1913 (13 page)

In New York the Federal Reserve, the ‘Fed’, is founded. The most important shareholders are the banking houses Rothschild, Lazard, Warburg, Lehmann, Rockefellers Chase Manhattan and Goldman Sachs. The introduction of the Fed ensures that American governments are no longer able to print new money. In 1913, on the other hand, income tax is introduced.

The industrialist Walther Rathenau far-sightedly recognises the economic challenge represented by the USA. And in 1913, the year of the arms race, he sketches the picture of a peaceful European union with close European ties: ‘One last possibility remains: the emergence of a Central European Tariff Union. The task of creating the freedom of economic movement for the countries in our European zone is difficult but not insoluble.’

In the
Cambridge Review
, vol. 34, no. 853 (6 March 1913), p. 351, the first publication by the student Ludwig Wittgenstein appears: a critical review of Peter Coffey’s
The Science of Logic
, but in fact the first manifesto of Wittgenstein’s very own logic. He considers what Coffey says to be illogical. The Viennese industrialist’s son, about to turn twenty-four, is also spiky with his teacher at Trinity College, Cambridge, the legendary Bertrand Russell. During the holidays he travels with his lover, the maths student David Pinsent, to Norway, where they have bought a little cabin in Skjolden, and works
on the foundations of his theory which, when published as the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
will be among the most important texts of the century. (It is, incidentally, so complex that Russell, when he receives a letter asking him to copy-edit the book, asks to have his own questions sent back to him so that he can understand Wittgenstein’s answers.) Only Pinsent understands Wittgenstein completely. When Wittgenstein, two years his senior, was looking for a guinea pig for his psychological experiments into language and music, Pinsent had answered the advertisement. He soon became his guinea pig in matters of homosexuality and logic too. Wittgenstein will, logically enough, dedicate his
Tractatus
to Pinsent.

Spring Awakening: on 8 March, in Vienna’s Café Imperial, Frank Wedekind, Adolf Loos, Franz Werfel and Karl Kraus meet for an early coffee.

Kafka’s father is making him suffer like a dog, and he can’t bear it when someone coughs in the Prague flat next door or slams the door. He doesn’t write his ‘Letter to His Father’ quite yet. But in 1913 Egon Schiele, the 22-year-old Viennese painter, writes his ‘Letters to the Mother’. On 31 March, for example: ‘I will be the fruit which, once corrupted, will leave behind eternal living creatures, so how delighted must you be to have brought me into the world?’ His mother has a different view of things. She is furious that the grave of her husband, Schiele’s father, is becoming overgrown, and writes to him: ‘That wretched and neglected grave contains the bones of your father, who sweated blood for you. How much money are you squandering? You have time for everything and everyone, just not for your poor mother! God may forgive you, but I cannot.’

Schiele’s father, Adolf, had suffered from early dementia, and little Egon always had to set a place at the table for an unknown person.
Just before his death, the father burned all his money and shares, and since then the family have lived in poverty. Egon’s relationship with his sisters Melanie and Gerti is unusually close: he repeatedly draws them naked, takes a gynaecological interest in their bodies as they awaken into puberty. As an adolescent he goes on trips with Gerti, without their mother, and the pictures from their relationship look like the illustrations of the fatal love of the poet Georg Trakl for his sister at the same time.

Gerti then steps out with Egon’s friend Anton Peschka, which makes Schiele furiously jealous, but he eventually gives the relationship his blessing when he himself meets Wally, the woman his drawings turned into one of the most familiar bodies of the twentieth century. Yet even though he drew himself and his family stark naked as if working not with a pen but a scalpel – unlike Gustav Klimt, Schiele clearly didn’t always go to bed with his models – he gained his glimpses of the depths of physicality only from passive observation. Hardly anyone understood that at the time. Even his dealer, the open-minded Hans Goltz from Munich, writes to him in March 1913, after yet another exhibition at which he hasn’t sold a single painting: ‘But Herr Schiele, while I am always delighted by your drawings, and while I am happy to go along with your weirdest moods, who is supposed to sell the paintings? I can see very little opportunity for that.’ This letter was the first that he received in his new apartment, the one that was to make everything better. No longer the 9th District, no longer 5 Schlagergasse, ground floor, door 4, but, at long last, the 13th District, 101 Hietzinger Hauptstrasse, 3rd floor.

Egon Schiele’s mother saw everything exactly as his dealer did – those ‘strange moods’ could have come from one of her letters. She accuses her son not only of moral neglect but also of ignoring his father’s legacy, of failing to pay for his grave and forgetting about her. She writes to Egon again. This prompts the second ‘Letter to his Mother’, which could find its way into any psychoanalytic textbook: ‘Dear Mother Schiele, why all these letters, which end up in the stove anyway? Next time you need anything, come to me, I’m never coming back, Egon.’

The year of parricide, 1913, was also a challenge to mothers. Or, as Georg Trakl writes to his friend Erhard Buschbeck: ‘Write and tell me, my dear fellow, whether I am a great source of concern to my mother.’ (Trakl had, in fact, just sold his father’s bracelet to pay for his brothel visits.) Not bad.

Gustav Klimt, on the other hand, is still living with his mother at the age of fifty-one. After breakfast he goes off to 11 Feldmühlgasse in the 13th District. (Schiele’s studio is only four blocks away.) He paints there and he lives there, he has written ‘G.K.’ on the door in chalk, along with the words ‘Knock loudly’. There are sketches scattered over the floor, and several canvases on easels. When he arrives in the morning, the women who long to undress for him are already waiting by the door. As he stands in silence at his canvas, half a dozen naked women or girls are walking about, stretching, lazing around, waiting until he summons them with a little wave of his hand. He wears nothing under his apron, so that he can take it off quickly when desire overwhelms him and the pose of one of his models becomes too seductive for the man inside the painter. But he’s home with Mum on the dot for dinnertime, or else he goes to the theatre with Emilie Flöge. When Klimt dies, fourteen former models will come forward with paternity suits.

In the spring of 1913 Georg Trakl is in a pretty odd way. He’s drifting through the world, he’s only ‘half born’, he admits to a friend. So he drinks his money away, takes Veronal and other tablets and drugs, drinks again, dashes around, screams like a child, falls in love with his sister and hates himself for it as much as he hates the rest of the world. He tries to be a chemist. Nothing comes of it. He tries to live normally. Nothing comes of that either, of course. But in between he writes the most beautiful, terrifying poems. And letters like this: ‘I
long for the day when the soul will no longer wish, no longer be able to dwell in this ill-omened, gloom-plagued body, when it will abandon this figure of mockery, of filth and foulness, nothing but an all too true reflection of a godless, cursed century.’ This is a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, his patron, father-substitute, even his friend, if one can use such a word about Trakl. His publisher, too, because
Der Brenner
, his magazine, will be the first place in which Trakl’s desperate litanies appear. This year he wanders aimlessly and hopelessly between three places: Salzburg is the ‘rotted city’, Innsbruck the ‘most brutal, vulgar city’ and Vienna, finally, ‘the city of filth’. He can’t sit in the train, because it would mean having someone directly opposite, facing him, and he can’t bear that. So he always stands in the corridor, his expression shy and hunted. If someone looks at him, he sweats so much he has to change his shirt.