into his office, puts a new ribbon into his beloved typewriter and writes down the row as dialogue. And so Rosshalde comes into being in 1913, and is published that same year in Velhagens & Klasings Monatshefte. The main character, Johannes Veraguth, relives all of Hesse’s suffering, all of his raptures, and of course it ends in disillusionment. The wife in the novel is named Adele, and she is as stubborn and embittered as Maria. He openly takes as his subject not only the failure of his marriage but also, fundamentally, the impossibility of retaining a sense of yourself as an artist within a marriage and within society. The law student Kurt Tucholsky, twenty-three years young, who has been working for the magazine Schaubühne (later Weltbühne) since January 1913, writes very shrewdly of Rosshalde: ‘If the name Hesse did not appear on the title-page, there would be no way of knowing that he had written it. This is not the dear, good old Hesse we know: this is someone different.’ Furthermore, Tucholsky immediately sees through the feeble boundaries between fiction and reality: ‘Hesse is like Veraguth: he has abandoned the heaven of marriage – but where will he go now?’ Good question.