In 1913 defence expenditure accounted for 2 per cent of the gross domestic product of Austria-Hungary, 3.9 per cent in the German Reich and 4.8 per cent in France.
Georg Grosz is in Berlin, sketching the incomprehensible. The explosion of poverty and wealth. The noise. The traffic. The building sites. The cold of the streets and heat of the brothels. Men of Straw. The obese men in hats, the fat women whose flesh is bursting from their clothes. Thrashing bodies, freezing bodies, gaping bodies. A jagged, thin black line captures everything. His sketches scrape, as if he’s carving tattoos into skin. ‘The periphery of the city, stretching around itself like an octopus, exerted a strong pull on us. We sketched the barely set new buildings, the bizarre cityscapes where rail tracks steamed over subways, waste dump sites bordered on garden allotments, where cauldrons of asphalt stood at the ready next to the newly mapped streets.’ Grosz draws and draws. And when he reaches the end of a sketchpad, he goes to a bar, drinks a glass of Pilsner and eats some pickled herring. He finishes up with a Koks mit’m Pfiff: potato schnapps with a little cube of sugar, dipped in rum, which you can barely taste. Whenever he’s flat broke, he goes to Aschinger’s with Kirchner and the other hordes of bohemians. There you can get a huge bowl of pea soup for 30 Pfennigs – and as much bread and rolls as you want to go with it. When the bread basket is empty, the waiter brings a new one, and Grosz tucks some into his pockets for the hungry days to follow. Then he goes out onto the street, into the cafés, the brothels, the bars, and sketches the crown of creation: the pig, mankind.
Vienna lies in Sigmund Freud’s shadow. Thoughts of the superego are even spilling from 19 Berggasse and entering people’s dreams. On 9 April, Arthur Schnitzler records the following in his notebook: ‘Ridiculous dreams. Arrive home from some rehearsal or other, planning to get a shave at Epply’s, suddenly in my bathroom, Herr Askonas wants to shave my leg (probably ahead of lancing a carbuncle) – the Freud school of thought might interpret this as some kind of disguised suicide attempt.’
Alfred Flechtheim, the great art dealer and collector, starts to plan his suicide. At this moment he is still a minor corn merchant with a fatal addiction to art. But he has a grand plan: during his honeymoon in Paris with his wife, Betti Goldschmidt, he invested almost all her dowry in contemporary art. Picasso, Braque, Friesz. In his diary he wrote: ‘There’s something psychotic about art. It has grabbed hold of me.’ So he plans to become rich by speculating on corn prices and copper-mining in Spain, so that he can then make his living as an art dealer. But when it comes to the corn trade, he is no expert. Sadly this seems to run in the family. His father and uncle have brought the family business, the Flechtheim Mill, to the edge of ruin through some risky manoeuvres. All the digging for copper in Spain comes to nothing, and before long all Flechtheim’s money is spent. He owns five Cézannes, one Van Gogh, two Gauguins, ten Picassos, pictures by Munch and Seurat – and is in debt to the tune of 30,000 Marks. He goes to visit his father-in-law, Goldschmidt – ‘dear beau-père’, as he addresses him that day – and asks whether he will accept his art collection as ‘security’. But the answer given by Goldschmidt, the biggest property owner in Dortmund, is ‘No’. Who can say whether Picasso and Cézanne and Gauguin will be worth anything in a hundred years’ time? Speechless, Flechtheim gets up and leaves. He cries on the shoulder of the young Nils de Dardel, a stunningly handsome but profoundly untalented Swedish artist. Flechtheim falls in love with him, and Betti threatens to leave him when she finds out. The threat of losing his dignity through divorce and the exposure of his homosexuality and debts prompts Flechtheim to decide, in the absence of anyone he can challenge to a duel, that suicide is the only way out: ‘I’m stuck in a quagmire.’ He writes to his wife: ‘I hope you find a man who is worthy of you.’ But he never sends it, instead taking out a very lucrative life insurance policy – to benefit his parents and wife – and planning the ‘fatal accident’ for 1914. He will dedicate the whole of 1913 to preparing for it. In his diary all his thoughts circle around his impending bankruptcy. ‘If I go bankrupt, then I’ll flee to Paris, take along as many pictures as I can manage and live there for another eight months.’ But then events take an unexpected turn: suddenly he is able to sell his Van Gogh to the museum in Düsseldorf for 40,000 Marks, his friends buy him out of his absurd mine dealings and the corn company is saved from bankruptcy. And so by autumn 1913 Alfred Flechtheim is, with the help of Paul Cassirer, able to open a gallery at 7 Alleestrasse in Düsseldorf. His wife forgives him, and he forgives himself. The carefully laid suicide plans are shelved. He is even able to pay the contributions for the life insurance.
