1913 (2 page)

A cat creeps into 19 Berggasse, Vienna, and into the study of Sigmund Freud, where the Wednesday club has just assembled. The cat is the second surprise visitor in a very short time: in the late autumn Lou Andreas-Salomé had joined the menfolk. At first she had been eyed suspiciously, but now she was fervently worshipped. On her garter belt Lou Andreas-Salomé wore the many scalps of the great minds she had bagged: she had been in a confessional in St Peter’s with Nietzsche, in bed with Rilke and in Russia with Tolstoy, Frank Wedekind named his
Lulu
after her and Richard Strauss his
Salomé
. Now her latest victim, intellectually at least, was Freud – that winter she was even allowed to stay on the same floor as his study, discussed his new book about
Totem and Taboo
, on which he was currently working, and listened to his complaints about C. G. Jung and the renegade school of Zurich psychologists. Above all, however, Lou Andreas-Salomé, now fifty-two, the author of several books about eroticism and the mind, was receiving psychoanalytic training from the master himself – in March she would set up her own practice in Göttingen. So there she sits at the solemn Wednesday lecture. Beside her the master’s learned colleagues, on her right the already legendary couch and everywhere the little sculptures that the antique-obsessed Freud collected to console himself about the present day. And into this devout room, as Lou stepped through the door, there slipped a cat. At first Freud was irritated, but when he saw the curiosity with which the cat was studying his Greek vases and Roman miniatures, he brought it some milk. But Lou Andreas-Salomé reports: ‘As he did so, in spite of his mounting love and admiration, she paid him no attention, coldly turned the slanting pupils of her green eyes on him as if on a random object, and if for a moment he wanted something more than the cat’s egoist-narcissist purring, he had to take his foot off the comfortable couch, and try to win her attention with enticing wiggles of the toe of his boot.’ From then on, week after week, the cat was allowed to attend Freud’s lectures, and if she wheedled she was allowed to lie on his couch, on gauze compresses. She clearly proved susceptible to therapy.

Speaking of sickly: where is Rilke, by the way?

Contemporaries are worried that 1913 may prove to be an unlucky year. Gabriele D’Annunzio gives a friend a copy of his
Martyrdom of St Sebastian
and in the dedication prefers to date it ‘1912 + 1’. And Arnold Schönberg refuses to mention the unlucky number. Not for nothing had he invented twelve-tone music – a fundamental principle of modern music, born in part of its creator’s fear of what might come next. The birth of the rational out of the spirit of superstition. In Schönberg’s music the number ‘13’ does not occur, not even as a rhythm. Not even as a page number. When he realised with horror that the title of his opera about Moses and Aaron would have thirteen letters, he crossed out the second A from Aaron, and henceforth it was called
Moses and Aron
. And now a whole year fell under the shadow of that unlucky number. Schönberg was born on 13 September – and he was terrified at the idea of dying on Friday the 13th. It was no good. Arnold Schönberg did in fact die on Friday the 13th (although in 1913 + 38, or 1951). But 1913 also had a fine surprise in store for him. He would receive a slap in the face. But one thing at a time.

And now enter Thomas Mann. Early on 3 January, Mann takes his seat on the train in Munich. First of all, he reads some newspapers and letters, looks out at the snow-covered hills of the Thuringian Forest, and then, in the overheated compartment, he repeatedly nods off while worrying about his Katia, who has gone off once more for a spa treatment in the mountains. The previous summer he had visited her in Davos, and in the waiting room he had suddenly had an idea for a great short story, but now it strikes him as pointless, too remote
from the world, this sanatorium-based tale. In any case, his
Death in Venice
would be published in only a few weeks.

Thomas Mann sits in the train and frets over his wardrobe: so annoying that long train journeys always leave those creases in one’s clothes, he would have to have his coat ironed again in the hotel. He gets up, slides the carriage door open and decides to walk up and down the corridor. So stiffly that the other guests keep mistaking him for the conductor. Outside the castles of Dornburg fly past, Bad Kösen, the vineyards of the Saale, covered with snow, the rows of vines running across the slopes like zebra stripes. Pretty, in fact, but Thomas Mann senses anxiety mounting within him the closer he gets to Berlin.

When he has stepped out of the train, he immediately takes a cab to the Hotel Unter den Linden, and he looks around the lobby to see whether the other guests recognise him as they push their way to the lifts. Then he steps into his usual room to change into expensive new clothes and comb his moustache.

