1913 (44 page)
Authors: Florian Illies
On 7 November, Adolf Hitler paints a watercolour of the Theatinerkirche in Munich and sells it to a junk dealer in the Viktualienmarkt.
In mid-November the fun-loving countess of Schwerin-Löwitz, wife of the president of the state parliament, or Landtag, issues an invitation to a tango tea-dance in the Prussian Landtag. On the floor: dancers in a close embrace with dignitaries and serious military officers. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who finds the tango vulgar, cracks down. On 20 November an imperial bill is passed, henceforth banning officers in uniform from dancing the tango.
Still no sign of the
Mona Lisa
.
For Adolf Loos his greatest year is coming to an end.
Ornament and Crime
was the name he gave to his furious
cri de coeur
against the threat of asphyxiation by wedding-cake architecture on Vienna’s Ringstrasse. And now, in 1913, more and more people want their plans and souls and shops and houses to be cleansed by Loos’s free spirit and clear vision. His ‘Haus Scheu’ at 3 Larochegasse has just been finished, as has his ‘Haus Horner’ at 7 Nothartgasse. And two internal spaces, which he has designed in an inimitably magnificent, minimalist and yet sedate elegance, also celebrate their opening: the Café Capua on Johannesgasse and the Kniže tailor’s shop at 13 Graben.
Precisely because Loos and his American wife, Bessie, are close friends with many of Vienna’s artistic avant-garde – with Kokoschka, Schönberg, Kraus and Schnitzler – he sees art and architecture as being worlds apart: ‘The house has only to please. Unlike the work of art, which doesn’t have to please anybody. The art work seeks to drag people from their comfort. The house has to serve comfort. The art work is revolutionary, the house conservative.’
His masterpiece from 1913 is the ‘Haus Scheu’ in Hietzing, the first stepped house in Europe which, in its plain white elegance and Arabic-looking tiers, enraged the Viennese from the year of its construction. But the clients, the lawyer and friend of Loos, Gustav Scheu, and his wife, Helene, were happy. ‘I wasn’t thinking about the East at all when I designed this house,’ Loos said. ‘I just thought it would be very pleasant to be able to step from the bedrooms on the first floor onto a big, communal terrace.’ And yet ‘Haus Scheu’ does have the look of a mirage. The living and sleeping areas open into fresh air, you walk out onto large terraces, the whole house is flooded with light and air. The neighbours and the local authorities protest loud and long, and then Loos suggests a compromise: he agrees that plants should grow over the façades. Loos is primarily concerned with the effect of spaces on people:
but I want the people in my rooms to feel the material around them, that it has an effect on them, that they know about the closed space, that they feel the material, the wood, that they perceive it with their senses of sight and touch, sensually, in short, and that they can sit down comfortably and feel the chair on a large surface of their peripheral physical sense of touch and say: here you can sit perfectly.
Adolf Loos did not make jokes, and meant everything in complete earnest. And yet he came across as incredibly winning. You could tell from all of his internal spaces and each of his houses that they were really made to measure. And also that Loos would prefer not to build anything at all rather than build something unsuitable. Or, as he himself said in his great, true credo: ‘Do not fear abuse for being unmodern. Changes in the old building style are only permitted when they represent an improvement; otherwise stay with the old things. Because the truth, even if it is hundreds of years old, has more of a connection with us than the lie that walks beside us.’ The provocative innovator as a thoughtful traditionalist – Loos overtaxed his contemporary audience. He had no problem with not being considered modern (whatever that word might actually mean). But we know how modern he was. More so than any other architect working in 1913.
On 8 November, at 10.27 p.m., after an eight-hour train journey, Franz Kafka arrives at Anhalt Station in Berlin. At the end of October, Grete Bloch, Felice Bauer’s friend, had stepped in as an intermediary between Prague and Berlin and attempted a reconciliation between the unhappy lovers, who seemed to have been paralysed by Kafka’s disastrous proposal.
On 9 November, the German day of destiny, the two of them meet for a second time in Berlin. Again it is a tragedy. In the late morning they walk through the Tiergarten for an hour. Then Felice has to go to a funeral, after which she says she will call at Kafka’s hotel, the
Askanischer Hof. She doesn’t. It rains slowly and incessantly. Again Kafka sits in the hotel, as he did in March, waiting for news from Felice. But nothing happens. At 4.28 p.m. Kafka boards the train for Prague. And he informs Grete Bloch, the intermediary: ‘I departed from Berlin like someone who went there quite without justification.’
On the same 9 November in Berlin, the well-known psychoanalyst and author Otto Gross is arrested by Prussian police officers in Franz Jung’s flat and extradited to Austria. There his father declares him insane, and he is committed to the sanatorium at Tulln. From Heidelberg, Max Weber vehemently campaigns in favour of his friend Frieda Gross, Otto’s wife. From Berlin the magazine
Die Aktion
protests with a special issue. It is a battle between father and son, a generational conflict of a very different kind. Controlling the uncontrollable son by declaring him unfit to handle his own affairs.
In the Minerva Hall in Trieste, the southernmost harbour city of Austria-Hungary, James Joyce delivers a series of lectures on
Hamlet
. He has previously tried to make some money by opening a cinema in Dublin and has toyed with the idea of importing tweed from Ireland to Italy. But it came to nothing. His attempts to earn money with his books have been a disaster too. Now he is scraping a living as an English teacher in the morning – and in the afternoon he gives private lessons, notably to the future author Italo Svevo. And in the evening he talks about
Hamlet
. The local newspaper
Piccolo della Sera
is enthusiastic: with its ‘dense but clear thoughts, with a form at once sublime and simple, with its wit and vividness the lecture revealed genuine brilliance’.
‘Those who touch you are bound to fall’, wrote wise, wild Else Lasker-Schüler when she met Gottfried Benn. Now he has left her. And she is laid low with unbearable abdominal pains. Dr Alfred Döblin, who has just sat for a portrait by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, drives out into the Grunewald and gives her a morphine injection. He can think of no other way to help her.