He went on to become one of the greatest gallery owners of the modern movement – even though, in 1913, he exhibited hideous paintings by his former lover, Nils de Dardel, next to works by Cézanne and Picasso. He later founded Der Querschnitt, perhaps the most liberal magazine Germany has ever known, and as timeless as the art Flechtheim loved so much.
At exactly half-past seven in the evening of 24 April, the American president, Woodrow Wilson, presses a button on his desk in the White House and sends a telegraphic signal to New York. This triggers the simultaneous illumination of 80,000 light bulbs in the newly finished Woolworth Building, the tallest in the world. Thousands of onlookers are waiting in the New York darkness for the moment of illumination. The tallest lighthouse in the world can be seen from far inland, and by great ships up to a hundred miles out at sea. America is beaming.
On 20 April, Adolf Hitler turns twenty-four. He sits in the men’s boarding house at 27 Meldemannstrasse in the working-class neighbourhood of Brigittenau, Vienna, painting in the common room. His room is too small to paint in. Five hundred people have tiny individual cabins there, each containing a bed, a clothes stand and a mirror, in front of which Hitler grooms his moustache each morning. Board costs 50 Hellers a night. Anyone who stays there long-term, like Hitler, gets new bedding every Sunday. During the day most of the residents hang around the city, looking for work or distraction, and in the evenings they come streaming back. Only a few stay there during the day, and Adolf Hitler is one of those. Day after day he perches by the bay window in the so-called study where the day’s newspapers are kept, sketching and painting watercolours of Vienna’s attractions. He sits there, puny, in his ancient, threadbare suit; everyone in the home knows the story of his humiliating rejection from the art academy. A heavy black strand of hair keeps falling into his face, so he flings it back into place with a frantic jerk of his head. In the mornings he sketches out the picture with his pencil; in the afternoons he adds the colour. Each evening he gives that day’s finished piece to another boarder, asking him to sell it in the city. Most of the paintings go to Kühler, a female art dealer in Hofzeile, in the 1st district of the city, or to Schlieffer, the junk dealer at 86 Schönbrunnerstrasse. Most of his paintings are of the Karlskirche, or sometimes of the Naschmarkt. If a scene comes out well, he paints it a dozen times, getting 3 to 5 Kronen per painting. Hitler puts the money aside, not squandering it all on booze as his fellow residents do; he lives sparingly, almost austerely. Next to the writing room is a branch of an Austrian dairy, where Hitler buys bottles of good milk and Iglauer farmhouse bread. Whenever he wants to relax, he goes to the Schönbrunn Palace Park or plays chess. For the most part he spends the whole day quietly with his paints. But when the talk turns to politics, a spark rushes through him. He throws his paintbrush aside, his eyes flash and he holds blazing speeches about the immoral state of the world in general, and of Vienna in particular. It can’t go on, he screams, there are more Czechs living in Vienna than there are in Prague, more Jews than in Jerusalem and more Croats than in Zagreb. He flings back his strand of black hair. He sweats. Then, all of a sudden, he breaks off from his diatribe, sits back down and turns his attention to his watercolours.
In the April edition of the National Geographic humanity sees one of the wonders of the world for the first time. Machu Picchu, the Lost City of the Incas, was rediscovered by a co
llaborative expedition between Yale University and the National Geographic Society. The leader of the expedition, Hiram Bingham, took the very first photographs of the ruins of this magical city, suddenly discovered among the high vegetation at the highest heights of Peru. National Geographic dedicates the entire issue to its excavation: the magazine publishes 250 photographs, dazed, enthused and excited, as the introduction to the article states, by this ‘wonder’. Then it declares: ‘What an extraordinary people the builders of Machu Picchu must have been to have constructed, without steel implements, and using only stone hammers and wedges, the wonderful city of refuge on the mountain top.’ In the fifteenth century, when Florence was at the peak of its greatest era and Leonardo was painting the Mona Lisa, Machu Picchu came into being, 2,360 metres high up in the Andes. Even today the rain drainage system in the terraced city works perfectly.
