1913 (4 page)

When Marc then invites her by postcard to come to Sindelsdorf, completely exhausted by the divorce and by Berlin, she boards the train with the Marcs. She is far too thinly dressed, so Maria Marc wraps her in a blanket she has brought along. It’s entirely possible she’s sitting in the same train in which Thomas Mann is hurrying back to his family fortress after his bungled
Fiorenza
première. It’s a lovely idea: the north and south poles of German culture in 1913, together in a single train.

When the enfeebled poet arrives in Sindelsdorf in the alpine uplands, she lives at first with Franz Marc and his wife, Maria, a strapping matron under whose wings Marc snuggled when the winds blew too chill. ‘Painter Marc and his lioness’, as Else called them.

She manages only a few days in the childless couple’s guest room, before moving on to the Sindelsdorf inn, with its terrific view across the moor to the mountains. But even here she can’t find peace. The worried landlady advises her to take a Kneipp cure and lends her the requisite books. Nothing does any good. Else Lasker-Schüler hurries from Sindelsdorf to Munich and finds a room in a pension on Theresienstrasse.

The Marcs come after her and find her in the breakfast room, with whole armies of tin soldiers that she’s probably bought for her son Paul, ‘fighting out violent battles’ on the blue and white table-cloth, ‘instead of the battles that life constantly threw her way’. She is in a fighting mood, furious, quivering, not entirely in her right mind. At the end of January, in the Galerie Thannhauser, at the opening of
the big Franz Marc exhibition, she meets Kandinsky, then gets into a squabble with the painter Gabriele Münter. She had made a remark that Lasker-Schüler had taken as an insult to Marc, whereupon she screeched through the gallery: ‘I’m an artist and I’m not going to stand for that from some nonentity.’

Maria Marc stands between the bickering women, entirely at a loss, shouting, ‘Children, children’. Later she will claim that Else Lasker-Schüler already had ‘much of the pose of the world-weary writer about her’, but still, ‘she’d really experienced a great deal compared to the young Weltschmerz gang in Berlin.’ So that’s what the world of 1913 looks like from the vantage point of Sindelsdorf.

On 20 January, in Tell el-Amarna, in central Egypt, the spoils of the latest digs by the German Oriental Society, financed by the Berliner James Simon, are being divided: half are promised to the Cairo Museum, the other half to the German museums, including the ‘painted plaster bust of a royal princess’. The director of the French antiquities commission in Cairo authorises the division, suggested by the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt. Borchardt alone sensed straight away that what he was holding was the kind of discovery that comes along once in a thousand years, when an excited Egyptian assistant pressed the little statue into his hand. A few days later the plaster bust sets off on its journey to Berlin. It does not yet bear the name Nefertiti. It isn’t yet the most famous bust of a woman in the world.

The world bubbles over with excitement. Small wonder, then, that in 1913 the Russian pilot Piotr Nikoayevich Nesterov flew the first loop-the-loop in human history in his fighter plane. And that the Austrian figure-skater Alois Lutz spun so skilfully in the air on a deep-frozen lake in that bitter cold January that the jump bears the name Lutz to this day. To perform it, you have to take a backwards run-up, then
jump from the left back outside edge. You achieve the spin by suddenly drawing your arms into your torso. Logically enough, for the double-Lutz you do the same thing twice.

Stalin will stay in Vienna for four weeks. Never again will he leave Russia for such a long time; his next foreign trip of any length will be thirty years later, to Tehran, where he will take part in discussions with Churchill and Roosevelt (in 1913 the former was First Lord of the British Admiralty, the latter a senator in Washington, campaigning against the stripping of the American forests). Stalin rarely leaves his secret hideaway at 30 Schönbrunner Schlossstrase, the home of the Troyanovskys; he is completely preoccupied with writing his essay ‘Marxism and the National Question’, commissioned by Lenin. Only very occasionally, early in the afternoon, does he stretch his legs in the nearby park at Schönbrunn Palace, which lies cold and neat in the January snow. Once a day there’s a moment of excitement when Kaiser Franz Joseph leaves the palace and sets off in his coach to do a spot of governing. Franz Joseph has now been in power for an incredible sixty-five years, since 1848. He has never got over the death of his beloved Sissi, the Empress Elisabeth, and even now her life-size portrait hangs above his desk.

