1913 (19 page)

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.