1913 (32 page)

So Wind-Bride Alma glows in the studio and on the easel, but in real life she is beginning to cool off. Or perhaps it is precisely the other way around, that because Kokoschka sensed with his neuraesthenic imagination that Alma was threatening to slip away from him, that she was distancing herself from him, precisely because a cloud had fallen over their symbiotic love, that he is even in a position to paint a portrait of them both that is a work of art rather than a declaration of love. It is only when Alma bears the title ‘Bride of the Wind’, only when he has imbued his bride with the fleeing evanescence of the wind that he is able to make a portrait of her. You can’t marry a ‘Wind-Bride’. Only paint one.

Is this the summer of the century? Who knows, but it
is
the month when Sigmund Freud has a fainting fit, and when Ernst Ludwig Kirchner is happy. Kaiser Franz Joseph goes hunting and Ernst Jünger spends hours on end sitting in a hot greenhouse with a winter coat on. Musil’s
Man Without Qualities
begins with some inaccurate information. Georg Trakl attempts to take a holiday in Venice. So does Schnitzler. Rainer Maria Rilke is in Heiligendamm and receives a lady visitor. Picasso and Matisse go horse-riding together. Franz Marc is presented with the gift of a house-trained deer. No one does any work
.

(
illustration credits 8.1
)

In Heiligendamm, sitting out on the hotel terrace, Rainer Maria Rilke slowly pulls off his dark grey gloves and loosely grasps the hand of Helene von Nostitz, who is sitting next to him drinking an Austrian
mokka
. She gazes into his eyes, his gentle, deep blue eyes, the depths of which always make women forget the rest of his face. Rilke was with Lou Andreas-Salomé in Göttingen when he received Helena’s letter asking him to come and join her. To the great surprise of all involved, bound together as they were by a tightly interwoven, confusing network of affection and jealousy, Rilke accepted the invitation. As he wrote in a letter from Göttingen while Lou was off somewhere lying down, exhausted from all their mutual silence, talking, arguing, pining, reading and more silence, he had an ‘intense need for some sea air’. But when Rilke arrives in Heiligendamm, he is confronted by the colourful chaos of horse-racing, for the racetrack on the small hilltop between Heiligendamm and Bad Doberan is hosting its big, traditional derby. The hotel in Heiligendamm is overflowing with chic urbanites and fat stud farm owners whose waistcoats practically burst at the belly every time they stand up. There are horse boxes everywhere, women with big hats, businesslike hustle and bustle, conversations about wagers – Beppo is the big favourite today, or so he hears. Distraught, Rilke asks at the reception for some writing paper.

He writes a hasty note to Helene von Nostitz, informing her that he plans to set off again within the next half-hour. When the bellboy delivers the letter to her room, she is in the middle of an argument with her husband about her reasons for inviting the poet. After reading Rilke’s lament, she quickly gets dressed and hurries out, finding him in the Kurhaus dressed in his white summer suit, but looking ‘grey and exhausted’. The clouds rage outside, towering up to form
mighty black mountains. A powerful wind starts up, blowing across from the sea. The women hold tightly onto their hats, while the first wilting leaves are swept from the tall beech trees up into the air.

Helene von Nostitz links arms with Rilke and marches him energetically out of the Kurhaus, past the little path to the newly built cottages, all the while firing out greetings to left and right, everyone hunched over against the stormy wind. Helene and Rainer reach the beech forest. They keep going; it gets calmer and calmer; the wind drops. Behind them, over Kühlungsborn, the sun pushes its way through the clouds and bathes the coast in glistening light. The beech trees rise up majestically into the Baltic Sea sky, their trunks rubbed completely smooth and their crowns pushed up high by the salty wind. Despite being many decades old, they still look so innocent. How do they do that? Rilke feels like he’s strolling among enormous stilts. The trees tear their gaze away from earthly moss formation and tree stumps up to the skies. He leans against a tree trunk and takes a deep breath. Helene von Nostitz gives him an encouraging glance, but all he can see is the blue sea, shining out from between the beech trunks, here and there a tiny frothed peak, but otherwise just blue, blue, blue.

Later, once his thoughts have come back to earth, he sits down and writes to Lou Andreas-Salomé: ‘This place is the oldest seaside resort in Germany, popular for its forest by the sea, and for its clientele, who consist almost entirely of the landowning nobility from the surrounding areas.’ The letter is surprisingly cool, given the newly rekindled relationship between Rilke and Lou, who only recently were holding hands in that Göttingen garden as if renewing their old bond. Then they parted ways – Lou decided to open a psychoanalytic practice in Göttingen, and Rilke decided to attempt a holiday. But, as always, he seems to feel under immense pressure to be suffering at least a little, as though Lou should never feel he can be happy when he’s not with her. This forms the basis of all the innumerable letters he sends to his faraway benefactress and admirer. So in Baedeker style he writes another few lines about Heiligendamm in 1913:

Here the reader expects Rilke to let another enthusiastic or at least relatively positive adjective slip out, but the Chief Risk Officer of Happiness manages to rein it in just in time, and continues with: ‘all in all, it’s a reasonable little place.’

