1913 (33 page)
Authors: Florian Illies
It’s a beautiful August day in 1913. Or, to be more precise:
There was a barometric low over the Atlantic; it moved eastwards towards a high-pressure area situated over Russia, not yet showing any inclination to bypass that high by heading northwards. The isotherms and isotheres were functioning as expected. The air temperature was in the appropriate proportion to the mean annual temperature, to the temperature of the coldest and the warmest months and to the aperiodic monthly temperature fluctuations. The rising and setting of the sun and the moon, the changing phases of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn and many other significant signs all corresponded to the forecasts in the astronomical almanacs. The water vapour in the air was at its highest buoyancy level, and air humidity was low. To sum it up more briefly in a way that corresponds to fact, despite being a little old-fashioned: it was a lovely August day in the year 1913.
These are the opening lines of Robert Musil’s
Man without Qualities
. Alongside Proust’s
In Search of Lost Time
and James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, this was the third classic of the modern era, saturated with the explosive power of the year 1913.
But what was the weather really like in Vienna during these August days of 1913? A detailed article was printed in the
Neue Freie Presse
on 15 August, with the lovely headline ‘Persistent bad weather’. In it, Dr O. Baron von Myrbach, assistant at the Central Institute
for Meteorology by trade, offers little comfort: ‘As feared, this year’s summer weather loyally retained the characteristics it possessed from the very beginning. Its harshness has relented a little. But that is not saying much, for the start of the summer was so unusually bad that even the period that followed, despite the improvement, must still be described as bad.’ In other words, there was not one single beautiful August day in the year 1913. No, in Vienna the average temperature was 16°. It was the coldest August of the entire twentieth century. Perhaps it’s a good thing that people didn’t know that back in 1913.
Franz Marc has gone to East Prussia with his sister to stay at her husband’s property in Gendrin. After dozens of horse paintings and horse sketches, now Marc himself is in the saddle. A lovely photograph taken that August shows him out riding with his brother-in-law Wilhelm. The horse, a grey, stands to attention, knowing that he’s carrying him, the horse whisperer. And Marc hardly dares to press his thighs against its flanks through sheer respect for the animal’s elegance. On the day of their departure Wilhelm presents Marc with a tame deer. The deer is sent by train to Sindelsdorf, survives the journey and lives from then on in the garden, named Hanni (not to be confused with the Sindelsdorf cat of the same name). To save it from the loneliness of roaming the meadow in front of Marc’s studio by itself, Hanni soon gets a life partner, a doe named Ruth. Captivated by their brown, shy beauty, Marc creates picture after picture of the two animals as symbols of paradise.
On 16 August a moving assembly line is installed at the Ford automobile factory in Detroit for the first time. In the 1913 business year Ford produces 264,972 cars.
While Alma Mahler stayed in Franzensbad, letting her wedding date pass by, Kokoschka finally carried on with painting
The Tempest
, turning in despair to his black paint and transforming his entire studio into a coffin. But then Alma comes back, and they fall for each other all over again. On 22 August, her birthday, they celebrate at the Tre Croci Hotel in the Dolomites, not far from Cortina d’Ampezzo. The next morning they set off early into the dense forest and stumble upon a clearing where foals are frolicking. In spite of his panic-ridden fear of being alone, Kokoschka sends Alma away, takes out his pencils and sketches the horses as if in a frenzy. The young horses come over to him, eat from his hand and rub their beautiful heads against his arms.
And what about Golo Mann? His mother, Katia, writes this in her memoir,
A Youth in Germany:
Summer 1913: Golo is gabbing on even more than Aissi. He’ll often talk all day long without uttering one sensible word, nothing but nonsense, about his friends, about Hofmannsthal and Wedekind, about the Balkan War, a mixture of things he’s picked up or invented, so I really have no option but to rebuke him […] one of the children’s favourite games, following on from all the military concerts this summer, is to pretend to be conductors. Golo does it in such an indescribably comic fashion, with those unsightly enraptured expressions, that feeble pathos summoned up from deep within, and given that he’s never even seen a proper conductor before, I can hardly believe what I’m seeing.
Golo, Thomas Mann’s son, was four at the time. Where did it all come from?
Like father, like son: in Germany,
jus sanguinis
, right of blood, becomes the basis for citizenship in 1913.
Ernst Jünger is bored during his summer holidays in Rehburg, on the banks of Lake Steinhude. Tall oaks rustle next to the family’s country house in Brunnenstrasse, the view stretches for miles. But Jünger feels imprisoned in the house, with all its little turrets and alcoves. Dark wood panelling from Germany’s industrial era set the tone for the entire property; the windows hardly allow any light in through their stained-glass panes. Magnificent wood-carvings sit enthroned on the door frames. The hunting room is always gloomy, the windows painted over with the scene of a belling stag and a skulking fox. This is where Ernst’s father sits with his friends, smoking fat cigars and hoping to shut the world out. Ernst Jünger feels his room is suffocating him, he lies on his bed up in the loft and goes back to reading adventure stories set in Africa. It’s raining. But as soon as the sun appears, its sheer summer-like energy warms the air outside in minutes. Jünger opens the window. His parents are setting off on an excursion. The water rolls down the hard leaves of the huge rhododendron bushes in the garden and drips heavily on the ground. He can hear it. Plop, plop, plop. Other than this, it’s deathly quiet this August lunchtime. Eighteen-year-old Ernst walks down the wide, dark brown steps to the cloakroom and searches for his warmest winter coat, the one that’s lined with fine fur. He takes the fur hat down from the hat rack too, and then sneaks out of the house. It’s a humid 31° outside. Jünger walks through the rhododendron bushes along the narrow path leading to the greenhouses. This is where his father cultivates his tropical plants and vegetables. As Jünger opens the door to the cucumber house, musty, stale heat hits him in the face. He quickly shuts the door behind him, pulls on the fur cap and winter coat and sits down on a wooden stool next to the flowerpots. The cucumber shoots snake wildly up in the air like darting green tongues. It’s two o’ clock in the afternoon. The thermometer inside
the greenhouse is showing 42°. Jünger smiles. It can’t be much hotter than this even in Africa, he thinks.
On 3 August an artist suffocates inside a pile of sand at Berlin Jungfernheide. His art form consisted of being buried alive for up to five minutes. Today, however, the director of the artists’ group was immersed in conversation and forgot to start the excavation until ten minutes had passed.