The grizzled monarch hobbles the few steps to his dark green coach, his breath leaving a little cloud in the cold air, then a liveried footman shuts the door of the coach and the horses trot off through the snow. Then silence again.

Stalin walks through the park, thinking. It’s already getting dark. Then another walker comes towards him, twenty-three years old, a failed painter who’s been turned down by the Academy and who is now killing time in the men’s hostel on Meldemannstrasse. He is waiting, like Stalin, for his big break. His name is Adolf Hitler. The two men, whose friends at the time say they liked to walk in the park at Schönbrunn, may have greeted one another politely and tipped their hats as they made their way through the boundless park.

The age of extremes, the terrible short twentieth century, begins on a January afternoon in 1913 in Vienna. The rest is silence. Even when Hitler and Stalin sealed their fatal ‘pact’ in 1939, they never met. So they were never closer than they were on one of those bitterly cold January afternoons in the park of Schönbrunn Palace.

The drug ‘ecstasy’ has been synthesised for the first time; the patent application drags on through 1913. Then it’s completely forgotten about for several decades.

Here’s Rainer Maria Rilke, at last! Rilke is on the run from winter and his writer’s block, and has ended up in Ronda, in southern Spain. A female acquaintance had recommended during a séance that he should travel to Spain, and since Rilke always relied throughout his life on the advice of mature ladies, he clearly had to turn to the inhabitants of the beyond for orders. Now he’s staying in Ronda, at the elegant Hotel Reina Victoria, a British hotel of the very latest kind, but now, out of season, almost empty. From up here he writes to his ‘dear, good Mama’ every week like a good boy. And to the other faraway ladies that he pines after so beautifully: to Marie von Thurn und Taxis, to Eva Cassirer, to Sidonie Nádherný, to Lou Andreas-Salomé. We will be hearing more about these ladies this year, don’t you worry.

Right now it is Lou, the woman who took his virginity and persuaded him to change his first name from René to Rainer, whose star is suddenly in the ascendant: ‘Merely to see one another, dear Lou [the word ‘dear’ is underlined three times], that’s my greatest hope.’ And he goes on to scribble in the margin, ‘my support, my everything, as ever’. Then off to the mail train, which takes three hours to get to Gibraltar. And from there it travels on to 19 Berggasse, Lou Andreas-Salomé, c/o Prof. Dr Sigmund Freud. And Lou writes to her ‘dear, dear boy’ that she thinks she can be tougher with him than before.
And ‘I think you will always have to suffer, and always will.’ Is it sado-masochism, or is it love?

The days go by, filled with suffering and letter-writing. Sometimes Rilke goes on working on his
Duino Elegies
. He manages the first thirty-one lines of the sixth Elegy, but he simply can’t finish it; he’d rather go walking in his white suit and his pale hat, or read the Koran (before going on to write ecstatic poems about angels and the Assumption of Mary). You could feel good here, far away from the dark winter, and at first Rilke too enjoys the fact that the sun doesn’t sink behind the mountains before half-past five, even in January, that before it does so it bathes the city, perched on its rocky plateau, in a warm glow one last time – ‘an unforgettable spectacle’, as he writes to his dear Mama. The almond trees are already in blossom; so too the violets in the hotel garden, even the pale blue iris. Rilke pulls out his little black notebook, orders a coffee on the terrace, wraps his blanket around his hips, blinks into the sun one last time and then notes: ‘Ah, if only one knew how to blossom: one’s heart would be/ Consoled for both the slighter dangers and the greater.’