1913 (10 page)

On 16 February 1913 Josef Stalin boards a train at Vienna’s Nordbahnhof and travels back to Russia.

His daily ration is one corpse. In total, between 25 October 1912 and 9 November 1913, Dr Gottfried Benn dissects 297 bodies – draymen, prostitutes, anonymous drowned corpses. Day after day throughout that cold, wretched February he climbs down into the cellar of the clinic in Berlin-Charlottenburg wearing his white coat and brandishing his scalpel. He rummages through the bodies, finding cause of death, but no souls. It’s hell on earth for the sensitive priest’s son from Neumark, just twenty-six years old: ceaselessly cutting open, filling up, sewing up, cutting open. Throughout those lonely months, underground and surrounded by death, Benn’s eyelids begin to draw shut a little from above and below, as the photographs show. Never again will he fully open them. ‘He saw only sparsely through his eyelids’, writes Benn, barely out of the autopsy cellar, as he tries to scrape the suffering away from his soul in the character of ‘Rönne’. Peering sparsely through his own eyelids, Benn foresees, blinking uncontrollably, the model for the twentieth century in his gloomy
cellar of corpses: eyes wide shut. In the evenings, after his second or third beer, he writes poems about it on scraps of paper: ‘The crown of creation: the pig, man.’ He knows that, come dawn the next day, the next corpse will be waiting downstairs in the cellar. Perhaps it’s even still alive and roaming around. By the next spring he is distraught, pleading to be dismissed. Professor Dr Keller lies in his final report: ‘During his time in office Herr Dr Benn showed himself to be up to the task in every way.’ Benn’s début collection,
Morgue
, published in mid-1912, begs to differ: merciless, cold yet daring late Romantic poems about the body, cancer and blood, they reveal a great existential trauma, and to this day cannot be read on an empty stomach.

But their rage and force turn their author – an unremarkable pathologist, barely 5 foot 5 inches tall, with a receding hairline and the beginnings of a paunch, into a highly mysterious figure of the Berlin avant-garde. The
enfant terrible
in a three-piece suit. ‘As soon as my first collection of poetry was published, I gained a reputation as a brittle roué,’ Benn later recalled, ‘an infernal snob and one of the typical coffee house literati, while in reality I was marching along on military exercises in the potato fields of the Uckermark and setting off at an English trot over the pine-covered hills with the division commando in Döberitz.’ We don’t know whether it was the military doctor Benn who went over to Else Lasker-Schüler’s table one evening at the Café des Westens on the Ku’damm (corner of Joachimstalerstrasse) or the other way around. But there was no better place for these two outsiders, trembling with lyrical emotion, to find one another. The artists’ haunt was run down, but nobly so, and there was mediocre Viennese cuisine on offer, of the sort that you might find in any Berlin artists’ haunt today. The air was dense with cigarette smoke, the deafening noise from the street forced its way inside, the newspapers were stamped ‘Stolen from Café des Westens’, and there the bohemians sat running up a tab. A cup of coffee or a glass of beer cost 25 Pfennigs, and you could sit in front of it until five o’clock in the morning.

Benn and Lasker-Schüler came here all the time. They eyed each other like two predators at first, prowling around one another, satiating their hunger by reciting each other’s poems aloud for weeks on
end as they headed home at night through the newly built streets of the west. At the time she wrote the following about Benn: ‘Every one of his verses a leopard’s bite, the pounce of a wild animal.’ Else Lasker-Schüler, a poet seventeen years his senior, recently separated from her second husband, tangled up in love affairs with all the prominent figures of the Berlin bohemian scene, abundantly draped with jewellery, ankle bells and oriental garments, immediately falls under the spell of the stiff doctor with the sleepy gaze and the shy, almost uninterested, tone of voice, with which, as in his poetry, he could say devastating things about death, corpses and the female body as casually as if he were ordering a coffee. And Gottfried Benn, still somewhat pompous and insecure, falls under the spell of the sensuous, mature woman with eyes that sparkle like black diamonds.

