1913 (43 page)
Authors: Florian Illies
Benn’s volume
Sons
is dedicated to Else Lasker-Schüler. ‘I salute Else Lasker-Schüler: Aimless hand of play and blood’, he writes on the endpaper, in what is evidently a last, brief trace of sentimentality before the pathologist’s fit of emotion turns truly pathological. From her mattress tomb, made bearable only by her daily opium and the visits of her family doctor and shrink Alfred Döblin, Else sends an update to her ‘Blue Rider’ Franz Marc in Sindelsdorf on the state of her love affair: ‘The Cyclops Dr Benn has dedicated his new poems to me. They are as red as the moon, as hard as the earth, wild twilight, hammering in the blood.’ And so this great love ends as it once began: with great words.
On 16 October, Ludwig Wittgenstein journeys with his friend David Pinsent by ship from England to Norway and continues to work on his
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
. He records his thoughts neatly in a notebook. First, though, he annotates the first page with these words: ‘In the event of my death, please send to Frau Poldy Wittgenstein, Neuwaldeggerstrasse 38, Vienna, and to B. Russell, Trinity College, Cambridge.’ Wittgenstein’s family and the Cambridge academic are his twin pillars as he attempts to erect a new structure of logic. While
still on the crossing he writes Russell a letter with key questions, only to leave it on board by accident. On 29 October he writes to Russell again: ‘Did you get my letter? I left it in the boat’s dining room and it was supposed to have been sent to you, but perhaps it was forgotten?’
Carl Schmitt, who believed he would be happy just as soon as his book
The Value of the State
was published, writes unhappily in his journal, despite the fact that the book
has
just been published: ‘No one writes to me.’ And it gets even worse: he has the sniffles. He doesn’t know if he will survive, and on 2 October he writes: ‘It’s hideous, this catarrh; oh God, and some day we will all die.’
First, though, Schmitt wants to get married to his beloved Cari, to whom he dedicated his first book. Even the privy councillor Hugo am Zehnhoff – Schmitt’s father figure during these months – agrees, and keeps sending little legal mandates his way. Zehnhoff is the second most important person in Schmitt’s life in 1913; he bows to him in constant fear and affection, pleading for his favour, drinking and smoking with him late into the night. Zehnhoff warns Schmitt about the ‘music-hall’ nature that Cari exudes, but then demands that she at least become Catholic so they can be married in Maria Laach Abbey.
Cari buys herself a hat, and Carl buys a ring; they get engaged. But then Cari suddenly loses her passport, making marriage impossible and Carl furious. Cari, though, remains strangely calm. Given that they now can’t move into their new apartment in the Conservatorium as a married couple, and also because they are hard up financially because Carl does not yet have a fixed tenure, Cari has to go and live with Schmitt’s parents in Plettenberg until they are able to get married and live together. They travel there by train, then Schmitt has to go back to Düsseldorf in full knowledge of the awful surroundings in which he has left his beloved: ‘She is in Plettenberg, in the company of my loathsome and evil mother and spoilt little Anna.’ Soon, he writes, he will free Cari from the family hell-hole and lead her to the altar.
He met Cari, a Spanish dancer, in a music hall in 1912, and
promptly fell head over heels in love with her. She said her name was Pabla Carita Maria Isabella von Dorotic. Her passport would never turn up again, and for good reason too. Later, when they divorce, he will find out that his wife was not of Spanish nobility, but an illegitimately born Munich girl by the name of Pauline Schachner.
It may seem unlikely, but there was a place filled with sunshine and happiness in this October of 1913. August and Elisabeth Macke and their two sons move into Haus Rosengarten in Hilterfingen, on the banks of Lake Thun, with a view across the water, and with the steep, snow-capped peaks of the Stockhorn on the horizon. In the foreground a meadow runs gently down to the shore, where the Mackes drink freshly brewed coffee at four o’clock every afternoon in the rose-covered veranda.
For the first time August Macke hasn’t brought any old paintings with him; he wants to make a new start here in Switzerland. He is still quite exhausted from the ‘First German Autumn Salon’ exhibition, and also bitter about his failure and bad reviews. But down here, by faraway Lake Thun and beneath the warm October sun, his mood lightens after just a few days. He buys some paints and makes a start – in a passionate fury, the like of which he has never experienced in his art work before – and manages to create the most important work of his oeuvre in those four weeks by the lake. He finds himself drawn to the lake promenade again and again, and repeatedly sketches the elegant strollers, the men in hats, the sunlight falling warm and bright through the rows of trees. And the blue of the sea beyond, here and there a white boat. In
Sunlit Path
, for example, painted at the very beginning of October, the tree trunk glows in the same tone as the woman’s dress, she gazes into the deep, dark blue of the water and the sky can’t even be seen for all the flashing bright green and yellow foliage. Here, by the banks of Lake Thun, August Macke paints his versions of paradise.
The Mackes have a small boat there too. Louis Moilliet and his
wife, Hélène, come to visit, the painter friend with whom Macke will soon depart on their legendary journey to Tunisia; but first they all set off together on a trip in Thun, out onto the lake. They berth on an island, where they build a small fire and Hélène brews up fine Arabic coffee in a Tunisian copper can that she has brought along with her.
It’s an idyllic life, even on weekdays. In the mornings they push open the green window shutters and gaze out into the shimmering blue of the Indian summer.
The days are so warm they are able to eat outside all through October; it’s only from the afternoon onwards, when the coolness slowly creeps across the lake towards the meadow, that Macke pulls on his favourite, unevenly striped roll-neck jumper and smokes his first pipe of the day. Then he romps around the garden with the two boys, Walter and Wolfgang.
August Macke has installed his kingdom right at the top of the house, a room with a balcony and a wonderful view over the lake, where he paints whatever he has sketched on the promenades, in the hat shops, the shop windows. Elisabeth Macke will later tell of how her husband would bring the paintings out from the loft studio down to the garden, ‘which was flooded in gleaming autumnal colours by the sunlight, and stand them in the middle of this glow: by no means did they pale in comparison, they had their own luminescence. Then he asked me: “What do you think; do I have something here, or is it just kitsch? I really can’t tell.” ’ Elisabeth knew what it was. And so do we. They were pictures of such genuine, captivating beauty that sometimes the only way to bear them is to denounce them as kitsch.
Adolf Loos says ornament is a crime, and builds houses and tailors’ workshops filled with clarity. It’s all over between Else Lasker-Schüler and Dr Gottfried Benn: she’s in despair, so Dr Alfred Döblin, currently sitting for a portrait by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, gives her a morphine injection. Proust’s
Swann in Love,
the first volume of
In Search of Lost Time,
is published, and Rilke reads it straight away. Kafka goes to the cinema and cries. Prada opens its first boutique in Milan. Ernst Jünger, eighteen years of age, packs his things and goes to Africa with the Foreign Legion. The weather in Germany is disagreeable, but Bertolt Brecht thinks: anyone can have the sniffles
.
On 7 November Albert Camus is born. He will later write the play
The Possessed
.
The lead magazine of the year: in Vienna – what a coincidence – on 7 November the first issue of the magazine
The Possessed
is published. On the front page: a self-portrait of Egon Schiele. Subtitle of the magazine: ‘A journal of passions’.
