1913 (5 page)

Indeed, if only one knew how to blossom. In Munich, Oswald Spengler, the 33-year-old misanthrope, sociopath and unemployed maths teacher, is working on the first chapter of his monumental work
The Decline of the West
. He himself has already set an example with regard to this decline. ‘I am’, he writes in 1913, in the notes for his autobiography, ‘the last of my kind.’ Everything, he writes, comes to an end; the suffering of the West is visible within him and on his body. Negative megalomania. Fading blossoms. Spengler’s primal emotion: fear. Fear of setting foot inside a shop. Fear of relatives, fear of others speaking dialect. And of course: ‘Fear of women, when they take their clothes off.’ He knows fearlessness only in his mind. When the
Titanic
sank in 1912, he discerned in it a profound symbolism. In the notes he made at the time, he suffers, laments, complains about his unfortunate childhood and an even more unfortunate present. Every
day he records it anew: a great era is coming to an end, hasn’t anybody noticed? ‘Culture – one last deep breath before extinction.’ In
The Decline of the West
he puts it like this: ‘Every culture has its new expressive possibilities, which appear, ripen, fade and never return.’ But such a culture sinks more slowly than an ocean liner, of that you may be sure.

Since the beginning of the year the Carl Simon Verlag in Düsseldorf had been selling a new series of original transparencies featuring seventy-two original colour glass plates in cardboard boxes inside a wooden case, along with a thirty-five-page accompanying brochure. Subject: ‘The Sinking of the
Titanic’
. All over the country slide shows were held. First you see the captain, the ship, the cabins, then the approaching iceberg. The disaster, lifeboats. The sinking ship. It’s true: an ocean liner goes down more quickly than the West. Leonardo DiCaprio has not yet been born.

Franz Kafka, a man who is terrified when women take off their clothes, has a quite different concern. A white-hot idea has come to him. In the night of 22–3 January he writes roughly his 200th letter to Felice Bauer, and asks, ‘Can you actually read my handwriting?’

Can you read the world? That’s what Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque wonder, and keep coming up with new codes that viewers are supposed to decipher. They’ve just taught the world that you can paint shifting perspectives – it’s known as Cubism – and now, in January 1913, they’re taking it one step further. Later it will be called Synthetic Cubism, when they stick bits of wood fibre and all kinds of other things onto their paintings; the canvas now becomes
an adventure playground. Braque had just moved into a new studio in Paris, right at the top of the Hotel Roma in Rue Caulaincourt, when he suddenly picked up a comb and ran it through his painting
Fruit-Dish, Ace of Clubs
and the lines looked like wood-grain. Picasso discovered the same thing the same day. And, as always, he was soon better at it than the inventor himself. So the artistic revolutionaries dashed ever onwards, impelled by their horror of being fully understood by the bourgeois public. Picasso might have been reassured had he known that Arthur Schnitzler wrote in his diary on 8 February: ‘Picasso: the early paintings outstanding; violent resistance to his current Cubism.’

He only just managed to survive. And now Lovis Corinth must pay dearly for his life’s work. On 19 January a spectacular exhibition of 228 paintings, entitled ‘Life’s Work’, is due to open in the Secession building at 208 Kurfürstendamm. Today, on the first day of the year, lying hungover and exhausted on a sofa at 49 Klopstockstrasse, he is rather dreading it. It’s barely four o’clock and already it’s dark again, and sleet is falling from the sky.

So now Weber’s, the framers, from 28 Derfflingerstrasse, want their money for the framing of the ‘Life’s Work’ – a hefty 1,632.50 Marks. And for the reception that he’s giving for the opening, the caterer, Adolf Kraft Nachfolger, 116 Kurfürstendamm, wants 200 Marks up front. For this he will deliver: ‘1 dish tongue. 1 dish Coburg ham with Cumberland sauce. 1 dish saddle of venison with Cumberland sauce. 1 dish roast beef with remoulade.’ Even reading about it makes Lovis Corinth feel ill. Life’s Work with Cumberland sauce. Last night’s Polish carp still lies heavy on his stomach. When his beloved Charlotte is away, he invariably eats too much: it’s yearning, he knows that. And so he writes a New Year’s letter to his wife, Charlotte, who is hiking through the snow, far away in the mountains: ‘Who knows how this New Year will go; the last one was awful. Forget it!’ Indeed. Corinth, a painter always bursting with vigour, who
swept out of the High Baroque into the Berlin of the early twentieth century, had been felled by a stroke, and his wife had looked after him at great personal sacrifice. When the ‘Life’s Work’ exhibition was being planned, everyone was afraid that Corinth’s was in fact over. But he had fought his way back to life. And back to the easel. Now the posters for his big exhibition were hanging all over the city, 9 to 4 every day, admission 1 Mark, with a picture of Corinth, amazed at himself, while Charlotte recovered from him off in the Tyrol. She’s back in time for the reception. ‘You’re looking well, Madame’, Max Liebermann says to her at the reception on 19 January at the Secession, his saddle of venison with Cumberland sauce in his right hand. My life’s work is looking good, Lovis Corinth thinks to himself as he stomps and grumbles his way through the exhibition halls. So it goes on. But – please – no more of that awful Cubism.

Back to Freud’s, at 19 Berggasse. He’s spending these January days in his study, finishing off his book on
Totem and Taboo
. And it’s quite natural that the unconscious should be forcing its way powerfully into this book about taboo-breaking and fetishisation. But there’s one thing he doesn’t seem to be aware of: at that moment, at any rate, when his pupils, above all the Zurich psychologist C. G. Jung (b. 1875), are challenging him and hurling violent accusations at him, Freud (b. 1856) is developing his theory of parricide. So in December 1912 Jung had written to Freud: ‘I would like to make you aware that your technique of treating your pupils as patients is a mistake.’ By so doing Freud is creating ‘impudent rogues’ and ‘slavish sons’, he writes. And he continues: ‘Meanwhile you always remain comfortably on top as the father. Out of pure subservience, no one dares to tug the prophet’s beard.’

Seldom in his life has anything hit Freud as hard as this act of parricide. During those few months, when his beard must have sprouted new grey hairs, he drafts a first reply which he doesn’t send, and which will only be found in his desk after his death. But on 3 January 1913
he summons all his strength and writes to Jung in Küsnacht: ‘Your assumptions that I am treating my pupils as patients are demonstrably inaccurate.’ And then:

What a letter! A father, challenged by his son, stabs furiously back. Never has Freud lost his temper so badly as during these January days. Never has she seen him so depressed as in 1913, his beloved daughter Anna will later say.

Jung replies on 6 January: ‘I will comply with your wish to abandon the personal relationship. Besides, you will probably know better than anyone what this moment means for you.’ He writes that in ink. Then he adds by typewriter, and it looks like a tombstone for one of the great intellectual friendships of the twentieth century: ‘The rest is silence.’ It’s a fine irony that one of the most interpreted and most discussed break-ups of 1913 should begin with a vow of silence. From this moment on Jung will chafe at Freud’s methods, and Freud, conversely, at Jung’s. Before that he gives a precise definition of parricide among primitive people: they put on masks of the murdered father – then pray to their victim. You might almost call it the Dialectic of Enlightenment.