1913- The Year Before the Storm

by Florian Illies

  In Vienna, Sigmund Freud is gripped by his own book: ‘I’m now writing Totem with the feeling that it is my greatest, best, perhaps my last good book.’ What he’s undertaken is quite massive. The last sentence is: ‘In the beginning was the deed.’ With these words he wants at last to confront the biblical ‘In the beginning was the word’ and establish his new theory of civilisation. The primal moment in the history of its evolution, Freud thinks in the spring of 1913, is Oedipus’ act of parricide. He writes to a friend in May: ‘The thing is due to be published before the Congress, in the August issue of IMAGO, and it should make a clean break with everything Aryan and religious.’ After his break with C. G. Jung and the Zürich group of psychoanalysts, Freud spends the whole year worrying about September, when that ‘Congress’, the Congress of the Psychoanalytical Society, is due to take place, the one that will force the now hostile groups back around a table. And Freud knows that the anti-Christian theory in Totem and Taboo, on which he is feverishly working, will seal the break with Jung and his disciples.

  In early May, Rudolf Steiner writes to his mother: ‘And the war keeps threatening to come.’ But he has no time to worry about it. He wants to set up an Anthroposophical Centre at last, known as the Johannesbau.

  And after his plans to erect this building in Munich are dismissed by the building commission, he speaks to his devotees in Stuttgart on 18 May and tells them to avoid trying to do anything new in Munich, as something about the city was dying (if Oswald Spengler had heard this in his Munich study, where he was working on his Decline of the West, he would have shouted with joy).

  So Steiner explains: ‘New cultures have never been able to settle in this dying place.’ For a long time he has sensed that Dornach, near Basel, is the place for anything new and flourishing. But it was still too early for that.

  For a long time the Anthroposophical Centre in Berlin was at the rear of 17 Motzstrasse. Rudolf Steiner lived there with his wife, Anna, but he insisted that his loyal companion and lover Marie von Sivers move in too, which, of course, didn’t work well for long. The rear extension was all a bit basic. Hardly any furniture, a few tables, books, a bed. Always the sound of a secretary tapping away somewhere on a Remington typewriter. Under great pressure Rudolf Steiner writes lecture after lecture here, theses elaborated over the course of several hours about the state of souls and the world, Christianity, the spirit of the nineteenth century, and at the same time his ‘office’ is busy organising lecture tours across all of Europe. Steiner and Marie von Sivers spend almost two-thirds of the year on the road – when Steiner is in Berlin, people make a pilgrimage to Motzstrasse to request help and enlightenment from the master. Consultations go on for days at a time, the atmosphere is unexpectedly informal, visitors wait in armchairs and are then ushered into a little room where Steiner generally sits among the suitcases from his last trip, still unpacked. And yet he wins them all over with his empathy and his approachability. All they want is understanding for their Weltschmerz, disguised as neurasthenia. We know that Hermann Hesse was one of those who came in search of enlightenment and who were granted an audience with Steiner, and so, in fact, was Franz Kafka. How their brief meeting went, history, alas, does not record.

  Spring is here at last. The teacher Friedrich Braun and his wife, Franziska, are pushing their pram through the Hofgarten in Munich. In December they became the proud parents of little Eva. Eva Braun is six months old when 24-year-old Adolf Hitler arrives in Munich on Sunday 25 May.

  On the Sunday morning when Hitler leaves Vienna, the city is frozen with shock: one of the most senior military officers and secret service personnel in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Colonel Alfred Redl, has been convicted of espionage during the night and has shot himself in his hotel room at 1.45 in the morning. Strangely, the pistol had been placed in his room, room number 1 at the Hotel Klomser, where he always stayed, in return for his signature on the paper in which he confessed his guilt. And the dishonoured Colonel Redl asks the secret service staff to leave the room quietly, before pulling the trigger. When Kaiser Franz Joseph, on getting up at four o’clock in the morning, learns the extent of Redl’s military espionage, he sighs deeply: ‘So this is the brave new world? And these the creatures that it brings forth? In the old days, that wouldn’t have been imaginable.’ An announcement is placed in the newspapers which tries to maintain appearances: ‘The General Chief of Staff of the Prague Army Corps, Colonel Alfred Redl, has taken his own life in an attack of mental confusion. The talented officer, who had a great career ahead of him, had been suffering from insomnia for some time.’ In that way they attempted to package the terrible news that one of the most influential generals in Austro-Hungary had betrayed all their military plans to the enemy as suicide caused by insomnia. But Vienna hadn’t reckoned with Egon Erwin Kisch, the young reporter with the newspaper Bohemia. That Sunday, Kisch is waiting in vain, at the away game between his own football team, Sturm, and Union Holeschowitz, for their most dangerous striker, the fitter Hans Wagner. Then, on Monday, when Wagner explains himself to the captain and hems and haws, Kisch learns that on Sunday morning he had been recruited by the military to break into a private apartment in the Army Corps headquarters. He had seen strange things there: ladies’ tulle dresses, perfumed draperies, pink silk sheets. Kisch deftly placed an article in a Berlin newspaper about the true background to the death of Colonel Redl, which he had researched with the help of one of his team-mates.

