1913 (30 page)

Picasso was seriously ill. But on 22 July Eva Gouel writes to Gertrude Stein: ‘Pablo is almost well again. He gets up every day in the afternoon. Henri Matisse keeps dropping round to ask after him. He came today to bring Picasso flowers, and spent the whole afternoon with us.’ What a wonderful, consoling idea: one of the two most important artists of his time bringing a bunch of flowers to the other most important artist of his time. No wonder Picasso was completely recovered a few days later.

Robert Musil is not seriously ill, but he is given sick leave so he doesn’t have to perform his duties as a librarian at the Technical College in Vienna but has time to write. On 28 July, Dr Pötzl writes a new sick note for Musil, whom he has been treating for ‘serious neurasthenia’ for six months (lest we forget). So Pötzl writes: ‘The high level of prevalent nervous exhaustion calls for a much longer period of recovery, and from today’s neurological standpoint it calls for a suspension of professional activity of at least six months.’ And so, referring to this document, Musil writes to request ‘six months’ leave’. The university sends him to the official doctor, and one Dr Blanka establishes: ‘He is suffering from a serious degree of general neurasthenia involving the heart (cardiac neurosis).’ Neurasthenia involving the heart – it is hard to think of a better summation of the malady of the modern age.

At the end of June, Harry Graf Kessler had travelled to Berlin for large-scale military exercises with his old regiment. The great aesthete joined in without demur. He loved life in the officers’ mess and the aristocratic officer corps in Potsdam, he loved the soirées and suppers that accompanied manoeuvres. So in July he is staying with Princess Stolberg in Potsdam, although she confesses that she ‘grew up in a castle surrounded by woods’ and still can’t tell the different Prussian uniforms apart. ‘I said: Well, she could easily tell a hussar from a garde du corps. Yes, she said, but it was so terribly hard to tell a general from an NCO.’ Kessler leaves it like that, so that we understand how terrible it is that in Prussia in 1913 there’s actually still a princess who can’t distinguish a general from an NCO.

On 25 July, when it has finally stopped raining, some of those who are very aware of where those differences lie – intellectually, morally and as regards the uniform – drive out with Kessler to Lake Sacrow. More precisely: Major Friedrich Graf von Kliknowström, born in 1884, 3rd Uhlan Guard Regiment since 1905; Lieutenant Thilo von Trotha, born in 1882, also in the 3rd Uhlan Guard Regiment; and cavalry captain Eberhard Freiherr von Esebeck. ‘When we came to the bathing spot, a lonely meadow lined with forests, where we wanted to swim, Krosigk suddenly rose up right in front of us out of the lake and the reeds, stark naked.’ Afterwards, Graf Friedel von Krosigk organised a naked race on the meadow. ‘Diagonally opposite, on the other bank, a white figure, also swimming.’ The white figure: who might that have been? Princess Stolberg, perhaps, wanting to double-check the differences between generals and NCOs? Asta Nielsen taking a break from filming in Babelsberg?

Male fantasies, Part II: two chimeras after a train journey: Oswald Spengler, the old sexist, doesn’t take a holiday, he’s thinking about the ‘Decline of the West’, and about all these women all over the place. ‘I can bear intellectual intercourse with women only in small doses. Even if a girl is as narrow-minded as a suffragette and as tasteless
as an art-filly.’ He is back at home in his flat in Munich, and thinks it’s ugly, particularly the furniture: ‘Any piece of furniture must be able to bear comparison with a Manet or a Renaissance palace. Old furniture can do that. The design of new furniture makes it look like five-finger exercises.’ But then he remembers his train journey and adds: ‘The only good things are the ones in which these stylistic idiots haven’t stinted on their “ability”: locomotives etc.’ Gottfried Benn takes the train that summer as well. He too gets a testosterone boost from the women in his compartment. In his little notebook he writes these great lines about his experiences on the fast train between Berlin and the Baltic: ‘Meat that walked naked./Into the sea-tanned mouth.’ And later: ‘Men’s brown pounces on women’s brown:/A woman is a matter for a single night. And if it was fine, for the next one too!/Oh! And then alone again!’ So Benn too can bear the company of women only in small doses. Then he too descends happily back into the basement of his solitude.

Kaiser Franz Joseph doesn’t want to be alone. Arm in arm with Frau Katharina Schratt he walks through the extensive parkland of Bad Ischl, for many years his resort of choice. And Frau Schratt has been his companion for many years too: they know each other from the days when Sissi was still alive. And yet – and this is the imperial wish – she will never become his lover, only ever his companion. So the two of them, separated by an age difference of thirty years, spend their days together. At night the Kaiser would like to be alone. However, at about seven o’clock in the morning he leaves his imperial villa and walks over to see Frau Schratt in her villa ‘Felicitas’, where they take tea together. Then he mingles with the spa guests. He generally goes unrecognised, because he doesn’t wear his decorations on holiday, dispenses with his bodyguard and looks like any knobbly old retired officer. He wants to be entirely ordinary. But sadly he is the Kaiser. So he goes along with that. But he writes letters of wonderful ordinariness to Fau Schratt. Oh, he laments at one point how his
bunions hurt when he has to stand up at the banquet and raise a toast to the king of Bulgaria.

The king of Bulgaria himself has quite different concerns: the dispute between Serbia and Bulgaria about territories in Macedonia escalates on 3 July. Serbia declares war – and the Turks, Greeks and Romanians also stand up to Bulgaria. The Second Balkan War has arrived. New dispatches are constantly reaching the Kaiser in Bad Ischl. But he doesn’t want to be disturbed by those hotheads in the Balkans. He walks over to Frau Schratt and drinks some tea.

On 13 July, Freud goes to Marienbad with his beloved daughter Anna to convalesce and gain inner strength for the great battle. The Fourth International Psychoanalytic Congress in Munich early in September, where he will meet up with Jung and the renegade Zurich analysts for the first time since their disagreement. And, of course, Marienbad doesn’t help Freud at all. Either with the rheumatism in his right arm or with his depression. He writes: ‘I can hardly write, we’ve had a bad time here, the weather cold and wet.’