1913 (7 page)

It was icy cold that February, but the sun was shining, which was and is rare for the Viennese winter, but it made the new Ringstrasse gleam all the more in its snow-white splendour. Vienna was bubbling over with vitality; it had become a world city, and this could be seen and felt all over the world – everywhere except in Vienna itself, where, through sheer joy in self-destruction, people hadn’t realised that they had unexpectedly moved to the apex of the movement which called itself Modernism. Because self-doubt and self-destruction had become a central component of the new way of thinking, and what Kafka called the ‘Nervous Era’ had dawned. And in Vienna nerves – virtually, metaphorically, artistically and psychologically – were laid bare like nowhere else.

Berlin, Paris, Munich, Vienna. These were the four capitals of Modernism in 1913. Chicago was flexing its muscles, New York was
blossoming gradually but didn’t definitively take the baton from Paris until 1948. And yet 1913 saw the completion of the Woolworth Building, the first one in the world to rise above the Eiffel Tower, and of Grand Central Station, making it the biggest railway station in the world, and the Armory Show made sure that the sparks of the avant-garde ignited in America too. But Paris was still in a league of its own that year, and the French press saw neither the Woolworth Building nor the Armory Show as cause for excitement. Why should they be? After all, the French had Rodin, Matisse, Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust, Chagall ‘etc., etc.’ – all of whom were working on their next great masterpieces. And the city itself, at the peak of its affectation and decadence, embodied in the dance experiments of the Ballets Russes and Sergei Diaghilev, had a magnetic attraction for every cultivated European, in particular four über-cultivated individuals in white suits: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Julius Meier-Graefe, Rainer Maria Rilke and Harry Graf Kessler. In the Paris of 1913 only Proust wanted to reminisce; everyone else wanted to keep moving forwards, but, unlike in Berlin at the time, preferably with a glass of champagne.

Over in the German-speaking world, Berlin’s population was exploding, but culturally speaking its golden age was still to come. It forged ahead rather impetuously – but word that ‘Berlin’s nightlife was its speciality’ had already reached Paris and the artistic circle surrounding Marcel Duchamp. Munich, by contrast, was stylish and yet had taken a kind of well-earned rest – most evidently in the fact that self-glorification was becoming all the rage there (and no one in Berlin had any time for that). One other indicator is, of course, that the bohemians are becoming completely bourgeois: Thomas Mann is seeking – for the sake of his children – a house in the suburbs, in a peaceful location with a large garden. On 25 February 1913 he buys a plot of land at 1 Poschingstrasse and has a magnificent villa built there. His brother Heinrich has sought out Munich as an excellent location from which to write about Berlin, the city hurling itself into the future that is the setting for
Man of Straw
, the epic novel that he is completing. If one were to read Munich’s satirical magazine
Simplicissimus
, one would find him mocking the fact that the policemen
worry about falling asleep out of boredom after eight o’clock in the evening; the great magazine of the
fin de siècle
can’t even provoke its own city any more and seems, in the most pleasant of ways, to be fatigued, as if it were stretched out on a chaise longue with a cigarette in its left hand. The magazine’s counterparts in other cities are
Die Fackel
in Vienna, and
Der Sturm, Die Tat
and
Die Aktion
in Berlin, their breathless names alone revealing that the true battles of the modern era are being fought there.

And of course, Munich’s quiet, gentle abdication as the capital of Art Nouveau and the
fin de siècle
can also be witnessed in the name of the guest house in Theresienstrasse where Else Lasker-Schüler is living in February 1913: the Pension Modern (not to be confused with La Maison Moderne, the legendary Parisian gallery of Art Nouveau set up by the German art propagandist and writer Julius Meier-Grafe, which closed in 1904). So if the guest houses proudly carry their modernity in their names, then it has clearly long since moved on – to the Café Grössenwahn in Berlin (whose name means ‘megalomania’) and to the Café Central at 14 Herrengasse in Vienna, to be precise. Names can be so revealing.