The April edition of the Berlin magazine Die Aktion issues a call for ‘parricide’, although the editor, Otto Gross, cannot possibly have known that, in Vienna, Sigmund Freud was working on his own theory of the subject. Gross writes an essay with suggestions for ‘Overcoming the Cultural Crisis’. The most important is this: ‘Today’s revolutionary, who, with the help of the psychology of the unconscious, sees the relationship between the sexes as lying in a free and auspicious future, struggles against rape in its most primal form, against the father and against the rights of the father.’ (At the end of the year Gross – quite seriously – ends up being committed to a psychiatric ward by his own father.) This is the same moment when Asta Nielsen can be seen in cinemas in the film The Sins of the Fathers. And Franz Kafka writes to his new publisher, Kurt Wolff, in Leipzig, that he’s thought of a title for his first collection of stories: Sons. Gottfried Benn’s second volume of poetry, published in 1913, not by Kurt Wolff, because Wolff doesn’t like Benn’s poetry, but by the small publisher Meyer in Wilmersdorf, is also called Sons. Small wonder, then, that on 3 April, in the Hamburg shipyard Blohm & Voss, the biggest passenger ship in the world, at 54,282 gross tons and 276 metres in length, is christened at its launch Fatherland.
On that very same 3 April, Franz Kafka declares himself to be ill beyond recovery – he writes to his friend Max Brod: ‘I keep imagining, for example, that I’m lying stretched out on the floor, cut up like a joint of meat, and am slowly pushing the pieces of flesh towards a dog in the corner – thoughts like these are my mind’s daily fuel.’ And then in his diary: ‘This relentless idea of a broad butcher’s knife plunging into my sides, at great speed and with mechanical regularity, cutting off these wafer-thin slices, which, due to the speed of the work, fly away in rolled-up form.’ Things can’t continue like this. His friends are worried, and Kafka himself is genuinely afraid he is going mad. He is hardly sleeping, and has headaches and major digestion problems. He can’t write any more – all he can manage are his letters to Felice in Berlin. Even that has become more difficult, ever since his idealised image of his lover from her letters became flesh and blood, since he trembled with despair beside her when they met in Berlin. He’s at his wits’ end. Another case of burn-out, or ‘neurasthenia’. But unlike Musil, Kafka doesn’t go to see a doctor. He turns to self-therapy instead. On 3 April he calls by at the Dvorsky market garden in the working-class suburb of Nusle and offers his help with the weeding. Rarely has he made such a wise decision as this: grounding himself as the ground begins to shake under his feet.
He is given a choice between flowers and vegetables. Of course, Kafka chooses the vegetables. He begins on 7 April, in the late afternoon, once he’s finished his work in the insurance company. It’s raining softly. Kafka is wearing rubber boots.
We don’t know how often he went to the gardens. We only know why he fled at the end of April. The gardener’s daughter draws him into her confidence, prompting these thoughts: ‘I, a man seeking to heal his neurasthenia through work, was forced to listen to the story of how the young woman’s brother, whose name was Jan and who was the real gardener and intended successor of old Dvorsky, and indeed already the owner of the gardens, poisoned himself with melancholy two months ago at the age of twenty-eight.’ So the very place where he was seeking to be healed from his inner suffering came with the threat of fatal melancholy. Distraught, Kafka leaves the gardens on the Nusle slopes. No sanctuary to be found anywhere.
Lyonel Feininger too is drawn to the country on 3 April, although admittedly his parental genes, nature and fate have conspired to grant him a happier mental disposition. Setting off from Weimar, where his wife, Julia, is studying, he climbs onto his bike and rides up the hill through the spring countryside of Thuringia. ‘In the afternoons I scuttle off with my umbrella and writing pad, heading for Gelmeroda; I spent an hour and a half sketching there, picture after picture of the wonderful church.’ That’s all we know about him. His pictures were his language. And yet this discovery on 3 April 1913 is of central importance for his life’s work. He will go on to make hundreds of sketches of the small, inconspicuous village church in Gelmeroda – over the decades twenty paintings in all. Even long after he leaves Germany and the Bauhaus behind him he will still create more and more visions of Gelmeroda from memory. After completing just the first few sketches of the church tower, he writes the following to his wife Julia: ‘While working outside over the last few days, I was literally in ecstasy. It goes way beyond observation and discovery, it’s magnetic amalgamation, a breaking free from all shackles.’ Soon the first painting emerges from around forty studies, named Gelmeroda I, as if he knew from the start that many other versions would follow– two more in 1913 alone. It is a very expressive picture, a wild confusion of lines reminiscent of Franz Marc and the Futurists. Or, as Feininger himself saw it: ‘For ten days now, an excellent picture has been grinning at me, charcoal on canvas, and I gazed at it with expressions increasingly consumed with longing – the Gelmeroda Church.’ That little church becomes a decisive artistic turning point in Lyonel Feininger’s oeuvre. And perhaps even the cathedral of Expressionism (although that doesn’t stop anyone from turning it into a ‘motorway church’ a hundred years later).
