1913 (6 page)

And speaking of Enlightenment, the ten-year-old Theodor W. Adorno, nicknamed ‘Teddie’, who will later come up with that phrase, is living at 12 Schöne Aussicht, Frankfurt am Main. The key
person in his life, apart from his mother, is the chimpanzee Basso in Frankfurt Zoo. At the same time Frank Wedekind, author of
Spring Awakening
and
Lulu
, is friends with Missie, a chimpanzee from the Zoological Garden in Berlin.

Marcel Proust sits in his study at 102 Boulevard Haussmann in Paris, building his own cage. Neither sunlight nor dust nor noise must bother him while he’s working. It’s a special form of work/life balance. He has hung his study with three layers of curtains and papered his walls with cork panels. In this soundproofed room Proust sits by electric light, sending excessively polite New Year letters, as he does every year, with the urgent request that they henceforth spare him presents. He was constantly receiving invitations, but anyone who sent them knew how exhausting it was for him, because he sent letters and notes in advance about whether he was coming or not, and how he probably wouldn’t etc. – a great procrastinator, actually matched in this respect only by Kafka.

Here sits Marcel Proust, in this soundproofed room of the mind, trying his hand at his novel about memory and the search for lost time. The first part would be called ‘A Love of Swann’s’, and in fine ink he writes the final sentence down on paper: ‘The reality I once knew no longer exists. The memory of a particular image is the melancholy remembering of a particular moment; and houses, streets, avenues are fleeting, oh! the years.’

Must memory be melancholy remembering? Gertrude Stein, the great Parisian salon hostess and friend of the avant-garde, is shivering a few streets away from Proust. She is engaged in a terrible fight with her brother Leo; their decades-long flat-share is threatening to come apart at the seams. Is everything ephemeral? She dreams of the spring. She draws warmth from a thought. She looks at the Picassos
and Cézannes on her wall. But does one thought make a spring? She writes a short poem including the phrase ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’. Just like Proust, she is trying to capture something that wants to be forgotten. So this is the world of poetry, the world of the imagination, in January 1913.

Max Beckmann finishes his painting
The Sinking of the Titanic
.

Things are livening up now. In New York the Armory Show is modern art’s Big Bang, with Marcel Duchamp showing his
Nude Descending a Staircase.
After that, his star is firmly in the ascendant. Nudes are everywhere, especially in Vienna: a naked Alma Mahler (by Oskar Kokoschka) and lots of other Viennese socialites in works by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Others bare their souls to Sigmund Freud for 100 Kronen an hour. Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler is painting quaint watercolours of St Stephen’s Cathedral in the common room of Vienna’s boarding-house for men. In Munich, Heinrich Mann is working on
Man of Straw
and celebrating his forty-second birthday at his brother’s house. The snow still lies thick on the ground. Thomas Mann buys a plot of land and builds himself a house. Rilke continues to suffer, and Kafka continues to hesitate. A small hat shop belonging to Coco Chanel expands. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, races around Vienna in his golden-wheeled car, plays with his model railway and worries about assassination attempts in Serbia. Stalin meets Trotsky for the first time – and in the very same month, in Barcelona, a man is born who will later murder Trotsky on Stalin’s orders. Is 1913 perhaps an unlucky year after all?

(
illustration credits 2.1
)

When will his time finally come? All the waiting around is driving Franz Ferdinand mad. The 83-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph has been on the throne for an incredible sixty-five years and has no intention of giving it up for his nephew, who is now next in line following the deaths of Sissi, Franz Joseph’s beloved wife, and Rudolf, his beloved son. The young heir’s only consolation is that his car has wheels with golden spokes, just like the ones on the Emperor’s carriage. But when it comes to the majestic title, well, the only man to have held that since 1848 is Emperor Franz Joseph. Or, to be more precise:

The schoolchildren who had to learn this by heart always laughed hardest at the ‘etc., etc.’, for it sounded like the whole world belonged to him, and as if only a small portion of it had been mentioned. But for Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne, it’s the three words right
before the ‘etc., etc.’ that really make him seethe: the ‘Voivodship of Serbia’. A battle is raging down in the Balkans, and he’s deeply unsettled by it. So he requests a meeting in Schönbrunn Palace with the ‘Grand Voivod of the Vovoidship of Serbia’ – the Emperor, whose white side-whiskers are as long as his title.

Arriving at Schönbrunn, Franz Ferdinand alights from – or rather, springs out of – his Gräf & Stift automobile in his general’s uniform, and bolts up the steps towards Franz Joseph’s study. He announces that urgent action needs to be taken in order to stop the Serbs. The Kingdom of Serbia is becoming too rebellious at the southeastern flank of the Empire, he says, destabilising things, playing with fire. But they will have to act with good judgement. Under no circumstances should they wage a pre-emptive war, such as the one the General Chief of Staff called for in his memorandum of 20 January, because that would be sure to alert Russia to the plan. The Emperor listens impassively to his blustering, clamouring, trembling nephew: ‘I’ll give it some thought.’ Then he utters a cool farewell. The rest is silence. Agitated, Franz Ferdinand rushes off to his enormous automobile. The liveried chauffeur turns on the engine and, spurred on by the heir, roars off down Schönbrunner Schlossstrasse at breakneck speed. If Franz Ferdinand must resign himself to spending his whole life waiting, then at least he shouldn’t do so stuck in traffic.

Standing by an upstairs window in the Troyanovsky household, Stalin is taking one of his short breaks from his work. He pulls the curtain aside and peers curiously but distractedly down at the heir’s automobile, which is racing along at great speed beneath his gaze. Lenin too had once stood in that very spot, always staying with the Troyanovskys when he was in Vienna. Elsewhere in the city in that February of 1913, a young Croat casts an expert eye over the car with the golden wheels as it races past. As a car mechanic and, as of recently, a test driver for Mercedes in Wiener Neustadt, he’s intimately acquainted with the qualities of the heir’s automobile. His name is Josip Broz, a
21-year-old daredevil and lady’s man who is currently being ‘kept’ as a lover by the upper-class Liza Spuner, an arrangement that includes having his fencing lessons paid for. (He also uses her financial aid to send child support back to his homeland for his newborn son Leopard, whose mother he has recently left.) Liza has him drive her all over Austria in his test car on trips to buy her new clothes. When she falls pregnant, he leaves her too. And so it goes on. At some point he will return to his homeland, which will by then be called Yugoslavia, and assume control of it. Josip Broz will then call himself Tito.

So, in the first months of the year 1913, Stalin, Hitler and Tito, two of the twentieth century’s greatest tyrants and one of its most evil dictators, were, for a brief moment, all in Vienna at the same time. One was studying the question of nationality in a guest room, the second was painting watercolours in a men’s boarding house, and the third was circling aimlessly around the Ringstrasse to test how well various automobiles handled the corners. Three extras, or non-speaking parts, one might think, in the great play that was ‘Vienna in 1913’.