1913 (21 page)

The month gets off to a difficult start for Oskar Kokoschka. On 1 May he writes to Alma Mahler: ‘Today wasn’t easy for me, as I didn’t get a letter from you.’

The love story between the vicar’s son Gottfried Benn and the Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler, who had published her ecstatic ‘Hebrew Ballads’ at the same time as his dances of death in the collection
Morgue
, lasted throughout the spring of 1913. On 3 May, Else writes to Franz Marc in Sindelsdorf: ‘I’ve really fallen in love again after all.’ And she’s fallen in love with Dr Benn.

Within a short time Marc, whom she had only met in December 1912 and who had shortly afterwards invited her to join him in his rural idyll in Sindelsdorf, had become Lasker-Schüler’s confidant. She called him not only her ‘Blue Rider’ but also, above all, her ‘Half-Brother Ruben’. No one came closer to her in her imaginary oriental realm. Karl Kraus was her ‘Dalai Lama’; she changed her husband’s name from Georg Lewin to ‘Herwarth Walden’ (when he left her, he kept the name at least). Oskar Kokoschka is the ‘Troubadour’ at the court, Kandinsky the ‘Professor’, Tilla Durieux the ‘White Leopardess’ – and Benn becomes ‘Giselher’, the Nibelung, the heathen, the barbarian.

The euphoric, scatterbrained visionary Lasker-Schüler grabbed testosterone-fuelled men by their poetic hearts and propelled them to unsuspected heights. But men afraid of too much femininity – Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Kafka, for example – were startled by her surging sexuality and tended to run away. And the women of her time despised this unkempt femme fatale by day for her negligence, her irresponsibility, her licentiousness – and secretly admired her in the evening, when their husbands had gone out for a drink and they were left by themselves to flick through a magazine from their lonely armchairs. Only Rosa Luxembourg admired her unreservedly, and pointedly walked down the streets with her in the hot summer months of 1913.

So one May evening Else Lasker-Schüler wrote to Franz Marc to tell him how in love she was with Benn: ‘When I fall in love a thousand times, it’s always a new miracle, it’s the same old thing when someone else falls in love. I have to tell you, it was his birthday yesterday. I sent him a box full of presents. His name is Giselher. He’s out of the Nibelungs.’ But Marc, whether his wife wouldn’t let him or whether he himself was already too exhausted by his demanding Berlin girlfriend, took a few months to write back. To which Else replied by return: ‘You are glad about my “New Love” – You say
that so easily, and have no idea that you should really be weeping along with me – because – it has already gone out in his heart, like a sparkler, like a burning Catherine wheel – which has rolled over me.’ NB: write quickly if you want to congratulate Else Lasker-Schüler on a new love, otherwise it’ll be too late.

Between Gottfried Benn and Else Lasker-Schüler, at first, it was as if an inter-city train and an Orient Express had come hurtling straight at one another and locked in a steaming, artistic tangle of steel and blood. But all that remains by the autumn is rubble and stale smoke. The intervening nine months produce some of the most beautiful German love poetry of the twentieth century.

We know everything and nothing about this love affair, because the dates are unclear, disputed; the beginning in Berlin is as obscure as the end in the autumn, probably on the Baltic island of Hidden-see – and yet we know everything about their feelings because they put their love on stage like a public romance, with poems to, for and about each other, published in
Der Sturm, Die Fackel
and
Aktion
, the magazines that set the standards of the day. In these poems Benn is the ‘Monkey Adam’, drawn to the ‘Brownest One’, to his ‘Ruth’, the archaic woman. It’s an unparalleled attraction that grips both of them, followed by battles, border disputes of the most violent kind, white-hot oaths, injuries, claw-swipes. When it gets going, she writes: ‘The august King Giselher/With the tip of his lance/Pierced my heart through.’

