1913 (12 page)
Authors: Florian Illies
In that same February of 1913, as Stalin and Trotsky see each other for the first time, a man is born in faraway Barcelona who will later murder Trotsky, on Stalin’s orders. His name is Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río Hernández.
On 23 February, Josef Stalin is arrested on the street in St Petersburg. Dressed in women’s clothes and a wig, he is running for his life. His attire has nothing to do with carnival fancy dress or any special predilection for women’s clothing. The revolutionary is in Russia illegally, and has stolen the clothes from the wardrobe of a musical benefit performance for
Pravda
which was raided by police. They apprehend the limping fugitive and rip the gaudy summer dress and wig from his person, revealing Stalin. He is recognised and exiled to Turukhansk in Siberia.
In turbulent Vienna there is an affair that stuns even the Viennese. Alma Mahler, the most beautiful girl in Vienna, with a legendary waist and a generous bosom, newly widowed after the death of the great composer and still dressed in mourning, falls for Oskar Kokoschka, the ugliest painter in Vienna, a brash provocateur who walks around with his trousers hanging low or his shirt unbuttoned, and whose most famous painting is entitled
Murderer, Hope of Womankind –
he means every word. But almost as soon as he captures the beautiful young widow’s heart, he gets scared. Not of her – but of his potential love rivals: ‘Almi, I don’t like it when other people can see your bare breasts, whether in night-dress or frock. Cover up the secrets, my secrets, of your beloved body.’ Hardly anything in the Vienna of 1913 was as unabashedly sexual as the letters and affair between Kokoschka and Alma Mahler – by day Alma was able to pursue her social life as the city’s First Widow, holding receptions and salons in her apartment. But by night Kokoschka asserted his rights. He could only work if he could sleep with her every night, he told her, and she becomes obsessed with his obsession. The day when she is supposed to sit for him, in the house belonging to the Mools, her parents-in-law, she drags him into the neighbouring room and sings a heartbreaking rendition of Isolde’s
Liebestod
. She throws herself
into the affair with operatic totality. Kokoschka is no longer able to paint anything but her. Mostly naked, her hair cascading wantonly over her shoulders, blouse open, he paints her as wildly and violently as he loves her. Impatient that it’s taking too long, he throws away his paintbrush and paints with his fingers instead, using the palm of his left hand as a palette and scratching lines into the mounts of colour with his fingernails. Life, love, art: all one great battle.
When Kokoschka isn’t painting Alma alone, he is painting Alma and himself: for example, the
Double Portrait of Oskar Kokoschka and Alma
. He calls it the ‘Engagement Picture’. He wants to marry her, hoping to capture her for ever. But Alma is cunning. She can only marry him, she explains, once he creates an absolute masterpiece. Kokoschka hopes that this engagement picture will be his masterpiece. By the end of February he is almost finished, and Alma is restless. He pleads with her: ‘Please write me a long letter, my love, so I don’t regress and lose time on the painting.’ But Alma has just aborted their child, and is angered by the bump on her belly in Kokoschka’s painting. The picture shows the two of them strangely entangled – Kokoschka’s gaze is full of suffering, Alma’s calm and composed. She travels with her mother to Semmering and looks for a plot of land on the estates Gustav Mahler once bought for the two of them. Now she is planning a love nest with his successor. Once the ‘Engagement Picture’ is ready, Kokoschka sends it to Berlin, to the Secession. It is, of course, what he hoped it would be: a public engagement notice. Upon seeing the picture in Berlin, Walter Gropius breaks down. The great architect, whose Fagus Factory was under construction at the time, had also hoped to marry Alma. The picture has achieved its desired impact. (But, between ourselves, it is he who will marry Alma in the end, not Kokoschka.)
Albert Schweitzer is in Strasbourg, working on his third doctorate. He has already been a D.Phil. for some time, ever since completing his philosophical dissertation ‘The Religious Philosophy of Kant
from the
Critique of Pure Reason
to
Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason’
. He’s a doctor of theology too: ‘The Problem of the Last Supper: A Study Based on the Scientific Research of the Nineteenth Century and the Historical Accounts’. After becoming a lecturer in theology in Strasbourg and even vicar of the Church of St Nikolai, he decided to become a doctor of medicine as well, receiving his licence to practice in 1912. But the Doctor and Vicar and Lecturer and D.Phil. and Lic.Theol. aren’t enough. His doctoral thesis ‘The Psychiatric Study of Jesus’ has yet to be completed. With the burden of threefold roles tiring him out, the secondary literature threatens to defeat him. To make sure he doesn’t fall asleep while reading, he develops the habit of putting a bucket of cold water under his desk. When he can’t follow the explanations in the books any more, he takes off his socks, puts his feet in cold water, then goes on reading. He’s almost finished now. And he has his next great goal in sight: Africa.
In March, Kafka actually goes to Berlin to see Felice Bauer, and they try to go for a walk together, but it doesn’t work. Robert Musil consults a neurologist and is allowed to go home, Camille Claudel goes into a clinic for nervous diseases and has to stay there for thirty years. And in Vienna, on 31 March, the great ‘ear-boxing concert’ takes place: Arnold Schönberg receives a public box on the ear for making excessively shrill noises. Albert Schweitzer and Ernst Jünger dream of Africa. In Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein launches his coming-out process and his new logic. Virginia Woolf has finished her first book, and Rainer Maria Rilke has the sniffles. The big question on everybody’s lips: ‘Whither are we drifting?’
The parliament of the German Reich authorises Prussia to mint 12 million Marks as commemorative coins in 1913. They are to commemorate Prussia’s revolt against the French occupation in 1813 as well as the twenty-five-year Jubilee of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II on 15 June.
‘A war between Austria and Russia’, Lenin wrote to Maxim Gorky in 1913, ‘would be very useful to the revolution in Western Europe. But it is hard to imagine Franz-Joseph and Nicholas doing us this favour.’
Albert Einstein, the great theorist of relativity, reveals himself to have a keen practical sense. In 1913, living in Prague, he is becoming increasingly remote from his wife, Mileva. He stops telling her about his research, his discoveries, his concerns. And she says nothing and puts up with it. They are getting on just as badly as Hermann Hesse and his wife in Bern and Arthur Schnitzler and his wife in Vienna, to name but two other couples. Anyway, in the evening Einstein goes to coffee houses or bars all by himself and drinks a beer – Max Brod, Franz Werfel and Kafka might be sitting at the next table, but they don’t know each other. And then, in March 1913 – just like Kafka – Albert Einstein writes long letters to Berlin. On a visit to the city he has fallen in love with his recently divorced cousin Elsa. He writes her terrible things about his marriage: he and Mileva no longer sleep in the same room, he avoids being alone with her under all circumstances, she is an ‘unfriendly, humourless creature’, and he treats her like an employee whom regrettably he is unable to fire. Then he puts
the letter in an envelope and off he goes to the post office – and so Einstein and Kafka’s epistolary laments travel, presumably in the same postbag from Prague to Berlin, to the far-off girls of their dreams, Felice and Elsa.