On 30 April, Frank Wedekind’s play Lulu is banned by the censors. Thomas Mann, who has just been elected as a member of the Munich Censorship Council, gives it a positive review. But he is outvoted: fifteen out of twenty-three council members vote for the play to be banned on moral grounds. Out of protest, Thomas Mann resigns from the Council.
Again on 3 April, the same day Franz Kafka is starting work with the vegetable farmers, Stefan George calls on Ernst Bertram, a friend of Thomas Mann. At this point in time George was already a mythical figure in Munich and throughout the rest of the Reich. A wonderful poet, a creator of verses of staggering beauty, yet at the same time the sinister ringleader of a circle of adolescent boys. He created an auratic image of himself early on in authorised photographs, always with his hair powdered, a diamond ring on his finger and his head in profile. He thought he looked too rough from the front. From the turn of the century onwards George visited Munich time and again, staying in Karl and Hanna Wolfskehl’s guest room: first at 51 Leopoldstrasse, then at 87 Leopoldstrasse and finally, as in 1913, at 16 Römerstrasse, where George was able to arrange two of the rooms as he wished. The Wolfskehls protected George from undesirable admirers and controlled access to him. They knew how to draw attention skilfully to their mysterious tenant’s public appearances. On this 3 April, George wanted to meet his youthful admirer Ernst Bertram. But Bertram was in Rome. Instead, the young Ernst Glöckner, born in 1885, opens the door. Confused and shaken, Glöckner writes to his friend Bertram in Rome: ‘And now I wish I had never met this person. What I did on that evening was beyond my self-control, it was as if I were asleep, completely under his will, I was a plaything in his hands, I loved and hated at the same time.’ Seldom has the direct, diabolical seductive power of the poet and self-declared prophet Stefan George been more honestly portrayed than in this self-accusation from the eighteen-year-old Glöckner. From then onwards,
Glöckner, 45-year-old George and his ardent admirer Bertram played out a homoerotic love triangle. At the time George was working on his poetry collection The Star of the Covenant. It was an attempt to glorify pederasty and the recruiting of young men to the ‘Secret’ as if to some sacrosanct cult. The Star of the Covenant becomes the constitution of George’s circle.
Futurism saunters through the Russian provinces: Mayakovsky, together with fellow Futurists David Burliuk and Vassily Kamensky, is on a reading tour. Out in the countryside it’s their style of dress which makes the greatest waves. The maxim at the time seems to have been: ‘Futurism is all well and good, but they could at least dress sensibly.’ When Mayakovsky climbs up onto the stage in Simferopol wearing a yellow-and-black striped blouse, the agitated onlookers shout for him to get off. On that particular evening Mayakovsky decides against the pink smoking jacket he wore previously in Kharkov. He still insists on declaiming his poetry with a riding whip as a prop, though, even in Simferopol. The response from the local papers is one of horror. But it’s all part of the Futurists’ carefully calculated plan. Without the opposition of the press they would have felt like they weren’t on track. When Kasimir Malevich went out for a walk on Kuznetsky Most, a popular meeting point in central Moscow, he alerted all the local papers so that they could write indignant reports about his provocative stroll. The provocation consisted of him wearing a wooden spoon in the buttonhole of his suit. By so doing, the Futurists wanted to demonstrate against what they regarded as the ridiculous fashion of the degenerate aesthetes who still wore chrysanthemums in their buttonholes in memory of Oscar Wilde. They felt they were on the wrong path. The ideal path, according to the gaudy Futurists, lay in unrestrained celebration of the future.
1913- The Year Before the Storm Page 9