And so the capital of the modern age
anno
1913 is Vienna. Its star players are Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Adolf Loos, Karl Kraus, Otto Wagner, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Georg Trakl, Arnold Schönberg and Oskar Kokoschka, to name but a few. Here the battles raged: about the unconscious, about dreams, the new music, the new way of seeing, the new architecture, the new logic, the new morality.

‘Fear of women – the minute they take their clothes off.’ There are two places in Europe in 1913 where this fear of Spengler’s is not an issue. One is Monte Verità in Ascona, near Lake Maggiore, where a wonderfully eccentric group of free-thinkers, free spirits and nudists are doing their exercises, a specific blend of eurhythmics, yoga and physiotherapy. The others are Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele’s
studios in Vienna. Their drawings, whose lines teetered so sensually between pornography and the so-called New Objectivity, delineated the curves of the ‘most erotic city in the world’, as Lou Andreas-Salomé declared Vienna to be back then. Although the women in Klimt’s paintings were always swathed in golden ornament, he encircled the bodies in his sketches with an inimitable line that swept across the page, softly undulating like curls falling loose over a shoulder. Egon Schiele went even further in his explorations of the human body – the forms he depicted were tormented, strained with nerves and martyred, distorted, more sexual than erotic. Where Klimt’s work reveals soft skin, Schiele shows nerves and sinews; where Klimt’s bodies flow, Schiele’s splay, entangle and contort. Klimt’s women lure, while Schiele’s shock.

‘I’m not interested in my own person’, said Klimt, ‘but rather in other people, especially women.’

If these drawings, which made a voyeur of everyone exposed to them, were well known, they were soon subjected to censorship, thereby increasing the notoriety of their creators. When Schiele wanted to exhibit his work
Friendship
in Munich, he received an interesting rejection letter. The director of the gallery wrote to inform him that his work could not be shown under any circumstances because of its extreme nature, and that it would offend common decency. Full stop. New paragraph. He, however, would be very interested in purchasing the work. There, neatly encapsulated, is the chasm between public and private morality in 1913.

Berlin is becoming too bright. The gas lanterns, neon signs and city lights are threatening to outshine the stars in the night sky. In 1913 the demolition vehicles roll in to tear down the New Berlin Observatory, near Hallesches Tor. Located between Lindenstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, the new Prussian observatory was completed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1835. Like everything else from this most beautiful decade of German history, it was barely surpassed in either practical
or aesthetic terms. A wonderfully simple building, over which the dome sits enthroned like a church tower – a church of the world, but with a view straight up to the heavens. A few comets were discovered here, and a few asteroids too. But the most significant discovery was the planet Neptune. In 1913, however, no one was interested in that. It only took a few weeks before there were only fields where one of Schinkel’s boldest structures had once stood. The observatory was relocated to Babelsberg, where the sky was darker and where Neptune could be seen more easily. And because they were good with figures in Prussia, the land between Lindenstrasse and Friedrichstrasse was sold: 1.1 million Goldmarks from the sale were used for the construction of the new observatory, and 450,000 for the purchase of new instruments. The land itself funded the Royal House – in the grounds of the Babelsberg Palace Park. And so it was that by 1913, perfectly timed after the foundation of the film studio the year before, everything in Berlin to do with stars and starlets ended up in Babelsberg.

On 6 February, according to the Chinese calendar, the year of the buffalo begins. The buffalo, according to an ancient Chinese saying, prefers fresh grass to a golden trough.

In Sindelsdorf, Franz Marc is back to work on his masterpiece, and Else Lasker-Schüler has returned to Berlin. He has set up his studio in the unheated attic of the old farmhouse in Sindelsdorf, from where he can barely hear Maria Marc playing the piano downstairs. It’s so cold that even Hanni, their beloved cat, retreats to the stove. Kandinsky comes to visit from Munich and reports:

What a question.