1913

This is the month when Hitler and Stalin meet while strolling in the Castle Park at Schönbrunn, Thomas Mann nearly gets outed and Franz Kafka nearly goes mad with love. A cat creeps onto Sigmund Freud’s couch. It’s extremely cold, snow crunches under the feet. Else Lasker-Schüler is impoverished and in love with Gottfried Benn, gets a horse postcard from Franz Marc but says Gabriele Münter is a non-entity. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner draws the ladies of pleasure on Potsdamer Platz. The first loop-the-loop is flown. But it’s no good. Oswald Spengler is already at work on
The Decline of the West.

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The first second of 1913. A gunshot rings out through the dark night. There’s a brief click, fingers tense on the trigger, then comes a second, dull report. The alarm is raised, the police dash to the scene and arrest the gunman straight away. His name is Louis Armstrong.

The twelve-year-old had wanted to see in the New Year in New Orleans with a stolen revolver. The police put him in a cell, and early on the morning of 1 January they send him to a house of correction, the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys. Once there, his behaviour is so unruly that the only solution the institution’s director, Peter Davis, can come up with is to hand him a trumpet. (What he really wants to do is slap him.) All at once Louis Armstrong falls silent, picks up the instrument almost tenderly, and his fingers, which had been playing with the trigger of the revolver only the previous night, feel the cold metal once again, except that now, still in the director’s office, rather than a gunshot, he produces his first warm, wild notes from the trumpet.

‘The gunshot at midnight. Cries in the alley and on the bridge. Ringing bells and clock chimes.’ A report from Prague: Dr Franz Kafka, a clerk with the Workers’ Accident Insurance Company for the Kingdom of Bohemia. His audience in faraway Berlin, in the apartment at 29 Immanuelkirchstrasse, is a lone individual, but to him she is the whole world: Felice Bauer, twenty-five, a bit blonde, a bit bony, a bit gangling. A shorthand typist with Carl Lindström Ltd. They had met briefly in August, the rain pelting down, she had had wet feet, and he’d quickly got cold ones. But since then they’ve been writing to each other at night while their families are asleep: hot-headed, enchanting, strange, unsettling letters. And usually another one the
next afternoon. Once, when there hadn’t been a word from Felice for a few days, after waking from unsettled dreams, in desperation he desperately started work on
Metamorphosis
. He told her about this story, which he had finished just before Christmas. (It now lay in his desk, warmed by the two photographs of herself that Felice had sent him.) But just how quickly her distant and beloved Franz could turn into a terrible mystery she would learn only from his New Year’s letter. He asks her out of nowhere, by way of introduction, whether, if they had arranged to go to the theatre in Frankfurt am Main, and if he had instead just stayed in bed, she would have beaten him violently with an umbrella. And then, apparently innocuously, he evokes their mutual love, dreams that his hand and Felice’s will be forever bound together. Before going on: it is, ‘however, always possible that a couple might once have been led to the scaffold bound together in such a way’. What a charming thought for a prenuptial letter. They haven’t even kissed, and here he is already fantasising about their walking hand in hand to the scaffold. Kafka himself seems momentarily startled by the thoughts spilling from him: ‘But what sort of things are these, pouring out of my head?’ he writes. The explanation is simple: ‘It’s the number 13 in the year.’ And that is how 1913 begins in world literature: with a fantasy of violence.

Missing person notice. Lost: Leonardo’s
Mona Lisa
. She was stolen from the Louvre in 1911; still no clues. Pablo Picasso is questioned by the Paris police, but he has an alibi and they let him go home. In the Louvre, French mourners lay bouquets against the bare wall.

In the first days of January, we don’t know exactly when, a slightly scruffy 34-year-old Russian arrives at Vienna’s Northern Station from Kraków. A flurry of snow outside. He is limping. His hair hasn’t been washed this year, and his bushy moustache, which spreads like
rampant undergrowth beneath his nose, can’t conceal the pock-marks on his face. He is wearing Russian peasant shoes, and his suitcase is full to bursting. As soon as he arrives, he boards a tram for Hietzing. His passport bears the name Stavros Papadopoulos, which is supposed to sound like a mixture of Greek and Georgian, and in view of his scruffy appearance and the piercing cold, every border guard has let him through. In Kraków, in his other exile, he had beaten Lenin at chess one last time the previous evening, making that the seventh time in a row. He was plainly better at chess than he was at cycling. Lenin had desperately tried to teach him. Revolutionaries have to be quick, he had drummed that into him time and again. But the man, whose name was actually Josef Vissiaronovich Djugashvili and who now called himself Stavros Papadopoulos, couldn’t learn how to ride a bike. Just before Christmas he had a bad fall on the icy cobbled streets of Kraków. His leg was still covered with grazes, his knee was sprained, and he had only been able to stand on it again for a few days. My ‘magnificent George’, Lenin had called him with a smile as he limped towards him to accept his forged passport for the journey to Vienna. And now
bon voyage
, Comrade.

He crossed borders unmolested, sat feverishly in the train, hunched over his manuscripts and books, which he frantically stuffed back into his suitcase every time he had to change trains.

Now, having arrived in Vienna, he had discarded his Georgian alias. From January 1913 onwards he said: My name is Stalin, Josef Stalin. When he had got out of the tram, on his right he saw the Schönbrunn Palace, brightly lit against the dull winter grey, and the park behind it. He enters the house at 30 Schönbrunner Schlossstrasse, which is what it says on the little slip of paper that Lenin had given him. And: ‘Ring the bell marked Trojanow’. So he shakes the snow off his shoes, blows his nose in his handkerchief and slightly nervously presses the button. When the maid appears, he says the agreed code word.