On 8 September, in the Café Imperial, the 39-year-old Karl Kraus, editor of Die Fackel and the sharpest-tongued author in Vienna, is introduced to 27-year-old Sidonie, Baroness Nádherný von Borutin, Rilke’s confidante. And it is about him that they immediately converse. They talk on and on, fascinated by one another. They stagger out into the night, they take a fiacre through the Praterallee, the stars are shining, and Karl says to her, ‘If one could only be where her eyes gaze.’ Then they are driven to a hotel bar, she tells him about the death of her brother, who has now joined their parents, about her depression, the spiritual wasteland in which she lives. And Karl Kraus, overwhelmed by Sidonie’s beauty, unmanned by her grief, takes her hand. He wants to lead her out of that wasteland. ‘He recognises my essence’, she thinks after their conversations in the Prater at night. And she even lets Kraus stroke Bobby, her Leonberger dog, which no one else is allowed to touch.
On Odd Fellows’ Day Louis Armstrong, who has just turned thirteen, makes his first public appearance as a jazz musician, with the band from the institution whose name, Municipal Boys’ Home, Colored Dept. Brass Band, is emblazoned on its big drum. Armstrong stands proudly beside the drum in the band photograph from that year, next to his first teacher, Peter Davis, who handed him the instrument in January. And Armstrong is wearing a police uniform. It was traditional in New Orleans for police to pass on their discarded jackets and trousers to poor young people so that they could use them as band uniforms. The band moves through the city, playing as they go, with an enthusiastic Armstrong on trumpet, following the tunes, setting the note. Then, when the band comes back to the home in the evening, happy and exhausted, and all the others have handed their instruments back in at the music room, Louis Armstrong picks up his trumpet again and looks hopefully at his teacher. ‘All right, then,’ growls Peter Davis, ‘Just this once.’ It’s warm in his dormitory, the others are still outside, smoking in the hot summer night, dreaming about their new female sports teacher, and the sounds of the Odd Fellows’ Day festivities drift over from the distance. Armstrong takes off the old policeman’s uniform. And as he sits alone on his bed and a fly flows through the room, he tries to copy its flight with his notes, he follows it, buzzing, stopping, buzzing. And when the fly has found its way out of the window, he just keeps on playing. And never stops. Louis Armstrong is on his way to becoming the greatest jazz trumpeter in history.
A special case of family care: on 4 September in the town of Degerloch, Ernst August Wagner kills his wife and four children because he wants to spare them the consequences of his planned rampage. Then he cycles to Stuttgart, where he boards a train to Mühlhausen. When night has fallen over the city, he sets four houses on fire and waits until the people flee the smoke and flames. Then he shoots them with his rifle, killing twelve, seriously injuring eight more. He is finally overpowered by the police. His further plans for the night were to kill his sister and her family, then go to Ludwigsburg to set the castle ablaze and die in the duchess’s burning bed.
On 9 September Albert Einstein delivers a lecture in Frauenfeld to the ‘Swiss Society of Natural Research’, in which he explains his new approaches towards the theories of gravity and relativity.
On 9 September at about 7.00 p.m. the first Germany naval L1 Zeppelin plunges into the sea off Heligoland after being caught in a whirlwind.
On 9 September, the day Gerhart Fischer dies and disaster is plainly written in the stars, 31-year-old Virginia Woolf is examined by two neurologists after complaining about an ‘inability to feel’. Since August, when she delivered her first novel, The Voyage Out, she has lost weight so quickly and become so anorexic that she is barely able to travel and has to be tended to by two nurses. The examination by the neurologists is so humiliating, her feeling of pointlessness so great, that only a few hours after the examination, when the nurses are taking a break, she tries to take her own life with an overdose of the sleeping tablet Veronal. Her husband, Leonard, saves her at the last minute, and she is revived in hospital.
He then sends her to Dalingridge Place, the country seat of her stepbrother George Duckworth. This is ridiculous, in that Virginia Woolf’s collapse dates back to her childhood abuse by that same stepbrother. But her husband, Leonard, seems to be blind to this difficulty, and that same September he writes of his brother-in-law that ‘as a young man he was, it is said, an Adonis’. Virginia Woolf can defend herself only by returning to health. She starts eating again and is able to leave Dalingridge Place in the autumn.
The Fourth Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association is held on 7 and 8 September, in the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich. It is the meeting that Freud and Jung have feared since their split in the spring. The atmosphere is tense and oppressive; both men are on their guard. There are 87 participants on the first day, only 52 on the next. When Jung stands for re-election as chairman, 22 members abstain. Freud has allowed himself to be persuaded to deliver a short lecture ‘On the Problem of Choice of Neurosis’. The next day Jung speaks on ‘The Question of Psychological Types’. The atmosphere, Freud says, is ‘weary and unedifying’. The main event is not the lectures but the seating arrangement: the ‘Freud table’ on one side, the ‘Jung table’ on the other, with icy silence in between. Freud, the father, and Jung, the parricide, barely look at one another – after 8 September 1913 they will never see one another again. Freud is delighted when Lou Andreas-Salomé suddenly appears in the conference room, bringing Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet he knows only from his verses. Freud flees into their arms to escape the atmosphere at the congress, and as soon as the last paper is finished they move on as a threesome, talking non-stop, even joking, and go and eat together. Lou hovers over things, Rilke is beyond Good and Evil. Freud, the patriarch, the great excavator of the unconscious and the repressed, hangs on Rilke’s every word. When Freud’s daughter Anna hears of this, she writes a euphoric letter to her father: ‘Did you really meet the poet Rilke in Munich? Why? And what’s he like?’
Yes indeed, what’s he like? The next day, after these conversations about the unconscious in which Rilke and Freud were immersed on their walk, Rilke goes with Lou, the woman who took his virginity when he was well on in years, and who has now become his mother-substitute, first to see his mother, Phia, who lives in Munich, and then on to Clara and Ruth, his forgotten wife and his forgotten daughter, helping them move into their new flat at 50 Trogerstrasse. Then Lou Andreas-Salomé and Rilke board the train into the mountains, and she analyses his dreams. They talk with great seriousness about the symbolic differences between a phallus and an obelisk.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal lies in his hotel bed in the Vier Jahreszeiten in Munich and dreams that his house has become a French Revolutionary prison – ‘and I am aware that this is the last day of my life: I have been condemned to death.’ All around him are clerks busy writing out death sentences. Then his wife appears: ‘but she is a creature whose face I have never seen before, but as familiar to me in the dream as the woman with whom one has lived for ten years. In a flash we both say to each other that we must not embrace.’ His wife leaves him with the clerks imposing the death sentence. ‘I feel I can’t watch after her, turn towards the window through which the harsh sunlight is falling.’ Hofmannsthal wakes up. He dresses woozily and tries to recover from the dream by going for a walk in the Englischer Garten. But the images won’t leave his head; his body still feels as if it has been sentenced to death. It is still very early, and there are hardly any strollers in the park. A warm autumn sun shines over the trees. He is crossing the little bridge over the Eisbach when – and this is no longer a dream – a man comes towards him, looking like the great interpreter of dreams Sigmund Freud. Freud greets his Viennese acquaintance cordially, asks how he is and whether he has slept well, and says he looks a little upset. ‘All fine, dear Doctor,’ says Hofmannsthal. And then when Rainer Maria Rilke comes around the corner, having agreed to go for a stroll with Freud, Hofmannsthal finally feels as if he is still dreaming. But i
t is, like everything in this particular year, true.
In an article about first-aid instruction the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna writes on 6 September 1913, as if it were the most natural thing in the world: ‘Just as the fate of the injured man on the battlefield depends on the quality of the first bandage, so first aid is of the greatest importance to the prognosis in everyday accidents.’
The symptoms of ‘neurasthenia’, the burn-out syndrome of 1913, are included in the eleven-volume work Special Pathology and Therapy of Internal Illnesses. Jung is supposed to write about ‘neurasthenia’ but refuses, because ‘I don’t understand enough about it and also don’t believe in it.’
Franz Kafka leaves Prague at the beginning of September to be cured of his despair and ‘neurasthenia’. His destination is Hartung’s sanatorium in Riva, on Lake Garda. He wanted to travel with Felice, but her father still hasn’t replied to his letter asking for her hand, so he sets off now because he has to go to Vienna for his job, to attend the Second International Congress for the Emergency Services and Accident Prevention, then by train to Trieste, Austria-Hungary’s only port on the Mediterranean, which is enjoying an unparalleled boom. Being a port, its streets and coffee houses are filled with a unique mixture of nationalities, and it is the city where James Joyce lives quietly as an English teacher, spending day after day writing the preparatory studies for his Ulysses. So on 14 September, Franz Kafka and James Joyce are in Trieste. Robert Musil is here at this time too, travelling from Rome to Vienna. We can imagine them drinking coffee in the harbour in the late afternoon, before moving on.
Kafka travels on to Venice by ship, and there, at the Hotel Sandwirth, he writes his last letter to Felice Bauer for the time being, after more than two hundred letters and cards since the start of the year. He has recognised that he cannot produce great art if he yields to love and life. In his diary he notes: ‘Coitus as a punishment for the joy of being together. To live as ascetically as possible, more ascetically than a bachelor, that’s the only option for me.’ And then, a few days later: ‘I am going to close myself off to everyone else to the point of oblivion. To make enemies of everyone, talk to no one.’ So he writes on 15 September on hotel writing paper, with a view of the Grand Canal, oblivious and ‘boundlessly unhappy’, to Felice: ‘What am I to do, Felice? We must say farewell.’
Kafka travels on, suddenly free of the burden of having to be a husband, and when he arrives in Riva, on 22 September, he feels empty and distraught, but also relieved. The brothers Erhard and Christl von Hartungen, who have just tried to cure Freud at their branch in the mountains, now take their next great patient under their wing. There is an introductory therapeutic discussion; the doctors recommend diet, a lot of fresh air and a lot of rowing. In the first week – the sun is shining, and the weather is warm – Kafka is transferred to one of the ‘air huts’ on the beach, to be completely surrounded by oxygen. The therapy seems to be working, and on 28 September he takes a little trip to Malcesine, from where he writes a witty letter to his sister Ottla in Praque: ‘Today I was in Malcesine, where Goethe had the adventure that you would know about if you’d read the Italian Journey, which you should do soon.’
On the same day – it’s cooler now, and the first snows are appearing up on the mountain peaks – Kafka moves from his air-hut to the main building of the sanatorium. At table, he writes to his friend Max Brod, ‘I am seated between an old general and a little Italian-looking Swiss woman.’ The little Swiss woman brings Kafka back to life. They devise knocking games between their rooms, play catch in the park. They row out onto the lake together, and drift in their rowing boat: ‘The sweetness of grief and love. Being smiled at by her in the boat. It was the loveliest thing. Only ever the demand to die and just surviving, that alone is love.’ They are both aware that they have only ten days for their love. Then they travel back: Kafka to Prague, the Swiss woman to Genoa, where her family lives. For the first time Kafka hasn’t been thinking about Felice every hour of the day. He has plunged for ten days into a childlike passion that will lead nowhere.
Kurt Tucholsky, the hotheaded postgraduate law student at Jena University, soon to be one of the sharpest-tongued critics on the Berlin magazine Die Schaubühne, dreams up the plan of every hotheaded, sharp-tongued journalist. He wants to found his own newspaper, which will be called Orion. Tucholsky wants to reach for the stars. It will be a ‘yearbook in letters’. Meaning that it will present the great people of the day in their authentic testimonies. A strange idea: three times a month subscribers will receive ‘the facsimile of a letter from a great European’. Nothing comes of it. Soon Tucholsky will have to tell the ninety-four interested parties who want to subscribe: ‘Orion remains what it was: a constellation, far away and unattainable.’ Rainer Maria Rilke and Hermann Hesse, those great letter-writers, had declared their interest early on (Rilke sends a poem on 21 September), as had Thomas Mann. But it isn’t enough. However, one extraordinary document survives from the phase of the magazine’s foundation: a letter from Tucholsky, in which he tries to recruit prominent collaborators from his room at 12 Nachodstrasse. In it he provides a cross-section of 1913 and the individuals who strike him as ‘great Europeans’ from a German point of view. The letter is unique in its breadth and concision. From the world of literature he wants to ask ‘Dehmel, Hofmannsthal, Brod, Blei, Morgenstern, Werfel, Rilke, Hauptmann, Wassermann, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Hesse, Schnitzler, Altenberg, Robert Walser, Sternheim, Shaw, Wedekind, Kellermann, Friedell, Keyserling, Hamsun and Kafka’ for contributions. But as well as them, ‘Mynona, Owlglass, Holz, Schäfer, Willi Speyer, Wied, Hochdorf (Brussels), Irene Forbes-Mosse’ – names which were given equal status to the great names quoted first, and which nobody knows today. Equally impressive is his list of the great living philosophers that Kurt Tucholsky wants to ask for help: ‘Mauthner, Chesterton, Rathenau, Simmel, Wundt, Mach, Buber, Flammarion, Bergson’. And finally, from visual art: ‘Meier-Graefe, Lichtwark, Behrens.’ And for the illustrations and drawings Tucholsky thinks, among others, of ‘Klimt, Barlach, Kollwitz’. It would have been nice if something had come of it.
