1913 (11 page)

When Heinrich’s forty-second birthday approaches, Thomas invites his brother and his wife over for an intimate dinner. Other than that, he spends most of his time working on his big book
Man of Straw
. He is disciplined, filling page after page of his small, square notebooks with delicate handwriting. His merciless analysis of German society under Kaiser Wilhelm II is almost finished. Now and then he sketches nudes, mostly stout women in risqué poses, rather reminiscent of George Grosz’s brothel sketches. Later, after his death, they will be found in the bottom drawer of his writing desk.

Heinrich Mann negotiates with different journals about an advance publication of
Man of Straw
and strikes a deal with the Munich magazine
Zeit im Bild
. Publication is set to begin on 1 November 1913. In exchange for a payment of 10,000 Reichmarks, Mann consents to ‘undertake the deletion of sections of an overly erotic nature’ where necessary. Fair enough, Mann may have thought to himself, in this case it’s more a question of ‘scenes of an overly socially critical nature’. The idea had come to him a few years before, in a café on Unter den Linden in Berlin, when he witnessed the sight of crowds of bourgeois pressing curiously up against the windowpanes to see the Kaiser pass by. ‘The old inhumane Prussian military spirit has been joined here by the machine-like, massive scale of the metropolis,’ wrote Mann, ‘and the result is the lowering of human dignity below every known measure.’ Mann quickly comes up with the idea for a paper factory which prints nothing but postcards glorifying the Kaiser; he engages in thorough research, travels to paper mills and printworks, makes fastidious notes, talks with the workers, acting like a reporter. Richard Wagner – particularly his vexingly narcotic effect on the spirit of protest – is such a puzzle to him that, for the first time, and in the interests of research, he goes to see
Lohengrin
. So while his brother is preoccupied with
Royal Highness
and the con-man Felix Krull, Heinrich Mann is in search of German subservience – and establishes with horror that it is, in fact, everywhere. He has a judge explain the legal
implications of the crime of ‘Offence against the Sovereign’ to him in minute detail. But that is precisely what it will be, his book
Man of Straw
: an insult to His Majesty, to the German bourgeois spirit.

Hermann Hesse is living very unhappily in Bern with his wife, Maria. He, together with Theodor Heuss (yes, the future President of the Federal Republic), becomes involved with the journal
März
, but the situation at home is taking its toll on both him and his writing. Not even the move from Lake Constance, where they were attempting to live a healthy, vegetarian life, to the peaceful capital of Switzerland, his wife’s home, helps their relationship. They have three children: Martin, the youngest, has just turned two, but the bond between his parents has worn thin. And so Hesse reaches for the medicine that only writers can prescribe themselves for difficulties of the heart: fictionalisation. He squabbles with his wife in the parlour, then goes into his office, puts a new ribbon into his beloved typewriter and writes down the row as dialogue. And so
Rosshalde
comes into being in 1913, and is published that same year in
Velhagens & Klasings Monatshefte
. The main character, Johannes Veraguth, relives all of Hesse’s suffering, all of his raptures, and of course it ends in disillusionment. The wife in the novel is named Adele, and she is as stubborn and embittered as Maria. He openly takes as his subject not only the failure of his marriage but also, fundamentally, the impossibility of retaining a sense of yourself as an artist within a marriage and within society. The law student Kurt Tucholsky, twenty-three years young, who has been working for the magazine
Schaubühne
(later
Weltbühne
) since January 1913, writes very shrewdly of
Rosshalde
: ‘If the name Hesse did not appear on the title-page, there would be no way of knowing that he had written it. This is not the dear, good old Hesse we know: this is someone different.’ Furthermore, Tucholsky immediately sees through the feeble boundaries between fiction and reality: ‘Hesse is like Veraguth: he has abandoned the heaven of marriage – but where will he go now?’ Good question.