The two people who meet and become close during this cold Berlin winter are both failures: she forty-four years old and he almost twenty-six. Else Lasker-Schüler, once a cosseted banker’s daughter from Elberfeld, is now a pauper, surviving for weeks on end on just nuts and fruit. Wracked with fever, she roams through the night with her son, sheltering under bridges and in hostels, scrounging every cup of coffee. In her worn-out, oriental robes she looks like a tramp from the
Arabian Nights
. She writes on telegram slips from the Central Post Office. Benn, the lost, cosseted preacher’s son from the countryside, is searching desperately for his vocation in life and has just failed for the second time: first as a doctor in the Charité psychiatry department, then as an army doctor, where he has been laid off temporarily. Reports state that he has problems interacting with people. They recommend that he interact with corpses instead. Shortly after he moves into the pathology field his beloved mother dies. Benn, by now well versed in sewing people up, writes: ‘I carry you around on my brow like a wound that will never heal.’ Biographically, this is the moment when Benn and Lasker-Schüler first see each other and cling onto each other like drowning souls. ‘Oh, Your Hands’ is the name of Lasker-Schüler’s poem from October 1912 – revealing for the first time the handwriting of Gottfried Benn on her heart. She can even, such is their luck, write to him in Hebrew, for the priest’s son knows
the Old Testament in theory from his Bible study days. Now the time has come to put it into practice.

Will things work out?

19 Berggasse is the residence of Dr Sigmund Freud, and the most famous address in Vienna even during his lifetime. His analyses have made him a rich man, he can get through up to eleven appointments a day, receiving 100 Kronen for each one: as much as his servants earn in a whole month. Alma Mahler will resent him for the rest of her days, ever since he wrote to the executor of Gustav Mahler’s will trying to collect payment for a stroll he and the late composer had once taken together. By 1913 his reputation is legendary, his research into dreams and sexuality common knowledge; when Schnitzler and Kafka jot down their dreams, they are always accompanied by the question of what Dr Freud would make of them. The focus of his research was sexuality, repressed not only by others, but also, according to the state of his research that day in 1913, by himself. After his wife had borne him six children, he apparently chose to abstain from sex. There are no known affairs; the only cause for speculation was his unexplained relationship with Minna Bernays, the sister-in-law, who lived with the couple, but nothing is known for certain.

It was a cause of great amusement to Freud that the Viennese began to take his research into the suppressed and unconscious seriously at the very time when he was appointed Professor. ‘Congratulatory messages and bouquets of flowers are raining down now, as if the role of sexuality had suddenly been given the official seal of approval by His Majesty, as though the meaning of dreams had been confirmed by the Council of Ministers.’

Dr Freud and Dr Schnitzler seemed like Siamese twins even to their contemporaries:
The Interpretation of Dreams
here, the
Dream Novella
there; the Oedipus complex here,
Frau Beate and her Son
there. But precisely because there were so many similarities between them, they politely avoided each other’s company. Once, Freud roused himself to write to Schnitzler about his timidity at the prospect of meeting him, a ‘kind of
Doppelgänger
anxiety’. He had received the impression, from his reading of Schnitzler’s stories and plays, that ‘you know through intuition – although really as a result of your keen self-awareness – all that I have uncovered through painstaking work with other people.’ But even this confession was not to change things. Like two similarly charged magnets, they couldn’t get too close to one another. Both approached the issue with humour. When the son of an industrialist was brought into Dr Schnitzler’s clinic in 1913, drenched in blood after having his penis bitten by a pony, the doctor ordered: ‘Take the patient to the emergency clinic straight away – and the pony to Professor Freud.’

The big Berlin cigarette company Problem advertised all over Berlin, on its buses and cabs, promoting a brand of cigarettes bearing the name Moslem. So anyone walking across Potsdamer Platz or down the Ku-damm could see the words, spelt out in large letters: ‘Moslem. Problem Cigarettes.’

Heinrich Mann is now living in Munich with Mimi Kanova, a woman whom he met – quite fittingly – during the Berlin rehearsals of his play
The Great Love
in 1912. She is a little on the fat side. He calls her ‘Pummi’. She writes to him to say that if he can find her more work at the theatre she will ‘care for him like a baby’. He clearly found that to be an attractive prospect. Everyone else turns up their noses at the vulgar woman and their low-class relationship (including, of course, his brother Thomas, who always purses his lips whenever Heinrich acts in too aggressively heterosexual a manner). Heinrich,
whose pointy beard and softly drooping eyelids make him look like a Spanish aristocrat, contentedly spends his days with his Mimi at 49 Leopoldstrasse in Munich and writes.