There is a second contemporary cross-section of 1913 – an artistic one. The ‘First German Autumn Salon’ in Berlin, for which Franz Marc from Sindelsdorf and his friend August Macke in Bonn had been doing the groundwork since the spring, opens on 19 September in Herwarth Walden’s legendary ‘Sturm’ Gallery. He has transformed the empty villa at 34a Tiergartenstrasse – actually scheduled for demolition – into a spectacular exhibition space.
The list of artists for this exhibition, based on the Paris ‘Salon d’Automne’, contains everyone who was avant-garde in 1913 – with the exception of the Berlin Brücke artists, who are off at their summer retreats on the Baltic, still licking their wounds after the painful collapse of the artists’ association in May, and who aren’t yet ready for the next burst of group dynamics. ‘If I don’t join in,’ Marc writes to Macke in Bonn, ‘it wouldn’t be the greatest disaster imaginable, I just feel sorry for Nolde and Heckel.’ Not a word from Kirchner. He is deeply alien to the two warm-hearted Blue Riders. In the end 366 paintings by 90 artists from twelve countries are shown – after the ‘Armory Show’ in New York, the second exhibition of the year to set new standards. For the ‘Autumn Salon’ Walden had hired a huge hall at 75 Potsdamer Strasse. Bernhard Koehler, the great patron, donates 4,000 Marks to the organisation, although in the end he has to add an extra sum for transport costs. The ‘First German Autumn Salon’ is a sensation. Robert and Sonia Delaunay come from Paris for the opening, so do Marc Chagall and almost the whole of the Blaue Reiter, and even the Italian Futurists travel specially to the Sturm Gallery. They all know that they are witnessing a historic event. Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, Czechs – all united in their desire for new art. It is an aesthetic alliance across all boundaries, a demonstration of the solidarity of the avant-garde beyond all foreign political skirmishes.
Works by
Archipenko, Delaunay, Léger, Severini, Carra, Boccioni, Jawlensky, Marc, Macke, Münter, Klee, Chagall, Kandinsky and Picabia are on show, and beside them, for the first time in the circle of the avant-garde, paintings by the young painters Lyonel Feininger and Max Ernst. Franz Marc shows his three epoch-making paintings from 1913, on which the paint is not quite dry: the Tour of the Blue Horses, then Wolves (Balkan War) and finally that picture of intersecting creatures for which he could not find a title, until Paul Klee at last suggested Animal Destinies. Accompanying this is a series of lectures for which Guillaume Apollinaire, the man who gave the Cubists their name, and Tommaso Marinetti, the spokesman of the Italian Futurists, the two most glittering art theorists, come to the Sturm Gallery.
The public reaction ranges from furious to outraged. The newspapers publish terrible insults that seriously wound August Macke after the organisation’s endless efforts. He rages at the ‘bastards’ and ‘swinish newspaper rogues’, who don’t understand the works on show in Berlin. The Frankfurter Zeitung, for example, writes: ‘It creates the impression that something is on show in a developmental phase. Never has pretention been more presumptuous, never less well-founded.’ And the Hamburger Nachrichten adds: ‘In fact it is rough fiddle-faddle, this great mass of absurdities, of ludicrous scribbles. You think you’re coming out of the art gallery of a lunatic asylum.’ On the other hand, Franz Marc writes to Kandinsky: ‘My guiding idea in the hanging was: to show the massive intelligent absorption and artistic activity that is going on. A person will only go with a pounding heart, full of good surprises. For me personally, the conclusion is also surprising: a significant predominance (also in terms of quality) of abstract forms.’ Then Marc, Macke and Herwarth Walden publish a flyer which they distribute on the Kurfürstendamm and in the Zoo. It includes these fine words: ‘Art exhibitions must be visited against the will of the art critics!’ But it’s no good. Hardly anyone comes. The exhibition ends up as a financial disaster. In the end Koehler, the patron, has to stump up almost 20,000 Marks rather than 4,000 to cover the costs of rent and transport.
1913- The Year Before the Storm Page 18
