1913 (3 page)

Two national myths are founded: in New York, the first edition of
Vanity Fair
is published. In Essen, Karl and Theo Albrecht’s mother opens the prototype of the first Aldi supermarket.

And how is Ernst Jünger? ‘Fair.’ At least, that’s what it says in the report the seventeen-year-old Jünger has been given in the reform school in Hameln for his essay on Goethe’s ‘Hermann and Dorothea’. He wrote: ‘The epic takes us back to the time of the French Revolution, whose blaze disturbs even the peaceful residents of the quiet Rhine valley from the contented half-sleep of their everyday lives.’ But that wasn’t enough for his teacher, who wrote in the margin, in red ink: ‘Expression too sober this time.’ We learn: this means that
Ernst Jünger was already sober, when everyone else thought he was drunk.

Every afternoon Ernst Ludwig Kirchner boards the newly built underground train to Potsdamer Platz. The other painters of Die Brücke – Erich Heckel, Otto Mueller, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff – had moved to Berlin with Kirchner from Dresden, that wonderfully forgotten Baroque city where the group was founded. They were a community in every respect, sharing paints and women, their paintings indistinguishable from one another – but Berlin, that pounding mental overload of a capital city, turns them into individuals and cuts away the bridges connecting them. In Dresden all the others were able to celebrate pure colour, nature and human nakedness. In Berlin they threaten to founder.

In Berlin, in his early thirties, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner comes into his own. His art is urban, raw, his figures are overstretched and his drawing style as frantic and aggressive as the city itself; his paintings ‘bear the rust of the metropolis like varnish on the brow’. Even in the underground carriages his eyes greedily absorb people. He makes his first, quick studies in his lap: two, three strokes of the pencil, a man, a hat, an umbrella. Then he goes outside, pushes his way through the crowds, sketchpads and brushes in hand. He is drawn to Aschinger’s restaurant, where you can spend all day if you’ve bought a bowl of soup. So Kirchner sits there and looks and draws and looks. The winter day is already drawing to a close, the noise in the square is deafening, it’s the busiest square in Europe, and passing in front of him are the city’s main arteries, but also the lines of tradition and the modern age: come up out of the U-Bahn into the slushy streets of the day and you will see horse-drawn carts delivering barrels, side by side with the first high-class automobiles and the droschkes trying to dodge the piles of horse droppings. Several tram lines traverse the big square, the huge space rings with a mighty metallic scrape each time a tram leans into the curve. And in among them: people, people, people, all
running as if their lives depended on it, above them billboards singing the praises of sausages, eau de cologne and beer. And beneath the arcades, the elegantly dressed ladies of the night, the only ones barely moving in the square, like spiders on the edge of a web. They wear black veils over their faces to escape the attention of the police, but the striking aspect is their huge hats, bizarre towering constructions with feathers, under the streetlights, whose green gaslight is lit when early winter evening falls.

That pale green glow on the faces of the prostitutes in Potsdamer Platz, and the raging noise of the city behind them, are what Ernst Ludwig Kirchner wants to turn into art. Into paintings. But he doesn’t yet know how. So for the time being he goes on drawing – ‘I’m on familiar terms with my drawings,’ he says, ‘I’m more formal with my paintings.’ So he grabs his intimate friends, stacks of sketches that he’s done from his table over the past few hours, and hurries home, to his studio. In Wilmersdorf, 14 Durlacher Strasse, second floor, Kirchner has made a burrow for himself: nearly every inch hung with oriental carpets, stuffed with figures and masks from Africa and Oceania and Japanese parasols, as well as his own sculptures, his own furniture, his own paintings. Photographs of Kirchner from those days show him either naked or wearing a black suit and tie, his high-collared shirt snow-white, his cigarette held as limply in his hand as if he were Oscar Wilde. Always by his side, Erna Schilling, his beloved, the successor to soft, scatty Dodo in Dresden, a ‘new’ woman with a free spirit beneath a page-boy haircut, the spitting image of Kafka’s Felice Bauer. She decorated the flat with embroideries based on her designs and Kirchner’s.

