1913 (31 page)

In July, Rilke goes briefly to Berlin and sees the newly discovered head of Amenophis in the city’s museum: ‘A marvel, I tell you’, he writes excitedly to Lou Andreas-Salomé. These are the excavations from Tell el-Amarna, from the expedition financed by James Simon. The whole city is in Egypt fever about the beauty of the sculptures. The
Berliner Tageblatt
writes excitedly about Amenophis: ‘A true modern, in the boldest sense of the word.’ Advice is suggested to the avant-garde: ‘Futurists, lower your heads!’ Else Lasker-Schüler comes to the museum, falls to her knees with enthusiasm; her paintings of
Prince Yussuf soon bear the features of Amenophis IV, also known as Akhenaten. And the greatest marvel, the head of his wife, Nefertiti, is even in the basement of the museum. The archaeological expedition initially decided not to show their most beautiful item. The curators of the exhibition guess that if everything taken from the country in January 1913 were put on display, the Egyptians would soon start demanding the return of their works. So Nefertiti stays in storage.

Anyone who has spent a thousand years under Egyptian soil can wait a few years until the world is at her feet.

So it’s July, everyone’s convalescing, Rilke has Egypt fever, a bit of money and nothing to do. So one might think it obvious for him to take a few days’ holiday by the sea in August. But for someone who must justify himself daily to his lady patrons and his superego for his cultivated leisure, ‘holiday’ is a dirty word. So it’s quite obvious that it seems ‘frivolous’ to Rilke to go to the coast in August. He leaves Lou in Göttingen and then writes to her from Leipzig immediately: ‘I have had the frivolous idea of going to the sea for eight days at the end of the week (to Heiligendamm, where the Nostitzens are). There are supposed to be lovely beech woods there, and suddenly my soul is filled with the idea of the sea. So perhaps I’ll do that.’

Frank Wedekind is in Rome, where on 8 July he finishes his play
Samson
, which he began on 26 January. He has gone to Rome to be alone and to recover from the chaos surrounding the ban on his play
Lulu
. A nymphomaniac who destroys the world of men, that’s not allowed. But Wedekind senses that with his Lulu he has created a new heroine for the twentieth century. He consoles himself with the heroes of the past for the ignominy of the present – and in Rome he reads Goethe’s
Italian Journey
and Burckhardt’s
Culture of the Renaissance in Italy
and visits the Sistine Chapel. The censors in Munich would have rubbed their eyes in amazement at this troublemaker’s
haut bourgeois
ambitions. He writes to his wife, Tilly Wedekind: ‘The loveliest thing I have experienced here was my walk among the ruins of the Monte Palatino.’ But then he warns her: Rome is fast asleep, no theatre, no
variété
. ‘For my own purposes Rome leaves nothing to be desired. But if we want to enjoy ourselves together, we would probably be better off going to Paris.’ Because this is worth establishing once and for all: ‘Paris is the most beautiful city in the world, then comes Rome, and just below that, Munich.’

Lovis Corinth is sitting in the Villa Mondschein in the Tyrol, with his children, his wife and his mother. He hasn’t quite recovered from his stroke, but here in Sankt Ulrich in the Grödner Tal he slowly starts feeling better. It is raining so hard that Corinth can hardly paint outside. So his family has to sit for him. First he paints himself, in local costume, his heavy green loden jacket and his hat decorated with a feather (he looks cheerfully growly again). Then his wife, Charlotte, also as a Tyrolean. He applies the paint thickly onto the canvas, as if to demonstrate that he’s alive again. And when the world sinks back into fog and rain, he brings the green and red and brightness of the costumes into his art. His son Thomas doesn’t want to be painted; he is freezing, and is soon in bed with flu at their boarding house.

Corinth receives the post from Berlin each morning as ‘manna in the desert’. Most of the letters concern the big dispute in the Berlin Secession, which has been raging since Paul Cassirer, the dealer, was made its chair. For the next exhibition he has uninvited all thirteen artists who didn’t vote for him, which led to a big falling out. Now the association belongs to the remaining Secessionists around Corinth, but the limited company, the owner of the exhibition house at 208–9 Kurfürstendamm, is controlled by Cassirer and Liebermann. So the association around Corinth has to erect a new building to regain its space and fame. When Corinth, in the Tyrol, learns of the idea that this is to be constructed by Peter Behrens, the architect and designer of houses, lamps and tables for the AEG electrical company, he admits he doesn’t like him, but he recognises the possible improvement in
the association’s profile, because Behrens is ‘modern’. In fact, amid the driving rain here in the Tyrol, all those quarrels in his distant homeland are far too much. He thinks ‘with horror of Berlin’, and spends days immersed in Bernhard Kellermann’s book
The Tunnel
, about which Corinth writes the shortest and most concise review of the year: ‘Good book, I’d like to go to America.’ But it’s no use: in August, Corinth has to go back to Berlin.

