1913 (17 page)

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illustration credits 4.1
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How long will Die Brücke remain standing? Ever since the artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, Otto Mueller and Emil Nolde moved to Berlin from Dresden, arguments had been getting more and more frequent, Kirchner wrote about their ‘women issues and intrigues’, and by 1912 Max Pechstein had left the group. Each one of them is trying to make his own way, both artistically and financially. They all find lodgings in Berlin lofts, their styles grow apart, and so do they. The unsold paintings pile up in their studios, but they carry on bravely painting.

Like a pair of lovers on the brink, the Brücke painters try to remember the prelapsarian innocence and archaic force of their shared beginnings. They plan to release a chronicle of Die Brücke. It is to contain original wood-engravings and photographs of their paintings. Kirchner, their nimble, egocentric spokesman, is to write the accompanying text. In April 1913 he is working feverishly on it, this text that is to be a manifesto – or he would be if only his anxiety, his drugs, his women, his sketchpads and blasted Berlin would give him a few moments peace to do it in.

‘The old collapses, the times change.’ This quote from Schiller’s
William Tell
is printed in large type in the
Chemists’ Pocket Diary for the Year 1913
. Is a revolution looming? Have the German chemists had some kind of premonition of impending catastrophe?

No. They’re just announcing some pretty new labels for ointments and cough syrups. Or, as it says in the advert: ‘The new labels published by our company were all created by commissioned artists and, with regards to taste, are exemplary and unparalleled. They exceed all others in existence.’

Now that’s advertising without false modesty. Unfortunately, though, the name of the company is not quite as catchy and certainly doesn’t exceed all others in existence: ‘Label printer and publisher for the chemical, pharmaceutical and associated industries, Barmen.’

In 1913 Colonel Mervyn O’Gorman, leader of the British Royal Aircraft Company, is pursuing two technical developments which are also intended to exceed all others in existence. During the week the legendary aeronautical engineer works on the development of powerful fighter planes for use in conflicts. And on Sundays, if the sun is shining, he uses his camera and the autochrome procedure to produce needle-sharp colour images of his beautiful but dour daughter Christina. His aeroplanes go down in world history. And his photographs of the beach near Lulworth Cove in Dorset make art history. An innocent young girl pictured in colour, walking along the beach, leaning against a dinghy. Not a plane in the sky. Only red tones, blue tones, brown tones, waves lapping softly against the shore. Enchanting photographs, created in 1913, but the images look so close you could reach out and touch them.

Thomas Mann wakes up at eight. Not because he’s been woken by something or set an alarm. No, it’s just that he always wakes up at eight. Once, when he woke up at half-past seven, he lay there for half an hour, baffled as to how it could possibly have come about. It could not be permitted to happen again. His body obeyed him. We still know little about the cold front which was Thomas Mann and Katia Pringsheim’s marriage. But it’s striking that Katia, after her husband completed
Death in Venice
in 1912, spent almost a year and a half without a break in different health resorts in Switzerland trying to cure her pulmonary condition. What really took her breath away was her husband’s concealed homosexuality. She, of course, knew more
than anyone else, that Gustav von Aschenbach was a self-portrait of her spouse – and that it was on their holiday together to Venice in 1911, in the Grand Hotel des Bains, that he couldn’t tear his gaze from the beautiful young boy Tadzio, whom he describes in the book as ‘utterly beautiful’, ‘pale and charmingly secretive’. Katia had been surprised by the way her husband gazed at the boy at the time, but then she read the novella about the ageing artist unrestrainedly pursuing his love for an adolescent boy, watching him while he was on the beach, while he ate, ‘pretty and harsh in a not-yet-manly way’. But Thomas Mann had Gustav von Aschenbach deputise for him in this respect, and ultimately meet his death. During that year of permanent sojourns in sanatoriums, Katia and Thomas must have painfully abandoned what Mann calls the ‘severe bliss of marriage’. But they stay together, maintain appearances and build a house.

Katia and Thomas Mann unite in holy matrimony each morning at exactly half-past eight to have breakfast together. Regardless of where they happen to be: Mauerkircherstrasse, their country house in Bad Tölz or, later, in Poschingerstrasse. On the stroke of nine the great writer begins his work. For the rest of their lives his four children will remember their father closing his door at nine precisely – whether they were in their apartment in Mauerkircherstrasse, the country house in Bad Tölz or, later, in the Poschingerstrasse.

It was a very definite, very final closing of the door. The world was to remain outside.

Then he would pick up his writing pad and get started. Like a machine. ‘Give us today our daily sheet of paper,’ he once said to his friend Bertram.

Exactly three hours later, on the stroke of twelve, he lays down his
pen. Then he goes off to shave. He has tried this one out. If he shaves first thing in the morning, the first signs of stubble will have returned by dinnertime. But if he shaves at midday instead, his cheeks are still smooth even at dinner. After shaving and a few splashes of aftershave, Thomas Mann sets off for his walk. Then he has lunch with the children, treats himself to a cigar on the couch, reads a little, talks a little. Sometimes he even plays with the children. Erika is seven, Klaus six, Golo four and Monika three. Afterwards they are promptly handed back to the nanny, because Thomas Mann wants to have a lie-down. He always sleeps from four to five. And of course, he doesn’t need an alarm clock then either. Tea is served at five, then he dedicates himself to what he calls ‘incidental tasks’; those who so desire can call him and even visit (‘come at around half-past five’, he writes to Bertram), and he will be there to receive them. Dinner is at seven. So there we have it: world literature is merely a question of precise planning. This spring he tells his children for the first time about the new book he wants to write, called
Der Zauberberg – The Magic Mountain
. And it is to be a funny one. Erika comes up with a pet name for her father:
‘Zauberer
’ – ‘Magician’. And it sticks, for the rest of his life. He always signs letters to his children with this nickname, and sometimes, affectionately, just with a ‘Z’.

And so it seemed he had everything under control with his magic wand: his fountain pen. From A for Aschenbach to Z for
Zauberer
.

Librarian Descending a Staircase. In April 1913, after successfully completing a course in Library Studies, Marcel Duchamp takes on the role of Library Assistant at the Sainte-Geneviève library in Paris. Despite his tremendous success at the New York Armory Show, he is done with the art world. He begins by staying silent, but the value of Marcel Duchamp’s silence hasn’t yet been over-inflated. No one actually notices. He spends all his time playing chess. Is this the end, perhaps, not just of his art but of art in general? Duchamp, the highly intelligent, highly sensitive lawyer’s son who, to his great surprise,
found himself celebrated in Apollinaire’s book
The Painters of Cubism
in March, thinks he has reached a dead end. The previous year he was in Munich, far away from Paris, where he passed the time being silent, reading and thinking. He also saw the Cranachs in the Alte Pinakothek. He combined the angularity of the naked Eves and the Futurist depictions of the female form in his picture
Nude Descending a Staircase
. In the stagnant medium of oil paint he had found an image of movement. But now his thoughts and his art are stuck in a rut. So perhaps he should just dedicate himself to chess instead? Later he will become a member of the French national chess team and participate in four Olympic Games.

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.