Not everything goes according to plan in 1913, of course. Preparations have been under way for a touring exhibition, opening in Frankfurt, which is to unite the work of the Berlin Expressionist and Secessionist artists with that of the Blaue Reiter. But to their surprise, the Blaue Reiter in Upper Bavaria soon find their pictures sent back to them from Berlin. Aggrieved, Franz Marc writes a letter from Sindelsdorf, with the seal of the Blaue Reiter on the letterhead, to Georg Tappert, the Chairman of the New Secession in Berlin:

It isn’t all over yet. In autumn the unique summit meeting of the two poles of German Expressionism will take place after all.

It’s too hot for Rainer Maria Rilke, even in early February. He has flown south in search of the sun. But now, lying on a garden lounger at the Hotel Reina Victoria in Ronda, in his white summer suit, he longs for the cool North. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be Rilke. His ability to understand women, to be at one with nature and connect with others is so strong that he even suffers along with the towns themselves when they are ‘worn out from the relentless summer’. That’s probably why only someone like Rilke would sense the destructive force to come in the year’s first warm beams of sunlight. And so he complains
in letters to his mother and faraway soulmates that spring doesn’t suit him: ‘The sun is too strong; at seven in the morning it’s quite clearly February, but by eleven one could easily believe it to be August.’ She would surely understand, he writes to Sidonie Nádherný, that it is simply ‘unbearable’ when the sun beats down like that. On 19 February he hurriedly departs. At the end of the month he moves into his new apartment in Paris, in the Rue Champagne-Première. After eighteen months on the run from himself across half of Europe, he arrives in the metropolis as it shimmers with early spring. He is afraid of arriving. But he wants to try one more time, here, in this Paris, in this place. But he can’t remember how you do those things: sitting, working, staying calm. Living.

In the spring of 1913 Charles Fabry successfully concludes a series of experiments culminating in the discovery of the ozone layer. It is still fully intact.

Vienna is only a day’s train ride away from the Austrian Crown land of Galicia, and that’s why it has become the most popular political exile for refugee revolutionaries from Russia. In the Döblinger Rodlergasse, for example, the writer and journalist Leo Bronstein, better known as Leo Trotsky, is working in a humble yet bourgeois atmosphere with his wife, Natalia, and their children. At Christmas the Trotskys stretch to a tree, trying to act as if they belong and never want to leave. Trotsky earns very little from his journalism for various liberal and social-democratic pamphlets, and often spends entire days sitting in the Café Central playing chess. In 1913 ‘Herr Bronstein’ is regarded as the best chess player in the Viennese café scene, and that is saying something. Whenever he needs money, his only option is to bring some of his books to the pawnshop. He has no choice.

By the beginning of February, Stalin is back to working on
Marxism
and the National Question
, which is to become his most famous work – and the mix of peoples in the Austro-Hungarian Empire provides him with a vivid learning exercise. In Vienna, Stalin develops the idea of a central empire behind feigned national autonomy – which, in the end, amounts to the aims and objectives of the Soviet Union. Stalin, ‘Sosso’ to his friends, talks about nothing else, even with the Troyanovskys’ children. He makes a brief attempt to flirt with the nanny, but nothing comes of it, so he flees back to his work. And quite rightly so; he has little time to waste on the practical application of the evils of capitalism. On one of his walks with the mother through Schönbrunn Park, he bets her that Galina, the temperamental daughter, will run to him if they both call out to her (based on the belief that she’ll be hoping he’s bought sweets for her again). He turns out to be right.

Two men visit him during his stay in the Troyanovsky residence. To Stalin’s delight Nikolai Bukharin helps him with translations, but, unlike Stalin, Bukharin proves to be successful with the nanny, for which the former will never forgive him (and for which Bukharin will one day have to pay with a bullet in the head). Even Trotsky drops by once: ‘I was sitting next to the samovar at the table in Skobelow’s apartment […] in the old Habsburg capital,’ writes Trotsky, ‘when, after a brief knock, the door suddenly opened and a stranger walked in. He was short […] thin […] pock marks covered his grey-brownish skin […] I couldn’t see even the slightest trace of friendliness in his eyes.’ It was Stalin. He fetched himself a cup of tea from the samovar and went out as quietly as he had come in. He didn’t recognise Trotsky – luckily, for in one of his articles he had already labelled him a ‘gimmicky athlete with fake muscles’.