Kirchner had met Erna and her sister Gerda Schilling a year before at a Berlin dance hall, where Heckel’s girlfriend, Sidi, was also on stage. He lured the two pretty, sad-eyed dancers to his studio that first evening, because he knew straight away: their architecturally constructed bodies would ‘train my sense of beauty in the creation of the physically beautiful women of our time’. Kirchner first stepped out with nineteen-year-old Gerda, later with 28-year-old Erna, and in between with both. Flirt, muse, model, sister, saint, whore, lover – it’s hard to tell exactly which, where Kirchner is concerned.
From hundreds of drawings we know every detail of these two women: Gerda sensually provocative, Erna with small, high breasts and a wide bottom, calm, at melancholy peace. There is a glorious painting from these days: on the left, three naked women, soliciting; on the right, the artist in his studio, cigarette in his mouth, checking the women out like a connoisseur. That’s how he likes to see himself. ‘Judgement of Paris’, he writes in black paint on the back of the canvas, ‘1913, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’.

But when Paris Kirchner comes home from Potsdamer Platz that evening, the lights are out, Paris comes home too late for his judgement, and Erna and Gerda have gone to sleep, buried in the enormous cushions in the sitting room that this
trio infernal
will turn into the most famous Berlin room in the world.

Prussian Crown Princess Victoria Louise and Ernst August of Hanover kiss for the first time in January.

The New Year edition of
Die Fackel
, Karl Kraus’s legendary one-man Viennese magazine, contains a cry for help: ‘Else Lasker-Schüler seeks 1,000 Mk towards the education of her son.’ It is signed by, among others, Selma Lagerlöf, Karl Kraus and Arnold Schönberg. After her divorce from Herwarth Walden, the poet could no longer pay the fees of the Odenwaldschule in which she had placed her son Paul. Kraus had wrestled with himself for six months about whether to publish the appeal. In the meantime Paul had been sent to a boarding school in Dresden, but at Christmas even Kraus, the cool executioner who could strictly separate emotion and rationality, was overwhelmed by generosity. He places the small ad in the last free space in
Die Fackel
. Before it, Kraus writes: ‘I see an apocalyptic Galopin preparing for the end of the world, the herald of ruin, overheating the limbo of temporality.’

The tiny attic room at 13 Humboldtstrasse in Berlin-Grunewald is ice-cold. Else Lasker-Schüler has just wrapped herself up in lots of blankets when she hears the shrill doorbell dragging her from her daydreams. Lasker-Schüler – wild, black eyes, dark mane, lovesick, unfit for life – envelopes herself in her oriental dressing gown and opens the door to the postman, who holds out her mail: her severe and distant friend Kraus’s bright red
Die Fackel
from Vienna and then, just below, a little blue miracle – a postcard from Franz Marc, the Blaue Reiter artist. Lasker-Schüler, with her gaudy garments, her jangling rings and bracelets, her wild, fairy-tale imagination: in those days she was the embodiment of a society dashing into the modern age, a dream figure, the object of desire of such diverse men as Kraus, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Kokoschka, Rudolf Steiner and Alfred Kerr. But you can’t live on deification. Else Lasker-Schüler is in a bad way now that her marriage to Herwarth Walden, the great gallery owner and publisher of
Sturm
magazine, is at an end, and he’s with the appalling Nell, his new wife, sitting around in cafés from which Else has been banned, precisely because it means she won’t be there. But it was in just such an artists’ café, in December, that she met Franz and Maria Marc, who would become her guardian angels.

So Else Lasker-Schüler picks up her copy of
Die Fackel
, oblivious to the touching advertisement by Karl Kraus, and then she turns over the postcard that Franz Marc has sent her. She freezes in silent jubilation. On the tiny space her far-off friend has painted her a
Tower of Blue Horses
, powerful creatures towering up to the sky, outside of time and yet firmly within it. She senses that she’s been granted a unique gift: the first blue horses of the Blue Rider. Perhaps this special woman, who always senses everything, and more – senses that in the weeks that followed, the idea of his postcard will produce an even bigger ‘tower of blue horses’ in faraway Sindelsdorf, a painting as a programme, an artistic landmark. The larger painting will later be burned, and all that remains of it will be that postcard, which bears the fingerprints of both Marc and Lasker-Schüler, and which will
always tell the tale of the moment when the Blue Rider began its gallop.

Touched, the poet notes how the great painter has included her emblems, the half-moon and the golden stars, into his little painting of horses. A dialogue begins; associations, words and postcards fly back and forth. She appoints him the imaginary ‘Prince of Cana’; she is ‘Prince Yussuf of Thebes’. On 3 January, Else writes back and thanks him for her blue miracle: ‘How beautiful this card is – I’ve always wished my own white horses could be joined by horses in my favourite colour. How can I thank you!!’