1913 (36 page)

After the dissolution of Die Brücke, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner leaves Berlin, heading for the island of Fehmarn. So eager is he to leave the city, its noise and motifs behind him, that he travels all the way to the south-east tip of the island, to the isolated home of the lighthouse keeper, Lüthmann – and then right to the top, to the ‘Gable Room’, where he spent some time last year. The lighthouse, the isolated beach, the lighthouse keeper’s eight children – these become his motifs for the summer. The bad weather is clearly visible in the paintings, dark clouds moving across the horizon again and again. Down on the beach, the trees stoop over into the water, almost reminiscent of the South Pacific. Above, the golden rainbow blooms, and Kirchner paints it for days on end, its blazing gold splendour. This time Kirchner brought not just Erna, who is called ‘Frau Kirchner’ here – even though she’s always running around practically naked – but Otto Mueller and his wife, Maschka, too. They take turns painting one another swimming; they relish the freedom, their steadily increasing fame. The Lüthmanns’ children and the lighthouse keeper himself welcome the Kirchners into their family circle with warmth and trust. Those summer weeks on Fehmarn may be the happiest days of Kirchner’s entire life. ‘Oh, Staberhuk, how wonderful you are, a little corner of happiness, so peaceful and beautiful!’ he cries out into the wind, again and again. Even Kirchner’s style ascends to new heights. The women are no longer broadly sprawled out but reach towards the skies; his brushstrokes are more nervous, slender, lengthy figures, his sketches and paintings dominated by Erna and Maschka naked on the beach. He is addicted to the body’s form, he complains jovially, utterly addicted to it. Whenever he is dissatisfied with a picture, he throws it into the sea in a fit of rage – only to plunge in after it, rescue it from the waves and put it back on his easel, to paint it all over
again, but better. The most wonderful driftwood keeps washing up on the beach; a year before, at the same time as the
Titanic
, a ship capsized off Fehmarn. The schooner
Marie
. Its wood has become part of art history, for Kirchner swam repeatedly out to the sandbank where the wreck lay in order to pick out especially fine pieces of wood which were suitable for carving. On 12 August he writes to his Hamburg collector and patron Gustav Schiefler: ‘The head I sent you is a wood carving (oak), I’ve made several like it out here.’ And in September, in a letter to his student Hans Gewecke, he writes:

As fascinated as Kirchner was by the wreck, and as much as he plundered it for his work, it doesn’t appear in a single one of his sketches, art works or paintings from Fehmarn, even though he created hundreds of works there in 1913 alone. The ship stranded in the Baltic Sea – he had the classic motif of Romanticism embodied in front of his very eyes, the ultimate Caspar David Friedrich scenario. But Ernst Ludwig Kirchner impudently denied the wreck a place in his oeuvre. There can hardly be a more conclusive sign that German Romanticism is definitively over.

The
Mona Lisa
is still nowhere to be found. In the Louvre a Corot has been hung on the orphaned nail.

Felice Bauer, shocked by Kafka’s letters, spends August in Sylt. Innumerable letters go back and forth between her and Prague, about whether Kafka is going to join her there or not, about whether or not the bracing climate will do him good. In the end, of course, he doesn’t come. Such a shame, it would have made for such wonderful journal entries: Kafka in Kampen. But it wasn’t to be.

A death in Venice shakes Berlin. Virginia Woolf and Carl Schmitt want to kill themselves. The stars look bad on 9 September. Duel in Munich: Freud and Jung cross swords. Rilke has to go to the dentist for amalgam fillings, Karl Kraus falls head over heels in love with Sidonie. Kafka goes to Venice, doesn’t die, but falls in love with Riva. The ‘First German Autumn Salon’ begins, and Rudolf Steiner lays the foundation stone in Dornach. Louis Armstrong makes his first public appearance. Charlie Chaplin signs his first film contract. The rest is silence
.

(
illustration credits 9.1
)

On 9 September, Gerhart, son of the publisher Samuel Fischer, whose birthday had just been celebrated in Venice, and who was already sickly and pale and feverish, dies the titular ‘death in Venice’ of his father’s great 1913 publishing success. He is brought back to Berlin hotfoot by ambulance, but there he succumbs to the disease – the ‘Italian disease’, as one might call it, because the story of his illness is so similar to that of Gustav von Aschenbach, Thomas Mann’s hero, who is carried off by cholera in Venice. And so it is only appropriate that Hugo von Hofmannsthal should learn of the publisher’s son’s death in Venice and sends condolences from there to Samuel Fischer and his wife on 17 September: ‘There, where lies the most grievous of pains, at the very summit of pain, there consolation seems to me to dwell – only there and not somewhere off to the side.’

Gerhart’s death is a shock for S. Fischer Verlag and the whole of cultural Berlin – Gerhart was a much-loved, delicate person, now following his own path as a music student after lengthy arguments with his parents. There is a large funeral in the Jewish cemetery in Weissensee, the sun sits ill with the shattered grief on the faces of the attendees. Samuel Fischer, numb with pain, loses his hearing in one ear from shock. Gerhart Hauptmann, after whom Fischer’s son was named, just fifty-one and at the peak of his fame, hurries to the funeral, before laconically observing in his diary: ‘3 o’clock Gerhart Fischer funeral. 5 o’clock big dress rehearsal for
William Tell
: that’s Berlin, that’s life.’

Rainer Maria Rilke has to be treated at Berlin’s Western Hospital, 4 Marburger Strasse, for severe toothache. From there he writes to Eva Cassirer, his confidante and the patron of his wife, Cara, that he has just read Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice
: ‘Very surprised by much
in the first part and found it wonderfully formed; but the second part rather contradicted this impression, so that I couldn’t work out the whole thing, even though it lifted me somewhere within.’ Then Rilke has to go back to continue his dental treatment. He is placed in the hands of Dr Charlie Bödecker, a German-American expert in metal inlays, who attempts to combat Rilke’s considerable dental decay with amalgam fillings.

Galerie Hermes sends Lovis Corinth a painting at his home in Klein Niendorf on the Baltic. He had painted it in the Tyrol in July, when his son was feeling better again and he was being bathed.
Naked Child in Wash Tub
it is called – and on his way back Corinth had then left it in Munich with the art dealer Oscar Hermes. But Hermes didn’t like the nursemaid’s nose. So on 2 September he sent the painting to the Baltic for cosmetic surgery. Corinth looks at the painting, looks at the nose, asks the nursemaid in, looks at her nose – and changes the nose in the painting. Then it is sent back to Munich. These are the advantages of being a dealer in contemporary art. Complaints can be dealt with straight away.