  So by Thursday 29 May the War Ministry’s military review has to reveal the whole truth:

  In the night of Saturday the 24th to Sunday the 25th of this month, the late Colonel Redl took his own life. Redl carried out the deed when he was about to be accused of the following serious shortcomings, proven beyond all doubt: 1. Homosexual intercourse, which caused him financial difficulties. 2. Sale of classified official information to agents of a foreign power.

  Colonel Redl – ironically awarded the ‘Order of the Iron Crown Third Class’ for his services to counter-espionage, the army’s brightest hope, who reported to the Kaiser in person and was in close contact with the General Staff of the German Reich, General von Moltke – this Colonel Redl was suddenly exposed as a character out of an operetta. The small, dapper, red-haired man had spent his entire fortune on his lovers, giving them cars and flats and buying himself perfumes and hair dyes. Having found himself in financial difficulties, he had been selling off all Austria-Hungary’s deployment plans, military codes and projects for national expansion. Now it was meltdown. The name ‘Redl’ became synonymous with a system that had gone rotten, an outmoded, decadent monarchy, the mark of Cain. His brothers Oskar and Heinrich were mercifully granted permission to change their names forthwith to Oskar and Heinrich Rhoden. Along with the name, the case itself was to be eradicated from the memory of the city and the country, but it did no good – whenever Stefan Zweig thought of the Colonel Redl affair, he felt a ‘horror in his throat’. But the Redl affair turned Egon Erwin Kisch, the man who uncovered it, into a legendary reporter. In return he received one of the highest civilian decorations that Vienna had to offer: the best table in Café Central was always reserved for him.

  One more footnote – a weird one. On 24 May, the night before Colonel Redl shoots himself, Arthur Schnitzler dreams he shoots himself as well: ‘A mad dog bites me, left hand, to the doctor, he takes it lightly, I go, in despair – want to shoot self. In the paper it will say: “like a greater man before him”, which I find irritating.’

  Early on 25 May, Hitler and his friend Rudolf Häusler, with whom he had stayed at the men’s hostel in Vienna, flee on the train from Austria, probably to escape the threat of military service. They have no idea that the army has other concerns just then.

  On the first day they go walking down the early summer streets of Munich in search of a room. They enjoy the compact size of the city: only 600,000 inhabitants rather than the 2.1 million in Vienna, everything lush and tranquil. At 34 Schleissheimer Strasse, the home of the ta
ilor Joseph Popp, they suddenly see the inconspicuous sign ‘Small room to rent’. Hitler knocks on the door, Anna Popp opens it, shows him the room, third floor on the left, and Hitler immediately takes it. In cramped handwriting he fills in his registration form: ‘Adolf Hitler, architectural painter from Vienna.’ With the piece of paper in her hand Anna Popp goes to her children Josef and Elise, twelve and eight, and tells them they will have to play more quietly from now on, as they have a new tenant.

  Hitler and Häusler pay 3 Marks a week in rent for their spartan room. He lives exactly as he did in Vienna: no drinking, no truck with women, a watercolour every day, sometimes even two. Instead of St Augustine’s Church he’s painting St Mary’s. Otherwise it’s the old routine. After only two days he’s found an easel and set it up in the city centre.

  When he’s finished a few views of the city, he walks through the big Munich beer halls and tries to sell his views to tourists in the evening at the Hofbräuhaus. The jeweller Paul Kerber sometimes sells his paintings too, as does the Schell perfumery on Sendlinger Strasse.

  The minute he sells a watercolour he converts his takings into pretzels and sausages: often he goes for days without eating. But with that amount of money you can get quite a lot: in 1913 a litre of beer costs 30 Pfennigs, an egg 8 Pfennigs, half a kilo of bread 16 Pfennigs and a litre of milk 22 Pfennigs.

  Every day at 5 p.m. on the dot Hitler goes to the Heilmann bakery, near his apartment, and buys a slice of plaited loaf for 5 Pfennigs. Then he crosses the road to the dairyman Huber and buys half a litre of milk. That’s his dinner.

  As in Vienna, Adolf Hitler, the painter who failed to get into the art academy, has no contact with the artistic avant-garde of the city. We don’t know whether he saw the exhibitions of degenerate art by Picasso or Egon Schiele or Franz Marc, which caused such a furore in Munich in 1913. The artists of his generation who had made a career for themselves were alien to the art-school reject throughout his life, and he eyed them with suspicion, envy and hatred.

  When he comes home, he knocks on Frau Popp’s door to ask her to fetch him some hot water for his tea. ‘May I?’ he always asks, looking trustingly at his pot. This gets on tailor Popp’s nerves, and he says, ‘Just sit down with us and have something to eat, you look starving.’ But Hitler’s startled by that, he takes his teapot and flees to his room. Throughout 1913 he never gets a single visitor. He paints by day, and until three or four in the morning he reads political pamphlets and instructions on how to become a member of the Bavarian parliament. The tailor’s wife sees that at one point, and tells him he ought to give up those silly political books and paint pretty watercolours instead. Hitler replies, ‘Dear Frau Popp, do we know what we need in life, and what we don’t?’

  ‘I really dislike Berlin itself’, Ernst Reuter writes to his parents. ‘Dust and a horrific amount of people, all running as if a minute cost 10 Marks.’ A man who understands the mystery of a city so quickly is bound to become mayor in due course.

  At the end of May the poet Stefan George comes to Heidelberg and stays, as he always does, in the boarding-house at 49 Schlossberg. He wants to gather all his disciples around him there at Whitsun. But for now it’s very hot, so George goes to the swimming pool. Not to swim, of course: the prophet, who is already walking through life like a portrait bust, would never do that. No, to see a beautiful boy with curly hair: Percy Gothein, the schoolboy and teacher’s son, barely seventeen, who will become the prototype for the poet’s disciple. Three years previously George’s eagle eye spotted him on the Neckar Bridge and boasted to the Gundolf brothers that he ‘looked so like an antique relief it was worth taking a photograph of him’. The photograph really was taken. Shortly afterwards he visits George at the home of his mother in Bingen. He teaches him – the psychological clichés are pitiful – to tie a tie, and lends him his velvet trousers. But one afternoon in 1913, when Percy is in the lido without his tie and without his velvet trousers, he spots Stefan George lying in the grass by one of the bathing huts. The conversation, Percy trustingly reports, ‘soon came back to the ancient Greeks, whom one likes to imagine like that, and even more in the altogether’. And so on. In the evening Stefan George continues to work on his big book The Star of the Federation, disguised as a swirling mystery, myth-heavy, somnambulistic verses in praise of boy-love.

  In 1913 Albert Schweitzer writes in his diary: ‘If only everyone stayed as they were at fourteen.’ But then again, perhaps not. At the start of 1913 Bertolt Brecht is fourteen. Reading his diary, you’re glad he went on to become someone unlike the person he was at fourteen. He would never have cut it as a disciple of Stefan George: too ugly, too quick-tempered, too self-pitying.

  Brecht, a pupil at the Royal Grammar School in Augsburg, complains in his little diary, with its faint blue checked paper, of the ‘monotony’ and ‘banality’ of the endless spring days, which he does his best to fill with walks, cycling, chess and reading. He conscientiously jots down his readings of Schiller, Nietzsche, Liliencron and Lagerlöf. And then the young man lets go and confides his wonderfully adolescent poetry to his diary. About the moon and the wind, about forest paths and sunsets. Then comes 17 May 1913. Now – he’s just turned fifteen – he experiences a ‘miserable night’. More precisely: ‘Until eleven o’clock I had a powerfully pounding heart. Then I went to sleep, until twelve o’clock, when I woke up. So powerful that I went to see Mama. It was terrible.’ But it soon subsides. The next day he starts writing poetry. As it was warm that May in Augsburg, he calls his verses ‘Summer’.

  I lie in the grass in the cool shade

  of a beautiful, ancient linden tree,

  and all the grasses on the sunlit meadows

  tilt gently in the wind.

  So in 1913 he’s still lying alone under the linden tree. Soon he will be lying with company under the plum tree, as we know from Brecht’s poem of the century, ‘Memory of Marie A.’, that testament to his earliest Augsburg love. Writing poems about trees is already a great source of comfort to Brecht in 1913. One day after he has crept into bed with his mother at night, on 20 May, he reports: ‘Morning very good. Now, early afternoon, relapse. – stitches in my back.’ With Brecht, it’s hard to tell raging hypochondria from genuine disturbance of his cardiac rhythm. He visits a doctor, who diagnoses ‘affliction of the nerves’. At the age of fifteen Brecht can proudly suffer the same symptoms as Franz Kafka and Robert Musil.

  So in terms of his attitude to life, there are surprising parallels with the two other nervously afflicted poets, as his poem ‘The Girlfriend’ from that spring reveals:

  You ask what love is —

  I didn’t feel it, —

  you ask what joy is,

  it’s light has never shone for me.

  You ask what worry is —

  Her I know,

  she is my girlfriend,

  she loves me!

  So: worries about worries in Augsburg. Was anyone in a good mood in May 1913? Plainly not.

  Die Brücke falls apart. In May 1913 the group dissolves once and for all. The chronicle of Die Brücke, written by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, provokes Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Kirchner depicts himself as the leading figure in the group, the inventor of the Expressionist woodcut and Expressionist sculpture and generally speaking the guiding spirit of the movement. For the first page of the ‘Chronicle’ Kirchner had made a woodcut featuring portraits of the members. He had surrounded his own head, on the top left, with a little halo. And the archway of the print, ‘Die Brücke’, rested on his signature: ‘E. L. Kirchner’. From the point of view of the other members of the group, that was egocentric and untrue. But from the point of view of art history it is actually true – Kirchner is the genius in a group of great masters. And in his brighter phases, when his brain wasn’t fogged with anti-depressants, he knew it too. There’s a big fight – on 27 May 1913, Schmidt-Rottluff and Heckel draw up a letter informing the passive members of Die Brücke about the group’s dissolution. Max Pechste
in had been excluded a year before, because he had exhibited in the Berlin Secession without their permission, which Kirchner saw as a ‘breach of trust’.

  ‘We hereby inform you that we the undersigned have decided to dissolve the artists’ group “Die Brücke” as an organisation. Cuno Amiet, Erich Heckel, E. L. Kirchner, Otto Mueller, Schmidt-Rottluff. Berlin, 27 May 1913.’ Four signatures follow. Kirchner doesn’t sign.

  Immediately after sending off the letter Karl Schmidt-Rottluff packs his bags. He has to get out of Berlin, that city which always remained alien to him, given that his art always retained a wonderfully rustic quality, and which afflicted him and his sense of beauty. Unlike Kirchner. He only became himself in the city. Kirchner’s art is urban, Schmidt-Rottluff’s always rural. He wants to go to the sea and as far away as possible, so he drives to Nidden, on the Curonian Spit. To the hotel run by Herman Blode, the only villager to rent out rooms. Soon Schmidt-Rottluff finds a simple, empty fisherman’s hut on the beach, where Max Pechstein spent two summers. When he has unpacked his painting equipment, he writes a postcard to his friend, on 31 May: ‘It would seem that I’ve landed here in Nidden for a time. It’s a curious area!’ Schmidt-Rottluff, exhausted by the quarrels around Die Brücke and the advancing, wearying metropolis of Berlin, revives on that spit of land. Heaths, pine trees, the lagoon behind him, and then: sand, sand, sand – an endless dune, which he turns into his paradise in watercolours and oils, in which the first humans look innocently at one another. Sun in the Pine Forest is the name of one of the paintings, and you could imagine you were in the South Seas. For the first time he paints big nudes, groups of women in the dunes, ink drawings, woodcuts – it’s an artistic liberation. He paints the fishermen’s wives and children, naked and uninhibited. Schmidt-Rottluff’s art may never again have been as sensual as it was that early summer on the beach. He paints the faces as if they were carved heads from Oceania, but the bodies are full of vitality. It’s only when he writes about the nudity in his work that he tenses up again, and the intellectual returns. ‘The breasts are quite straightforward. They are an erotic element. But I would like to free it from the fleetingness of experience, establish a relationship between the cosmic and the earthly moment.’ You must be joking: ‘Disenchantment of the world’. But: cosmic breasts! An anatomical discovery of the year 1913, hitherto overlooked by scientific research.