What a shame he can’t let himself go even here. For Rilke, that ardent lover of tender unhappiness, high priest of the inexpressible, even Paradise was probably only a ‘reasonable place’. But he cannot deny that he grows increasingly fond of Heiligendamm, helped by the fact that the weather is better here than anywhere else in the country, for the sea wind always drives the clouds away, and the most beautiful of sights play out on the beach before Rilke’s eyes, with fluttering garments and Impressionist gatherings of people. It pleases him to sit there on a deckchair, his legs crossed, and read poems by Goethe or Werfel, that young hothead he is currently so in awe of. And so he becomes increasingly fond of the place, but this has little to do with the presence of Helene von Nostitz, who, like all his women, he finds very alluring from a distance but demanding and irritating at close quarters. He knows how to escape her without being choked by her jealousy, though, and declares the following: ‘The Unknown is drawing me in.’ That must have delighted Herr von Nostitz, who was seriously bothered by the goings-on between his wife and the strange poet. So Rilke goes to his room and tries – in complete earnest – to make super-sensory contact with his ‘Unknown’.

He got to know her at the séances held by Marie von Thurn und Taxis in Duino, when she, this unknown lady, instructed him to
throw a key or ring from the bridge into the river in Toledo. And because he was planning to travel to Spain at some point anyway, he took this order very seriously and had the princess pay his first-class fare for the journey. Rilke’s restless and lavish lifestyle depended on permanent contributions from a circle of powerful women – in order to keep them sweet, he developed an intense correspondence with each of them. Every day he sent off many dove-blue pages to the palaces and hotels of Central Europe. He wooed them to solicit money, understanding, affection, even a wife. But he shied away from it too – not from the money, understanding or affection – he was perfectly happy to take all that. It was just the wife he wasn’t sure about. He preferred to keep them at a tender distance through his letters. He even became the German champion at doing so. And this is what he is doing now, in Heiligendamm. On 1 August he writes one of his epic letters to Sidonie Nádherný, who is drowning in grief since her brother shot himself. Rilke dries the tears of her soul with his pen, as if it were some exquisite handkerchief, and urges her to turn her mind to practical grieving: she should play some Beethoven on the piano, he instructs, for that will help, and she should do it ‘this very evening’.

Then he turns his attention back to his super-sensory relationship. Unfortunately, we don’t know what the ‘Unknown’ told Rilke to do in Heiligendamm. We do know, however, that he stayed on there even after Helene von Nostitz’s departure. But that’s probably for sensory, rather than extra-sensory, reasons: for he met Ellen Delp, one of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s ‘adoptive daughters’, a young actress favoured by Max Reinhardt, who was recuperating in nearby Kühlungsborn. No sooner has Helene set off to Bad Doberan by train than Rilke writes the following on the afternoon of 14 August: ‘Dear Lou’s daughter, I’ve come to extend my hand to you in greeting.’ And he does: far away from their social circle and from convention, Rilke seems to achieve a relatively uncomplicated affair with Ellen Delp here in Heiligendamm. After their first walk together beneath the tall beeches, he writes the following poem:

The ‘soon-to-be-lovers’! This state of affairs is Rilke’s second favourite. His favourite is that of ‘having once loved’. Because then he no longer needs to exert himself and can just get on with writing his letters. The in-between state, normally called the present, love and uncertainty – he’s not too fond of that one; it overwhelms him. But here in Heiligendamm, behind the innocent trees, he seems to feel freer than usual.

He reads poems out loud to his ‘matutinal Ellen’, Franz Werfel mostly. They go to the beach together, Rilke letting the fine Baltic Sea sand glide through his long, slender fingers. After that, they probably go to his room. The day after, Ellen has roses sent to the poet’s room. And he sends a thank-you letter on his dove-blue paper: ‘The roses are beautiful, beautiful, bountiful, and cheer, the way they stand there, one’s own heart boundlessly. Rainer.’

To increase the strength of the armed forces, a search begins throughout Austro-Hungary for deserters from military service. As part of the campaign, on 22 August the police publish this missing persons notice: ‘Hietler [!], Adolf, last known residence in a men’s hostel in Meldemannstrasse, Vienna, current residence unknown, enquiries under way.’