Authors: Florian Illies
1913 (28 page)
When the survivors of the
Terra Nova
expedition return to their homeland in June 1913, the brigade’s scientific achievements attract a great deal of attention. This is intended to distract from the fact that Scott, exalted as a national hero, was in fact the second to reach the South Pole. For when the last members of the expedition finally arrived at the South Pole in 1912, the freshly erected Norwegian flag was already standing proud. Roald Amundsen was a few days ahead in this ruthless race against ice and time. The morale of the British expedition members was broken. Scott was not the only one to lose his life in the endless ice on his way back. Even today Captain Lawrence Oates is revered as a martyr in Great Britain, for committing suicide so as not to be a burden to his four comrades. His last words
as he left the tent are legendary: ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ A sentence like that makes a man immortal in England. The title of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s legendary report on the catastrophic expedition is just as fitting:
The Worst Journey in the World
. So the Brits may not have discovered the South Pole, but at least they didn’t lose their sense of humour.
‘The Worst Marriage Proposal in the World’: on 8 June, in Prague, Franz Kafka has finally begun to ask for Felice’s hand in marriage. But he breaks off mid-sentence, and it’s not until 16 June that he is able to bring himself to finish the letter. It ends up being over twenty pages long. Kafka begins with a detailed account of how he needs to look for a doctor – what exactly he wants him to certify, perhaps fertility or sanity, is unclear. Or maybe it’s all just a laboured pretext to delay the inevitable marriage and its consummation: ‘Between you and me there stands, apart from everyone else, the doctor. It is doubtful what he will say, because medicinal diagnoses are not really the crucial factor in such decisions, and if they were, then it wouldn’t be worth taking them into account. I was, as I said, not really ill, but I am.’ Hmm. Then follows a passage in which Kafka, that wonderful, sensitive stylist, establishes a form of written stuttering:
Now bear in mind, Felice, that in the face of this uncertainty it is hard to say the words, and it must sound peculiar. It’s simply too soon to say it. But afterwards it will be too late, and then there won’t be any time for discussing such things as you mentioned in your last letter. But there isn’t any time to hesitate for too long, at least that’s how I feel about it, and so that’s why I’m asking: in view of the above premise, which is sadly ineradicable, do you want to consider whether you want to become my wife? Do you want that?
In fact, what he probably wanted to write was: ‘Do you
really
want that?????’
Then, in a rare moment of clarity, he presents Felice with the cost-benefit calculation of a potential marriage:
Now give some thought, Felice, to how marriage would change us, what each of us would gain and lose. I would lose my – for the most part, terrible– solitude and gain you, whom I love more than anyone else in the world. But you would lose your former life, with which you were almost entirely content. You would lose Berlin, the office you love, your friends, little pleasures, the prospect of marrying a healthy, cheerful, good man, and of having beautiful, healthy children, which you, if you stop to think about it, really long for. And on top of this inestimable loss, you would gain a sick, weak, unsociable, taciturn, sad, stiff, pretty much hopeless human being.
Who could turn down an offer like that? A proposal of marriage disguised as a confession.
Kafka is still uneasy, for he suspects he has stuck his neck out on this occasion, even though he tried, with hundreds and hundreds of words, to cover up and mask his question. But he knows that, somewhere in the middle of the letter, he did ask her to marry him. He hems and haws before putting the letter in an envelope, then goes on a laborious search for a bigger envelope, because the letter is now so thick. Then he goes out on to the street, but dawdles, waiting so long that all of the post offices have closed for the evening. Then he is suddenly overwhelmed by the desire for Felice to have the letter on her desk first thing in the morning, so he runs to the station, where urgent post can be put on the fast train to Berlin. On the way, sweating and in a panic, he meets an old acquaintance. Kafka tries to excuse himself, saying he’s in a hurry and has to get the letter to the station. What kind of letter is so urgent, asks the acquaintance in amusement. ‘A proposal of marriage’, says Kafka, amid laughter.
On 8 June, the day when Kafka began writing his proposal, the German Stadium, built for the 1916 Olympic Games, is officially opened by Kaiser Wilhelm II. The German builders completed it three years ahead of schedule. Ah, the good old days.
On the occasion of the twenty-fifth royal jubilee, fifteen-year old Bertolt Brecht writes the following verse in his diary:
And if, in the evening, we set
and die a hero’s death
then the flag will wave consolingly
black white and red.
And then another verse:
The wind shall sing within it
Your duty you have done!
You died in battle
as a loyal German man.
Interesting.
In Wuppertal-Elberfeld there are already five paintings by Picasso hanging on the walls. Two still-lifes from 1907 at the home of the painter Adolf Erbslöh, a
Mother and Child
from 1901 at the home of Julius Schmits, as well as a
Man in Coat
from the same year and a watercolour from the Rose Period at the home of the banker August von der Heydt.
The War of the Roses in two Viennese marriages. Fur is flying between Arthur and Olga Schnitzler, with Schnitzler confiding in his diary that he’s lying on the balcony as if paralysed. And on 10 June, Robert Musil writes the following after an argumentative walk with his wife: ‘Martha, in a foul mood, fired unnecessary accusations at me that left me cold. You’re going to leave me, and then I’ll have no one. I’ll kill myself. I’m going to leave you.’ But she didn’t.
Someone left, though: Leo Stein. After months of arguments he walked out of 27 Rue des Fleurs, the Parisian apartment he shared with his sister Gertrude and which he had made into
the
salon of the avant-garde. Picasso and Matisse and Braque kept passing through, and the
jour fixe
on Saturday evenings was a central gathering point of Parisian creativity. But it was more than that: over the years the salon had become the first museum of modern art in the world. In the tightest of spaces masterpieces by Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Gauguin and all the other great French masters crowded together, collected by the Steins early on and with sound judgement. Gertrude, dressed as ever in brown sackcloth, sat in a dark Renaissance chair and stretched her feet out towards the fireplace. She always felt the cold. Next to her stood Leo, explaining his understanding of modern art to the dozens of guests. His captive audience included English aristocrats, German students, Hungarian painters, French intellectuals and, somewhere in the crowd, Picasso with his lover
du jour
.