With her rare grasp of the essential, she produces one of the quickest, clearest portraits in existence of Benn, an indian-ink line drawn across the page in a matter of seconds, the hooked nose, the big reptilian head, the eyelids with the centuries apparently weighing upon them. And down on his chest the Nibelung wears an oriental star as a piece of jewellery. It appears in the 25 June 1913 issue of
Aktion
with, below it, Lasker-Schüler’s piece about ‘Dr Benn’: ‘He goes down into the vault of his hospital and cuts open corpses. Tirelessly enriching himself with secrets. He says, “dead is dead”. He is an evangelical heathen, a Christ with the head of an idol, with the nose of a hawk and the heart of a leopard.’ Beside this was a poem by Benn, the
eighth part of his ‘Alaska’ cycle, whose very title reveals that this is about a lesson in coldness. And for simplicity’s sake his first love poem to the deified poet is called ‘Threats’:

Else Lasker-Schüler’s reply appears in the next eidition of
Der Sturm
, under the title ‘Giselher the Tiger’: ‘I carry you around always/Between my teeth.’ And the whole Berlin art scene watches as the two outsiders celebrate each other in public. The doctor with the good manners and tightly knotted tie, whose hands always smell of the disinfectant with which he washes his hands, which have just been rooting about inside corpses. And the twice-divorced single mother with her tatty robes, her neck and arms hung with fake jewellery, chains and ear-rings. And as she was forever brushing an unruly strand of hair from her forehead, she was forever surrounded by lots of jangling and rattling. ‘You couldn’t cross the street with her, then or later, without the whole world stopping to look’, Benn wrote later. And if they weren’t walking down the street together, they were publishing their blazing declarations to one another, their wooing and their rejections. Else Lasker-Schüler’s greatest triumph was when Benn refused military service, denied the Kaiser and settled in her personal kingdom. He became King Giselher at the Court of Prince Yussuf – in his military files he imagined he had something called a ‘wandering kidney’, which made it impossible for him to ride across fields on horseback. Of course, no such kidney existed, either then or now. Benn never suffered from it, and yet this invention helped him turn his inner turmoil into a poetic diagnosis. Benn broke away from his military world, moved through the night with his lover, climbed up to attics and down to basements, learned to love, learned to live. When the winter nights in cafés and lofts and house doorways are over and spring breaks out in Berlin like a feverish virus, it’s easy for us to imagine Benn and Else Lasker-Schüler drifting out of the city
on one of the many barges that bring fruit and vegetables from the country into the city; they let themselves be carried out into the Havelland, the lakes and rivers of Mecklenburg, to settle on an island, the dark water playing around them. They sit there, the two of them, in the reeds, naked beneath the moon. She plays with his hands, he plays with her hair and then they write poems: ‘Oh, I became acquainted with too much bliss from your sweet mouth.’

But in the end, once the battle has been fought, she will write: ‘I am a warrior with the heart, he with the head.’ The great Protestant–Jewish reconciliation project that they made out of their life, here Yussuf or the Prince of Thebes, as she called herself, there the Nibelungen, is a failure. For her, ‘Nibelung fidelity’ means being senselessly faithful to something that is false. So she knew from the start what she was letting herself in for with this doctor with the piercing eyes and the receding hair-line. But when it happens, it throws her off track more than any man before or after him. She knew she was the prophetess of the Jewish people – and she needed Dr Benn, with the pomade in his hair and the galoshes on his feet, as the perfect counter-image to her oriental world, as the embodiment of the Germanic. But the young Nibelung moves on and the older Jewess stays behind in despair. She is gripped by a constant fever, abdominal inflammations, pains. In the autumn of 1913 Dr Alfred Döblin will prescribe her morphine against the mental pain caused her by Dr Gottfried Benn.

And so Franz Kafka writes about Else Lasker-Schüler to his distant Felice:

There is still no trace of the
Mona Lisa
. J. P. Morgan, the American billionaire, receives a letter from a lunatic who signs himself ‘Leonardo’ and says he knows where the painting is. Morgan’s receptionist throws the letter away.