At the same time, in the Grunewald deep in the west of the city, Alfred Kerr is tying his bow tie in the dressing room of his villa at 6 Höhmannstrasse and combatively twirling the tips of his moustache.

Their duel is scheduled for eight o’clock that evening. At a quarter past seven they climb aboard their respective droschkes. They drive to the Kammerspiele of the Deutsches Theater, arriving at the same time. And they ignore one another. It is cold, they both hurry inside. Once (in Bansin, on the Baltic), strictly between ourselves, he, Alfred Kerr, Germany’s greatest critic and vainest popinjay, had wooed Katia Pringsheim, the wealthy, cat-eyed Jewess. But she had turned him down, the proud and reckless man from Breslau, and thrown herself instead at Thomas Mann, the stiff northerner. Incomprehensible. But perhaps he can get his own back this evening.

Thomas Mann takes his seat in the front row and tries to emanate calm gravitas. This evening sees the première of his
Fiorenza
, the play he was writing when he met and fell in love with Katia. But he senses that tonight there may be a débâcle of sorts: the piece has long been his problem child. They shouldn’t have made such a drama
about keeping a drama off the stage, he thinks. ‘I’ve tried to save some things, but no one listens to me’, he wrote to Maximilian Harden before he left 13 Mauerkirchstrasse in Munich.

He hated walking eyes open into a disaster. It wasn’t worthy of someone like Thomas Mann. What he had seen at the rehearsals in December didn’t bode well. Tormented, he watches the play that is supposed to bring the Florentine High Renaissance to life, but it just refuses to get going.

Eventually Mann glances furtively over his left shoulder. There, in the third row, he spots Alfred Kerr, whose pencil is scurrying over his pad. The auditorium is pitch dark, but he thinks he can discern a smile on Kerr’s face. It is the smile of the sadist, delighted that the production is providing ample material for torture. And when he catches Thomas Mann’s anxious expression, an even more agreeable shiver runs through him. He is delighted to have Thomas Mann and his unfortunate
Fiorenza
in the palm of his hand. For he knows he is going to grip it very hard, and when he lets go, it will slump lifeless to the floor. The curtain falls and there is a ripple of friendly applause – so friendly, in fact, that the director, in his only successful production, manages to invite Mann on stage twice. In countless letters over the next few weeks he will not fail to mention the fact. Twice! So he tries to bow with great dignity, twice! And ends up looking rather awkward. Alfred Kerr sits in the third row, not clapping. That night, when he arrives at his elegant villa in Grunewald, he asks for some tea and begins to write. He sits down solemnly at his typewriter and sets a roman ‘I’ down on the paper. Kerr numbers his paragraphs individually, like volumes in a collected edition. First he whets his sabre: ‘The author is a delicate, rather thin little soul, whose dwelling-place has its quiet roots in stasis.’ Then he lets rip: the lady Fiorenza, who is presumably supposed to be a symbol of Florence, is completely bloodless, the whole thing was cobbled together in libraries, stiff, dry, feeble, kitschy, superfluous. Those are more or less his words.

When Kerr has numbered and concluded his tenth paragraph, he contentedly pulls the last sheet of paper from the typewriter. An annihilation.

The next morning, as Thomas Mann boards the train for Munich, Kerr has dispatched his piece to the editors of the newspaper
Der Tag
. It appears on 5 January. When Mann reads it, he breaks down. He is ‘unmanly’, Kerr writes – that will hit Mann the hardest. Whether Kerr was alluding to Thomas Mann’s concealed homosexuality, or whether Mann only understood it as an allusion, is irrelevant. Kerr alone, apart from Karl Kraus, saw where his words could inflict the deepest wounds. At any rate, Thomas Mann was deeply hurt, ‘to the marrow’, he wrote. Throughout the whole spring of 1913 he would not recover from that criticism. Not one letter omits a reference, not a day passes without fury directed at this fellow Kerr. Mann writes to Hugo von Hofmannsthal: ‘I had known more or less what to expect, but it exceeded anything I could have foreseen. A toxic affront, in which the personal bloodlust must surely be apparent even to the most unsuspecting!’

‘He wrote that only because he didn’t get me, my dear Tommy,’ Katia says by way of consolation, and strokes his forehead maternally when she returns from her spa cure.