Käthe Kollwitz is in the Tyrol too, with her husband, Karl. They are forever arguing, the rain cascades down, they can’t get out into the freedom of the landscape, they sit there dully on the chairs in their pension and are profoundly unhappy with each other. After the summer holidays she falls into a ‘great depression’. She has suicidal thoughts, is in despair about her life and her artistic work, is unsatisfied with her first attempts at sculpture. And then she asks her diary: ‘Karl and me?’ Answer: ‘Such a love I have never known.’

Karl no longer interests her. ‘Always the same, you already know every nuance, slack sensuality can no longer stimulate it. Quite different fare is needed to revive the appetite.’ That is Käthe Kollwitz’s declaration of freedom in 1913. She seeks comfort in Strindberg, plunges into his dramas: wild hatred between the sexes, dull togetherness, it helps her, she doesn’t feel alone. She tells her son about it, says Strindberg is about the way couples ‘maul and hate each other’. Kollwitz sits listlessly at the window, gazes into the rain and writes in her diary: ‘Summer is passing and I don’t feel it.’

In Vienna, Oskar Kokoschka has called the banns for his marriage to Alma Mahler. It is scheduled for 19 July, at the town hall of Döbling, the district where the bride’s parents live. He has gone to the Hohe Warte to see Carl Moll and ask for Alma’s hand. Moll has no objections. But when Alma learns of Oskar’s plans on 4 July, she panics, packs her bags and flees; she wants to go to Marienbad. Kokoschka
chases after her, catches up with her at the station, shouts, rages at her to open the window again, Kokoschka shoves a self-portrait at her and orders her to hang it in her hotel room to ward off all the other men. And as soon as she’s gone, he sends her his first letter: ‘Please, my little Alma, don’t look at anyone, the men there will always stare at you.’ And then: ‘Why did you laugh when I said: stay healthy! I would have loved to ask you, but you’d already gone.’ Yes, why did she laugh? In the few clear-sighted moments of their relationship (which were also the darkest) Alma probably felt that they could not be healthy together because they were sick with love. Or, as Kokoschka puts it two days later in his next little letter: ‘For example, I’m uncomfortable with a thug of a doctor feeling you up, a waitress seeing you partially undressed or in your bed and so on.’ She puts up with all these letters, perhaps even enjoys them, but she writes to him from Franzensbad that she’s only coming back when he’s finally finished his masterpiece. She calls him a ‘weed’ and ‘Jewified’; he’s that too. Kokoschka is furious and goes straight to Franzensbad – when he arrives at the hotel, Alma isn’t there. And his self-portrait isn’t hanging over her bed, as he had ordered. When she comes back from her walk, he erupts. He rages against Alma, drums his fists on her bed and jumps on the next train back to Vienna. The date of the wedding passes. And then, with the smell of Kokoschka’s sweat still lingering in her hotel room, Alma, the great tactician, writes a letter to Berlin. She would like to know what chance she has with Walter Gropius, her serious, strict former lover, who withdrew disappointed when he saw the double portrait of Alma and Kokoschka in the Secession exhibition. So Alma writes to him on 26 July: ‘I may marry – Oskar Kokoschka, a man both our souls know intimately, but I will remain bound to you throughout all eternity. Tell me if you are alive and if this life is worth living.’

Kokoschka still has no idea that Alma has been putting out feelers again. He is still in Vienna, painting for dear life. But also wondering if this life is worth living. He works away at the huge canvas of their double portrait. He works away on his masterpiece. Perhaps only his visitor keeps him from despair that July in Vienna. Because compared with Georg Trakl, Kokoschka’s soul is still in pretty good
order. Trakl is staying temporarily in Vienna, at 27 Stiftsgasse, and between his alcoholic and drug-induced stupors he has taken an unpaid job in Vienna, as an accounts clerk at the war ministry. It is hard to imagine a more absurd job for Georg Trakl. He holds it down for only a few days. But during that time, as soon as work is over, he steals away to Kokoschka’s studio. The painter is standing in front of his canvas, hopping nervously back and forth, sunk in wild inner dreams about Alma’s infidelity, cigarette in his mouth and paint on his palette, painting with brush and right forefinger. Behind him, Trakl sits on a beer barrel, rolling back and forth for hours on end. Kokoschka, the lunatic, finds that calming. Every now and again a faint growl is heard from Trakl’s corner. He is starting to recite his poems, talking about crows, fate, corruption and decline; he cries out desperately for his sister, then sinks back into eternal silence and rolls mutely back and forth, back and forth. Trakl is there every day while Kokoschka is painting the double portrait. And it is also Trakl who gives the painting its name:
The Wind-Bride
. In a poem by Trakl written during his chaotic Vienna days, ‘The Night’, he writes: